Jergel’s Rhythm Grille might as well be located on its own planet. It is 28 degrees and getting hotter, but according to the locals it was snowing two days previously which might explain why the car park surrounding the place is lined with trees bursting with luxurious yellow blossom that gets visibly more abundant as the day wears on and the temperature goes up. Jergel’s is big, plush club with private rooms and a cigar and whiskey bar behind the stage. We are aware that this is the one show on the tour that hasn’t sold well, at least in relation to its capacity. As a courtesy I want to make sure that the manager A. J. knows that we know this and A. J. explains that they have problems selling concert tickets generally because touring bands are requesting that ticket holders are vaccinated against Covid and hardly anyone in western Pennsylvania is. This takes a second to rationalise—we are in heartland, rust belt United States and liberal expectations need to be reigned in here. I can’t formulate a coherent reply and nod vaguely. Sound check is early to allow the place to open at 5 and by 4.30 we are all at a loose end. I get talking to A. J. again who, to my surprise, tells me he walks to work. “It takes me five minutes to walk here and two hours to walk home”. Jergel’s is, coincidentally, just off highway 19 (albeit 300 miles north of the picnic table we were sat at last night out front of the Summersville Hampton Suites) and remembering that it was pretty much impossible to get across the road there, I wonder if this has something to do with it. “Nah, I always stop at the bar. Just over there,” he says pointing to a building fifty feet away obscured by the blossoming trees. “The Brush Creek Inn. Been there since 1886. If you go over there tell Sue I sent you.” It doesn’t seem like much around these parts would predate 1986 so this piques my interest. As I’m heading over there I bump into Justin and we make our way past the pickups and the Harley’s lined up in front and head inside. The pool room clientele looks like it could be a little challenging but the bar is quiet so we choose a table and I order a beer. (Justin is on water and really so should I be given the recent stomach upset, but I can’t see us getting away with ordering two waters). There is a sign next to the cigarette machine (yes, it you can still smoke in bars in Warrendale) that says the jukebox is OFF during Pittsburgh sporting games. And sure enough the five people in the bar are all watching the Pittsburgh Pirates vs the Chicago Cubs live from Wrigley Field on a tv behind the bar. While I’m ordering I notice that the score is 17-0 to Chicago. By the time I’ve finished my Heineken the final score is 21-0 which is unheard of in Major League baseball. 4-0 is a sound defeat. 10-0 is an embarrassing drubbing. 21-0 must be some kind of record. We leave without engaging the locals. In the end a respectable 150 turn up to watch us play. Not enough to make Jergel’s look busy exactly, but enough people to make the show seem worthwhile, and as always with US audiences they make us feel much appreciated. It is an early show and we are loaded out by 12.30. With a short drive to Cleveland, the bus isn’t due to leave till 4 am. By 1.30 the temptation presented by the Brush Creek Inn proves too great on the penultimate night of the tour and Buddy, Jim and I throw caution to the wind and decide make our way over for a nightcap. Everyone is super hospitable. Sure enough, A. J. is there but having spent the entire day at the bar in Jergel’s and now installed in the Brush Creek he is pretty much incoherent. He is surprisingly steady on his feet but I can see how it might take him two hours to get home. Last orders at 2 and back to the bus on the back of one of the massive bikes that are still parked outside (courtesy of Ryan, via a somewhat circuitous loop on Northgate Drive that must have woken everyone within half a mile). Just what touring should be like.

Into the south, proper. North Carolina is lush and verdant. The skies are cloudless and the temperature is perfect. This feels like a different continent from Virginia, never mind New York. I set off from the strip mall where the Carrboro Arts Center languishes in the direction of downtown Chapel Hill. Walt’s Grill is en route and is quoted on the wire as a happening place for southern soul food. I stumble across it, but it is not what I was expecting. It stands on its own on a side street and at a first glance I mistakenly reckon that the building has been long abandoned. But while I am standing in the road in front of Walt’s taking a photo of the place, the door cracks open and a voice, which I want to presume belonged to Walt himself, barks “You alright boy?”. This might conceivably have had friendly intentions but the effect was not to entice me to step inside for lunch. I reply with the warmest “I’m doing just fine, thank you” I can muster and head on in to Chapel Hill.

The famous skyline has been anonymized by the towers of glass that rise above Hudson Yards leaving only a glimpse of the needle on top of the Empire State building visible as we drive in from the west but the heart still beats faster as the city approaches.

We have a day off so I get up early and go for a run along the Jersey shore before taking the NY Waterway from our hotel in Weehawken across the Hudson to the W 39th Street ferry terminal. I’m meeting friends and family in Union Square: it is sunny and cold and beautiful and I have given myself the time to walk, the only way to get about Manhattan—if you have the time. It is early on Easter Sunday so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that this is the quietest I have ever seen the city. But it feels very different from when I was last here seven years ago—it is not just the skyline that has changed: there are cycle lanes everywhere; every restaurant seems to have tables on the street. All good stuff, but the city feels less alive than it did seven years ago. Gentrification? Covid?

The Crystal Ballroom is a chic club above the Somerville Theater, a very chic repertory cinema. There are people living on the streets but otherwise pretty much everything in Sommerville, MA is chic. It is a beautiful day with cloudless skies and Davis Square fills up as the sun warms but things go downhill when someone a guy who might be in his seventies appears with a semi-pro busking set up. He starts playing an acoustic guitar and has a remarkable improvisational technique—–I wonder if he could be a surviving member of the Grateful Dead: wrong coast, I suppose. Unfortunately every two minutes or so, in spite of the fact that he cannot sing he launches into tuneless steam-of-consciousness lyrics to accompany his playing. The locals enjoying the evening sun in David Square seem prepared to tolerate this, and some even seem to be enjoying it but after the fourth or fifth interlude of impressionistic wailing I can take no more. After spending a while fantasizing a scenario where I give the guy fifty bucks to stop playing for half-an-hour I head off sauntering around the boulevards of Somerville before picking up some food from a chic organic supermarket.

The World Cafe is surrounded on two sides by elevated streets. The stage door is under an elevated rail track and mile long freight trains with graffiti covered containers stacked two high on the flat-beds clatter past at walking pace fifty feet overhead.

On the other side fifty-feet below street level the Shuylkill river cuts through the city flanked by an eight lane expressway and more rail tracks. The skyline is dominated by gigantic, shiny new Penn State University buildings. The scale of the place is overwhelming: none of this is familiar from previous visits to the city. I trust my phone to guide me across the Shuylkill and ten blocks east to Rittenhouse Square and a part of the city that operates at a scale that feels safe for an individual on foot and is a little less existentially challenging. Chicago and New York City seem to make sense as huge towns that don’t really relate to places you might visit in Europe. The Los Angeles area sprawls so massively that you just stop thinking about it as mile after mile of it passes on the freeway. But being dropped into an unfamiliar part of Philadelphia is a reminder of how many huge cities there are in North America.

Kris is very excited to be standing on the same square meter that was occupied for an hour or so by one Keith Richards on the evening of June 4, 1997 when the Rolling Stones decided to play an impromptu show at the Horseshoe Tavern during rehearsals for the Bridges To Babylon Tour.

We can just about fit on to the Horseshoe’s stage and after the show at the Vic there needs to be a bit of conscious body awareness to avoid tripping over a guitar lead, or even your own feet, both of which I manage to do during the first song. Clearly the Rolling Stones gave the horn section and the backing singers the night off when they played here. I like to think they just cabbed up here from a rehearsal room with the drum kit and a couple of Telecasters.

Monday nights can be a challenge: expectations need to be lowered on Mondays and after the reception in Minneapolis the Vic Theater looms as a potentially daunting prospect. The sun in shining when we arrive and the city is alive. Belmont Boulevard is full of purposeful people with coffee in hand. Trains run minutes apart over the alley behind stage door. Chicago is gritty and real. (No scientologists to be seen in this part of the world: goopy, west coast ideas like Dianetics are gonna get short shrift from these people.)

Another Sunday in a deserted city. The Fitzgerald Theater sits in the heart of downtown Saint Paul not far from the capitol building and everything around is closed. Even the venerable Mickey’s Diner open 24/7 since 1937 is shut. There are a lot of churches—God seems to beget factions. A giant building across from the Fitzgerald advertises that the Scientologists have invested heavily here, presumably in an attempt to help the people of Saint Paul get over their schisms about conceptions of God and unite behind belief in the Truth of a third rate space opera written in the 1950’s by a fourth rate pulp fiction writer turned con man, now peddled by two contemporary con men, Tom Cruise and David Miscavige. As Andy once memorably proclaimed, in the land of no brain the man with half a brain is king.

The indicators are good: one block off the main drag, just across from the Capitol building. Inauspicious looking, no view in from the outside. I head in and take the last remaining seat at the counter. Two types of ketchup, four different hot sauces and Goldy’s house seasoning are lined up a carousel at each seat. Bodes well.

The place is small, maybe 50 seats but there are about a dozen staff; a guy at the door to greet, three behind the counter pouring coffee and walking out the orders from the tiny kitchen where four guys are doing everything to order. There are two others at separate stations, one for teas and other beverages and one for toast. The owners move around fetching stock from the back room keeping the operation running. I order one of the house specials, Andalusian eggs; Asparagus, chorizo, tomatoes and eggs done house style.

The first mission of the day when Gary parks the bus in the morning, in fact the only mission of the day prior to sound check at 5 pm, is to find a good spot for brunch. Berkeley looks promising. I set off from the bus down Shattuck Avenue and every third door is a coffee shop. Presented with such a excess of places to eat eggs I ask a security guard outside a bank where would be a good place to have breakfast. “Sit down?” he comes straight back with. Sure, I say. “Julia’s” he replies without hesitation and then, gesturing down University Avenue qualifies with a vague, “Or there are some places down there”. Figuring that this guy probably has breakfast in Julia’s before work every day I decide that this is surely the place to go for eggs and coffee. I look it up on my phone and it’s a five minute walk, a couple of blocks off the main drag of WeWork lattes. Looks perfect.