Tour Journal, September 26 or something, 2026
Dearest Gentle Reader,
I have been remiss in my duties to keep you abreast of my travels and tribulations.
Yesterday I walked two miles to get to my show in Antwerp, Belgium, and it would be fair to say that’s the furthest I’ve ever walked to get to a gig. I have one friend who considers anything more than eight miles from his home a “tour.”*
But we have to back up, because I haven’t told you about Austria at all.
My friends Roman and Barbara are two of my favorite people. If you have my book, you can refresh your memory with the chapter “83 Steps Up in Vienna.” The two of them work with people with developmental disabilities in their city and have done that work for a long time.** Their living room has a wall of guitars as well as two upright basses (double double bass?). Barbara’s main instrument is a beautiful Czech-made double bass, and she has a solid-body electric upright that she uses mostly for silent practice. Two years ago, when I was here, Barbara performed her first concert on bass. Now I think she’s in three bands and writing songs.
I don’t want to give away her lyrics, but she shared one of her songs with me, and it has a tag at the end of the chorus that is SO good I’m mad I didn’t think of it or write it. I mean, not mad mad. Just, Damn, that’s a great line. And like the best country songs, it’s said so simply but elegantly.
Roman is no slouch either, and his group, the Sundown Ramblers, are playing with me tonight at Kulturcafé Henriette, which has a nice back room and stage just for musical performances. While they’re soundchecking, I get some toast and tea from the bartender, and we talk about music (she’s also a musician) and what’s playing overhead.
“Have you ever heard the song ‘Houseplants’ by Squid?”
Nope. But it’s cool and different, and at first it just seems like someone screaming “Houseplants!” In truth, it’s a song about younger generations feeling squeezed out of the possibility of a comfortable domestic life, and the only luxury they seem to be able to afford and keep alive is a nice houseplant. It’s about rising gentrification and the impossibility of feeling secure enough to start a family. AND YOU CAN DANCE TO IT.
I introduce her to Green Magnet School, as they have a similar musical aesthetic, and she digs them and adds them to her queue.
Back in the other room, the Sundown Ramblers are finishing up their soundcheck. Nothing is plugged in. They have an Ear Trumpet Labs mic front and center and a couple of smaller condenser mics to the left and right. It’s amazing how hard we all worked to get pickups in our guitars, only to discover that unplugging and setting up mics is actually better. Is it more challenging? Maybe a little, and if you throw a drummer up there, it all goes haywire. But they sound amazing.
Barbara is part of the Sundown Ramblers tonight, filling in for Gila on bass, and apparently she’s only had one rehearsal. You would never know. The group swaps lead singers and soloists, and it’s the kind of performance that makes me wish my mother were here. It’s classic country and western. Roman goes back and forth between guitar and his eight-string dobro slide guitar. I don’t even understand the tuning of it. Their fiddle player leans in for a solo, and Ritchie keeps them on track. When they end with Townes Van Zandt’s “White Freight Liner Blues,” it feels and sounds great.
I get up on stage and tell some stories, and this room sounds great. An amazing listening audience really allows me to stretch out and sing my stories and tell my songs. I’m feeling a little bit like I’m a lot for these mics, so I step down in front of them, into the space between me and everyone else, and play the rest of the show completely unplugged, unamplified, and unencumbered by time and space.
At the end of the night we all play The Byrds song “you ain’t going nowhere” (technically a Dylan song but whatever)
I dig it.
After the show, Ritchie says we must do another house concert in Klosterneuburg next year, and I really hope we can make that happen. It’s a great hang with folks after the gig, and I am spent. Performing live takes a lot of energy. Performing live with no cables or cords takes MORE energy, and some of the stories are still, and will probably always be, not exactly easy to tell. I am drained.
On the way back to their place, I make the proclamation that tomorrow we will get pizza for lunch, but only if we go somewhere in Vienna they’ve never been before.
This may seem like a simple request, but Roman and Barbara are serious about their pizza. SERIOUS. And I love that. I love pizza too, but Barbara has a running list of pizza places - by district - so she knows which ones are the good ones. I have suggested that she make this into a website, or at the very least a Facebook page. She does not seem all that interested in sharing her findings, as her scientific approach is more Pass/Fail for the pizza joints.
They find a place in a district where Barbara has no info for her data. The pizza place has no online presence to speak of. There are two tables outside, and when we walk in, we are ushered through the kitchen, out the back door, and to one of three tables behind the restaurant. The woman who seats us is followed by her daughter and a horse of a dog. We drink blood orange soda and order our pizzas. Yes, we all got our own. Mine had champignons and pork. I could not finish it. This was not the case for Roman and Barbara. They are Clean Plate Club winners. (See pics.)
My show tonight is at a burger place and brewery favored by U.S. expats, so I’m told the burgers are good. Truth be told, I’m still full from lunch. We set up in front of some of the brewery tanks and again have a great listening audience. I meet two other local singer-songwriters, one of whom flew back into town this afternoon and was determined to make the gig: Roman Tröster and Jason Lee Haines. Roman is in a band with Roman. They call that group Friends and Romans. Yes, it’s very clever, and I challenge you to top it.
Jason tells me he grew up in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.
“So you know the Ham Fam?” I ask.
“The what?”
“The Hamilton Family Diner.”
“Oh, yeah. I do.”
I don’t think he was expecting me to know such a specific restaurant in the area, but Tracy went to school in Allentown, so I know the area fairly well and what used to be The Pennsylvania Turnpike/ Route 9 - or at least I used to.
Jason worked at the Martin guitar factory for a while, and he talks to another guy here, Daniel, about solid tops and how laminate sides are made. It’s interesting, and he knows his stuff. He also likes to play in DADGAD tuning, and I really like the folky drone it creates. I’ve only used it a little bit, but I think I’m going to do more with that tuning in the future.
For my set, I mostly stay behind the Ear Trumpet Labs mic, but this venue has more ambient noise from the rest of the bar and the hard floors. I feel the sound getting a little lost in the room, but it’s still a great show. Afterward I ask Roman how it sounded, and he says, stoically, “I miss your Gibsons.”
I get it. Me too. I could have plugged in tonight, and I didn’t. I should’ve. Ah well.
The next day, Roman, Barbara, and I take a train outside the city to the garden space they rent, and we have a picnic on the grounds of what used to be a very large hospital. The grounds have since been put to all sorts of different uses, but it’s still so quiet and green here. They pick tomatoes off the vine, and we eat those with the falafel, hummus, and bread we got from the street market. It’s a great way to wind down my time in Vienna.
At 8 a.m. Monday, we walk to the tram, hug goodbye, and go our separate ways. I head to Wien Hauptbahnhof for my train to Schweinfurt. There are trains and delays and boring shit. My uncle Marty picks me up at 8 p.m. in Schweinfurt and brings me home to a great home-cooked noodle and vegetable dish made by Petra.
I sleep for a long time.
My cousin Martin comes to visit his folks, and Petra has made a fish soup that is delicious. I eat so many things that are new to me when I travel. Fish soup isn’t all that unusual, but it’s also the first time Petra has made it.
We have plans to visit a park tomorrow and go for a walk, and it’s amazing to me that this is still my life. I’ve built a thing where I can travel and stay with folks who put up with me, feed me, and show me their world. I am a lucky man.
It’s an early train again, but a fairly easy trip. My first train is the wrong train, but it still gets me to Würzburg. Nothing drastic. I just booked the express and got on the slow one. Still plenty of time to make my transfer to Frankfurt and then Brussels, where I have a nice conversation with a woman on her way to a workshop at Deutsche Bahn. She takes a picture of my guitar case.
Brussels is new to me. I did not meet a man who was six foot four and full of muscles, but they did speak my language. Mein Deutsch was pretty useless here.
I wander into a small shop selling used clothes that looks a bit punk rock and meet Katani. She speaks great English, has a shaved head and tattoos all up and down her legs, arms, neck, and head. She even has “Misery” tattooed above her right eye. She was born in Japan, raised in New Zealand, lived in Vancouver for a while, and has settled here in Brussels. Kiki is her spouse, and he’s tatted up as well.
They ask me what I’m doing in Brussels, and I tell them about the music, the book, and all that. My hotel is about a hundred yards away, so I go back, get the bottle of wine I’ve been unable to open (no corkscrew), and return with my book and a CD. A deal is made, and I’m now getting a new tattoo.
Trying to think of something appropriately “Belgium,” I settle on “BE”—both Belgium and a reminder to just be in the moment. It’s small. It’s subtle. Katani writes it out, and then I take the pen and write it myself.
“You have great handwriting for a tattoo,” she says. “Very natural.”
For all my life in school, I was criticized for my handwriting. Still trying to fit my round peg into a square hole. I tell her I also have a font made from my handwriting and point to my “Don’t Give Up” tattoo, which is in my handwriting too. She writes down the font’s name to look up and download.
Katani and Kiki own this shop together, and the economy is killing them. The future of the shop is in jeopardy, which means their economic future is shaky too. They got married a few months ago so she could stay in the EU. She’s quick to add that they are actually a couple, but the nuptials were a bit more rushed because of looming deportation concerns.
It’s wild to have all this shared with me while just hanging out and getting a tattoo.
“You know how to take care of your tattoo. I don’t need to tell you,” she says as she puts the film and tape around my arm.
The next morning, I try to find a taxi to take me the one mile to the tram station, but the taxi driver refuses to take me and says that it’s not far enough and says I should walk. I have my guitar, my backpack full of clothes, and a suitcase full of books and merch to drag. The suitcase is slightly over 50 pounds. I fully expect the wheels to give up the ghost on one of these cobblestones soon. It’s an Eagle Creek suitcase Tracy and I bought new, and I’ve already had the wheels replaced once because of…Hamburg cobblestones. (I am hoping this is not foreshadowing.)
Tonight’s show is at @420 Club. It used to have a different name, but that’s a whole other thing. I check into my Antwerp hotel early, try to close my eyes for a few minutes, and then decide I’m just going to walk the two miles to 420 Club. There will be food somewhere along the way.
As I walk out the front doors of the hotel, three people are standing there.
“Are you playing tonight?” the woman asks in a thick London accent.
“I am,” I say, slightly surprised by the abruptness.
“What kind of music do you play?” one of the men asks.
It’s all a very nice conversation with a guy from Scotland, a guy from Holland, and a woman from London. But the whole thing starts way sooner than I am prepared to talk to anyone. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I wasn’t ready to be “Performer Bobbo” just yet.
“You’re American and you’re walking two miles to your gig? That’s not very American of you,” says the guy from Holland. “It’ll probably take you about 40 minutes to get there.”
He’s wrong. It takes me 50 minutes.
I’m on the other side of the street from 420 Club when Katrien sees me and excitedly waves. Inside, Ruud is helping a customer, and Katrien gets me a sparkling iced tea. I’m introduced to Ruud’s mother, who everyone tells me is crazy. But she clarifies: “I’m positive crazy.”***
“Ah, the good kind of crazy. Understood.”
420 Club is the CBD type of cannabis place, where they help people with ailments and things like that. It’s not like an Amsterdam coffee shop. Although 420 Club does have a coffee machine, whereas Amsterdam coffee shops typically do not. I understand all that, and it still confuses me.
Katrien and Ruud are wonderful hosts and make sure I don’t want or need anything. It’s almost a curated concert, with them knowing everyone here tonight as family, friends, or customers of their shop.
“How long would you like me to play?” I ask.
“What do you typically do? Like a 30-minute set, a break, and then another 30 minutes?”
“That sounds great.”
Dear reader, I start playing at 7:30. I stop at 8:20, take a ten-minute break, and then finish at about 9:30.
I was never good at the maths.
Katrien is flipping through my book and showing her friends the page they’re on. I did not plan ahead: they’re on page 429. I cross out the number at the bottom of the page and write “420” before signing the books for them.
I’m given a ride back to my hotel by Michael.
“Where are you playing tomorrow?”
“Mechelen.”
“Mechelen?? I live in Mechelen. Where are you playing?”
“Zennegat 13.”
He takes out his phone and shows me a map.
“This is Zennegat 13, and this is where I live.”
The two places are 0.2 kilometers apart.
“I’d invite you to stay, but my girlfriend and I just had a baby. I made a deal with her to come out to see you tonight.”
“Oh man, congratulations. I wish I’d known I was going to get a ride from someone in Mechelen. I would’ve gotten a hotel there.”
“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow night. It’s still hard with a newborn.”
“I get it.”
The ride back to my hotel is full-on ’80s music, with Stevie Nicks and Talk Talk and then a song called “Shame” that I’d forgotten all about.
“Do you know ‘Shame’ by The Motels?” I ask.
“I don’t know that one.” He tells his car to play it. “Ah, that is very ’80s.”
Back at my hotel, I try to find a place to stay tomorrow night, but I’m barely awake enough to FaceTime with Tracy before I fall asleep in what is, so far, the most comfortable bed of the trip.
It is now morning in Antwerp. I have to leave this hotel room in the next hour. I must sign off because I don’t have a train ticket yet, I don’t have a hotel yet, and I technically don’t have much direction other than needing to get to Zennegat 13 by about 5 p.m. tonight. I have six hours to travel about 30 miles.
I do not want to walk.
*Not only is this friend Boris, but I will actually get an email from him complaining that I’m misquoting his “eight-mile rule.” And I am, for comedic purposes.
**They have both also recently gotten promotions!
***At one point, Ruud announces that he’s going around with the hat to take collections for me and says something like “Money not underwear for Bobbo.” And his mother is walking across the room and she says “I will put my underwear back on!” And makes like she is pulling underwear back on. It is absolutely hysterical and the whole room laughs. I have never…it’s always something new and I love that.