After 2 weeks home my head is still spinning from what turned out to be one of the best trains I’ve ever ridden. Great turnouts every night, talented and inspired opening acts, beautiful clubs and theaters, promoters and agents who put their heart into every show, mouthwatering food, and much satisfaction pickin’ my songs for folks all over the continent. Logistically the tour ran like a well-oiled machine, although there was the little matter of a major earthquake. But what’s a 5-week tour without a disaster or two?
I barely averted a smaller disaster before I left home. After spending months organizing the tour, I managed to leave my passport and driver’s license under the hood of a Xerox machine at Kinko’s two days before the tour. 24 hours later when I figured out what I had done, I called Kinko’s in a panic, only to be assured multiple times by multiple employees that the documents were not found. (“Look, I’ve worked here 10 years and we find stuff every night. I think I would know if someone left a passport and license in one of our machines!”) After some frantic Google-ing, I learned that it’s impossible to get a new US passport in less than 2 weeks unless you are stuck in a foreign country. I sprouted a few more gray hairs as I realized that I was over $10K in debt for an ensuing European tour when I couldn’t leave the country. Miraculously, after a couple more frantic phone calls to Kinko’s, my documents showed up in their safe, and I was free to travel. Fortunately this turned out to be my biggest logistical error on the entire tour, and things ran relatively smoothly after I showed up in Italy.
It usually takes me a few shows to warm up, but I felt right at home on my first stage in Trieste. 40+ fans showed and made things feel right, as did the pristine tone of my new/used Collings OM-2H that I christened that night. And things got better from there; Verona was a blast, more than 200 folks showed up for the Florence show, and even the always-fickle Bologna crowd gave me a good vibe. Unfortunately in Forli someone decided they wanted a souvenir from the show, and they took $40 worth of Read Bear flatpicks, along with a set of steel fingerpicks that were perfectly molded to my fingers after years of daily use. But I forged on to the beautiful cities of Anghiari and Bari for two more great shows.
By the time I got to Pescara the only thing on everyone’s mind was the tragic earthquake that struck 100KM away in L’Aquilla, a rural city where my great grandparents are from. Pescara was silent and dour when I arrived, and my friend Paolo’s house was crowded with refugees from the earthquake. It turned out that just about everyone in town was hosting refugees, and I met people who had lost their homes, family, and friends to the disaster. Needless to say folks weren’t too interested in hearing music that night, and the show felt tense and inappropriate. Pescara certainly put things in perspective; When aftershocks turned Paolo’s 4th floor apartment into rubber at 3AM and people started running into the streets, we got a small taste of the terror that thousands must have felt in L’Aquila. You can watch natural disasters on CNN all day, but being close to one is a completely different story, and hanging out with folks who have lost friends and family is quite sobering.
Speaking of disasters, every time I start organizing an Italian tour I tell myself I am not going back to Napoli. The shows are always packed with the sweetest, most excited fans, but the tense, frantic drive in and out of the city is just too much for my old bones. But every time I organize an Italian tour some friendly promoter invites me to a nice new club at the last minute, and I just can’t say no. So there I was, once again stuck in the pure chaos that is Neapolitan traffic, swearing and sweating after almost being run off the road, my knuckles white and my shoulders feeling like a couple bricks. According to my GPS I was 1KM from the club, yet unable to reach it after an hour driving in circles. And as I had at every other Neapolitan show, I arrived at the club tardy, grumpy and exhausted, and left the club 8 hours later content and inspired by the wonderful folks who screamed for 2 separate encores, bought me drinks, and took the time to tell me how much they appreciated my music. Yeah, I’ll be back.
By that time I had recruited my good friend/booking agent Gianluca to travel with me in the south, which definitely took the edge off the drives and made the travel a lot more fun. But on our way to Cosenza, Gianluca decided to recite stories of the Ndrangheta (the Calabrian mafia, known to be the cruelest and most violent in all of Italy) as we drove deep into the isolated mountains of Calabria on lonely, half-paved highways that have apparently been “under construction” by corrupted construction companies for 20 years. Gianluca recounted in great detail stories of kidnappings, torture, and murders that had taken place in those very mountains as we drove through the region where the Ndrangheta touches the lives of every citizen.
But Cosenza turned out to be one of the best shows of the entire tour. I played in a beautiful old theater to a crowd of folks who were demonstratively thankful that we had made the trek, and a lot of them told me after the show that there haven’t been many concerts down there for the past few years. Apparently southern Italy is having a tough time these days. Berlusconi is marginalizing the middle class and poor just as Thatcher and Reagan had done to their less fortunate constituents, the bum economy is hitting the south harder, and crime is getting worse. As a result there is a “cultural crisis” in the south, as more than one local told me. This gave meaning to our southward voyage (as did the sublime cuisine and the mesmerizing Mediterranean women). When we awoke to the warm sun coming through the window of our medieval villa the next morning, we were reticent to head north again.
Thanks to a Roma/Lazio partita (soccer match), the highways were all but abandoned that Sunday. I somehow made it from Cosenza to Rome in about 7 hours, just in time to return the rental car without having to sport another 40 Euro for an extra day. A train, bus, and cab ride later, Gianluca and I stumbled into Init, a club run by our friend Gianpaolo Felici of Ardecore, the Roman folk band that I play with once or twice a year. Even more folks showed up for this Init show than for the Glorytellers show last year, but somehow the night felt a bit cold and sterile. Maybe I was tired from the 9 hours of travel, maybe I was still digesting the amazing steak dinner (complete with roasted potatoes, tira misu, red wine and grappa) to which I was treated an hour earlier, or maybe it was just time to learn a couple new songs to freshen things up. But folks seemed to dig it anyway as I sold out of CDs and signed quite a few autographs, and before I knew it the Italian leg of the tour was over.
I was sad to see my pal Gianluca head back to his hometown of Forli the next morning. We had been together for almost a week of intense touring, and we smiled and said we’d do it again soon. It was Easter Sunday, and I spent the rest of it in the studio recording three songs for the upcoming Ardecore record. The session was a bit unorganized as things in Rome usually are, but Gianpaolo is such a talent that it was worth it just to hear him sing rough takes of his majestic new songs. Around midnight on the way back to the hotel, Gianpaolo’s car broke down somewhere in the industrial outskirts of Rome. As we poked around under the hood in the dark streets, we talked about Ardecore, our lives as musicians, and his struggles trying to keep Init open in the oppressive local bureaucracy. We finally made it back to the hotel and had one last grappa in the bar together before saying goodbye. After one last night of fitful sleep in a noisy Italian hotel, I was at Ciampino awaiting my Ryanair flight to Barcelona. Italy had been as exhilarating, stressful, frightening, inspiring, and beautiful as it ever was, and I’m counting the days until I can step on an Italian stage once again.
