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April 1999
Friends: Ah, home. Home is where the heart is – or in my case, where the lumpy linoleum, leaky faucet, and piece-of-crap stereo is. Either way, it's always good to be back. I've been on the road almost non-stop since March, and I've never been so glad to see my little one-bedroom by the sea.I drove cross-country and back. On the way I was profiled (translation: pulled over by the police for the crime of being a long-haired musician from California, and searched for drugs. No, I didn't have any) three times, and played about 20 shows in New England, the Midwest, and the South. While doing a radio show in Louisville, KY, I asked the radio guy (Dan Reed, who is way cooler than your average radio guy) to show me some local culture. Having been born and raised in Louisville, Dan knew exactly what would most scare the crap out of an unreconstructed New Jersey Yankee like me. We went down to The Gardens to see Tuesday Night Wrestling (pronounced rasslin'). I had the rare anthropological opportunity to see an arena full of inbreds (or, as Dan so aptly put it: “the flotsam and jetsam of industrialized society”) cheer on “The Claw” as he took on “Trailer Park Trash” for the Ohio Valley Heavyweight Wrestling Championship. That, my friends, is culture. I arrived home at the end of March for a quick four or five days off, then I was gone again. In the course of one week, I opened for Vonda Shepard at House Of Blues in Las Vegas, then flew to Ann Arbor, MI, to play at The Ark, then drove to Kelseyville, CA (2 hours north of Sacramento) to open for Manhattan Transfer. My girlfriend was with me, and we took the scenic route home: Highway 1 along the coast from Monterey to Morrow Bay. In my opinion, the most beautiful place in America. On the way, we stopped at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, which sounds dreadfully stiff and formal, but was actually a rustic cabin in the woods full of cool books by people like Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac (and, of course, Henry Miller), and run by a couple of aging hippies (and I mean that in a good way) who sit on the porch with their guitars and sing folk music all day…I live to stumble onto stuff like this. So now I’m home: where I will relish the conceptof not having to go anywhere for two solid, uneventful weeks. Then I’ll be back at it. I hope this finds you all well, and that I see you all out there. Love, Bob
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