Warmer, wetter and greyer as we pull into the self-styled "just a beach bar" right on the edge of the Long Island Sound. Waves boil underneath the back deck, under the floor of the bar itself. It's "wing night" and all the youngsters are tossing back the chicken and swilling Rolling Rock. The barkeep tells me in a proud voice that they don't serve Anheuser-Busch products here. I print and circulate 15 pages of email comments sent to us on the road for the group to read. Jim likes it for the moral support. If Jim's happy, we're happy. The rain falls steadily and the rising tide sends waves farther and farther up the beach. Under our feet. I play the poorest game of pool I've played in years. Cold and wet outside.

After an hour and ten minutes of music, the set ends with an abusive version of "Obsession For Men." A couple people listen closely.

Wake up late, wander around, bump off walls, into the van, eat, look at surf, stop at a market. Thick and foggy, damp...contemplating the 16 hour drive to Cleveland, OH. Everyone a little testy. Trailer lock seizes and we get a locksmith out to the hotel. We have our last meal on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean at the misnamed "Crazy Burgers", in Narragansset, RI. Turns out to be a great place run by young people who care about food. The first Woodstock album is playing and we quickly commandeer the stereo playing Cream's "Wheels Of Fire" and Traffic's "John Barleycorn Must Die" and fill up the place with our own noise. The people working here show a remarkable tolerance for musicians from out of state.

Fog-shrouded Route 80 west, through beautiful midstate Pennsylvania, through the Allegheny mountains in the middle of the night.

One late-night/early morning gas stop I tumble out the back door, across the pavement and into the floodlit flourescent room of colorfully-packaged products. Waiting for the men's room, I see a phone book for a forgotten county in Pennsylvania and I blurt out: "We're in Pennsylvania?" The cigar chomping old doughnuthead behind the counter beetles his brows and puffs out smoke. "Where else would you be?" he grouses. After gassing, pissing and purchasing, I catch Mark, outside the door, saying that he's got the receipt for the gas, but the cigar-man didn't give him the four dollars change. I question Mark closely, but he appears ready to let it go. I ask him if he's SURE, does he have four one dollar bills on his body anywhere? He assures me, that, no, he doesn't. I burst back into the shop with Mark in tow and exclaim, "hey, he doesn't have four one dollar bills on him...you haven't given him his change." To my surprise the guy caves in immediately and grumbles about stupid people and their money. I tell him we haven't driven 9,000 miles to rip him off for four bucks. He says: "I don't need a sermon, preacher boy." Martyn, at this moment, completes his transaction and wanders off forgetting his change. The guy has to call him back which gives him another excuse to bitch us out. We get our precious money and get back in the van. 3 a.m., on an interstate. If we ever try to find that place again, I'm certain it will be a hole in the ground and some trucker will see us gazing into the pit and tell us that: "yeah, the old guy who ran this place was a real pisser...his ex-wife burned it to the ground back in '73...with him in it, too..." Fade to Rod Serling.

Arrive in Cleveland early morn and crash at The Alcazar, an enormous, gaudy, Spanish-Rococo Christian Science residence hotel, full of very old people and tiled walls, benches, stairs, etc... Everything is tiled.

Martyn pops the Question (Ballroom of The Alcazar Hotel, Cleveland, OH: 2/24/96)

Dance of the Dervishes (Allen & Leslie, Ballroom of The Alcazar Hotel, Cleveland, OH: 2/24/96)

The Waltz (Leslie & Martyn, Ballroom of The Alcazar Hotel, Cleveland, OH: 2/24/96

Alcazar is Spanish for fortress, I learn. Twenty minutes walk from here is the "Haight St. of the North." Vegetarian food, bookstores, coffee shops, newsstands, etc...Kids play hackysack, indigents hawk "homeless" newspapers for a donation, slow-moving traffic. Before soundcheck I get my hands on the first vinyl pressing of our long-playing album, Songs Of The Cows. I stand on the street holding the record up to the light and turning it around. I put it away and take it out again. I gaze through the translucent blue disc. The first vinyl I've ever been on, a bass player for over 25 years. I'm standing on the street in Cleveland.

We open for a popular local ska band. After The Mermen's set, I ask the music editor of the Cleveland free paper why she is leaving before their show. She says: "I don't like stupid music." There are, besides the 150 18-and-over friday night ska kids, about 30 people to see us. We load out onto the street and the wind is howling. Trash blows by the swinging trailer door. Traffic lights sway erratically over busy intersections. I walk back to The Alcazar Hotel through the old brick neighborhoods, leaning against the air roaring through the branches above. Through Cleveland Heights with bare trees, wet sidewalks and clouds of windborne leaves, streetlight reflecting off their damp and wildly spinning faces.

Kilroy was here (Cleveland, OH - 2/24/96)

On our way out of Cleveland we visit The Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, an enormous, squat, glass-windowed pyramid on the shores of Lake Erie. I got teased by Martyn and Leslie for spending $12.95 to get in, but Jim and Roz went in too. Jim said he "almost" cried "like 12 times." Roz was ecstatic. I was enthralled. I struck up a conversation with Stacy and Jim, a fiftysomething local couple who come for the free Saturday afternoon concerts. They explained the thousands of dead fish, frozen in the ice of Lake Erie, below our vantage point next to an enormous picture window facing north, out over the water. "It's the winter die-off," he tells me, "it's not the pollution. Hell, it used to be a lot worse!" Jim found our CDs for sale in the enormous RRHOF store. My favorite area is the signature room, at the top floor. A dark, round room, its walls covered with the signatures of the honored etched in glass and backlit. I noticed one signature as being remarkably similar to Jim's. A flowing and illegible scrawl. It was Jim Morrison. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant's sigs looked like their strange icons from The Song Remains The Same era. My favorite sig from an aesthetic perspective was Ginger Bakers'. I overhear one girl say to another: "Look, Janis Joplin...I'm so obsessed with her."

We pull into Motor City at sunset under clear skies, about 52 degrees. A billboard reads: "Say Nice Things About Detroit." We pass through heavy industry and entire city blocks of empty brick buildings with their windows either boarded up or blown out and broken. Drifting trash and the occasional naked winter tree punctuate cracked sidewalks and city streets without people or cars. Martyn says it reminds him of Liverpool. The club has four bowling lanes next to the stage, ten pool tables and room for a thousand people. Next door is the Majestic Theatre where Harry Houdini gave his last performance. Across the street is the hospital where he died. There are lots of stairs here. I am reminded, yet again, how much equipment we have.

Marky (a.k.a.Mr. Happy) behind the bowling alley (Detroit, MI - 2/24/96)

Opening for us is The Silencers (you guessed right again, a surf band.) They have matching bowling shirts. Our set is well received. After the show we bowl. Fights break out at the bar. People hurl each other down the stairs. During loadout we are assisted by a one-armed man. Roz is compelled to give him $5 to make him go away. Leslie charms George, the handsome young bartender, into giving us a tour of the upper stories of the Majestic. We learn that it was the first theatre in America built specifically for movies. George tells us that Detroit was the "Paris of the West" in the Forties. I want to beleive him. We have to climb up through the ceiling of the men's room in the cafe at street level, removing acoustic tile and dragging a barstool around for a boost. Once above the toilet it looks, in the flashlight, like a bombed-out building. Dust, conduit, broken stone and trash litter the cramped, random passages. Roz and Martyn climb higher still, with the aid of a rope they found hanging down from God-knows-where, up to the top of the theatre where they're rewarded with commanding views of the entire space. I find an electric light and, with a flashlight in my teeth, follow the conduit down to a junction box, about six inches square. I pull off the cover and find it stuffed with wires. The box is completely crammed with heavy-gauge copper cable and multi-colored wirecaps. Not even room to hide a cigarette. Built to code? I doubt it. I can't divine a way to turn on some light so I place the cover back on the box and at that exact moment Martyn dislodges a brick from above that crashes down a foot and a half from my head. I flinch and with an alarming "SNAP" sparks fly from the junction box, over my hands and bounce off my clothing. All the lights go off downstairs. I decide I have had enough adventure for the night. This place is haunted and dangerous. I stumble back over pipes and down wooden ladders and find the ceiling of the men's room. Everything is black. An off duty cook comes to my aid with a flashlight. People are wandering around, looking for ways to see better. Back on terra firma, at the bar, I con a glass of wine from an off-duty waitress and hope no one fingers me in this caper.

The Paris of the West (Detroit, MI - 2/25/96)

Passing through Detroit I feel like I'm on the surface of an enormous basketball, I can sense the curvature of the earth. There are huge empty spaces between giant buildings. It's a '50s science-fiction paperback cover art landscape. City Hall bristles with statuary and sculpture, winged horses, charioteers, angels, saints and trumpets covering the roof. There are turn-of-the-century mansions, built in the grand style, directly abutting 24-hour gas-minimarts. We spend the night at the St. Regis, a faded -glory granite hotel whose architecture suggests Austria in 1880. Our rooms are directly across the street from the world headquarters of General Motors, an entire city block, built in the thirties, complete with company name on the roof in thirty-foot orange neon letters. A monument to "progress", before the word acquired its recent, and rather darker, meaning. Detroit, city of shiny cars and empty streets. Graffiti hurls union sloganeering.

The day is spent leaving Detroit, driving to Indianapolis, and stopping for the night in preparation for driving to St. Louis, MO. At the econobargainlodge the night manager, Holomann Jones, kindly lets me in the office to send email because the phones in the rooms are hardwired to the wall. Pot-bellied, smoking long white cigarettes the width of matchsticks, he tells me that, with a last name like Jones, his parents had to make his first name something interesting. I tell him that we have two Joneses in our group. With the skinny smoke bouncing in his mouth he says: "yeah...there's a few of us..." I finish downloading about a hundred messages, thank him and say good night.

We leave our nameless generic motel in the rain. Heading south, the sky clears and the weather turns hot and muggy. Birds sing in the bare thickets by the service station phonebooth. I call my friend. I ask what's new and he tells me that he, the domestic one, is furiously active all the time but there's nothing to tell. Asking me the same question makes me realize I feel the same way. All this furious activity and nothing to tell. Except that I miss him. We head south.