Fargo

We stopped for the night in Fargo on our way to Winnipeg. Apparently you can have your photo taken with the actual wood chipper used in the film Fargo - it's just down the road and you can buy one of those silly looking hats with ear flaps to wear while you're being photographed. Or maybe you can rent one for the occasion, I don't know, but I don't think we'll be needing the hats because it's very hot outside even though there's a howling gale blowing, which is disturbing but perfect - when it comes to round here neither of us has driven north of Minneapolis before. We're a long way from anywhere we might consider normal and the weather is adding to the otherness of it all.
Before we head off up the trail towards the Canadien border we're going to venture into downtown Fargo. Amy has already been out - she discovered a Target and a Starbucks. It's disappointing to come all this way and they've got exactly the same everything as you might find in Watford or Washington DC. I was hoping to trade a couple of blankets for a Bowie knife and the various supplies we'll need as we head out further into the wilderness. The wind is still howling around the Travel Lodge & Suites here and I'm doing my best to be faintly terrified.
We had a great show at Schuba's in Chicago the other night. The situation was possibly more weird than anything Fargo and its environs can throw at us because we were sharing a dressing room with the two young acts who were doing the late show, and both of them were accompanied by a full compliment of parents. The one group, Skating Polly, who are all set to become the greatest thing to come out of Oklahoma City consist of two half sisters, one seventeen, the other only thirteen. They had a young balding guy with them who fussed around their equipment and repeatedly told us how awesome we were. I thought he was the drummer but he turned out to be the dad and tour manager. The other act was Emily Wells - she tours solo with half a drum kit, a violin, a lot of electronics and a very sweet boxer/mongrel dog for company. Tonight she had her parents with her.They were helping with her merchandise. They appeared to be a lot were younger than either of us. Amy's daughter Hazel came to see us and she said she felt old. The dressing room was cluttered with thirteen year old's homework and the youngsters tirelessly twittered right up until showtime - only a few tickets left for our show tonite at Schuba's with Emily Wells - it's going to be awesome. Let's make it a sell-out! Something like that anyway. I felt like a sleazy old git by comparison and I'm sure I said the F word in front of the thirteen year old.
Jake Burns from Stiff Little Fingers came to see us play. He raved about us on Facebook afterwards -
Just home from the most entertaining evening I've had in...forever. If you get the chance to catch Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby on this current short tour, don't think twice. Go! I thought Ray Davies, Neil Young, The Beatles (in a good way). Best night out in years. I was thrilled to bits.

On Saturday night we played in an old factory building in Manitowoc (that's us in the photo above). I still can't pronounce Manitowoc with any confidence. We had a great time with the promoter, David Smith, and his family. He introduced me to the work of Phillip R Goodwin. I'd seen his illustrations before but without knowing who he was.
I hope we see some bears on this trip...

Blood on the bar room floor. Well, almost...

We shared the night at The Lovin' Cup in Rochester last night with a beer tasting shindig and it wasn't a good co-bill. It was obvious that the Lovin' Cup management's first priority was to keep a crowd of  ignorant, beer-swilling morons in the place for as long as possible in order to maximise beer sales, at the expense of our concert. After the beer tasting they should have turned the house but they didn't. The woman who was hosting the boring and thoroughly pointless event suggested over a microphone that the beer tasters might like to stick around to check out the music and if they liked it they could make a donation if they felt so inclined.

Wow! Thanks a lot!

It's like saying - if you haven't got a ticket that's OK, just stick around, drink up and fuck up the concert for the people who have bought tickets with your incessant and moronic chatter. One ticket holder who remonstrated with a gaggle of  loud beer people got on the wrong side of the manager and was actually thrown out. We saw the commotion from the stage and assumed it was the people who were disrupting our show who were being made to leave. If I'd known what was really happening I would have been inclined to stop the show which wouldn't have been fair on the ticket holders, but they were already getting a raw deal. At times it was almost impossible to play, what with the noise and the fact that we hadn't had a soundcheck due to the beer event.and the late arrival of the soundman.

I don't ever want to play at The Lovin' Cup in Rochester again though I don't somehow think we'll be asked - they didn't like me telling their patrons to either shut the fuck up or fuck off. The manager sort of made that clear in a passive aggressive, jokey kind of way when he told us to pack up our equipment and get out.

I hope Rochester isn't an indication of how this tour is going to go. We've already had a minor catastrophe - as we were checking in to a hotel in Toledo, Ohio, this evening on our way to Chicago, Amy's electric guitar fell off a luggage cart and the head broke off. It's the second time it's happened. We're retiring the guitar and buying a cheap Danelectro. We're sort of wishing we could retire ourselves at this point but perhaps tomorrow night's show at Schuba's in Chicago will convince us otherwise. I hope so.

The people who had actually come to hear us play last night were wonderful - they stuck with us til the end and gave us a standing ovation which I think we deserved if only for not abandoning the show. Highlights for me included bouncing a marker pen off the soundman's head to get his attention, Amy's fabulously manic piano playing in the middle of Teflon Wok, and sweetly smiling at a table of office girls (who had already taken offence) as I said 'It's alright, I don't like you either'. I think I called someone a cunt too but I can't be sure. It does you good to misbehave once in a while.

I'll try to stay within the bounds of niceness at Schuba's but I'm not promising anything.

A Video, Some Travel Tips And Grandad's Homemade Aeroplane

As I'm going to tell you a bit further down we've made a video for Do you Remember That.
First I have to waffle on a bit about other stuff that has nothing to do with that, probably so that in my own mad mind I won't appear to be giving it the hard sell, which of course I am. You have two choice - or possibly three: you can click on the video, get it over with and either fuck off or carry on reading, in which case you'll have another chance to see the video further down the page; or you can read the other stuff and then watch the video; or the third choice is... I don't actually know what the third choice is.

I play the part of Barry....

I don't know where or how I used to find the time to constantly update my website and write lengthy reports of tours and trips out and one-off gigs and so on. These days the writing just stacks up in my head rather than in cyberspace or wherever this stuff exists when you click the 'publish' button. My intentions are good but my life is overwrought with busy-ness, and in the few moments I have to contemplate and possibly write an update of some sort I feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights of some monsterous oncoming vehicle which is probably the task at hand. If you can follow all that.
I want to tell you about Wyoming, and in particular the Days Inn hotel in a town called Evanston where I discovered a large and very dubious looking stain on the top sheet at two o'clock in the morning. The stain was right next to my face. We had to be up at some early hour to carry on driving across America. Complaining to the management and having the sheet changed would have cut into valuable sleeping time, and besides, the only person we could have complained to was a grubby and somewhat psychotic looking night porter who didn't really look like the kind of person that would be bothered by a stain on a poly-cotton sheet. Even one created as the result of an enema or other bowel related incident, or an accidental spillage during a birthing ritual. Not that I want to make any sweeping judgements – not about the stain - I mean about the psychotic night porter.

And besides, a successful complaint would have resulted in the changing of the sheet which may well have resulted in our seeing the naked mattress which is something you never want to see, not a naked hotel mattress. I should run a course on surviving hotels and other on tour accommodation.

The first rule, as stated above, is that you never want to see the bare mattress. Sometimes there's a plastic undersheet – and this is totally unacceptable. You'll want to remove it for two reasons: one reason being that the aftermath of an event neccessitating a plastic sheet to protect the mattress will probably have been sponge off by a hurried chambermaid or more likely allowed to air dry. The othere reason is that you'll sweat like a pig and have nightmares about being pre-packaged supermarket food. If indeed you can fall asleep for the rustling of crumpling plastic as you toss and turn trying to get comfortable with your head precariously balanced on a small lumpy hotel pillow (more about hotel pillows in a minute).
You'll need to remove the plastic sheet without ever catching sight of the bare mattress. This is how you do it: gently remove the corner of the fitted lower sheet from thecorner of the mattress, then remove the corner of the plastic sheet and push it under the sheet where you can't see it and pull the corner of the fitted bed sheet back over the corner. Repeat this exercise on two other corners. On the fourth corner which should be the one nearest to the wardrobe, the door of which should be open, remove the corner of the fitted sheet, liberate the corner of the plastic sheet and pull violently until the whole nasty plastic expanse, which you'll notice is a rancid creamy yellow colour, is out and away from the bed. Now stuff it in the wardrobe and shut the door. Put the fourth corner of the lower sheet back over the mattress and try not to think about it anymore. Wash your hands. If you happen to have a pair of surgical gloves you should of course have been wearing them during this procedure.

If you can feel the bed springs don't on any account remove the plastic undersheet. The hotel proprietor will have put the plastic undersheet on not to save the mattress from bodily fluids, but rather to try and keep a quite possibly disgusting and literally shagged-out mattress intact for another five years or so. In a case such as this your only option is to sleep on top of the fully made up bed in all your clothes or leave and sleep in the car.

Hotel pillows – you don't ever want to see a naked hotel pillow. They put pillow cases on them for a very good reason. People you don't know breathe into them and drool all over them and use them to raise the lady's bottom slightly to facilitate deeper penetration during casual acts of hotel intercourse. You should arrange the pillows so that the sides open outwards because you never want to wake up looking directly into the bowels of a hotel pillow. Hotel pillows are often stuffed with surgical waste. Just perch your head on the thing as best you can and try not to think about it.

I don't know why I've just told you all that but I'm sort of glad I have and I hope it's of some use. As I said before, my real reason for writing this blog post thing is to try and interest you in our fabulous new video for Do You Remember That. I was hoping to get a starring role as someone sexy and debonnaire. Instead I saddled myself with playing the part of Barry who signs the event for the hearing impaired. I'm not at all like Barry in real life. Barry is the sort of person who may have stayed in your hotel room before you did.
Amy plays the part of a slightly older but still aspiring singer-songwriter getting her first big break on a regional TV show. Our friend Jeff Economy helped us to make the video. It's a low-budget affair  and we decided to put a tag on the front of it to really set up the story - just like in those early MTV videos from the early eighties. We really hope you like it. Here it is - please feel free to share it with all your friends and let's hope it turns into a virus....

I don't know why I'm telling you all this stuff about hotel mattresses and pillows. There are so many wonderful things I could be writing about if only I could think of any of them. Grandfathering for instance – real life was suspended for a couple of weeks – or perhaps I should say everything but real life was suspended while my daughter Luci and grand daughter Tiger Mae came for a visit. The house was filled with laughter and chaos and we couldn't get much done but it didn't matter. I've become quite an expert on animated films for children and I've lost count of how many times I've seen Shrek and Toy Story, and danced insanely to Tiger's favourite 45, Steel Guitar Rag by The Dynatones. If you want to dance insanely to it yourself you'll have the opportunity very shortly when I re-launch The Wreckless Eric Radio Show. I've been trying to get a show together for some time but my efforts were always interrupted by a toothily grinning little girl asking 'What are you doing?' followed by more insane dancing, frivolity and stories about a skunk called Mike.

We're playing on Long Island on Sunday and the following week, February 16^th, we're putting on another Homemade Aeroplane show at our house in Catskill NY. As with the other ones we've got a surprise special guest – I'm very excited about the guest but of course I can't say who it is or it won't be a surprise. At the last one we had Brian Dewan who accompanied himself on an electric autoharp propped up on an old persons walking frame and backed by Amy on piano and organ and me on the bass guitar. I think it's the first time I've ever played with someone who wore a tweed sports jacket. Brian is a wonderful and disquieting performer who somehow puts me in mind of a curmudgeonly Airedale. He's like a children's entertainer that you wouldn't let anywhere near the kids. Typically I don't appear to have a single photo of the event.

For the next aeroplane show we're going to do The Mod Housewife meets The Donovan Of Trash. We have an idea that the songs from these two albums might intersect in a good way – we're going to learn how to play as many of them as we can and see how they fit together on the night.... Tickets are $20 each and we ask you to bring something to share - a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, a pot of soup, a pie, a dessert, an crate of oranges, a bar of chocolate... anything really - it's just a matter of people getting together and enjoying each other's company. And apart from that you get to hear us play live in our own house, sounding exactly as we want to sound, performing through the famed Empress Of Catskill Public Address System.

Here's a ticket link in case I've inadvertently sold the idea to anyone: http://wrecklesseric.com/?p=665 

And now perhaps I can get back to doing a few more paintings. See you soon.

The Hurricane House Concert

We were in Memphis when the storm (sorry superstorm) hit. Or we might have been in Chicago. Or somewhere in between because we played in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Memphis and Chicago on consecutive days and my memories are already beginning to blur.

I was a bit concerned. Catskill was directly in the projected path of Superstorm Sandy. (I've been calling it a hurricane but it's slowly coming to my attention that everyone else is calling it a superstorm so I'm attempting to join in here). I was worried that a tree might fall on the house. We've got a lot of trees. Occasionally I take a stroll around the back yard, count them up and catalogue them all, marvelling in a fearful sort of way at the fact that I own so many trees (if you can actually own a tree – it seems like an odd idea). And then I lose count or forget. I think there might be eight of them, fucking great big maples lined up along either side of the property line towering over the grass in between with branches touching one side to the other. In the summer, when they're in full leaf, the effect is faintly terrifying. Especially at night - it's like being in a vast organic cathedral. I've often been out there on my own at night, tending the barbeque with just a wall light between me and the murky towering blackness, cicadas kicking up a deafening racket and the distant wail of freight trains rumbling through the night from Buffalo to New Jersey...

Catskill's very own celebrity slum lord Frank Cuthbert started off the second set with Drunk On Love (Amy on 12 string, Eric on bass) and the beautifully insipid Pasa Robles Wine where we almost turned into The Archies...

We really should have employed the services of a tree surgeon but we couldn't afford it. So somewhere on the road between Memphis and Chicago I was trying to console myself with the idea that what we saved on not hiring a tree surgeon we could put towards the cost of repairing the house and paying the increased insurance premiums.

It was all going to be fine - I grew up on a high cliff top on the south coast of England, constantly buffeted and battered by violent south westerly gales. Roads were frequently rendered impassable by shingle thrown up from the beach. Waves would hit the ninety foot cliffs and water, shingle and seaweed would fly another twenty feet into the air. I used to go to school in this weather – on a double decker bus listing at a thirty degree angle as the wind smashed into the side of it. 

They showed us pictures of buses being tested for stability and sometimes the bus conductress used to laugh it off but I could tell she was just as scared as I was. Thankfully the bus never blew over. There weren't any trees – I think I was eight before I actually saw a tree in real life – they wouldn't grow where we lived. I read stories from some parallel universe where boys climbed trees and got lost in the forest, and I felt vaguely inadequate as though it was my fault that in Peacehaven and Telscombe Cliffs the only vegetation apart from grass was hardy privet, gorse and Spanish broom.

We listened to news reports of rising tides, warnings of imminent disaster and so on, and I texted a friend in Asbury Park, New Jersey asking if he was OK. He sent me a photo of his girlfriend's house. The storm hadn't happened yet, the tide was still rising and the ground floor of her house was almost completely under water.

The David Greenberger Formation, a 75% spectacle wearing celebrity superstorm supergroup perform "Snakes"

They said it was going to be worse than Irene. Personally  we were very lucky there. I became the proud owner of a dilapidated Cape Cod two days before Irene. We were in England getting ready to start a new life in America. It occurred to us that we really ought to get some house insurance so Amy called a few insurance companies. They told us to call back after the hurricane. We saw footage of water flowing over the top of a road bridge across the creek near our house in Catskill. We looked at a house there back in the summer during one of our many house hunting expeditions. It was creepy – Amy didn't like it because there was an old pair of crutches built into one of the walls of the rather slimy basement.

I almost quite liked the place in spite of the traffic noise from the bridge you could see if you looked upwards from the back yard - the bridge that later had water flowing over the top of it. That house must have been almost totally submerged. Fortunately for us there was a loud wail and suddenly I was in that parallel universe - the one where othe boys climbed trees and so on – 'I love that sound!' I exclaimed, and then we couldn't hear ourselves speak for the next ten minutes as five miles of freight train thundered across an adjacent trestle. So we did the sensible thing and bought a house on a hill an attractive distance away from the railway line.

We were very lucky. The town was devastated. The ice cream place by the creek where we dreamed of having a root beer float, all washed away. The t shirt printing shop – that had to be gutted and completely rebuilt (we got our new t shirts printed there before we went on tour). The restaurant down where Catskill Creek flows into the Hudson river was destroyed. And so it went on. And miraculously our house and surrounding neighbourhood came out of it unscathed.

We arrived at Newark Airport and drove through torrential rain to our new home in a national disaster area. The rain never stopped tipping out of the sky for four and a half days. We stayed in a friend's house with a tin roof. In the middle of the third night Amy asked me if it was the end of the world. I thought it probably was though I didn't like to say.

Catskill wasn't the worst affected – in the town Pratsville which is only thirty five miles away just about every building was badly damaged. We drove through there only the other week, over a year later – it was like a ghost town. Some people have given up, they're not coming back. There were a lot of shabby houses with new roofs. On Saturday night at our house concert someone told me how they bought a few groceries in the only remaining store in Pratsville and the owner was moved to tears of gratitude.

All this might sound depressing but I'm trying to talk about our house concert and why we did it.

We've been lucky twice – Sandy took a left turn before it got to us and ploughed off into Pennsylvania.

We were going to put on a house concert as part of our Kickstarter campaign to raise money to put out our latest album but we only sold one or two tickets so the idea put itself on hold. We weren't even sure if we could get away without either – someone always gets upset if you do anything noticeable. But if it's a charity fundraising event...

The house was a mess and we'd been away on tour for two months. In the second month we drove eight thousand miles coast to coast and north to south and back again. It was a little bit overwhelming but we did it and I'm glad we did. We're like Ike & Tina Turner doing Proud Mary – we never do things the easy way. In between touring and recording we're fixing up the house. We love this place and we're doing it with pride and on a low budget. We do a bit, we run out of money, we go on tour, come home, do a bit – a few repairs, a bit of paint, tiles, a shelf or two... We're very lucky.

The house concert was almost like a housewarming party, even though we didn't know a lot of people who came. We sort of did though – I recognised names from emails, mail order, facebook and so on. And there were some we knew from other shows we've done. It was fun – I wanted it to be a celebration as much as a fundraiser. We should appreciate what we've got. People lost their homes. We were lucky enough to have one to come home to.

Everyone bought something along with them. People helped out, laid out food, took turns overseeing the list of ticket holders, that sort of thing. The police chief who lives across the street was very nice about it all - he actually said well done and told us not to worry about the parking restrictions. David Greenberger helped me to paint even more signs which were meant to be helpful but probably ended up being charmingly confusing. I'd already painted some large ones - "3 hours of Love, Peace and Dischords" in honour of the Woodstock contingent (there's nothing going on in Woodstock so they all have to come to Catskill to get their kicks), a big Eric & Amy sign that we hung in a tree and illuminated with a torch. 

A selection of signs. We're thinking of starting a business.

Frank Cuthbert bought a load of folding chairs along from his art gallery in Catskill, Brik. His lovely girlfriend Danette somehow managed the catering and put me in mind of a Pan Am air stewardess. Next time we're going to get her a uniform and turn the place into a homemade aeroplane. Later on she commandeered the kitchen as her personal dancing space.

We raised $1300.16 and donated it to Occupy Sandy. I know they say they prefer 'in kind' donations and only take money as a last resort but there's no bartering system for gasoline and heating oil so I hope the money does some good.

And finally I should mention the vinyl - we have vinyl copies of our new album!!! We've got boxes of them hidden under beds, in cupboards, up chimney flues... We've got so many of them we're having to sleep standing up in a corner of the bathroom. Help us to regain our sanity - buy a copy here: http://www.amyrigby.com/amyshop.html

Across The Great Divide

Seattle...

Excuse me you cunt, we've driven three thousand miles coast to coast across the USA, turned right at San Francisco and done a further two days hard driving to get here so would you mind shutting your fucking trap or leaving because we don't want to hear you trying to impress your dolly-bird date when we're trying to play for these people.

A fine opening to the show. Amy actually heard the guy say to the girl stop trying to sleep with me. Well, really. He looked quite offended after my reprimand but he left and everyone was pleased and we started up with Astrovan off our first album in two different tempos because I was a bit adrenalised by the diatribe.

I love Seattle. It's about as far from England as you can get without doing something daft like crossing the equator so it's a mystery to me why the musicians here are so compatible. Same wit, same jokes, same spirit. Grunge gave them something to kick against - the Seattle music scene is open to anything so our free-form-folk-rock-metal-pop-skiffle thing really works.

We wound up with another impromptu Seattle subsupergroup - Johnny Sangster on guitar, Jim Sangster on the bass, Mark Pickerel on tambourine (Is this what I'm reduced to Eric?), Amy on the organ and me on my first broken string of the tour doing Reconnez Cherie as an encore. We just had to do an encore after the soundman had engaged us in a post-set group hug. Never been hugged by a club's sound engineer before - threatened, but never hugged.

Johnny Sangster's solo opening set was a sensation as was Mark Pickerel - two great supports and then us  - a real value for money musical event. I wish Seattle was on the East Coast so we could play there more often though the excitement might be a bit too much for us. As it was we were glad to have the next day off.

Two weeks ago we were playing at a house concert on Rhode Island. We stopped off at our place on the way to Pittsburgh where we stopped off on the way to Indianapolis for an intimate Tuesday evening show in front of maybe as many as twenty people. And then we carried on to Springfield Missouri for a fabulous early bird special between the bingo and happy hour. Loads of people - no one comes to Springfield so we were a bit of a novelty. And it was a good show which I hardly want to mention because they've all been good shows.

I can't begin to explain how bizarre, back-breaking, mind-numbing and just plain exhilerating the next four days were. I haven't driven across America coast to coast since 1979. From Missouri onwards it was like being in a giant film set, watching John Wayne country onfold in all its vastness beyond our filthy windscreen.

We stayed in Wichita, in an instantly forgetable motel. We had dinner in an Italian chain restaurant. The waitress was a young woman from California who came to Whichita for college. She wanted to go back to California. She told us downtown Wichita was quite picturesque but we never found it. All we saw were shopping malls – Staples, JC Penney, Starbucks, Panera, Macy's, Sprint, AT&T, Radio Shack, Sports Authority, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Claire's Accessories, Vitamin Shoppe, Gap, Arby's, Autozone, MacDonalds, Burger King, KFC... It seemed to go on forever and then it was back to Burl Ives and The Big Country and I'm singing Wichita Lineman in my head all the way to Denver. We could tell we were in Denver and not back Wichita because the retail outlets were in a different order - Home Depot, Autozone, MacDonalds, JC Penney, Macy's, Gap, Target, Walmart, TJ Max... a thousand miles of shopping malls and back to the scenery. It was freezing too. And in Denver it started to snow.

Somewhere along the the highway in... it might have been Kansas, we saw signs for the world's largest prairie dog, a five-legged cow, a six-legged cow and a miniature donkey called Roscoe. The world's smallest zoo - we didn't actually get to see all these wonders because the place was closed, boarded up with a For Sale sign hanging off it. And the night was coming down and it was all faintly terrifying. Who needs a zoo in a place like that? Who ever came to see it? No one, that's why it was boarded up.

Out here you could probably tell people anything and they'd believe it. A brilliant strategy – train 'em up in the ways of ignorance and they'll believe anything you tell them – there are little brown men coming to rape your unborn fetuses in the middle of the night, there's all manner of evil out there beyond the safe confines of Kansas, or Wyoming or Nevada. Pro-Lifers, the Assembly Of God. When You Die You Will Meet Your Creator – what ever are you going to say to him? Fine bloody job you've done there Jesus God old mate – loved the shopping malls. No evil there.

Pro-life – it seems to me that with that lot human life gets the best protection as long as it stays in the womb. Get born and you're fucked. A sixteen year old girl from a trailer park with a deadbeat boyfriend, no prospects, no hope, but the baby must be protected. Until it gets born. Then it's just useless human trash, the product of a godless unmarried mother.

Strange, these people who hold human life in such value. Do they really give a flying fuck whether or not people live or die. They just need livestock for their people farm. A capitalist society needs a workforce, a healthy well-nourished, properly housed workforce would surely be more efficient but that's not how it works here. - here on the People Farm we're heading for a subtle form of slavery.

I hope you've all registered to vote. I hope everyone in America who reads this bothers to go and cast their vote. I haven't got a vote here, I'm a resident but not a citizen. I pay taxes - income tax, property tax, school tax, village tax... plus the tax on all the gas we've put in the car to cross America - but I don't have a vote. So I say please, please, Vote For Me. I don't mean Vote For Me, I mean VOTE FOR ME. Or do it for yourself and everyone else. But please do it!!

We met up with Roy Loney in San Francisco. I would have liked to have had him get up and do a couple of songs with us but I didn't want to put him on the spot and I was too shy to ask. Anyway the soundcheck was too short to sort anything out – the soundman was three quarters of an hour late and generally seemed to have a lazy attitude. You find that in some towns – it's as though it might seem uncool to make anything more than the minimum effort. He was nice enough though, and the sound was probably OK in the room, and when Amy's microphone fucked-up he at least came over and waggled the stage box connections until it was sort of working, so I don't want to slag him off. I don't think it's worth driving the entire width of America to play at the Hemlock Tavern. I hope we can find a better venue next time.

We had a house concert in Chico the night before. The hosts, Marcel and Mary, have a house surrounded by beautifully planted and landscaped gardens. We stayed in a room full of cowboy memorabilia and western trinkets. The morning after the concert I got up early – eight o'clock - which is early for me though Amy had probably already been up for two hours. Amy has a secret morning life which I know little about, she writes in a notebook, does sewing, stuff like that. And sometimes she even sneaks out for coffee. Or so I believe though I can't be certain of any of this because I'm usually punching out zeds.

But this particular morning I was up around eight and Mary gave me a guided tour of the grounds, pointing out exotic birds in the equally exotic Californian plant life. It was a great start to the day and one of the highlights of our west coast adventure.

And then we got the terribly sad news that Jim Wunderle was dying back in Springfield Missouri. Amy's known him since nineteen eighty something – Last Round-up recorded their album in Springfield - Lou Whitney produced it and Jim Wunderle was the engineer. I met Jim in 2008 in Kansas City. He came to see us play at a club called Knuckleheads, a place that looked almost exactly like the country 'n' western venue in The Blues Brothers (we have both types of music here - country and western...) The show went really well in spite of expectations and afterwards we hung out in front of the club which was festooned with neon signs and surrounded by railway lines. I've got a load of photos of Jim, his wife Terry, Amy and me silhouetted in front of the neon signs. I'd put one in here but they're at home and I'm not.

I was really pleased we were going to Springfield and seeing Jim again - I recognised him as a kindred spirit or whatever. Someone sent me a clip of him performing Whole Wide World with some of The Skeletons and I felt that there was something completely unique about him. I was glad to see him again, a bit nervous because he and Lou Whitney are like Amy's uncle and older brother all rolled into one, and I wanted their approval for what we're doing together.

We had a great time - Jim was a delight and we railed against the world together - men with pony tails, young shop assistants who answer your thank you with no problem (that was one of Jim's particular peeves), five string basses (ungodly), the inadvisability of eating near the railway station...

He wasn't in a good way - his health had suffered and he'd age considerably since we last met but we would never have imagined that less the two weeks later he'd be dead. Amy's very sad about it as I'm sure you can imagine, and so am I. I made a friend and now he's gone. But at least I had the pleasure of knowing him for a short while. That makes me happy.

The Screen Age

I spend half my waking hours muddling and befuddling my way around the internet. I think the internet is like new town grown old,  a Utopian dream gone wrong. When it started I was naive enough to think it was going to be this great instrument of world peace - we were finally going to communicate directly instead of through this or that third party and find out that we're all basically the same and so on...
Of course I was younger then, bright-eyed from not having spent ten years or more staring hopelessly at computer screens. Now everywhere you go people are staring at screens and myopically jabbing at them with stunted digits.  That's where we're at now - we've had the stone age, the iron age, the bronze age, the machine age, the space age, and here we are in The Screen Age.
I routinely sit and wait for crappy adverts to load up before I can check my emails - weightloss, middle-aged women in your area just dying to meet you, car parts, fishing tackle, viagra, holidays in Corfu, eczema cures that have doctors infuriated...  Occasionally I click the close ad option and a box pops up offering me advert-free browsing at a not immediately obvious price. So it's not about weightloss, dodgy dating, car parts, fishing tackle, viagra and all the rest of it - no, the purpose of the advertising is deliberate nuisance, a form of extortion - pay up and we'll stop tormenting you with all this crap.
I am determined that these people (whoever these people are) won't manipulate and control me and my life so I sit here steadfastly waiting to read my emails or see what's happening on Facebook while little annoying adverts for breast implants, grapefruit juice, garden furniture, incontinence cures and even Barack Obama load up in side panels. Twenty-first century civilisation. We've come a long way.

I'm sure Gary Horowitz won't mind me putting his wonderful photo of me and Amy being whisked away from the Take Me To The River Festival in Hastings-on-Hudson last Sunday. We had a great time though it's always a fearful business playing in the open air in cruel daylight to an all-ages crowd who are as intent on soaking up the sun as they are listening to music. Looking at all those people from the stage and seeing the kids running around and the tree tops against a brilliant blue sky I must admit I had one of those it's great to be alive moment. Don't tell anyone I said that - I've got a position to keep up.

I used to think I was an unhappy person and I'm sure a lot of other people did too. But I'm not - I may have been, but not anymore. Life is full of annoyance, day to day stuff like the crappy ads, and bigger annoyances like what happens when I get old / have a stroke and end up paralysed down one side / break a leg in a freak gardening accident and can't afford the medical bills... But I keep managing to push it all away and have a great time on an almost daily basis. I'm sure that's going to worry a few of the fans I have who think that you can only write songs when you're practically down and out. I've never subscribed to that idea, the starving artist in his lowly garret. People work better when they're warm, dry, well fed and healthy, and that includes artists. I wish the Republican party understood that - I can't believe the stupidity and cynicism of a ruling party who don't see the sense in looking after the workforce. We had enough of that in England under Margaret Thatcher. Here's a track from our new album:

07 1983 by southerndomestic

It's actually by Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby - Southern Domestic is the record label. But that's the internet for you.
And to finish, in another shameless attack of self-promotion, here come the tour dates. Come and see us play, stick around afterwards and say hello, buy an album and maybe even a t-shirt - help us pay this months health insurance which we have courtesy of Obamacare. We'll blunder through live versions of some of the tracks off our new album, A Working Museum, plus a few old favourites and you might even have a good time.

And don't forget to register to vote.

Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby on tour….

13 ASBURY PARK NJ USA, The Saint buy tickets
14 PHILADELPHIA PA, The Tin Angel - EARLY SHOW - 7:30pm!! buy tickets
15 SOMMERVILLE MA USA, Johnny D’s buy tickets
18 WASHINGTON DC, The Black Cat buy tickets
19 RALEIGH NC, Berkeley Cafe http://www.berkeleycafe.net/events.php
20 COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, Conundrum http://conundrum.us/concerts/index.html
23 RICHMOND VIRGINIA, Banditos - details to follow
29 PEACE DALE RI, Roots Hoot house concert – email rootshoot@cox.net

OCTOBER
02 INDIANAPOLIS, Do317 Lounge 1043 Virginia Ave, Suite 215 buy tickets
09 SAN FRANCISCO CA, The Hemlock Tavern http://hemlocktavern.com/
11 SEATTLE WA, The Funhouse, with Mark Pickerel + Johnny Sangster http://www.thefunhouseseattle.com
13 PORTLAND OR, Mississippi Studios EARLY SHOW – 7pm!!! buy tickets
16 SAN DIEGO CA, The Soda Bar buy tickets
20 PASO ROBLES California, www.vinesonthemarycrest.com  info@vinesonthemarycrest.com
21 LOS ANGLES CA - details to follow
25 DALLAS TEXAS, The Allgood Cafe
26 AUSTIN TEXAS - details to follow
28 MEMPHIS TN, (to be confirmed)
30 CHICAGO - details to follow

NOVEMBER
02 ROCHESTER NY, house concert
03 ITHACA NY, The Nines

A Working Fantasy

We have the CDs of the new album. The UPS man delivered them this morning just as we were starting one of our whacky rehearsals, trying to figure out how to play the new tracks live.
I had it all worked out – we were going to film the delivery man coming up the path – ‘No love, cut, cut CUT – could we just take that again and could you just try to look a little more like, you know, like a delivery man…’
It reminds me of the time my dad called to see what I was up to and I told him I’d formed a group called The Len Bright Combo and we were about to release an album called The Len Bright Combo Present The Len Bright Combo By The Len Bright Combo. There was a silence on the other end of the line and then my dad’s disapproving voice – ‘I sometimes think you live in a fantasy.’
I probably do just that for a good half of the time but we’ve managed to turn the fantasy of yet another album into a reality and I’m very happy about that.

And if you happen to be in New York City we'll see you tomorrow night (September 7th) at Bowery Electric. Here's a ticket link: http://www.ticketweb.com/t3/sale/SaleEventDetail?dispatch=loadSelectionData&eventId=4715595
Sorry about the hard sell.