Story Of A House

A house can take it out of you. When we got it, almost thirteen years ago, it was in a horrible state - a foreclosure, abandoned by the previous owners who apparently fled to South Carolina leaving behind debts and mountains of junk. We never knew how many of them there were - it’s a slow process of casual detective work. We've been able to tell a lot from the mail that still sometimes arrives for them. 

A neighbour told us he sent his kids to daycare at the house - another neighbour used to drop them off and bring them home. One day he picked them up himself, saw inside the house, and never sent them here again. He said the place was filthy. We knew that already - it took us years to clean it up.

There had been an above ground swimming pool but another neighbour took that when the house was empty. He also took the patio bricks. He came round shortly after we moved in to explain himself. He stood at the front door with a cigarette in a cupped hand, the burning end facing inwards - a jailbird smoke - and explained that he had worked for the previous owners, maintaining the property while it stood empty. As payment they had given him the patio bricks and the swimming pool. I said I wasn’t aware the banks paid neighbours to maintain their foreclosed properties, but he hardly noticed. He waxed lyrical for a moment: 

‘When we got that pool home and set up lil Danny’s eyes were shinin’…’ 

He broke off, took a clandestine drag of his cigarette, his eyes darted around, he lowered his voice: 

‘I don’t know what the neighbours around here have been telling you, but none of it’s true.’ 

‘Oh’ I said with a magnanimous gesture, ‘they’ve had nothing but good to say about you.’

We never were friends. He died a year or so ago. We sent a consolation card but we never heard back. We’d see Neighbour Dan, as we called him, busy cleaning his gleaming white pick up truck in the autumn sunlight when we were raking leaves. ‘Just imagine every one of them’s a hundred dollar bill’ he’d yell, and we'd reply with a sort of ahh whaddya gonna do? gesture that one of Amy’s brothers, who has lived for years in a suburb of Pittsburgh and knows how to handle these things, taught us. 

I sometimes thought the only reason for having such a large back yard was to keep the neighbours at bay. We could see them - keep an eye on things - but they were way off in the distance.

Neighbour Dan’s neighbour, an Italian American called Denise, ran a daycare next door to them. Seems like everyone ran a daycare. From our bedroom window we could see processions of cars in the early morning, pulling up, discharging children, driving off. Denise would sit on her front step and conduct telephone conversations that rang through the neighbourhood. She sold up and moved away last year. No more daycare. There are new people now, we haven’t met them but they’re having their basement done - you know these things when you’re a neighbour. We’ve seen a truck in their driveway with All Things Basementy on the side.

We absolutely loved our next door neighbours, Al and Tammy and their son Alex, who used to cut our grass. Tammy grew up in the house. Her mother, who was in her late eighties, lived with them. We’d see her on the back deck smoking a joint. Tammy told me her father had been a pharmacist. He distilled gin in the basement. In one of our earliest encounters she told me how on her eighteenth birthday he had presented her with a phial of grade A pharmacutical cocaine and told her to go and enjoy herself. She grabbed my sleeve: ‘Eric, I nearly shit my fucking pants!’ And to underline the point she reiterated: ‘I…nearly…shit…myself’. All this in a loud voice in the street. She was my first experience on an American neighbour. I was thrilled to bits.

One day during our first summer there I asked Tammy if we made too much noise. She said not at all - she really liked hearing us play music - they loved having us as neighbours. She said it was the first summer in years that they’d been able to open the windows on that side of the house. The previous owners kept dogs in a kind of dog pound in the back yard. Apparently they hardly ever let them out and they never cleaned the cage. Then there was the swimming pool - Al told me it was full of stagnant, green water with frog spawn in it, but the kids still jumped and splashed around in it. I thought perhaps they were trying to get clean having spent too long in the house. He agreed that that was very likely.

A wily old lady called Roberta lived on the other side. The kids were all scared of her. She knew everything that went on, and on the occasions that we talked to her she told us every detail, right down to her friend in the next street, the one with the prolapsed rectum.

Roberta had a clear view of our driveway from her back deck. When the hillbillies, as she called them, moved out the junk they left behind was hauled away by the truckload. A twenty foot dumpster was parked in the driveway, and when that was filled up another took its place and that was filled up too. They were hoarders. The basement, which they’d tried at some point to turn into a party venue, was filled with their crap. They’d built stud walls down their, insulated with fibreglass roof insulation, and lined with with plasterboard. The house had no gutters so the rain water drained into the basement and turned the walls of the party basement into a rotting, rancid mess.

In the first month we lived there I cleared out the basement as best I could, tore down the sheet rock and removed the soggy insulation. I dismantled a hideous structure that was intended to be a bar - it was built out of left over two by fours and offcuts, held together with four inch nails. It was probably meant to look charming and rustic, but it was just a filthy mass of nailed wood. We dealt with the basement most of the time by keeping the door shut and only going down there when the heating furnace broke down and had to be coaxed back to life.

Eventually we got hooked up to gas and waved a less than fond goodbye to the old fuel tank. We ran out of fuel on a regular basis, dug our way through to the tank through three foot high snowdrifts, and poured in red diesel from the gas station, five gallons at a time, in blizzard conditions. The mains gas hook up was absolute paradise after a few years of that.

We had the roof replaced, and when we’d got over the shock of that we had work done in the basement to make it dry and watertight. We finally made the effort and got rid of the remaining junk that was left down there, most of which was a large, rotting sound system left over from when the previous idiots tried to make it into Catskill’s most happening nitespot. While I panelled, painted and finished things that we’d left half done Amy painted the basement walls with special basement paint in fresh shiny white, and having done that she painted the entire basement floor with utilitarian grey floor paint.

I used to find the house quite daunting, but only if I thought about it too much. For ten years I would lay in bed, morning and night, and plan how I would replace the bedroom door with something that wasn’t the horrible, brown-varnished hardboard slab that wouldn’t close properly because there was no door frame for it to close into. I’d do the job twice a day in my head. It became an immense undertaking, a constant irritation, a niggling daily depression, a testament to my failure as a homeowner and as a human being.

One morning I could stand it no longer. I took the door off it’s hinges, carried it downstairs to the garage and came back up with the panelled door I’d been saving for all those years. It only took three hours to build a door frame and hang the door.

Now I lie in bed staring at a slight imperfection, a gap between the top of the door frame where it doesn’t quite run parallel with the low attic ceiling, and dream of pieces of trim that might somehow even it up. I shouldn't be hard on myself. I built everything in the place - walls, shelves, the front porch, the entire kitchen, and even the dining table. The house has worn us out and could quite possibly drive us insane if we stayed there.

But now it’s official - we’re leaving - we’re gone. We have a realtor, or estate agent if you’re in the UK. We’ve spent the better part of three months making the place into a saleable proposition - mending, finishing, cleaning, painting, decluttering… 

The other week I took the definitive step of I dismantling and packing up the studio ready to roll it into a shipping container. It took four days and I found it emotionally draining. It was a great sounding room. I made a lot of records in then - A Working Museum with Amy; my last four albums: 'amERICa', Construction Time & Demolition, Transience and Leisureland; The Old Guys for Amy; her latest album Hang In There With Me due out of Tapete Records in August; an unfinished reworking of my 1985 album A Roomful Of Monkeys; plus a whole load of tracks for compilation albums and tracks and albums for other artists. 

The room looks wonderful now, with only a Wurlitzer electric piano, a celluloid bikini mannequin, and a couple of armchairs and a coffee table added by the realtor, but it sounds like the acoustic disaster it was when I first tried to record in there. I remember driving hooks into the ceiling and tying an old quilt above the drumkit with string meant for wrapping Christmas presents. It sounded a lot better but it looked dreadful. It stayed that way for three years until I took the matter in hand and built some nice looking acoustic panels. It took years to get that room sounding right.

The sale listing went live just yesterday. We love the place but it’s time to start a new chapter. We couldn’t stay any longer - everything we needed was in storage and quite honestly the place was beginning to intimidate us - every smudge, every speck of dust… I’d love to live in such a beautiful place, but it’s up to someone else now. Here's a link for the listing in case you're interested in buying the place, or if you're like us and enjoy looking at houses for sale:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1-Orchard-Ave-Catskill-NY-12414/30494760_zpid/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0b57ReSUpw7qFFUtntCWfHkIeWAnY2slxmHCFYs9qkPg-i1w9g22xQH7w_aem_AfnKfWXgKABOZ8KkcwB1KbD_XbKkEO6oIxskTEvxaHEkzwt-B0_iQg31bH9P6nI1u-gn41Xqv8MPxiZ5muhlZVuo

And here's a list of tour dates:

May

17 KINGSTON UPON HULL - Wrecking Ball TICKETS

18 HOLT, NORFOLK - Community Centre TICKETS

30 SUTTON, SURREY - the Sound Lounge TICKETS

June

01 NORTH SHIELDS -Engine Room TICKETS

o6 BIRMINGHAM - Rock n Roll Brewhouse TICKETS

09 COVENTRY - Just Dropped In TICKETS

20 LONDON, WALTHAMSTOW - Rock n Roll Book Club TICKETS

 

Quincy, Recording, A Wedding Anniversary & A Run In With The Law

I keep writing stuff and not posting any of it - the world lurches from crisis to crisis and what I write quickly becomes irrelevant, inappropriate at at the very least just plain glib. I won’t write stuff about what’s wrong with the human race, and tell everyone how to put the planet to rights because it’s really not my place to do so, and most of the people who read what I occasionally write would probably agree with me on everything I’d have to say, so there’s really very little point.

And there are the others, the ones who disagree. I get so jangled by internet confrontations. I used to be stronger than I am now, but since having Covid and a heart attack in quick succession, and dealing with this thing called Long Covid, I’m not tough enough to take up the fight. Though I handled it coolly, a Facebook dust up with the daughter of a friend who told me my post was a fucking disgrace and I shouldn’t be in a creative industry left me depleted for the better part of a week. 

It was a joke concerning Eric Clapton in the wake of his anti-vaccine proclamations. I said that after careful consideration I was banning him from attending any of the shows on my US tour last October. It gave rise to a lot of anti-Clapton vitriol. I didn’t join in but as far as this person was concerned I was to blame and had relinquished any right to be in a creative industry.

 

Whatever the word in means in this context, and whatever industry it is that I’m supposed to be in that might be at all creative. 

The tremors, the palpitations, the extreme anxiety and upset that this sort of thing incurs just aren’t worth it. So from that point of view I’ve decided to be a human cabbage. 

I’ve been recording , and I’ve been recording, and I’ve been recording. I just finished mixing a song I recorded together with Amy for a forthcoming compilation album, a tribute to Badfinger. I’m never sure about these kinds of projects but I can never resist an invitation to participate. I had to work hard at it because I wasn’t sure the song had much going for it.

We started out with a random bass synthesiser loop, Amy played the Wurlitzer electric piano while I played an electric guitar with a load of delay and reverb on it.  We strummed a couple of acoustic guitars together around one mic and then overdubbed a couple more. We recorded a track of brushed cymbals and started on the vocals.

We sang in harmony - I sang it, then Amy sang with my vocal, then I replaced my vocal. The lyrics meant nothing to either of us. The track sounded great but the vocals were prosaic and lacklustre. At various points I wanted to give up on it but we kept going. I sent my vocal out through a Boss vocoder pedal and into my wonderful Moog Opus which Amy played. The result was other worldly and decidedly creepy. We put some oscillator noises on it and a casual bass guitar here and there and it suddenly came together. 

I wish I could do that with some of my own tracks. I spent bits of yesterday wrangling a track into shape in between celebrating out fourteenth wedding anniversary. It was a great day. In the morning we somehow got onto the subject of Quincy, played by Jack Klugman. I can’t imagine how we got there but Amy asked me if I’d ever watched the show. 

I was a huge fan, possibly for a lot of the wrong reasons, but I’ll readily admit to it. I watched it for the outfits - you never knew what he was going to be wearing next: loud checkered sports jackets with huge lapels; chunky V necked pullovers; windcheaters with elaborate collars and complicated arrangements of buttons or press studs. Every scene was a fashion shocker. Re-runs of Quincy were required late night viewing through the nineteen eighties.

We watched most of an episode involving the illegal dumping of toxic waste, featuring Quincy in a succession of golfing jackets and a big suede affair with sheepskin collar and cuffs, and patch pockets. Amy said she can see where I get my fashion sense. I hadn’t realised how much Quincy had rubbed off on me. I’d like to think that if he really existed we could be friends, maybe go thrift store shopping together.

It felt very decadent to be watching Quincy at ten o’clock in the morning, but it was our wedding anniversary after all.

Later on we decided to go for dinner and chose a restaurant down in Rhinebeck that looked suitably upscale and disgustingly expensive. We set off in my old Mercury Cougar talking enthusiastically about the writing of books, the making of records, and, of course, our rediscovered hero, Quincy. Amy usually keeps a check on my speed but she was having a night off. It was a country road that I’ve driven on many times. The speed limit changes every couple of miles. The Cougar was running perfectly and we were bowling along when I saw red and blue lights in the rearview mirror. I slowed down and prepared to pull in so he could pass me. Only he didn’t, he pulled in behind.

‘Have you any idea why I stopped you sir?’

‘I think it might be because I was going a little too fast…’

‘You were doing seventy-seven miles an hour in a thirty-five mile an hour zone.’

‘Oh wow! The car really is running well tonight…’

He asked where we were going and we told him. Amy took the opportunity to mention that it was our wedding anniversary. He asked how long we’d been married. I stuttered a bit over the answer to that, as you do, but I think it gave me a bit of guys together credibility

All this time we’d been trying to find the registration but for some reason it wasn’t in the car. I was having visions of celebrating our anniversary alone in a jail cell. He took my licence and headed off for his patrol car. He came back a couple of minutes later, handed back the licence with a smile, wished us a happy wedding anniversary, and told me to watch my speed.

I thought how different this encounter might have been had we been young and black instead of old, white, and heading for the stodgy town of Rhinebeck.

I don't usually drive so fast in thirty-five mile an hour zones but this one wasn’t exactly populated and I didn't see the sign. I’m usually more mindful. I don’t drive through neighbourhoods at breakneck speed.

Dinner was no great shakes but we enjoyed it anyway. There were an inordinate amount of waiting staff including a young man who kept coming around with a bottle of tap water. He topped us up and said Enjoy. He did this three times. The main or most prevalent waitress put me in mind of a shark with a ponytail. Vicious in her determination to do the absolute minimum.

It made us happy to be up here in Catskill. We’re lucky.

We came home and watched the last episode of the Warhol Diaries. Amy promised she wouldn’t cry but I think she did anyway. It was a happy sad ending.

I lay exhausted on the sofa. Amy googled Jack Klugman and we listened to him talking about the beginnings of Quincy. No one thought it would last more than four episodes, least of all Jack Klugman. But his cynicism turned to belief and it endured for eight seasons between 1977 and 1983.

Amy wondered why Quincy was such a success. 

The answer came to me in a flash from somewhere in the mists between awake and sleeping: those moist and soulful eyes, almost unable to bear the latest injustice, this week’s wrong which must be put right. Quincy is a good guy, the kindest, most tenacious, and fair-minded man that never existed. He lives on a boat with a vast collection of sports jackets and windcheaters. He’s a latter day male version of a fairy godmother. The world needs someone like Quincy. How could he not prevail?

Things Like This Happen To Other People (part one)

Things took rather a sinister turn last week - I had a heart attack and spent the weekend before my birthday in intensive care. 

I felt good when I got out of quarantine. A few days later I suddenly didn’t - we went for a walk and I got very out of breath - I had to sit down. It kept happening and it kept coming and going. Other virus sufferers told me they had exactly the same experience - the recovery is long and drawn out. I kept reading about the comet tail - recovery from the virus can be slow and fraught with setbacks. 

Apart from being short of breath, on occasions I started to feel quite nauseous. And then the chest pains started. High up, either side of my shoulders. Then they'd subside and I’d feel tired. I’d curse the virus and try to get on with things.

Obviously it was going to get better. Except that it didn’t. I had a day when I felt pretty crappy just about all day. The following day I got up and felt vaguely well. I sat and drank peppermint tea and enjoyed Amy’s latest homemade granola experiment. I felt tired - maybe I just needed to lay down for a while... I went up the stairs and felt the pain, an acute discomfort, grip me. I lay down and after a while it was a little better so I got up, got ready and went out with Amy in her car to run a few errands.

We were up north of Hudson where some friends have a farm. It was good to be out in the country, in the sunlight enjoying a socially distanced conversation.

I felt unwell. I had to excuse myself and get back in the car.

We set off to go home and I started to feel really unwell. Amy suggested we stop off at the hospital but that seemed to me like a drastic step, an admission that something was seriously not right. And that’s the last thing I wanted to admit to.

Amy said ‘I hope you’re not having a heart attack,’ and I laughed it off and said ‘No, that would be completely different to this.’ It couldn’t be - everybody knows a heart attack is when there’s something like a fist gripping a large stone in the middle of your chest and you get tingles and sometimes a shooting pain down your left arm. I didn’t have any of that so it couldn’t be a heart attack. And anyway, me and a heart attack? It’s not possible, it’s a bad fit. Heart attacks happen to other people and possibly to me in some dim and distant future when I’m very old.

I was quietly freaking out and trying to keep a lid on it because I didn’t want Amy to be upset. My head had turned into a hot, fuzzy mush, my rib cage was squeezing itself inwards, I had a fairly excrutiating pain each side of my chest and my arms had turned into nonsense. It became imperative that we get to the hospital. I’ve never seen Amy drive so fast.

We skidded into the ER parking lot where there was a barrier and one car ahead of us. Amy jumped out leaving the door open and the engine running. Everything was blurring by this point. I saw an exchange taken place but didn’t know what Amy was saying. I found out later it was ‘My husband’s having a heart attack.’

There was a team running across the concourse and I was in a chair being wheeled through. I think I told them I’d had the virus.

‘He’s Covid-positive!!

‘Room seven?’

Yeah, room seven.’

We crashed through to the back of the hospital and into a room containing a whole team of medical workers. They dumped me onto a bed, clustered around, fired questions at me - allergies, medications, date of birth… A nurse who said his name was Scott told me I was going to be ok and he was going to give me an injection. They gave me pills to swallow, tore off my shirt and stuck a whole bunch of electrodes on me. They put a tube in my arm, gave me the injection and siphoned half a gallon of blood out of me. 

Scott asked if I wanted a chaplain.

‘That’s the last bloody thing I want!’

A woman in a lab coat bustled in with some apparatus and announced that she was going to test me for Covid-19. The apparatus looked like something you might use to artificially inseminate a goat - two small wiry looking probes - I tried not to look too closely. She plunged them deep into my nose and I could feel them in my throat. It was unpleasant but it was over very quickly.

They gave me oxygen tubes and I began to feel a lot less alarmingly like I was about to die. I had four over-riding concerns: 

I wanted to someone to go and tell Amy how I was - they gave me my phone and I called her. I had no recollection of this until later. It went something like: everything’s ok here - apparently I’m having a heart attack. 

I wanted to pee really badly - why didn’t I have the sense to go before all this happened? 

I mustn’t die because tomorrow was the second anniversary of the death of my daughter Luci’s mother, and I really didn’t want to bring this on her. The timing was not good and at the very least I could hear her saying: why are you making this all about you? And quite right too.

I was three days from my sixty sixth birthday and I didn’t want to spend it in isolation in a hospital.

Bit by bit I was divested of all my clothes apart from my socks - I went through the ensuing twenty four hours wearing my socks - how quintessentially English - he died with his socks on… They put me in a flowery robe that didn’t button up at the back and it occurred to me that they weren’t planning on letting me walk around anywhere for a while, not in that garment, and anyway I was hooked up to too much machinery. 

I was going to be transferred to Albany by ambulance. I was introduced to the paramedics who were going to take me there, two large and baggy looking men in black satin bomber jackets. They were called Duane and Shane. They seemed quite proud of the comedy aspect of their pairing.

They swaddled me in blankets, strapped me down to the trolley, loaded me into the ambulance and off we went with the siren wailing, Shane at the wheel, Duane busied himself with a few things then sat with me in the back. 

‘So, what do you get up to in your spare time? Are you into huntin’ and fishin’?’

It was going to be a long ride to Albany. 

******

There's obviously more to come but it's a long and twisted tale. Look back in a day or two for the next installment.

A One Way Ticket To Amy Rigby

A couple of months ago, with too much to do and too little time to do it in, Amy dumped a large box of cassettes into the middle of the studio floor and asked me to go through them with her to see if we could find maybe ten or so tunes that we could make into a giveaway CD to go with pre-orders of her memoir, Girl To City.

They were four track Portastudio demos, hundreds of them it seemed. One of her brothers had been in the merchant navy, and sometime in the early eighties he found himself on shore leave in Japan where he bought a Tascam Portastudio, the very latest model of this new-tangled device, and sent it to Amy and her brother Michael to help them along with their new group, Last Roundup. For a decade or so it shuttled back and forth between their two apartments in the East Village and eventually found a permanent home in Amy’s flat in Brooklyn’s decidedly un-hip Greenpoint. And during this time she made literally hundreds of demos of songs she’d written.

The original Tascam had long ceased to function so I blew the dust off a lumpy beige Tascam 424 that I’d come by and stashed away wondering why I really needed to hang on to it. I patched the four channels through to the studio computer and set to work, wondering what I might find.

The recordings may have been rough but the execution and the sound, the atmosphere, was magical. She’d perhaps record an acoustic guitar on one track, a vocal on another, and fill the remaining two tracks with a vocal harmony and an electric guitar. Or it might have been all electric guitars and sometimes a complicated vocal harmony arrangement recorded complete with echo which apparently came from a cheap and long-lost delay pedal.

Every song was a gem - even ones that were quite blatantly aimed at the middle-of-the-road Nashville country market. I was transported into Amy’s life from long before I met her: the everyday noises of her various apartments, her daughter Hazel playing in the background and occasionally coming to the fore:

‘Mommy!’

‘Wait!’ [Curt interjection from Amy]

‘Do you want to here Holiday For Strings?’ 

A toy keyboard starts up and is immediately obliterated by the guitar intro of the next song.

When it rains you can hear it splattering in the courtyard at the back of the building through the open window. The window was evidently always open, and you can hear the shouts of neighbours and kids at play, distant traffic, car horns and police sirens. At one point a pause in the middle of a song is augmented by a loud power tool in the building next door. It sounds like a sheet of plywood being sawn in half.

Sometimes what was on the four tracks didn’t immediately make sense. Amy worked for a while at Sony and acquired a lot of tapes that had already been recorded on. Portastudios run at double speed so there might be sudden backward snatches of The Very Best Of Christopher Cross or some such nonsense, roaring in at high speed and an octave higher than it normally would be. And then a song, started, abandoned and superseded by another song which finds its way to fruition accompanied by gorgeous harmonies on another of the four tracks shared with high speed blasts of a rough mix from Diary Of A Mod Housewife.

I wanted to do as little as possible but I was very much aware that if these recordings were to be heard and appreciated they needed a certain amount of help in order to turn them into a fully listenable experience - raw is great - but unlistenable is pointless.

There were pops and bumps and rumblings - no one tells anyone how to avoid these things happening in the macho world of recording - so every time Amy sang a word beginning with P or B there would be a massive explosion into the vocal mic, and words with the letter S in the middle of them could be especially sibilant. I spent a long time at the computer taming these down. There was evidently a faulty microphone cable too - in fact I think there may have been two mic cables, one of which was good, and it was a gamble as to which one would get used, so there was often a loud buzz or hum on some of the tracks. I did what I could to reduce these things without compromising the integrity, atmosphere and intent of the original recordings.

The nineteen tracks on this album are just the tip of the iceberg, all we had time to put together with a looming deadline. There be another volume or two coming soon. In the meantime I think anyone who fancies themselves as a songwriter should listen to this collection - you might find it, as I did, a humbling experience.

Order a copy along with her new memoir Girl To City from her website: amyrigby.com

And while you're there check her tour dates!

Air B n B

I used to be a fan of Air B n B but I’m rapidly going off the whole idea. I wasn’t too keen to begin with - Amy got into it and my first experience was in Pasarobles, California. It was before we discovered the ‘entire place’ option so it was a room in a lady’s house. We were obliged to interact. I got into conversation with the lady about the how difficult it can be to do all the things you want to do in life, something like that.

‘The trouble is’ I found myself saying, ‘that there’s never enough time.’

‘I don’t find that’ she said, ‘you see, I have all eternity.’

In the morning Amy got up early and blundered out onto a sun terrace where she found our host in full on communication with Our Heavenly Father.

I have no problem with people holding beliefs, I just don’t necessarily want to become involved in them.

My second Air B n B experience was a caravan in the grounds of a house in North Hollywood. It was cheap and it was wacky, just our sort of thing. We’d been playing in San Diego and had to be in Los Angeles early the following day, so we arrived at this place at five in the morning. Birds were trilling the dawn chorus and there was nobody around, just us and the garbage truck. It took ages to find The Gate In The Long Fence, and when we did it was almost impossible to open the lockbox and then to unlock the gate. We stumbled down some steps through a rockery with our luggage and there was the caravan - originally cream and orange, but faded and covered in an accumulation of moss and whatever debris had fallen onto it from the trees that surrounded it.

Bijou.

Inside it smelled of gas and microwaved pies. I opened a window and a dilapidated fly screen fell out. We tried to put a brave face on it - it was half past five in the morning by this time and we were exhausted. I pointed out to Amy, by way of being positive, that you could open the bathroom door and flush the toilet without leaving the bed. We were considering toughing it out for the sake of a few hours sleep but we found leeches in the sink so we booked into the downtown Best Western and stayed there for three nights. It cost a fortune but it was like paradise after the caravan.

I have had some good Air B n B experiences. Last June Amy and I stayed in a two storey shack in Mendocino. It was very small - the ground floor contained a sofa, a coffee table and a sink unit. Upstairs was a bedroom with a bed in it and not much else. The whole place wobbled as you climbed the stairs. The bathroom was in its own separate shack next door, connected by a short, secluded path illuminated by fairy lights. To get to the place you had to walk past the remains of a lot of scrapped and rusting cars and into some woodland. It should have been a disaster but it was quite wonderful.

We stayed in a converted breeze block garage in the back garden of a house in Nashville and that’s where I figured something out: in the good old days, before the Air B n B craze, short term rentals were traditionally filled with collections of mismatched furniture and knick-knacks - unwanted gifts, flower vases, decorative plates, hideous table lamps and so on. The modern way is to take all this crap and donate it to the Goodwill, get a tax receipt and spend the equivalent money furnishing the place with brand new crap from TK or TJ Maxx and Target, and that’s why the places where they’ve made A REAL EFFORT are full of overstuffed chairs that look like rotund aunties and aren’t comfortable to sit in, and oblong blocks that say COFFEE on each face. And why they invariably have a large number of decorative cushions on the bed varying in size from large to quite small, one of which will be heart-shaped. There might be a sign that says: Two Lovers Built This Nest, and in the kitchen there may well be another sign that says: Instant Human - Just  Add Coffee.

I find the concept of two lovers converting the garage into a nest by lining it with plasterboard, installing a Pergo floor and filling it with tacky crap from Target, Pier 21, Bed Bath & Beyond ridiculous, cloying and quite unbelievable.

Some Air B n B hosts get it right. We stayed in two different places on the south coast of England that were just great, and I stayed alone in another that had a wonderful sea view but was filled with furniture and had walls covered in inconsequential pictures - framed photos of not very interesting exhibitions from 1998 and 2011, that sort of thing. There were something in the region of five chests of drawers, there were window treatments, a foldaway bed, a million kitchen utensils, cabinets of trinketry, books that no one wants to read, shelves of CDs: The Best Of R.E.M., The Very Best Of Chris de Burgh, Graceland, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon... I couldn’t hear myself think for the encroachment of someone else’s life. I had to gaze out at the sea across the promenade in order to hold on to my fragile sanity.

I endured one in West Hollywood, a tiny Spanish bungalow from the 1930s, that had almost nothing in it except a bed, a chair and a large wall-mounted TV. It had a beautiful all-original kitchenette but the charm was lost to an over-large, and very loud refrigerator, a Keurig coffee maker and a bulky black microwave that filled the fold-out kitchen table so there was really nowhere for me to sit and write my novel. I spent my time in there spreadeagled across the bed trying to summon the will to get up and turn off the light.

I stayed in a charming duplex in Echo Park, Los Angeles, except that once I’d been there for a few hours I realized it wasn’t at all charming, it was indefinably grubby, with a spongy bit in the middle of the vinyl wood-finish Pergo floor where the underfloor had been joined between the floor joists and had given way.
My stay coincided with an unseasonably cold spell and the only heating came from a dusty oil-filled radiator and a ceramic wall-mounted heater with a big crack across the middle of it. This place had a separate kitchen, a ghetto beyond the bedroom with a one wall painted with blackboard paint and covered with tributes from former guests, who I can only imagine must have been drunk for the duration of their stay to have scrawled such sentimental gibberish with the chalks provided: We had an AWESOME time! …We Love You! …your place is an oasis of peacefulness and beauty in an otherwise grey world…we’ll be back for more wine and walks and good food and hugs… I even saw a tribute from someone I knew.
Everything in the kitchen was covered in a thin film of grease, embedded with dust. I didn’t want to imagine how much bacon had been fried up in that place. There was a shelf stacked up with the stuff that people had bought over the years to cook esoteric dishes and live temporary existences involving the imbibing of herbal teas. There was paprika, basmati rice, salt, pepper, curry powder, sachets of saffron, stale coffee, sweet and sour sauce, soy sauce, demerara sugar, ketchup, tabasco, plastic bear honey, organic tea bags… and everything on the shelf was stuck to it and the whole installation was greasy and very unappetising, but with a thin veneer of generosity. The stove was old and clunky, and superficially clean, and you had to keep checking that the pilot light was still lit.

The good thing about that place was that it had a piano. I worked up two songs for my new album while I was there: The Half Of It in its entirety and California/Handyman which I’d started to write by a dilapidated swimming pool at a motel near San Diego. You can pre-order the album as a download on Bandcamp and get The Half Of It and two other tracks to be going on with right now. I hope you’re going to love it.

And Introducing Bryce McCafferty...

I should be strutting about in a fur hat, large mirrored shades and possibly a cloak - a pop svengali, top producer and engineer with a sound coveted by many and achieved by none - because I'm the man who produced and engineered the new Amy Rigby album, a rough, tough psychedelic garage record, her first solo album in twelve years, and her best yet.

But I couldn't really carry it off - my head would itch in the fur hat, the mirrored shades would be covered in fingerprints, and even though I might quite like it I'd feel ridiculous wearing a cloak. So instead I've cast myself in dual roles as Bryce McCafferty, the dependable but tempermental bass playing sideman, and as Amy's erstwhile road manager who I imagine as a sort of Jon Voight character - buckskin jacket, silk scarf, cowboy boots, and a good foot or so taller than myself.

I set the stage, switch on the amps, tune up the twelve string, put the capo on the second fret and report back to Ms Rigby that all is ready. Then I walk back on as Bryce McCafferty and pick up the bass guitar.

Bryce doesn't give a fuck. He's the king of crass. He watches as another more willing band member backs the truck into a bollard or a low brick wall: 'Oooh! I saw that coming - bang goes the deposit!'

A guitar goes missing: '...yeah, I saw that in the dressing room as we were leaving last night and sort of wondered about it.'

'I'm not setting foot on that stage until I get my per diem - I'll do the soundcheck but there's no way I'm going on for the show until I get paid.'

The band leaves the stage with the applause still ringing. Band members metaphorically patting themselves and each other on the back, saying the dumb things that euphoric band members are apt to say. But not Bryce - Bryce is too cool for that - 'Here, did you get your per diem yet? I still didn't get mine...'

Bryce on the right wondering where his per diem went. With Ms Rigby and the gainfully employed Jeremy Grites

Bryce... at turns scruffy, unshaven, abstracted or satorially elegent. Reprehensible but quietly dependable, even when he's drunk. A Thursday gig might see him in grubby jeans, Saturday nights find him fully suited and booted.

Bryce turns and looks at the drummer: 'Who is it this week then? Have we worked together before?'

On this tour Ms Rigby is going through more drummers than Spinal Tap - there's nothing dark or lurid about it, it's just that unlike Bryce they all have day jobs.

'Ground rules, there have to be ground rules...'

I love Bryce McCafferty! I only invented him because promoters were announcing me as a featured musician on Amy's shows, and although I find that very flattering I was worried that it might take the heat off when I come back and do my own shows next month. Because next month I'll have a new album out and I'll be back to boring old me.

I'm going to miss Brycey.

pre-order the new Wreckless Eric album from Amazon

Catch Bryce McCafferty and a gainfully employed drummer on tour with the incomparable Amy Rigby:

08 NEWHAVEN CT Cafe Nine

10 NORTHAMPTON MA The Parlor Room
14 ASBURY PARK NJ The Saint

15 VIENNA VA Jammin Java

18 CHARLESTON WV Culture Center Theater

25 HULL UK O'Riley's

26 MANCHESTER UK BBC 6 Music Marc Riley Show

27 BRIGHTON UK Prince Albert

28 LEICESTER UK Musician

29 BRISTOL UK Thunderbolt
30 LONDON UK Betsey Trotwood