I tend to write a few thousand words about whatever comes to mind at the end of one of my concert tours. Sometimes it's all fairly coherent, but coherency or consistency isn't necessarily the point of these travelogues, unless that's how the world appears to be -- which it generally doesn't.
I'll start where I left off with the last travelogue, after Kamala and I left Mexico, which was on March 24th, after a spectacular five days we spent there, celebrating St. Patrick, the St. Patrick Battalion, international solidarity, and everything Irish. We both knew the beginning of the tour -- our stay in Mexico City -- would be the highlight of it, and it was, though the rest of it was just wonderful.
The entire tour was more a working vacation than anything else. I mostly blame my own lack of organization for the tour not being as busy as it could have been. Kamala is trying to help me with this project of getting better organized, but we have a long way to go with that. The fact is, if someone hasn't organized a gig for me in the past couple years, I tend to forget they exist, from an organizational standpoint at least, and they generally stop hearing from me. If they're not actively looking to see what I'm up to, or actively paying attention to my email list or social media posts, then we lose touch with each other. This is very bad, but it's how it is.
One thing I'm a bit better at keeping track of is which ones of my friends have homes with nice accommodations for guests. The geographical concentration of the gigs meant that although we had 10 appearances between Los Angeles, England, and Scotland over the past 3 weeks, we only stayed in 5 different homes during these travels, thus adding to the holiday vibe.
One of the most striking aspects of traveling these days that I tend to forget to mention in these travelogues is that the US and the UK are disposable countries. The amount of trash generated by the average individual in these countries on a daily basis is absolutely staggering -- nothing like what life is like for me at home, where I make my own espresso drinks in my own kitchen, and use real porcelain cups, like most people do at home.
While it is indeed the case that I have in the past had more than one relative in my extended family who was so disinclined to wash dishes that they used paper plates for every meal, one might hope that this kind of extremely wasteful orientation would now be a thing of the past, but it isn't. It is, in fact, completely institutionalized, and this in the allegedly most progressive and ecological states in the USA -- California.
Whether you're going out for a coffee in the bohemian enclave of Topanga or going out to eat in the more touristy parts of LA, whether you ask for your food or drink to be "for here" or "to go," everything will be served to you in disposable paper and plastic packaging. As far as I understand the phenomenon, it is cheaper for businesses to do this than to actually wash and reuse dishes. Given the insane rents most of them are paying to barely stay afloat, every corner that can be cut must be cut.
And given that the allegedly progressive, ecological state of California utterly fails to regulate much of anything, most definitely including disposable packaging, everywhere you go, if you eat or drink out, you will end up creating enough garbage in a given day that could easily fill a typical kitchen-size trash bag. This practice of serving people food in disposable packaging could be banned in the stroke of a pen, as it was in France, but no -- not in the land where capitalism rules supreme.
England, Scotland, and Wales are all the same as the USA in this regard. As with every other bad practice adopted by folks in the USA, it's also become the norm in the land that many British leftists have long referred to alternatively as Airstrip 1 or the 51st State.
When we got to LA we were hearing about chaos at Heathrow Airport in London, which had shut down completely for a day because of a power outage resulting from a fire somewhere near the airport.
Fire also characterized the landscape in LA. Authorities had shut down access to most of the burned-out neighborhoods, but we took lots of walks around the Topanga Canyon State Park, from which many scorched hillsides could be seen.
While it is indeed the case that a US state has the power to regulate things like disposable packaging use within its borders, seeing the destruction wrought by the recent fires that destroyed so much of Los Angeles, hearing about the mass layoffs throughout the federal government, and hearing about Trump's wacko views on why the western states are so fire-prone, it's all extremely worrying. The situation was extremely worrying before Trump, but now dramatically more so.
Over half of the state of Oregon is federal land. Oregon also had the biggest wildfires of anywhere in the US in 2024, so many of which originated on federal land. If it's just up to state and local authorities to deal with these massive fires, as it seems it soon will be, we can expect many more catastrophes on the level of what just happened in Los Angeles, and soon.
Even if California or Oregon were run by people who had any real interest in dealing with this situation rather than helping the real estate industry profit from it, even if these states were run by people who were prepared to regulate the housing market to stop society from sprawling further and further into the flammable forests further and further away from the urban centers, we'd still be totally fucked, due to the federal government's abdication of any responsibility in managing lands under federal control.
The first most noticeable things about flying into LAX as well as flying into Heathrow was the line at immigration was shorter than either Kamala or I have ever seen. People may be on the move all over the world, but not many of them seem to be flying into either Los Angeles or London these days.
By a freak coincidence, the clouds parted the moment we landed, and the sun shone down from entirely blue skies everywhere we went, up until our last full day on the island, during which time it drizzled a little bit. Though sunny, it was still mostly cool and breezy. Altogether perfect weather, if you don't think too hard about it. But when anyone we met wasn't busy enjoying the unusually sunny and unseasonably warm weather, they were talking about how unusually dry and flammable so much vegetation was looking like, listening to BBC reports about how the island received 1/4 its usual amount of rainfall for the month of March, and fearing for the future. The moors have already been catching fire on occasion in recent years, and look set to do that lots more in the next few.
Our three weeks between England and Scotland on this tour involved a full schedule of gigs on three consecutive weekends, but with very little to do in between, aside from having lots of time to make the trip between England and Scotland and back. So we had plenty of time free to get into trouble, which included singing at three different protests.
Unlike our last tour of that island that shall not be named lest we offend a Scottish nationalist, this time there was no evidence that anyone seemed to hear about in terms of my various cancelation campaigners from either the pro-genocide Israel supporters or the anarcho-puritan sectarian leftists. This may be because the right noticed their efforts were mainly serving to give them bad publicity, and the anarcho-puritans are thinking better of being on the same side as the Zionists while Israel is committing genocide.
Or it may be because people offering to organize gigs for me have learned to be very careful about choosing venues. Your typical pub that's barely staying in business can be easily pressured by letters threatening legal action. If the venue is owned by a labor union, on the other hand, they're much harder to intimidate, and if it's a venue associated with the Irish or Scottish Republican cause, they're used to being called terrorist sympathizers, so such accusations against me slide right off. Most of the venues we played in on this tour were either associated with a union or with republicanism of the Celtic variety.
Our first gig in England was at the Islington Folk Club, and as always, it was packed, and a great night. I don't know what that folk club is like on the nights I'm not there, but whenever I'm the feature act, all the songs other participants do leading up to my sets are full of radical notions, while still generally staying within the fold of what is easily recognizable as traditional or trad music from one of those islands just to the north and west of France. Every time I play at Islington I get to hear yet another poignant a cappella song about a hapless young man who was conscripted into service for the British Empire, only to die young in the process.
Two different Palestine-related fundraisers in Portsmouth were two more opportunities to hear more great music, and poetry and storytelling as well. The person we stayed with there, as it happened, was marking the anniversary of the death of his son, who was a beautiful young man who had been very active working in solidarity with refugees in France, along with his dad, and then when what they call the full-scale war began in Ukraine, he joined the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia, and got killed.
On our way up to Scotland, where we had gigs on our second weekend on the unnamed island, we spent a glorious day hiking in the mountains of Cumbria with friends who live in Penrith, and communing with the Danish sheep that the Vikings brought over to England a thousand years ago.
In Scotland, which is even less used to sunny weather than England is, many people were quite visibly turning pink from sunburn. Apparently hospitalizations increase in Scotland during sunny weather, due to the tendency of certain Scottish folks to have no clue about the existence of sunburn as a phenomenon, and also their tendency to drink too much alcohol in reaction to the sun coming out, which I don't quite understand.
A relatively new operation being run by a collection of musical radicals in Glasgow is the Keelie Folk Club, who were responsible for organizing both of our Glasgow gigs, each of which was in a really cool venue with a long history of being on the side of the people -- Galgael, a community center that is a home away from home for the homeless and other disenfranchised elements of society, and Lynch's Bar, which was a venue where secret republican gatherings were being held in the days before I was born, and it's been in the Lynch family there ever since. The granddaughter of the founding family of the place was working the bar during our show there.
One of the fine upstanding radicals who came to the show at Lynch's Bar was the son of the union shop steward at the Rolls Royce factory in East Kilbride who initiated the campaign to boycott any work for the Chilean Air Force's plane engines -- a campaign which resulted in the Chilean Air Force for a time having zero functional fighter planes.
In addition to doing another excellent show in Edinburgh, organized by the same collection of peaceniks who have organized gigs for me there consistently for many years, we played at a protest rally for Gaza in the depressed, post-industrial city of Paisley.
I talked to many people in both Scotland and England who were very involved with the big rallies for Gaza that have been happening every Saturday since October, 2023, who lamented the fact that the big rallies in Glasgow and London never involve live music. Rather, they generally involve the same people speaking, expressing the same outrage, and otherwise saying the same things -- things that everyone who goes to such rallies already knows, which is why they're there.
Paisley, instead, was a much more inspiring affair than that, at least. Still a bit heavy on speakers, but featuring a bunch of music, which made a big -- and entirely positive -- difference.
The way this was organized followed the same kind of logic I am so often preaching to anyone who will listen, about how a rally organizer can make use of local musical talent to improve a rally immensely, and make people want to come to the next one. Of the four musical acts that were part of the rally, there were two that were singing songs that were specifically about the genocide at hand -- us, and a jazz pianist who wrote one song on the subject, and that's the one she did. The other musicians included a bagpipe player who played "Amazing Grace" -- which may not be about Palestine, but anyone who is familiar with the song and its meaning can both see and be profoundly moved by the relationship there -- and a couple of folks who did a set of songs that were against war, and written in the 1960's.
Now, some folks will cringe at the very notion of having anyone singing songs from the 1960's at an antiwar protest, and this is really sad. People know and like these songs, so why should they not be sung? Especially when there's other music on the program that is more honed in on the particular genocide at hand, songs about other genocidal wars, such as the one the US military waged against the peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, a set of songs from the Sixties fits right in to the mix.
Their set was a perfect example of what can happen if you ask local musicians to do a set at a protest rally. Maybe they normally sing cover songs in local pubs as a general rule, and they're not politically-oriented troubadours like some of us are. But then they can just choose a few of those cover songs they sing in the pubs for the right kind of content and voila, you've got a perfect set for an antiwar protest.
As it happened, on the same day that we were singing at the protest in Paisley, across the US there were 1,200 "Hands Off" protests against aspects of the Trump agenda that Democrats oppose, a tiny handful of which included live performers of any kind. (And folks who follow me on Substack may have already read the essay I wrote that was inspired by the lack of music at those protests -- Why We Abandoned Our Most Effective Tactic.)
Back in England again for our last of three weeks on the island that some people call by the name of "England, Scotland, and Wales" -- which I maintain is a ridiculous name for an island that the Greeks named something along the lines of "Britain" thousands of years ago -- we had a lovely, windy day on the south coast city of Hastings, which seemed more abandoned than it had before, maybe because the last time I was there it was a bit later in the year, when some people go to the coast to lay on the beach and such, which no sensible person would have done on the day we were there. Well, there were a couple of scantily-clad sunbathers freezing on the beach there, but only a couple.
Along with a packed crowd at the London Action Resource Center with us and Steve White and the Protest Family performing, that weekend in London coincided with a protest folks organized at the US Embassy, which ended with Kamala and I and other folks performing at the encampment that folks have been maintaining for months now, across from the embassy.
The new US Embassy in London is a massive, modern building that still has a palatial quality to it, given that it is basically surrounded by a mote. It's a pretty mote, but still very obviously a mote. Prior to our action there, Greenpeace activists had come around with some kind of red dye, and made the mote turn red. The water in the mote is recycled, so clearly putting the red dye in it was a great plan, because days later, it was still blood red.
On the day we were there, a couple hundred folks came around to participate in a mostly silent surrounding of the embassy, with lots of banners against the genocide, and various powerful, artistic representations of the thousands of children that have been relentlessly killed by the Israeli military in Gaza over the past 18+ months.
What's happening 24-7 across from the embassy is a little peace camp, with big banners on display at all times, along with clotheslines with children's clothes and other artistic ways to try to communicate the horrors of Israel's kindercide to passersby. The embassy workers mostly walk right through the encampment from the nearest subway stop, on the way to and from work, along with lots of other people. From what I saw that day, most passersby are either sympathetic, or disinterested, but rarely hostile. Which seemed notable, given the very upper-crust neighborhood the embassy is located in.
Our very last musical appearance in England was another protest camp, one we only heard about at the Gaza solidarity encampment. Folks associated with the venerable Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were to set up camp outside the gates of the Lakenheath Royal Air Force base north of the city of Cambridge, where it was recently revealed in a tabloid media scoop that the US and UK have for years been making secret arrangements to use Lakenheath as a base for American nuclear missiles -- much to the horror of many local residents.
The CND has been around a long time, as have some of the principal CND organizers. Given that many of them are from that generation we call the Sixties generation, or somewhat younger folks profoundly influenced by that generation, the idea of including lots of music and art as part of this peace camp was automatic. When I emailed on Saturday to offer to do a show there on Tuesday, I heard back from them right away, with an enthusiastic "yes please." After getting to the camp I learned that some of my favorite radical musicians from southern England such as Robb Johnson and the band, Seize the Day, also had plans to come perform there the following day. Such a wild contrast with what happens when I offer to sing at a protest in the USA in recent years -- that is, nothing.
Over the decades it has often seemed at the bigger rallies in the US that used to have music at them that if we had a good sound system and an otherwise optimal setup, inevitably this would mean the rally would get drowned out by a police helicopter hovering overhead. Of course, if the sound system sucked and no one could hear the stage anyway, the helicopter might be absent. In the case of our little concert at the gates of the Lakenheath RAF base, the loud noises occasionally drowning out the music came from fighter jets taking off very nearby.
As it happens, the day I left Heathrow to head home to Oregon was April 16th, and the 25th anniversary of the A16 protests in Washington, DC, when tens of thousands of people came to commit nonviolent civil disobedience, surrounding a 90-block section of the city, and severely hampering the operations of the IMF/World Bank summit that was happening there that week, which was cut short because of our activities.
My first flight back to the US was the main one, from London to Seattle. Whereas at LAX and Heathrow my experience at immigration was one of waiting for about two minutes in a very short line before breezing through, in Seatac there was no line at all. I just walked right up to one guy who was working there, and that was it. The last time I came to Seatac Airport on an international flight, which was maybe a year ago, the line for immigration was a mile long, as it usually has been at LAX and Heathrow.
Not now, of course. Every hour I hear new stories of the deportations of permanent residents for participating in protests, and others being sent with no trial or judicial process to some kind of endless sentence in a gulag in El Salvador. And today as I land back in the land of the free, Trump is finally talking openly about treating US citizens to the same fate.
I don't know what's coming next, but I do know that the US left is in the most anemic and incompetent condition it has ever been in since the 1950's. But at least back then we had Pete Seeger, and even a widespread affection for the notion that music was a powerful medium for communication. Compared to now, really, the state of domestic dissent in the 1950's looks pretty good. I wish I could say, therefore, that there was nowhere to go but up, but looking at reality, anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of fascism can tell you that that's not true.
