Gun Violence, Massacres and “Other Developed Countries”

One evening in the spring of 1993 I took a bus across San Francisco, leaving the troubled, largely impoverished neighborhood of the Western Addition, populated mostly by the descendents of African slaves, in which I lived (representing, I suppose, the artistic hippie beginnings of the gentrification process which has since pushed most of San Francisco's Black population across the bay). My closest friend at the time was someone I met because we were housemates in a big apartment. He was a tall man with a long, thick red mane and beaming eyes named Eric Mark. A brilliant engineer with a promising career as such who quit his job and became a cab driver in the interest of experiencing life more fully. Eric and I, along with one friend and two of his acquaintances, were headed to the Mission District, another troubled, impoverished neighborhood, this one populated mostly by the refugees from the wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, generally known as “immigrants.”

Had we been just a clueless bunch of outsiders maybe we would have been fine, but two members of our party were of Mexican origin, and there was a gang war going on. It was the wee hours of the morning on May 1^st and several of us were decorating a nearby abandoned building with political slogans appropriate for International Workers Day, while Eric and Alfredo were keeping watch, ostensibly for cops, on the sidewalk three stories below. A group of kids with a gun pulled up in a car and demanded the contents of Eric and Alfredo's pockets, which were promptly delivered. One young man then pointed his gun at Alfredo, who looked suspiciously Latin but was apparently causing offense because he was dressed entirely in black, which was not either one of the gang colors. Eric stepped in front of the gun, asked the kids what more they wanted now that they had taken their money, and the kid pulled the trigger.

A madman with a gun killed Eric. He didn't use an assault rifle, just a shotgun, and it didn't even make the news. The police investigation seemed to last a few hours at most, with no one identified, arrested, tried, or any of that. And although it was a somewhat unusual case in that Eric was white, he was otherwise just another one of many thousands of mostly young men killed that year, and every year since – one of many, many times more innocent people killed this way by guns, and as shocking and life-shattering for his friends and family when he was shot as it has been for those close to the stolen lives of Newtown, Aurora, or Blacksburg. The motivation for the crime? Gang initiation, perhaps. The motivation for the gang? Poverty, racism, drug prohibition – what you could call the madness of our society. A madman with a gun killed Eric, but what was it that drove him mad? Was this a “senseless murder”? “Senseless” meaning we can't make sense of it, it's so crazy it can't be understood?

Now there's been a massacre horrific enough to sustain the attention of the media as well as the general population for more than a few days, and there's a lot of talk about banning assault weapons, what to do about gun violence in the US, and how to improve mental health services for the sociopathic killers in our midst.

Banning assault weapons is a very good idea, no doubt, and I don't want to set up a straw man in order to knock it down, but a simplified version of the argument I'm hearing from a lot of mainstream as well as progressive media is if we had the gun laws of “other developed countries” we'd then have a similar homicide rate to those countries. While I'm sure that a lot fewer people would die on the streets and classrooms of the US if we could effectively ban assault weapons, what seems equally obvious is once such a ban went into effect we would still have a far higher homicide rate than “other developed countries,” because we are not one of those “other developed countries,” we are a banana republic.

I have spent several months of almost every year since the late 90's playing music in those other developed countries, mostly in northwestern Europe, and I can tell you from abundant first-hand observation that it is not just our gun laws that differentiate us from “other developed countries.” I hear the talking heads making noises about expanding mental health services. Sounds like a nice idea, if you're into rearranging deck chairs on sinking ships. The elephant in the living room is we don't live in that kind of country. This isn't a country where people get “services.” This is a country where you work or die, where you are denied essential surgery for not having insurance, where even if your insurance covers mental health care, that means three appointments with a psychiatrist and a prescription for Prozac. Not all deranged American mass murderers are from privileged suburban communities with parents who can easily afford them “mental health services.”

This is America, this is a banana republic, this is a country with two oscillating ruling parties who both agree we should spend half our tax dollars on the military while governing over a country which has entire cities where the average lifespan is significantly lower than in many impoverished African countries. This is a country with four million people living on the street. You gonna give them mental health services? Before or after you find them a place to live and enough food to eat?

But it's a nice fantasy. We need lots of mental health services. And after we ban assault weapons it would be nice if our society didn't systematically breed alienated young men who learn to resent the more privileged and more attractive people they seem to be surrounded by, who ultimately dehumanize the socially more successful girls and women who are usually their targets when they snap and bring assault rifles and bombs to their schools. But once these people have been produced by our pathetic, jock-worshipping suburban school systems and our culture of commercialism and greed which constantly tells these unstable young men that they're not pretty enough, not sociable enough, or rich enough to ever get anywhere in life, then there's a lot more than some mental health services that they will need.

I know what it's like in countries where there is no underclass to speak of, where the social atmosphere in the public schools is much more reminiscent of a Waldorf school than a typical American public school, where people can talk sensibly about “improving mental health services” for an entire society. In the social democracies of Europe where most government housing is indistinguishable from privately-owned buildings, where almost all the jobs pay a decent wage and include at least several weeks of paid vacation every year, where any citizen can get a college education for free, where you can get across town or across the country more cheaply and faster in a train than in a car, people talk about “improving mental health services.” It seems half the people I meet in places like that work in mental health services, it's like my own private joke, one that only visitors from a banana republic can understand. You ask a Scandinavian what they do for a living, and you'll see – a shocking amount of the time their answer will have something to do with caring for people. If they're older than their early twenties, they'll usually be highly trained experts with college degrees specializing in something having to do with education, taking care of the elderly, or helping drug addicts and people with mental problems. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Me: What do you do for a living?

Scandinavian: I'm a pedagog.

Me: Oh, I see. Do you specialize in children, the elderly, or drug addicts?

At which point the Scandinavian will respond with one of those three options, generally.

But the only reason they can have a society like that in those “other developed countries” is because they have a certain fundamental thing that we lack: democracy. For all the hype to the contrary, we live in the least democratic “developed country” around. You need go no further than the following for the evidence: while polls have shown consistently for decades that most Americans would rather spend their tax dollars on things like education, health care and housing, we instead spend half of our taxes on the military, sending generations of young men all over the world in order to learn how to be sociopathic killers. We spend more on taxes than the average Japanese. Whereas the Japanese get space-age mass transit and universal healthcare, we get Amtrak, prisons and an abundance of fighter jets and nuclear bombs to defend us from an enemy that has never really existed, that has always been nothing more than an excuse for a nakedly imperial, extremely violent foreign policy.

If any political party in Europe even talked about changing the system there so half of the taxes went to the military, they would be voted out of office in the next election. But they have multi-party democracies with political groupings that have radically differing opinions – we don't. It is our lack of democracy, the fact that we are a banana republic ruled by a consortium of energy companies and banks, that prevents us from “improving mental health services.” “Improving mental health services” in America is like putting a new coat of paint on the Supermax penitentiary. It's a sick joke. We are not one of those “other developed countries” – we are a country with a huge portion of the population that lives with levels of violence that have far more in common with Bogota than Berlin, and for the same sorts of reasons. Inequality, poverty, lack of opportunity.

We can take away the assault rifles, and I hope we do, but until we develop a real democracy, stop spending all our money on bombs, and eliminate poverty – all of which can and has been done by many of those “other developed countries” – the innocent children and adults like Eric Mark and so many others will continue to be killed by “madmen” in “senseless acts of violence.” And while Anders Breivik is evidence that even in a democratic, egalitarian society where assault weapons are not available over the counter, a dedicated fascist can still manage to import some guns from the USA and kill lots of innocent people if he really wants to, it is only once we have a democratic, egalitarian society ourselves that we will be able to stop the majority of the violence so rife on the streets of America: the violence caused by American poverty and American racism.

David Rovics is a singer/songwriter who grew up in suburban Connecticut, currently based in Portland, Oregon. Songs and poems he's written relevant to gun violence and modern-day massacres include “Song for Eric,” “All the GhostsThat Walk This Earth,” “I'm Taking Someone With Me When I Go,” “Aurora Massacre,” and “Breivik.” All of these songs can be found at www.davidrovics.com for free download.

The New Normal: Police State

I'm pretty sure I have just experienced the most disproportionate reaction to a protest in a supposedly democratic society ever, at least since labor organizer Mother Jones faced off all by herself with one hundred members of the National Guard around a century ago. As someone who has personally been fairly actively attending protests since the early 1980's, and as a student of the history of social movements that happened before my time as well, it seems difficult to put what just happened in Florida into some kind of relevant context, but I'll just share my own story of the past week in north Florida and attempt to make sense of it, for whatever that's worth.

I suppose a place to begin might be with my last trip to Florida, in October of last year. It was soon after the birth of what became known as the Occupy movement. After participating in the protest on Wall Street on September 17th, I had gigs further south, and by early October I was in Florida. Going to Disneyworld inevitably includes experiencing certain things along with the roller coasters, such as bad food, bad parenting, and long lines. While waiting with my family in the long lines I engaged in my own, slightly more subtle form of bad parenting, spending much of my time staring at my phone, reading the endless stream of articles in the news related to Occupy protests and encampments that were starting up all over the US, Canada and elsewhere. As the day progressed and the long lines continued, I moved from reading about the news to writing about it, in the form of a song, which I finished by the pool at our hotel the following day.

I debuted the song at Occupy Tampa soon thereafter, where several dozen people of all ages, from all walks of life, had just set up a tent city, as people had done in hundreds of other cities throughout the continent and beyond, at the same time. The first police raid against this apparently very threatening group of peaceful urban campers happened the next day, and was repeated ad nauseum at almost every Occupy site in the US over the next few weeks, involving innumerable cases of unprovoked police brutality and a national total of 7,000 arrests by the end of the fall.

While I was in Florida last fall, many local activists in Tampa, St. Pete, and elsewhere were beginning to make preparations for various protests and other activities to welcome the upcoming Republican National Convention to Florida, which was still a long way off, but you gotta start early with making such plans, and folks were excited that something of national significance was going to be happening in their neck of the swamp, with lots of advance notice. I was asked by many people if I was planning to come, and of course, having no plans yet for August 2012, I said yes, as long as I can line up a couple of paying gigs to cover my travel expenses. The gigs came together, and I made plans for August in Florida.

Of course Florida, like North Carolina, is a “swing state,” which might be the main explanation for why the Republicans decided to have their convention there. It did occur to me, though, that given the extreme paranoia of the various US authorities about protests of any kind, especially ones that might not involve a permit and might potentially feature civil disobedience or maybe even a couple of misguided kids throwing a rock at a window (oh horror of horrors, not that!), Florida in August was the next best thing to holding the convention in a bona fide dictatorship somewhere – but given that this was a convention for a US political party, Florida was the best they could do.

For people in what we might call the activist community, Florida, at any time of year, is not the most welcoming location. Although it is a state full of transplants from New York and Massachusetts, it is otherwise in what we call the “deep south,” which is more known for gun-toting Republicans in oversize pickup trucks than for leftwing organizations. And sure enough, most of the folks coming in to protest were from places like New York, Illinois and California much more than from neighboring states such as Georgia or Alabama. Also, unless you're from Louisiana or Missisippi or somewhere subtropical like that, the heat and humidity of Florida in August is something most sensible people would tend to avoid. Add to that the fact that, as anyone who remembers Hurricane Katrina would know, August is hurricane season in that part of the world, and what you get is a good formula for very small protests.

There are many other reasons anyone paying attention would have known not to expect much of a protest crowd in Tampa over the past week. The Republicans, while even more terrifying than the Democrats, are in opposition right now – not the ruling party and thus somewhat less of a target for public ire than, say, four years ago. Also, since the Occupy movement fizzled out in most cities for the most part by the end of last autumn, there hasn't been anything anyone could reasonably describe as a militant mass movement happening in the US. And unless you believe every anonymous statement of anarchist bravado written by suburban teenagers on Infoshop.org, you would have known beyond any doubt that there was not going to be any mass migration of insurrectionary elements to Florida any time soon.

But the authorities were taking no chances. And although there have been dozens of massacres carried out by wingnuts with automatic weapons just over the past couple years, no attempt was made to limit the carrying of concealed firearms near the convention center – to have a few machine guns and a few thousand rounds of ammunition in your trunk while driving around downtown Tampa would have been perfectly legal. The concern on the part of the authorities was clearly not about terrorism of one kind or another. The concern was all about people who might dare to march without a permit, what kinds of dangerous items someone might hide inside a puppet, or whether there might possibly be a handful of black-clad youth who might dare to smash a window or – gasp – set a dumpster on fire or – scariest of all – make and perhaps even use a molotov cocktail. None of which would seem to even approach the chaos that could ensue if someone decided to fire into a crowd with an AK – however, the laws passed in Tampa related to puppets, placards and face masks, not rapid-fire, high-calibre weaponry. That's protected under the Second Amendment (the First Amendment apparently just being an annoying afterthought not worth anyone's concern).

After a festive pre-RNC party at the venerable Civic Media Center in Gainesville last Friday night, I headed into Tampa on Saturday. As with other major meetings of the elites in recent years where some kind of protest was anticipated, the corporate media stenography machine had been going full-tilt for weeks, fueled of course by the propagandists in government who they obediently echo, telling all who would hear them that violent anarchists from the west coast were coming to destroy the city. The propaganda is clearly meant to scare all but the hardest hardcore of activist types from showing up, as well as to psychologically condition the local population to fear the streets, to fear the protesters, and to sympathize with the police, who are there to protect the law-abiding citizens of Tampa from the crazed, bomb-toting revolutionaries from Oakland and Seattle and corrupt places like that where most people don't go to church enough anyway.

Upon arriving in Tampa on Saturday, I headed downtown to see what was happening. The RNC was not scheduled to kick off until two days later, but the lockdown of the city was well underway. Every government building, whether or not it had anything to do with the RNC, was surrounded by ten-foot-tall, black steel fences. Entire areas of downtown were blocked off to all traffic except for Republican delegates and others directly involved with the convention. Thousands and thousands of police on foot, on bicycles, and in cars, vans, buses, open-air Jeep-type vehicles, and in helicopters were everywhere. To overstate the police presence would be very difficult. If you were anywhere near downtown Tampa, which is a very large, spread-out, car-oriented city, you were always within view of at least a few cops – always. And usually you were within view of several dozen cops wherever you went. And if you were participating in a march or something like that, you were, without exception, going to be “escorted” by hundreds of cops – dozens within view, and hundreds in bullet-proof riot gear hiding around every corner, waiting for the orders to pounce. (And in case you think I'm being metaphorical here, I'm not – I literally mean hundreds of cops hiding around the corner, trying – and failing – not to be too obvious about it, by virtue of the fact that the larger number of cops were generally carefully staying on the other side of the block from the march itself.) Almost at all times during the entire week, wherever I was in Tampa, there was at least one helicopter directly overhead or within view, and very much within earshot – the damn things are very loud, and almost every outdoor event involving a sound system was badly affected by this constant noise.

In the wake of 9/11 and the almost weekly massacres that have been happening in the US more recently, one might think these helicopters would be hovering over the convention center or other places where Republican delegates were having meetings and cocktail parties and such, looking out for Al-Qaeda or something. But no, the helicopters were invariably hovering over us, the peaceful protesters, waiting to see if we left the park and decided to take a collective stroll around town, so they could tell their Ninja Turtles to “escort” us, and, if we were marching without a permit, to surround us, box us in, and generally prevent us from getting very far. (Note that nowhere in the First Amendment does it stipulate that a group must have a permit in order to peaceably assemble, and in most democratic countries this is not necessary.)

As I walked around the deserted ghost town that was the center of Tampa for the past week I had many conversations with police officers. With most of the groups of police there was always a majority of red-faced white men who had an unmistakably aggressive expression on their faces, as if they were just itching to break some bones. When you look someone like that in the eye with a friendly expression, inviting them to relax just a bit, and they don't change their expression in the least, you know what's going on – it's blatant intimidation is what it is. But in every group of cops that I talked to there was always a minority (which usually included a greater percentage of nonwhite cops, but also white ones) who were friendlier-looking and ready to engage in conversation, often initiating it themselves when they saw by my facial expression that I was open to it – unlike a lot of the protesting youth who were as aggressively unfriendly to the cops as some of the cops were to them, which seems to me to be entirely counterproductive. (Remember Tunisia, where the cops switched sides? It can happen here, too. But this would seem like a more distant prospect if too many people are treating them like they're subhuman.)

What I learned from talking to the cops who were willing to engage with me was they had all watched the same video, presumably shown to them by their superiors, of a molotov cocktail being thrown by a black-clad youth in Oakland last May 1st. What was also clear was that the police had been told that not all of the protesters planned on doing stuff like that, but that those who were intent on doing such things would always be lurking amongst the ranks of unsuspecting, nonviolent-type protesters, so they needed to be ever vigilant, watching out for anyone who might do something unspeakable like cover their face with a bandana and break a window or worse – throw a bottle at an armored vehicle perhaps! What they clearly hadn't been told was that the one case of a molotov being thrown at a riot cop in Oakland happened only after months of terrible, unprovoked police attacks on the Occupy movement that had resulted in some very serious injuries, repeatedly.

But what if there had been a contingent of young people intent on trashing corporate property, as happened a couple years ago at the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh, where the police presence was similarly overwhelming? How many cops were required to deal with the 80 or so kids who marched down the street beside the University of Pittsburgh, set a dumpster alight, and smashed three or four store windows? How much was the value of those windows altogether – maybe a thousand dollars? Maybe two thousand dollars? As I recall from my time there in Pittsburgh, the response of the police at the time was to collectively punish – and I mean physically punish – anyone who happened to be on or near the college campus that night, whether they were black-clad kids with masks on, or sorority girls fruitlessly trying to defend themselves by chanting cheerleader slogans that the cops might recognize from local football games (the cops beat them anyway, as they chanted their Pitt slogans). And it didn't require more than a couple hundred cops to savagely put a lid on that riotous mini-mob. (Among those who were hit with a police baton that night was yours truly – and I was just as innocent of any window-smashing or dumpster-burning as those sorority girls, though at least I was actually wearing black clothing...)

As counterproductive as window-smashing generally is (although quite cathartic, therapeutic, etc., no doubt), nobody in Pittsburgh got hurt by that incident, nor has anyone been hurt (except by cops) at any protest that I know of in the US for decades. The cost of those windows would be a tiny fraction of the cost of just one of those fences that surrounded so much of downtown Tampa. But nevertheless, preemptive collective punishment of any potential protester was the order of the day, and is the new norm throughout the USA.

I attended most of the planned and unplanned protests in Tampa over the past week, I think, including the biggest protest events, and by my count none of the protests involved more than 300 people. I probably have a tendency to under-count, and many other estimates of the crowds generously involved numbers like “500 to 1,000,” but I think in all cases, 500 was probably an exaggeration. The fear-mongering, the massive police presence, the season, the location, and the impending hurricane had done what I had expected it to do, and kept most people away.

Romneyville was an encampment taking up one square block of private land maybe a bit less than a mile from the center of the Republican storm in the center of town. It was run largely by a combination of folks from Cheri Honkala's Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, plus two buses full of folks from Occupy Wall Street in New York City, who were thriftily and wisely spending the money many people had donated to the campaign to rent two buses and take everybody to Florida and North Carolina to protest the two corporate parties that rule our land on behalf of the 1%. Romneyville had a squad of cops watching over it at all times, and more often than not, a helicopter hovering directly overhead.

Nearby Romneyville, on the way to downtown, was a fabulous Arabic restaurant. Me and my friend Jun, a fellow musician from St. Pete, went in there for dinner one evening, and while we ate we did some people-watching, which mostly meant cop-watching. Two small marches passed by, each accompanied by many times as many police. We were talking with the owner, who told us that a few weeks before some men in dark suits had visited and explained to her that because of the RNC she could assume she'd have approximately three times as much foot traffic in front of her establishment than normal. Predictably, what really happened was a serious loss of business and revenue due to the police state, not just for her but for most downtown establishments aside from the 5-star hotels.

The Food Not Bombs World Gathering was happening in the days leading up to the RNC in Tampa, which involved a fair number of dedicated Food Not Bombers from around the country, plus at least one from Russia. Keith McHenry, a co-founder of Food Not Bombs who had, along with several others, spent time in prison recently for daring to feed the hungry in the very image-conscious, poverty-stricken (Disney-stricken) city of Orlando, was there too, participating in workshops and marches and feeding lots of people. One of the last events of the FNB gathering before the RNC kicked off was a concert that took place at a spacious bar in the Ybor City neighborhood, an area that's fairly deserted during the day but at night is packed, teeming with bar-crawlers of all description – well-off people dining in fancy restaurants, toothless street dwellers trying to panhandle enough money for a meal, gobs of college students, strippers, and others. It was striking that aside from the six or seven cops standing directly across the street from our bar all night, the rest of Ybor City had a relatively low police presence – although I think I can confidently say that far more drunken idiocy, violence and property destruction probably takes place in Ybor City on any given Saturday night than occurred throughout the week of the RNC, as far as us protesters were concerned. (As far as I know, nobody was hurt and no property destroyed by protesters at all during the whole week, and there were a total of three arrests.)

In past decades, the authorities in the US have tended to differentiate between different kinds of protests – like if it was the “direct action” crowd they might have a heavy police presence, but if it's a mainstream labor event they'd tend not to. As far as I know it's been many decades since there was anything approaching a riot that involved a union rally, and it used to be that the authorities generally recognized this reality, but at the small march held by the Service Employees International Union in Ybor City the police were taking no chances, and were there in their hundreds, covered in body armor, wearing night sticks, pistols and handcuffs as usual.

The SEIU also marched in St. Petersburgh, a small city not far south of Tampa, where the Republicans had an event at a stadium there. St. Pete was an even more eerie scene than Tampa, with most businesses having closed in preparation not for the hurricane, which was still days away and mostly bypassed the area, but for fear of violent protesters. The streets were almost completely deserted except for lots of cops, a few protesters trying to find their way to the rally, having to navigate a ridiculous maze of steel fences that the police had set up, which made both walking or driving through St. Pete very difficult. Every other street was shut down and cordoned off with fencing. For what? Who knows. No pedestrians or cars were permitted to go down these streets. Perhaps they were available for emergency vehicles to use if needed...? Who knows. Eventually the three buses full of union members wound their way to Mirror Lake, where the rally was taking place, and then the 300 or so people who came marched around town a bit, nowhere near where the Republicans were meeting, nowhere near anything or anybody, since the city was bereft of local people or even businesses that were open. Walking down the street after the march, looking at one closed business after another in this normally bustling, normally pedestrian-friendly tourist town on the water, I walked for blocks before I finally found a restaurant that was open. (It was a very good Greek restaurant complete with a real Greek bazouki player playing real Greek music, being thoroughly ignored by all those dining in the restaurant except for me.)

Code Pink did what they do best, repeatedly, every day, to great effect. There were very few of them, mostly folks I knew from lots of other protests in the past. Once again, Medea Benjamin, Ann Wright, Rae Abilae and others managed to infiltrate and disrupt the convention on both days. As usual, as the police are keeping their eyes pealed for masked anarchist youth, the real disruptive types were petite, pink-clad women. Outside the cocktail parties of the Republican elite they flirted with the rich and powerful with bags full of (mostly fake) money in their hands, representing the latest incarnation of Andrew Boyd's Billionaires for Bush – Millionaires for Mitt. No massive number of police could prevent these women (and some men) from disrupting various events, and with the massive media presence at all of these events it seemed the police decided that attempting to arrest small, pink-clad women for standing on a public sidewalk and verbally harassing rich people was a bad tactic, so they let it go on uninterrupted from what I saw.

While it was more or less impossible to have a protest anywhere in Tampa that could be heard or seen by anybody actually at the convention itself, because the authorities were making sure we were always kept out of sight and out of mind, at least one group – Planned Parenthood – was apparently so freaked out by the police state that they canceled their plans to march, and decided to hold their small (maybe 300 people again) rally in the middle of a park on the other side of the bay from downtown – far away from the action, in what the organizers must have figured would be a safe space. There were a couple dozen cops visible at that event, and I heard one of them say that “the anarchists are trying to blend in with the crowd, but they're here.” Given the violence certain rightwing, Christian thugs have rained upon pro-choice advocates such as Dr. Tiller, Dr. Gunn, Dr. Slepian, and so many others, perhaps in this one case the police presence served a useful purpose.

For all the overwhelming police presence and the kettling of nonpermitted marches, it should be said that the police apparently were under orders to avoid mass-arresting nonviolent protesters as has happened on so many occasions at other protests in recent years, such as the RNC in New York City in 2004 and Minneapolis in 2008. But the scariest thing for me that I experienced in Tampa was that when I engaged local citizens in conversation, most of them seemed to think that when a few hundred people are going to protest in a major city, it is normal and perhaps even necessary for there to be thousands of cops and steel barricades all over the place. As one veteran journalist at WMNF who has lived in Tampa for 33 years pointed out, these were the biggest protests in Tampa he had ever seen. (Maybe he was on vacation in April, 2006, when there were much larger protests in Tampa around the issue of immigrant rights, but I don't want to split hairs...) Presumably they were the biggest protests that most other local people had ever seen, and so how would they know that this is a completely, outrageously over-the-top police state response to a protest? It's here, it's now, not in some dystopic future – the police state is here, the new normal. It's morning in America all over again.

Aurora Massacre -- a poem

In the wake of the Aurora Massacre, pundits of all stripes are saying the same things they always say after all the massacres. In this sort of situation, poems are better, even if they may be just as inadequate as any other form of communication. There is also an audio version.

Aurora Massacre

The survivors will hug and tell their stories
With flashing lights the living and the dead
Will be taken to the morgues and to the hospitals
We'll hear about the last words that they said
At least if it was a notable occasion
Like if it happened just down the road from Columbine
If the victims numbered in the dozens
The murder plan especially malign

The governor will talk about the senselessness
The madness that must explain the crime
Some will ask about the guns, six thousand rounds of ammunition
He bought legally all at the same time
If the murders were especially dramatic
This man will have his week of fame
But by around this time next year
Just a few will remember his name

Fewer still will remember his victims
In this great nation that seems to have no peer
And who can blame us for our amnesia
With fourteen thousand killed by guns last year
But for now they'll talk about his methods
They'll ask how he came to be this way
They'll hire more policemen in the theaters
It's another massacre in the USA

They'll ask about his schooling
Who could have seen these warning signs
Some will ask why he had access
To buying an assault combine
Former victims will speak out on the TV
They'll have a platform for just a little while
Until something else takes over
Like a storm or a fire or the latest summer style

They'll talk about violent films and video games
The social disconnection of the youth
They'll talk about the cubicles and headsets
With each one separated in a little booth
They'll talk about bullying in schools
They'll talk about all sorts of social ills
They'll ask if he smoked marijuana
And if he was on any kinds of pills

The corpses will be removed from the theater
They'll replace the seats and wash away blood stains
The NRA will lay low for a week or two
While pouring money into electoral campaigns
The President will praise the First Responders
And ask God for these madmen to be cured
The Assault Weapons Ban will be voted down in Congress
And the next massacre will be assured

A Weekend in Texas

I took a taxi to the Portland airport and flew to Houston, via Seattle. My ride to the show was one of the organizers and a friend of hers, and they were stuck in traffic. I sat outside the terminal with my stuff in the shade on a bench, watching the SUV's and pickup trucks come and get everybody, many of them getting yelled at by an overzealous traffic guy. The man sitting beside me asks to borrow my phone. He calls his sister, who is waiting for him at the airport but they can't find each other. I wonder if maybe she's at the other Houston airport, so I make sure he explains to her we're at George HW Bush Intercontinental. Then she figures out what's wrong – he came to the wrong city. She's in Dallas, a four-hour drive to the north. He's never been to the US. He's from an island in the Caribbean I had never heard of with a population of 20,000. It hadn't occurred to him that Texas might have more than one international airport.

My ride arrives and we head into the city. Both of the women had been in prison for nonviolent drug-related crimes of one sort or another and had come out more leftwing than when they went in. We got to the Houston Cultural Center and there was a spiffy red and yellow flag with a hammer and sickle on it. The Houston Communist Party, proudly displaying their flag. There were a couple dozen people of all ages, mostly a bit older. Much of the crowd is made up of my most reliable fans, who are on my email list, folks I used to see more often when I more or less lived in Houston, at KPFT events or Green Party meetings.

The next day, Friday, I visited KOOP in Austin and spent an hour with veteran underground newspaper editor turned modern-day blogger Thorne Dreyer, then it was off to San Marcos for a concert in the outdoor pavilion of a suburban house belonging to a leftwing police sergeant. He voted for GW the first time but after that came to his senses and became a leftist. He tries to get his cops to watch Michael Moore films but most of them politely decline. Two of his cops came to the show. They were nice enough, but I'm not sure how much they liked it. Sergeant Dave Waugh apparently has a poster on the wall of his office at the police station from my Halliburton Boardroom Massacre tour. Definitely the kind of cop I like!

The next morning I discovered that there is no good coffee at the Austin airport, none. But I'm sure I slept better on the plane to Dallas that way, anyhow. In Dallas I got some coffee, rented a car and pointed the GPS towards the Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, where my friend Marie Mason is serving a 22-1/2 year prison sentence. The prison is next to a military base, but my GPS said it was on the base, so I went to the base's entrance. The teenager in camouflage on guard politely directed me to the main entrance of the military base when I explained I was trying to visit the prison. Miles away at the main entrance a woman gave me a piece of paper with directions to the entrance to the prison. Apparently this happens often. The directions are old, and some of the landmarks in them don't exist anymore, such as a CVS pharmacy that has closed since someone printed them out. After getting thoroughly lost, I finally find the entrance to the prison, save the coordinates, and the guard tells me I'm ten minutes too late for visiting hours, they're over for the day. It's Saturday, and visiting days are Saturday and Sunday. He tells me which hours I can come back the next morning.

That evening I'm playing at a beautiful chapel sort of place, one of those big, spacious modern churches that the big cities of Texas are full of – gotta spend that oil money on something I guess. The place was designed for sound, but the stage was oddly set in the wrong part of the room, so the echo was horrendous. Whoever designed the building would have been really annoyed with whoever decided to put a stage in that part of the room, but it was a fun show, with a fairly small but very enthusiastic crowd. Dallas has a large population of folks from all over what we call the Middle East. There in a suburb (the whole city is a suburb) called Richardson the directors of the Holy Land Foundation were found guilty of giving charity to hungry Palestinians in some fashion that the government decided was terroristic, and now they're serving unbelievably long prison sentences of up to 65 years, in Communication Management Units similar to the one Marie is being held in. (Listen to my song about the the Holy Land 5 if you want.) I recognize faces in the crowd from the Palestine Film Festival in Dallas where I've played before. Others, such as one of the organizers of the show, Leslie Harris, I recognize from Camp Casey and many protest-related encounters since then. Camp Casey is what changed her life, and she went from organizing tailgate parties at football games to organizing tailgate parties at protests. Even as her life was was changed by living in the ditch with Cindy Sheehan beside Bush's ranch in Crawford, some of the cops assigned to dealing with Camp Casey were also changed by the experience, became different people, different cops. What seemed like the remnants of Occupy Dallas were also there. I never got to Dallas during the Occupy Autumn, but the Occupy crowd was clearly represented, waving their hands in the air instead of clapping when someone said something they liked, with the sort of enthusiasm of people who just discovered this tradition of unobtrusive appreciation. I personally associate it with the anticapitalist movement around 1999-2001, but I'm sure it predates that scene as well.

In the morning I left Leslie's house early to get to the prison on time, but there was massive construction going on at one of the interchanges and I missed the exit and had to drive an extra twenty miles or so, and by the time I got to the gate the first window of opportunity was over, which was from like 8 to 9 am, and the next one was at around 11. I went and got more caffeinated at a nearby Starbucks full of camouflaged soldiers on breaks, who all looked tired and worn down. When I got back to the gate there was a line of cars waiting along the road for the gate to open. Should've got there sooner, I realized. But the line moved, slowly. I got to the gate house and the harried-looking man there told me I couldn't go in because the expiration date on my driver's license is faded (which it is). I should have brought my passport for extra ID but I didn't. I sat there for a couple minutes or so thinking about the possibility that I had come all the way to Texas to visit Marie in prison and would be turned away for having some faded text on my stupid Oregon driver's license. He called someone and came back and told me I could go in, that they'd decide whether my ID was OK further on in the visitation process.

I drove down the barren streets in the neighborhood past the gate. It was a very basic kind of prefabricated neighborhood clearly intended to house workers, very much like the places where the soldiers lived in the massive adjoining military base. There are signs all over the place announcing that any visitors can be searched anytime, but there was no one around who looked like they had any time to search a car, the streets were empty. The guard at the gate had told me to take a right, head towards the big flag, then park in the lot beyond it. The big flag was indeed big, and impossible to miss. It flew proudly directly in front of the building where visitors enter the prison. The friendly, obese man behind the desk smiled and said, “we've been waiting for you!” I wasn't sure if that was about the faded expiration date on my license or because I was visiting one of the few women held in this ultra-maximum-security prison within a prison that are the CMU's, nicknamed Little Guantanamos, since most of the prisoners in them are of Muslim extraction.

Visiting Marie there at Carswell is a special procedure, not like visiting most of the thousands of prisoners at this huge complex surrounded by multiple, very tall, very barbed-wire fences, overseen by a tower, presumably staffed with snipers. A guard escorts a group of us visitors to a big room where most of the visitation is taking place. I'm instructed to wait until another guard comes to get me. I don't want to be nosy, so I sit close to the wall, several meters away from the nearest group of visitors and prisoners hanging out together. I can't hear much of what people are saying, but from the body language of everybody in the room it's completely clear – the sadness, the guilt, the mourning, the attempts at putting on a brave face, the stiff upper lips, it's all there on everybody's faces as clear as tattoos.

A guard comes to get me. He's a clean, polite, short man with a close-cropped goti and an Italian name. His demeanor seems highly professional, he strikes me more like Secret Service or FBI rather than what I imagine prison guards to be like. I don't know many prison guards, but you hear about the sadistic rapists, like the 7 or 8 from this very prison who are themselves in another prison now for raping inmates – not like this clean, polite professional. He takes me through a variety of the biggest metal doors I have ever seen, doors that make the bomb-proof buildings I've seen in Ireland look like tin foil. They always came in sets of twos, and the guard always needed someone else to let us in. They all have these massive keys, the size of the old ones, but higher-tech-looking. The doors, of course, all open and close by themselves, slowly, deliberately, so you can feel just how massive they are. Each one must weigh a ton.

Finally I'm led into a room, completely barren except for an odd poster of the Statue of Liberty or something, and two card tables with a few plastic chairs around them. The tables are next to each other. The guard takes one of the tables and moves it to the other end of the room. The room is around four square meters, not very big, but he takes his table as far from the other one as he can. A door opens after a few minutes, and there is Marie in her blue prison jumpsuit. I then realized that the guard was trying to give us as much space as he could under the circumstances during our visit. Marie and I hugged briefly – she had already told me over the phone or in a letter how full-blown hugging is forbidden, but a brief greeting hug seems to be acceptable.

I hadn't seen Marie in person for years, since she was under house arrest in Michigan. She looks a lot like she used to except for the gray hair and the pallor of a person who lives in a cage with very little access to direct sunlight. In her face is the clear look of an animal who is attempting to live a life inside a cage. Not surprising to see that look, since that's the situation she's in. We talk about her conditions and things she could use in there. The problem is, there's so little she's allowed to do. Where she was held before, at Waseca up north, closer to home, to where most of her family and friends live, she was allowed to play the guitar and there was regular access to social activities with other prisoners at least. Then she was moved to Carswell, a thousand miles from most of her personal connections, to a city where she didn't even know a single person, for example, someone with whom her children could stay when they came to visit, so they didn't have to pay for a hotel. There at Carswell she had access to a guitar for a little while every week or two, that was it. The occasional phone call, the occasional visit on some weekends when someone like me made the trek to Dallas from somewhere far away.

There are only twenty women in her unit in total. Most of them are crazy, and badly-behaved, and her unit is under lockdown much of the time. Several of the prisoners are some of the finest political prisoners you could imagine. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani scientist who supposedly attempted to defend herself against American soldiers who had kidnapped her. Ana Belen Montes, the high-ranking Defense Department official convicted of spying for Cuba for 25 years, about whom I wrote a song about ten years ago. And Marie Mason, convicted of several cases of politically-motivated arson. Like Montes, Marie did not hurt anyone in carrying out her offenses, but now, like Montes, she is serving a sentence many times the length of sentences served by lots of actually violent criminals. The mix of the insane and the political seems like such an obvious reference to the Soviet gulag it's almost beyond belief that it's happening today in the USA, but I guess there is no more Soviet Union to set the standards we're supposed to be avoiding anymore.

Since being convicted Marie has become what we could call a third-tier celebrity – famous among a limited crowd of people, but for some she's certainly a rock star, along with people like Eric McDavid, Daniel McGowan, Bill Rodgers, Rod Coronado, Peg Millett – an unrepentant radical environmentalist of the direct action variety. The point can't easily be missed by anyone who sees her up close – she has an amateur tattoo job on her left arm that has been added to a more professional, circular, Celtic-looking piece of body art. On one end of the circle is etched "A.L.F.", and on the other side, "E.L.F."

We go back and forth talking about politics and talking about life in prison. Mostly I'm asking questions and she's answering them. I wish I could have brought in a recording device. She has a lot to say about the state of the environmental movement, the Occupy movement, and more. If these movements were a bit more movement-like we'd have more to talk about, but as is so often the case with two leftwingers in the US these days having a conversation about politics, most hopeful references in terms of overthrowing established orders usually have something to do with Latin America or the Arab world.

We talk about those perennial questions of what do you do when you live in such desperate times and most people are not responding with the militancy that change requires. What is it we should be doing, at least among those who are willing to make great sacrifices for the cause? What are the most useful courses of action? Is Derrick Jensen right or wrong? We probably don't see eye to eye on all these questions, but we both enjoy the discussion, and Marie is, as always, open to seriously considering different viewpoints. She's concerned about becoming out of touch with the world around her – an obviously relevant concern in her situation. She wants to remain engaged somehow or other, although cut off from the physical outside world as well as from the virtual world, the internet, only allowed a limited amount of monitored, restricted communication time. She says something positive about the Guardian, a newspaper I also read regularly. She's so hesitant to ask for anything from anyone. I order her a subscription to the Guardian Weekly when I get online the next day.

We're not allowed musical instruments in there or anything else as far as I know, but I wish we could play music together. I regret that I didn't just try organizing a little a cappela singing with her – she's a good singer. But there's so much to talk about, and time seems so short. I had to leave my phone behind so I don't know what time it is, but after two or three hours our time's up. The guards have changed during our visit, and now the guard is an absolutely massive, musclebound man of unmistakably Nordic descent. He looks like Thor, complete with shoulder-length, light blond hair, but his shoulders are wider, and the muscles on his arms, torso and neck are so huge that I wonder if he has the flexibility to touch his own waist.

Thor is even more reserved than the last guard, and clearly doesn't want to be in the position of telling Marie her visit is over. He waits patiently while we say our last good-byes. Marie walks down a hallway where I'm not allowed to follow, smiling but with tears in her eyes. Thor and I walk together through the labyrinth of steel doors together in silence.

When we're outside I venture a little communication. "I wish she could have a guitar," I say.

"I was trying not to listen in on your conversation," he said, "but I'll see what I can do about getting her more access to the music room."

You're terribly understaffed here, is that right? I had heard this from Marie, about cuts to staff at this prison. Thor sort of acknowledged this, but seemed not to want to get too much into that subject. What he did make clear, in a roundabout way, was that letting Marie have access to the music room was not a time-consuming or difficult thing for him to arrange, but that it wasn't up to him. He told me Marie is such a well-behaved prisoner that it's easy for the guards to forget she's there. The look on his face, as with the guard before him, told me that he felt seriously conflicted about what must have felt like keeping his mother under lock and key. Many prisoners fit the part – they “look like criminals,” you might say. They're covered with tattoos, they're obviously angry with life, they treat guards and each other with blatant disrespect, and so on. Marie doesn't fit the mold in any way, and I'm pretty sure I could see how uncomfortable this was for these guards.

I drove to the airport, returned my rental car, and flew from Houston back to Portland, via Denver. The flight from Houston to Denver was full of people who had apparently never flown before. The flight was somewhat delayed and everybody on the plane, it seemed, were terribly concerned that they were going to miss their connection and be stranded forever at the Denver airport. Many people were wondering whether the airline was going to pay for a hotel in Denver if they were stranded there. They were constantly harassing the flight attendants for information of all kinds, and all the flight attendants could tell them was that the airline people would do everything they could to make sure they got to their destinations, but this vague bit of information only pissed people off even more. Having done this before, I knew that probably we'd make our connections, because the folks on the ground in Denver, which was the hub city for the airline in question, would know this flight was delayed and would delay the various connections, which they did. If people did miss their last connection and the airline didn't want to pay for their hotel room, the flight attendants were not the right airline employees to be whining to – you had to save the whining for the customer service desk, if you wanted your whining to actually accomplish anything other than allowing you to blow off steam at some low-wage peon. But blowing off steam at low-wage peons is an American pastime, Americans just do that without giving it any thought, it seems.

In Portland I shared a shuttle with an Army veteran who was heading home after visiting his girlfriend, who is herself in the Army, and he had just been visiting her on another Texas military base. I had a smoke on my porch, enjoying the fresh air that I usually take for granted, and went to sleep in my comfortable bed, with no crazy people waking up sweating and screaming anywhere nearby, no musclebound jail guards walking by with their keys clattering, no fluorescent lights. The next day I went for a walk to a cafe and played with my daughter in a park, something Marie won't be able to do with her kids until they are well into middle age, unless something dramatic happens between now and Marie's release date that changes the scenario. I hope so.

Busking Memories

Listen to the audio PODCAST of this essay if you want...

Some recent experiences over the past few months have brought me back to my youth, or at least my young-adulthood, much of which I spent as a professional street musician. For many, busking is a marginal profession at best. For others, it's a good living. These days there are large parts of the world, particularly in the US and Canada, where you can travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a busker. In much of the world, though, and in some parts of North America as well, the buskers are an active subculture that anyone who uses mass transit or frequents pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods has daily contact with in one form or another.

Ever since anybody has been paid to play music, there have been buskers. In other words, it is a tradition that goes back at least as far as the first market town. And as sure as busking is as old as civilization, it has also always been the number one profession of travelers of many kinds, and of the newest migrants to any place, along with other forms of day labor. Although the tradition is old and has a timeless quality to it, it's also profoundly influenced by things like laws, urban planning (or lack thereof), and the state of popular culture (that is, Clearchannel, Sony, Time-Warner, etc.).

From the time I was in my late teens I guess I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professional musician. I tried my hand at busking in various cities as a youthful vagabond, but for years it was only an occasional preoccupation that only supplied me with a very supplemental income in terms of what I needed to come up with every month in the perennial effort to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly. In my early busking efforts I don't think I ever made much more than $4 an hour on average, and I could make three times that much money doing temp jobs for Kelly Services and the like. Back then, in the 1980's, someone who could touch-type and knew how to use a primitive word processing program was in high demand. I could (and did) live somewhere for a few months just to check it out, knowing I had a skill that could keep me more or less gainfully employed in any major city or college town.

By the early Nineties, though, I developed an unmistakably nasty case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and typing for a living was no longer a viable option unless I were just resigned to the problem getting worse, which I wasn't. I stopped typing for a living and never looked back. Faced with the need to make a living doing something else, I started busking again. I also took a couple jobs in cafes, but it became clear that I could make just as much money per hour busking, so I never worked the cafe jobs more than on a very part-time basis.

I quickly discovered that there were ways I could make quite a bit more money busking. But I never intended to be a professional busker -- I wanted to be a professional musician, making a living performing mostly original material, or at least covers of really obscure leftwing artists. I knew this kind of material wasn't ideal busking material, unless you're busking near a protest or something, but I didn't care. I had a plan, and busking was to be part of it. The plan was to become a really good musician, and then to become a really good songwriter. I viscerally recognized the truth in the advice I had received somehow or other from Utah Phillips, I believe it was -- that in order to be a good writer of any kind, you first had to steep yourself in the tradition. Whatever tradition you're into, you have to have it in your blood.

At the Pike Place Market in Seattle there was a young woman one day handing out fliers about what it meant to be a bard. It said a bard needed to be able to make up a song on any subject on the spot, and a bard should have at least three hundred songs memorized at any given time. I never worked too hard at on-the-spot songwriting – although one of Pike Place Market's regular buskers, Jim Page, was and is a master at that art -- but I thought memorizing three hundred songs seemed like a good plan.

Although I had lost the worker's comp claim against my former employer due to a new law passed by the state of Massachusetts under the Republican governor at the time that said any worker's comp claims had to be approved by the employer of the injured worker, thereby making most claims by folks like me completely pointless, Aetna kept on sending me worker's comp checks by accident. They were supposed to only send them for 6 weeks, but they kept coming for eighteen months. I was receiving a whopping $160 a week for eighteen months, and I savored every bit of my newly-found liberation from wage-slavery.

I used the time methodically, living in the tiny little efficiency apartment in Seattle I had moved to. Every day I spent several hours learning songs and practicing them, committing them to memory. I had a songbook I made from photocopied pages of other songbooks, and lots of lyric transcriptions I had made myself for songs of artists without songbooks such as Jim Page, John O'Connor, Utah Phillips and others. Once I had a batch of songs memorized I'd spend an afternoon busking at Pike Place Market, then I'd go back to the woodshed and work on learning more songs.

Life continued like this until Aetna rudely stopped sending me checks. I then briefly and abortively pursued higher education a bit more in late 1993 and early 1994, before picking up with a band called Aunt Betsy, for whom I played bass guitar, recorded an album, and did a midwest tour. Soon after that was over I found myself once again living in Boston, where I had originally gotten Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. This time I wasn't typing for a living, I was busking, pretty much five or six days a week, four hours a day (until my voice was hoarse, which took four hours generally), mostly in the Boston subways -- the T, as it's known.

Although I spent most of three years as a full-time busker in Boston, I was still looking at it as an opportunity to pay the bills while honing my craft. By this time I had learned well what sorts of acts make significant money on the streets, and I was not doing most of the things I should have been doing if I were trying to really master the specific craft of busking. My goal by then was to become a good topical songwriter and a good musician, and I was still working at it.

Particularly on the streets -- the tourist spots like Faneuil Hall or the neighborhoods where people go when they're "out on the town" such as Harvard Square -- the buskers who make serious money are generally very talented people who tend to fall into one of three categories: the exotic, the extravagant, and the familiar. People who combine these qualities often do the best. For those of us who possessed none of these qualities, those of us doing a more subtle kind of thing, such as telling an unfamiliar story or singing an unfamiliar song in a way that wasn't particularly flashy, our best bet was always the subways, rather than the streets, and the Park Street T stop, middle platform of the Red Line, became my home. Usually Monday through Friday, 11 am til 3 pm or so.

On the streets people are walking around from place to place, going somewhere, and if they're going to stop and listen to a street musician or watch a street performer of some other kind, the performer has no more than a few seconds to catch their attention. In the subways it's different -- people are standing on the platform waiting for the next train. If it's not rush hour, the trains might be coming once every ten minutes. This means that most of your audience is going to be on the platform, within earshot of you, for one full song. If the trains are running late, maybe they'll catch two or three. (Those were the best days.) In this situation you have a bit more to work with, you have a chance to suck them into your story -- nothing too impressive required other than a good, solid narrative.

Until last fall I hadn't really done any busking since 1997. I often think of the years when I spent much of my time on most days somewhere underground, though, and sitting in a bus a couple weeks ago really brought it all back to me in a more physical way. Sitting in a bus is also something I haven't done much since those days, for better or worse, and sitting in my seat, looking at the advertisements and the poetry and the diverse bunch of people crowded onto that bus, I remembered all those mornings, many hundreds of them I guess, taking the Orange Line from the second-to-last stop, where I lived in Jamaica Plain, to Downtown Crossing, where I'd take the Red Line one stop to my spot at the Park Street T stop.

I guess it was the closest thing to a regular full-time job I ever had. Each weekday morning I'd put my guitar on my back and pack my battery-powered amp, mike stand, mike and assorted cables onto a little wheely thing and I'd walk to the Green Street T. The commute from there in JP to downtown was 45 minutes each way on the Orange Line. I became quite disciplined about reading a book during the commute, so I was spending 1-1/2 hours each day reading a book in those days, and I got more book-reading done during my Boston busking years than ever before or since.

The subway line I was riding on every day only exists due to a struggle waged by the local residents against a planned highway that would have essentially wiped the neighborhood off the map, like so many others around the country before it. People mobilized and the government ultimately canceled their highway plans and replaced them with an extension of the subway instead. Above the subway in JP is a long, thin park, and on this park every year people involved with a local institution called Spontaneous Celebrations hold a small festival -- in part to commemorate the victory of the neighborhood in defeating plans for a new highway.

In a place like Boston it doesn't take very long to get to know all the regular street performers. Some of them come and go, but by and large it's pretty much a few dozen people who are full-time buskers, at least among those whose main stomping grounds were the T, like me. I quickly discovered that for the sort of music I was doing, the mid-day train schedule worked best. Fewer people coming through, but they have more time on the platform. I made a living, just barely, but in a decidedly unambitious way. The more ambitious performers did popular covers, or had a really eye-catching shtick of some kind, and in the subway they played during rush hour, when the maximum number of people are going past them or waiting on the platform near them, and when the trains are coming every few minutes -- too fast for most commuters to even hear an entire song.

The plus side of being unambitious was there was rarely any competition for my favorite spot -- at least by the time I got to it. Before I got there there would often have been someone busking for hours, taking advantage of the rush hour. Two of the regulars at that spot other than me were a cantankerous blues musician from New York with the stage name of Roland Tumble, and a cantankerous blues and folk musician from West Virginia named Nathan Phillips, who later took up the moniker of Bullfrog. Many of the other musicians would drop by on their way to another spot, sometimes checking in to see if my spot was already taken. It was a major stop for switching from one major line to another (Green to Red or vice versa) so they would often have been coming through anyway, and when you ride the subway enough you know where to get on so when it stops at Park Street you'll be near the area where the buskers usually busk when you step out of the train.

Some of the best musicians I know, who I have recorded and performed with on and off since then, I first met in the subways. Eric Royer was one of them. I don't remember if we met when I was listening to him busk or when he was listening to me, but whenever I was lucky enough to come across him on the street or in the subway somewhere I'd listen for a good spell. He was and is a crazy musical phenomenon, with a vast repertoire of traditional old-time and bluegrass songs in his head, all delivered on a five-string banjo that he plays with consummate skill, and when it comes to most of the bluegrass numbers, with the blinding speed and technical accuracy that the genre usually calls for. But in addition to the fine singing and banjo-playing, Eric also accompanies himself with the most sophisticated one-man band setup I have ever seen or heard of, which basically involves playing a two-string bass, a four-string guitar and a cow bell using an intricate, medieval-looking invention of his that allows him to play different chords, complete with an alternating bass line, using pedals controlled by his feet.

The highlight of many different afternoons of busking was when Eric would stop by on his way somewhere, get out his banjo, and play along with me for a few songs. Eric is a fairly shy sort who probably didn't enjoy a lot of the attention he'd get while busking, but his craft was clearly destined for the profession. The blistering banjo solos are a real attention-getter, and combined with the wild one-man band setup it's irresistible. Eric made more in an hour than I'd generally make in a day -- this despite the fact that he hardly ever did a song that anybody other than a serious traditional music fan would recognize. If he did bluegrass, one-man band versions of Aerosmith songs he probably would have made many times as much money, I'd guess.

One of the legendary buskers of Harvard Square in the 1980's -- a few years before my time as a professional busker, but he would very occasionally make an appearance during my time on the scene -- was a guy named Luke. I don't know his last name -- I heard many people refer to him by his first name and never once heard anyone mention any other name. He was a very precise, energetic performer with an impressive vocal range and very solid guitar skills, and he did nothing but Beatles songs. He only ever busked in the same storefront in Harvard Square, and whenever he'd set up to do his thing he'd attract an adoring crowd of tourists, students and street kids who'd stick with him until he packed up for the night. If he wasn't around on a warm weekend night when people figured he'd probably show up, many of the street kids could be heard asking, where's Luke?

With Luke there was something intoxicating about the way he used the Beatles as a unifying factor for all of society. It turns out pretty much everybody loves the Beatles -- they transcend age, class, ethnicity, etc. Their music was just so popular and so infectious that it just managed to get into the broad fiber of society, and people would sing along actively, often in harmony. It was a very participatory thing.

But if Luke represented the positive side of using popular culture for good purposes, you might say Manny represented the dark side. He was always an impeccably nice guy, and extremely industrious. He had learned many things about doing street music over the years, growing up somewhere in the Boston area, with his unmistakable, working class Boston accent. He knew the basic elements, or some of them, of how to make decent money at the craft: a good spot with room for lots of people to gather, a good sound system, a knowledge of songs that people are familiar with. He may have known that he could make even more money if he were a better musician, but this was unclear.

I heard the stories from many people who attempted to have a chance to busk in Manny's very prime spot there in the middle of Harvard Square on Brattle Street. Whatever time of the morning they'd get there -- and for the best spots you had to get there hours early and hold the spot until the good busking time came around -- Manny would be there. It seemed he often got there before dawn, riding to the Square on his bicycle, home-made wooden trailer attached to the back of it, with his mixing board, speakers and guitar.

What he lacked was the ability to deliver anything but the most lifeless renderings of only the most over-played, over-busked songs ever written. Like a broken record, visitors and locals alike would be accosted every day to many hours of Cat Stevens, Neil Young and the Rolling Stones -- but only their very most popular songs, none of the other ones, ever. Workers at the local businesses had to suffer interminably repeated unvaryingly stillborn renditions of "Heart of Gold" and "The Sound of Silence," quietly wishing Manny would one day be silent, their wishes dashed with every new dawn, as they found Manny holding down his spot when they came to open their businesses.

And then there were artists who had an even better, more souped-up battery-powered sound system than Manny's, complete with a variety of effects pedals, but who were masters of their craft. One such busker in Harvard Square for many years was Ned Landin, aka Flathead. He was, in fact, slightly Neanderthal-looking, with long hair coming out of a balding head and big, hairy eyebrows. I assume that's where he got the stage name, I don't know. More notable than his appearance was his mastery of the guitar and his poignant songs. He'd do a lot of his own songs, not so much familiar stuff, but despite this and the fact that he was just another white guy with a guitar, he had a loyal following in the Square because he was just so damn good. Flathead originated in Minnesota, and he could often be seen busking in Harvard Square in the middle of winter, when most buskers were either in the subway, busking in some warmer part of the world for a few months, or doing something else for the winter. Just to emphasize the point, he would plant his big amp on top of a nearby snowbank. He told me once that if the temperature went down below 25 degrees Fahrenheit he'd stop for the day, not because he had a problem playing the guitar in such weather, but because people wouldn't stop and listen when it was that cold.

Weekends were the best time to busk in a place like Harvard Square, and many people only came out to busk on weekends, such as Mike, the juggler and tightrope-walker extraordinaire, who set up his tightrope in one of the few parts of the Square where there's a wide enough public space to set up a tightrope without getting hit by a car. This happened also to be within earshot of Manny's perennial spot, so the juggling and tightrope-walking inevitably had to happen to the tune of yet another sad performance of "Wild World" or "Down By The River."

A bunch of us regular street performers once had a meeting to try to figure out a system so people wouldn't have to get up at dawn to hold down a prime spot, which is generally the default procedure when a better system isn't agreed upon, but if I recall, Manny didn't show up to the meeting, and we gave up soon thereafter. Sometime after that Flathead abdicated his position as a fixture of Harvard Square and moved to Los Angeles. I couldn't believe a Minnesotan who had lived for years in Boston could find a happy home in LA, but he's still there last I heard, so I guess he likes it.

At the Harvard Square T Stop -- easily the most popular place on the T to busk, the Inbound platform, specifically -- a system had been agreed upon by all the regular buskers, called "the flip." This happened every morning at 7 am, and I believe it still does today. Every morning at 7 anyone who wanted to busk on the spot at some point during the day would show up, and the spot would be randomly allotted via the flip of a coin to three performers, who had dibs on morning, afternoon or evening. I never wanted the morning slot and I was damned if I was going to get up at 5:30 so I could be on the other side of the Boston area by 7, just so I could hang around somewhere or other in order to have the afternoon spot I wanted. But I did show up for the flip on more than a few occasions, somehow or other.

During one of the time periods when I was showing up for the flip we had an entertaining little problem in the form of a Polish accordian player, an older man who had probably very recent immigrated to the US, and spoke no English. The flip is, of course, just a convention established by the community of street performers -- nothing legally binding or anything. So if someone gets there before 7 am and doesn't want to play by the rules, there's no predetermined method for dealing with this. So for several mornings in a row, an assortment of musicians showed up for the flip and encountered this stern-looking, very large Pole with a massive accordian protruding from his very large belly. Each morning we'd all attempt to explain to him through some combination of English and sign language what the deal was, and each morning he'd look at us with an expression that at first appeared to be confusion, and later looked more like annoyance.

By the second morning, Roland, who was cantankerous to begin with, suggested we break the accordian player's fingers. The rest of us, exasperated though we were by the situation, all thought that this was a shockingly violent idea, especially coming from a fellow musician who used his fingers for a living in very much the same way as the accordian player. Along with me and Roland, Grant was there every morning. Grant was a very good classical guitarist from somewhere in England who was one of the most regular occupants of the spot there on the Inbound platform of the Harvard Square T. Finally, after four or five days of this, a young classical violinist from Russia came to the flip, and the confict was resolved immediately and amicably. Amazing what a little verbal communication can do when it's in the right language. The Pole spoke Russian. The violinist explained, in Russian, how the flip works. The accordian player understood. Starting that very morning he started participating in the flip and playing by the established norms henceforth.

In all the years I was busking in the Boston area I hardly ever played an original song. I was actively writing them by then, but I felt like they were still collectively works in progress. I also couldn't bear exposing my own songs to the harsh subway environment, really, it was more an emotional thing than anything strategic in terms of my musical evolution, though that was also part of it. In any case, what I sang down there was almost entirely obscure songs from the past and present that only hardcore fans of topical folk music might recognize -- and even most of them wouldn't, either.

In my years living in Seattle I became a huge fan, as well as friend, of Jim Page. Leftwingers in Seattle and people who frequent certain places like the Pike Place Market know his music, but in Boston, and most other places, this is not the case. While in Seattle I went to many of Jim's shows. Many of his songs I couldn't find in recorded form I found by befriending other Jim Page fans who had recorded some of his live shows. I copied their recordings and transcribed every word of every song on them. Then I set out to figure out how he played the guitar parts. That part was harder -- I never learned to fingerpick anything like Jim, nowhere near that good, but I did learn to mimic his flatpicking style, as well as his idiosyncratic singing style, which he has since pretty much abandoned, but he used to fancy a certain vocal trick that made him sound perpetually like a teenage boy whose voice was changing.

So I'd stand there deep under the streets above, singing the songs of Jim Page, Phil Ochs, Utah Phillips, Woody Guthrie, and loads of old anonymously-written songs I had found in books like Songs of Work and Protest or the Little Red Songbook. There were many conclusions I could effectively draw from years singing those songs in the Boston subways. For one, the overwhelming majority of people riding the Boston subways seem to have a "live and let live" policy in life. Only twice did anybody ever get visibly angry as a result of my leftwing songs. One was an elderly World War 2 vet who took offense to "The Draft Dodger Rag." Another was an agitated young man who seemed to think a line in a Judy Small song was offensive to poor people, because he evidently didn't understand the line was supposed to be ironic.

Most people didn't react one way or another, but from those who did, whether because they said something, or through their facial expressions or their donations, it was clear that many people were very sympathetic to the ideas I was singing about. One conclusion that can be drawn unequivocally is that white men in suits are almost universally stingy bastards. They probably also didn't like the music or the words, but other street performers can also attest to the stinginess of this crowd. The working class is generally far more generous than the yuppies, and, breaking things down demographically, no one was more generous than middle-aged Asian women.

The Boston area has the best mass transit out of any city in the US with the possible exception of New York City. Boston is also a huge college town and is comparatively pedestrian-friendly, though compared to many cities in Europe it doesn't come close. But neither of these factors is the main thing responsible for the flourishing street and subway music scene there. It mainly comes down to the actions of Stephen Baird and the Street Artists Guild in the 1970's.

As I heard the story from Stephen and others soon after I started busking there in Massachusetts' capital, busking in Boston or Cambridge was much like busking in most of the US. That is, any cop who didn't like your looks or your music or was just in a bad mood that day could tell you to pack it up because you were blocking the sidewalk, disturbing the peace, or because a business owner or resident complained, or whatever other reason they wanted to invent. The street artist had no recourse but to pack it up or risk arrest. Stephen's organization sued the city of Boston and the city of Cambridge, and maybe other entities, I don't remember. They won these suits, and street music was established as a legally protected activity. This really upset some of the meaner elements of the local police force, but they had to accept it.

In Cambridge, it wasn't even really under the authority of the police to say anything about the street performers now. They were officially being monitored by a paid staff member from the Cambridge Arts Council. Official rules of conduct were established that the monitors were monitoring. The performer couldn't take up more than 50% of the sidewalk in front of him or her. Volume of the amplification equipment (which they were allowed to use) couldn't exceed 80 decibels measured at a distance of 25 feet, etc. Unfortunately, in one particular case, the power-tripping police force was replaced by a power-tripping monitor. Granted, the guy wasn't armed, but he had the authority to issue tickets that the street performers were obliged to pay, and he issued them regularly. He seemed to think his performance as a monitor was dependent on how many tickets he issued. I'm pretty sure this was his very own idea. He was either on a big power trip, or he hated music, or he hated people generally, nobody knew. He was a quiet, stern, single-minded man, and his job was to make the life of street musicians difficult. It's conceivable that he didn't actually know how to use a decibel meter, but only just. He definitely wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but this decibel meter was a very simple device. The thing was, he often took his measurements at a distance closer than 25 feet, which would of course dramatically increase the reading. Also, a passing truck could be far louder than the music on occasion, so if you were just a vindictive misanthrope of some kind, you could always get high readings and blame it on someone.

I never got a ticket. The amp I used was industry standard for the subways, but kind of wimpy for street use. The streets -- and we're not talking about pedestrian streets here, for all you European readers who might assume such a thing -- are much noisier than the subway platforms, and people tended to use bigger amplification devices. Usually things they'd have to rig up themselves, requiring a certain level of interest in slightly technical things, like you might need to use a soldering iron or something, from the looks of it. They'd use things that were made for cars and rig them up to work as amplifiers to connect to speakers and play live through, all powered by a car battery. So there was always some mixing of things that were designed to be powered by AC and things meant to be powered by DC. I never got into that fancy street amplification stuff. In most places I had busked before Boston, people didn't tend to use amplification. In Boston they did (mainly because they were allowed to). But in the subways the standard device was a Mouse amp.

I believe the company stopped making them. But at the time it was the best thing you could find for the price, by far. Basically nobody else made anything quite like them, I suppose because the market for such a thing was so small. How many street musicians are there in the world who are allowed to use amplification? Who else would have need of a battery-powered amp you can plug a mike and a guitar into and sound pretty good for several hours of battery life as long as you had no ambitions of entertaining an audience of more than 25 people or so? I remember being surprised when I heard, rightly or wrongly I don't know, that the folks who made the Mouse amps went out of business. For many years the little thing was, along with my guitar, my most important possession. If you didn't want to mess around with soldering irons and car batteries, there simply wasn't anybody else who made a small but decent-sounding amp with a battery that lasted several hours on a charge. A Pignose amp was the closest thing there was before Mouse, and those things are awful. Many years later, perusing a music store somewhere, I came across this thing made by Crate, the Limo. It was similar to a Mouse, but slightly bigger, louder, better-sounding and with a longer-lasting battery. I hadn't busked in years at that point, but I had to get one. I never used it, but it stuck with me somehow for many different moves. (Then when Occupy started last fall I knew I had to take it with me in my travels so I'd be prepared to do impromptu concerts at the local neighborhood Occupation, and I did. But it's really more of a subway amp, still, I discovered when I finally put it to use.)

The quality of the buskers throughout the Boston area is so high, generally, that tourists often asked me if we were being paid by the city to busk. Other times they just assumed we were. People in charge of attracting business to downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire instituted a program to help defray the costs of Boston-area musicians who want to go up there and busk, so this idea of people being paid something to busk wasn't actually a complete pipe dream. We got the option to enroll in the Portsmouth program when we got our $40 annual busking licenses at the Cambridge Arts Council. Licenses to busk in the T were free. But we weren't being paid.

During my busking years I left Boston a number of times and plied the trade in other places. In San Francisco the general knowledge among buskers was that among the places you could play was the lobby area in the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) where people buy their tickets to ride. I busked a bunch there, but there you just get the passersby, nobody spending substantial time there for the most part. On the platform is where you get the quality time, but the platform is where you were strictly not allowed to busk.

One day I tested the law. I bought a ticket and got onto the BART at Civic Center. Took the guitar out on the platform and started singing "This Land Is Your Land." Not in any kind of offensive way, just a nice, moderate rendition of the song, with my guitar case sitting on the platform in front of me as usual for busking. I wasn't even halfway through the song when I was interrupted by a cop and told to stop, that I couldn't do that. I got in the next train and took it one stop, and there and at every other stop in the city of San Francisco (I tried all of them) the same thing happened, I never got to finish the song, and it's not a long one. People responded very generously to the song each time, and I think I made $20 in 20 minutes or so there.

I visited London, England twice during my busking years. Once just before the 1995 Criminal Justice Act went into effect and once just after. There was a provision in this law that dealt with street music, which basically criminalized it, as I recall. The impact of the law was stark and easy to see. Before the law went into effect the Underground was full of talented buskers. After the law came into effect the Underground was still full of buskers, but the level of talent had plummeted. These new buskers were people living on the margins of society who didn't care whether they got a 200-pound fine. The buskers who didn't want to get the fine, or were just offended at being considered criminals in the first place, left the Underground and presumably took up different occupations or went to busk somewhere else where they were not unwanted.

I remember around that time listening to someone on BBC World Service saying that he liked the buskers in the Underground. He was saying this in the context of a story about Singapore, where busking was a criminal offense. Ironically, he didn't seem to know that the same was now true in London as well.

The worst part about busking was the air quality. It's not necessarily smog of the sort cars produce, but it always smells really bad when they hit the brakes. In both Boston and London the subways were built around the turn of the 20th century, and it's not like the florid-smelling, ultra-modern Metro in Copenhagen or the Shinkansen in Japan. It stinks, a lot. London, not surprisingly, given that it's a much bigger city, is much worse than Boston. Every night after busking in the Underground I'd have nasty black gunk coming out of my nose for hours.

But far more challenging than the air quality, really, is the illegality of the activity. When you give it a try, you'll find that in most places that would be obviously good places to busk, public spaces with lots of pedestrians who would tend to enjoy having good musicians around, it's not legal to do so. In New York City spaces are limited and auditions are required, going against the very nature of the thing. Try busking on subway platforms in Atlanta or the nation's capital and you will suffer the same fate. Or London, Singapore, or lots of other places. But in Boston it's alive and well, for now.

In the spring of 1997 I went on a tour around the US playing bass for Robert Hoyt, and then traveled for several months backing up veteran street performer Chris Chandler. Like Chris had, I went on after those tours to touring myself, playing indoors, as Chris put it, doing gigs that usually paid a little bit better than street performance did for me, where the air quality is somewhat better as well. But despite the downsides of the craft, I often nostalgically recall my years of working there beneath the streets of Boston.

My Spring Vacation in Europe

Listen to this essay as an audio PODCAST!

Note: This is just a bunch of random recollections from my spring 2012 tour of Europe. If gigs are mentioned, it's because they fit in an anecdote one way or another – but mostly they're not mentioned, so please don't feel like the gig you organized wasn't fantastic because it's not mentioned in here!

Belfast. Greece and Spain may be the hot spots of economic collapse in Europe these days, but parts of the UK are not far behind. The sense of despair is palpable there, particularly in the cities with a long history of chronic, mass unemployment, especially Belfast. The new Tory-led government has instituted a US-style welfare reform that requires welfare recipients to work, for nothing, just to stay on the dole, thus putting them into competition with those low-wage workers who do manage to find a job of some kind. In England the welfare reform may be hated, and may lead directly to riots, but in what they call Northern Ireland it could lead to all sorts of other unanticipated consequences – the Peace Process was supposed to lead to greater prosperity somehow, not this.

Although the Occupy movement hasn't really taken off in much of northern Europe, the UK has been something of an exception, sensibly enough. It's been pretty clear to me that the Occupy movement and its southern European counterpart, the Indignados, is especially a product of collapsing economies -- not the sort of movement likely to flourish in places like Germany, the Netherlands or Scandinavia where very few people are in some kind of financially disastrous state. But the UK, as usual, is more like the US than the rest of northern Europe, and a lot of people are really suffering under what are broadly known as the Cuts.

In Belfast's city center a motley crew of people, mostly folks from West Belfast, have occupied a large bank that had been sitting idle for some time. It's a lovely building of four or five stories, a very sturdy thing made with lots of stone and concrete and metal. There are vaults in the basement that look like they were designed to be bomb-proof. On the upper floors folks are camping in tents on the concrete, and on the ground floor people have set up a sort of informal cafe, with a stage that people have just put together for the little show that's happening there on the first Saturday of March, one of the two gigs I'm doing in Belfast to kick off this fifty-gig, eight-country tour of Europe.

The gig has only been thrown together over the course of a few days, and the audience is small but enthusiastic. The performers are me and Tommy Sands. I first heard Tommy's music a long time ago, can't remember when, maybe in camp when I was a kid -- “Your Daughters and Your Sons,” an iconic song that I seem to have always known, certainly since the first time I became familiar with the Rise Up Singing songbook, and Winds of the People before that.

In a very divided society, Tommy has managed to maintain close connections with lots of people from both sides of the divide, and it was a fascinating evening talking with him about the Irish conflict, about identity, and about his experiences relating with other divided societies. Although our audience at the occupied bank was small, as soon as we walked out of the bank, and for the next several hours, everywhere Tommy and I went, walking with our guitars slung over our shoulders, every ten meters or so someone would say “hi Tommy,” or just shake his hand and say “thank you,” or I'd hear someone nearby whisper, “that's Tommy Sands.” Tommy was graceful and warm in his interactions with each person who would stop him in the street like this, just as he was with me.

Flying from Belfast to London is mostly a major exercise in contrast. In Belfast, which side of the divide you grew up on affects everything in your life profoundly. In London most English people barely remember if their family used to be Catholic or Protestant, and in most cases they were probably a mix of the two, way back when those things mattered to anybody there, back when people would be discriminated against for being Catholic, back when anybody actually went to church or believed in God or marriage or any of that traditional English stuff. But for the most part, what's so cool about London is that so many of the people in there aren't English, at least originally. They're from all over the world, and not just the former colonies either.

I often stay near Brixton with friends in a small flat with a difficult parking situation. I'm usually traveling in a rental car, as it's overall the cheapest and easiest way to get around for a luggage-laden musician. But after two 65-pound parking tickets on one day I really wanted to find another place to stay. One night in Leytonstone I was invited over to the home of a little family in nearby Hackney, and I ended up staying there on and off throughout the month of March. They're French, and it turns out that much of the neighborhood is of some kind of Francophone origin, too. London, Anne told me, is the sixth biggest city in France. All I previously knew about Hackney was Robb Johnson's classic song, “Anarchy in Hackney Now.” I didn't experience any anarchy in Hackney, although I did see lots of gridlocked traffic, lots of one very lovely canal, and lots of Francophones eating really good food, which I partook in daily during my stay. A long walk along the canal listening to BBC on my headphones, to the crepe place a couple kilometers from my new home.

By happenstance, several of the other things that I wanted to do in London were also in Hackney, within walking distance. A couple I had met at a gig just outside of town, it turned out, were living in a houseboat that was moored on the canal near me at the time. And, very close to where they were moored, Occupy Hackney had a very small tent encampment just outside the fence where the authorities were building a supposedly temporary Olympic training facility on the wetlands beside the canal, taking from the local area a popular park. I did a little concert for the Occupiers one night. They got cleared out not long after.

Edinburgh. There are certain music clubs that have been around a long time and have become iconic in the folk music scene in different cities. One such place is the Wee Folk Club in the center of this beautiful medieval city. It is what it sounds like – a very small folk music club in the basement of an old building, about one-third of which is taken up by a bar, and another third of which has such a low ceiling you have to duck when you sit down. I stood awkwardly in the corner, with the front row sitting directly in front of my guitar, so if I strummed a chord a little too enthusiastically I might accidentally hit someone in the head. It occurred to me that it was a strange achievement to have played a gig in such an iconic folk club, since you basically have to be virtually unknown in order to get a gig there, as it can only fit a crowd of 25 people if they really like each other.

Glasgow. Back at Fatima's place, what used to also be Alistair's place, before Alistair Hulett died suddenly a couple years ago. The multitude of guitars that once filled most of one of the rooms have moved on to homes where they'll be played and looked after, but the posters remain. One wall is covered with posters evocative of various time periods, various tours. Punk rock posters from his days singing for Roaring Jack in Australia, posters for gigs he did with Dave Swarbrick, a poster from a gig we did together in Edinburgh with Leon Rosselson, Robb Johnson, Maggie Holland and Attila the Stockbroker at the chandelier-laden Queen's Hall during the week of the G8 meetings in the charming little village of Gleneagles. Last time I saw Ally was in that room, guitar in hand, singing a new song he had just written about a Scottish anarchist who was the English-language voice of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War.

Bellshill. Somehow it was a great gig, although the sound system was way too loud for such a small pub, and most of the people were talking throughout the night. But they have my picture framed above the bar in the Saints & Sinners pub in Bellshill, an overwhelmingly Catholic town in Scotland not far from Glasgow, where Irish Republicanism is very popular. Some of the Catholic-origin folks in Scotland are more fervent about Irish Republicanism than most Irish Republicans, it seems, and I shared the night in Bellshill with a man who is apparently an even better fighter than he is a singer. He sang excellent renditions of various Irish Republican songs, and you can forgive him if his guitar-playing wasn't the most intricate you've ever heard when you learn that his hands function much more often as fists than anything else. He had just returned from winning some major kickfighting competition in Thailand, and he had a scar and a tattoo to go along with every rippling muscle on his body. The type of guy you really want on your side of the argument.

Back in London on the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica, the first carpet-bombing of a city I believe, an atrocity committed by the Luftwaffe, under the command of the Nazis at the time. (A war crime carried out on so many more occasions in coming years by the Royal Air Force and the US Air Force as well.) The event took place at a pub called Filthy McNasty's, a bizarre place for such a solemn occasion, but it was good anyway. One man spoke who was from Guernica, and was sent to Britain as a child along with other orphans of the bombing, to be raised in London and, he said, embraced by the kind and generous people of Britain. Very moving, especially if it's true.

I used to be lovers with someone in Bristol, and Bristol makes me think of her every time, naturally enough. It's a nice town though, with qualities other than whether or not Kat lives there anymore. Including a nice, vegan cafe called the Arc, right in the center of town. The folks who run the place were organizing a day of activities, the main focus of which were performances by me and Gilad Atzmon. They were putting huge color posters all over town promoting me and Gilad, but they said the event was from noon to midnight. So both Gilad and I were regularly getting emails from local people who were wondering what time we were actually playing. Until the day of the event we didn't know, but once we did find out somehow Gilad managed to attract several dozen people to the 4 pm show. I know they were his crowd because when I started my set after him most of them left, and what remained was a dozen or so folks, mostly people I knew or people who really were just hanging around with the staff but had the courtesy to keep quiet during the music, so they looked a bit like a small audience.

Hearing Gilad play was a powerful experience. He's a phenomenal, passionate jazz musician, he's on fire and he can do amazing things with a saxophone or a clarinet, evoking sounds of the Arab world, the gypsies and the New Orleanians. He's an ex-Israeli with a dark, somewhat bleak sense of humor, which, along with his incessant writings on Jewish identity and history, have evidently earned him enemies on both Right and Left. His enemies include the rightwing US-based Anti-Defamation League, so he calls his foes collectively the Atzmon Defamation League. He is so hated, he jokes, he has become “king of the Jews.” This, I think, is the sort of comment that would get some hypersensitive person without a sense of humor to start flinging accusations of anti-Semitism. For weeks leading up to this gig I was hearing from people all over Britain and the US that I should cancel it. But I liked his supposedly evil book (The Wandering Who?), so I didn't. And then he turned out to be a really nice, funny, and extremely talented guy, too, on top of being a good writer. Apparently the Arc is being boycotted by some local people for not canceling this gig, too.

On April 3rd I flew from London to Berlin, where I had a gig in the lobby of the building that houses the offices of the mayor of Kreuzberg, one of the most solidly leftwing neighborhoods in this thriving international city. London to Berlin is normally a short and uneventful flight, but not today. I should have left Hackney sooner, but after getting stuck in predictably horrible London traffic, returning the rental car, and taking the shuttle to Heathrow's Terminal 5, it was still a full hour before flying time, so I thought, wrongly, that everything would be OK. I went to the machine and got my boarding passes no problem, then got in the line to drop off my bags. The line, inexplicably, took 45 minutes. Normally waiting in this line to drop off your bags most anywhere in the world takes more like ten or fifteen minutes, not 45, and of course, on this day I didn't have 45 minutes to wait in line without missing my flight, so I missed it. Amazingly enough, but not surprisingly, the British Airways peon I talked to after missing my flight told me I should have been at the airport sooner, did not seem to think that 45 minutes was a long time to wait to drop your bags on a conveyor belt, and made me pay for a new ticket.

This was only the beginning, however. It could all have been much worse of course – I wasn't injured or killed, my guitar wasn't even damaged. But when I arrived at the rental car center I discovered that several of the main rental car franchises were now engaging in a dishonest money-making scheme that used to be the purview only of little rental car companies you had never heard of. Now it was Thrifty, Dollar and Alamo all doing it together under the purview of a little rental car company no one had ever heard of. The car I had rented was very cheap. So cheap I might have wondered why it was so cheap, but not quite that cheap. It was like a hundred euros per week or something, like half as much as you might often pay for a rental car in many cities – though it always depends a lot on which city, what time of year, and other factors. But when I got to the counter, the nice, patient German man working there informed me that I had to purchase insurance.

Purchasing insurance, for those of you who don't go around renting cars much, is a scam. The thing is, if you have a credit card – which you probably do if you're renting a car, since it's basically a requirement for doing so – the card probably comes with rental car insurance. If it's a “gold” or a “platinum” card from Visa, like the one I was using, it always comes with insurance, and anybody in the business would know that. I only discovered this the hard way when I got in a fender-bender on my way to return a rental car at Heathrow several years ago. I had declined the insurance as usual, and thought that I would then be stuck for the repair bill to the car, but then the nice man at the rental company told me that because I had declined their insurance, I was covered by the insurance that came with my card. Which then made me really pissed off at all the rental car people who had sold me insurance in the past, who had never told me that. Which made me realize that they must be getting a commission when they sell insurance, otherwise they'd tell people about that more often. Which made me hate capitalism even more.

I of course explained to the man behind the counter there at Tegel Lufthaven that the card came with insurance, and he told me that if this was the case (this thing which he already knew was the case), I would need to provide a fax from the Visa Corporation with my credit card number on it that explained that my card came with insurance. Now, oftentimes when I reserve rental cars I reserve more than one, just in case one of the companies turns out to be engaging in just this sort of scam. But because I was using a rental company that had never done this sort of thing to me before, which I had used many times in many different countries, and because I was renting the car in Germany, which is, as the stereotype accurately indicates, a very well-organized, sensibly-run country where there are usually laws against this sort of nonsense, I wasn't thinking about it and had only reserved one rental car. So normally I would then have gone to the second rental car company where I had reserved a car, but in this case that wasn't an option. I knew it would cost a lot more to just ask about prices at the other rental car companies there in the rental car center, so I figured I needed to get online in order to either get this fax from Visa or reserve another car.

Normally getting online in a major airport is fairly straightforward. At Tegel this appeared to be the case. When I opened the browser I saw that I could get a free 15 minutes online before being charged for more time than that. So I used my 15 minutes on Skype with Visa, where I eventually learned that although they could point me to the web page that indicated that anybody with my specific credit card did indeed have rental car insurance, for security reasons at Visa they don't have access to fax machines, or, for some reason, to pen and paper, either. At this point the 15 minutes was up. I then tried to pay to get online some more, but none of my credit or debit cards worked. I dragged my two suitcases and guitar back to the main airport building and tried to use the pay phones there, but none of them worked. By this time I had to get to the gig, so I abandoned the effort to rent a car and took a taxi instead. (I did manage to rent one from a different company the next day, for twice the price.)

Guttersloh is a town about halfway in between Berlin and Bonn, which is why I accepted the gig offer there. I normally try to mostly take gigs that I have a reasonable suspicion will pay well and be well-attended, since I need to make a living and I like playing for audiences that significantly outnumber me. This was a gig I had no idea about. There was no guarantee but the organizer assured me he'd promote it and I'd be fed and I'd have a room to spend the night in, so OK, what the heck. When I got there I discovered that the organizer was a militant young Greek communist whose family ran a small pub in the middle of an otherwise residential neighborhood a kilometer or so from the center of town. I had only spoken with him for about ten minutes before I discovered that he hated anarchists.

This did not bode well, I thought. I know in Greece it's not uncommon for communists and anarchists to hate each other, and occasionally to come to blows with each other, but in northern Europe it's usually not that way. Although in big cities it still happens sometimes that I'll do a gig organized by communists that will have almost no one in attendance other than communists, or a gig organized by anarchists which will be attended almost exclusively by anarchists, at least in big cities there are enough of one population or the other to have a well-attended gig. This is not the case in Guttersloh, which, I believe, has ten communists, and, I'm guessing, ten anarchists, twenty environmentalists, twenty Pirate Party activists and maybe a dozen or so serious labor activists. Normally in a town the size of Guttersloh (small) the various tendencies that you could say broadly make up the progressive scene would do things like this together to at least some degree, but not at this Greek communist pub. The only promotion that appeared to have been done was among the local members of the German Communist Party's youth wing, and all ten of them showed up. They were a very enthusiastic, very good-looking bunch of teen-agers and twenty-somethings, and I ended up having a good time singing for them and watching them get drunk. In talking with Nikos the Greek communist I discovered that it wasn't just a hatred of anarchists that had prevented him from telling anybody else about the gig, but a fear of fascists, who had targeted his mother's bar, smashing windows and spraypainting xenophobic slogans in recent years. But he had neglected to tell me that he wouldn't be promoting the gig outside of the DKP, which is, at this point, a very small organization, and in Guttersloh, virtually nonexistant. Although maybe if the adult members of the party had also showed up we could have had an audience of twenty people instead of ten... (I will hasten to add, lest Nikos reads this and feels bad, that the gig in Guttersloh was not the most badly-attended gig on this tour – there was one other gig that only had six people at it, not including the bar staff...)

Amsterdam. The infamous Eurodusnie squat with the Las Vegas bar in Leiden is no more, but a new squat in Amsterdam has been granted a right to exist under complicated Dutch squatting law, and folks are actively reorganizing the dilapidated old building's innards. Almost no one is there when the show is supposed to start, but after a very long opening set by a punk from Poland an audience was coalescing. By the middle of my set there were several dozen enthusiastic people, including a large number attempting to dance along to my erratic and often not very rhythmic rhythms. One standing off to the side was the unmistakable pair of Herman (stage name Armand) and Marrit – Herman with his long, bright pink-and-yellow hair, Marrit with her traditional Dutch peasant dress, braided hair and wooden shoes.

Soon thereafter five of us spent the day at Efterling, which is easily the coolest amusement park I've ever been to. It being the Netherlands, we smoked joints throughout the day in between the rides, the fairy forests, and the Dutch pancakes. Any ride that the rest of us were too freaked out by that my daughter Leila wanted to do, Herman was always up for it. Throughout our time there, grownups but especially children were regularly approaching Herman for an autograph. He's easily recognizable, and he was recently on a popular Dutch hiphop TV show, so he has a newfound popularity among the kids – though he has, since the Sixties, been well-known to adults, being dubbed by the press “our national smokestack.” Most of his songs are related to marijuana as far as I can tell, though I'm not sure because they're generally in Dutch. Herman is very humble about his fame, which is not surprising, since he can easily re-familiarize himself with what it feels like to be anonymous as soon as he leaves the Dutch-speaking world, which is fairly small. Occasionally when he's recognized on the street he says to me quietly, “I'm in the phone book!”, quoting from Steve Martin in the Jerk, who gets really excited when he finds that his name is now published in the new phone book – he was now someone.

For five days Reiko, Leila and I had our own flat in the middle of a Hasidic neighborhood in Antwerp. It was a lovely neighborhood with a park nearby, but there were no cafes or restaurants in it, and most of the men were wearing what has got to be the most ridiculous hat I've ever seen, a sort of graduation cap stuffed with marshmallows and wrapped in plastic. Walking into the town center, after the Hasidic neighborhood is the one with lots of Turks and others from across the Muslim world, and then you get into the center, with its little Chinatown. I'm sure there is more to Antwerp than what we saw, but in our entire time there we never came across a single fresh cream truffle.

Crailsheim. The town was completely destroyed by bombing at the very end of the Second World War, and rebuilt later. The Jugenzentrum (Youth Center), where I played, has black walls inside the club, except for large white writing in Arabic that says “sex, drugs and rock & roll.” (Although when I showed a photo of the slogan on the wall to my friend Saed he said it reads, “sex, illegal narcotics and music” – close enough!) Someone from the anti-Deutsch had evidently tried a little to get the gig canceled by posting on Jugenzentrum's Facebook page a quote from an interview I did with the Tehran Times, but after discussing it they decided to let the show go on.

Lately a good bunch of the folks organizing and attending my shows in Germany are somehow or other related to the Pirate Party. Which is especially interesting for me because these mostly young, extremely intelligent people who are usually expert in some computer-related field are not coming out of the Left scene, they're more like figuring out a lot of political questions along the way, as they increasingly keep getting elected to public office all over the country. I'm once again reminded in so many ways what a remarkably introspective people the Germans are, what a society so keenly aware of its own history – so unlike so many in the US who go around waving flags as if all these massacres and carpet-bombings never happened.

Freiburg is a lovely city in the mountains of southern Germany, near the Swiss border. There's a vibrant community of organizers there, a bunch of whom live together in a big collective house. Some of the folks there were friends with Brad Will, and we were surely in some of the same places at the same time, though for the most part this is our first encounter. People were organizing a musical event at the big community garden they had on the outskirts of town. When many of these folks were a bit younger and involved with organizing civil disobedience against the IMF and the World Bank and such, the question of “convention hopping” vs. “community building” was posed by many. It was evident among this group of gardeners, filmmakers and lawyers that their answer to this question was “both.”

The Reitschule in Bern is a cavernous bunch of buildings which include ten different performance spaces, from ones that can fit a few dozen to one that has room for thousands. The biggest rooms are used less often, but most of the place, which used to be a school before it was abandoned and then squatted, is pulsing with activity. It's directly next to the main train station, right outside the old walls of the medieval city, and is very valuable property. Some people really want to shut it down, but thousands of local people circulate through the Reitschule going to shows every week, and the efforts at shutting it down get voted down by the people and their elected representatives. Outside the building is a welcoming crowd of refugee drug dealers, a common thing to find in a place like the Reitschule, where those inside would be more likely to take the side of the refugees in a conflict with the cops, and where lots of young people are going every day and they need their drugs. It's the refugees without papers who end up dealing the drugs, naturally, because they have to do something to survive and legal avenues aren't generally available.

When I told anyone outside Switzerland that I had a gig in Davos I was usually met with a perplexed look. Davos is mostly known for being the town in the mountains where there's lots of snow and lots of bankers having ski vacations and deciding the world's fate together, like when the World Economic Forum meets there every year. But Davos is also home to a punk rock club called the Box. It's a smoky place where the music is up too loud most of the time, in other words, a fine place for a punk rock gig. I had them eventually lower the volume to less deafening levels for my set. Hopefully far enough away to avoid hearing loss, Leila slept through the whole thing. At the end of the show when she woke up for a little while and we were walking to our rental car, she said, “that was weird -- you brought your guitar and we came to this place but you never played!”

In another, smaller, smokier place in Winterthur that, unlike the Box, which has a squattish feel, was an actual squat, Leila, Reiko and I were hanging out with a room full of fine upstanding squatters and eating some delicious vegan food together. Leila really liked the food and ate lots of it, but she wasn't very impressed with the place otherwise, as evidenced by the conversation she had with her mom, which was on speaker phone and easily audible to anyone in the room who wanted to listen.

“Where are you?” Nathalie asked over the phone line.

“In a squat,” Leila replied, sitting on the upper bunk of a bunk bed, next to Reiko.

“What's a squat?”, asked Nathalie. “Is that when people take over an abandoned building and live in it?”

Leila wasn't sure, but she was looking at Reiko's face for guidance, and Reiko was nodding her head in agreement. “Yes,” she said.

Nathalie: “What's it like in the squat?”

Leila: “It's dirty.”

I break out laughing, I can't help it.

“Daddy, stop laughing!” Leila says, suddenly embarrassed but not knowing why.

West of Cologne the three of us visited what is known locally as the Biggest Hole in Europe, a massive coal mine that is trying to expand even more, taking forest after forest and turning it into a big pit of coal and machinery.

Most of the time when I'm going somewhere I get a street address I can plug into my GPS, but for this gig there was no such thing. I was told to get off at a certain exit and take a right at the end of the ramp. We did that, and within a hundred meters the road ended. There where the road ended there was a makeshift dirt parking lot, and a young man on a bicycle wearing a pink skirt who welcomed us to the camp and pointed out where the action would be happening, a few hundred meters down a dirt road. We drove down the dirt road and eventually came to a small stage covered by a tarpaulin, with a nice little sound system already all set up. It was only at this point that Reiko and Leila ascertained that the gig would be outdoors.

Admittedly, before we got to the camp there near Cologne I didn't know if it was a protest against building a new road through the forest or some other sort of unwanted industrial activity, but I did know that it was a protest camp in the woods, and I had explained that to Reiko and Leila. Leila, however, is six, so should be forgiven for not knowing what a protest camp in the woods was, exactly. Reiko is 36, so quite a bit older, but she still somehow thought that a gig at a protest camp in the woods might somehow be an indoor gig. Which is all just to say that I was the only one of us who brought appropriate clothing for what turned out to be a very cold night, but luckily there was a big fire, so it all turned out fine.

Initially, trying to figure out what kind of protest camp this was was slightly confusing because most of the banners and posters scattered about were against nuclear power. Somehow this made sense, though, given the size and scope of the German anti-nuclear movement, and given that any sensible German environmentalist would be opposed to both nuclear reactors and coal mines. After having what must have been a slightly confusing conversation with a local resident about how the Cologne area seemed to have enough roads, I was informed that this was a protest against a coal mine, which was – he pointed – about three hundred meters in that direction.

Upon being informed that the biggest coal mine in Europe was just over yonder, Leila, having not the foggiest idea what a coal mine was, really wanted to check it out. So we walked into the woods to the platforms high up in the trees that folks had been busily constructing all that day, past that area to where the woods thinned out and then stopped being woods altogether, at which point we were walking on a surface that looked like the sort of caked, dried mud you see in the pictures of areas in the Amazon that have been logged and over-grazed and stuff like that. As we walked on the dried mud, the surface started getting increasingly harder to walk on, and then there were signs – in German, but the meaning was clear enough – that said this was an active mining area beyond these signs and people who didn't work at the mine were not allowed any further. I explained what the signs said to Leila and she very quickly said, “let's keep going.” When I hesitated she scolded me. “Come on, daddy!” Reiko was thirty meters behind us. “Come on, Reiko!”, she called to her.

We kept going. We could hear the machines in the distance, but it's a fairly flat part of Germany, and without any trees or hills it was impossible to tell how much longer we would need to walk before we could actually see the pit. It was starting to get dark, and I managed to convince Leila that we should turn back, though I really wanted to see the actual pit myself too and get a feel for just how big the biggest hole in Europe really is.

By 9 pm, when my show was happening there in the woods on the outdoor stage with the lovely sound system, Leila was tired, but didn't want to miss any action. She wanted me to park our car directly in front of the stage so she could be part of the scene while lying down in the car. Thirty meters was practically speaking the closest we could really be to the stage with the car, and that wasn't close enough for Leila, so she did what she has done innumerable times in the past, and made a little nest for herself on the stage with my jacket and other soft things, including some stuffed animals of course. Incidentally, that's often the quietest place for a kid to be if a kid is going to attempt to sleep through a concert. I rarely use monitors, so I'm behind the speakers, where it's much quieter than in front of the speakers...

On the day Leila and Reiko flew home from Hamburg, after getting yet another call from an immigration official (this time a friendly Dutch one) wanting to make sure that Reiko was not engaging in child-trafficking, I had to fly back to London for one night. Crazy, but that's how the gigs happen sometimes, and this was one that paid well enough to make that sort of thing make sense, at least financially. It turned out that that day, April 26th, ended up being the first of who knows how many days of headline-grabbing queues at Heathrow's infamous Terminal 5. I waited in line for Immigration along with all the other non-EU citizens for two hours. At other times in the day the wait was apparently as long as three hours, but I guess I was lucky. Most people in line were stoic, others were discussing the reasons for the delay.

What was evident was that it was a protest of some kind. I say this because it was plain to see that the line for UK and other EU citizens was staffed by three Immigration agents, who glanced at the ID's presented to them and let the Europeans through within a few minutes. Then, during the two hours I and hundreds of other travelers were waiting in line, those three Immigration agents were sitting there with nothing to do. In our line there were also three agents – although there were desks and computers sufficient for twenty or so agents if the place were fully staffed. Conveniently for me I suppose, these three overworked agents were not asking anyone what they were doing in the UK, they were just stamping the passports when they finally arrived at their desks. I asked the agent I finally got to if this was an industrial action of some kind. No, he said, this is because of the Cuts. Actually, I thought, it's a good strategy for them to be doing this kind of industrial action and then saying it's because of the Cuts, because the Cuts do royally suck, but it was very obvious that the line could have gone twice as fast if the three agents with nothing to do had been temporarily moved to our line instead. In a society less riven by class division and animosity than Britain – such as anywhere else in northern Europe – I suspect that's what they would have done.

Back in Germany. A gig in Senffabrik, an old factory in the center of Flensburg that is being rented by an assortment of alternative types. In every way it has the feel of a squat. The rent is cheap, but it's interesting that the landlord manages to charge for the place at all – the building is not that ancient, but it's certainly well over a century old, and has clearly not been well-maintained. The floors, once presumably flat, have become a series of hills about the height of your average speed bump on a residential street. There is so much mold growing on the walls the entire building smells like a rainforest. I had a packed audience, and most of them clearly had never set foot in the place. I don't know who they were or where they all came from, but they were half my age and looked very green, as in inexperienced, at least in terms of exposure to places like Senffabrik. About twenty of these young people came in as a group, and all of them looked like if it weren't for the fact that twenty of them had come together, they would have fled immediately. Instead they all came in and sat on the various couches strewn about the bar, looking very uncomfortable. Eventually they relaxed.

In Neumunster the Pirate Party was having their annual national convention. Some folks set up a gig for me to do in town during the weekend of their convention, thinking it might attract some Piraten. It didn't – they were all still having meetings and such late into the night, like good political activists often do. I thought this might be the case, but that we'd attract a crowd of somewhat less committed Pirates, the ones who tend to leave meetings early, but there were none like that – which impressed me even before about the Pirate Party, though for my own selfish purposes I wish there were more lazy Pirates around... There was still a good crowd, four members of which had come all the way from Denmark, which is where I needed to be the next day, so it was very convenient that they offered me a ride. (I had been planning to take the train, but this option seemed like more fun, and was definitely cheaper.)

They were two married couples, one of which had kids that were staying with the grandparents for the night so they could go to the show. The two men had both been members of Red Youth when they were younger, and back when Red Youth was a much more active national organization in Denmark. It was over ten years ago, when they were active in Red Youth, that they had first heard my music. When you get to play for teenagers it's great, because it tends to have a bigger impact on them than with older, more jaded adults, and as they get older they remember their teenage years and everything they did and all the music they listened to with an intensity unlike the associations most people will make in their adult years. I felt like a real rock star, particularly once we got to their house in the countryside of Jutland, where they rolled all the joints I could smoke and put me up for the night in the most comfortable bed in the house. I don't know where the four of them slept, but I'm afraid they were all on couches. I didn't protest though.

May 1st. I have no idea how many times I've spent the First of May in Denmark, but probably at least ten. May 1st, of course, is International Workers Day, but some of my readers from the US may not be aware of that. Although the holiday was an initiative of the Socialist International following massacres of workers protesting in support of the eight-hour day in Chicago and Milwaukee on May 1st and 2nd in 1886, International Workers Day was renamed Labor Day in the US and moved to September a long time ago. But in Denmark, and in just about every other country on Earth with the exception, at least to a large extent, of the United States, May 1st is a big deal.

Usually it's raining, or at least cold, in Denmark on the First of May – as was the vast majority of my time in Europe over the course of the spring. But there were two hot, sunny days in Scandinavia during my time there – May 1st and May 3rd. I began the day early in Roskilde, where I have begun May Day now on I think five different occasions. When I stay in Copenhagen I almost always reside in the shack behind the house of two of my favorite Danish communists, Gerd and Jan, who are as welcoming as hosts as they are leftwing. As I was walking from their house in the Valby neighborhood to the train station at seven in the morning, I walked past a dozen or so young men, some wearing hardhats, most with a can of Carlsberg in their hands. That was not a typo or anything – it was seven in the morning and the Danish May Day celebrants had already started drinking. This is normal in Denmark.

I took the train to Roskilde – which takes fifteen minutes, twice as long as it takes to drive there – and was met by a young woman working for Danish national radio. This is also something that happens to me in Europe sometimes – getting on the radio. The interviewer was, not unusually for Danish women, shockingly beautiful and almost completely unaware of this fact. She exuded a self-confidence completely normal for Danes who grew up going to Danish daycares as a baby and Danish schools as a kid, but not the sort of arrogant self-confidence you might expect of such a beautiful, intelligent, well-educated woman, if she were, say, from the US. Maybe it's something to do with growing up in a big imperial country like the US that makes so many people so loud and arrogant, or maybe the Danes are just so humble because they are completely surrounded by other beautiful, intelligent, self-confident people, so what is there to be arrogant about? I might not have been so affected by her beauty if she hadn't been standing about ten centimeters from my face, holding that furry microphone stuck right near my mouth. I think I did OK with the interview, and I'm sure I succeeded in not acting inappropriately, which was my main goal, given the circumstances.

The event I was singing at in the small city of Roskilde was the annual First of May breakfast get-together of the most leftwing political party that actually runs candidates, what's known as the “Red-Green Coalition,” called Enhedslisten. In past years people would talk who were party activists, many of the older ones having been active in the Danish Communist Party or other leftwing organizations before Enhedslisten came together not too long ago. But now it was a bit different – the same sorts of people speaking, but now most of the speakers were holding elected office, both nationally and locally. Suddenly I find myself with friends in parliament, which is always a bit unnerving.

Although it wasn't raining and I spent the morning hanging out with actual politicians, the rest of the day was more like a typical May Day in Denmark for me. I sang at three different events in Copenhagen, one planned well in advance, the others planned only hours in advance. As is often the case, the gigs that had the biggest and most enthusiastic audiences were the more spontaneous ones.

All of Copenhagen was a bustling sea of humanity, drinking beer, listening to music, and often waving red, black or red and black flags. This was particularly true in the most leftwing neighborhood in Copenhagen, where the old Ungdomshuset once stood, Norrebro. In Faelledsparken, the big park where the officially-sanctioned May 1st event takes place every year, it was such a sea of humans that it was a bit annoying. Normally, on a typical rainy May Day, you get more of the extremes – people who are so political, or so enthralled with a certain band, or so enthusiastic about drinking that they don't care that it's pissing down cold rain and they go to the park anyway. On a sunny day, though, you get all the riff-raff. Granted, they are scantily-clad, sun-bathing, very attractive riff-raff, but riff-raff nonetheless. They're not there for the music or the politics, by and large, just there to burn their lilly-white flesh and look really good while they're doing it.

In Norrebro, at the completely unplanned gig at Folkets Park, the sound system was an absolutely wretched disco kind of thing that basically didn't work for live instruments, but somehow we made it work, though it was probably a bad idea to try. There was some kind of Elvis-ish slap-back effect happening, some kind of weird half-second delay, which made the guitar sound just horrendous for playing anything that had any kind of beat to it. Nonetheless, a large crowd in front of me was dancing and singing along. Oddly, although I often have a hard time lining up a good gig in a spacious venue in Copenhagen, here I was in this park with hundreds of people, dozens of whom knew all the songs and were happily, drunkenly singing along with them. Something like this can randomly happen in a park in Norrebro, but then two days later I can (and did) do a gig in a venue fifty meters away from Folkets Park for a crowd in the single digits. Maybe someday I'll figure out how this all works.

In all fifty states of the US I don't think I've ever come across a socialist youth club oriented towards teenagers, but in Denmark there are a number of them. The one I ended up singing at to finish off May Day is around the corner from Folkets Park. It's a socialist youth club unaffiliated with any of the left parties, but probably most oriented towards Enhedlisten. They have their own two-story building, and some arm of the government that supports youth groups pays the rent. Most of the folks were in their teens, with a bunch in their twenties as well, such as the one who brought me there from the park, a young man who lamented that most of the kids in the socialist youth club don't stay politically active when they're older. This reminds me of what one of my bosses said to me a long time ago when I used to do word processing for a living. I was surprised that this basically nice but apolitical woman had been in SDS as a youth. She explained, “that's where all the cute guys were.” It might be the same sort of thing with the socialist youth club, but if so, it's a bit hard to imagine, based on the level of enthusiasm with which dozens of kids were dancing and singing along to every word of many of my songs. (But maybe I just think too highly of the potential influence of my music over young minds.) Turned out they had four of my songs in their official socialist youth club songbook...

In Skals, a small village in western Jutland, about as far as you can go from Copenhagen without leaving Denmark, I had the very unusual, indeed almost unique, experience of playing at the same high school not once, but twice, one month apart. I believe it's only happened once before that I've been invited back to play at a high school that I had played at before in the US. Generally, the teachers who invite me get in trouble afterwards, even if they didn't think they would. The one high school where I was invited back, the teacher got in trouble after the second time. (The first time was only for his class – the second time was for several hundred students, and the gig included not just me, but the very rude, beer-promoting English punk rock poet, Attila the Stockbroker.)

Turns out the Skals Efterskole is one of over two hundred such schools across Denmark, a sort of boarding school with partial public financing for kids in the ninth and tenth grades. I don't know if all the other schools are like this one, but it was fairly evident right away that this school is a place with highly engaged teachers and administrators who are really focusing on critical thought, civic engagement, democratic decision-making and good stuff like that. The students were generally present in a way that is very rare among their peers in the United States. No doubt they were still kids, but they were kids with whom you could have an intelligent conversation in a foreign language about many of the issues of the day. Both times at Skals I sang with no amplification in a theater for two hundred or so students, and the entire audience was quiet and clearly, authentically appreciative. The second time there was a lot of coughing going on but that couldn't be helped – it seemed like half the country had the flu during the month between my visits to Denmark, and Skals was definitely not spared.

In Malmo, Berg had recently returned from Moscow, and together he and a Russian anarchist gave a presentation in a collective vegan cafe in which they painted a chilling picture of how tough it is to be an activist in Russia. There I met an Iranian filmmaker named Mehdi who was working on a film about Wikileaks, and wanted to record me singing “Song for Bradley Manning.” We did an interview in a nearby park that was pleasantly interrupted by a large family including kids ranging in age from two to eleven or so, who insisted that Mehdi film them doing an intricately choreographed hiphop performance. They all had Spanish names and were rapping in Swedish. The evidence of Sweden's open immigration policy for so many decades is everywhere, and Malmo is a vibrant multicultural city, as are all the major cities of Sweden.

By the time I got to Oslo, the trial of mass murderer Anders Breivik had been going on for several days. I was reading about it every day in the news, along with the always-imminent possible Greek exit from the Eurozone. I took the train from Gardemon Airport, locked away one of my suitcases in one of the big lockers that they still have at the train station in Oslo (in many other countries they did away with these big lockers at train stations, sensible and useful though they would be, because of the threat of terrorism). I went to Rooster Coffee, the best espresso in the Oslo train station, and met a young man there, one of the organizers of my gig in town that night, I'm spacing on his name. We went to Hausmania, a venerable Oslo squat, and left my guitar with the refugees who populate the cafe, relatively safe within the bowels of the squat. My comrade and I walked around town for most of the afternoon, in the rain, and got very wet. We visited the other prominent local squatted social center, Blitz – if Hausmania is largely for older hippies and refugees, Blitz is the domain of the young, vegan punk rockers. Norway doesn't have a Black Bloc, but if there were anyone militant enough to be part of such an outfit they would hang out at Blitz.

Several city blocks were still closed off to the public, their facades still being repaired after the extensive damage done by the massive bomb that somehow failed to cause the collapse of the building that was intended. (Though Breivik planned his deadly operation with great precision, he apparently failed to take into consideration the parking garage that was directly beneath his explosive-packed van, so much of the blast impact went downwards instead of upwards into the government offices above.) Flowers were surrounding the courthouse where the trial was taking place, where 40,000 people had recently engaged in a wonderful sing-along to a popular Norwegian version of Pete Seeger's song, “My Rainbow Race,” a song Breivik apparently hates, which promotes multiculturalism and togetherness among us humans, something Breivik opposes to a wildly sociopathic degree. Although the question posed in the trial, which is not about Breivik's guilt or innocence, as this has already been firmly established, but about whether Breivik, or anyone else who commits an unprovoked massacre of 77 people, should be considered sane or insane, is a very interesting one. On one level, of course the guy is completely nuts and sociopathic. But on the other hand, if that's true of everyone who commits similar massacres throughout history, then Europe is populated largely of the descendents of sociopathic killers, as anyone who participated in the Inquisition, the Crusades, or fascism clearly had to have been.

I'm sure I'm not the only one ill at ease that not far away from the courthouse, beside Hausmania, is a small park that, as I visited, housed the remnants of what had been a 24-hour encampment of Palestinians refugees. A couple weeks before I got to Oslo most of the tents had been taken away by the authorities, and yet another public protest camp of refugees not wanting to be deported to war zones had been stopped by the powers that be. The fact is, Breivik or no Breivik, Norway remains a far less multicultural society than its more populous neighbor to the east, Sweden.

At Bergen airport I learned that the brother of one of Breivik's victims, an Arab, threw a shoe at the killer, but hit his lawyer instead by accident. Collateral damage I guess. He was very nervous about throwing the shoe, but when others in the courthouse applauded him he felt better. It's hard to imagine well-behaved, middle class, social democratic Norwegians applauding someone for throwing a shoe at someone else, but until recently it was very hard to believe that a Norwegian would be the one to carry out the most horrific massacre in western European history since World War II.

I had never been to Bergen. It didn't take long in Bergen to see that it is easily one of the most beautiful cities in Norway, a country full of beauty. To a certain extent it wouldn't matter what kind of buildings they stuck in there, since the whole place is perched on hills and mountains overlooking stunning fjords – it would be very challenging to make this landscape unattractive. Probably nothing short of open pit mining could ruin this scene.

Bergen is a university town, and my gig there was at the university. My main contact was an Englishman named Dave Watson who had been living in Norway since soon after Thatcher took over his mother country. Dave has lived for decades in this prosperous social democracy, raising children there and becoming fluent in Norwegian, but he is still a leftwing English class warrior at heart. He's a few years older than me, and like so many others of that generation, across Europe, North America, and most especially Central America, his life was forever changed by his direct experiences with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, Reagan's proxy war there, and the concurrent civil war in nearby El Salvador. He's part of the Ben Linder generation, you could say.

During times when there is no serious mass movement going on in a society, the more fringe leftwing groups always retreat to the university campuses, especially the larger universities. It was immediately clear that this was the case with the university in Bergen. The sponsors of my concert were students and community members like Dave who were involved with Latin America solidarity. For the most part, this meant students involved with organizing trips to help out on a farm in Cuba or to monitor elections in El Salvador, but there were other, smaller groups also present, such as the one Maoist group on campus with three very active members who makes it their main purpose to support the most controversial guerrilla movements they could find, namely Peru's Shining Path and India's Naxalites. Being on the left comes with lots of internal challenges, no doubt about it. As far as I could tell, the three Maoists had more important things to do than to attend the film screening and concert in the other room, remaining for the whole time at their little table with their Naxalite literature. I talked with the one female Shining Path supporter for ten minutes or so, and I could feel her commitment to principle, it oozed from every pore. Like many other members of political groups that are so marginal that they don't have much of a community associated with them, she had a tension about her borne, I suspect, from the pain of having to hear her peers regularly tell her she's in a cult, or she's crazy, or she supports a divisive, violent, authoritarian group that has very limited popular support. The very last thing I felt like doing was disagreeing with her politics like almost everyone else she meets would probably be doing when they started talking about politics, which probably was a daily occurrence, initiated by her. What I really wanted to do was join the cult just long enough to become her boyfriend and extricate her from it with the help of lots and lots of psychotropic drugs that we would do together every weekend. But that's just in my fantasy life. In real life we talked for ten minutes and I went and did my show while she ignored it.

My last gig in Europe was to the north of Bergen in the city of Trondheim, a place I've been many times before, ever since meeting Bjorn-Hugo at a NATO protest in Sweden seven years ago. The gig was where my gigs in Trondheim have been ever since the punk rock social center, UFFA, burned down several years ago. Actually the specific venues have varied since UFFA, but they've all been in the same neighborhood, Svartlamon. Svartlamon is sort of Trondheim's answer to Christiania, the 900-member squatted community in the center of Copenhagen. Svartlamon is a bit smaller and less populous, but it has the same feel of a liberated, squatted urban neighborhood. It's a very international neighborhood, easy to find folks from the US, Germany, England, and at least one Argentinian man and one Chinese woman. The day after my show I played in the same venue for a young man's Confirmation, which is apparently something Lutherans do when they turn 14. I had never played at such an event before, and I was skeptical about it at first, but it went OK. The mother of the boy turning 14 had only heard one song of mine, a love song I wrote for Yuan-Yuan, the Chinese harp player who was also performing at the Confirmation, along with the rest of her band – the Argentinian academic moonlighting as a bass guitarist, and two talented Norwegian guitar players. I warned everybody that most of my songs were terribly offensive and the one song the woman liked was not at all representative of my repertoire, but after scaring them all like that, the songs I actually did weren't as offensive as all that – if only because my warning probably made people think I'd be much more offensive than I actually am... (At least I'm not as offensive as Attila the Stockbroker, for example.)

On the morning I left Trondheim I flew to Copenhagen. Noting there that I had almost three hours until my next flight, to Chicago, I dashed away from the airport, took the Metro to Christianshavn, and walked to Pusher Street in Christiania. Bought a joint, smoked it with two young German travelers who I thought looked like they needed a smoke (they did, it turned out), and then I took the Metro back to the airport and caught my flight in plenty of time – and I was in the right mindframe to enjoy it, more or less.

The fun in Chicago began right away. Some nice labor activists who saw my Facebook post about needing a ride from the airport picked me up and delivered me to my lovely home during my week in Chicago in the Rogers Park area. When I got there I went for a walk to the Heartland Cafe, a mile away, to eat dinner. I hadn't looked to see if an event was happening there, but when I got there I discovered many friends from throughout the US and even a couple from Europe, there for a Code Pink event where Medea Benjamin was speaking, and rallying the crowd brilliantly as usual. Medea was arrested for disrupting a speech by some high-ranking government official recently. I had heard the audio version of the great speech she managed to make while being hauled off by security, but the video which I saw that night was even more impressive.

Every morning during my stay in Chicago I walked to the Heartland to meet friends for breakfast who were in town for the festivities, that being the protests against NATO's biggest-ever get-together, which was happening for the first time in Chicago, rather than its usual location of Washington, DC. No matter how successful these protests are in terms of changing anything or getting media attention or whatever else, I always enjoy them immensely, because it's the only time I get to hang out with so many different friends during the same period of time in the same city.

Having been away from the US all spring I was especially curious to see if the Occupy movement had revived itself since it was essentially beaten and arrested into not being able to hold almost any physical spaces throughout the US. There were lots of scattered elements of Occupy in the city throughout the week but nothing like an overwhelming presence. Still, the atmosphere was festive, and there were always small or somewhat larger groups of people involved with various protest activities in various parts of the city every day. Some of the marches were too small to even happen, while others involved hundreds and in a couple of cases thousands of participants.

Riding around on the back of Todd Allen's electric recumbent bicycle with a spiffy sound system mounted on a cart on the back of it and singing while moving was a definite highlight for me. The big rally on Sunday was marred by the sound system inexplicably dying after I was about two-thirds of the way through with my first – and, it turned out, only – song of the day. Tom Morello, the Outernationals and other musicians did a semi-acoustic set in the middle of the crowd on the hot asphalt beneath the stage, which was very photographic and absolutely the right thing to do, but very few people could hear anything they were playing due to the sound situation.

I had to leave the rally early to get to my last gig of the tour, a sleepily anticlimactic show for a small crowd of Palestinians at the Hyatt in Dearborn, Michigan, commemorating the anniversary of the Nakba 64 years before. So I left the rally before most of the arrests and police brutality that evidently came with the end of the march. And as I left Chicago, the three young men charged with “terrorism” who seem to have been entrapped by undercover police posing as Black Bloc, were still being held in solitary. On the way to Detroit I wrote a song about that. And now I'm back in Portland, watching my daughter ice skate in the mall.