There has once again on F1 race weekend been a fair amount of noise in the media about protests and social unrest, about armoured vehicles and police fighting rioters with teargas in Bahrain. But like last year, I didn’t see anything myself, not venturing out into the villages outside the capital, as I was busy enough working on my sports stories. Again, however, this year, I did find the time to go jamming in downtown Bahrain, where life does indeed go on as usual.
That is not to deny the civic strife and the problems in the country, as there is social unrest. But not only was it life as usual in the city, but in fact, personally this year I have already beat my record for the number of jam venues I have played at in the city. Prior to last night, I had only played in one place here in Bahrain, as I had only found one place: The Dublin Club open jam at the Ramee Palace hotel.
This Irish bar in the ground floor of the Ramee Palace in Juffair is a lively joint, and has a great expat band featured throughout the year. This weekend it played to a backdrop of an F1 weekend, and it held its usual jam session. The jam takes the form of the house band opening the stage for anyone who wishes to sing or play along, in the company of the house band.
That meant that for me I got up and played “Wicked Game” with my acoustic guitar and vocals, along with a keyboard player, a lead guitarist – Félix Fréchette, from Québec – a couple of backing vocalists, a drummer and a bass guitar player. It was really magical, especially as the band is so good, and despite not having played the song before – apparently – it went very smoothly, I thought.
I recognized a few of the other jammers from last year, a vocalist or two, and a guitar player. The U.S. navy fifth fleet is based here, and some of the jammers come from there, I understand….
But the night had begun with a dinner at Bennigan’s restaurant and bar, where there was also an open mic going on in the pub opposite the dining room. The house band here is a Filipino couple named Wally and Tanya. Wally plays lead guitar and sings, and Tanya sings. They also use recorded backup stuff, like drums, and generally have a vast repertoire of cover songs.
But on Saturdays they open the stage to anyone, in addition to playing themselves through the evening. I played three songs, and Wally played lead on two, while he shook maracas on the third – my song “Borderline.”
Sometime in the next day or two I will put up my Bahrain guide to open mics and jam sessions, as promised at the beginning of my world travels….
Today I have taken the first step, by putting up my guide to Melbourne, Australia open mics. I have also rearranged the blog to simplify and make sense of the new series of thumbnail guides. The Paris guide and the Melbourne guide and all future guides will be located in a new menu item at the top of the blog page, called “Worldwide Open Mic Thumbnail Guide,” which has a page with a full explanation of the project.
As I explain, the new pages will not be as exhaustive as the Paris page, since I live in Paris. But I hope they will help travellers and locals, and I also ask for locals and travellers to provide me with any open mics they think should be listed, by sending a word in the comments area on the relevant page, and I will add it to the list.
Here it is, my fifth year in a row of traveling the world to play in open mics and jam sessions. It starts tomorrow with my flight from Paris to Melbourne, then the following week I go to Kuala Lumpur. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have been documenting my musical adventures around the world on this blog for the last three years, and for the year before that I began writing a book about it. This year I will again visit 20 countries in the next nine months, and play in a massive number of open mics and open jam sessions, and I will write about what I find here….
To recap a little, the first year was the book. The second year was the blog. The third year was the blog and a documentary film. The fourth year was the blog and me recording myself playing music with musicians in the open mics around the world, as well as a series of podcasts of people running the open mics and playing in them.
So where does this whole trans-media epic stand at the moment? Another recap: I take these worldwide trips as a journalist reporting on Formula One auto racing for my newspaper, and in my free time I seek out places to play, in these cities and countries where I would not otherwise expect to find open mics – in many cases. And each time I like to have a new project to work on to document it, or do something “else” with it. This year will be no exception. I again have projects in the works. What are they?
First, I want to say that my goal this year is perhaps more ambitious than in all the other year combined. Because my No. 1 goal will be to COMPLETELY finish all of the projects that have accumulated but never ceased to spin out. In other words, I’m still working on the book – it’s written, but I’m now editing it – and I want that finished finally by the end of the year, but hopefully within the next couple of months. I want to work with all the recordings I did and make some kind of CD – ie, the podcasts and some of the stuff of me playing with other people. And I want to finish the film, finally. To that end, I have made a number of very important steps in recent weeks, and I’m very, very excited about them, and I will write about that in the coming weeks.
For this year, I will not simply sit back on my laurels and be satisfied with finishing the other projects, but I will start one or two new ones. In addition to simply continuing to play at open mics and jam sessions everywhere I go, and recording it here on the blog, the first new project is that I will be adding a new page to the blog at every location I go to, which will be a Thumbnail Guide to the open mics and jam sessions, etc., that I know of in those cities. Having now had four years, and this will be the fifth, of accumulated and growing knowledge about each city’s open mics, I finally feel like it is time to put it all up on the blog in a usable form. Of course, my Paris guide to open mics will always be the most up-to-date, since that’s where I live and play the most. But the other pages will, I hope, serve their purpose well, and give a whole knew heft to this site.
The other project I plan to do, but this one may or may not be feasible, is that I plan to write a new song in each country and city I visit, and the song will in some way be inspired by the place. I have no idea how big a task that will prove to be, but I really want to face the challenge and try it. If it produces one good song, then that’s cool enough – the rest will just be a great exercise and discipline…. I will decide whether or not to make the songs heard on the site, but I expect that I will only manage to lay down the melodic idea and write the full text, but not perfect the song at each place – since I’m often not present in the countries long enough to do that…especially given all the work I have to do for my day job.
So that is it in a nutshell: 20 countries in 9 months; a new web of evergreen material for a worldwide open mic thumbnail guide of where to perform; 20 new songs inspired by the places I visit; and finally, all of my previous years’ projects finished and finalized to tie together the entire multimedia, trans-media, worldwide musical adventure. Sound like I’m a dreamer? I hope so!!!!
PS, here is the schedule of places I will visit, and when (although the date usually but not always represents the last day I am in the country – and while there are only 19 countries here, the 20th is France, where I will play in between times):
Mar. 17 Australian Grand Prix Melbourne
Mar. 24 Malaysian Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur
Apr. 14 Chinese Grand Prix Shanghai
Apr. 21 Bahrain Grand Prix Bahrain
May 12 Spanish Grand Prix Barcelona
May 26 Monaco Grand Prix Nice/Monaco
Jun 9 Canadian Grand Prix Montreal
Jun. 30 British Grand Prix Silverstone/Oxford
Jul. 7 German Grand Prix Nurburgring/Cologne
Jul. 28 Hungarian Grand Prix Budapest
Aug. 25 Belgian Grand Prix Spa-Francorchamps/Liege
Sep. 8 Italian Grand Prix Monza/Milan
Sep. 22 Singapore Grand Prix Singapore
Oct. 6 Korean Grand Prix South Korea/Seoul/Mokpo
Oct. 13 Japanese Grand Prix Suzuka/Nagoya/Osaka
Oct. 27 Indian Grand Prix Delhi
Nov. 3 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Abu Dhabi
Nov. 17 U.S. Grand Prix Austin
Nov. 24 Brazilian Grand Prix Sao Paolo
It has been an insanely long time since I have posted on this blog from India, and there are probably some readers who are used to frequent posts from me wondering if I have caught malaria, dengue fever or a bad case of Delhi Belly. Quite honestly, there were moments I asked myself the same thing. But apart from a general feeling of fatigue and another cold – after Korea -, the silence on this blog has had nothing to do with any of those things. It has had to do with my situation in Delhi, however.
The race track that hosts the Formula One race that I cover for my newspaper is so far out of downtown Delhi where my hotel is located, that it requires in general an hour and a half trip at best to get from door to door. And the only viable method of doing that trip requires taking a metro and a shuttle bus provided by the circuit for journalists. The last shuttle left Delhi every day at 9:00 AM, and that meant me getting up at 7 AM in order to exercise, eat, prepare and take the metro to the shuttle. The return shuttle left at the earliest from the track at 19:15 PM. That meant a huge full day.
Added to that, I had a workload in my job like none I have ever had before. It is an accumulation of six races in eight weeks and also a special report consisting of eight stories by me that was due today and will be published at the end of this week for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. All of this meant that the usual intrepid adventurer that I am decided to buckle down into a life consisting of the usual journalists’ excitement of: Racetrack, metro, shuttle, hotel room. No more.
Having said that, I continued to look and ask about music venues in Delhi, and as far as I could see, there was nothing for me from last Thursday until yesterday. No open mics or open jams, and no likely or obvious venues where I could gate crash. So it was that I accepted my fate for once of living a one-dimensional life.
Still, I was incredibly pleased and lucky with having managed to get to the Turquoise Cottage jam session last Wednesday on my first day in Delhi – despite my flight related exhaustion. And this morning, just when I thought I will have failed to play again in this city and had for the first time failed in a remaining challenge or two that I had set myself this year… I learned that the other branch of the Turquoise Cottage is holding its own Rabbit Session of jam and open mic tonight.
So I am intrepidly running off tonight to see if I can find this new place, take part, eat, play myself and hopefully with others, and then get another half night’s sleep before taking off to Abu Dhabi tomorrow. Can I feel anymore ecstatic about the Turquoise Cottage bookends to my India trip than I do at the moment? No way! Let’s see how it works out tonight. I have no idea when I will be able to get access to a good internet connection to report the results, but I hope it will be tomorrow night in Abu Dhabi. If not, it will be Thursday….
There has been a long break from activity on this blog, partly because I have been traveling from Japan to South Korea, but mostly because I was lying sick as a dog in a tiny town called Mokpo in the south of South Korea for two of the three days. Sick as a dog is not a term I really wanted to use in this place, but it was the best one that came to mind. The good thing about all that is that it did give me time to contemplate the new CD of David Broad, one of the few guitar players I have seen at open mics who has made me briefly contemplate quitting playing guitar.
Mokpo is the location of the Formula One race this weekend, and I got in so much music AND work in Japan that sleep and proper nourishment and all of the rest of the things we do to keep ourselves healthy were left out of my life for a little too long, resulting in a wretched, flu-like deathly cold. Now under control, I found a moment to write about the music I did NOT play, but would have liked to – that of David Broad.
Broad is this amazing finger-picker guitar player from Leeds, England, who spent some time in Paris last year playing at the open mics and doing some concerts. He sent me his new CD a couple of weeks ago, and is it beautiful. You feel like you are in the same room with him and his band listening to his songs performed to perfection. Old time, country, blues, it’s all here. Broad’s heroes are above all the country blues stars of the 1920s and 1930s, people like Mississippi John Hurt, Rev. Gary Davis, Skip James, Blind Blake, and of course Robert Johnson.
The album is not just beautifully produced in sound terms – with its mix of his finger-picking guitar, warm vocals, harmonica and double bass, and the mandolin, lap steel guitar, fiddle and 12 string guitar of the other musicians – it is also a wonderfully produced physical CD with a screenprinted cardboard sleeve. Recorded in Leeds and released on Folk Theatre Records, it has been produced in a limited edition of only 500 copies – so get one. If you’re sick and/or low, it will bring you out of it. If you are doing just fine, it might head off the flu – or the blues – lurking just around the corner.
I’ve used plays on words like that before about the open mic on Tuesday nights in Paris at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance bar, but frankly, it just keeps doing the same thing again and again: Bringing bonheur and luck. Last night there were a number of new and interesting musicians, and all sorts of interesting meetings with interesting people.
I arrived a little late, but still had a chance to get up to play two songs. Amongst the standout acts were Baptiste W. Hamon, formerly known as Texas in Paris, who continues to do amazing stuff with his new entity singing and writing in his native French language; and then the newcomer, Allonymous, from Chicago originally, but a longtime expat in France and the UK. He did this very cool sort of recitation/singing from texts he has written and committed to memory. He started as a painter, but has done lots of spoken word stuff, both in the U.S., U.K. and here.
After the open mic we all went up to the bar on the ground floor and had another fun jam session, sometimes with two corners with musicians playing almost at once. What more can I say about this place that I have not said already? Unfortunately, I don’t feel inspired to say much more – it was all such a great trip on its own that it leaves me without words. Check out the videos….
Oh, yes, and P.S., there was a fantastic meeting with a fellow journalist who happened to show up at the open mic and who is involved in writing a Formula One related article. She had no idea that I was covering that series in my day job, but learned it through someone else. So we chatted for a half hour or so all about Formula One in order to help her with her story. Amazing how our worlds can run in to each other….
Man oh man oh Mannheim, I never thought I’d find myself playing music in a McDonald’s in Mannheim, recording “Crazy Love,” with a German violin player with the Italian name of Tonio. But that is exactly what happened last night just before midnight, and just before we got kicked out….
Thing is, Mannheim is a crap place for open mics and jam sessions. I stayed here a couple of years ago while attending the German Grand Prix in Hockenheim, and I did managed to find one odd bar to play in and then a down moment in a karaoke to do my guitar and singing number. But arriving here yesterday, I felt quite demoralized, and after a nice dinner of schnitzel or some other pork-based delight, I walked out of the restaurant to find a young man looking at the menu and with a violin on his back.
My “opportunity” lights flashed brightly and I asked – with my guitar on my back – if he knew of anywhere to play in an open mic or jam. Tonio – as I would find was his name – spoke perfect English, and he said, “Heidelberg.” Yes, Heidelberg is next door to Mannheim, but there were no hotels available when I looked. So then he said he would ask some friends in a pub across the street, and each one he asked answered: Heidelberg.
Mannheim ain’t manly in the way of live music. So anyway, Tonio also told me that did like me, when he traveled, he looked for people to play music with. He had just returned from Amsterdam, where he had joined some buskers playing in the street.
Feeling somewhat defeated, I thanked him and left. But as I made my way toward the bar where I had played last year, I suddenly realized I had let slip the most important chance of my whole four-day trip to Mannheim. My project this year on the never-ending worldwide open mic and jam musical adventure is not simply to find and play in an open mic or open jam. It is to play with a local musician in every country I visit, and to record the playing. So far I have succeeded in every one of the 10 or so countries I have visited since March.
I suddenly realized that there was an interested and willing, classically trained violin player who liked pop and jazz as well as classical music, and that I had actually walked away let down. Without even asking him to play. So I ran back to my hotel, picked up my recording device – which I had forgotten there – and returned to the pub across the street from the restaurant where I had eaten. There I found Tonio again, about to eat his meal, with his sister and friends.
I arrived and told him my goal for the trip, and he said he would love to play some songs with me. So he ate, I socialized with him and his friends, had a beer, soaked up the atmosphere in this fabulous, popular, student pub, and then said: “So where should we play?”
We decided to head for the main public square, but by now it was so late it was likely to be considered a public disruption if we played there. Tonio suggested we try the McDonald’s restaurant just off the square. We arrived a bout 20 minutes before closing time, we were the only people in the McDonald’s – Tonio and two of his friends – and we ordered coffees and sat at a table. I turned on my recording device and we played “Crazy Love,” me on guitar and vocals, Tonio on violin and doing great mouth drumming sounds and then ad lib lyrics. Got through all but the final verse, and were then kicked out by the manager.
But I GOT my recording of me playing with a local!!!!! Couldn’t believe it! And in a McDonald’s of all places…. Thanks Tonio.
I just hate letting the blog slide, but things were just way beyond my control over the last couple of days, and I do not want to leave the impression that either I was not doing anything interesting, or not doing music, or not taking risks in life to live my dreams. OK, now that I have that dramatic lead out of the way, let me get on with a three-part blog item, which is the only way I can figure out doing justice to the last three nights of musical levity and profundity.
I left off with my last Oxford blog talking about the lost opportunity at the Oxford Folk Club. Well, Saturday night I had nothing lined up for playing music when suddenly a Formula One racing journalist colleague and I discovered after many years of knowing each other that we had a passion for music, and on his side especially jazz. It was clear we would hit it off when I told him I could never sing jazz, but loved it. But I added the singer HAD to be astounding for me to like it, as most amateur jazz singers sound to me like cold porridge – or flat champagne.
So he said, “Who is a great jazz singer?” I said, “Jimmy Rushing.” He said, “Guess who I was listening to in the car on the way to the circuit this morning?!?!” Yes, Rushing. So later in the day, this colleague told me he had been invited to a barbecue of a mutual colleague of ours – a photographer – and I was now invited and should bring my guitar to entertain the guests. I felt great relief telling him my guitar was in Oxford, that I could not return there and then back to the circuit. For the location of the party was in a small village next to the circuit. “Bad news, Brad. It turns out our colleague’s daughter has a guitar,” he said to me.
He must have picked up on my relief that I would not be found out as a fake, since I had spoken a lot about my musical adventure – as had some others of our colleagues to him. I was scared shitless that I would not be up to his expectations. But music comes first, emotions come first, the real reason for playing and singing, come first: expressing inner emotional truth, and who gives a fuck what others think.
So I went to the party, drank enough to relax, ate, and met the 25 or so guests. Then at the right moment, I got the daughter’s guitar out and began playing. It turned into about one hour of singing along, clapping, fun, emotion, and a general huge success. I had an astoundingly good time, and reports back the following day confirmed that I was not alone to have fun. So it was yet another example of, “Push yourself towards expanding the boundaries and doing what you love and taking chances.”
PART II
I ended up sleeping over at this person’s home, in the swimming pool room, and so thereby avoiding traffic and getting to the circuit early for an interview and then the race. I then returned to my hotel in Oxford, went out to dinner and then went to the Harcourt Arms pub’s open mic, which I also attended last year in its first weeks of its existence. Remember, this one came out of the Bookbinder’s open mic down the street, which was organized by Nigel Brown…. A year later, with Nigel still running the Harcourt Arms open mic, I was greeted warmly as I entered, by both Nigel AND the publicans. Wow! It is like a second home. I have a lot of those now around the world.
It turned into a perfect open mic evening with a wide cross-section of performers, wonderful meetings with musicians, locals, tourists and three drop-dead gorgeous German women students all studying biochemistry! (I now realize I should have gone into science….) There was a fabulous pub atmosphere as usual in this consummate neighborhood English pub, with the added attraction of it being located in the great university town.
But the adventure here would become for me yet another case of following instinct, desire and ambitions as I performed a set of two songs alone, and then got another chance to go up, and I asked Nigel a question.
“This year,” I told him, “as I travel the world, I am trying to play and record myself playing, in each country with a local musician. Would you like to play with me?”
He said fine, but added that I would be better off with a guitarist named Johnny Hinkes. So I asked Johnny, and he agreed to play with me. I had not really been very motivated to ask, as it really is like leaping across a big canyon to go out and put yourself forward and say, “Can someone play with me?”
But when I got up to play with Johnny, I realized that I was with a lead guitarist like none I had ever played with before. I started with “Mad World,” because I thought it suited the moment, and would be easy and good for him to play along to. But he did such an amazing and different job with it, that I decided to be ambitious and do my song, “Borderline.” He was even better with that, and had never heard it before. It was a fabulous success, I had the time of my life, and I got it recorded too – although not on video. The Harcourt Arms and Nigel Brown came through again – better than ever! (I was then offered a cab ride back to my hotel by someone going that direction, which was a fabulous time saver for my Monday travels.)
PART III
It was a long, long, long day from Oxford back to Paris. I had to drive my rental car to Avis in London, then go to the St. Pancras station and take the Eurostar. Just before entering the Channel Tunnel, the train stopped at a station and we sat there for 2 hours!!! That is 20 minutes short of what the whole trip is supposed to take. The train had a technical problem and could not go through the tunnel. Would we have been suffocated or something?
Finally, we switched to a new train, and I arrived in Paris at 20:15. It was too late to return home and THEN go to the Coolin open mic as I planned. So I just went directly to Coolin with all my luggage and my guitar and ate a meal there – English fish ‘n chips – and I waited for the open mic. I was not feeling particularly inspired about the evening, but it began to grow on me, I saw friends, I heard great music, I got into the vibe, did my bit, and then saw some people I met last week – the trio with Alix, Anzaya and Leyone, whom I had met last week when I hosted the Galway open mic.
Suddenly, I found that I was having the greatest evening, totally into it, loving every moment. It was yet another cool Coolin, and I was again on top of the world. A fine end to a busy weekend.
I’ve been saying a lot lately that if you want something interesting to happen in your life, carry around a guitar with you. I might also add a guidebook. At least, that is what happened to me in Valencia, Spain, last night – something very fun and interesting thanks to my guidebook and my guitar. And it also happened at a very interesting place where Ernest Hemingway, Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles and others used to hang out.
To step back a little…. I finished my day’s work at the Formula One race track at the Marina in Valencia and I decided, exhausted after a long night the night before and the travel and the work, that I would not even look for a place to play music. Valencia has never been good for my musical adventure. So I opened up my guidebook, called Cartoville and published by Gallimard in France, to see if there were any good restaurants nearby.
hemingway at la pepica
Carrying these Cartoville guidebooks is a new thing I have been doing this year after I was introduced to the books by my friend Vanessa, last year, and she took me to some amazing places thanks to these books. So I thought, why not find one for each town I go to. Tourism was never my thing – but there’s no point traveling around the world for my work and being dumb about finding places, either.
The books are great because they split up the cities into sectors, and in each sector you have only five or six choices of bars, restaurants and shopping. So the choice is done very carefully, and I am rarely let down by what I find. I looked in the area around the Formula One track last night and saw this restaurant overlooking the beach; it was called La Pepica, and the guidebook described it as a “local myth” and that it was mentioned in Hemingway’s novel, “The Dangerous Summer,” and that these other celebrities had followed him there, etc. And the food was said to be good, and the ambiance was good, and simple, too.
So I walked over to the place, dragging my luggage behind me, and with my guitar on my back – for I had still not checked into my hotel. As I approached the restaurant, I saw suddenly some familiar faces: A massive table of maybe 35 British journalists sat on the terrace of the Pepica, in some kind of get-together for before the British Grand Prix, which is the next race after the one this weekend. There they were, BBC, Sky TV, magazine journalists, newspaper journalists from all the major publications and wire services, web journalists, other television and whatever journalists – the cream of the British racing media.
As soon as they saw my guitar, two or three of them requested I play a song. In the state I was, and given that it was the beginning of the evening and still bright out and they were just being served their first course, I thought, No way. I laughed off the invitation and said that perhaps once I had eaten, I would play.
I went inside, found a table not too closely within sight of the Brits, and I had a wonderful meal. The first course alone consisted of three dishes: a Valencia salad, calamari and some kind of mini muscles, shellfish. I had a nice half bottle of Rioja, and an amazing desert of some kind of parfait ice cream. It makes me want to run right back there as I write these words.
So I finished the meal, reading my New York Review of Books and the latest issue of Rock&Folk, the French music magazine, and then I went out and wondered over to say goodbye to the British journalists. Some had already left, but I was immediately invited once again to play music. And now, I was really ready, and desperately wanting to sing. And what a place to do it in? An old Hemingway hangout in the country of the flamenco guitar….
I ended up playing perhaps a total of 10 songs, split up by periods of talking, carousing and drinking the wine they offered me. Somehow I managed not to drink so much that I would lose hold of the notes, and I must say, with the beach in the distance, the sea a little beyond that, and even the appreciative waiters at this wonderful restaurant, it was an unbelievably great way to finish my first day in a town that has never been nice to me on this musical adventure – until now.
(Unfortunately, although a number of the journalists took photos and made videos of me playing, I have none myself, exceptionally, for this post.)
When I first started this musical adventure in 2009, I had written off Monaco as an impossible place to play, and settled for Nice. Too chic, too much money, too many pre-planned events during a Grand Prix weekend for there to be anywhere for a gypsy singer player like me to show up and inherit the mic. In the last couple of years I managed to play at McCarthy’s Pub in Monaco, and last night I managed to add a new location, thanks to Pete Cogavin, the lead singer and guitar player for the band Pete and Folks. This was, guess what, a pre-planned gig for Pete and his band in a chic place called Capocaccia, but Pete being the same cool cat he was at Shapko last year invited me to play a couple of songs.
So there I was in this chic joint where you buy a drink and get a free, all-you-can-eat buffet to go with the drink, a garden terrace, a front bar and back room, and the fast moving, bopping music of Pete and Folks, which was a mixture of their own songs and well-known cover songs. I met Pete on his Pete and Friends night at the Shapko bar last year, and he let me go up and play a few songs there. I enjoyed his music there, but he was mostly solo at the time. Hearing him with his band is another experience. Pete has a fabulous voice, and the keyboard player – Marcus Sylvan – sometimes looks like he studied at the Harpo Marx school of mad piano playing. Loved it!
I can see why the band – keyboards, bass, drums and Pete – have been stirring up interest in France, and not only in the South. They also played on the great French television show for live music called Taratata, although I did not speak to Pete about that – I just learned about it on the Pete and Folks band web site today. They just released a CD, as well, and you can hear some of the cool songs from that on the band site. Oh, by the way, Pete is Irish, not French.
So they played their great music and during the break I got to go up and play Pete’s quite amazing Epiphone guitar, which looked pretty vintage. It is a copy of my Gibson J-200, but some of the J-200s are really great guitars, and this was one of them. I decided to play a couple of cover songs, “What’s Up!” and “Father and Son.” And the Capocaccia manager or owner or whoever it was, gave me a free glass of wine after that, so I’m assuming it went well!
But it is a great thrill to play in Monaco – and I’m hoping to do it again before the weekend is finished….
