I am moving along the highway between Seattle and Portland through the lush pastures of the Pacific northwest. Farmsteads nest cosily amongst the cows and tall pines and blossoming roadside shrubbery. No matter where you are on this continent you always know it's North America. You've seen every region - mountainous, arable, rocky and desolate in countless Westerns, road movies and documentaries. Not an inch uncovered by celluloid, only the interior life lived in these locations remains mysterious to those of us from abroad and that's as hard a nut to crack as any. Don't be fooled, the North Americans are a complex people and those representations of their national character, be it Kennedy, Monroe or Jimmy Stewart are less archetype than empty caricature. Everyone here, it sometimes seems, is as much Melville's Ishmael as Coppola's Captain Willard, Hulk as Annie Hall or Houdini as Huckleberry Finn. With, God help us, a smidgeon of Gordon Gekko.
Much of the route to Portland resembles Perthshire, the fertile, rolling garden of Scotland rich in soil and gentry and like there you can feel a heat emanating from the dense riot of early summer vegetation. It presses at the van windows as we rock to songs of the eighties on satellite radio. No commercials, no DJs just wall-to-wall hits: ZZ Top, Bon Jovi and Rod Stewart in his hideous 80s over-produced pomp. Beautiful lakes float by and the clouds hang low over the thickly wooded rises and we fire through pretty metal bridges spanning slow meandering rivers as the cheapest sounding music ever made from pop's lost era drives us onward.
The show last night took place in a swanky dinner theatre club called the Triple Door in downtown Seattle, a clean and lovely city with tree-lined avenues and hills and expanses of ocean water. Formerly Grunge capital, U.S.A. it is now a laid-back metropolitan flagship for the 21st century digital economy. Amazon is throwing up its new corporate headquarters surrounded by home-grown Starbucks outlets and alternative professionals going about their cutting-edge business. You can see life is less of a straight fight to the food table here than in L.A. The venue, with its state-of-the-art sound system even webcasts your show as a matter of course. With a hundred or so present at the event, chewing on hip fusion fare and sipping nicely rounded reds from boutique wineries, I wonder if the virtual audience even doubles their number. Live all over the world - to an audience of seventy. I am narrowcast through the broadband like a minnow in the Mississippi.
Portland brings a muggy heat absent up north. Our venue tonight is a revamped 50s motel called Doug Fir, excruciatingly self-conscious in its cool ironic chic. I want to kick it from its complacency but I'm complacent myself; just too old and beyond it to care for its little tricks like blackboards for doors and pink condoms on the bedside table. It is a patronizing folly but as their patron I must mention the efficiency of the staff lest I appear, heaven forfend, ungrateful. I am given a wristband and meal ticket at the soundcheck. I have credentials, I am in their club. I will always be one tattoo short of a dude, a haircut short of a hep-cat but I can mingle amongst their number on nights like these and smile inwardly at all that wasted effort like the ultimate reverse snob that I undoubtedly am.
I crawl into my small square room to listen to Portishead's Magic Doors a third time before taking a walk into nightfall and the encroaching final show. On my way back I stumble into a local writer who was one of the original coterie of Del Amitri enthusiasts back in our "difficult" period of the mid-eighties. As Rod the Mod, Filthy Collins, Journey and Heart pumped out their coked-up, treble-heavy formulaic radio rock the Dels debut must have seemed like a message from the moon to those few misfits and messed-up kids who came upon it on college stations or in collector's record shops. He shows me some letters I'd written to him at the behest of our then manager, Barbara Shores, when he was a college DJ and fan in 1986 and I am stunned by the delicate balance of homespun chattiness and bare faced shmoozing therein. Always a whore for the work, I think to myself. If I'd have run for high office back then I'd have romped it; the Mayor of Meretriciousness, Janitor of Counterfeit Pain. He jokes that he believed it all until he realised I had been only nineteen when I wrote those lyrics and had obviously made all that angst up. I laugh. All I remember is being lonely and desperate and wanting to fall in love. The rest was invention but when you're so young and hungry for it all it's not so hard to invent. I read his kind plug in the local listings free-sheet and see that he's a fine writer with a cunning twist of phrase and clever choice of adjective. Though I have to look "logorrheic" up. Tendency to extreme loquacity. So, a self-eating snake of a word for a self-obsessed snake!

It occurred to me yesterday as I realised I would have not a spare second to poke around Seattle that I'm unlikely to pass these ways again. It has been a great privilege to return to the scenes of my prime and, considering the financial constraints understandably placed on an aging rock singer long past his peak with nothing but a bag of mid-life reflections and tales of disappointment, it won't happen again, to my great sadness. I could write a hundred hammering hits and run myself fit and suck the teat of the devil till I'm blue in the face but I've had my crack and it's a young man's game: Why should they ever let me back?

From the interstate New Jersey mostly appears to be an industrial scale service area for New York City - warehousing, processing plants, railroad yards and depots. We emerge from the Holland tunnel into the 21st century Disney-fied and strangely sedate Manhattan. No clamour anymore, no insane rush of adrenalin, no filth except the filthy rich. Successive mayors have expunged pretty much everything that made New York unique and now it's safer and calmer and a great place for the wealthy to shop and school their kids. I miss the old version, the eighties bankrupt, crazy capital-of-the-known world version. I guess you'd find that buzz now in Rio or Shanghai. In the U.S. everything gets suburbanised eventually, even the vertical. But I'm an outsider scratching a square inch on the surface of a city containing four times the population of Switzerland and New York is still out there, in there, but not right in your face like it was.
It is a fairly leisurely day. Check-in, sound-check and then a wander through the streets around the venue to find places to shoot more pictures with the snapper, Geoff. He has me sit under the awning of a little Korean bar and then asks the petite waitress, Cindy, to take a shot of us both. Geoff's big Canon camera looks like a cinder block in her two hands but she persists and shoots off a few decent frames.
The gig is in Joe's Pub which despite its homely name is an upscale arts theatre bar/ restaurant. It's an early show - seven ten, so not exactly raucous. I think we do pretty well. We don't tear the roof off, we don't tear anything except perhaps the corner from a paper napkin.
Unusually for me in New York I have a reasonably early night and wake up to a long, quiet sponsored walk filing past the front of the hotel. After breakfast in the nearest diner I emerge to the now empty street to watch a dapper old dude with dyed hair, bow tie, a sky-blue jacket, navy blue flared slacks and royal blue loafers make some quip to two stout female traffic cops. As they guffaw together a really old guy comes out of the news-stand behind me asking, "What's happening - are they fighting? Hoo, I'd like to see that."
So I'm back on the road bound for the city of wholly heterosexual brotherly love and the final date of this short jaunt around the U.S.A. I have fond memories of Philly, meandering through the streets in high summer, admiring the architecture in a post New York reverie. History happened here, the Declaration, the Constitution, the Liberty Bell. But history happens everywhere, they just don't teach it in school. The city's dense clump of skyline appears beyond a wide bend of the Delaware and we come upon a tail-back, our first of the trip. It's symbolic of my slowing and stopping. My momentum will diminish and I'll soon be marooned again, nothing flowing past the windows but the wind and the light things caught in it.

People ask me what I've been doing the last ten years since I toured here. It's a difficult question to answer without sounding like an alcoholic recluse. I've been watching television: Ten series of Big Brother, fifty DVD box-sets, God knows how many Matches of the Day. I watch every football show broadcast. I have watched every hour of Wimbledon, all day and every day since 1998. I watch obscure film noirs and 1940s Westerns. World Cups, European Championships, Champions Leagues, World Series, Olympic Games, Pop Idol, Later With Jools, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Question Time, Extras, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage. I have watched documentaries about murder cases, wars and famines. Quiz shows, panel games, sit-coms and period dramas. Property shows, How-To-Dress-Like-A-Cunt shows and the news, the news; flitting between continents, sport , weather and global desolation. And I have been nursing week-long hangovers. Grinding, edgy, deranged whirlwinds of hangovers. Sweating in coiled sheets, shivering in hot showers, wincing at the world and shuffling shakily around newsagents with a Private Eye and a Mojo and a pint of milk. The guitars and piano glare at me resentfully, unplayed and dust clogged. I slump on the couch with my feet on the coffee table and grasp for the remote, point and shoot.
That's about it. Anything else would be an embellishment. And for all this I am paid a King's ransom. It is a wonderful life.
But for now I'm working and work is good, "My life is good," Randy Newman has it. Or to paraphrase Thomas Szasz: There is not a modern western psychiatric ailment that can't be ameliorated of banished by one therapy - work. And to travel is romantic. What changes without stirs within, brings up rare memories and provokes amused reflection. Look out of the window, what do you see? Nature and infrastructure locked in the embrace of a war and Nature's winning. People and their primate displays. Status, strength and sexual power advertised everywhere. The great drive to dominate and procreate blatant and desperate right before your eyes. The Beaver's dam, Dawkins calls an extended phenotype - not flesh and blood but an entity made by genes just the same. Our buildings, our homes, our clothes, our books and bags and pianos and guitars, guns and missiles - all built by DNA. You can see our efforts as a kind of mad bacterial rash that briefly flashed across the thin crust of our interesting planet. It's reassuring that we're so alive, so blind and busy. There may be a bang or it may be a whimper but what a thing it is, this fervid occupation.
We pass through Baltimore, rust-coloured and work-worn with great container ships berthed at the docks disgorging stuff sucked from the world. To be stuffed back in again somewhere, living-room then landfill. Nothing escapes this world but radio waves and religious fundamentalists. We hit traffic, get clogged up, snarled in the strings of automobiles and then break loose into open road. The sun beats today, you can feel it throb through the glass. Every tree and plant on the roadside is leafing or blossoming. I count ten different colours of green. New overpasses are being constructed, cranes lift improbable weights onto slim columns and great banks of fresh earth are piled into slopes to be sewn with grass-seed and become home to insects, rodents and rubbish. The traffic in front of us is inexorably pulled to its destination - it's a train with the links between us set in the drivers' minds. We change lanes just to prove we have free will but it's a process and we have no power. It's the road that takes us to the sea, not the vehicle. I look at other riders in their private worlds. Truckers with their wrap-a-round shades and set jaws high in their cabs, working women fidgeting with their hands and glancing over worriedly. Mostly they stare ahead as if mesmerized by a dream.
We are pulled over by the lure of coffee and find ourselves thrust into a frenzied tumult of vacationing families crushed into a maze of calorie dispensers. Hell. In the restroom I take a blind man by the elbow and guide him to the sink, which is automatic. I wonder if he sits down in a cubicle or uses the urinal. His white stick looks pretty versatile. He is immaculately dressed and quietly cordial. The only person in the place with any style.
We take a powder. Back in the thick sluggish traffic we watch a Harley rider bum a light from a woman smoking with her window down. The going is slow. Peter fiddles with the radio and speculates that if this is what passes for music it's a wonder anybody actually likes music. I have a secret yearning to stick with the country station but I'm no DJ. Akiva requests my MP3 player and Peter selects tracks. I dread to think what monstrosities live in that little Pandora's box. He goes for "Blood and Chocolate" by that lippy little squirt, Elvis Costello. Of course, "I Want You" is a masterpiece but I wouldn't want to have dinner with the guy. Nick Lowe is a different proposition. How sweetly he has aged. History will judge him the better writer.
We cross three state lines today: Virginia/ Maryland/ Delaware/ New Jersey. I see a Glasgow, Delaware on the map. I hear a distant bell ring; not a difficult peal to ignore. We plough on - road, road and more road until - oh, shit - there it is.
Imagine a huge Stalinist chemical works clad in cardboard casino fakery with the word "Trump" stuck on top of the towers. A hideous mess of cheap architecture and vast ugly video billboards. I had a romantic image of Atlantic City from old 1940s newsreels but then I remember Louis Malle's film made in the eighties filled with real footage of demolition teams tearing the pre-war buildings down with wrecking balls and mechanical claws. I hate what they've done to Vegas but this is unforgivable. There is a photographer here to follow me around the eastern seaboard for three days and we struggle to find a single location in which to shoot.
We are playing in a "House of Blues" which is contained deep within a giant of a hotel called The Showboat. Our rooms are a fifteen minute walk from the stage in the same building. Utterly spooky, everything is lit up like a Christmas tree and deserted. The corridors are wide and unfeasibly long, the carpets incredibly garish, the lobby cacophonous and dizzying. As we check in there is a juggler beside us and a woman wobbling on stilts who appears to be dressed as the ghost of a Victorian prostitute. It must take an army to clean this place. The noise, a cocktail of slot machine chirruping and five different MOR pop soundtracks is Hadean. I am energised by the absurdity. Peter and I look at each other in bemusement through a sound-check in the most cavernous sounding hall I have ever come across. It's like we are performing inside an old spring reverb unit from a Fender Twin. Or a subway tunnel. An audience of around thirty five turns up in a room that could comfortably accommodate a thousand. It's wonderfully surreal and stupid. We muse how perfect a few mushrooms would be to render this scene hyper-crazy, vivid and hysterically funny. Not one person in the Showboat Casino complex is smiling or laughing. Maybe they're losing. Maybe it was all lost for them years ago. Everyone is sleepwalking through hell and thinking it's a holiday.

I'm sad to see the back of San Francisco because I know we're headed for the sticks. I bid farewell to civilization as the gimmick-laden Virgin America Airbus lifts out of the mist. Five hours later we touch down in DC and head for the rental car lot. En route I notice that the streets are aircraft themed. There is Auto-Pilot Drive, Landing Gear Avenue and Cockpit Place. No Heroes of 9/11 Plaza, as yet. Our hotel is situated in not so much a satellite town as a soulless congregation of intersections and strip-malls. We take some ghastly food, trapped in toxic polystyrene, from a chain restaurant back to our rooms. It is warm down here and the night seems thicker, the dense woods studded between the cement black against the sky.
I watch an old Michael Redgrave movie and eat my shrimp salad with a plastic spoon spirited from reception. I have a long anxious dream about my old top-floor flat in Glasgow - the hall ceiling is coming in and there are shadowy figures living in the roof. I go to the kitchen and find the remnants of a roast chicken dinner abandoned before I left for the tour. Encrusted pots and dishes are piled everywhere. When I use the bathroom I am suddenly at ground-level and looking through an open window at a small crowd gathered across the street shooting a film. They wave and I wave back from my seat on the toilet. A perfect metaphor for my shows.
In the morning we drive an hour and a half to a radio station in Towson, Maryland to perform three songs. And this the day after "Earth Day". Last night Edward Norton was intoning somberly as images of extracted albatrosses' intestines blocked with consumer detritus flashed across my T.V. I muse upon the fate of my plastic food boxes crushed into the little hotel-room bin. I tell myself I can't worry about this when I've got a hall ceiling to fix.
The radio station is situated within the cloisters of a leafy college campus and my interview conducted by a softly spoken and intelligent DJ called Erik. We are just outside Baltimore and the two of us enthuse about The Wire, HBO's brilliant cops-and-robbers show set in that benighted city. Charlie Brooker, The Guardian's profane and acerbic television critic led me to this programme which is cinematic in quality and Shakespearean in scope. Erik says he could have given me a Wire tour of the local streets if we'd had more time. I'd have liked that. We grab lunch in a crab house. I order the crab burger which turns out to be a hamburger with some crab mayonnaise smeared on top. Perhaps their Veggie burger is some minced cow covered with a cabbage leaf. As we wait for our order Peter puts some money into a ten-pin bowling video game. I take him on and lose substantially. Where's a fucking football when you need one? The route back leads us through some seriously wealthy neighbourhoods. Beautiful red tulips stretch along the central reservation. The street names are ripe with civil war references: Plantation Road, Rebel Run, General Lee Avenue. Slavery, the unspeakable blight of European colonialism, hangs in the turbid air.
The show is mostly successful, the small crowd loud and responsive from the start. A very old acquaintance whom I have not set eyes on in decades meekly enters the dressing room as I am packing up. He looks well and says sweet things about how I seem to have mellowed. He tells me of his work running a foundation dedicated to restoring an old plantation and about a film he's making about the Underground Railroad. We catch up on the whereabouts of mutual friends before I pose for photographs and sign a few things here and there for the few who have hung back. There is an old 1970s music centre backstage and Peter puts Saturday Night Fever on the turntable and gets down. He flashes the wall light-switch on and off for effect. It sounds beautiful - warm and sibilant and I want to dance in the warm air of a garden somewhere back in time with pretty girls and friends laughing.

After an appearance at KFOG, the big "triple A" station here run by a loyal supporter, Dave Benson, I take a walk downtown to buy a new suitcase. There is a bewildering array in Macy's and I do my neurotic mother act, pulling twenty different models from their tidy displays and roughing them up for signs of weakness. I eventually plump for something stupidly expensive that seems hardier than the malfunctioning cheap shit I brought with me. I notice it is made in Thailand. I step back into the daylight with my empty black tank to find myself surrounded by up-market designer outlets and multifarious street people, the juxtaposition a living cliche of Reaganite social inequality. I hike up the ten blocks to the hotel checking out the different signs the homeless guys hold. One rhymes, "I sleep on the street, I eat from the trash, I don't want your pity, I just want some cash." Another reads, "No lies, No bullshit, I just need help." Further up the hill a young guy with a bunch of imitation cloth roses growls at me in a voice identical to Gonzo's from the Muppets, "Guaranteed to get you fucking laid." All the time I'm dragging my luxury luggage behind me like an itinerant going first class. I pass by half a dozen more homeless folk with various ingenious methods of wheeling their world about; shopping carts, old suitcases with extender handles and one pushing a child's buggy with a kind of awning built about it like a mad hansom carriage from 1890s London. These guys seem to have their own code, and shout across the streets to one another in indecipherable barks whose frequency we rich don't seem to be able to hear. Here are Saint Francis's lepers in their steel and glass lazar house.
"Francis, Francis, go and repair My house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins".

We are quickly onto the freeway and into the small groupings of hills that break up the city, rashes of bright green shoots spreading amongst the brown scrub. In front of us is a filthy truck with the word suicide written above its rear driver-side wheel and an arrow pointing to where passing him might achieve this end. The Six Flags amusement park drifts by, a jumble of roller-coaters wrestling in a hollow. The desert weeds are blooming along the slopes and verges in wonderful yellows and florescent greens. Electricity pylons run along the ridges above us with their hands on their hips. The road curves smoothly round sandy outcrops and shrub lined arroyos. There is a faint echo of Scotland in the topography but it's all so much wider. In America one can see the sense of CinemaScope; a peek through God's letterbox.
Akiva introduces us to the strange delights of Neutral Milk Hotel and conversation peters out. We descend out of the hills onto a vast irrigated plain and the highway locks onto an arrow-straight northern bearing. The only greenery here is artificially produced: Little olive trees, pinstriped fields of spring vegetables - everything perfectly ranked and rowed with a preternatural precision. Power lines march into the distant horizon alongside us as three dust devils spin up from a fallow patch. It is both enlivening and deadening being constantly in motion. The scenery changes but, locked in the private world of a car, you're unaffected - there is no interaction with the environment. You don't smell the world or touch it. It's all just a very high definition movie. You are remote.
Fingers of sea around the San Francisco hills twinkle in the weak sunlight and we see the long arc of Golden Gate. I imagine signs posted along its walkways reading "Suicide" with the arrow pointing down. I read an article in the LA Times about a picturesque bridge spanning a lush gorge in northern California whose attraction to jumpers is becoming a nuisance to police. A six foot high barrier is proposed. Conservationists object on aesthetic grounds. Psychiatrists are pro-fence. Personally, I'd install a circus-style net below; you can't rule out pole-vaulters.
I forget things during the show - chords, words, my sense of decorum. Alison, Del Amitri's computer-boffin website genius calls out for "Evidence". I feel like a public prosecutor. I discover afterwards she and her sister are pregnant. They are rosy and blooming and their young husbands exude a wary pride. I'm genuinely happy for them. They're clever people and armed with a wit that will be a great advantage to their children.
Our hotel is the Phoenix, a well-known rock hotel whose rooms are set round a nicely planted courtyard. Exceedingly tame birds flit out from the dense shrubbery in a fever of nest building. In days of yore they used to play a continuous recorded loop of birdsong around the balconies here. A friend of mine was so impressed by this he made his own loop to help him sleep at night. I wonder if years of this transmission has conditioned the local avian population to regard the Phoenix as a sanctuary in the heart of city. Or perhaps they just like the name. I'm sure with a little goading I could have one eating out of my palm. Is this not every performer's dream? At my next show I will try to ignore the two in the bush and concentrate on the matter in hand.

I am seated in a row with a young mother and baby on the aisle and a green Marine returning from leave beside me. They get talking and I earwig while pretending to read. He tells her Marines are the best of the best and never wear uniform when they travel on civilian transport. He shows her a picture of his sweetheart. "She's been kind of shy with me," he tells her, "But she's opened up recently." I wonder if he understands the subtext or the inference she might make of this. He is both charmingly naive and frighteningly simple. She asks him if he's been to, "You know, Iraq?" He has not yet seen active duty. "But I'm going to Afghanistan in July."
"Will you be nervous?" she asks. "No," he says, " I'm excited."
Her baby starts to cry and we hit a little turbulence and the teenage soldier seems perturbed. "Must be windy", he murmurs to me. With his big frame, massive hands and buzz-cut, I look out of the window and silently wish him luck.
We descend into Denver, the Rockies arrayed along the outskirts beneath us like some mythical battalion of horses. The downtown towers stand in a mist of dirty air, puny compared to the mountains. As we re-ascend after the stop-over I see whisks of dust spin up from dry fields before we cross into the snowy plateau of the hills. A vast expanse of high forest follows before the land falls away into more verdant gullies and valleys. This is the great Continental Divide and I am now very much in the West. There is nobody down there, no freeways or towns; so much land in the hands of the few.
We fly out of the high desert and into the LA basin. Sprawl isn't right. Los Angeles floods, a reverse flood - against gravity - from the sea and up into the hills. It spreads like a panic from the snaking ropes of highways. Dry river beds meander through its insistent grid and, as we lower, the pools appear; turquoise flecks in this great morass of grime. The San Gabriel mountains lord it over the pit with their heads above a film of cloud and down, down we go into the concrete circus. Then the cars appear. Pulled along their conveyor belts by a mysterious force, quicker through the arteries and sluggish in the veins. Lower still the lawns throw up a false primary green then we're dumped with a thud onto the tarmac runway. Let the insanity commence.
We pull-up at the Comfort Inn on the crossroads of Hades: Sunset and La Brea. A high full moon stares baldly down on the depravity. There's an unpredictable edge round here as if somebody put something in the water I am yet to be infected by. Lots of strung-out weirdos and twenty-year-old tourists. Young itinerants, fucked on cheap drugs in training to be full-time tramp-poets. From my window I peer out into a vacant lot the same size and shape as the hotel I'm standing in. In the corner of the long grass is a nest of blankets exactly where my room would be; a dark matter Discomfort Out. A human resettles in the dusk, I close my shutters and power up the huge flat-screen. Bill Maher is throwing Obama tit-bits around a table featuring the impressive Cornel West and intriguing Aayan Hirsi Ali. Liberal America is wholly in love with Barack right now. There is a palpable sense that he is the real deal and can deliver them from Bush like no other. I remember being holed up here in 1997 and hearing the hysterical joy in my friends' voices as the Labour landslide washed all the old guard away back in Britain. I was sad to be absent from the party. What happened?
On Sunday morning I take a long walk around West Hollywood, crazies at every crosswalk mumbling or snarling in my direction. There are a few thrift stores on Santa Monica in aid of gay charities but the pickings are negligible. Young things cram every cool cafe for brunch and Bloody Marys. Middle-aged professionals arch their eyebrows at my tatty attire. BMWs everywhere. You could die of shame in Hollywood if you gave a damn. A woman with long orange hair tied in a pony-tail plays sweet tenor sax for the stall-holders in a street-market I stumble into. She has a little Casio keyboard at her feet spitting out a rhythm with a bass line which she changes with her big toe. Her playing is remarkably fine and I notice she has no upturned hat or open case to collect money. She's playing real good for free.
On La Cienega I pass a small used car lot. A white Roller sits with enticements across its windshield. 89! Low Milage! I conjecture that once oil hits $500 a barrel these things will become good for nothing but ripping the roof off and filling with plants.
After the show I catch up hurriedly with some old colleagues. Music people, LA residents toiling in the thick of it. Outside in the alley I bump into Jimmy Coup, a kind of legend in Dels circles, who played guitar for a while with the hilarious Andrew WK. He's a sweetheart and a singular spirit and we swap numbers. I will be back here soon and I look forward to having some beers with him and hearing his tales of adventure. The moon is still staring down upon all the moneyed and all the lost from the roof of the cool night and you can feel Monday coming, nagging about work and time and sleep.

We pull over at The Ironworks Restaurant truck-stop off of I-94 and sit around the counter on vinyl swivel-seats. Fake veneer abounds and there is the small miracle of ashtrays at every place setting beside the mahogany brown upturned coffee mugs waiting to be filled and refilled. You can still see the old phone points built into the counter where truckers would phone home before the age of the cell-phone. I used to use these all the time - it was such a luxury talking to someone in the Scottish morning from your midnight booth as you waited for your eggs over-easy, half-cut on weak American beer.
Our waitress, well past retirement age and quick as a whippet, gets our mugs upended and takes our orders. Later she tells us how her husband, who worked for the Denny's chain of greasy-spoons, used to get "ticked off" with air travel. We immediately sense that here is a woman not to cuss around. My tour manager, Akiva, uses the delicate phrase "pain in the...butt". Her eye make-up is thick with broad deep-brown outlines. She's a smoker and a sprightly one, a widow now at a guess, and provides us a grandmotherly reassurance. On the way out we buy crooked comedy teeth from a bubble-gum machine.
A billboard for Chubby's Gentlemen's Club drifts buy. Somehow I feel Chubby is anything but a gentleman and too depraved to even call a rogue. I clamp on headphones and hit play.
I always find the people who adore Bruce Springsteen enough to make any sane person despise him but on the road in America he makes extraordinarily compelling sense. That solid 4/4 beat impels your car through the country like a whip lashed at carriage horses. The lyrics are soap operatic myths pitched somewhere between 1930s Indiana and 1980s Philadelphia. A three state wide world. Already he's amassed a vast catalogue of essentially the same story told in minutely different ways and you cannot help but admire its compassion. Four-square on the off-beat, with just enough slant to be special, he's the Elvis of the eighties.
We head south out of the sticks into the fringes of the Rust-Belt and the town that made Schlitz famous, Milwukee. I have a good friend here, Bobby, whose lovely parents suffered days of The Dels camping out in their apartment in '86. Bobby is an ex-indie label guru turned newspaper-man and big-time Weller fan and he makes a person laugh with a lyrical irony. At the Chicago show he sat stage-side and shouted obscure demo-tape titles at me. Some of them even I don't remember writing. He has his requests in for tonight, I shall see what I can do.
The show is at Shank Hall, a venue with which I am familiar. They've re-modelled since 1997 but it is essentially as I remember. A miniature stone Pi hangs halfway up the back wall of the stage in homage to Tap's "Stonehenge". There is a single spotlight dedicated to it and Paul, the house technician, picks it out at moments of high pretension. Afterwards I go out to meet friends and respectful members of the audience spontaneously form a line and wait politely for me to finish my conversation before asking for autographs. Very Milwaukee, very Midwest. A tall man skips the queue to show his adventurous spirit. His hand is like a big over-filled leather bag when I shake it. I can see his ancestors wagonned-up with shovels, rakes and hoes. A pioneer in plimsoles and designer frames.
The hotel bar is called Aqua and, bizarrely in a place populated by old age pensioners, plays pumping dance music in a room whose tables are made of perspex and contain furiously bubbling water lit in lurid pinks and greens. We stomach a single drink before the heading for the sanctity of our rooms. In the morning a haar steals across the shoreline of lake Michigan blotting out the sun before burning off. We load up for the airport, checking the nooks and crevices of the van for stray items amongst the pistachio shells and potato-chip packets. I find a photograph from years ago given to me by a fan. Who is that guy?

"Roads girdle the globe"

As the freeway reaches the Minnesota border, steel plate cloud draws over the lowering sun. Joni Mitchell's lush re-arrangement of "Refuge of the Roads" stirs around the van. No leaves on the trees here, the big freeze having only recently crept away but it's balmy tonight and grateful Minnesotans congregate around patio-heaters outside bars and restaurants. Such is the ferocity of their winters, every building has multiple sequences of doors and the small square windows of our hotel are hermetically sealed. We browse a surplus store opposite the gig; a hundred kinds of glove and Navy coats so thick they seem to stand erect unaided. Men are empty overcoats, Groucho said.
I was here, at the Fine Line Music Cafe in 1990 and it retains a sort of quaint 1980s smugness. A venue for the discerning professional. Exposed brick and tables and chairs and an ironic catch-phrase on its literature. Waitresses swerve smoothly around the tables as we perform. A plucky group of women from the end of the bar attempt a little celebratory dancing in front of us towards the end of the show but the music is slow and sour and I feel that I am letting them down. I catch up with old friends in the basement dressing room, polite band grafitti neatly marked on the white space above the picture rail. It is a brief reunion and I'm touched by the gnawing regret of nostalgia.
Back through the the rolling meadows of northern Wisconsin the rain falls into the yellow grass, the smoky clouds dirty and low. Last night my dreams were full of un-nameable feelings, horribly intense and signifying nothing. The mind at work upon its obscure wanders leaving the baffling remnants of its trip in my contorted bedclothes.

We pass rolling fields of yellowed stubble, kites suspended overhead eyeing the rat-runs. Road-kill raccoons litter the shoulder; I speculate that it's mating season, that they're throwing themselves across the freeway to reach potential mates whose ripe scents are wafting on the wind. You could get three coats and a good stew from the carnage.
Enormous road-side billboards invite us to Adult Superstores (1000 yards off Exit 56) and budget motels and family restaurants. There is not much view for them to obscure. A pair of hipster dudes zip by in a vintage Buick, wearing vintage shades and vintage T-shirts and vintage facial hair. Then a pick-up passes towing a trailer loaded with blasting material. That's followed by a truck carrying medical waste. There's a pile-up I'd like to see.
The lady in the truck-stop admires my shirt. I seem to be appealing to the older woman these days. Once they'd want to mother me, now I think it's something else. I tell her it's second-hand but that doesn't translate. Used, baby, used. The next comment I receive I will say that I am in mourning and wearing my deceased grandfather's wardrobe. To be fair, for all I know I might be. Although my grandfather was a Victorian Calvinist and I don't think he had much taste for round collared Celtic-green chemises.
The beautiful Chicago skyline rises suddenly from the horizon like Atlantis emerging from Lake Michigan. I remember how breathtaking the same view was when I first saw it in 1986 as the August night fell. America is a place still capable of thrilling a person as jaded as me. The sky is a piercing blue, the breaths of air from the lake waft pleasantly in your face as if you just opened a freezer door. I want to stay here for a month and go to shows and diners and sordid bars.
The crowds at the two shows exude a highly personalized affection for the tunes. They know all the words and often break collectively into song on particular lines from verses and middle-eights. Maybe that's where I hid the choruses. I never could get my head around a hook.
In the morning I take a bus downtown - so clean and gleaming. There is always this relaxed atmosphere here, like someone took New York and turned the volume and contrast down. Lakeshore Drive bends around its huge expanse of vivid turquoise. I'm in a pensioner's version of Grand Theft Auto. I feel serene, strangely; not a state I am used to. A young woman with a clipboard grin asks me to contribute to gay rights. I become befuddled. Am I just to hand over a dollar bill to affirm my liberal world-view? It seems to me that the better option would be just to say I am gay - what does it matter anyway?
Now back to the interstate. We point our vehicle north-west to the Twin Cities and press go. The landscape flattens and widens, broken by lines of the low bare trees that delineate the plots of dry soil. Great steel snakes stretch across the fields injecting water into the parched dirt. We cruise through, Gillian Welch on the stereo moaning exquisitely about this vast sad land of hopes and desires stopped short and buried in the shallow earth.