Received an email from James Riedel, who wrote a recent biography of Weldon Kees (please refer to 2 blogs back; you might also scroll through all of them again at some point as Tanya occasionally updates my entrys with new visuals)-- some friends of his had passed on my recent commentary on the Kees/Dylan connection, and James wrote me directly acknowledging my sleuthing...nice to know I am being read in academic circles ... and now he's going to send his new bio in exchange for some of my albums...very cool!

in Amsterdam now after an intense sweaty concert in Brussels with lute meister Jozef Van Wissem Saturday night at the ancien Theatre Marni. We got treated royally by the distaff theatre staff (thank you Joelle and Isobel!) and artistic director Jules, who drove back on the very day of our concert from France with champagne specially for us which he broke out at the after-party (also a box of succulent Leonidas chocolates--a confirmed chocoholic, I must say that Belgian chocolates are right up there with their Swiss counterparts). It was thunder and lightning and rain hammering down outside as Jos and I coaxed an admixture of the sacred and profane from our respective instruments (guess who was contributing what here) and the crowd attended on us, hushed, as if at the unfolding of an arcane ritual...

The night befor, my last night in London for a bit, I went with the mad Scotsman John Stewart to see my pal Warren Haynes and his band Gov't Mule at the Mean Fiddler, the same joint where The Magic Band held forth in June. John was an hour late meeting me at Gaby's in Leicester Square (excellent salt-beef) due to flooding on the tube, but we managed to catch a good hour and a half of the Mule's kicking set. Warren is an excellent guitarist, singer and songwriter (check out "World of Confusion" which I co-wrote with him and which appears on the Mule's "The Deep End Vol. Two" album--and these days, more relevant a song than ever) and if you're a fan of Southern rockers he definitely is one of the best, observing the eternal verities of the form while pushing the band into prog and jamband territory.

Now I am here in Amsterdam on a day off visiting my friend the director Flip Nagler's NGN studio (Flip made an early documentary on my work, "Guitar Unbound", for the Dutch Kunst Kanaal tv network, it was 6 times in one day upon its premiere in 1995 and it's available from my website) which is on a beautiful sidestreet off the Singel, and it is utterly delightful outside, a shimmering sunny Indian summerish day and I am about to take a stroll where ever ...staying tonight at the Winston, a real rock 'n roll hotel on Warmoestraat in the Red Lights where I used to give concerts in exchange for room and board and nice to see that it hasnt changed much...this must be my 40th or so visit to Amsterdam, I've been coming here since 1978 and have played up and down the lowlands (or the highlands I should say, "in the Dutch mountains"...) and I have logged many actual months of residency here, I've written some of my most famous songs here as well (including "Dream of a Russian Princess" which was written in a fever-dream shortly after Christmas 1990 at my friend the painter Joep Ver's atelier)...in short I adore it here, Holland was the first country in Europe to embrace my work and everytime I pass through here it feels like a homecoming...

xxGary

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Posted by Gary Lucas to Gary Lucas at 9/13/2005 07:00:00 AM