I’m in bed with the laptop appropriately on my lap. Beth is asleep next to me. She can sleep through anything - she slept in my bed back when Government Cheese rehearsals happened in my tiny apartment bedroom 25-plus years ago. She lays her head down on the pillow and within five minutes her breathing changes and I can tell she’s already unconscious. I attribute this to two things: A) she has a clean conscience, and B) she works her ass off.

She’s up before anybody else in the house. Sometimes she goes into work at 6:30 AM to get work done before the phones start ringing. Beth is a driver supervisor for Metro Nashville school buses. It’s madness. I’d lose my mind trying to do what she does. I pretty much know not to call her to chat when she’s at work, because there’s always a bus driver called in sick and a kid let off at the wrong stop and her phone and her nextel both sqwaking more chaos at her. And she handles all of it with apolmb and focus. She likens the job to working on a puzzle, and every morning you start the puzzle from scratch. She’s sort of an air traffic controller for school buses. And sometimes the nextel is still going off when she gets home, about anything from a kid from Green Hills dropped off in Bellevue to a driver having a diabetic collapse and driving all the way to Antioch with a bus full of frightened kids, eventually pulling the bus over to the side of the road and sitting there. (That really happened.) And like any other working wife and mother, she hits the ground running with the laundry and dinner the minute she gets home. Only by about 8:30 or so, depending on the size of the laundry pile, might she be able to chill a second and watch her beloved Food Network channel. By 9:30 she’s ready to hit the hay.

It suits our marriage that she can go so deep into REM sleep with a husband who’s bedside light is still on and whose iPod clock radio is playing the Beastie Boys at very low volume.

I bought “Paul’s Boutique” a few weeks back and it’s come to dominate my listening life. (Johnny RYALLLL Johnny RYALLLL!!!) To a lesser but still significant extent I’ve been listening to “Fear of a Black Planet”, which is a deeper, darker aural collage, much more serious, but Chuck D is an absolute genius on a mic. He’s as much a preacher as a rapper. His words are coming at you a million miles an hour and you’re not going to catch it all the first, fifth, or thirty-fifth listening. Meanwhile the sonic landscape underneath him keeps changing. The Beasties’ record does those things too. They rap fast too, and far funnier, and the Dust Brothers are just masters at keeping the beat happening but constantly changing all the other samples and sounds in some swirling collage. The records Beck makes with the Dust Brothers have that characteristic too. That’s some of my favorite listening anymore.

So are you going hip-hopera on us Mr. Womack? Absolutely. I’m going to pitch myself to the Dust Brothers under my new name, C-Rock City.

I got in this afternoon from a four-day run, walked into the bedroom with my travel bag and this very laptop, Beth was at Costco and so Nathan was alone back in our room looking in the full-length mirror, fashioning a toga out of a tartan pattered small blanket. I burst out laughing at the sight, a toga for a Scotsman, I put my stuff down, and from then on the rest of the day we were two peas in a pod. We watched an hour of Disney Channel. Beth came home with a Costco pre-roasted chicken that was really good, awesome mac and cheese from scratch, and some caramel pie that was still left from last week. Then Nathan dressed me up at C-Rock City with an XM Radio Cap turned sideways and one of Beth’s blingiest necklaces and we performed in the kitchen for her. (Nathan can actually make credible beatbox noises with his voice. I don’t know where he picked it up, but it’s cool.) After dinner, he and I huddled with this laptop and I helped him type out a 3-page short story about a snake, describing as many of a snake’s characteristics and habits as possible.

STEVE THE SNAKE

By Nathan Womack

August 23rd, 2010

Once in the country of India, there lived a very scared snake named Steve.

Steve was a very scared snake. For one thing, he was afraid of a mongoose who lived nearby, and was also terrified of humans. Steve would slither around in the grass always being scared that a human might come by, or the mongoose could grab him and eat him.

Steve wasn’t poisonous. He wouldn’t hurt a human if he bit him. But he would have to try and strike the human anyway if he felt threatened. That was natural for him to do that.

There was also a house nearby. There were two twelve year old stepbrothers who lived there and knew a lot about snakes. They even had one as a pet.

Steve moved around through the grass near the house and ate mice he caught. He was cold-blooded, which meant his body didn’t have the same temperature all the time like a mammal would. So Steve would lay in the sunshine sometimes to get warm.

Steve would often use his tongue to sense out bugs, mice and possibly the mongoose. Steve could taste the air with his tongue and tell what may be within the area.

Steve was literally always on the look out, considering the fact that he had no eyelids, so he couldn’t blink. So he was always looking out to see if the humans and/or the mongoose were nearby.

Steve often loved to slither and move around in tall grass, lucky for him the land around the humans house was full of it. He felt safer the higher the grass was. Because people and animals couldn’t see him then.

One day the two boys left the house and walked out in to the tall grass around their house. Their names were Punjab and Tony. Tony was from the United States and Punjab was a native of India. Tony was staying with Punjab’s family and going to school in India. In class, Punjab and Tony learned a lot about snakes and that made then even more interested in snakes.They went out in the tall grass looking for a new snake to have as a pet. One thing they had learned from class was that in tall grass like this you could sometimes find cobras, which had venomous bites. The cobra’s bite could often be deadly. However, Punjab and Tony knew how to carefully search tall grass so that they would be safe from the cobras.

Steve, however, was a harmless garden snake. His bite could hurt, but was not poisonous. With all the two stepbrothers knew about snakes, they would know that Steve was harmless and safe to handle. To Punjab and Tony, Steve would be a great new pet.

When Steve realized this, he became extremely worried, considering that he had no idea what it would be like to be a pet.He didn’t know that Punjab and Tony might be very nice to him and give him lots to eat and lots of love and affection. Plus, another thought even better than that came over him. If he became a pet of theirs, he would be free from the mongoose.

However, a dreadful thought came upon him. The pet snake Punjab and Tony currently had was a cobra. Steve had seen the two stepbrothers take the cobra one day, so he knew that the cobra was inside the human’s house. He worried that the cobra might bite him and he would be poisoned and die.

Before he new it, the two stepbrothers had Steve in their sack and were taking him back to the house. Steve was coiled up in the bottom of the sack and he was very, very scared.

However, what he didn’t realize was that he and the cobra were put in separate containers, so there was no reason for him to be afraid of the cobra.

It turned out that Steve loved living with the stepbrothers. They fed him well and he had no worries. Steve the snake was very happy.

THE END

That’s Nathan’s legitimate work. I just coached. He’s got a good eye for word flow and a vocabulary that surprises me every day. Nathan’s very shy, won’t say boo to a goose, but he talked my ear off all night long, music to my ears except for that brief period when I had all my cash and receipts from the weekend laid out on the bed and I was trying do math. Once or twice when we were working on STEVE THE SNAKE, he laid his head on my shoulder. This was one happy kid, happy to be back with his Daddy.

And I reckon this is the best place to wrap up this note. I’m a blessed son of a biscuit eater. My cute wife sleeps soundly beside me, my still cute boy sleeps soundly in his room, I’m listening to the Beastie Boys sing about Shadrach, Meeschach and Abednego. I hope that you in your life is in such a blessed position as I am.

Tommy

Wednesday, June 26th

Every time I go over to the WASP Mother Continent, I always have one question I want to ask everyone. At once. I always want to jump up on top of a parked car and holler out “Listen up! Everybody! Who else is freezing!!?? Raise your hands!!!” There is probably not a day in Europe when I didn’t stay wrapped up in my Joe Strummer hoodie, and keep in mind that the weather was GOOD. When the Scottish sky is cloudless and above 55 Farenheit, you’ve got a damn good Scottish day! Everyone was walking around in short sleeves and short pants and I was hugging my arms and thinking of plugging two 9 volt batteries together to make a pocket warmer.

It was silly of me, but it never occurred to me until I visited Europe that it is latitudinal with Canada more so than with Tennessee. (The summer sun stays in the sky there well past 9:30 PM.) I guess the people who settled the New World knew what they wanted when they moved over here too. Where did the Pilgrims go? Massachusetts! They got off the boat and mused to themselves “hmmm, cold, drizzly, this’ll do!”

And another thing! Not that it’s a federally-mandated policy or anything, but in the U.S. we have something I’ll call ‘lavatorial consistency’. Every toilet in America has a flush handle on the left side. Not once in my home country have I ever had to bend down and deduce how the hell you flush this damn thing. Go to Europe –they have a fair dozen different toilet designs. Sometimes the flusher’s on top, sometimes it’s on the side, sometimes it’s a hanging chain and sometimes I left stuff floating in the bowl because I never figured out what the hell I was supposed to do. Is it voice-operated? Should I say “flush sesame!”? What the fuck? How do you flush this thing?

Enough of my bitching about these wonderful countries.

After the What’s Cookin’ gig in London we drove back to Leicester, a fair three-hour drive. Paul Needham, who’d trained down to London to shoot photos, was riding back with us. We listened to Little Feat all the way back and I amused my cohorts by commenting about how Little Feat were certainly great but let’s be honest – they never really did anything that the Doobie Brothers didn’t do much better! I mean, “Dixie Chicken” is a fine tune and all, but compared to “Long Train Runnin’”… I mean, come on! I amused them all with variations of that japery for mile after mile. It wasn’t Seinfeld-level comedy, but we were hitting that part of the tour where giddiness sets in, and running jokes can cause paroxysms of giggles way out of proportion their true worth in yuks. Things would be giddy and giggly more and more from this point out. (And the jokes would turn really sick too as each day passed. More about that later too.)

We stayed at the Hotel Campanile in Leicester again. They didn’t have our reservation on their books, but since we’d stayed there already, and they thusly had Will’s name in the hotel records, the night clerk let us stay. (That was sweet of her, don’t you think?)

There wasn’t much sleep to be had, given how when we checked in, in the wee wee hours, and we’d be ejected from said establishment at the wee wee hour of 11 AM.

So we slept - after Will read some of his book and I read mine. “The Kingdom of Jones” was Will’s book at the moment, it was about a virtual holocaust that happened during and after Reconstruction to the former slaves and their descendents in south Alabama. (After he finished that, he bought a book about trees and how they “communicate” with one another. Talking trees, no doubt functioning at a level of consciousness where time moves REALLY, REALLY fast!) Me, I was mired in “The Gulag Archipelago”, though I felt I owed it old Alexandr, given how he’d kicked my ass with “One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich” (about how a simple Russian citizen by that name survived one whole typical day in a Siberian labor camp. It was cold that day in the book andyou’ll get cold reading it.)

To take an ambien or not to take an ambien? That is the question. Whether tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of being so tired you’re wired, or to take up arms against a sea of reality, being in a hotel way the fuck away from home, lying on your pillow berating yourself like every singer-songwriter does. To die. To sleep. But in that sleep of death what dreams may come?

The same dream I always have, Shakespeare! I’m on the road with Government Cheese but we’re in my hometown when I was 17 and then suddenly I’m driving on the highest lane of an interstate clover leaf and it’s one of those Dallas-type metastasizing tumors of interstates running through over and under each other rising into the ether, and I’m on the top road out of all of them, the road is very narrow with sharp turns, and beneath me is the sea.

Math won out. Ambien now would mean still being a somnambulistic gibbon at wake-up time. Eventually, I drifted off without taking one. I had a good sleep too. Maybe not as long as I would have liked, but good all the same.

Thursday, May 27th

In the lobby the next morning, we were met by a nice girl who was Paul’s intern, learning photography. She took us over to a rave club that Paul had arranged for us to use for a photo shoot. For an hour we posed for pictures. They turned out well, when you consider what Paul to work with, i.e. two guys who’d been playing every night in a different UK town for 10 consecutive nights. I had bags under my eyes that Easyjet would charge overage fees on. (Easyjet? More about them later too!!) But hey, that’s what Photoshop is for, innit?

Then it was off to Nottingham to play the Maze. This is a favorite club for me. I have a very poignant memory of the place. It was my first club gig in England ever, five years ago …and was a three-encore night the likes of which I’d only had dreams about my whole life. It was one of the greatest nights of my life.

We loaded in and sound-checked and then we went down the street to a pub where our dinner was comped. I honestly can’t remember what I ate but I do remember that it was wonderful. It was some trad English dish and I made love to it.

English cuisine gets a bad rap. It’s really not that bad, except you have to salt and pepper the shit out of everything.

The great food thing they do have is Indian cuisine, as in India, their former colony. It’s not really Indian cuisine anymore than Chinese food in America is true to what real Chinese people eat. Still, Chicken Tikka Marsala rocks my word (and happens to be the most popular food in England according to some survey). The English call all Indian food “curry”, as in “Fancy a curry?”

Even if all the proper Indian sit-down restaurants are closed by the time the gig is over, you still can’t go far without chancing upon a “kebab takeaway” (which translates to “gyros to go!” in American English). Kebabs are gyros, but they’re flipping huge. They’re Dagwood gyros! This can be a lovely after-gig nosh, if you don’t mind sauce all over your face because you have to dislocate your lower jaw to take a bite.

So ANYWAY, we ate at the pub in Nottingham down the street from the Maze, it was great, then we went back to the Maze and hung out in the dressing room while the opening act warmed up a by-God respectably full house. This gig’s gonna be good, I remember feeling that.

By this point in the tour, Will and I had an elastic first and second set mapped out in our heads between us.

The first song was always “Nobody from Nowhere”, mine and Will’s Daddy song that Jimmy Buffett does on his most recent ‘Buffet Hotel’ record.

Song #2 was always “Early to Bed, Early to Rise”, about a curmudgeonly speaker at a college graduation scaring the shit out of the kids with brutal adult reality, set to a nicely dumb less-is-more chord structure.

Then, more often than not, would be “Wash & Fold”, a song about sex using nothing but laundry metaphors, set to the Bo Diddley “shave and a haircut” beat, with great slide work from Will. We took to dedicating it to the spirit of Lowell George every night, and it was a great jam piece.

My whole part in “Wash & Fold” was one of the main pleasures I know of, playing a Bo Diddley beat for around five minutes. Just zone in, Tommy. Just keep that beat. Let Will do all that wheedly-whee, YOU just keep that beat happening! It’s such a satisfying focus off all the voices in my head into one mind with one goal; gimme that beat, boy! Free my soul.

Next was usually “Nice Day”. From my “There, I Said It!” album. It’s about a day swimming with my son, worrying about life, but then again, I’m in a pool and my boy’s telling me he loves me, and there’s hope in among terror.

After those four songs, all bets were off. We’d intersperse Daddy material with our own solo stuff. Will did a lot from his new solo LP, “Wings” (8 Weeks in the Americana Top 10!)

That title track showed up every night, as did “Three Angels”, and “Big Love”.
I’d usually do “Vicky Smith Blues” & “Heaven in a Dream” during the first set as well.

The first set always ended with “Alpha Male & the Canine Mystery Blood”, a nine-minute torrent of lyrics laid across 4 chords over and over: It starts with me talking about seeing a poster of a band on a phone pole as I’m walking to work at some dead-end job, and I’m thinking how I’m too old to care, and then I reminisce about those long gone days when I would have gone to see a band just because I liked the name, and from there the story spirals in many directions: religion, love, dignity, goth dog-lover markets, and the never-say-die human spirit. In that song, I’m doing 9 minutes of verses with very little chance of catching a breath most of the time. Audiences always applaud fiercely after that one. For two reasons: 1) they’re very impressed that I can remember all those words, and 2) they’re glad it’s over.

The first set was usually 45 to 50 minutes. So when it felt like the appropriate time, I started playing “Alpha Male” and we wound the first Maze set up. It was only later that we discovered we’d been onstage almost ninety minutes already. It felt like time had run twice as fast. (That or I blacked out for a while.)

So we took our union break, sold some CDs, talked to a lot of folks, then got up for the second set and rose to the occasion even more.

I don’t mean to brag but let’s tell it like it is, Will and I play great guitar together. People dance to us when we don’t have a rhythm section, we rock so well together that even on full-out rock and roll tunes like the old bis-quits chestnut, “Yo Yo Ma”, it rocks like Chuck Berry on a Saturday night and makes a dandy finale. “You Made Your Bed” always rocked. “Glory Be” was always great. The first set is more “nice to see you” and the second set is more “hey dude, let’s party!”

My fingers were like raw meat by this point in the tour, but I was also finding chops I haven’t seen in years. Will is an in-demand session musician and big-time tour player for people like Rodney Crowell and Jimmy Buffett. He can play anything on demand. I am not anywhere near his league of truly awesome musicians, but I am good at some things – rhythm, drama, dynamics – and I love to try and give Will the Keith Richards he needs in order to be Mick Taylor. Bur our songs were still the stars, and my comparatively crude guitar chops are balanced out by my ability to spew nine minutes of lyrics without missing a word night after night.

Friday, May 28th

We went from there to East Grimstead, the Grub Café, the last stop on the UK two-week swing. I remember two things about that gig, okay three things: First, I had a great lasagna, secondly, I had a twenty-minute bout of homesickness upstairs from the club, and the gig was good once I figured out what was going on.

The Grub’s back wall was nothing but windows, and somehow, everything we played and sang reverberated back to us and sounded exactly like a roomful of people talking while we’re trying to sing and play. It really started to piss me off even though I did notice how the sonic effect stopped in between songs. Even though I knew nobody was really talking, I was still wishing nobody would shut the hell up or get up and leave.

We stayed with Steven, the club owner. But we weren’t going to stay there long. We had to leave at 4 AM to drive to Gatwick, where Jeff would put us on a plane to Berlin, and that’s where our next entry in my tour memoir will pick up. First, we take East Grinstead. Then we take Berlin.

If my disgusting parody of a life has illustrated anything of value at all, it is to prove that any goal can be met, even by twitchy dumbasses, if you sink your teeth into your dream with the bite pressure per inch of a great white shark. I’m a guy who was already too old ten years ago, and there was one night back then, at home with Beth and a little version of Nathan, when I whined and cried like a little girl that I’ve never made it, waaah, I’ve never seen Europe! Waah! Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.

But I had a beacon. It was the Old Country. The country of Waterloo Sunset. I would not be diverted.

Time goes along, work pays off and fortunes change. Here it is, ten years later, I’m incredibly old now, but I just saw the UK for the fifth time in five years and just did the most successful tour yet with Will Kimbrough, one of the great guitarists of our age and a dear friend to boot. It has been a happy month, albeit with moments of profound homesickness, but never very long ones because we were pretty damn busy. Here’s basically what I remember.

Sunday, May 16th

DADDY (the full band) played in Dragon Park in Nashville at 3:30 PM. Was it a good gig? Well, it didn’t rain and we got paid, and that’s all that really counts at outdoor gigs. It was a family affair, so no boob-flashing. (Beth gets irked at me when I do that anyway.) Actually it was very fun musically. When I say it was a full band show, I mean, of course, that we had a quorum: Dave (Jacques) was on bass and Paul (Griffith) was on drums. But John (Deaderick), our keyboardist, was not with us, but instead he was out with goddam Patty Griffin.

(Patty’s first two records were released on the same Tuesdays as my first two records. You know what happened to her, and you know what happened to me, and that’s why she may be Patty Griffin to you but she’s goddam Patty Griffin to me. Nothing against her as an artist at all – nothing but love! {godammit}Josh Rouse, same deal.)

Doug Lancio was there with his cute boy Rufus, and it was lovely to see him. We did Leno together behind Todd Snider. Everybody loves Doug and that’s as it should be. He’s out with John Hiatt now (and in the past he’s played for goddam Patty Griffin.)

Then, with the gear packed up and the family loaded into the van around 5:30, it was back home to take sedatives and pack.

Packing for three weeks in Europe is a Zen art. You have ten pounds of shit and a five pound bag to put it in. And 18 hours to figure it out.

First in the suitcase went the pedal board, in it’s carrying bag. That was 8 pounds of shit right there! Then socks and underwear. Three pair each, stuffed in as padding. (We anticipated doing laundry. We anticipated wrong.) In the folding suits part of the bag with the hanger loop I carefully arranged six shirts and two pair of pants. Then in went the sleep pants. Then my Joe Strummer hoodie. Then I wedged my beautiful leather Briggs & Riley toiletries bag in between the pedal board and the suitcase wall. In the remaining crannies I wedged the voltage and power plug adapters I’d need to run the pedal board in Europe.

Then I put two Ziplock bags – one full of English coins and one full of Euro coins – in zippered compartments. This is important petty cash for when you get over there. You wind up with coins from previous trips because the currency exchangers won’t take them, and it adds up to serious kebab money your first couple of days back over there.

Then the merch went in. We already had merch over there but wanted to carry more, and each CD took precedence over intimate apparel. I stuffed CDs and books in every nook and cranny and across the top of everything else arranged like tiles on the bathroom floor. Then I tried to close the suitcase, and then I tried to close it again. On the third try I did it. I picked it up, lifted it by the handle up in the air for a second, and just stood back for a moment and mused about how much is was going to suck lugging this piece of concrete on wheels around for three weeks.

In my trusty black backpack I packed my thick envelop full of itineraries and contracts, then my ledger diary, a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”, my passport, Sharpies (no serious artist is without a Sharpie at all times. I packed four. Three pair of boxers, four Sharpies!), a notebook of lyrics, my meds, my sleep mask, my neck pillow, my phone, its charger, my laptop in it’s case and, at the last minute, for some reason I packed one more pair of socks. I tried the backpack on, my shoulder blades touched and my sternum popped.

Then I packed the guitar in its bag, filling the zippered pockets with all the relevant accoutrements, including harmonicas, capo, extra guitar cables even though I had cables in the pedal board bag. That way, if the airline lost my luggage, I could still plug in. (But if I had to gate-check the guitar bag and they lost THAT, I had some dance steps rehearsed. I’m always thinking!) Then I remembered to detune the strings. If a guitar with tuned-up strings goes into a baggage compartment where the temperature goes very far down, it’s not good. Your neck will either break or be very pissed off at you for a long time.

I put guitar picks everywhere, in my backpack, my gig bag, my suitcase, and especially in the pockets of my pants. (They were pre-planted there while on the hangers!) That way I would never be out of picks. I’ve walked onstage before and discovered I had no picks. You suddenly feel like a tuned-up guitar in a baggage compartment.

Then I went to bed. About three times. Each time, I got up and checked my bags to make sure I really put in the things I thought I put in there, and once or twice having yowsah moments of remembering something else important that I couldn’t live three weeks without and had to be wedged in somewhere.

Monday, May 17th

Cab ride to the airport. Lugging luggage. Already pissed off because I know I’m going to have to take off my shoes and dismantle my backpack to get the laptop out, take off my belt, empty my pockets, walk through a laser beam and then put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I met Will at the gate and we settled into our seats for a short hop to Charlotte, where we’d get on the big jet to London Gatwick.

Why do the stewardesses say, “Sit back, relax and enjoy your flight”? Did they tell Gary Gilmore, “Sit back, relax and enjoy getting shot”? First off, you can sit back four inches, second of all, NO ONE likes to fly. Airports are the clogged intestines of life. It’s a pretty bad place that makes you actually relieved to at long last be sitting squashed in a child-sized seat within an aluminum tube that is going to hurl through the air at killing speed.

When we took off from Charlotte, I took an Ambien. Then I sat, awake, for eight hours, occasional thumbing through “Gulag” while this big tube I was in traveled across a really big ocean. (I found Gulag to be a rather dry recitation of court cases and injustice without enough freezing and starving to make it more compelling on a plane ride. Maybe I should have gotten that Don Felder bio instead, I remember thinking.) It’s not much fun to be alone with your thoughts for hours on end when you’re miles in the air and neither Solzhenitsyn nor modern science nor a night mask, earplugs and a neck pillow can help you to fully drift off.

Tuesday, May 18th

We arrived at London Gatwick on a sunny British morning. You know you’re in England because after you jump through the passport and work permit hoops you are admitted not to Baggage Claim, but to Baggage REclaim! That makes grammatical sense enough, I admit.

According to our itinerary – reading it now – we took the train from the airport to Brighton. I have no idea; I have no memory of anything until we got to the show. Ambien recoil.

It was a small audience and what we feared was a bad portent for the tour, but they were enthusiastic. A lot of our English regulars were there: two of the three “London Pauls” were there, guys named Paul who lived in London and come to see us as often as they can whenever we tour over there. (There is a bootleg of the show out there in the cyber sphere.) It was a good show but also the only one that was in any way shaky. Understandable, as we hadn’t done any gigs yet and it takes one to knock off the rust. We also had two Micks: London Mick and our soundman, who was a dead ringer for Doug Lancio – and this wasn’t the first Dougie doppelganger we’d see.

Paul Needham, my good friend from Leicester (graphic designer who did our posters, designed my website and the covers for “There, I Said It!” and Daddy’s “For a Second Time”, and also does some “tour gimp” services – which means tour managing…) came in with his girlfriend Jo, who gets a grant from the British government to put up with him (I’m just assuming), and he brought all the rest of our merch, which he’d been holding onto.

Also, we met up with our driver for the UK portion of the tour, another Leicester mate of mine, and one of the nicest, gentlest souls you’ll ever encounter, Jeff Goff. That was a big hug when I saw him.

Wednesday, May 19th

A six-hour drive to Swansea after a nice night’s kip in a Travelodge in West Sussex. I played the fellas my two discs of remastered Government Cheese, to rousing approval. And the Tonya Mills record I produced, which made me feel good that Will gave it his thumbs-up. (Tonya’s record will be my debut as a producer when it comes out!)

The Chattery was, pleasantly, full of paying customers. We hit our stride and even later we would remember this as one of the best shows of the tour.

We stayed in a big house with the owners of the venue and a couple of girls who work there, one of whom could have been Doug Lancio’s sister. (This was the last Lancio doppelganger of the tour.) Don’t get any dirty ideas. We’re married men and these two girls were a couple themselves.

I had apparently slept well at some point, and coupling that with the jet lag, I was up all night at that house in Swansea. Since there were CDs all over the house, and wi-fi, and I was wide awake anyway, I went through the shelves and ripped about seven LPs: Thin Lizzy’s “Live & Dangerous”, Madonna’s first record (I love “Borderline”. Great pop song.), Lightning Hopkins’ “Lonesome Dog Blues”, Sam Baker’s “Mercy”, “The Very Best of Elvis Costello”, Dylan’s “Empire Burlesque” & “Under The Red Sky”, and Thelonius Monk’s Greatest Hits. Then I read some more of “The Gulag Archipelago”. This was my fifth Russia-related book in a row and I was bound to get through it. Besides, I wasn’t going to buy another book. Parsimony was the iron rule of this tour.

Thursday, May 20th

We drove through Wales and saw amazing craggy mountain scenery. Very picturesque. I caught visual snatches of it when my sleeping head would droop forward far enough that I’d jolt awake for a second.

It was another really good gig and another just-about full house. We were picking up steam. Our prayers go out to Owen, the promoter, who was going into the hospital the next day to deal with some issues. We hope he’s doing well now. And if anyone could update me on his condition, please do.

Friday, May 21st

Ahhh, Leicester, my English hometown. I’ve had so much fun here and been the recipient of so much love and hospitality, playing gigs with Dawson & the Dissenters and staying with Dawson and his charming force-of-nature wife, Annie. We played at the Musician, Dawson and Simon Fawlkes opened for us and then Will & I wound up playing for three hours or so. This was the first Springsteen-length gig and by now we were tight and unstoppable. Annie sang “25 Years Ago” with us. Then we retired to the Campanile Hotel, me with my McVitties Caramel Digestive Biscuits. (Boy I wish we had those in the states.)

Saturday, May 22nd

Now HERE was a drive! From Leicester to Strathpeffer in Northern Scotland. 11 hours. People might question such routing, but you go to where the good gig is on the night it’s offered! It was a house party, and a good one. There is video of it posted. Thanks to Rob Ellen the promoter (it was good to see him) and our lovely hosts, Steve and Clancy.

And kudos to God for giving us unbelievable weather for the Scottish Highlands in May. Great sun, great vistas.

Sunday, May 23rd

Down to Edinburgh to play the Cabaret Voltaire. Will and I had been there before and this time, on a Sunday, we had more people than the last time, which had been on a Friday. That’s a good indication of progress, I think. We spent a nice time at a pub up the street with a charming couple, Willie & Claire, who once baby-sat Bert Jansch’s dogs. Then we had an ordeal finding out hotel. It appears GPS (or “Sat-Nav” as they call it over there) is a bit more hit-and-miss than it is over here in our land of straight roads and right-angle turns. It took a while but we found it. The desk clerk was charm itself, helping us sort out a third bed for Jeff and letting us sit on the lobby steps where the wi-fi was better, drinking tea and pecking at our laptops. (All but Jeff, who didn’t do the computer thing. At all. Jeff is a delightful hippy from the original generation of them. He’s a totally genial to his toes sort of lanky midland motorcycle and music enthusiast who greets you with a laugh. How many people can greet you every day with a laugh and get away with it. He can do it because he’s Buddha bad to the bone and his first laugh greeting in the morning affirmed, “You and I, we’re in the same joke. Let’s live our asses off today. Yippee!”)

Monday, May 24th

A pleasant, mere two-hour journey this day to Largs, a seaside resort town on the west coast of Scotland. Another Victoria Hotel venue, though they’re not affiliated. The promoter, Tam, was a scream. We were loading in at 4PM and he went behind the bar and got out several scotch bottles and tall glasses. “Yous want a wee whiskey?” he asked. I demurred in favor of a diet coke, Will and Jeff assented. A wee whiskey by Tam’s measurements was a bit over a double-shot by my visual estimation.

Here’s a nice memory, and a nice line of words to live by, as provided by Jeff. He was asking about “Early to Bed”, a particular Daddy favorite of his, and I was explaining to him the whole premise of the tune, how a curmudgeonly commencement speaker at a college graduation explains to them how the job market is currently a rocky place where your seed might find no purchase, so you’d better work your ass off, because it’s kill or be killed out there, kids! Early to bed, early to rise, work like a dog and advertise.

“But,” Jeff said reclining on his bed in our room, still nursing the same mega-wee whiskey he’d taken from Tam two hours before, “the tune is very tongue-in-cheek.”

“No, actually it’s not.” I replied. “I’m actually serious. If I were a commencement speaker, I could see myself just admonishing these youngsters that they’d better be prepared to work their asses off just to survive in today’s world.”

“Ah,” he responded, beautifully putting me in my place, “but wouldn’t it be better to live your ass off?”

As Monday gigs so often are, the audience was slight. To be exact, 10 people. But Jeff said it was the best show yet and damned if our merch sales tally wasn’t £100! That’s a £10 disc per customer. I don’t mean that as mercenary as it sounds either. When you sell a CD to every member of the audience, you went over with all of them, affected them enough to buy a record. We hit ten home runs in ten at-bats.

Then came a bit of a will power exercise for me. We were staying at the venue – it is a hotel after all – and Tam ordered us a (great) pizza. We sat up with him and his nephew the bartender and his girlfriend and listened to Sam Cooke as Tam poured one “wee” whiskey after another for anyone who cared to have one.

Jeff, being a conscientious driver who’s duties would be called upon all too early in the morning, demurred, as did I, but Will used his Scottish genes to the fullest and sampled this whiskey and then that one and then this one again (judging one later as having tasted like a peat bog). After I’d judged that a polite amount of time hanging out and being social had gone by, I went to bed, unscotched. We had to leave early. Another mother scratcher of a drive lay before us in the morning. Largs to London. 10 bloody hours.

Tuesday, May 25th

Thus was done said crazy drive – which I slept through a lot of – from Largs to London, to record a performance for Bob Harris’ BBC radio show at 4:30 in the afternoon. The great man couldn’t be with us so we chatted between Will and myself and played songs and the engineers later told our associates it was one of the best sessions they’d ever recorded. One of those songs has since aired on Bob’s show. Bob is the legendary Whispering Bob Harris, who hosted the great, titantic toem of ‘70s rock shows, “The Olde Grey Whistle Test”

Then we went and had Thai food and I found out later that Will was having chills because he was so tired. Will sleeps about six hours and then he’s up, peat bog scotch or no peat bog scotch. He stayed awake on the drive from Largs a lot double checking our “Sat Nav” versus the map because that damn thing had a mind of its own sometimes. (It was a Tom Tom. I have a Garvin at home. I’m not sure about those Tom Toms. On tour with the Coal Men a couple years back, their Tom Tom took us through midtown Pittsburgh when we weren’t even bound for Pittsburgh in the first place. I have an ad campaign for them: “Tom Tom – When you’re not in a hurry!”)

And there could be no mistakes on this trip. We had to get from fricken Scotland to London and all it’s nightmare traffic to an exact spot in that huge city – by 4:30. No excuses. So Will was at his best as he had been every day so far. He’s a very quick-thinking and sensible strong person to have on the road with you – God knows he’s saved my ass in train stations figuring stuff out and so many other situations – but even the alien needs to get to bed for more than six hours, especially since the human bodies the two of us were in had no fricken clue when we were supposed to sleep or not.

We’d been hard at it for 9 days at this point (considering we’d played a gig in Nashville the day before we flew), playing hard and traveling a lot, and it was just in time that this two-day stay in London at the same hotel happened. We didn’t have to move until about 1 the next afternoon and that would give us plenty of time to drive to the Sheep Walk in Leytonstone (east London) for the good old What’s Cookin’ show upstairs. This would be my third trip there. It’s a great music night with a loyal following and how can you not like a show with a backdrop of a giant rug with a painting on it of Freddy Fender riding a horse? Ramblin’ Steve the Master of Ceremonies and David the DJ, this would be fun. Plus we were going to get to see Lex Armstrong. I met her through Will the last time we played here and she wrote me very nice things about my record right after receiving it practically. She’s a top northern bird!

We went back to our hotel, another Travelodge, in Borehamwood (south London), and everyone slept like it was going out of style, me more than anyone. (I could out sleep Rip Van Winkle. It’s been that way ever since I lost my spleen in ’93. Ever since then I’ve got to have plenty of sleep or I’m just not right. Okay, maybe I’m never “right”, but you know what I mean.) I had more McVitties Caramels and life was grand.

Will was asleep on a pull-out bed on the floor and I was sleeping on a couch bed above and adjacent to him. Sometime in the wee hours I started cussing in my sleep, which Beth says I do from time to time, and it awakened him. Will stirred to find my head hanging over the couch close to his ears hissing “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Weird, but true. I promise I don’t feel that angry about anyone or anything as a daily matter of course, but I do recall snippets of dreams I have here and there where I’m in a day where I’m just fucking up one thing after another and pissing off one person or another and people are giving me shit like happens on those days and so I just explode with F-bombs fired back. Maybe that’s it. Tourette’s? Could be. God knows, really. Ask me when I’m asleep sometime and I can probably give you a clearer answer.

TO BE CONTINUED….

Howdy from one soaking wet piece of the planet. My family and I are very, very lucky. We’re okay, our house is dry, and we have power. Compared to so many, we are very blessed.

Nashville flooded like it never has in recorded history last weekend. 13 inches of rain in 36 hours. The Cumberland River blew out of its banks all the way past Fourth Avenue, drowning honky tonks and making Steinways float around in the Schemerhorn Center. It has, for two days now been relinquishing its grip inch by inch, sinking back into the river where it belongs. Norm’s River Road House is still underwater. In so many cases people have lost everything. Obama declared us a disaster area and I’m wondering whom I ought to go help clean up this weekend. Beth is cleaning a friend’s entire wardrobe as I type this. On the back deck there are thirty pair of cleaned women’s shoes, lined up like planes waiting for take-off. I couldn’t take a shower this morning because of all this woman’s newly cleaned clothes drying on the shower rack. Just as well, as we have a water shortage in Nashville right now. If you’d like to help out, google “Nashville Red Cross” and you can’t go wrong.

In and amongst this, life goes on. To wit, on Tuesday I got my second day of recording done for my next solo venture. John Deaderick and I – the same team who gave you “There, I Said It!” - are at it again. Expect a 2011 release for this one. (It makes no sense to rush these things anymore, does it.) Songs recorded so far: “On & Off The Wagon”, “Play That Cheap Trick, Cheap Trick Play”, “It Doesn’t Have to Be That Good”, “Bye & Bye”, “Wishes Do Come True”, “Pothead Blues”, “I’m Too Old to Feel That Way Right Now”, “Darling Let Your Free Bird Fly”, “Guilty Snake Blues” & “I Love You to Pieces”.

The entire official lineup of Daddy will be playing a free concert in Dragon Park in Nashville. It’s on Blakemore across from Vanderbilt. That’s 4 PM Sunday, May 16th. Daddy is Tommy Womack & Will Kimbrough: gtr/voc, John Deaderick: keys, Dave Jacques: bass and Paul Griffith: drums.

Will Kimbrough and I head off to Europe on May 17th. We’ll be doing three weeks in the UK, Germany, Netherlands and Brussels, returning on June 7th. For the tour dates and a really good overview of Daddy in general, go to http://www.reverbnation.com/daddytheband.

Michael Romanowski is mastering the Government Cheese 2 CD Reissue as we speak. I just spoke with him today as a matter of fact. And yesterday too! I am very, very excited that the Cheese project is finally fully front burner happening. And I can’t wait to hear it all done up. In the meantime, here is the sequence of songs…

DISC ONE

1: People Who Died (previously unreleased)
2: Kentucky Home (previously unreleased)
3: Mammaw Drives the Bus (unreleased alternate take)
4: The Shrubbery’s Dead
5: Camping On Acid
6: Oh Yeah (unreleased alternate take)
7: American Band (previously unreleased)
8: Stay With Me
9: Face to Face
10: Just the Beginning of the Day (previously unreleased)
11: This Life’s For Me
12: I Can’t Make You Love Me (unreleased alternate take)
13: Face in the Crowd
14: Rebecca Whitmire
15: Inside of You
16: Underneath the Water Tower
17: C’mon Back to Bowling Green
18: Bathtub, He Asked
19: Yellow Cling Peaches
20: Fish Stick Day
21: Search & Destroy

DISC TWO

1: Single
2: Sunday Driver
3: Before the Battered
4: For the Battered
5: No Sleeping in Penn Station
6: A Little Bit of Sex
7: Fall in Love With You
8: Drivers’ Ed Films
9: Sellin’ Out
10: The Yuppie is Dead
11: Nothing Feels Good
12: I Wanna Be a Man
13: Growing Up to Stand Still (previously unreleased)
14: Somewhere Between
15: It’s Too Late (previously unreleased)
16: The Shrubbery’s Dead ’95
16: Jailbait
17: Cattle Prod (previously unreleased)
18: Dreaming of the Beautiful Day When I Lose My Mind (previously unreleased)
19: The KKK Took My Baby Away (previously unreleased)
20: Life Outside the Window

Look for a September release for the Government Cheese retrospective. That will be the 25th anniversary of our first release, produced by Byron House, who just became Robert Plant’s bassist. (We taught him everything he knows!)

I had a wonderful early evening with Dan Baird & Warner Hodges a couple of Fridays back. They invited me out to a hillside outside Castle Studios in Franklin, and we sat on upturned buckets and looked out onto a valley. They already had the chords to something and I helped them with the words. It’s called “Twistin’ in the Wind” and I dare now to be presumptuous and say you can look forward to hearing it on the next Dan Baird & Homemade Sin record. (BTW, Warner’s on tour with Jason & the Scorchers in Europe right now promoting their new release, Halcyon Times, right now. Go see ‘em.)

“Jack The Bunny”, my children’s book, is getting closer to a reality. We’ve made some progress in securing funding for the printing costs, and I’m mulling over whether to include a CD in it or not. (Decisions, decisions.)

I’m watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper live from Nashville. The devastation around here is unbelievable. I drove across the Shelby Street Bridge the other day and saw the water swallowing buildings. It’s unbelievable, true, but what is more unbelievable is the spirit around here. People are helping each other out. There is a real sense of community here and, so maybe the media coverage has not been all that, not to matter, the city will survive.

God bless,

Tommy