(This week I'll share an old letter, written to Chris Dombrowski when we were still in our thirties, detailing certain vagaries of the road. Enjoy. - JF)

May, 2014

Dombrowski,

I’ve driven my mother-in-law’s car to a parking lot in a small town on the coast in Massachusetts. The day is a gym sock, cloying and hot, with low, thin cloud. I was hired to play a festival, the contract said festival, and though I don’t always look at the contract I had this time, scanning for the magic word, Guarantee. But this is the address I've been given, and as I top a rise in the frontage road there is, down between the PetSmart and the T.J. Maxx, a make-shift stage, with a massive generator and a handful of tents and booths set up within an archipelago of mulched islands, containing each a single dying, juvenile tree.

I park the car behind the stage and find my shades, walk out into the salt air and weak sunshine. The generator sounds like a helicopter landing and somewhere far beneath it stray piano notes cut through like wind chimes in a gale. I nod to a couple of hands and, rounding the corner of the stage, find it is occupied by a ten year-old boy in a piano key tie and an overlarge fedora, playing a creditable if entirely sexless version of Great Balls of Fire on an electronic keyboard.

As the song ends a man with a radio-school voice and a cordless microphone says, “Ladies and Gentleman, Spiderman is on the premises!” And in fact there is someone wearing a Spiderman costume, weaving through the seventy or a hundred people milling around. This man is not notable for his superhero physique – he’s rail thin and weighs perhaps a hundred and thirty-five pounds – but for his unsettling and incomprehensibly large genitalia, difficult to hide in a form-fitting costume. He keeps approaching children to offer them balloons, and mothers keep turning those children away by the shoulders while looking fixedly at the ground. In the distance a young girl tries to lift an enormous mallet for the strongman game. I walk back to my car.

The second act is a demonstration by a local fitness club of a routine somewhere between Richard Simmons and gladiator school. It’s led by a fierce, whippet-thin woman who bounces around and among her people, smiling like a maniac at the crowd while occasionally turning around to snarl at her charges, screaming directions over the music, which is Bon Jovi’sLivin' on a Prayer. Nervous Saturday Fathers in khakis mill like sheep scenting wolves. Fascinated, I watch from the tailgate as the program suddenly downshifts into yoga, signaled by the playing of Sting’s, Fields of Barley, which I imagine is something like the National Anthem of yoga. The backstage techs begin to arrive for the headliner.

I am the third act.

The sound is coming back at me off the PetSmart a few seconds behind and out of time with the beat, making my voice echo like a bad cell connection, so it’s all I can do deliver each song without losing my way. I keep my sunglasses on and don’t engage the man with the cordless microphone when he tries for a little repartee at the intro. I just play the set and leave the stage, gathering up my few effects as he turns to me off-mic and says, sotto voce, You are the coolest person here. I don't know how to feel about this.

As I put my guitar case into the back of the car I can hear them checking the subwoofer crossover for the last act, a young blond woman with Charlie’s Angels wings and a full band, a local who appeared on American Idol and is now trying to parlay that brief fame into, well, something. Her manager pulls up in a late-model Honda Accord and jumps out, looking cheerful and deranged, saying important and very final things on his cell. As I back the car out, there is a clap of thunder. I flip on the AC, and roll into the sunset.

Your Pal,

JF

TEXAS – This week I'll return to the Kerrville Folk Festival (5/22) in the Texas hill country, where it is decidedly hot, but there is also Shiner beer, and night.

MONTANA – In June I'll tour Montana solo to visit some rivers and people I know, playing two nights at Live from the Divide in Bozeman (6/6-7... the first night is sold out, night two has a few seats in play), and two nights up at the unreasonably great Home Ranch Bottoms in Polebridge (6/11-12), then back down to the Covellite Theater in Butte (6/13), out to the One Legged Magpiein Red Lodge (6/14) and finishing up in Whiter Sulphur Springs with a very low-key show at the Ringling Social Club on Sunday (6/15... speakeasy style, find @theringlingsocialclub on the socials to RSVP). Old pal and prominent Walkervillian Christy Hays opens Butte, and young friend Jackson Holte opens Bozeman, supporting his beautiful forthcoming album Sky Blues, on which I happen to play some guitar.

NORTH DAKOTA – In the first week of July I'll play the Broadway Square Summer Music Seriesin downtown Fargo, ND (7/2). If you live in Fargo and you are upset because I never play there, please understand that, like Santa Claus, I am aware of your inmost wishes, and have booked this show especially for you. Guitar maestro Erik Koskinen joins me in the air-conditioned rental car, and maybe we will also play a show in Iowa or Minnesota.

RHODE ISLAND – July 18th I have a show at the Norman Bird Sanctuary in Middletown, Rhode Island. We were trying for an All-Bird-Sanctuary tour but this is as far as we got.

WISCONSIN / MINNESOTA / MICHIGAN – In August I'll play a few Midwest shows, starting at Milk and Honey Ciders in St. Joseph, MN (backed by and sharing the bill) with Erik Koskinen and his band, then solo at the Cafe Carpe, my old home bar, in Fort Atkinson, WI (8/20) and Gibson Music Hall in Appleton, WI, on my way north to perform at the Porcupine Mountain Music Festival in Ontonogan, MI., again with Erik Koskinen and his band.

EUROPE – In late August we'll kickoff a full-band European tour for The Universal Fire with a return appearance at the wonderful Tønder Festival in Denmark (8/27-30) alongside friends and correspondents met and unmet, like John Smith, Lyle Lovett, Joe Henry, Charles Wesley Godwin and a pile of others. From there we'll head down into Germany and points south with shows at The Music Bar in Norderstedt, DE (8/31), The Singers and Players Theater in Oldenburg, DE (9/1), De Amer in Amen, NL (9/2), Thiemeloods in Nijmegan, NL (9/3), and LantarenVenster in Rotterdam, NL (9/4), with further dates TBA. Erik Koskinen opens the tour and slings the hollow-body electric.

FALL – October I'll play around New England and then out in the Pacific Northwest, November I'll be in California, and December I'll be in the Midwest. Keep an eye on the TOUR page for details.

READING / LISTENING – (Non-Fiction) Holism and Evolution, Jan Smuts; Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc., Galen Strawson; Syntax of the River, Barry Lopez in conversation with Julia Martin; The World As I See It, Albert Einstein; Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Albert Einstein; The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck; The Slavery of Our Times, Leo Tolstoy; Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns, and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues, Joel Selvin. (Fiction) A Piece of My Heart, Richard Ford; A Murder of Quality, John le Carré; The Looking Glass War, John le Carré, The Hundred Days, Patrick O'Brian; (Poetry) Locations, Jim Harrison; Complete Poems, Robert Frost; (Online: Appetites(Substack), Jenna Rozelle; Interesting Times (podcast), Ross Douthat / New York Times LISTENING: Complete Recorded Works, Lonnie Johnson; Don't Lose This, Pops Staples; Slow Train Coming, Bob Dylan, The Real Folks Blues, Sonny Boy Williamson (II), Confessin' the Blues, Little Walter; 3, Abdullah Ibrahim.

Alright kids. Chin up and cheer down. We'll see you out there.

May 2025