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  Southwold, Suffolk, United Kingdom
Sunday, July 15, 2007

(Southwold, Suffolk, UK, Sunday, July 15, 2007)-British music fans gather regularly in the thousands to enjoy weekend-long outings in remote rural settings where festival promoters stage gala musical events featuring scores of bands and associated entertainers from the world of popular culture.

It's kind of like the olden days of hippie rock festivals except everything is extremely well organized and fully under the control of the promoters and the tickets are quite costly. There are camping grounds where tents may be pitched for the weekend and a plethora of food and drink stands on the musical midway which all seem to be owned and operated by the festival organizers as well.

There's a main stage at one end for the star performers, a couple of smaller stages for the more obscure acts, a poetry tent and a literary tent with non-stop performances all afternoon, and a few thousand happy music consumers trooping from one venue to the next for the three full days of the festival. By the time we arrive on Sunday afternoon there are some seriously burned out campers stumbling around the grounds after two sleepless nights and an overload of various stimulants, but they're well outnumbered by the fresh-faced festival-goers who surround them.

I'm reading a passage from GUITAR ARMY so my assignment is the literary stage rather than the poetry tent, and when I take the mike our tent is packed with people young and old who train their full attention on my paean to rock & roll, dope & fucking in the streets written almost 40 years ago in Detroit. A great question-and-answer session follows the reading featuring one intelligent and well-informed query after another from the crowd until it's time to make way for the next performer, and then I get to greet the people who are lined up outside with newly-purchased copies of GUITAR ARMY for me to sign.

We spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying the grounds and some of the music before the festival starts to shut down and we make the long drive back to London. Bill and Jane have set up an interview the next afternoon with David Kerekes of HeadPress publications, and I've arranged lunch before that with my old friend Chris Musto and his partner Richard England, so I've got a full day before me when I get up on Monday morning.

Chris Musto is the guy who brought me to England on my first trip there three or four years ago. He's a remarkable character I met through Wayne Kramer who seems to be equally skilled as a drummer, writer, producer, artist, designer, and promoter in the employ of Smash-UK, running the London office of the Japanese firm that stages the massive Smash Festival in Japan each year. When Chris brought me over from Amsterdam before, he organized a terrific band, played drums, booked the gigs at the Borderline in London and the Threlka in Bristol, arranged the transportation, made the poster, contacted the press, set up a pair of in-store appearances, interviews and a radio show, and situated my wife Penny and myself in a friend's tasty apartment for the week.

So I was looking forward to seeing Chris again and followed his directions through the tube system to a little joint on music row called 12 Bar where we were joined by Richard England for a lively and productive conversation. Chris and Richard are working together on a film project which purports to produce a Stooges documentary, and I'm telling them about my movie TWENTY TO LIFE being ready for release this fall. It's just been accepted for screening at the Raindance Film Festival in London at the end of September, and we wonder about how we can link the two film projects together.

After a couple of hours spent brainstorming and talking the kind of crazy talk that people like ourselves do, our meeting breaks up and I reverse my course back to Bill's place to meet Jane Goodsir and go with her to the nearby headquarters of the HeadPress underground media empire for my interview with David Kerekes.

-Detroit
August 27, 2007

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