Notes from a Month on the Road in California, France and England

California

This tour began on a very special day -- my daughter Leila's 18th birthday. On January 28th, Reiko and Leila's two much younger siblings dropped us off at PDX, and from there we flew to LA. 

Traveling in much of the world has gotten so much more expensive over recent years, along with existing in general. Even with supporters covering many of my flights with frequent flier miles, the cost of renting a car was pretty crazy for a few years there in many of the countries I tour in. This spike in such expenses never occurred in Denmark, but it happened most everywhere else.

So I was happy to find a really good deal on renting a car at LAX this time around. When we got to the car rental place, we learned that the "manager's special" I had reserved for us was an electric car. The nice man at the desk said we could have a gas-powered car for an extra $20 a day. We were fine with the electric car.  We own an electric car, I already have the apps on my phone and know how to find a charging station.  But it was clear from his whole approach that many other customers did not feel this way about renting an electric vehicle, which perhaps provides some insight into some of the challenges involved with this transition.

Our first gig was in Topanga, which was also where we were staying throughout our three days in southern California.

A recurring theme lately, particularly in the US and the UK, has been the twin obstacles for many venues of rising expenses and increasing difficulty just staying afloat, while often at the same time having to deal with being targeted for boycotts and harassment of all sorts for making the mistake of hosting the wrong speaker or performer, or for being an owner or manager of a venue who has the wrong opinions on things like whether there's a genocide happening in Gaza, or whether there should be peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

One such venue facing these twin challenges is the Corazon Center for the Performing Arts on South Topanga Boulevard, which was our first destination, after stopping along the way for a little visit to Santa Monica. One needn't look further than their Instagram account to see the horrible comments of the trolls who have taken it upon themselves to tell the world, ad nauseum, all the usual stuff, and sadly, the harassment has not been limited to Instagram comments.

Our other gig in the area was at the Worker's Circle, which can still be found listed on Google under its previous name, the Workmen's Circle. Either way, it's an old institution dedicated to the struggle of the working class and to promoting Yiddish culture that can also be found in Manhattan, where I've played at another one in the past.

I remember the gig at the Workmen's Circle in Manhattan. It was 2002, the Second Intifada was still raging, and I had recently written "Jenin." This song upset one member of the audience, and I remember the guy telling me about it after the show there. In 2024 in LA there was no such audience member present.

At both Corazon and at the Worker's Circle it was a small crowd of fewer than 20, but everyone who was there seemed to be on board. Or perhaps, if anyone had a dispute with anything I said or sang, they kept it to themselves. As with most of my gigs, the crowd at Worker's Circle was quite predictably disproportionately made up of academically-inclined and/or leftwing activist sorts of Jewish lineage. This used to be something I expected and didn't tend to notice, given my own background, but in recent years, with all the crazy talk about me being some kind of Jewish antisemite, I now note the Jewishness of my audiences much more readily.

Around LA there was much talk of the impending rainstorms. In recent years the torrential downpours called "atmospheric rivers" have been causing a lot of flooding and erosion, and the rainfall that hammered the area the day after Leila and I were once again airborne apparently did serious damage to Topanga in particular.

France

I had failed to seriously consult a map when making plans for this visit to France, and thinking Lyon and Toulouse were much closer to each other than they actually are, I had made plans for us all to arrive in Lyon, only discovering later that this would then mean a seven-hour drive to the beautiful big house in the countryside near Toulouse that we had rented.

In Lyon, Leila and I met up with Kamala and her 19-year-old daughter, Ro -- and four of the much larger group of participants in the recording project that was soon to begin were assembled. 

Kamala and Ro had flown in from Australia and were probably even more tired than Leila and I were. We all picked up our rental car and embarked upon the long journey, ending up staying about halfway at a self-service hotel in the middle of nowhere that we had been sent to by the nice man waiting tables at the restaurant we stopped at for dinner.

It was by the time we stopped for dinner somewhere in rural southern France that it became abundantly clear how much Leila's fluency in the French language was going to make our travels so much smoother and more enjoyable. I'm not sure how we would have even ordered dinner that night without her.

The next day we eventually arrived at Le Moulin de L'Isle, a particularly beautiful old stone house with a 400-year-old millstone in it and a creek running beneath, in an area surrounded by farms, trees, and other beautiful old houses, in various states of disrepair.  Old ruins with just a wall still standing were often right next to a well-maintained house that people were living in, that may have been first built 400 years ago -- a lot more recently than the old Roman walls. 

It was the beginning of February, and farmers all over France were on the move, blockading the toll roads and dumping manure on the doorsteps of certain politicians.  On our drive from Lyon to Le Moulin we saw many tractors with spraypainted signs on them raising attention to what they have been calling "the emergency" for farmers.  We saw many assemblies of farmers with farm vehicles ready for action -- along with many other tractors that were working the rolling hills being farmed in every direction around there, interspersed with forestland.

Another feature of so many of the villages we passed through, as Google guided us around the many roadblocks on the highways, were the upside-down signs.  People involved with the movement have systematically been carefully removing the metal signs welcoming people into town, and replacing them upside-down.  The messaging is the same as flying the flag upside-down to indicate something is wrong, or perhaps Karl Marx's reference to the world being upside-down under capitalism. 

The producer of the album project and the man who had invited me to come to France to make a recording, Gregg Weiss, met us at the house soon after we arrived.  Gregg had already advised me that it was best to avoid the toll roads, as they were currently being blockaded by farmers.  He had also advised me that if wanted to stop for dinner we should make sure to stop at the right time of the evening, or else we'd be out of luck.  Sure enough, the only place I've been outside of rural southern France where there is less evidence of commercial activity or anyone trying to sell you anything is Cuba.  As with the Cuba I once traveled in 24 years ago, the villages in France had plenty of evidence of community, and very little evidence of capitalism, which was endlessly refreshing to witness.

One of the many ways France contrasts so starkly with the entirety of the Anglosphere countries with which I am so familiar is the complete lack of disposable cups or "to-go" boxes and the like.  

It has been in the news a bit lately that disposable packaging has been banned in Paris, and McDonald's now advertises how green they are by not using disposable packaging in France.  (They presumably don't mention in their ads that in the rest of the world they're one of the most wasteful corporations in history.)  In the villages, my impression is that no ban has been necessary, because the tradition of wasting paper and plastic in order to have a meal has never gotten off the ground there in the first place.

Meanwhile in southern California, in London, and wherever you go in the rest of the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, etc., you will inevitably create a mountain of garbage every day, especially if you're traveling, just by trying to eat three meals and have a few things to drink.  Much of the time these days in the Anglosphere there aren't even any real cups on display in a cafe, and even if you specify that you want your order "for here," you'll get it in paper or plastic anyway. 

I first met Gregg close to two decades ago, in Arizona, when he was living in a van.  It was soon after that that he ended up in Europe, and eventually living in rural southern France.  Having been established as a musician there, in recent years he and his band of wonderful French musicians -- calling themselves the Flying iUteurkies collectively -- have been doing recording projects with different artists frequently.  I was happy to learn, when I first heard from Gregg about this idea sometime in early 2023, that I was one of the musicians on his short list to work with. 

Gregg's Zen orientation in life, in combination with his musical talents, come together to make him a brilliant producer.  He's got a producer's sense of how much time and effort different elements of a project might require, but at the same time he's constantly receptive to the various twists and turns things may take, and able to seamlessly incorporate the musical whimsies of various band members, that often meant updating the plan as we went along.

Having just finished Notes From A Holocaust, an album entirely about the genocide of the Palestinian people currently being perpetrated by the Israeli military in Gaza and by paramilitary settlers in the West Bank, I was open to whatever musical or topical directions this album project in France might take.  

Gregg's idea was "the quintessential David Rovics album."  He was drawn to songs that expressed some kind of optimism.  I liked that theme, too, though then hearing Lea Desplats' improvisations on the keyboard led to the inclusion of a couple of the darker songs that also appear on Notes From A Holocaust, which ended up being some of the most powerful elements of what will eventually be an album.

My longtime musical collaborator now, Lorna McKinnon, who, along with Kamala Emanuel, has written and recorded vocal parts on several of my albums, flew in from Glasgow to join us during the last half of the project.  It was as long as she was able to get away from her very busy life organizing the revolution there -- and it was also perfect timing, because generally vocals aren't what comes first in a recording project, but after some of the basic instrument tracks have been laid down.

With Lorna in the house, the place was transformed into a vocal arrangement studio, with several people at any time hard at work, often with headphones on, coming up with harmony parts, recording them to see what they sound like, and so on.  

Between the rehearsing and recording there were the almost-daily morning trips into one nearby village or another to stock up on baguettes and other things.  Each evening involved a sit-down dinner around a large table that was in Le Moulin just for such purposes.  Once it was all of the visitors plus the full band plus a journalist and a photographer, both named Isabelle!  The photos from France are from Isabelle Souriment, who we were lucky enough to be visited by on multiple occasions. 

Figuring out how to make a meal from scratch for eight or nine people was one of the biggest challenges for me, and I've never been very good at it (unlike my sister, Bonnie, who is an expert in the field).  But I'm good at buying lots of tasty snacks, at least, and I discovered the section of the supermarket that is stocked with locally-made, delicious things that can be easily heated up in an oven and served, voila.  In supermarkets in the US there is often the appearance of variety, but the quality of most of the things is poor.  In the French supermarkets there appeared to be much less variety, but most everything was really good.  In this and so many other ways, I much prefer France!

The backdrop to the recording project during those seventeen days at Le Moulin, aside from an outing involving one gig on each of the two weekends, was the Gascony countryside surrounding us, and of course Le Moulin, the house -- the mill -- itself.

The region is amazing not only because of copious beautiful rolling hills, trees and farms and villages and so on, but because the cost of living is very low, compared to what those of us visiting from the US and Australia are faced with every day in recent years.  The cost of buying or renting a house around there is a fraction of what it is in much of the Anglosphere.

This was not the case, however, with the old mill house that we were renting for the duration, through the dreaded and controversial Airbnb platform, which was the one to use if we wanted to find a house big enough for a whole bunch of people to stay in comfortably.  It was expensive, but it was a big, beautiful old house with a mill in it, and a barn as well.  For setting up the studio and housing everyone it was perfect, and the surroundings were of course breath-taking. 

The appliances and other hardware in the house turned out to be much shoddier than the old stone structure they were contained within.  Not at all like that 400-year-old millstone, still capable of grinding away.

On the second day we were there, when temperatures were staying at around freezing at night, the boiler died.  This meant the central heating wasn't working anymore.  The boiler room smelled like a gas station, which didn't seem good.  This was also how the ground floor of the building got hot water, so it meant there was no longer any hot water in the downstairs bathroom, or in the kitchen.

The house had four bathrooms, so not having hot water in one of them was certainly not a problem.  But without central heating for the rooms, the house was freezing.  Not below freezing, but freezing, in the literal sense, because that's what the temperature was outside.

There was a pellet stove, with lots of wood pellets provided, in one of the upstairs rooms.  But that stove soon stopped functioning, and none of the professionals who came around over the course of the next two weeks could get it working again.

In the kitchen/dining room area there was a beautiful old wood stove with an oven connected to it.  Around the back of the barn there was big logs.  Somewhat confusingly, in the back of the barn there were lots of pieces of wood that were too long for the stove, a few of which had mysteriously been placed next to the stove they didn't fit within.  And then there were a fair number of big logs in back of the barn that were the right length, but needed to be chopped into smaller pieces in order to be burned in the stove.  There wasn't a saw, an ax or an awl anywhere to be seen, unless these items might have been behind one of the locked closet doors that we didn't have a key for.

Borrowing an ax from members of the band turned out to be an easy solution to that problem, and both the drummer, Thibauld, and Paul, who played bass and dobro for the most part, turned out to be skilled with an ax.  

Paul was one of the best wood-splitters I've ever seen.  I grew up with a wood stove and I'm OK at splitting wood, but Paul is like a black belt at it, never needing an awl, most of the time just cleanly slicing into every piece of wood he's confronted with by the first or second try, and these were very knotted, gnarly old logs. 

Heating everything from the stove meant that, as with the house I grew up in in Connecticut, there was one room that was always warm, and the rest of the house got cooler as you got further from the kitchen.  Although for the cost of the rental one would expect hot running water in the kitchen and such, heating the place with the stove in the kitchen probably meant we all spent more time together -- or at least anyone that didn't want to huddle in a cold bedroom or go for a walk in the rain had to hang out in or near the kitchen/dining room area where the stove was.  And I enjoyed every wood-splitting session -- though I got more of a thrill out of watching Paul split the wood even more than doing it myself.

A few days before we were leaving Le Moulin, yet another appliance failed.  This time it was the gas-powered stove.  One of the mechanisms that sparks the flame for a burner got stuck in the "on" position, with the flint constantly trying to light the burner, not going off until the thing was unplugged.  So then no more stove.  Sometime around the time that happened, someone came around to fix the central heating, and the whole house smelled strongly of petrol for a day.

The one appliance that never failed us was the little espresso machine in the kitchen, running on pods.  With the very limited hours cafes keep in the nearby villages, the espresso machine in the house definitely helped keep the whole project on track.

Having seen how far it was between Lyon and Toulouse, we scrapped our plans to get back to Lyon in order to go to London, in order to get there from Toulouse, which was one of those situations that the English refer to as an "own goal."  It sure was easier than driving seven hours before catching a train, which had unintentionally been the original "plan"...

England

Going to England on this trip in the first place had not been part of the original thought, but when no gigs were coming together anywhere near southern France, I added England to the itinerary for several reasons:  I hadn't been there too recently, and I knew I could line up a couple of gigs there, unlike in the Mediterranean region; I knew we could all stay together in a very nice flat; and Ro had never been to London and wanted to see it.

It was only after making plans to go to London that I heard about the dates of the final hearings under the British legal system to determine the fate of the incarcerated Australian journalist, Julian Assange.  I made plans with Archie Shuttler and Guy Smallman for gigs in London those nights, so us travelers could spend those days with the other folks in front of the Royal Courts or marching to Downing Street in support of Julian.

While we were in France, most of the time with at least one extra guest room for visitors, no one came to visit who wasn't directly involved with the recording project.  In London, however, keeping all the rooms in the flat filled with people was no problem, given the timing of our visit.  While the hearings at the Royal Courts were happening, our roommates included Vinnie DeStefano from Assange Defense in the US, and the brilliant Greek journalist and radical, Lamprini Thoma, who it turns out is also an amazing cook.  

We all had one night free before the gigs started up, and before the hearings began, which we spent at the flat in Kentish Town (informally known as the Prolesville Hotel), eating the results of the afternoon Lamprini spent preparing a Greek feast.  Much of dinner for me involved listening with fascination to Lamprini and our dinner guest, Guy Smallman, talking about their years of involvement in various capacities with the refugee crisis in Greece, and the many different political and social reactions to it there over time.

Although it was generally raining and only somewhat above freezing in London during those days, there was a constant presence of a thousand or so folks packing into every available space in front of the Royal Courts of Justice, sometimes spilling into the streets.  When the march from the courts to Downing Street began in the afternoon of the 21st, we all realized just how many of the people occupying the cafes, restaurants, pubs and shops within a few blocks of the courts were there for the protests -- most of them. 

So many people poured into the streets that a construction zone that created a bottleneck for the march caused a crush that could have had dire consequences, but the one journalist I know who was involved in it said everyone made it out OK.  I personally filmed the march passing by for a minute, as did many other people, easily verifying that many thousands of people were involved.  Some media reports actually estimated the crowd at "dozens," which of course is blatant disinformation.  Most media in the west ignored the hearings and the protests, as usual -- though there was an active presence in terms of media from outside of the west, or from particular parts of the west where there seems to be a much more engaged movement around defending Julian against this persecution, such as among Italians.  On the first of the two afternoons outside the courts, we left early, to talk about Julian and Gaza on Press TV, for example.

Aside from events around London, everything we were doing in England on this visit involved local branches of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.  Not long after I put the word out that we were coming to England, I heard from lots of organizers, and almost every free night we had got filled up with gigs.  All of the shows that came together like this were being billed as a Concert for Palestine or a Gig for Gaza or something along those lines. 

The local PSC branches are made up of people who want to be protesting the war on Gaza.  Lots of fine upstanding radicals, many long-time members of the Socialist Workers Party, many former Labor Party members who were purged from the party for supporting the rights of Palestinians, and many freelance radicals.  The national organization of PSC seems to be led by more cautious elements, but local branch leaders are pushing for a national agenda involving more civil disobedience, boycotts and blockades, along with the tremendously large marches in London the PSC is mostly known for.

The people organizing local marches for Palestine and getting people to go to London for the national marches were generally the very same people who were organizing the gigs in Hastings, Dorchester, Bristol, Leicester, and Portsmouth.  So these gigs were all great opportunities to talk to folks about what was happening with the Palestine solidarity movement, and to meet people of all ages and walks of life who are deeply involved with what has become a massive national (and international) social movement, that includes every demographic.

Oddly enough, the gig with the biggest crowd was in the little city of Dorchester, in the well-heeled county of Dorset.  More than a hundred people packed into the venue there, including lots of very politically engaged teenagers, and lots of refugees who live on a barge off the coast of the nearby town of Portland, where they've developed a wonderful community with the locals, who have organized lots of activities that involve refugees and locals doing things together like cooking, fishing, or hiking.

The local PSC branch leader and a couple other folks gave great speeches, which could more or less be understood despite the constant, shrill feedback emanating from the sound system.  It was the same with the Kurdish musician who sang beautifully to a karaoke track, who was our support act for that night.  

The venue was a big boxy space with a new sound system in it, that hadn't yet been used.  We got there early, but there was no one available to do a sound check with us yet, so we went and had dinner first.  Upon returning to the place, it was already full of people.  The older man who introduced himself as a "sound engineer" said he could work on getting the sound good after we started playing.

This soon seemed very ominous, since the speakers speaking sounded awful, with all the feedback.  Despite the boxy shape of the room, I knew the sound system was a good one, and it soon became clear that the "sound engineer" was absolutely and completely incapable of doing sound.  He had everything way too loud, and seemed to be unable to find the volume controls for each channel.  When he found one, he only seemed to be able to turn things way too loud or way too quiet.  He couldn't find any of the tone controls and was unable to do anything when I asked him if he could turn the treble down on everything, so maybe the feedback would stop.

After about a minute of this kind of back-and-forth, trying to get him to do really basic things I was realizing he had no idea how to do, I was at a loss.  No one could understand anything we were singing, there was no point in continuing with this sound system.  But there was more than 100 people in the room, some of whom didn't speak much English, and I wasn't confident we could do an acoustic set and keep everyone's attention, or even sing loud enough for them all to hear us.  To make matters worse, soon the "sound engineer" was sitting in front of us with his arms crossed, refusing to even try to do anything else to improve the disastrous situation.  And then the owner of the venue came over and yelled at me for ordering the "sound engineer" around in a way that this person apparently found disrespectful.  I was reminded that this man was volunteering his time.  Which is good, because you wouldn't want to actually pay someone to totally sabotage a gig like that!

We soldiered on with the disastrous sound situation for a few songs and then took an early intermission.  When we got back to the stage, the "sound engineer" had vanished from the room, and the DI for the guitar was now turned off for some reason.  This settled the question of whether we should use the sound system or not.  We sang several songs totally acoustic, as loud as we could, for the second set.  We had already lost a bunch of folks after the first set who couldn't stand the feedback, but those who stuck around for the little acoustic set at least got to hear a little live music.

The contrast between the sound situation in Dorchester and the sound situation everywhere else would be impossible to overstate, but the most contrast was between Dorchester and Leicester, where the young woman on the soundboard was a consummate professional, getting everything sounding great within about 30 seconds.

That show almost didn't happen, however.  The day before the show, the wife of the CEO of UK Lawyers For Israel wrote an email on behalf of her pro-Israel "charity" to the venue owner, threatening legal action if they didn't cancel the gig with me, on the basis that I am supposedly violating some Thatcher-era disorderly conduct laws by promoting racial hatred against Jews.  In the email, Caroline Turner openly admitted that the way I am promoting racial hatred against Jews is by criticizing Israel's genocidal war against the people of Gaza.

The owner of the venue refused to cancel the gig, however.  At the same time as I was getting word about this email to the venue, I also became the subject of a massive trolling campaign that is still ongoing, involving at least a couple thousand comments, almost exclusively on Facebook, spewing every anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian trope ever invented. 

The gig the following evening, in Portsmouth, our last one of this little tour, was also at risk of being canceled, after the first venue already canceled, but the owner of that venue decided to go on with the show despite the new prospect of threats from lawyers.  One of the London gigs almost didn't happen for similar reasons, but after one venue canceled, another, more reliable one was found.

After seeing the email from the "charity" threatening legal action against any venue in the UK where I might play a gig, I asked around a bit and quickly learned that this group is one of the most active pro-Israel hate groups harassing the best of the pro-Palestine charities, artists, activists, politicians and others across the country.  It seems with this charity, as with their counterparts in the pro-Israel press, they constantly lose legal battles and lawsuits, but it just doesn't seem to matter.  They're not businesses trying to turn a profit, after all -- they benefit from the infinite largesse of several different states and an assortment of wealthy donors, from the looks of it, just like with AIPAC in the US.

Certainly every time I have a problem like this, whoever is attacking me is someone familiar to Lowkey because he's already been attacked by them.  So I'm in very good company.

As one might expect, everywhere we went in England, every evening at another well-attended event full of people desperately concerned about the plight of the Palestinians, people were asking us visiting foreigners about the state of the solidarity movement in the US and in Australia. 

For me, reflecting on the events I just participated in in England and contrasting that with my own experience in the US before and after this visit to Europe, as the genocide has been unfolding and I've been documenting it in song, I've heard from a lot of people around the world.  In places like Scandinavia and England, some of the people I hear from are the same people organizing the protests and other things, and being in touch with them also means them asking me if I'm coming back soon, in which case they want to organize a concert and have me sing at a protest or a blockade or something that's happening in their town.  This has meant very busy tours full of well-attended gigs with a sharply Palestine focus to them in England on this visit, and in Scandinavia when Kamala and I toured there last November as well.

By contrast, although there are lots of people in the US outraged by the genocide as well as listening to my new album about it, not a single person anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, where I live, has taken the initiative to organize anything like that -- not one.  In the densely-populated northeast, where I lived for many years and where there's a similar number of folks listening to my latest album as there are in England or Denmark, my efforts to organize a tour there have resulted in two gigs in Massachusetts and one in New York.  I'm looking forward to these gigs very much, but the contrast between the response from London and the response from New York City is about as stark as can be imagined.  

It wasn't at all like this twenty years ago, and I can only speculate as to why it's like this now, as I lament this strange new reality that seems to be largely characterized in my country by fear, suspicion, and inaction.  I wish, among other things, that moving my family to another country weren't such a challenging prospect, in so many ways, because in terms of being involved with a functional solidarity movement, it ain't happening here, from where I write now, back home in the dis-United States of America, and that has been the case for at least ten years now.

Meanwhile in Gaza, while Leila and I were in the air somewhere between London and Seattle, hundreds of starving Palestinians in search of food and water were massacred by Israeli troops.

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The next plans for the tour include:

• the northeastern US in late March/early April

• Australia in June/July — including Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide

• Backyard Tour from Portland to San Francisco August 8-22

• November in Scandinavia

• March 2025 in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland

• living in the Pacific Northwest the rest of the time, where I'm available to do shows or sing at protests as well as provide sound for small ones