Apart from Tania, a Swiss Army knife, an iPad, an iPod and of course iLiner, a travel guitar is essential for me when I’m on the road.  It has to be compact, sturdy and able to jam into an overhead bin and yet it must still sound great.   Not an easy combination.  For years I have searched for the perfect balance between sound, weight and cost.  Musser, one of my favorite luthiers, custom built me a handmade beauty which sounds superb but looks way too good and I’m always scared someone will nick it.  I do take it to Mexico, but I prefer the beautiful Parlor Guitar and a couple of others of his, which are simply exquisite, but of course they are too good to risk.  A travel guitar needs to take some knocks and not break your heart if it gets pinched.  I have tried several electric travellers, but then you need to hump all the electronics and you end up playing with headphones or plugging in mini systems which defeats the purpose, which is to play happily while waiting for the wife to get out of the bath.

To avoid the problem I try and stash guitars round the world in friend’s houses, and I have found kindly disposed guitar shops will hostel them for me, because I don’t like having to haul them on airplanes, I don’t like being in hotels without one and I can’t go for more than a few days without playing because you lose your pads and then it hurts like hell – think of fingering a cheese-grater.  So this year was a problem.  We were off to a wedding in Henley, and then going to Bath and Venice, and it would be at least two weeks before I found my next stashed guitar.  Too long.   And you must sing in Venice, at least to shut up the gondoliers and annoy the tourists, while in Bath….well there must be a Jane Austen song, or ironically, haven’t I written it yet?

My lovely luthier friend Danny Ferrington made a beauty of a mini guitar for Jeff Lynne back in The Wilbury days, which I always pick up and admire whenever Jeff permits me to come over and hear his amazing new music (coming this Fall)  so I asked Danny to make me one, but that will take him a while.  Danny is a sunset man who has his priorities right:  and he won’t make a guitar for just anyone….

Jeff himself travels with a little rough guitar, which is virtually a plank of wood with a small sound board, which he can chuck into a suitcase, not unlike The Rutles guitar I had Danny make for George Harrison, and boy can Jeff make that plank sound great.  But then he is Jeff Lynne.  I require more help from the guitar, but the Ferrington won’t be ready before the fall, so I faced my usual dilemma, what to take on the road?

Fortunately this year for my birthday Kevin Nealon, the tall sweet funny man with the banjo, gave me a Gift Card at The Guitar Centre and there I found a guitar as good as almost any I have ever owned.  It’s a Taylor for less than $400 called a GS Mini, and it’s a real beauty.  An absolute cracker.   I’m crazy about it.  I can’t put it down. I can’t wait to  pick it up. It sounds great, it’s easy to play, and the acoustics are magnificent. It also comes with a very strong, light, padded, traveling bag, so bless them, they have thought of everything.

I have had Baby Taylor’s before, and even a Baby Grand which I left behind on Tomburoa in Fiji, because the local boys played so well on crap guitars and it was the least I could do, but this GS Mini leaves them all dead in its wake. In fact for pure tone, and for depth and purity of sound it leaves most guitars behind.

I once toured the Taylor factory in San Diego with Clint Black, because I wrote with him a new intro for The Galaxy Song, which he recorded for his D’Electrified album.  Movingly for both of us it was Clint’s version they played from space on the last morning of the Space Shuttle last year.  Personally I think they should have played mine but you know these Texans….Anyway Clint asked for a new intro to the song as opposed to the old Python lyrics:

Whenever life gets you down Mrs. Brown

And things seem hard and tough….

….which he felt didn’t apply when he sang it on stage, so together we wrote and recorded this:

When you’re feeling inside out and insecure

And life keeps getting you down

When all life’s daily worries

Hurry through your head

You don’t wanna even get up

You just lie around in bed

When you feel you just can’t take it anymore

And you wonder what on earth it is all for

Your love life’s like a war zone

Your TV’s on the blink

It’s enough to drive a drinking man

To stop and take a think.

Just remember…etc

(Recorded with Clint Black for Delectrified in 1999)

Anyway out of the kindness of his heart Clint gave me a lovely Taylor, and arranged for us to visit the factory, which if you are a guitar freak is fascinating.   It’s certainly the first time I have ever been in a Board Room where people pulled out guitars for a jam.  So thanks Brothers Taylor, for this very travelable, very fine guitar, which accompanied me to Henley, Bath, London and Venice, and is now happily accompanying me to Biarritz for a family wedding in a rented Peugeot. The wife is driving, Clint Black is on the CD player, and life is good….

Just remember….

Diamond Jubilees are a Girl’s Best Friend

The Jubilee was very British :  very long, very wet, and not much fun.   But by God they stayed the course.  A flotilla of Royals on a gala barge grimly faced the driving rain which seemed determined to kill the celebrants.   Wellington would be proud.   Contemplating the Queen stoically standing on her barge for three and a half hours in the freezing rain (Prince Philip was taken to hospital next day) reminds me of the stern stuff from which she is made.

“Couldn’t they give her a chair? ” Tania asked in her sensible American fashion, but that’s not the point.  Being British is about the pursuit of unhappiness.  That and getting shit faced on Public holidays.

Harrison Ford once told me he was going to donate some money to teach the Brits how to enjoy themselves.  But anyone can enjoy themselves.  To make a public holiday an example of stoical duty, now that’s British.

I sensibly watched from the comfort of a friends armchair in Henley, being dragged from sleep occasionally by the increasing desperation of the BBC commentators to make any sense at all.   A reference to “Nelson at Waterloo” I particularly enjoyed.  The thrilling idea that a ten years dead Admiral should have been present at a famous land battle was perhaps the most interesting speculation of the entire programme.  Was he on his ship?   But the attempt by the commentary team to make the most mundane things seem interesting became increasingly desperate, very British, very funny, and very Monty Python.   It was all there:  cake making by the Women’s institute, large ladies in large hats in the rain, watercolorists desperately holding up water colors seeping off the page, the spirit of “carrying on” –  ah you have to love we Brits.   But with summers like this no wonder we love California.

Italy fortunately was sunny, although Venice,  whence we fled in the knowledge that all the water was meant to be there, was completely flooded by tourists.  Five enormous Cruise Ships were berthed in the port,  which meant that it was impossible to cross St. Mark’s square at all.  Thousands of people of all nations followed hundreds of muttering tour guides, and on the Rialto you risked being pitched into the Grand Canal as they jostled and fought for their photo op.

St. Mark’s  itself was surrounded by a three hour line of cattle, sorry cruisers, so we nipped into the Doge’s Palace, which is a better tour anyway, and allows you to glimpse something of the tremendous power of the Venetian Empire at its height:  a cross between Washington,  Wal-Mart and the Papacy.

Of course the best thing to do in Venice is to get lost.  Once you head away from the crowds you soon find yourself in deserted squares, and tiny alleys and subterranean passageways, hidden away from the Pizza hunting masses.    I chose to hide from the poor and struggling masses by watching footie with my friend Jeff at the Cipriani.

“Is this in Hi Def?” I asked.

“No, half Def,” he replied.

Don’t you hate it when your friends are funnier than you…

But it was inevitably the weather that gave us the biggest surprise.  On our penultimate morning the sky darkened, thunder rattled around and a huge, menacing, black cloud headed for the Church of the Salute directly in front of our Byronic casement windows.

“Honey, have a look at this”  I said to the wife.

“I’m just….”

“No really you must come and have a look at this right now.”

“Holy shit.  Is it……?”

“Yes a tornado!”

In Venice.  Heading towards our hotel.

Mercifully as it hit the Guidecca island it slid to our left along the lagoon, running between us and the Lido, becoming a waterspout before our amazed eyes, touching down on the water and sucking up huge masses of material.  Up on the roof terrace we watched it tear into the Botanical Gardens where Tania took pictures and video footage.

Fortunately no one was killed, though many boats and houses were hammered.  Tornadoes are rare but not unknown in Venice.   One in the seventies lifted up a Vapo (one of the huge water boats that are like buses there) and slammed it back down into the lagoon, killing seventy six, or so my pal Dario gleefully informed me.

See him at work in his book binding atelier http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgJfg156pr0&noredirect=1

Alas, none of the Cruise ships were destroyed, though to watch them leaving on the evening tide, gigantic, monstrous things, as long and as high as a city block, is to experience both the feeling of awe at what mankind can create and despair at the uses to which it puts such skill.

Hopefully they didn’t have an Italian Captain….

Image © 2012 Tania Kosevich

Talking about therapy is like talking about sex:  it’s vain and boastful.  Nothing wrong with that I hear you say, you live in LA, but I like paying someone to listen to me; it’s the opposite of showbiz, and it helps me understand that strange collection of people I call my self.   I am interested in the brain, how it works miracles, like reading, turning a jumble of letters into pictures, and the fact that about ninety per cent of what it is doing all the time is not even noticed by our consciousness, which is just the surface stream of our thoughts.  It also helps me connect the dots to my wiring in my upbringing.   Why am I a comedian?   Why do I still get angry at certain things?   Why do I like talking about myself for an hour?  Which are healthy thoughts and which are simply old patterns of gloom reasserting themselves.   Talk therapy is a practical guide to our selves,  since we don’t come with a manual, and we can learn to become better fathers, husbands, friends, and even comedians.  And it’s a lot more useful than Confession.

This week it suddenly became clear to me that my excitement about packing for England mirrors my own excitement felt three times a year for twelve years, packing to go home from boarding school.  Not that my home in LA is remotely like The Ophney, an ex-Orphanage in exotic Wolverhampton which I reluctantly attended from the age of seven, and British Airways ain’t exactly the Harry Potter steam train I took at the beginning and end of each interminable term,  nevertheless each year, when the jacaranda trees turn purple, I know it’s time to head East old man.

This year I’m on a short visit to London to announce that Monty Python’s Spamalot is opening again in the West End, for a limited run, to entertain the tourists during the Olympics, in an entirely new production by Christopher Luscombe which has been successfully touring the UK for two years.  I’m very excited that after only a three year absence it’s back in London, which means that this show really has legs.  I’m also looking forward to seeing a thousand boats on the Thames for the Queens jubilee, to watch a bit of England in football and cricket, and see the Brits enjoying themselves, for, as Gilbert and Sullivan put it…

.. in spite of all temptations

To belong to other nations

He remains an Englishman…

So if you are visiting London this summer to support the Polish hop skip and jump team, or visit The Synchronized Shakespeare, or simply to catch the vibe, do make a determined leap to The Harold Pinter Theatre in Panton Street, off Leicester Square, where you’ll find a very fine and funny production of Spamalot, ably led by the hilarious Marcus Brigstock.    Booking now open!

All together “And, Always look on the bright side of life…”

The first published writer I ever met was Angus Wilson, a bouffant-haired, flamboyantly gay novelist, with saturnine skin of an alarming tobacco hue, which looked remarkably like the old “Five and Nine” theatrical makeup everyone wore in the mercifully few months I spent in Repertory Theater in Leicester.   A kindly, finely spoken man, with attentive acolytes, and a propensity for cocktails, he threw a daytime party for the Cambridge Footlights at his exquisitely thatched East Anglian cottage in 1965 when we bright young things played The Theatre Royal Bury St. Edmonds, an unforgettably beautiful Regency theater.  His interest in young men from Cambridge far from home, and far from talented, was far from academic, though one recalls with a shock that homosexuality in those days was illegal and punishable by prison terms.  The harsh laws in England were only changed in 1967.   Things, mercifully, have moved on since then, though it is still ironic to realize that in the US the Candidate strongly opposed to gay marriage comes from a Church with a background of multiple marriage.

If I may quote the Reverend Whoopsie in What About Dick “Let us not forget our Lord himself had twelve little male friends, all sailors, and nobody said a word.”

“Marriage is a state given by God” say the opening lines of the old Church of England wedding ceremony,  and that in itself is ironic given the fact that the Church of England only exists because of a failed marriage – Henry VIII’s desire to dissolve his union with Queen Catherine, so that he might enjoy the body of Anne Boleyn, a privilege he was probably not the first to sample –  but if it is permissible nowadays for we disbelievers to marry isn’t it about time that the pursuit of happiness applied to all Americans?   I was married in NYC and just celebrated 31 years of marriage to the saintly forbearing Tania, and I find it hard to understand why anyone would wish to deny stable unions in society.

My thoughts are triggered by an email from an old Spamalot alumni Jimmy Ludwig, who writes:

I’m running the ING NYC Marathon in November for the 4th time, but this year for charity; so what prompted this? A few months ago, I saw this post from a friend of mine who lives in LA:

“On the plane back from Mexico, the stewardess handed us two customs forms and said “One per household. One per family. If you live at the same address, you only need to fill out one.” Arriving at immigration, a married man and woman walked up to the officer’s booth when summoned, they showed the officer their passports and customs form and moved along. We were then called. I walked with Michael to the booth and was told by the officer to “Stand Back behind the line!” I said, “We are married. Just like that couple ahead of us.” “Stand back, sir! Behind the line, or I’ll call security!” I said, “But we are married. We filled out one customs…” “Stand back sir, or I’ll call security. We only recognize Federal marriage law.” I stifled my anger as I was forced to fill out a second customs form and told to go to another booth to process my customs declaration. My face was red with embarrassment, frustration, and anger as I realized that my marriage is not a marriage, my husband is not my husband, and my country will never be my country – not until DOMA is overturned and there is a federal marriage equality law.”

This is DISCRIMINATION, pure and simple. So this year I’m running for Broadway Impact in support of Marriage Equality – and I’m asking for your support. Follow the address below – you can click thru and donate right online, and your donation is tax deductible. Thanks everyone. Much love to all – let’s make stories like this History instead of news.

You betcha Jimmy.  Let’s make Sara Palin illegal as well as redundant.

http://www.broadwaycares.org/JimmyLudwig