Summer 2008 - U.K./Europe
by Jim Stewart

The fact that you've shown up here indicates a level of curiosity about the tour, so I'll share some thoughts and offer a preview of Joan's upcoming tour that includes dates in the U.K., Europe, the United States and Canada!

I know the summer tour is winding down because the beautiful Spanish architecture of Segovia is making me homesick for my home in Tucson, Arizona that has a similar Spanish style. But, hey, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, and in the words of Maria von Trapp and her brood of stepchildren, "...let's start at the very beginning...a very good place to start."

The tour's first show was on June 29 at the amazing Glastonbury (U.K.) Music Festival, where some 100,000 music lovers and campers enjoyed Joan, in addition to Neil Diamond, K.T. Tunstall, Amy Winehouse, and Thea Gilmore, who is featured on Joan's new CD Day After Tomorrow, on 23 different stages! I flew to London via Boston on the Glastonbury show day and arrived too late to get to the concert, so I stayed at the Heathrow Airport and awaited the arrival of the rest of the tour group. During my stopover in Boston, I was able to catch our friend Josh Ritter in concert with the Boston Pops Orchestra at Symphony Hall. What a stunning evening! Josh did many of his best known songs with the legendary full orchestra. My favorite was the stunning "Monster Ballads" with an arrangement that incuded dozens of strings sweeping in at just the perfect moments! It was fantastic to have a reunion with another Joan Baez tour friend, Tim Craven, who is Josh's tour manager.

The day after the Glastonbury event, the tour group flew to Cologne, Germany where Joan and I headed to the amazing Dom Cathedral in the city's main square. The Cathedral's magnificent stained glass windows and the oldest remaining sacrament altar with a permanently fixed tabernacle were stunning. Joan was intrigued by the artists making colorful, lifelike chalk drawings on the sidewalks in front of the Dom! Later that evening, Joan strolled to a street-side cafe for dinner, where she admired the plate of food a nearby patron was enjoying. When she inquired what he was having, the gentleman politely asked, "Has anyone ever said you look just like Joan Baez?" Joan confessed that she was the genuine article and invited him to one of her future European concerts, which he gladly accepted!

The concert in Bochum was followed by ones in Dresden and Stuttgart, after which we headed out on a 7 hour bus ride to beautiful Montreux, Switzerland where Joan appeared at the internationally renowned Montreux Jazz Festival. What a place to have a day off! The hotel overlooked Lake Geneva, and, despite rainy weather, Joan swung open the big shutters on her hotel room windows to find a hungry little bird ready to visit and eat crumbs off her breakfast tray. The day after the Montreux concert, Joan and tour manager Blair Woods flew to do interviews while the rest of us piled on the bus for a drive to Heidelburg, Germany and a couple of days off. Heidelburg was a glorious place to catch up with laundry, visit a wonderful castle, and explore this lovely old college town.

The entire group was reunited in Trier, Germany for a concert at Europahalle where fan Annette Austermann gave Joan a beautiful silver rosary that had been blessed by the Pope and featured many lovely charms including shells that opened. As soon as Joan saw the beautiful gift, she lovingly clutched it in her hands and wore it nearly every day on the tour! (Photo at left is Joan wearing the rosary.)

On July 2, exciting news came via CNN that anti-corruption activist Ingrid Betancourt had been rescued from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) by Colombian Security Forces after being held captive in the jungles fro 2321 days. For her audience in Amneville, France Joan dedicated a song in French to Ms. Betancourt.

Joan's good friend Count Denis de Kergorlay from Chateau de Canisy in the Normandy region of France arrived for a brief visit and a ride on the tour bus. Joan and Denis had a grand time dining in the hotel's nice restaurant and recalled memorable moments from Joan's many visits to the Chateau de Canisy with friends and family.

Magdeburg, Germany was a grand city for a day off. Joan's mother's primary caregiver, Susan Knoll, had been on the tour to assist Joan and one evening when Susie wasn't running errands we explored Magdeburg, finding a very strange looking building designed by Austrian Friedensreich Hundertwasser called "The Green Citadel of Magdeburg." The overtly pink castle-like structure featured uneven brown stripes and had the optical illusion of looking like it was going to fall over at any minute. Before the Magdeburg concert I strolled around the venue and found some familiar, welcome, happy faces of Joan fans from all over Europe and the U.K. who had arrived early to score the best seats for this general admission concert. That evening Joan thanked the folks in the first couple of rows for their loyalty and determination. The venue offered me the best merchandising area I've had to date - a huge American Indian-style teepee where this Arizona cowpoke could sell his wares. What fun!

After the show we faced one of several near-dreadful 12 hour bus rides on this tour. Thank goodness, everyone was sufficiently tired and, after watching a couple of movies, crawled into the bunks for a good night's sleep as the miles ticked away to the next concert in Zagreb, Croatia.

Sarajevo, Bosnia was next on the tour schedule. It was a busy time for Joan, because Mary Wharton and her crew from the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series American Masters was filming concert footage and conversations between Joan and Vaclav Havel, the former president of Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) and Vedran Smailovic, the famed Cellist of Sarajevo. (Photo at left is Joan reminiscing with Vedram Smailovic while the cameras roll.) After filming his interview with Joan, Havel signed a copy of his autobiography, To The Castle and Back, and presented it to Joan, while she shared with him a demo copy of Day After Tomorrow. Mary and her chief cameraman James kept the cameras rolling to record Joan's portion of a music video called "American Prayer" in support of U.S. Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama. (You can watch the video below!)

Despite the hectic Sarajevo schedule, Joan took the time to walk from her mountainside hotel that overlooked the city and where soldiers once fired on the terrified citizens below during the Bosnian civil war (1992-1995). As she walked, Joan recalled how she had interrupted a 1993 spring tour of the U.S. to travel to Sarajevo as a guest of Refugees International to let the victims of the crisis know they hadn't been forgotten by the rest of the world. To accomplish this, Joan did live interviews with television shows such as "The Today Show" and, along with then-guitarist Paul Pesco, toured the war-ravaged city, sang to the people, and was featured in a televised concert from a small Sarajevo studio. During that visit Joan went to a bombed bakery where she first met Vedran Smailovic, a professional musician, playing his cello in tribute to the innocent people who had been killed while simply lining up for bread.

Early the next morning Joan was having breakfast in the hotel restaurant with her manager Mark Spector and Mary Wharton when members of the Nashville-based band The Ranchhands arrived. Joan found it easy to excuse herself from the business discussions going on at Mark and Mary's table in order to chat with the energetic musicians at their table. The Ranchhands were part of the same music festival that brought Joan back to Sarajevo. After breakfast a CNN report carried news that American pop singer Jo Stafford had died, so on the way back into town Joan and I recalled Ms. Stafford's hits and sang little pieces of "You Belong To Me," "Jambalaya," and "Hambone" as our little tribute to a famous singer lost to time. When we reached a bridge in town where we met our tour guide Alvaro (in pic at right), Joan, Susie and I were off on an educational and fun exploration of the older part of the city. Along the way Joan shopped for gifts, and we all feasted on gelato. In one shop Joan admired a remarkably lovely coffee grinder, and when she was recognized by salesclerk Aida Borovac, Aida proudly presented the grinder to Joan as a gift.

The next morning while waiting in the hotel lobby for the tour bus that would whisk us off to Trencin, Slovakia, a documentary crew captured The Ranchhands presenting Joan with their latest CD Driven and a bright yellow Ranchhands shirt!

After the Trencin concert we faced another 14 hour bus ride to Arezzo, Italy where Joan gave a concert to an overflow crowd in a town plaza. It was exciting to see the audience spill out of the seating area and up the steps of a church across the street. A full moon enhanced the evening, and before the show Joan once again found time to locate a gelato shop, buy a new suitcase, and present me with a very manly, oversized, olive green wallet that features Velcro strips that make a wondrous ripping sound every time I open it!

Next we were off to sweet, sweet Venice, Italy where all luggage, instruments and sound equipment had to be removed from the bus and put on boats. The equipment was placed on a boat that wound through the canal system to St. Mark's Square where Joan sould be singing the next night, while the luggage, instruments and tour members were transported by water taxi to the Hilton Hotel on the city's Grand Canal. The concert was a knockout! St. Mark's Plaza was filled with people and surrounded with old and lavishly restored buildings. Rain threatened most of the day, and in the middle of Joan's performance of her signature song, "Diamonds and Rust" Mother Nature couldn't wait any longer and it started to rain. Some members of the audience fled to find shelter under overhangs in front of the plaza stores, while the ever-so-intuitive Joan Baez quickly switched songs to "Blowin' In The Wind," luring the crowd back to their seats. She continued her concert with classics like "Here's To You," and as the last notes of "Dona Dona" echoed through the massive square, the skies opened up and dowpour ensued!

The next day was a day off in Venice. Joan investigated what is claimed to be one of Europe's most beautiful swimming pools, situated on top of the Hilton and featuring an absolutely awesome view of the Grand Canal and the city of Venice! Next, Joan roamed the side streets of Venice, avoiding the heavy touristy shopping districts, where she found lines filled with colorful laundry hanging from building to building and encountered Marie-Helene Laurens, a lovely lady who instantly recognized Joan. Later on her walk Joan entered an intriguing shop, Reilegatura Libri, where the shopkeepers also recognized her and requested having their photos taken with the singing legend.

The scheduled 16.5 hour, 852 mile trip from Venice to Cognac, France was extended by an uncooperative, overheating bus that forced the drivers to stop every 30 minutes to refill the radiator and resulted in no air conditioning for the passengers baking inside. The weary travelers were excited about staying at the Chateau de Bagnolet in Cognac, but alas the broken bus would not cooperate, and we found ourselves sitting on a very unglamorous cement curb in an ugly truck parking area waiting for someone from the venue to save us from this pathetic fate. Once we arrived, the Chateau became an even more welcoming sight, and once everyone got refreshed, dinner awaited. After a lovely meal sound engineer Jason Raboin, Blair and the band played croquet in a soft rain, while Joan went off to stroll around the Chateau's lake and rehearse "Manhattan/Kabul" in French.

At the Cognac Blues Passion Festival we found the still broken bus had somehow been transported there and was parked alongside a new bus. Everything had to be transferred from the old bus to the new so that the old bus could limp its way back to homebase in the U.K. while we continued our concert travels to Nice, France, on the French Riviera. Joan could not resist the temptation to take a swim in the fantastic body of water that was in front of our hotel, so she headed to the beach where she found no sand - just rocks and boulders, which didn't seem to deter anyone from swimming and basking in the sun. Later, as Joan was entering the hotel elevator, she heard someone call out. It was former tour manager John Nave who had just enough time to share greetings and hugs before heading off with the artist he was now touring with. As Ethel Merman sings in Gypsy: "Small world, isn't it?"

After her concert at the Nice Jazz Festival Joan couldn't be found anywhere, and we needed to get the bus rolling to Barcelona, Spain. I was assigned the task of locating our lost star, who I found had drifted onto the festival's grounds with promoter Gerard Drouot and ended up dancing to the music of one of the festival's bands.

Despite the heat (which I love) and the humidity (which I hate) of Barcelona, Joan asked me to join her at a streetside cafe and later, to join her in enjoying a classical guitar concert at the city's Cathedral. On the way back to the hotel Joan heard a street musician Joan (pronounced "Juan") Parera playing his flute and decided to drop some money into his container. As she stooped down, Parera looked up...then looked down...and looked up again and exclaimed, "Ah! Joan Baez!" He then nervously fumbled with his flute and played "El Preso Numero Nueve" from Joan's first official album, which he later confessed was a favorite of his. He and Joan chatted, and Joan invited him and his daughter to her Barcelona concert at the magnificent Palau de la Musica which ranks among the grandest venues I've ever encountered. It is such a renowned performance hall that Joan fans came from France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. to enjoy her concert there. During soundcheck I wandered outside the venue to enjoy a Coke when good friend Catherine Turek and her husband happened by. We were talking about Joan when Diego Curatella overheard us and joined our conversation. He confessed that he had longed to hear Joan Baez in concert and decided it was finally time - and so he traveled from Argentina to see this performance!

Well, that brings us up to date on this tour. I'm sorry to rush you off my little balcony here in Segovia, but I must get ready to leave for the last concert of this tour. You see, I travel directly to the Madrid airport after the show and catch a flight to Rome, then on to Atlanta, and then, finally, to Tucson, where I'll wind down and get ready for the fall tour that will take us to the U.K., Europe, the U.S. and Canada.

Before we close I must express how sad it is to note that tonight's concert in Segovia is the last with the current band. We'll miss Erik Della Penna (guitar, cigar box mandolin - yes, it really is made out of a cigar box! - dobro, lap steel and vocals), Dean Sharenow (drums, percussion, vocals), Mike DuClos (bass) and our temporary tour manager Blair Woods, who was filling in for Crook Stewart. For the fall tour, Jason will return as sound engineer, Crook will be back as tour manager, Stephanie Hudacek will assist Joan, and I will be there hawking the merchandise, with new items like Joan's brand new Steve Earle-produced CD Day After Tomorrow and a gorgeous new tour program, along with Joan Baez classic titles on CD. And to accommodate the sound of the new album, new musicians John Doyle, Dirk Powell and Todd Phillips will join us! We look forward to seeing you along Joan's 50th Anniversary tour trail. And lastly, I need to thank some special fans who assisted me during busy times at the various merch tables, so here's a tip of my Joan Baez baseball cap to Michaela, Catherine, Petar and Carine.

See you soon!

All photos by Jim Stewart, 2008

Be sure to take a look at the many other photos from this tour. Enjoy!

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