We are rapidly approaching staples. That’s "staples day", the mid-point in the tour. We call it staples day because in our old tour book the staples would show that we were half way through our journey. To many people the three best days of any tour are the day you leave, staples day, and the day you return. There are many ways to see the road, and this is one of them.

Tonight Hunter was incredible. He did Terrapin Station. The audience was so with him. They would sing Terrapin and he would sing the refrain. It is so cool to hear this body of work done by him. Sometimes he is playing our music with his words, other times he is rendering the songs the way he originally wrote them. Once he gave the words to us it was fair game. I was sitting on the side of the stage during his Terrapin rendition and my whole back and neck was tingling with emotion. It felt like a slight electric shock was moving through my body. It was electric.

Mason’s Children was very cool with all the time changes, twists, and turns galore. We nailed it tonight. This was the last song of the first set and I missed the ending by 1/16 note. Bobby then informs the crowd,"just like a Swiss watch".

Unbroken Chain is a difficult song as there are time changes and tempo changes in rapid succession. There are the bars of 11, the bars of 15, the expanding and contracting that is part of this tune. The Strange Remain is taking on a completely new identity with its new feedback setting and rapid tempo. I can sing this with conviction now. The drums were dead-on with Susan joining in for a little Supralingua, words with no meaning, no literal translation.

Interesting phenom at the end of drums. Towards the end I go to the Trompong, the Gamelon instrument made of bronze that I brought back from Bali. Its home is right under right eye, left eye and home plate. These are the large steel drums Ramrod and I built for the percussion score of Apocalypse Now. Together they are called "The Beast". It sounded like a ghost band was playing along with me. I looked to the front line and nobody was there. It was just Bill and I. I have experienced this before, but it was many years ago. It must be some psychoacoustic phenomenon that happens when the overtone series of the instrument kind of sings another tune, or I perceive another band playing along with me that is just not there. It sounds like it is coming from "up there". Strange.

Casey Jones chugged on down the tracks and made the seamless transition to Help on the Way.

Mountain Girl is back on the bus and we make tracks for Philly.

We arrive at 4 am in Philly, but where are my suitcases? They must have been left back in the hotel when I went to Kent state. Kathy (Love Bunny) and Chuck (The Evil One), our road managers, jump into action in a frantic search for the truth. They are good, very good, but I love to see them scramble. The road is full of these kinds of things and you just have to roll with em. Before I go on the road I think of all the things that might go wrong, and you know what, they are always different in some way than you imagined they would be. It is never the same twice, although some things never change. You always lose bags, but never the same way.