We’re home from our European tour. We had a wonderful time, but it sure felt good to lie down in my own bed and sleep around the clock. We played 15 dates in 17 days, with both off-days near the start of the tour so that we finished with 12 shows in a row. On the road like that you live only in the present. All the yesterdays blur together. Now that some German friends are sending links to videos on YouTube, I can remember those shows, but I‘m watching myself and wondering, “What’s he going to do next?”

I’d like to share a couple of those videos with you, two different versions of Slim Harpo’s “Shake Your Hips,” a song we often stretch out to see what will happen on a particular night.

The first is from the Moist Corner Irish Pub in Suhl, Germany (thanks, Bernd). When we walked into the small bar we found a table and a bench on the stage. “We’ll have to move these,” Mark said. “No,” the owner told us. “There are six people sitting here and three people sitting here.” He said that last November advance tickets for the show sold out in 50 minutes, and that was at 40-some bucks a pop. So, okay, we squeezed in to the space allotted and, as it turned out, had a ball.

The second video is from Kammgarn in Hard, Austria (thanks, 008gral). This was a big stage and a big room. There was a good-sized audience, but they were keeping their distance and so left an empty table down front. That was all the opening Mark and I needed. (If you noticed that I didn’t use a guitar strap in Suhl, you can see in this video the reason why.) As usual, Mark got the last word.