Hell's column starts like this:
Hands Across the Ocean
It happened on tour in Japan in 1990. I hadn’t toured for six years and I haven’t toured since but I’d gotten an offer from Japan that I couldn’t refuse.The drummer in the band I put together for the trip was a pure product of rock and roll named Chuck Clearwater. He’d been brought up on a commune and spent half his boyhood in his parents’ van along with the hitchhikers it was policy to never refuse. His parents didn’t make him go to school either and they liked drugs. He was into the radio and eventually became a heavy-metal type guy. He was 25 when he played for me, and lived in a home-built recording studio in New York that looked like a cross between a homeless person’s street tent and a trailer camp dumpsite.
He was great to travel with because everything he did was funny. He actually carried home with him two big heavy half-working radio/cassette players he’d found in the garbage in Tokyo. That’s home 10,000 miles back from Japan including a long stop-over on the west coast. [...]
