This Swede who set up my recent trip there turned out to be some kind of miracle man. Micke is a sax player in a popular rock-and-Euroll outfit called the Refreshments, and when he's not out with that band -- whose records were prominently displayed at may gas stations we stopped at -- he's bringing acts he likes into Sweden and serving them as all-purpose tour overseer: driver, loader, soundman, contractor, paymaster, hospitality host, and hotelier. He also owned one of the venues he booked me at, where he tended bar while I played -- I mean, this was small-scale vertical integration gone nuts.

His compound, as you might call it (a barbed-wire-enclosed warehouse next to a lumberyard, with clean rooms and showers, a comfortable rehearsal room and studio, staff, and small fleet of tour-customized RV's), was a mile outside a little village called Skutskar. Mornings I would usually wake and stroll into town to eat at one or another of the village's two restaurants. One was a Thai place run by an Iranian and his vaguely enslaved-looking young Thai bride, who cooked. The other was a fast-fried-food joint with a skinny teenage counter guy who thought it was very funny and remarkable that I should travel 4300 miles and end up in Skutskar. I confess to a similar thought about the middle Easteners and Chinese that I would occasionally meet in small villages around the country. (Also, I might note, this was the only time I saw a Swedish person laugh heartily during my two-week visit.)

I went to a gig of Micke's in Stockholm my first night in (and my only night off). After sitting backstage with the pianist Gene Taylor for an hour or two, I thought I'd walk around the town. It's a pretty place, scattered across a few islets, with a 500-year-old section, some steep hills, somber architecture enlivened by bold primary-color neon, and a number of churches. Near a churchyard cemetery I saw a rock-club handbill advertising hip rock acts, with Peter, John, and Bjorn as the top name; it reminded me how trivial and absurd most pop music looks as soon as you're standing one small step outside its culture. Around the corner, on Gotegatan Street, there were suddenly young people and trendy boutiques and outdoor drinking. I walked past a movie theater marquee and amused myself trying to decipher the names of the moldy American offerings: "Perskje Skilskjhammer Flik da Zohan" and such. Around another corner and up a hill, and all was quiet again, and I stood overlooking the river and the old quarter.

After the gig Micke came sweatily off stage through the applause and to the dressing-room door, where I was standing. "Good job!" I said. "Ah," he nodded, and said in accented English, "the musical police were out in full force tonight." Who could these be at a no-frills rock-and-roll show? I wondered. Critics? Naysayers? "'I can play that solo better than you played that,'" he imitated the musical police in a mock-arrogant tone. "Yes, they can," he conceded, then thumbed his large chest proudly. "But look who has the jobs!" Another day Micke told me of an American drummer who, "how do you say -- swings like the donkey's dick"; and on another occasion he lambasted the work ethic of young people, saying that "when I got my first job, I was proud as a rooster!" Most Swedes speak this sort of fluent and idiomatic English, with many animal-kingdom similes and an odd off-key note here and there.

At the compound the first night the guys from Ducks Deluxe were occupying some of the beds, having just wrapped up their jaunt. I got to hang out briefly with Jim the drummer and Kevin the bassist, whom I hadn't seen in perhaps ten years. I was thrilled to hear from them that the great British singer, Paul Young, with whom they work in another band, likes my music, sought me out once on a Chicago visit, and in fact performs one of my songs with that band (whose name I forget). When my sweet wife got me a turntable for Christmas two years ago, the record I immediately put on was Paul's "No Parlez," the 1980s production overkill of which brought on a lot of groaning around the house -- but I love it! While in Sweden I also got to meet one of my favorite rock guitarists, Billy Bremner, and the dashing and bubbly Linda Gail Lewis (whose daughter, a pretty singer, is if anything even bubblier). Photos to come, if I can surmount the Mac.

The northern town of Umea was cozy and collegiate. There we saw the only public litter of our trip, and it was actually a nice change, in the manner of a couple loud bars I played after some raised-pinky kind of joints. I walked in a record store and the manager recognized me and gave me a very sweet deal on some CDs (Rodney Crowell, Billie Jo Spears, Jim Ford, Allen Toussaint, Buddy and Julie Miller, and Joe Fournier). The driver at this point in the tour was not Micke but one of his staff, a 46-year-old named Putte with big eyes, an imposing physique, a heavy scar across his right cheek, and a fierce nicotine addiction. He looked a little like a James Bond villain but was exceedingly kind in fact (and exceedingly loquacious!) and a tireless worker -- in all these respects, the ideal tour manager. When an audience member came too close or wanted to talk with me between songs, Putte's figure would loom promptly behind the upstart and a meaty paw come down decisively on his shoulder. In Umea the bartender seemed unsure when I first asked as to whether I was owed a hot meal after the show; then the loom and the paw, and within five minutes Putte, my son, and I were knee-deep in potatoes, fish, cream sauces, and wine.

At my gig in Stockholm, at the same bar where Gene Taylor and Micke had played a week earlier, we met Mr. Tony Carey, who I was told had been added to the bill the day before. Who is Tony Carey? you want to know, and I'm about to tell you. He is a veteran of some oldtime rock band that has something or other to do with Deep Purple, and is now in his mid-fifties with a  stocky figure, thin black hair, and very dark sunglasses. Tony rather awesomely broke almost every rule of opening-act etiquette during the first five minutes of my meeting him in the dressing room. (For a complete list of opening-act manners, see Danny Barnes's helpful website, Folktronics.com.) First he conducted a loud cellphone interview, in which he said, "Nah, I would never go so far as to call myself one of the top hundred keyboardists in rock history. Those jazz guys are the true keyboardists!" Then he shook hands with me and let me know that he had only accepted this date because his fans needed a place to see him on a Sunday night. Then, smiling and shaking his head sadly, he told me that it was overoptimistic of me to try facing a crowd in Stockholm with one acoustic guitar. (It was what he was doing too.) Then he showed me his latest record. Then his crew guys came by to start setting up his stuff: a guitar, a stand, a tuner, and eight cans of Red Bull, of which he knocked back seven in a four-hour window. Near his showtime, he walked to the side of the stage, where the soundman was standing, and checked out its height, which was about 18 inches above the floor. "Step!" he said simply. The soundman obediently went and got one. Then Tony looked at it and said, "Tape!" and one of his crewmen (who were moving with sharklike superiority through the audience in ponytails and black rock tour-souvenir T-shirts) secured it with gaffer's tape. Then, at last, Tony took the stage, and, from what I read in the paper the next day, performed disastrously. It didn't sound memorably disastrous from where I was -- I heard "Mustang Sally" and smatterings of applause -- but who knows, it's a nice story; the review noted details such as Tony telling the audience that German audiences were better. The whole thing, the review and the dressing-room scene, were really fantastic. Though, if that review had been about me, I think I would have shot myself until dead...if the Red Bulls hadn't done the job first.

One of the best gigs was in the small Southern village of Getinje, where my paying audience consisted of exactly two people. Almost needless to say, but this was a commitment we drove seven hours to honor (and we also drove two hours more afterward). I would have walked, but these people, a married couple, had traveled 200 kilometers, and indeed had made the same trip a few days before to buy tickets on site. They owned all of my records, and I invited them to make up a setlist for me, but they declined with diffidence. A rail worker and his wife, both in their mid-fifties, they were, as my son observed, the kind of couple you want to be when you get that age -- clearly in love with each other and with music, but not ostentatious in either, by all appearances perfectly content with their lives. The manager set up a few candles at their table, and I sat on the edge of the stage, off PA, and played for them for about 80 minutes. It was really something.

In Vannas, I played at a little bar owned by a man whose father had served Saddam Hussein as Minister of Defense in the 1970s. He was convinced that my show was going to be a big bloodletting for him, and his wife, Maria, looked increasingly put-upon as she served our party a series of Putte-insured meals and goodies. "There will be no more than 15 people here for your show," she told me gravely. "Do not be disappointed." I got weary hanging around the place and walked with my son around the village awhile, ending up at a pizzeria run by two Kurds who were cousins. Over dinner, the elder of the two, a man with haunted, fast-changing eyes, regaled us in very poor English with the miserable story of Kurdistan and Saddam's reign of terror, focusing on the time between Bush 41's pullout and the present day. He urged us as Americans not to walk away from Iraq, and took vigorous opposition to my son's remark that contrary to pre-invasion advertisement no WMD's had been found. "Saddam destroys 4500 of our villages with those weapons," he said. "The Jews, they are smart," he later said; "they remind and remind the world, after their holocaust, with literature and museums. In Kirkuk we are starting to be civilized again, and go to college -- but we have no storytellers, and the world does not know." I listened to him over 90 quiet minutes with, at various times, interest, shock, incomprehension, and fellow feeling. But toward the end I got a little impatient with his implied appeal and unbreachable victim's perspective. "There are too many places where America's needed," I said. "Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia, North Korea, the middle east...Cuba," I added as a small joke. Leaving there, Nick and I agreed that America's commitment to Iraq would very likely have to stop well short of where this man insists.

Back at the bar, some young drunks and toughs were milling around, and I played to about fifteen of them. One of them came up near my face as I sang and leaned on the monitor, observing me fixedly. I declined to look at him. Putte was shifting restlessly. When I had finished my song, he asked for a Johnny Cash, so I started "I Walk The Line." There were shouts and whistles, and the tiny dance floor started to bustle and throb to the sound of a lone Tony Careylike man with guitar. "Jerry Reed!" someone shouted. The rest of the night I played Roger Miller, Hank Williams, Merle Travis, Gene Watson, and more Johnny Cash. At the close of the night, the monitor-leaner, whose stance I had originally misinterpreted as menacing, offered me his apartment, his girlfriend, and his undying devotion. It's amazing, what effect Johnny Cash has on people. Do you think people are crazy for him in Africa?

The next night was another bar, a livelier and happier one. Again there was dancing; and most of the youngsters were quite sauced by the beginning of my second set. Nick went to the men's room, a wide-open area in the basement where twentysomethings stood unsteadily before a trough while women wandered in by accident in bare feet. One man was trying to piss but his penis was evidently disfigured by chlamydia, his urine making a heavy "splok!" as it sporadically hit the metal. "You were great up there!" he said to Nick, standing alongside. "That was my dad, not me," said Nick. "You were fucking great up there!" he said. Upstairs a gaptoothed Norwegian in a red top was rubbing her titties on my arm and breathing stinking vodka fumes in my face as Putte smiled benignly. After throwing her and loading out, we gave a ride home to a couple nice guys who had seen two other shows of mine that week.

So. 14 days, 14 shows, zero days down. Memorably good meals: 4.  Flat tires: 1. Dates with bad turnout, 3; decent to very good turnout at the rest. After the first few shows some reviews started coming back which had an instant and happy effect on attendance. Good results overall. (I would have played to smaller audiences and made less money touring Florida for 2 weeks, as a comparison, which attests to Micke's doggedness, those reviews, and maybe a deep Swedish boredom.)  I talk about my shows, my hotel, my drivers, and so on, rather than the real Sweden, because as always, that's mainly what I saw. Thanks to all who came out, and many thanks to Micke, Putte, and the Refreshments. I'll be back!