Charm City lived up to its name. We found a clean hotel in the downtown area. When we pulled up in front to unload our suitcases, a couple of patrons were standing out front smoking and they checked us out keenly. I realized that the ostentatious opulence of our car (it is so big that it has its own zip code) led them to expect to see a celebrity, and when Egon got out in his rock outfit with the European scarf and the weird haircut and the big dark sunglasses, they were sure they should be tweeting something, they just couldn’t figure out who we were.

Impostor rock star

After checking in, we ate decent crab cakes in a tourist trap on the harbour with an excellent view of the waterfront. We then made our way into the city. Because of the Wire, Norwegians think of scary things when they think of Baltimore, and it is true that there is some priced-to-sell real estate there, but having just come from Manhattan where people can be brusque and businesslike, what struck us most was the friendliness of the locals.

We made our way to the Mount Royal Tavern. This is a typical Baltimore dive bar, with Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap for three dollars, wobbly stools, a sticky floor, and a decent juke box. It has the kind of men’s room that makes you consider going out to the alley out back instead, and there are coasters with corny humor stuck on the wall. The bartenders look like they’ve been there since the first Reagan administration. What distinguishes the MRT is that it is located near an art school, and the place is full of hipsters who are probably too young to know whether the Reagan administration was before or after the Civil War. Some of the art students’ art is on display on the walls, in a jarring juxtaposition. The place has played on this, and has matchbooks printed up with the slogan “Where art is bullshit and good bullshit is an art.”

But if you look up, you see that the entire length and breadth of the ceiling in the whole bar is exquisitely painted in a perfect replica of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Some art student (I think his name was Joe Helms) must have laid on his back on scaffolding for I don’t know how long, painstakingly reproducing every angel and saint in the original, with all the fleshy bulges, and God and Adam in the middle. It is truly a work of art, and completely unexpected in the ticky-tack surrounding. In return Joe got a lifetime tab, i.e. his money’s no good at the Mt Royal Tavern.

A detail from the astonishing ceiling at the Mt. Royal Tavern

Back at the hotel the next morning as we were eating a meager breakfast from styrofoam dishes with plastic cutlery, a woman complemented Egon on his Stooges T-shirt: “I like your shirt” – Egon responded, “I love the band,” and the woman asked, “Oh, is that your band?” Egon’s eyes lit up at the thought of being mistaken for a member of the Stooges, and he jovially denied it and we chuckled over it over our cereal. But then when Egon left our table to get coffee, the woman came over to me and said in a conspiratorial tone, “I know you guys are travelling incognito, but where have you just been?” I didn’t get what she meant at first, so I gave her a straight answer, Atlantic City, since that is where we had arrived from. She was very happy with that answer, and then I realized she was wondering where we had just played, and was expecting me to name some club in Baltimore. She was way too friendly and chatty so we said we had to move on and left.

To be continued….