I never went on tour. Not the way bands go on tour. I did not rent a van and drive to Cleveland and play a bar and sleep on somebody's floor and drive to Pittsburgh and play another bar and sleep on another floor. I did not do that because I did not need to. My tour was a walk. I walked from one corner to another corner and the corner was the venue and the audience was whoever was standing there and the tour was over when I stopped walking.

A tour is a band going to the audience. The audience is in a city and the band drives to that city and sets up in a room and the audience walks to the room and the band plays and the audience goes home and the band drives to the next city. That is a tour. It is a delivery system. The band delivers itself to the audience. I never had to deliver myself to anybody. The audience delivered itself to me. They were already on the sidewalk. They were already walking past. All I had to do was play loud enough to make them stop.

The economics of touring are insane. You rent the van. You buy the gas. You pay the tolls. You pay for the motel. You pay for the food. You pay for the gear that broke in the back of the van. You split what is left between four or five people and each person goes home with less money than they spent getting there. That is a tour. It is a small business that loses money in every city but keeps going because the band believes that someday the money will come. The money never comes. The music comes. The money goes somewhere else.

I played in Washington Square Park for fifty years. Fifty years in the same venue. No van. No gas. No tolls. No motel. I walked there from my apartment. The walk was the tour. The park was every city at once because every city sent its tourists to the park and the tourists stood in front of me and I played and they put coins in the hat and that was the tour. I toured the world without leaving the Village.

The biggest tours in the world are stadiums now. Sixty thousand people in a room. A hundred million dollars in ticket sales. And the musician is a dot on a stage that the people in the back cannot see so they watch the screen and the screen is a television and they paid three hundred dollars to watch television in a parking lot. That is the tour now. That is what the delivery system became. A television in a parking lot where the band is a dot and the beer costs fourteen dollars and the parking costs forty and everybody pretends this is what music was supposed to be.

My tour had no screen. My tour had no parking lot. My tour had no beer for fourteen dollars. My tour had a guitar and a hat and a corner and whoever showed up. The best tour in the history of rock and roll was a man walking to a park and playing until somebody stopped. No van. No rider. No green room. No barricade between the musician and the audience. The audience was close enough to touch and sometimes they did and that was the show and the show was free and free is the only ticket price that does not lie.