"I probably put 1,000 miles on my car just for the one show," she says. "I used to be slightly chagrined at the fact that I've actually flown across the Atlantic to see a concert, but there are actually quite a few people who travel great distances for the shows. I know of people from Australia and New Zealand who have come to the US and UK for shows."

In fairness to the intelligent, engaging, and quite sane Dyer, I'll admit that I've gone across the pond to see Stewart in concert. "Meeting" online, she and I came face-to-face in England during his 1999 UK tour. And we weren't the only faraway fans: I recall encountering people from Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany, each as passionate as Dyer and myself. But we crossed an ocean.

Neville Judd outdoes Kim and me by quite a bit, having crossed the ocean blue numerous times in pursuit of his passion: documenting the musical journey of Al Stewart. I first met Judd, who lives in England, that fall in 1999 as well. He was there to document the dates for posterity, as he often does on Al tours. In fact, he just sent me an e-mail: Al is playing The Old Theater of Oriental in Oriental, North Carolina, tonight; Neville is driving him to the show.

Judd's Al-addiction began after the release of the seminal Stewart classic Modern Times. "I heard ‘Roads to Moscow’ on Alan Freeman's Saturday afternoon show on Radio One in the UK in 1973," he recalls via e-mail. "So I went to shows on that Tour and was hooked! Completely. Still am."

Asked about his favorite concert experience, he pauses. "Impossible to answer. Maybe the day that Yoko got in touch and said that she wanted to help with the Book. It's not every day that a Beatle wife gives you a call!"

The Book would be Al Stewart: True-Life Adventures of a Folk-Rock Troubadour, Judd's 2002 authorized biography, which features interviews with the artist himself, his mum, and many of his friends and contemporaries, among them the aforementioned Mrs. Lennon. Given extraordinary access to Stewart's old poems, notebooks, and photographs, Judd produced a detailed recounting of the songwriter's life and career story.

Long before then, though, in 1984 to be exact, David Dasch asked journalist Judd to write articles for Chronicles. [Note: The author has been published in Chronicles as well.] This led to Judd going into the Al business. "People began writing to me asking where they could get Orange in Eastern Europe etc., and this became both a time consuming (no problem with that) but also costly undertaking (sending 50 letters' postage worldwide each week adds up)," he says, explaining his move into producing and marketing Stewart CDs, videos and DVDs under the label Tess Films (named for his favorite movie) and promoting them via Stewart concerts and a UK newsletter he called Jackdaw. "So the distribution of things such as [Stewart CD compilation] To Whom It May Concern [for which Judd contributed the liner notes] and the Rarities CDs were initiated to subsidise all this."