I spend a lot of time driving around the back roads of New England. Lately I’ve caught myself mentally updating an informal inventory I seem to be keeping of venues I’ve performed at over the years.

Whether cruising past some Opera House in New Hampshire, a hotel in Boston or a college campus in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, I find myself thinking: “Hey, didn’t I play there back in …?”

Although I still occasionally perform at some of these places, a disconcerting number of them have simply vanished. Others, while still standing, have long since “retired” from show biz.

Driving through Kingfield last spring, I noticed someone sweeping the sidewalk in front of the old Herbert Hotel. Seeing that venerable old pile again stimulated a flood of memories. I was momentarily transported back to a long cold winter in the mid 1970s. I spent a lot of evenings at The Herbert that winter. My real life experiences in their basement lounge inspired my routine “The Dubious Brothers vs. The Skidder Crowd,” a remarkably true-to-life chronicle of the adventures my bandmates and I shared while performing there.

People are often surprised to learn that The Dubious Brothers was an actual band with a rotating roster, including pianist Stephen Bither of The Wicked Good Band, saxophone player Richie Gerber, my best friend and songwriting partner from high school, Bill Arsenault, and his younger brother Ron (the originaldubious brothers) on various guitars.

We played regularly at The Herbert; and while consistently failing to connect with the upscale Volvo driving “ski crowd,” we certainly managed to run head-on into the “skidder crowd.”

The day I stopped by, the owners offered me a free nostalgia tour of the downstairs “lounge,” currently serving as a storage room for restaurant equipment.

Under a thick layer of dust and cobwebs, the place looked eerily similar to the way it did when we last played there circa 1976.

I’ll admit to getting a few goose bumps as I wandered around the former Hogpenny Lounge, recalling those bygone days when a gig meant lugging bulky amps and P.A. systems up and down narrow flights of stairs and playing “45 on 15 off” until the wee hours of the morning.

Back then, the patrons of The Hogpenny Lounge weren’t likely to be sipping martinis and discussing stock options. They were, in fact, an almost exclusively male, hard drinking, loud and rowdy, bar bourbon bunch not much prone to small talk.

But, it was a gig; and as I recall it paid nearly $50 a night!

Fortunately, a very different sort of venue from that era The Grand Theatre in Ellsworth is still alive and well.

My history at The Grand spans 30-plus years. My family’s connection goes even further back than that. My mom, born and raised in nearby Brooklin, tells of childhood trips to Ellsworth to watch movies there in the 1930s.

I’ve lost track the number of times I’ve performed there, sharing the stage with a host of great performers including folkies like Noel Stookey and Tom Paxton, storytellers Marshall Dodge, Robert Bryan, Joe Perham, Kendall Morse, John MacDonald and others.

I once narrated an original Maine humor version of Peter and the Wolf with The Bangor Symphony at The Grand, and I’ll be on the bill again for their big 75th anniversary show next fall.

Of course no trip down memory lane is complete without a stop at The Opera House at Boothbay Harbor, simply because it’s where my life onstage really began. Back in the 1960s, it was still the Pythian Opera House. That’s where I saw my very first live play, a local amateur theater group production of Gramercy Ghost, sometime in the late 1950s.

I sat in the audience at Opera House talent shows watching Brud Pierce play the spoons. Around 1966 as a nervous teenager I stood behind the curtain waiting to make my rock ‘n’ roll debut in a local battle of the bands on that same stage.

Memory, of course, can play tricks; and I’m aware that many of mine benefit from the strange alchemy embodied in the old saying “Tragedy plus time equals comedy.”

A case in point: Following one show many years ago, I was approached by an elderly man asking me to autograph two ticket stubs.

I happily complied, feeling like a big shot … until he turned to leave and I overheard him telling his wife, “I can get 50 cents for these at a yard sale!”