Music and the road: Essays on the interplay of music and the popular culture of the American road 9781501335266, 9781501335297, 9781501335280

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. The semiotics of the road
3. Easy riders and hard roads in the early recorded blues
4. Easy street on mud tires: The “heartland” and the frontier of the road in country music
5. The tour bus and the road
6. Band on the ruins: Meditations on music and motion
7. “All that road going”: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and The Beach Boys’ Smile
8. “Happiness is the road”: Bob Dylan
9. “Apology and forgiveness got no place here at all”: On the road to Washington D.C. with Bruce Springsteen
10. “But people are strangers”: Lyric narratives and ethics on Paul Simon’s roads
11. Gender is over: Transgender narrative homecomings, punk music, and the road
12. Knowing the score: Road movie soundtracks and cinematic verities
13. Conclusion: “The miracle of serendipity”
Works cited
Index

Citation preview

Music and the road

Music and the road Essays on the interplay of music and the popular culture of the American road

GORDON E. SLETHAUG

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Gordon E. Slethaug, 2017 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Cinematic road landscape © Aleksandra H. Kossowska. Cover image: Continuous line drawing of guitar © Yury Shchipakin. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3526-6 PB: 978-1-5013-5262-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3528-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-3527-3 Typeset by Deanta Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction Gordon E. Slethaug

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The semiotics of the road Gordon E. Slethaug 19 Easy riders and hard roads in the early recorded blues Steve Knepper and James Tuten 39 Easy street on mud tires: The “heartland” and the frontier of the road in country music Virginia Shay 57 The tour bus and the road Anaia Shaw 73 Band on the ruins: Meditations on music and motion Warren

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Leming 7 8 9

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“All that road going”: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and The Beach Boys’ Smile Dale Carter 107 “Happiness is the road”: Bob Dylan Susan Kuyper 129 “Apology and forgiveness got no place here at all”: On the road to Washington D.C. with Bruce Springsteen Chad Wriglesworth

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“But people are strangers”: Lyric narratives and ethics on Paul Simon’s roads Alexander Hollenberg 175 Gender is over: Transgender narrative homecomings, punk music, and the road Evelyn Deshane 189

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Knowing the score: Road movie soundtracks and cinematic verities Kurt Jacobsen 203 Conclusion: “The miracle of serendipity” Gordon E. Slethaug 221

Works cited Index

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Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge several individuals and agencies that have made this book possible. First, I would like to thank the contributors to this volume, who have come from Canada, Denmark, and the United States: Dale Carter, Evelyn Deshane, Alexander Hollenberg, Kurt Jacobsen, Steve Knepper, Susan Kuyper, Warren Leming, Virginia Shay, Anaia Shaw, James Tuten, and Chad Wriglesworth. Both recent and seasoned, all of these scholars shared in making this an especially worthy study through their strong commitment, excellent ideas, and hard work. Second, I would like to thank Special Rider Music for permission given to Susan Kuyper to cite Bob Dylan’s lyrics and Bruce Springsteen’s legal representatives for permissions to Chad Wriglesworth, so that the chapters on them could have their needed depth and breadth. Third, I would like to thank the Bloomsbury Academic editorial staff who have together made this volume possible. These include Leah Babb-Rosenfeld and Katie Gallof who saw promise in the edition and helped keep the ball rolling; Susan Krogulski who has overseen the editing process; Giles Herman and Grishma Fredric of the production department; and Margaret McDonell as copy editor.

1 Introduction Gordon E. Slethaug

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n the past few years, several studies have appeared concerning the road in American culture, history, film, and literature, but none has been written about music and the American road, which is strange because this rich resource informs and colors the perception of the road and the experience of fans at every turn. Early on, before the twentieth century, folk songs celebrated the various modes of travel in America, but these were occasional and applicable to very specific groups of people. With the advent of the mass media in the twentieth century, road songs followed three main avenues—all of them recorded and broadcast to small and large audiences: blues reflected the pain and grief of those on the road; country-western music picked up on the dreams, possibilities, and anxieties of the road through Southern habitats and others with frontier ideologies; and, finally, the emergence and ongoing popularity of rock ’n’ roll extolled the speed and thrill of the road but also the heartbreak and despair that sometimes accompanied such travel. Altogether, these varieties of road music and more have been a formative part of the fabric of American society across the spectrum of race, class, gender, age, geography, and technology. With the invention of the railroad in the nineteenth century and the automobile in the twentieth and their associated industries, new kinds of road experiences and music emerged with bands traveling by train, bus, van, car, and truck, and with passengers sitting privately or in groups listening to the radio, that wonderful 1930s invention of Motorola. Early performers of road music during the first half of the century included legendary blues singers such as Robert Johnson of the Mississippi delta, Blind Lemon Jefferson of

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Texas, and Buddy Moss of the Piedmont area. Some of their experiences and gigs were decidedly rural, but others were urban. This tradition continues into the present with many contemporary male and female African American blues artists. At the same time, mainly white country-western singers were taking the folk-song tradition and turning out some wonderful road songs. Later white rock ’n’ roll bands and singers as well as others with people of color in the second half of the century took their music from small country towns to big cities and even to foreign destinations, writing memorable road songs that included Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and “No Particular Place to Go”; The Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Long Promised Road,” and “California Dreamin’”; Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild”; the Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow”; Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “On the Road Again”; Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A,” “Born to Run,” and “Thunder Road”; and Paul Simon’s “America,” “Papa Hobo,” “Hearts and Bones,” and “Graceland.” There were, of course, films that focused on singers and bands themselves, including such documentaries as Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan that lays out the trajectory of Dylan’s myth-making move from northern Minnesota to New York City and onto the road circuit. Then there are fictional films about singers and bands such as that of Clint Eastwood who “played a country singer in the sentimental Depression-era film Honkytonk Man as well as the impresario of a traveling show in Bronco Billy” (Cohan and Hark, 10). Early on, there were the various “Road To . . .” films that featured popular actor Bob Hope and singer Bing Crosby and fabricated romances of travel on the road. Then, too, there were later fictional films memorializing the lives of countercultural heroes and gangsters alike such as Bonnie and Clyde whose exploits were accompanied by tunes and lyrics that stayed with the audiences long after the big and small screens went dark. Various travelers, singers, bands, and listeners/viewers are as much tied to the road and vehicles as they are to the music, and this study will look at the semiotics of the road in American culture, the implications of the music of the road itself, and the experience of taking it on the road—in short: the interaction of the road, travelers, and music. As Kurt Jacobsen notes of road music and film, road music “either one, invokes the road as explicit theme, or two, is encountered while passing through strange regions, or three, heightens the road experience, whatever the origin of the song or subject of its lyrics” (Chapter 12). This road music, then, has something special to do with freedom, independence, rebellion, and mobility that are part and parcel of the experience and cultural understanding of the road, but it encompasses many other aspects of self and culture.

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Scholarship of music and the road Although there is growing scholarship available concerning the road, only limited research currently exists on the link between music and the road or even road music and road films. In Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark’s The Road Movie Book, of the 17 chapters in the book, music is alluded to in only two, and the only chapter that deals centrally with music and the road is Corey K. Creekmur’s “On the Run and on the Road: Fame and the Outlaw Couple in American Cinema.” This chapter, however, doesn’t address the music of films but follows Creekmur’s contention that the outlaw road film follows the structural and stylistic features of musicals (91). Creekmur does note that “the contemporary road film seems especially suited to the now dominant mode of constructing and marketing film soundtracks through a selection of semi-autonomous, nostalgic hits or newly recorded pop songs” (101). In exploring Easy Rider in the chapter called “The Road to Dystopia: Landscaping the Nation in Easy Rider,” Barbara Klinger briefly alludes to the road music of Steppenwolf and the Byrds that is paired with and assists in the celebration of “panoramic point-of-view shots” of magnificent Southwestern wilderness landscape scenes that Wyatt and Billy travel through in the early part of Easy Rider compared to the use of Jimi Hendrix’s “nihilistic ‘If Six Was Nine’” paired with the road montage of the threatening culture of the Deep South that eventually destroys the two riders at the end of the film (in Cohan and Hark, 188, 192). Similarly, in Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie, David Laderman only once refers to “popular music” as an integral part of road films, though he does bring in rock ’n’ roll several times. As he notes, “the distinctive emergence of the road movie in the late 1960s is culturally interwoven with the advent of rock and popular music and the genre usually deploys the former as another aesthetic expression of the visceral and sensual thrill of driving, of moving at high speed” connected with “youth rebellion drive” (16, 19). He repeats such a comment in considering three American films and one German: the “mood-mixing, controversial banjo music” of Bonnie and Clyde, that conveys “the thrill of road travel for the counterculture” (69); the use of rock music to unleash “spiritual energy through a politicized driving” in Easy Rider (70); the “peripatetic mobility” of the countercultural figures and lifestyle suggested by Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced” and “Break on through to the Other Side” in Two-Lane Blacktop (96); and the “visionary, rebellious energy,” “fiery feminist perspective,” and “rebellion” of the later German film Bandits (271). Gordon E. Slethaug and Stacilee Ford’s Hit the Road, Jack: Essays on the Culture of the American Road does only slightly better in exploring music and

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the road. Two chapters focus exclusively on road music: Susan Kuyper’s “The Road in American Vernacular Music” goes into detail on road music’s early origins in folk music, and Paul Attinello’s “Assassin in a Three-Piece Suit: Slow Fire, Minimalism, and the Eighties” looks at the road as represented in Paul Dresher’s contemporary opera. Otherwise, the chapters do not reference the music that is talked about in road literature or that accompanies various road films. There is, then, little in the way of criticism that explores the relationship between music of or about the road and various kinds and examples of literature and film. Of course, those in the popular music scene know that these links between song and literature and film are intrinsic but have never subjected them to critical analysis as indicated by the numerous sites where interesting road music is identified by the number of tunes without commentary, such as the Ultimate Classic Rock’s “Top 10 Road Songs,” Playlist’s “20 Essential Songs for Your Road-Trip,” Buzzfeed’s “The Only 39 Road Trip Songs You’ll Ever Need,” and Timeout’s “The 50 best road trip songs of all time.” These sites quantify and promote but do not analyze. That is the task of this book. This compilation of essays, then, creates a unique and valuable collection that addresses a fundamental lack in the scholarship of the intersection of the road and popular music from the latter part of the nineteenth century to the present time.

The theoretical and narrative framework of this study In “The Semiotics of the Road,” Gordon Slethaug points out that the notion of the road in the United States is inextricably tied to the changing developments of American economics, politics, culture, and technology, so that, while key ideas of freedom, independence, and mobility may be relatively constant in the construction of the road over time, other factors such as individualism, identity, and rebellion are dependent on specific historical circumstances and social movements. Undergirding these historical changes are those in technology, such as development of the automobile, the availability of electricity and telephones at the end of the nineteenth century, and the rise of media and communications at the beginning of the twentieth century. Consequently, the music of the road that marks the focus of this volume depends on codes of the American road that developed in certain periods during that time. These include the development of “individual and national

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freedom, independence, and mobility; democratic space in a simultaneously present and vanished frontier; self-reliance and liberal individualism; diversity in ethnicity, race, class, gender, and culture; communal and personal transformation; [and] rebellious countercultural challenges to a complacent and conservative society . . .” (Slethaug and Ford, “Introduction,” 4). Consequently, this volume brings into focus the modern period in which technological developments radically changed modes of travel and networks of roads. It does not intend to represent all of the many forms of road music in the contemporary era because that would be a separate volume in itself, but this volume will explore the classic forms of recorded road music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries while also exploring contemporary forms in movies as well as those of an LGBT singer.

Transitions: The disappearing frontier and rise of transportation and the media When in 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner announced that the American frontier had closed, he also identified the traits that had been necessary to settle the United States and which in his mind accounted for the characterization of present-day Americans as well. Key traits included: That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier. (227–28) Susan Kuyper’s “The Road in American Vernacular Music” paid close attention to these traits as evidenced in the American frontier itself and in the subset of road songs in folk vernacular music that was produced before the twentieth century, noting that they “resonate with the weariness of travel, tell stories of terrible challenges, but also never lose hope” in work, play, love, and worship (55). This was not a small subset, Kuyper notes, comprising roughly one-third of the 317 folk songs collected in Alan Lomax’s Folk Songs of North America; so mobility, travel, and the road in all its forms has been an enduring part of American history and culture (57). This present study of music and the American road begins where Kuyper’s leaves off, marked by the transition from anonymous folk songs to those

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written, played, sung, and increasingly copyrighted by particular artists and groups. In “Easy Riders and Hard Roads in the Early Recorded Blues,” Steve Knepper and Jim Tuten write about the early country-blues tradition that had such a profound influence on American popular music, including later blues and rock ’n’ roll. As they note, country blues first flourished in three seminal areas of the South—the Mississippi delta, Texas, and the Piedmont area of the East Coast (the Carolinas and Georgia) and was spearheaded by Robert Johnson (the rural Delta), Blind Lemon Jefferson (urban Texas), and Buddy Moss (Atlanta and surroundings) whose music helped to consolidate the blues as an art form and to shape the myth of road mobility. Theirs was African and American music to the core, the rhythms and patterns reflecting early roots in Africa as well as American folk songs, and the themes expressing their aspirations, values, and challenges in an American racialized South at the first half of the twentieth century. In the Mississippi delta, Robert Johnson traveled in almost every conceivable way: he walked on dirt roads and highways; he sat on a pile of corn in a wagon pulled by a tractor; he rode freight trains and buses; he hitchhiked rides in pickup trucks—all to perform on street corners or in front of barbershops and restaurants in adjoining towns (Guralnick 20) An oldfashioned traveling minstrel, Johnson and his blues songs truly represented the rural Southern delta. While Johnson traveled the dirt roads of the rural delta, blues musicians Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson and Atlanta blues singer Buddy Moss traveled in the urbanizing areas of Texas and the Georgia Piedmont. In these locations the automobile gave musicians access to more commercial possibilities in both urban and out-of-the-way places of the South and, increasingly with the Great Migration, the North. Indeed, in Texas and the Piedmont the automobile came to be seen as a palpable object of desire—a sign of sexual possibility and potency, achievable luxury, and even conspicuous consumption for fortunate black musicians. Incarnated in the automobile, the road emerged in blues music as a promise of freedom, adventure, agency, and financial reward but also conveyed nostalgia for places and people left behind as well as anxiety about the perils of driving under the vigilant eyes and oppressive Jim Crow laws of Southern white communities. The earliest country blues, then, embrace contrary extremes of possibility, hope, and frustration and often position the musicians and their listeners on a knife’s edge of hope and existential despair. As Knepper and Tuten note, however, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and Buddy Moss were not the only ones singing and recording blues during the first half of the twentieth century, but are representative of many of their compatriots and followers. Jefferson himself influenced

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Texas musicians Leadbelly, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and T-Bone Walker as well as leading blues artists from outside Texas, including such Delta blues luminaries as Chester Arthur Bennett (Howlin’ Wolf), McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), and Son House, while Buddy Moss influenced those such as Blind Blake. The influence does not stop there, however. As Knepper and Tuten note, musical techniques and themes in “Adia Victoria’s 2016 album Beyond the Bloodhounds” contain “a pervading Johnson-esque Gothicism” (Chapter 3). In the explicitly racialized culture and politics of the South and indirectly of the North, the whites dominated the blacks, but whites also were divided by geography, economics, gender, and class. Virginia Shay’s study of early and late American country music, “Easy Street on Mud Tires: The ‘Heartland’ and the Frontier of the Road in Country Music,” notes the way in which road music has been shaped by, and responded to, the simple rural, white, bluecollar life of the South with real links to the Midwest heartland and more imagined links to manifest destiny and the Western frontier. While country music had roots in early folk music and the 1920s “hillbilly” Appalachia, and still waxes nostalgic about its common people and villages, these towns and their inhabitants have generally become more imaginary and mythic than real in connecting with the larger population across the country in their interrogation of urban corporate ways. “As Scherman remarks, ‘Country music was born of the trauma of rural people’s adjustment to industrial society. . . . Severed from its working-class origins, country music is becoming a refuge for culturally homeless Americans everywhere’” (Scherman qtd. in Peterson, Creating Country Music, 222). This country-western road music is marked as white, and culturally and politically conservative both in its inception and in the recent Nashville iterations. What black blues and white country-western musical traditions share is a common disdain for exploitative urban environments as well as a hope for personal, financial, and musical independence. This country music and the implied rural life have helped to mold and sustain a belief in an exceptionalist America and the American Dream that inform its sounds, cadences, and lyrics from origins in old-timey music to the slick pop-based sounds that emerged from Nashville in the 1960s, including those of female artists Dixie Chicks, Jo Dee Messina, and Miranda Lambert. Though country music originated in the pre-Depression South and was somewhat limited to the banjo, fiddle, and autoharp, it spread throughout the United States as a staple of popular culture and more complex sounds (including accordion, bass, various kinds of guitars, and drums) by marrying images of cowboys and cowgirls not only to rural country dirt roads and small towns, but also to pickup trucks, fast cars, and interstate travel.

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Narratives of modernity and mobility As highways became better, cars more plentiful and faster, and young people had the money and time to travel independently or in groups, the road became evermore associated with freedom, liberation, and independence— from former selves, family, and society in general. Jack Kerouac’s 1957 landmark novel On the Road illustrated these qualities in the main characters’ lifestyles and speech but also in the book’s deliberate departure from styles and methods of earlier fiction, instead embracing a peripatetic style meant to reflect bebop jazz and the lives of the hipsters who could race back and forth across the broad expanse of the United States, seemingly without stopping. Musicians, however, often chose to undertake such journeys using tour buses as their vehicle of choice. Anaia Shaw’s “The Tour Bus and the Road” and Warren Leming’s “Band on the Ruins: Meditations on Music and Motion” shift the focus from the binaries of black versus white musical traditions, city versus rural, the South versus the North, and the automobile versus the truck as the ideological, geographic, vehicular, and musical focus to the importance of the bus as a means of inexpensive travel for everyone. For many musicians, the tour bus enabled a sense of adventure, established identity, created camaraderie and community, reinforced the idea of the musician as a perpetual traveler, and above all shared their music at various gigs and concerts across the country. While the bus has not entered the musical road repertoire as strongly as songs about the car or the train, R. L. Burnside’s “Greyhound Bus Station,” The Hollies’ “Bus Stop,” Jeffrey Lewis’s “Roll Bus Roll,” and The Guess Who’s “Bus Rider,” for example, all indicate the impact of the bus on road travel and music. While Warren Leming in “Band on the Ruins: Meditations on Music and Motion” does not describe his own experiences on road tours with the Wilderness Road Band group as overwhelmingly easy, positive, and worthy of songs, the trips themselves spoke to his wanderlust, satisfied a yearning for freedom from the shackles of narrow-minded Midwestern values, and promised moments of glory. He narrows the focus of the tour bus and accompanying vehicles to his own nearly three-decade story built on his frustration with growing up in the socially conservative culture of Chicago of the ’50s; his intellectual liberation in reading Kerouac’s On the Road in the late ’50s; his inspiration from the Beatnik and hippie revolutions of the ’60s; his learning to play the banjo at a time when folk music resurfaced with the Kingston Trio; and his exit from Chicago on the road trip with the Wilderness Road Band in the late ‘60s and ’70s in cars and an ancient, “creaky cranky” VW van while also listening to rock, bluegrass, blues, R and B, and jazz.

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Part of the joy of Leming’s tour lay in rolling down highways such as Route 66 made famous by other roadies, visiting those places iconized in song lyrics or books, staying at the hotel on Denver’s Larimer Street that housed Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road, spending time on the Santa Monica beaches made famous by The Beach Boys, or smoking a little pot at a bar on the Strip in L.A. A related part of the joy was being able to stay with friends and acquaintances along the way for companionship and to defray expenses. Those who went on the road with a group and a radio usually had favorite bands and songs to match the mood, and Leming listened to songs of the most popular American singers and bands: Ricky Nelson; Eddie Cochran; The Beach Boys; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Elvis Presley; Little Richard; The Kingston Trio; Woody Guthrie; Bob Dylan; and Larry Williams. But they also included such British bands as Peter Townsend, The Beatles, The Kinks, and The Rolling Stones. Such joys came at a price: discovering the American cultural and urban wasteland of the ’50s and ’60s in the rust-belt cities of Illinois, Tennessee, and Iowa where young people seemed to be trapped by their surroundings; being on crowded highways around the large Midwestern cities or on the lonesome, empty highways that stretched from Chicago to the beaches of Santa Monica; and having to sleep in tawdry motels and eat in greasy spoons for lack of being able to afford anything else. Often, too, they were deprived of sleep because they had to travel all night instead of being able to stop anywhere. Still another part of the price Warren and his band paid for being on the road was the mechanical breakdown of their vehicles. These deprivations and inconveniences made musical groups aware of the real-life perils of such trips, as remembered in the tragic deaths of musicians Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, Richie Valens, Eddie Cochran, and many others. Leming’s account, then, is simultaneously a celebration of the great music of traveling singers and bands and a lament for some of the musicians’ untimely deaths—both real and musical, reminding readers that, even as the road gives joy, it can extract death.

From innocence to social consciousness—The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Paul Simon The ’60s launched the careers of four of the all-time greatest rock ’n’ roll bands and artists of the United States: The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen. The careers of The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan were both launched in 1961, the former in Hawthorne, California and the latter in New York City. These were followed shortly by that of Paul Simon in 1964 in

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New Jersey when he and Art Garfunkel signed on with Columbia Records for an album, though they had been playing together since they were eleven, in grade school. Springsteen did not begin recording until 1972 but began entertaining audiences in 1964 at a trailer park in New Jersey when just fifteen years old. The early ’60s music for these performers/bands was inflected by an innocence and enthusiasm that became more musically sophisticated and politically edgy as the decade moved on and as the country became more divided about culture, race, politics, and war. In “‘All That Road Going’: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and The Beach Boys’ Smile,” Dale Carter notes that, during their most commercially successful period from 1963 to 1966 with albums like the car-themed Little Deuce Coupe (1964), The Beach Boys became famous for their upbeat rock ’n’ roll songs about the road, teenage romance, and California surfing in which the automobile itself is an icon of youth, fun, adventure, freedom, and masculinity. However, in the slightly later albums The Beach Boys Today (1965) and Pet Sounds (1966), Brian Wilson and his new lyricist Van Dyke Parks began to explore new musical sounds and emotional states and to query American cultural and political ideology, especially related to environmentalism and civil rights. These new sounds and ideas were meant to culminate in their new album Smile in 1967, which would detail a physical and spiritual trip from Plymouth Rock Westward across the continent to Hawaii, interrogate the positive and negative historical developments in America, and imagine a process of rehabilitation or redemption. Things fell apart with the band, however, and a much-reduced collection Smiley Smile was produced in the place of Smile. Given this abridged version, there was a feeling that the innocence, promise, and momentum of The Beach Boys and their national, cultural, and musical project had been diminished if not altogether lost, but Brian Wilson, the lead musician of The Beach Boys, did complete a version of Smile in 2004, almost 40 years later. This new version was updated from the original and marketed as Brian Wilson Presents Smile, though Van Dyke Parks’s contribution as lyricist was also everywhere in it. Dale Carter finds this version to be the definitive version of what Smile was intended to be and bases his discussion on this version. (In 2011, Wilson produced The Smile Sessions that was intended to recreate the original Smile as closely as possible but went further than was intended by Brian Wilson Presents Smile.) It is significant that the launching point for Brian Wilson Presents Smile is a section called “Heroes and Villains,” a recognition of cultural doubleness/duplicity—national heroic ventures that descend into misadventures, but still create the possibility of redemption as compensation for loss of direction and purpose, the divisiveness of the Vietnam War and the cultural wars that marked the second half of the twentieth century. That the album succeeded in its critique of America, mobility, and

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music was recognized by its wide acceptance: the American public was very much behind Brian Wilson Presents Smile and The Smile Sessions when they appeared, and their winning of several awards, so perhaps the wait was worth it with a much more diverse public in 2004 and 2011 than in 1967 and one that could accept a critique of American history and culture and simultaneously celebrate its musical legacy and cultural transformation. Truly, for The Beach Boys the road had transformed from a more-or-less innocent view of youthful coming of age in a California car to a more substantive overview of personal and collective American responsibilities, even though the band itself did not endure for a long time. Another product of the ’60s who would continue to be embraced by the public well into the twenty-first century, Bob Dylan, shares Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks’s complex linking of the road, mobility, special causes, and music. Because Dylan continued to sing, record, and tour from the time he moved to New York at 20 years of age, his is a longer trajectory than The Beach Boys, with numerous and ever-changing road songs along the way. Also, although Dylan is widely credited for his civil rights activism and support for the underclass in America, he has added a much stronger personal, mythical, and spiritual vision than did Wilson and Parks, replacing Parks and Wilson’s redemptive American cultural and musical history with his own personal, musical, and spiritual anxieties and redemption. As Susan Kuyper reminds us in “‘Happiness Is the Road’: Bob Dylan,” Dylan, by his own account, tried desperately to run away from his family home and community norms in Hibbing, Minnesota and achieved his dream of freedom and special purpose when, in 1961, he moved to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, changing his name and taking advantage of the rise in popularity of folk music. He began his professional tours in 1964, embracing the civil rights movement and taking his band to black colleges in the South and universities in Denver and Berkeley. In early 1965 he took a band, The Hawks, on tour to the UK, notoriously switching to electronic music from his acoustic/folk music style to the instant dismay of British and American audiences. Then in quick succession he married, had children, and dropped out of entertainment for eight years until he went on the musical road again in 1974 with his very successful Tour of America. With the exception of 1977, 1982–1983, and 1985, he has since toured every year for the past 41 years, the most recent 15 being part of what he calls “The Never Ending Tour.” Throughout this time, real and imagined roads and their travelers and emotions have been a significant part of his repertoire. In signaling the road throughout his lyrics, Dylan refers to very specific roads and destinations that have had an important effect on him, such as the iconic Highway 51 that brought black culture and music from New Orleans

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to Madison, Wisconsin, and Highway 61 that took this culture even further to Duluth, but he also dreams up imaginary roads and locations where his personae act out their lives, sometimes under the cloud of nuclear extinction. In some of these lyrics, he references predecessors such as Woody Guthrie and his journeys on the road, but he also invents other adventurers who succeed in finding something of value on the road and still others like the hobos, gamblers, and wild men who are destroyed by its challenges. It is, however, the longing for love expressed in road metaphors that occupies many of Dylan’s songs and marks the work of many other singers of the road as well. The early songs often depict unrequited love, but some convey the anxiety and confusion of separation. Still others—particularly those from the late ’60s to the mid-’70s when Dylan was the happiest with his wife Sara and children—communicate deep love and happiness. Those from 1975 refocus on separation, not just physical but often frighteningly emotional and sometimes deeply spiritual. As with Dylan’s, Paul Simon’s songs about the road are a combination of critical portraits of those he knew who were negatively affected by the road and many contemplative ones that are positive about it. As Alexander Hollenberg notes in “‘But People Are Strangers’: Paul Simon, Lyric Narratives, and the Road,” some of these songs about the road describe wasted lives, for instance of a young Detroit schoolboy who would like to leave the city’s pollution behind but probably cannot. A certain number of these lyric narratives cluster around accounts of masculine freedom on the road often with a wistful quality. In “Cars Are Cars” from the 1983 album, Hearts and Bones, the singer thinks of his favorite car as a home, noting that if his real homes had the qualities of that car, he would not have needed to go on the road. That wistful side was present even in his early 1968 song “America,” which became one of the most celebrated of Simon and Garfunkel’s songs. In this song, the narrator on board a Greyhound bus begs his girlfriend to “Let us be lovers” as they “come to look for America.” In looking for America out of the windows of the bus, they resemble others in private cars on the highway, but on the bus the couple finds a shared dialogic space of mutual affection, stories, cigarettes, and shared food, reinforcing the idea that buses are more likely to be associated with community than independence. In other early songs, such as “Duncan” and “Papa Hobo,” as well as such later ones as “Another Galaxy” and “Graceland,” the road offers a physical and emotional comfort zone, and Simon’s music slows down the discursive pace and journey, forcing the listener into a contemplative communal mode. This wistfulness associated with the road does not entirely prepare the listener for the ruckus that Simon’s 1987 album, Graceland, caused when he included South African black singers and songs on his musical road,

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creating very new sounds for North American audiences. For some, Simon’s arrangement with the black musicians was exploitative. For others, it granted the repellant apartheid South African culture legitimacy. For yet others, Graceland’s collaborative enfolding of township umbaqanga or “township jive” and American rock ’n’ roll signaled an act of cultural and political resistance to the white apartheid government’s power and control and celebrated racial and musical diversity. Indeed, in the title song “Graceland,” the narrative of a father and his nine-year-old child traveling from the North on a highway beside the Mississippi River into the Southern heartland of the black music tradition and of enslavement and looking for the absent mother draws an implicit analogy with the American singer’s journey to South Africa to record with black musicians, discover something about his own musical foundations, look for musical hybridity or syncretism, and raise questions about enslavement. The song does not conclude with the singer actually arriving in Graceland, so by implication the international, interracial, and mixed musical and political journey to South Africa may be unfinished work as well. Nevertheless, fans were not altogether happy about Simon’s political missteps in confusing musical and racial harmony with predatory nation-states. Of these four quintessential modern singers of the road, it is Springsteen who has been the most controversially outspoken in critiquing vulture capitalism, the failed American Dream, and the Vietnam War (Springsteen interview). Many of Springsteen’s well-known songs about the American road appeared early in his career, especially in the 1975 Born to Run album that contained, among many others, the title song “Born to Run,” and “Thunder Road,” both holding out the promise of deliverance from repressive cultural, economic, and military forces in the United States through the freedom of the road but, as other songs in the album indicate, was unable to fulfill that promise. This frustrated desire for deliverance in albums such as Nebraska (1982) and The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) became explicitly centered on the Vietnam War: though the war ended in 1975, the country suffered economically because of it, and veterans who returned from the war frequently endured poverty, physical and emotional abuse, dysfunctionality, lack of help from the Veterans Administration, and even suicide, as evidenced in even in the early “Lost in the Flood” (1973). It is this sense of great injustice about the Vietnam War and its aftermath that continues to pit Springsteen against the political-military-economic establishment. As Chad Wriglesworth points out in “‘Apology and Forgiveness Got no Place Here at All’: On the Road to Washington D.C. with Bruce Springsteen,” Springsteen sang an anti-draft song “Fortunate Son” and Vietnam protest song “Born in the U.S.A” at the November 11, 2014 Concert for Valor in Washington D.C. designed to honor some 2.6 million veterans

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who had volunteered to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. This free Veterans Day concert held at the National Mall was intended to present a vision of hope, patriotism, progress, and new beginnings, but Springsteen’s performance interrogated national healing and renewal by foregrounding the sacrifices of some 650,000 draftees who went “on the road” to the Vietnam War, most unwillingly. While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been popular, they have been viewed by most as necessary in ways far removed from that of Vietnam, which was protested while it was being fought and has never gained favor or public legitimacy. For Springsteen all such wars are problematic, and rock ’n’ roll and the metaphor of the road are deeply embedded in the necessity of protest against such unjust causes.

From engagement to the metafictive play of the postmodern road While the music of The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen has endured for over fifty years and remains among the most recognizable for American and international audiences alike, the culture and music of the road has evolved. In “Knowing the Score: Road Movie Soundtracks and Cinematic Verities,” Kurt Jacobsen appraises the contribution of music in some of the most relevant and important road movies from the ’60s on—precisely in tandem with the period of time that The Beach Boys, Dylan, Simon, and Springsteen began their careers and brought them to maturation and then into the twilight years. In this same fifty year period the American public had the money, leisure, and interest in going on the road so that changes in music and the road have been linked in the public’s mind. The ’60s not only marked the onset of the careers of The Beach Boys, Dylan, and Simon but also coincided with the release of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), and Easy Rider (1969), movies that are singularly remembered for changing the face of Hollywood, introducing remarkable musical scores, and altering conceptions of the American road. All of these films were premised on revealing the weaknesses in middle-class American society. Arthur Penn’s Depression-based Bonnie and Clyde celebrated Bonnie and Clyde’s heroic if deadly resistance against their bleak small-town lives and a banking system that impoverished Americans. This film was accompanied by an old-time instrumental banjo and fiddle piece “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” by Grand Ole Opry icons Flatt & Scruggs that was played along with the couple’s many escapes. Mike Nichols’ The Graduate with its superb score by Simon and Garfunkel also played to young people’s disillusionment with a society where middle-class affluence was reinforced by hypocrisy. Dennis

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Hopper’s cult film Easy Rider depicted Wyatt and Billie’s thrilling motorcycle ride through the American Southwest from California to Louisiana and their horrifying execution-style murder on the highway en route to Florida. This film was accompanied by the Byrds’ “The Ballad of Easy Rider,” Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” and “The Pusher,” a psychedelic “Kyrie Eleison,” and Jimi Hendrix’s “If Six Was Nine.” Only slightly later Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory (1976), and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) reinforced the relationship between folk songs, the road, and social critique. Pat Garret and Billy the Kid described the sell-out of the freedom of the Old West to land speculators and lawyers. Bob Dylan’s role in this film is quite extraordinary for he not only wrote several songs for it, produced an album (including the now-famous “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”), but also acted the part of Alias in the film, reinforcing his socially conscious stance. Bound for Glory was a loose adaptation of Woody Guthrie’s Depression-era travels from the Dust Bowl to California and his anger against vicious employers of the migrant Okie workers. Although David Carradine got mixed reviews for the way he sang Guthrie’s songs, Jacobsen thinks that “This Land Is Your Land” strikes a national chord in its condemnation of the one percent. While Ina Rae Hark observed that road films with social critiques generally fell out of fashion during the Reagan presidency in the 1980s (204–205), Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) was an exception to that rule, sharing a similar bleakness to Bonnie and Clyde and Bound for Glory in its depictions of the south Texas desert and even urban Los Angeles and Houston. The music, too, based on Blind Willie Johnson’s melancholy gospel blues firmly links the road, music, and social critique. Each of these films links the lives and travels of countercultural heroes to the authenticity of folk instruments and music. Something else was afoot during this period as well, for until the stock market collapse in 1987 the United States was beginning to forget about its disastrous Vietnam War and attendant financial problems. That meant that it wanted to forget about gritty buddy road films that would give an unfavorable view of America. That did not happen, however, with Ridley Scott’s cult classic Thelma and Louise (1991), the story of two women rebelling against an unjust and patriarchal world, traveling across the Midwest in their Thunderbird in pursuit of freedom, and finally hurtling into the Grand Canyon in a final act of death-accepting defiance. In this film, the electric guitar, banjo strings, songs of Glenn Frey, Martha Reeve, Marianne Faithful, Chris Whiteley, and B. B. King assist the pace, celebration, and angst of these women and reinforce the links between folk songs and social/political resistance. Thelma and Louise was an exception to the general disappearance of films about the road as a vehicle for social protest, and road films would morph

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into more romantic postmodern forms for the next 20 years, in the process becoming more diverse in cast and music, less tied to youth and traditional masculinity, and less dependent on the automobile as such. Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994) would take Forrest on the road in several buses (school bus, military bus, and commercial bus) and use a collection of old tunes by The Byrds, The Doors, The Mamas & the Papas, Joan Baez, and The Supremes to create a feel-good patriotic and sentimental film affirming both the humanity of and possibilities for the disabled. One of the most romantic and metafictive of the new postmodern films is Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (2005) that departs completely from the buddy road film in favor of an old-fashioned heterosexual relationship with a happy ending and a plot that breaks the unwritten geography rule that the action must proceed from East to West. In this case the main male character Drew first flies from Oregon to Kentucky and only at the end drives from Kentucky to Oregon partly along Route 66, making the trip a self-conscious evocation of past road journeys. Even the playing of the songs that the film is known for, including those by Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac, Lindsey Buckingham, My Morning Jacket, and Elton John, gives the impression that the film is self-consciously fulfilling the expectation that there must be road music associated with the plot. Two Native American films also break down typical barriers in the choice of plot, cast, vehicle, and music, though they are not so self-conscious about doing that. Jonathan Wacks’s Powwow Highway (1989) concerns Buddy and Philbert’s road trip in an old beat-up jalopy from the Cheyenne reservation in Montana to Santa Fe, New Mexico to take care of Philbert’s sister’s children and try to get her out of prison. This plot concerning Native Americans and acted by them is accompanied by tom-toms and flutes, and the music is performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joe Ely, and Robbie Robertson. Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998) tells a story about family and social healing on an Intermountain bus when two young Native American youths go from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to Phoenix, Arizona to retrieve the ashes of one’s father and in the process find reconciliation. This film, too, is quite singular in its use of Native American musicians Jim Boyd, John Sirois, Andre Picara Jr., and the female trio Ulali to provide excellent, almost haunting sound and lyrics. Both of these Native American road narratives are focused on family divides and a healing process. Finally, two movies that intentionally violate the ideal of the young buddy road relationship are David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) and Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt (2002). Both of these are about old men who go on the road individually to solve a family problem. In the case of The Straight Story, Alvin Straight has had to surrender his driver’s license because he

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suffers from bad health (mainly diabetes) and so drives a lawn tractor on the side-roads from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin to make peace with his brother who has suffered a heart attack. This journey through the cornfields of the Midwest is accompanied by the simple relaxing country tunes of Angelo Badalamenti. In About Schmidt, the newly widowed Warren sets out in his oversized Winnebago Adventurer RV to drive from Omaha, Nebraska to Denver, Colorado to stop his daughter’s wedding, but repents of this action and helps to celebrate her marriage before returning home. As Warren makes this drive, he revisits some of the themes and sites of exploration along the way, self-consciously reminding the reader of various related historical road journeys. The music to this film by the filmscore composer Rolfe Kent (who also did the score for Alexander Payne’s 2005 buddy road film Sideways) is suitably pleasant without being edgy, underscoring the process of reconciliation he goes through. The films and narratives of this postmodern period, then, self-consciously revisit many of the previous sites and conventions of road travel because by this time the road has been firmly established in the American narrative of self and country. Mobility, adventure, and freedom continue to be important characteristics of the travelers on this late road—by whatever vehicle might come in handy, but the emphasis in the past 20 to 30 years has been on the strengthening of family ties and the development of community, even in the instance of solo journeys. The travelers, still mainly white men, but not exclusively so, are certainly concerned about their identities but don’t feel they must rise up against their families, the bankers, the politicians, and even the military in order to accomplish their goals. Nor do they seem to have to start out afresh in a new location, whether East or West, in order to find themselves. Conventionally, they tend to go West and especially by car, but buses, vans, RVs, tractors, boats, planes, even walking all fill the bill going in any direction and playing or listening to many different kinds of music.

2 The semiotics of the road Gordon E. Slethaug

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or thousands of years, human beings have been traveling to find new sources of food, populate new areas, spread or take up religions and other cultural concepts, and go to war. What began as bare necessity and restricted transportation with narrow paths and limited waterways developed into substantial sea and air routes and overland highways spanning localities, countries, and continents. Nayan Chanda makes the case that, taken together, the various pursuits, routes, modes of travel, journeys, and increasing technological sophistication established interconnected communities that have led to the farreaching travel we enjoy today—and which we call “the road.” However, Only well into the nineteenth century did men and women go on the road to work or relax, be alone or enjoy companionship, satisfy curiosity or follow dreams, and explore all those things that we now identify with the road. From that time “the road” became an increasingly complex image, metaphor, and icon—or trope—for nation-based exploration and exploitation, the journeys of families in pursuit of better living conditions and of individuals who hoped to discover more about their identities, and, in the process, overcome difficulties and limitations in transforming themselves. (Slethaug, “Mapping,” 13) The “road” denotatively is a certain kind of pathway over which human beings travel but connotatively it has a wealth of associations of pathways, modes of travel, the travelers themselves and their pursuits, as well as the fiction, film, music, and art associated with it. All of these aspects of what we call the road

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are dependent on particular cultures at particular times, so that they do not remain constant over time. Nevertheless, within American culture they have some long-standing connotations as well as short-lived ones which need to be considered as part of the semiotic construction of the concept of the road. As Roland Barthes, one of the formative influences on semiotics, hints in Mythologies, travel and its modes, routes, and goals have entered our cultural consciousness with multiple layers of narrative and myth, so that they are never value-neutral. As an example, in America a highway is rarely just a highway but one with memorable numbers (Route 66) and names (The Mother Road) that resonate locally, nationally, and even internationally with both factual and fictional associations. As a result, fellow Americans and foreign tourists come to travel this road to capture some of the magic that made it so famous during the twentieth century. This chapter will detail some of the important changes in mobility and conceptions of the road, both metaphorical and actual, along with its relationship to music traditions analyzed elsewhere in this volume.

Mobility and the early American road Associations of roads vary from place to place, time to time, and culture to culture, but the most important underlying conception for all is that of mobility. Although North America had Native settlements and travel between them long before whites and other people of color people came, the connotative narrative of America, what Barthes would call one of its dominant myths, is of the white Puritans’ journey early in the 1600s across the Atlantic to pursue political and religious freedom and trade, and to establish communities along the North American East Coast and riverways. Almost forgotten in this narrative of white, English, Christian mobility is the fact that Africans were taken by force on slave ships to labor in the New World as early as the mid1500s, first in South America and the Caribbean and later in North America itself. Although black mobility for settlement in the Americas preceded that of white Puritans and with more dismal connotations that the world would rather forget, in the popular imagination it is the Thanksgiving idea of the Puritans traveling to America to settle it against great odds that trumps. These white and black experiences remind us of the ambiguity attached to the road/travel as a semiotic sign: for some it is redolent of heroism and adventure, while for others it can smell of oppression and failure. In keeping with that, while there are many early folk songs that celebrate travel to America by ship from the British Isles, there seem to be none that commemorate or reflect those early desperate voyages by enslaved blacks.

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These early accounts of transatlantic seaworthy mobility gave way to those of short domestic journeys between villages and growing towns by foot, horseback, or boat, but that, too, changed with the opening of the West after 1776 and the large-scale movement of families by foot, horse, and wagon especially across the Appalachian Mountains or by boat up the Mississippi River into the fertile fields and forests of middle America. Still, roads at that time were, according to Bryson, “little more than Indian trails, seldom more than fifteen inches wide” (189). There are many early folk songs that recount the travel during this period. There are those such as “Petticoat Lane,” “Scarborough Fair,” and “Strawberry Lane”—new-world versions of old-world music and lyrics—that reflect walks in small communities in search of love and companionship and many later ones such as “Cumberland Gap” that reflect the hope that settlers felt as they crossed the Appalachians in search of a new productive life. There are still others such as “We’re coming, Arkansas” that speak of the travelers’ anticipation and anxiousness to start their new life, and yet others like the wellknown “Wayfaring Stranger” that turn these demanding overland journeys into metaphors of the search for salvation: I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger A-wandering through this world of woe. Yet there’s no sickness, toil or danger In that bright land, to which I go. “Wayfaring Stranger,” J. and A. Lomax, Our Singing Country

Mobility, identity, space, and the nineteenthcentury road This narrative of mobility and settlement in the late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century advancing American nation—mainly by horseback and wagon—was also modified with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the advent of train travel in the 1830s and 1840s. These transformed travel, making it much easier to migrate from New York City to Buffalo and from there to other growing towns and cities on the Great Lakes. Similarly, the train absolutely transformed mobility so that riders could go many places inland that were inaccessible before: those who were well-off could travel in style for short or long distances and those of the underclass might catch rides on the freight cars. Then, of course, there were those (blacks, whites, Irish, Chinese) who laid the rails, work that was magnified with the passage

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of the Pacific Railway Act in 1862 and construction of the first transcontinental railroad completed in 1869. There are many songs such as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “John Henry Steel Driving Man” reflecting this new mode of transportation and hard work. The Homesteading Act of 1862 also added to the Westward thrust and the development of new “trails” to make these adventures and settlements possible. The road—travel, mobility, and exploration—in the nineteenth century, then, was closely identified with horses, wagons, boats, and trains—as well as work associated with these. Though this mobility for purposes of trading and working is singularly important in the taming and settling of the frontier and the formation and development of the United States, Walt Whitman’s mid-nineteenth-century “Song of the Open Road” (1856) makes it clear that the open spaces themselves were of deep allure. Villages were small and cities often cramped and dirty, so the beauty, variety, and bounty of the open spaces provided people with material, psychological, and spiritual sustenance. As the narrative persona of Whitman’s poem notes, people could go walking on the road for reasons of personal freedom, friendship, and spiritual development. Whitman did not have anything as consequential and systemizing in mind as Puritanism, conventional Christianity, governmental policy, settlement, or the development of the train industry, but a sense of wonder, companionship, sensuosity, and sensuality, and even awe that could prompt travelers to leave home for the open spaces and ultimately bring them together on the road in many ways. As pointed out in Hit the Road, Jack, Whitman very specifically links the wonders and travails of the road with the adventure, discovery, and the identity of the traveler, forging a strong link in the American imagination between mobility, space, and personal identity (Slethaug, “Mapping,” 15–19). With Frederick Jackson Turner’s assertion in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) about the closing of the American frontier and with the dawn of the automobile age at the beginning of the twentieth century, the quest to settle America changed as did the personal and collective coding of mobility (including Whitman’s idea of the road as spiritually regenerating). According to Turner, the United States was mapped and settled from coast to coast and north to south, so that the fortitude and heroism required of pioneer life were no longer thought to have the same value in setting out or settling down, though they remained abiding qualities of Americans. Others would state that increasingly they were augmented by notions of new beginnings, identity and the “autonomous self” (Mills, “Revitalizing,” 3), personal development, self-invention, and adventure. The closing of the frontier was accompanied by major transitions in technology and media. Both electricity and the telephone began to permeate cities in the United States in the 1880s and had become a significant presence

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by the time Turner wrote his paper in the 1890s. These were momentous changes not only for the betterment of everyday life for everyone but also for the development of media and communications: music, radio, and film industries all began to be developed, soon to be joined by the automobile industry so that the rapid rise in technology began to unite Americans across the country in ways that could not have been imagined fifty years before. It also marked the rapid demise of anonymous folk music and the rise of individually copyrighted and recorded music. It is this juncture that this volume is premised upon—it will deal with individual artists and groups that write and record their own music, rather than the early folk music tradition as such. However, this juncture also marks an unhappy event: the imposition in 1890 of the “separate but equal” law for African Americans in the former Confederate states that provided the basis for the so-called Jim Crow state and local laws legally discriminating against blacks until abolished by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The rise of both music and the road in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century especially in the South must take this factor into consideration.

Geography and race: The changing twentieth-century road The execution of this more-psychological-than-physical profile associated with the road at the onset of the twentieth century depended considerably on who you were, where you lived, and what sort of road connections there were. As Skidmore notes, “When the United States entered the twentieth century, its transportation system was [still] confined largely to waterways and railroads” (“Uncovering,” 123). Roads were only slowly built during the first part of the century, and that mainly in the urban East, but, even so, whites, as this chapter will take up shortly, were empowered to travel those roads almost anywhere they chose, while blacks found travel more limited and precarious until at least a decade after the Civil Rights Act. Cotten Seiler writes of the perils of African Americans in the early days of the twentieth century, in which until about 1914 they mainly avoided the road. After that time, as they traveled North and West in pursuit of work and a better life, particularly in the period known as the Great Migration, they had to avoid certain places in the South, sit only in designated places on buses and trains, and stay out of hotels, motels, and cafes that served whites on the Southern roads and even in some of those in the North. African American musicians were no exception to this rule and

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sang of both the excitement and anxiety of precarious mobility in their music. In the Mississippi delta, for instance, the blues singer Robert Johnson sang of the road as a place of liberation, connection, and empowerment but also as a place of poverty, loneliness, foreboding, and fear that Jim Crow oppression would lead to harassment and racial violence. For other early twentieth-century African American blues and jazz musicians in growing urban centers like Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta, driving experiences and train travel were less vexed than in the rural environs of Mississippi, and they could find better opportunities and mixtures of talent in these environments, but the laws were the same in both areas. Cities—North or South—with their show of technology and industry gave African American musicians something different to sing about than those in the rural Mississippi delta, though they, too, were affected by the illiteracy and poverty before and during the Great Depression, and racial violence throughout the Jim Crow South. Nonetheless, African Americans became increasingly enamored of travel by automobile and train, especially during their Great Migration, in transiting from South to North where jobs were easier to find. Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson and Atlanta blues singer Buddy Moss sang of the joys of rambling and open roads, but were just as likely to sing of “the locomotive’s drive and thrust, its promise of unrestrained mobility and unlimited freedom” (Baker, 11). As Carter notes, “in railroad songs, the train was typically perceived as a means of escape (from lovers or creditors, bosses or jail); car songs often saw in the automobile more than the prospect of physical liberation alone, often a desirable destination in itself, whether as club-house or workshop, bedroom or home from home—unless broken down, stuck in traffic, or out of gas” (Chapter 7). In short, incarnated in the automobile, the road emerged for African American travelers as a promise of freedom, adventure, agency, and financial reward but also channeled nostalgia for places and people left behind as well as anxiety about the perils of driving under the vigilant eyes and oppressive laws of Southern communities. Early-twentieth-century musicians and writers speak to these extremes of possibility, hope, and frustration and often position artists and their audiences on a knife’s edge of hope and existential despair. Though not under the same duress as African Americans, white Americans, too, in the early part of the twentieth century looked at the road and its signification from several vantage points, depending on where they lived, what they did, and what position they occupied in their communities. For business and community leaders in the developed urban areas of the East, the automobile shortly after the turn of the century represented the opportunity to escape into the countryside for rest and relaxation (Flink 24). As cars came down in price, suburbs began to multiply, and roads were

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built to accommodate them, the car became necessary for both the middle and upper classes for travel into the city for work and also for shopping and taking care of the family in the suburbs themselves. However, those who had less money did without cars until the price dropped sharply. Many people did purchase cars in the boom period of the 1920s, but those who did not generally had to wait first for the Great Depression to subside and then for the Second World War to be over. Because roads were only just being built and paved, rarely did middle-class families go on the road for adventure. Consequently, the road and mobility connoted relaxation for the rich, work and family responsibility for the middle classes, and desire for those who could not afford car ownership. The road and the automobile in the East and larger cities of the Midwest were thus increasingly coded with images of self-determination, hard work, and family that updated earlier notions of personal mettle and honor required of adventurers and settlers. In that way, ideas of freedom, personal authenticity, family values, and new personal and economic possibilities begin to define the road. Something else was at work in the perception of transportation in the South, however. Before industry began to move into the South after the widespread use of air conditioning, the South lacked big cities and industry as well as the corporate growth and financial backing that went with that, but had strong traditions of small-town and rural culture where family and close social relationships counted heavily. Trains, trucks, and cars became lifelines of commerce and communication between these towns but tended to escape the taint of malign technology and big money of the urbanized manufacturing North. So the white country artists of the 1920s sang of catching rides on trains and trucks that would take them to friends’ places, from the countryside into town, sometimes away from small towns, and sometimes away from down-and-out, hardscrabble circumstances but often with a nostalgic sense of the community they were leaving behind. For whites, trucks and truckers in the South represented work and community responsibility, as strongly indicated in the account of the Joad family in John Ford’s memorable Depression-era film, The Grapes of Wrath, at the same time as they showed a rejection of urbanization, industrialization, and Northern banks and corporate ways. It is this adherence to the ethos of small community life and a distrust of banking and big business that the road represented to many and that country music of the South picked up, which, despite changing industrial and economic conditions, remained in place in Nashville music even from the 1960s on. Hence, the semiotic coding of the road and the automobile in the South often differed considerably from that in the North and East.

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Modernity and automobility in the 1950s and 1960s The coding of the road and mobility in the United States changed and intensified after the end of the Second World War, especially after 1956 with the construction of America’s interstate highway system running from coast to coast that made travel easier and safer and gave America the feeling of modernity. It also depended heavily on the ability of young males like Jack Kerouac and his Beat friends to find work, afford travel, and experiment with their lifestyle so that they could race along the so-called blue highways and developing interstates in search of adventure and the modern life that were increasingly identified with the West. The myth of the road and mobility, then, is not limited to motion in general but to changing modes, styles, and goals of travel, and varying attitudes toward them that depended significantly on where the travelers came from, what their occupations were, where they were going, and the period they lived in. Closely related to the narrative of modernity and mobility in the 1950s and 1960s is their association with freedom and speed. Going at top speed across the country was possible not only because of advances in automotive technology but because it was closely aligned with an idea of total freedom, independence, and liberation. For members of the Beat generation, this was also a rapid drive away from home, social conventions, and responsibility. Going faster took these young people more quickly to their destinations and goals but also away from all the middle-class practices, conventions, and values that home represented at a personal, familial, and community level. However, this same association of freedom, speed, and changing values also represented the dynamic of a forward-looking, technologically advanced United States. It is, then, paradoxical how in the United States notions of freedom, independence, and liberation from middle-class family, work, community, and even national values, could in many cases co-exist with wholehearted support for advances in technology. Such a paradox is a mainstay of the ideology of the road, but is especially noticeable in the bond between the retreat from middle-class values, primitivism, and an embrace of technology in Kerouac’s 1957 On the Road. The main character and narrator Sal Paradise wants desperately to leave the East which he feels is overly complicated and corrupting, while he views the West as a place of primitive wonder where new life, ideas, and identity can flourish—an uncorrupted social frontier. When he fails to find his ideal American West in any sustained way, he pins his hopes on Mexico where he is sure this paradise still exists, though again becomes disappointed.

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Paradoxically, in both cases the attempt to discover primitive innocence is via the automobile itself, the result of some of the most advanced technology that the East and Midwest had to offer, and the person who best combines speed, abilities with cars, rejection of middle-class values, and maintains a primal innocent view of society is the unpredictable, quixotic, and lawless though loveable Dean Moriarty. In addition to the quest for adventure and discovery of an innocent and primitive West, Kerouac’s novel exemplifies another part of the coding of the road that goes back many generations: individualism, self-invention, and personal refashioning. Leaving home concerned a desire to discover something deeply personal. As James Flink argues: Individualism—defined in terms of privatism, freedom of choice, and the opportunity to extend one’s control over his physical and social environment—was one of the important American core values that automobility promised to preserve and enhance in a changing urbanindustrial society. Mobility was another. (38) American culture presents many instances of this combination of individualism and mobility, of which Kerouac’s Sal Paradise in On the Road is one, but two of the most famous (both real and fictive) in different periods of history are first, Ben Franklin who, in his Autobiography (1791), recounts breaking his apprenticeship to his brother and running away overland and by boat from Boston to Philadelphia where he began his life’s work anew on his own terms and fundamentally reinvented himself; and second, Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby who was originally named James Gatz and came from dirtpoor German farm stock in North Dakota but left home at sixteen, rescued Dan Cody from ship wreck on Lake Superior, sailed with him, and then gave himself a new name and identity. These young men seized the opportunity to break ties with their background, leave the past behind, discover new places, and form new identities as a result of the road. Of course, Fitzgerald’s 1925 The Great Gatsby reminds us that not all journeys of self-discovery, self-reinvention, and new beginnings have happy endings, but the paradigm is common enough to serve as a lure in road narratives. The lure held for musician Bob Dylan who moved from Hibbing, Minnesota to New York City in 1961, changed his name, and began his career in folk music and rock ’n’ roll, so this paradigm had a strong attraction for young people over time, application in the ’50s and ’60s, and appeal for road music. A significant part of the positive affirmation of the automobile in this discovery of self and others lay with the design and manufacturing of automobiles themselves. Henry Ford famously said that his customers

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might have any color of car they wished as long as it was black. Not every car was in fact black, but dark tones were pervasive enough that when the prolonged period of restraint caused by the Great Depression and the Second World War was over, consumers immediately wanted more choice. They chose white, beige, yellow, turquoise, blue, red, and many other colors from major American car companies. In the ’50s and ’60s America was in love with the car, which became ever more extravagant with bright colors, large sizes, big engines, famous fins, exterior chrome decorations, and interior amenities, all for reasonable prices. During this period the car was king, and everyone wanted one. Indeed, because of the rationing and saving required during the Second World War, most Americans of whatever background did have the money to afford one. Few would dare to disagree that this modern technological development made the average American’s life better and more interesting. Also, as the American highway system developed exponentially, Americans could drive singly or take their family in their shiny new cars on long trips across the United States. Highways, then, developed a deep psychological allure, started to become very busy places, and were coded as icons of modernity for single young males and families. With the development of the American highway system, the bus continued to be an important feature for the public in general but especially for musicians and social protesters. Riding the bus did remain less expensive than taking the train or driving a car and had gathered cultural and cinematic capital through the film industry, beginning in the ’20s and ’30s and increasing during the ’50s and ’60s with a surge in popular culture led by Kerouac’s novel On the Road, movies such as Bus Stop (1956) and Wayward Bus (1957), maintaining that popular perception a decade later with The Graduate (1967) and Midnight Cowboy (1969). Practically speaking, the bus did allow the general public to see the country and build relationships, but in fiction, film, and television characters were tested, gained, and grew in the time between boarding the bus and arriving at a destination, so the bus came to be seen as an important part of seeing America and forging identity—both of which were identified with the car as well. This pattern was especially true for musicians traveling together as bands and developing camaraderie. Like other kinds of buses before the 1960s, the tour bus (also called the band bus, sleeper bus, or entertainer bus) was basic, functional, and utilitarian, designed to carry the members of the band, their musical and acoustic equipment, luggage, and some food and drink. It enabled the entire band to practise for their performances en route, exchange tips and know-how about playing and writing music, listen to their favorite songs, and arrive for performances at the same time. But, as recounted by Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous, early musical bus travel was often

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dirty, crowded, claustrophobic, and the locus of conflict between the various musicians, technicians and sound men, and groupies. Some early high-profile bus tours such as that of the Merry Pranksters on their bus “Further” in 1964 were tied to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, and that, of course, was a sign not only of modernity in the ’60s but of antiestablishmentarianism. In short, the tour bus morphed from an early, hesitant, and inexpensive option to a sensational expression of modernity and social resistance as it moved equipment, bands, and families across the country in a symbiotic relationship of musician, music, and tour bus. Perhaps even more significant than the tour bus for the coding of the road on a national level was the link between civil rights protesters and buses. Primeau thinks that “in some way, all road trips are protests” (33), and, while that generalization could be contested in many instances, it certainly rings true with buses and the civil rights movement. In 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, the African American Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white person, triggering the onset of the massive civil rights demonstrations lasting into the ’70s. In 1960 the federal government disallowed segregation on interstate buses, and in 1961 Freedom Riders began to ride these buses to test the will of the Southern cities in enforcing integration. In May of 1961 there were several attacks on Greyhound buses carrying these Riders in South Carolina and Alabama, so these buses came to be identified not only with youthful rebellion but with political resistance and the struggle for equal rights by the black community. While the private car came to be identified with individual experience, perception, and development, the bus became identified with collective experiences and understandings, communal activity, and resistance to unfair and unjust laws and social behavior.

Mixing it up: Social rebellion, media and music, gender, race, and the road following the ’60s Many think that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road contributed greatly to America’s postwar love affair with the automobile and the road and fully established the link between mobility and rebellion, a connection which Laderman considers key to the development of the road movie (1). While the plot of On the Road consists of a series of fast-paced, looping journeys across America that ties in well with speed, as an artist Kerouac was specifically trying to form structural ties between the fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation of cool jazz (or bebop), the structure of fiction, road mobility, and youthful rebellion.

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This yoking of music, poetics, motion, rebellion, and the road came to define the ’60s and ’70s in a powerful way for this was the period when young people had money and wanted to travel, when they questioned their parents’ value system and single-minded pursuit of financial success, when artists of various sorts experimented with new forms, when there were huge national protests over civil rights and engagement in wars in Asia, and when movies became increasingly dark in reflecting the social and political mood of the nation. This was the unsettled period when road films became very gloomy in their assessment of American culture: Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) forged a link between an outlaw couple battling an unfair banking system and the temporary escape offered by the road; Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) depicted social and political discontent and ended with gratuitous killing of the two main characters; Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973) told the story of the disappearance of independence and self-sufficiency as bankers and con-men took over the West; and Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory (1976) detailed Woody Guthrie’s struggles as he tried to survive his move from the Depression-era South to California. Though in many instances the music of these films was wonderful, they were not happy-ending Hollywood films and increasingly seemed to suggest that social protest was a zero-sum game in which “the powers that be” controlled the politics and culture of the United States. Young people across America were internalizing this negative outlook on an everyday basis, for this was also a time not only when they went dancing to the rebellious rock ’n’ roll that they heard in films, on the radio, and increasingly on TV, but when they could bring that music into the privacy of their own bedrooms through mass-produced, inexpensive record players, inspiring some to join in the momentous social rebellions of the time, others to stay out of the political forum altogether, and still others to head out on the road to places not afflicted by the controversies. In all of this, musicians played a critical role by taking their music on the road. Indeed, the ’60s and ’70s would launch the careers of four of the alltime favorite American rock ’n’ roll bands and artists who have been identified closely with the road; have helped form attitudes, mold public opinion, and facilitate social movements and protests; and at least three of whom have continued to perform up to the present moment—The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen. The first of these, Bob Dylan, moved to New York City in 1961 and linked his acoustic-style folk music with compassion for the American working class and blacks at a time of growing social resistance and rebellion. The Beach Boys began their career in 1963 with upbeat rock ’n’ roll songs such as “I Get Around” and “Little Deuce Coupe” about the joys of the road in California (which seemed at the time to have

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avoided the racial clashes besetting the East) but soon transitioned to more complex musical forms and cultural critiques of environmentalism and racial issues. Although Paul Simon began harmonizing with Art Garfunkel in the sixth grade, they split up in 1970, and Simon went his own way, at first seeming to avoid the issues surrounding civil rights in favor of singing about relationships but later becoming more socially involved. Younger than the others, Bruce Springsteen, who didn’t begin recording until the ’70s, experienced firsthand the loss of friends in the Vietnam War and the anguish and poverty of many who managed to return. Given the social upheavals in the ’60s and ’70s (civil rights demonstrations and riots, political assassinations, anti–Vietnam War protests, hippie subculture, the birth control pill, and the feminist movement), these four seemingly could not help but be influenced by the shortcomings of culture and politics in America so publically on display in the late ’60s and ’70s, whether on the individual or national level. It was Simon and Springsteen, however, who became the most controversially outspoken in their critique of American culture and US government practices and ideologies. Some of Simon’s early songs presented images of masculine freedom on the road marked by independence, individualism, linear thinking, and pursuit of good times, women, and happiness, but the score of The Graduate also critiqued a society that was too much about money and risked losing its values. But this kind of cultural critique softened in Simon’s later lyrics such as “Cars Are Cars” from the 1983 album, Hearts and Bones. In this song the narrator affirms that cars are the same everywhere but people do change—an allusion to and rejection of a male-dominant, socially independent model. In such later songs as “Another Galaxy” and “Graceland,” the road offers the promise of understanding and comfort, and the pace of the music slows accordingly. However, Simon was also thrown into the politics of race with the appearance of his 1987 Graceland album in which he recorded with South African black musicians and consequently was accused of flouting UN Resolution 35/206, an international boycott against apartheid South Africa. He defended himself against the charge of political subversion by stating that he had deliberately steered away from performing in South Africa and was only giving marginalized black musicians from the Johannesburg slums the opportunity for their music to become known in the West. He avoided some criticism by choosing to go on tour with many of these South African black groups, consisting of a female chorus that included Miriam Makeba, the 10man Zulu vocal team Ladysmith Black Mambazo led by Joseph Shabalala, Ray Phiri’s band Stimela, and Hugh Masekela, who had earlier fled South Africa. He also sang apolitical and personal songs—something that pleased some of his audience but displeased others who thought that he missed an

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opportunity to be effectively political against the apartheid South Africa. This tour was a hit, the audience loved the township jive or umbaqanga that was so new to most of them, and the black musicians were justly celebrated abroad and at home, but action groups like Artists Against Apartheid did not lessen their criticism. Springsteen’s act of subversion was much more direct and less open to multiple interpretations than Simon’s, though he did not go against any international sanctions in the process. His singing the anti-draft song “Fortunate Son” and the Vietnam protest song “Born in the U. S. A.” incensed many in the audience of the November 11, 2014 Concert for Valor in Washington D.C. This audience had come to the concert specifically to honor the veterans who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and who did not think they were going to be party to a denunciation of Vietnam War perpetrators and veterans alike in the process. Springsteen’s engagement of protest road songs was an act of extreme political resistance that almost no one could miss and had none of the innocence that marked singers and groups in the early 1960s or even the ambiguity of Paul Simon’s engagement of South African musical groups. The lead singers and main players for The Beach Boys’, Dylan’s, Simon’s, and Springsteen’s groups were predominantly. white males, much of their music was targeted to young white males, the road itself had a white cast to it, and, as Georges Van Den Abbeele pointed out, until the 1970s travel was male-dominated (xxvi). In support of that view, Heginbotham claimed that before the ’70s “women . . . were unwelcome on the road” and in the case of the Beats were regarded as “encumbrances,” a “source of problems,” and little more than sexual objects (99). Though many young women associated with the Beats went on to carve out their own artistic careers, their impact on the narrative of the road per se was significantly less than the men of the period though they too were acting out their resistance to middle-class values and cultural conformity through their own lifestyles and associations with rebellious men. It was not until the film Thelma and Louise (1991) that women were placed firmly in the driver’s seat on the filmic road, but the end of the film fell short of an unequivocal celebration of women’s independence and assured place on the road. In the final moment of the film when the two women drove their car over the cliff into the Grand Canyon, it was questionable whether that action was apotheosis or defeat. So, even until the ’90s, the role of women in relation to the road had not changed so quickly or so much. While African Americans had been largely excluded from the road in the early stages of development, the real change in their engagement began after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. However, though it promised to put to rest national division over the issue of racial inequity, it was not able

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to prevent race riots and burning of American cities in 1964 and 1967 from Alabama, to Detroit, to Los Angeles, or those following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Moreover, the first protests against the Vietnam War began in 1965, and in 1968 anti-war protests disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as opposition to the war in Vietnam grew. From then until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, people in the United States were more concerned about American aggression in Asia and their men dying in this unpopular war than they were about correcting lingering injustices over race. So, for two decades from 1955 to 1975 the lives of Americans in general were destabilized, shifting, and marked by protests, and the road itself became a marker of this instability, changing from a place of freedom and excitement to that of insecurity if not threat in the ’60s and ’70s. Despite these anxieties, the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 quieted the American social and political landscape, including racial clashes, allowing African Americans to have real access to the highways and byways of America.

The intrusion of the postmodern into the road at the turn of the century If civil rights and the Vietnam War dominated public and political life as well as the road until 1975, it was the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 that marked a turn in public thinking, the manufacturing process, and attitudes toward the road. Gas production had seemingly reached its peak even though there was greater demand amid considerable fear of an interruption of imported oil from the Middle East. In these periods of crisis, gas supplies were limited and sometimes rationed, and people had to wait in long queues at service stations to get gas. That changed the public perception of the automobile and the road. No longer could many people feel comfortable buying big American cars and trucks, so, with smaller, less gas-guzzling cars, the Japanese began to dominate the market, causing public concern over the loss of American manufacturing, which in turn caused American automobile manufacturers to downsize cars and make them more fuel efficient. Both American mobility and prosperity seemed imperiled at a time when the United States had lost considerable face and capital over its engagement in the Vietnam War and even the terms of its exit from it. During much of the ’80s, public attitudes were grim and the movies dark, but gradually they responded to the possibilities of globalization and postmodernism of the late ’80s and ’90s. As the social attitudes became more positive, views of the road and travel again turned positive and even romantic,

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and, as Mills notes, “the rebel in the 1980s is the one who works toward family unity rather than hitting the road in search of an elusive truth” (Road 163). This postmodern coding of the road is kinder, gentler, and less focused on traditional masculinity and youthful rebellion than earlier forms. Many of the new road films emphasized friendship and racial and ethnic diversity and had more Hollywood endings than the generation before, as indicated by Forrest Gump (1994), Smoke Signals (1998), Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), and Get on the Bus (1996), as well as the documentary My America, or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997). Some road films directly concerned heterosexual romance—When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Elizabethtown (2005), but a few others like Brokeback Mountain (2005) were clearly gender benders revising masculinities (Slethaug, Postmodern). Still others nicely brought in the elderly as an important new focus— Fried Green Tomatoes (1992), The Straight Story (1999), and About Schmidt (2002), which had not been part of traditional road films or fiction. Women, too, were/are now involved at every level of this postmodern road culture. In an article called “Women and Cars,” Excellence magazine notes that 85 percent of decisions about cars involve women; women themselves purchase 63 percent of new cars and 53 percent of used cars; and roughly half of those who have driver’s licenses are women. These statistics are a strong indication that women have more than established their real presence on the road. Then, too, they have entered the discourse of the road as designers and executives in automobile firms, as race-car drivers, and as travelers in general. Similarly, as Elinor Nauen noticed in 1997, they had already entered the market as writers of road literature. Indeed, as both Virginia Shay and Evelyn Deshane have written in this book, women have ever more strongly entered the discourse of the road in recent years both as singers and subjects of songs. Another part of postmodernism and the road has consisted of a new attitude toward bus travel and the road, particularly for musicians. Although the bus had been a symbol of cheap transportation, community building, and civil rights protests in the ’70s, television began to capture a different view. The Partridge Family (1970–74) and The Simpsons (beginning 1989) contributed to the growing mystique of the bus as a modern and family-oriented mode of transportation, a view that was reinforced by the highly popular film Forrest Gump in 1994. With the advent of Elvis Presley’s bus in the 1960s with its full shower, queen-size bed, closets, and well-provisioned kitchen, many of the musicians’ tour buses started to be identified with a certain glamor and hallmark of the active musician. As indicated by Johnny Cash who spent $553,000 refurbishing his bus in 1980, “inexpensive” was clearly no longer the deciding factor—or

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perhaps even a factor at all—when later artists chose to use a tour bus (Johnny Cash Tour Bus). As Kuyper notes in “‘Happiness Is the Road’: Bob Dylan” (Chapter 8) customized buses were fully utilized by Bob Dylan beginning with his Never Ending Tour in 1989 and became a standard part of his annual tours. Recently Taylor Swift used a number of customized, expensive buses for her tours, and her so-called “1989 World Tour” that began on May 5, 2015 even used an entourage of 11 buses and 26 semis (Swift). Touring by bus became increasingly elaborate and sophisticated as the concerts became bigger, more profitable, and the distances longer. Indeed, the tour bus has become so intimate and necessary that musicians began to call them by individual names, sharing the identity of the musicians within. The 1970s Partridge Family bus was called Shirley, the 1973 musical tour bus described by Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous was Doris, Elvis Presley’s bus was Taking Care of Business (TCB), Johnny Cash’s mobile mansion (purchased in1979) was called JC Unit One, Willy Nelson’s bus was Honeysuckle Rose, Dolly Parton’s tour bus where she wrote many of her songs was called Gypsy Wagon, the rapper 2 Chainz called his on-bus recording studio Deuce Mobile, and Taylor Swift called one of her buses Dragon Nest. With a convoy of buses, modern musicians like Taylor Swift may not call all their buses by individual names but rather splash the title of their current road tour all over the sides. All of this demonstrates that musicians often fully identify with their own bus and depend on its comfortable familiarity. As Cash wrote in his 1997 autobiography: I have a home that takes me anywhere I need to go, that cradles me and comforts me, that lets me nod off in the mountains and wake up in the plains: my bus, of course. We call it Unit One. I love my bus. It really is my home too. When I make it off another plane through another airport, the sight of that big black MCI waiting by the curb sends waves of relief through me—Aah!—safety, familiarity, solitude. Peace at last. My cocoon. (Cash) Another feature of the postmodern road at the turn of the century is the tendency to metafictively and self-consciously manipulate and play with the ideas and traditions of the road, in a way that the reader recognizes and accepts the self-conscious play. Jacques Poulin’s 1984 novel Volkswagen Blues, first published in French and then translated into English, provides a nice example of this phenomenon in telling the story of a Québécois couple (Jack—a writer—and his female companion, La Grande Sauterelle—a mechanic) who make their way from the camp in the Baie de Gaspé (where Jacques Cartier landed and began his explorations of North America) across Ontario and the

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United States as far as San Francisco in search of Jack’s missing brother Théo. This journey over the roads, in the towns and cities, and into important cultural landmarks that might yield information about Théo is believable in itself, but in the process the couple metafictively evoke many traits of paradigmatic historical, literary, filmic, and musical road trips and conventions, holding them up for the readers’ comprehension and delight. Interestingly, not only does this story begin in Quebec, but the first chapter invokes the French explorer Jacques Cartier (the Canadian parallel of the English Puritan origins of the American road), showing an awareness of the early road tradition of adventure, discovery, and settlement but wresting it, first, from the first Americans in favor of the French explorer who hoped to find the legendary gold of Eldorado in the New World, and second, for Jack himself who is of French descent taking a road journey through the United States. However, La Grande Sauterelle complicates these European colonial explorer and settler traditions because her mother is a Native American woman, so this English/French/Native American combination not only internationalizes the American road but retrieves and secures it for Native Americans. Indeed, La Grande Sauterelle searches everywhere for Native American roots and rails against the white man’s occupation and destruction of Native American tribes and identity. This book, then, is not just about the couple’s recycling the prototypical American road trip but also about reinventing the tradition to suit their own nationalities, ethnicities, and identities. It also questions the exceptionalist Manifest Destiny view that it was the white American’s responsibility to go on the road and take over and settle in the West. That Poulin’s novel does recycle parts of the prototypical American road trip is indicated in several ways. One is that the main character’s own name Jack tantalizes the reader with associations of the historical arc of travel from Jacques Cartier to Jack Kerouac and then to the main character himself. Indeed, the novel directly references not only Cartier and French explorers in Canada and the United States but Kerouac’s On the Road, along with another book called The Oregon Trail Revisited by Franzwa when Jack discovers them both to have been among items in his brother’s possession when he was picked up by the Toronto police on his way west. Jack learns several key things about the Oregon Trail’s road westward—first, “it was the oldest trail in America. It was older than the history of the conquest of the West, older than the coureurs de bois and the pioneers, older than all the emigrants with their ox-drawn carts. It was as old as the Indians and probably as old as America” (174); second, in the nineteenth century it was common people who took that journey on the Oregon Trail, not famous explorers (95); and third, many were disappointed and even sacrificed their lives in trying to attain their final destination of the West Coast. Jack ties the Oregon Trail inextricably to Jack Kerouac when he

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cites from the preface of On the Road: “The road has replaced the ancient trail of the pioneers heading West; it is the mystical link that joins the American to his continent, to his compatriots” (195). Finally, the book ties both Cartier and Kerouac to the main character Jack when La Grande Sauterelle tells him he should write about their adventure, saying “You’ve said that writing’s a form of exploration” (221). He also discovers that he is not only an explorer but also a common man who, without knowing it in advance, suffers disappointment at the end of his journey across North America when he finds that his brother in San Francisco has severe dementia and doesn’t recognize or remember him. The novel also evokes the road movie, road music, and literary road traditions. One of the very first of these occurs when Jack mentions his fondness for the director Sam Peckinpah, whose films such as Straw Dogs are remembered for their violent action and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) as a dark road movie. Jack also comments on his favorite Canadian and American fiction writers, including Richard Brautigan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Carson McCullers, and J. D. Salinger, all of whom have road fiction in their corpus. In Chicago, Jack and La Grande Sauterelle actually meet Saul Bellow, strengthening the Canadian-American connection but also highlighting the road allusions as they quote from The Adventures of Augie March: I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America. (Bellow, 79) When in San Francisco, Jack also notes the importance of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his City Lights Bookstore, and its parallel Le Bouquiniste in Quebec City, and Shakespeare and Company in Paris. This combination links English American, French-Canadian, and French literary haunts and the travelers who frequented them—literati, Bohemian, Beat, and hipsters— common folks who are able to think and rebel against social conformity. In addition, Jack mentions road music, especially a French road song translated into the American context: America’s road is long And long is the road of love When suffering’s done, happiness takes its turn So don’t you grieve, my dearest, I’ll be home Wandering’s what holds you when you’re young But I’ll grow old, my love, so don’t you mourn. (71)

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This French song might well have come from any of the other countrywestern road chanteur Jack identifies such as Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, Kris Kristofferson, Jack Elliott, Roy Acuff, or Jimmie Rodgers—whose “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride” and “Train Whistle Blues” they listen to on the radio (130– 31). La Grande Sauterelle, Jack, and a hitchhiker also sing Jerry Jeff Walker’s “very sweet, nostalgic country ballad” “No Roots in Ramblin’” with a few key phrases as “I’m now alone and I know I need to ramble,” “It’s the call from deep inside,” and “The blues will haunt me till I die” (174)—key elements of many of the country-western road songs. This metafictive play of the road is part of postmodern literary and musical play that breathed new life into road fiction, movies, and music. Altogether, then, the road as a semiotic sign in America has retained particular qualities over the duration of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but others have changed significantly as culture shifted. What has remained fundamentally the same is the idea of traveling over certain routes, the mobility required to accomplish that, and the hope for some kind of discovery in nature, open space, culture, or self. However, the type of routes themselves changed from small paths, trails, and waterways to major highways and train routes as well as those of sea and air. Then, too, the travelers changed from explorers, adventurers, and frontier settlers to common people who wanted to experience travel and profit by it in some financial, psychological, or spiritual sense. For many Americans in the twentieth century, this kind of travel also depended on and developed a sense of individualism and identity. By mid-twentieth century, automobile travel on highways had become the most engaging form of travel and clearly linked modernity, adventure, speed, individualism, identity, and agency but also with rebellion against social values that would impede their desire for these qualities. With the civil rights and anti-war protests of the ’60s and ’70s, individualism lost some of its blush, and travelers began to think more in terms of social responsibility and the development of community as being the goals of travel on the road, whatever the mode of transportation. Finally, at the turn of the century, individualism was rekindled, and a kinder, gentler, and more romantic view of the road was invoked as travel became easier, globalization more universally accepted, and literature, film, and music about them became more playful and positive.

3 Easy riders and hard roads in the early recorded blues Steven Knepper and James Tuten1

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hether for wanderlust or escape, whether to pursue new opportunities or to shake old routines, whether by foot, bus, train, or automobile, the narrators of blues songs in the 1920s and 1930s are often on the road. As R. A. Lawson notes, the “spirit of mobility” pervades the blues (96). Because of this, the artists of the early recorded blues contributed to several different mythologies of the road.2 They helped to pioneer the myth of the automobile, but they also contributed to the already established myth of the railroad (and even of the mule). As an archetype, the road is bound up with subjectivity and agency, and this connection is certainly central to the early recorded blues, as well. Traveling the road is a multiform and often ambiguous activity, one that can thrill or cause anxiety, which can evoke an exhilarating sense of freedom or a sinking sense of loneliness. These complexities have historical roots, of course. Houston Baker argues that the “signal expressive achievement of blues . . . lay in their translation of technological innovativeness, unsettling demographic fluidity, and boundless frontier energy into expression which attracted avid interest from the American masses” (1). For black Southerners in the era of sharecropping

1

The authors would like to thank Rob Wyllie, Steve Goodson, Jerry Zoltan and the Juniata College History Seminar.

2

Many of these myths were already established in American vernacular music traditions. In “The Road in American Vernacular Music,” for instance, Susan Kuyper notes the prominence of wandering the road in cowboy songs. Like the protagonists implied in the blues, cowboy wanderers are often richer in experiences than property.

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and segregation, the road suggested a means of self-determination and the prospect of a better life. For many the road led north to cities like Chicago or Detroit with growing industrial bases and employment that paid far better than the cotton economy. Those jobs helped to lure around six million African Americans onto the roads from the South beginning in the 1910s, and the early recorded blues chronicle this “Great Migration.” But Jim Crow realities could also make traveling the road an unsettling and even dangerous experience. This chapter elaborates on the complex treatment of the road and travel in the early recorded blues by surveying the work of three blues artists with recording careers from 1925 to 1941: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and Buddy Moss. Each artist is regarded as among the foremost performers of one of the three secondary regions of the blues: Jefferson of Texas blues, Johnson of delta blues, and Moss of Piedmont blues.3 All three treat the road in rich ways. While many earlier blues musicians made frequent use of “floating verses,” lines that were mixed and matched across songs, the songs of Jefferson, Johnson, and Moss usually evince sophisticated thematic and at times narrative unity. It is rare for blues artists from the three major regional styles to be considered together, and some differences do emerge. Jefferson, for instance, was based in urban Texas, so it is perhaps unsurprising that his songs are more preoccupied with conspicuous consumption of particular brands than are Johnson’s from the rural delta. Still, there are definite continuities in these three artists’ treatments of the road. After providing brief biographies of the three artists, this chapter examines the varied modes of transportation that show up in the early recorded blues and how these simultaneously reflect a transitional time in transportation history and provide rich figurative possibilities. These possibilities introduce the main focus of the chapter: the ways in which Johnson, Jefferson, and Moss present the road as a complex, multivalent site of both empowerment and anxiety. The aim throughout is to be suggestive rather than comprehensive, to take a few steps toward historicizing these three blues artists’ treatment of the road while simultaneously exploring how their songs contribute to a rich mythology of road and self that remains a powerful part of the American music scene and broader cultural imagination.

Biographies The blues is a form of black secular music originating in the American South. Dating the appearance of the genre has proven difficult due to the lack of

3

Piedmont blues is sometimes called East Coast blues. Since the artists themselves mainly hailed from the Piedmont of the Carolinas and Georgia, we prefer calling it Piedmont blues.

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serious music collection before the early twentieth century. Blues scholar Bruce Bastin argues that “the blues, as a musical form, was almost certainly polygenetic and did not emerge everywhere at the same time” (7–8). We do know that the term ‘blues’ came into use at the same time Jim Crow became law across the South, during the decade of the 1890s (Palmer 42). Between the earliest recorded blues around 1920 and the spread of blues to the North, the West, and into “urban” forms after 1940, “country blues” dominated. The country blues had roots in rural African American folk song and emphasized acoustic guitar. Categorization within the blues is contested, but three major divisions of country blues are widely recognized. The Texas blues, best represented by Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893–1929), sprang up among artists who actually spent considerable time among the growing cities of eastern Texas and Louisiana. In that sense the “country blues” label can be misleading. The Delta blues, which featured many renowned figures but none more influential than Robert Johnson (1911–38), existed in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta, a truly rural and agricultural region where open lonely spaces and deserted crossroads were a reality of daily life. The Piedmont blues artists—well represented by Buddy Moss (1914–84)—often lived in Atlanta, itself a growing “New South” city, but the singers had migrated there from the countryside and can be seen as having an urban brand consciousness alongside rural metaphors. Texas blues is known to us today mainly through the recordings of Jefferson and subsequent artists based in the Lone Star state’s larger cities, such as Dallas and Houston, but the category often includes musicians from northwest Louisiana and Oklahoma, as well. Andrew Cohen describes Jefferson as “an intuitive virtuoso” because, unlike most musicians across the blues landscape, he employed all of the thumbing techniques (155–56).4 He made seminal recordings for Paramount Records in 1926. Those recordings and subsequent ones during his very brief four-year recording career catapulted Jefferson to a position as the best-selling black recording artist of the era. As music historian David Evans has written, “Blind Lemon Jefferson unambiguously represented the solo blues sound of the street corner, the house party, the southern country-picnic, and the honky-tonk, and he did so with extraordinary virtuosity as a lyricist, vocalist, and guitarist” (“Musical Innovation,” 87). Jefferson’s influence on the development of the blues is profound (Govenar; Uzzel 10–16 and 64–66). He influenced not only other Texas bluesmen such as Leadbelly, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and T-Bone Walker, but also leading blues artists from outside Texas, including such Delta blues luminaries as Chester Arthur Bennett (Howlin’ Wolf), McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), and Son House.

4

See also David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues (Oakland: University of California Press, 1982), 168.

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In the popular imagination, and for some scholars as well, Delta blues are the original. The guitar reigned supreme among instruments in the Delta, as in the other regional styles, but playing with a slide was more common (Palmer 43–45; Gioia 5–6). The Delta refers to a portion of the state of Mississippi that extends along the river north of Vicksburg’s bluffs to the Tennessee border and parallel to the Arkansas Delta on the west side of the “Father of Waters.” The blues may or may not have been born there, but it is certainly true that no other blues region can claim so many prominent blues artists, and the central early figure in this most central blues tradition is Robert Johnson. Johnson had a brief but remarkable musical career that yielded twenty-nine songs from two recording sessions—five days in a San Antonio hotel in 1936 and two days in a stuffy Dallas warehouse in 1937. Johnson traveled throughout the Delta in the mid- to late 1930s, but his budding career also took him to St. Louis, Chicago, and New York City. In 1938, at the age of twenty-seven, Johnson died under mysterious circumstances near Greenwood, Mississippi. He was most likely poisoned by a lover’s jealous husband, but the legend of Johnson (one that he probably encouraged in his lifetime) is that he sold his soul to the devil in order to learn how to play the blues and that in 1938 the devil came to collect (Guralnick; Gioia 182–87). The Piedmont blues is the folk-blues style geographically associated with the Piedmont region of the Carolinas and Georgia, but which, according to such experts as Bruce Bastin and Peter Lowry, included the territory between Florida and Virginia too. Bastin believed that Piedmont blues likely came after the blues emergence in the Delta and can be dated to around the early 1900s. The Piedmont blues relied on finger-picking and sometimes displayed elements of ragtime. Although several cities developed lively blues scenes, Atlanta became the center for Piedmont blues musicians. The premier Piedmont bluesman before 1930 was Blind Blake. During the Great Depression, though, no Piedmont performer was more important than Buddy Moss (James; Bastin 125–28; Weissman 71). Eugene Buddy Moss was born in the little community of Jewel in the Black Belt region of Georgia.5 The agricultural depression in the South preceded the global Great Depression by a number of years and drove down black land ownership along with rural black employment. African Americans did not migrate only out of the South in this time period. Many, including the Moss family, migrated to the South’s own growing urban centers. In 1928, when Moss was fourteen, his family moved from rural Georgia to Atlanta. Within a few years he became a participant in

5

Note that Bastin gives Jewel’s location as Hancock County, but maps show it as in Warren County. On the economic travails of Southern agriculture in the 1920s and 1930s see Gilbert Fite, Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980, especially Chapters 5 and 6.

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the blues music culture of the city, joining a trio by 1930. Moss had a clear and rich baritone much of the time, but he could move into a higher tenor register in some songs. He usually stuck to the AAB blues structure, yet the ragtime elements that helped to distinguish the Piedmont blues are found in some of his work, especially in later pieces like “Joy Rag” and “Struggle Buggie” (Bastin 116–21 and 125–26; “Georgia Days”). The three main blues regions shared some characteristics, of course, including high rates of poverty and illiteracy and the ongoing oppression of the Jim Crow regime. In each region, artists composed songs with humor, sadness, longing, lust, and the road. The road appears as a complicated, even contradictory, place in the Depression-era blues. The road offered empowerment, whether through escaping the Jim Crow South or opportunities for adventure and displays of conspicuous consumption. Yet the road could also be a place of anxiety, due to legitimate fears of racial violence or lonely experiences of deracination. The same pathways that beckoned as an escape from a soured love affair and the possibility of new ones just as easily separated heart-struck lovers from one another. These complex motifs of the road can be seen in the blues of all three genres.

Traveling the road Rural southern roads in the 1920s and 1930s were sometimes cement, brick, macadam, or loose gravel, but most often they were simply packed earth. Southerners, black and white, used various means to travel those roads— feet, horse-drawn buggies, mule carts, and increasingly automobiles. The early and varied travels of Robert Johnson are representative: He traveled by bus and by train, hitching a ride on the back of a pickup truck, sitting in the back of a corn wagon with a tractor pulling it. Sometimes [Johnson] and a companion like Johnny Shines would set off walking down the highway; other times they would hop a train pulling out of the freight yards. When they arrived in a new town they would play on street corners or in front of the local barbershop, set up in front of restaurants or in the town square. (Guralnick 20)6

6

William Faulkner depicts early-twentieth-century changes in roads and transportation throughout his 1962 novel The Reivers. The narrator recounts youthful escapades on rural roads where automobiles were still rare. He sardonically recalls, for instance, “just another country road crossing another swampy creek, the road no longer dry not really wet yet, the holes and boggy places already filled for our convenience by previous pioneers with brush-tops and limbs, and sections of it even corduroyed with poles laid crossways in the mud . . .” (81).

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Given experiences such as these, it is unsurprising that the lyrics of the early recorded blues reflect a transitional time in transportation. Blues narrators traverse the road by foot, wagon, horse, and mule. In Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues,” the narrator’s ghost catches a ride on a Greyhound bus. Hearses offer more ominous last rides in Buddy Moss’s “Undertaker Blues” and “When the Hearse Roll Me from my Door.” An airplane, a submarine, and a buggy all appear in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Rabbit Foot Blues.” The railroad, which had for several generations been a major symbol for mobility, also makes frequent appearances in the blues. Houston Baker suggests that blues artists were drawn to “the locomotive’s drive and thrust, its promise of unrestrained mobility and unlimited freedom” (11). Jefferson mentions railroads or trains in at least fourteen of his pieces.7 His “Sunshine Special” catalogs a number of rail lines by name: “Cotton Belt is a slow train, also that I. and G.N./If I leave Texas anymore, going to leave on that L. and N.” In “Black Horse Blues,” Jefferson sings, “Tell me what time do the trains come through your town?/I wanna know what time do the trains come through your Town./I wanna laugh and talk with a long-haired teasin’ brown.” Moss mentions trains in a half dozen songs. In his “B&O Blues No. 2,” the narrator says, “I’m gonna grab me a train, I’m goin’ back to Baltimore/ I’m gonna find my baby, Lord she rode that B&O.” If the train roaring down the tracks represented “unrestrained mobility,” though, the broken-down locomotive offered an evocative image of power rendered impotent, one tapped by Moss in “Broke Down Engine,” where the narrator “ain’t got no whistle or bell.”8 But the means of transportation that most captured the imagination of blues artists in the twenties and thirties seems to have been the automobile. Automobiles did not yet monopolize the roadways, but they certainly were revolutionizing not just transportation and daily life but also popular culture. The early recorded blues often name automobiles by make and model. For instance, the inexpensive and popular Terraplane, manufactured by Hudson Motor Car Company, provides Robert Johnson with the conceit for his “Terraplane Blues,” while Blind Lemon Jefferson’s brand conscious “D. B. Blues” features a Dodge, Packard, Ford, and Hudson “Super Six.”

7

This is roughly fourteen percent of his career output.

8

The Sunshine Special had a route including east Texas all the way to St Louis, Mo. The I and GN Railroad was the International & Great Northern company that ran within Texas. The Cotton Belt took much the same route but was not an express. L & N refers to the Louisville and Nashville which served the south-central part of the country. The B & O refers to the Baltimore and Ohio railroad.

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The many modes of transportation that show up in the early recorded blues reflect historical realities, but they also provide blues artists with rich figurative possibilities. Different modes of transportation carried with them differing connotations and levels of prestige. They provided metaphors of power and potency (or weakness and impotency). Feet, cars, and trains allow for different speeds and degrees of agency. They can make distances seem vast in one instance and vanishing in another. They figure the road as a site of loneliness or connection. These means of movement carry protagonists far from home or fail to take them far enough away. Consider Buddy Moss’s 1933 recording of “Hard Road Blues,” which evokes some of the most important themes and tensions surrounding the road in early recorded blues music. The opening verses trade upon the difference between walking and driving. Indeed, the opening lines of the song evoke a sort of phenomenology of walking the road. They bracket modern transportation and evoke the slowness and difficulty of journey by foot: Walking down a hard road done wore the soles off a my shoes Walking down a hard road done wore the soles off a my shoes My clothes are ragged I got the old hard road blues The blues’ characteristic AAB structure, here modified, to AAA reinforces the long duration of the lonely journey. As is often the case in the early recorded blues, traveling the road in this song is a solitary endeavor. It entails separation from others, especially lovers. This can be exhilarating if the love has grown stale or bitter, as is the case in many blues songs, but it is also a frequent source of anxiety and loneliness, as it is in the second verse of “Hard Road Blues”: Have you ever lay down at night thinkin’ about your brown Have you ever lay down at night thinkin’ about your brown And got the hard road blues, and ramble from town to town The first two verses thus give us the sense of a long, solitary journey. The third verse, while testifying to the rough condition of those Depressionera roads, offers a possible solution to the narrator’s sore feet and loneliness, one signaled first by a more upbeat guitar part: Bridge washed out, wires all down My gal done quit me I’m gon’ leave this town I’m put some wheels on my boogie shoes Gonna roll back to my baby to get rid of these hard road blues

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Adding “wheels” seems to offer the hope of actually getting somewhere rather than interminably trudging down the road, the promise of reunion rather than the separation bemoaned by the narrator elsewhere in the song. By implication—and this is born out in other blues songs of the period—a good automobile can transform the road from a site of separation into the means of connection. The first three verses of Moss’s “Hard Road Blues,” then, move from separation to union and from walking to driving. The last two verses return to walking the road, and they circle back over the pattern of separation and union. At times in the early recorded blues wanderlust seems to motivate the narrator to take to the road; the road seems to entice or pull the narrator. At other times, the narrator seems to be pushed onto the road, which offers an escape from anxieties, pressures, or problems. These “walking blues” can seem to serve a therapeutic function, as is the case in the fourth verse of Moss’s song: I lay down last night a thousand things on my mind I lay down last night a thousand things on my mind Going walk these hard roads just to cure my low down mind The last verse offers a different possibility, though, a rare one in the early recorded blues. Instead of walking the roads alone in an attempt to cure his troubles, the narrator here returns to the familiar themes of the early verses, how the hard road is itself a source of tribulation and trouble, and that loneliness is one of the foremost among these. In the final verse the narrator hopes that walking with his lover will ease the torments of the road itself. The song ends with the hope of reunion: Come here baby give me your right hand Come here baby give me your right hand Walking these hard roads gonna drive me insane. In short, Moss’s song surveys a number of different approaches to the road, some in which it is a site of empowerment, some in which it is a site of alienation or distress. In this way, it is a fitting entry point into a wider survey of the complex treatment of the road in the early recorded blues.

Empowerment For many early-twentieth-century rural black Southerners, whose lives were circumscribed by Jim Crow and the sharecropping system, the road offered

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a means of exerting their agency. Croppers had little bargaining power, but they could switch farms at year’s end if not in debt, looking for better land or a better landlord.9 Guralnick explains that many Delta bluesmen were trying to get out of this exploitative system: Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Robert Lockwood, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson were bright, imaginative young men who knew what they didn’t want, which was to pick cotton like their parents or to be stuck in a rural backwater where their music was a diversion—but a diversion only—from backbreaking labor. Education was not available; perspective was not possible; there was little family or economic stability. The world in which they lived was enshrouded by fog but enlivened by their music and a sense of expectation and adventure, of having to create around them the coherence and connections that were otherwise lacking in their lives. (29–30) Throughout the 1920s and ’30s the road increasingly offered an exit from the sharecropper system and the southern countryside altogether, as many rural blacks joined the Great Migration to industrial cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Chicago. This migration was the subject of many blues songs (Lawson 81–115).10 In Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago,” for instance, the narrator holds up two destinations, one from the West and one from the North, as hopeful ideals: “Ooh, baby don’t you want to go?/Back to the land of California, to my sweet home Chicago.”11 Buddy Moss puts it even more directly in “Travelin’ Blues,” singing, “I’m goin’ to Chicago, ‘cause I think it’s a better town.” Blues artists like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters joined in the migration, bringing the blues from the country to the city, where it would eventually draw the attention of the world. R. A. Lawson explains that

9

The blues emerged from this exploitative system and from slavery before it. Houston Baker states, “The blues performance is further suggestive if economic conditions of Afro-American existence are brought to mind. Standing at the juncture, or railhead, the singer draws into his repertoire hollers, cries, whoops, and moans of black men and women working in fields without recompense” (8).

10

Lawson claims, “At the most superficial level, blues music became a documentary of the Great Migration, recording in song the experiences of African Americans increasingly looking over their shoulders, back toward the South” (88).

11

Many blues songs focus on the hopes and possibilities of the Great Migration. For a song about the disappointments and financial struggles that sometimes accompanied northern migration, though, see Moss’s “Cold Country Blues,” where he sings, “In the summer I had money but, this winter I didn’t have a lousy dime/Said in the summer I had money, but this winter I didn’t have a lousy dime/And I’m goin’ back south, where the weather suits these clothes of mine.”

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such “musicians exemplified the hopes and dreams of the millions of black southerners” who were also northward bound (86). The road offered blues artists not only a way out of sharecropping but also the possibility of adventure, prestige, and cash. The latter, in particular, encouraged a culture of conspicuous consumption to emerge among blues performers. As Ted Ownby has shown, Mississippi bluesmen developed a new taste for consumer goods and began to identify with luxury items because such “goods [were] important elements in gaining self-esteem, respect in the black community, and romantic success” (113). Baker offers a complementary point: Many instances of the blues performance contain lyrical inscriptions of both lack and commercial possibility. The performance that sings of abysmal poverty and deprivation may be recompensed by sumptuous food and stimulating beverage at a country picnic, amorous favors from an attentive listener, enhanced Afro-American communality, or Yankee dollars from representatives of record companies traveling the South in search of blues as commodifiable entertainment. The performance, therefore, mediates one of the most prevalent of all antinomies in cultural investigation— creativity and commerce. (8–9) The automobile came to be seen as the ultimate luxury good and form of conspicuous consumption in the early recorded blues. The car’s status and the value of brand imagery come through in many songs, but nowhere more vividly than Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “D. B. Blues”: Who is that coming: hey with a motor so strong That’s Lemon in his D B: people think he’s got his girl out on Going to get out of my four-cylinder Dodge: I want to get me a Super Six I’m always around the ladies: and I like to have my business fixed I’m crazy about a Packard: but my baby only rates a Ford A Packard is too expensive: Ford will take you where you want to go Come here brownskin: listen to my motor roar Because my Super Six sufficient: to take you where you want to go I never did like no horses: I never could stand no steel Ever since I was old enough to catch a brown: give me the automobile Blind Lemon effectively name-drops car brands and hints at individual tastes, such as the difference in his affection for a Packard and his lover’s appreciation for Fords. Power and cost enter the lyrics as he hopes to upgrade from a four-

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cylinder to a six-cylinder Dodge, while Packards are out of his price range. The final lines highlight the transition that this generation of blues musicians lived through, as he makes clear his preference for cars over horses and railroads. Buddy Moss also occasionally names automobiles by make and model, and he too links them to prestige. In “Going to Your Funeral in a Vee Eight Ford,” a mock-serious song, the narrator sticks to a consistent theme of how he will celebrate and profit from his lover’s death: “I’m gonna buy you a straight life policy, sick and accident, too.” The insurance money allows for a binge of conspicuous consumption. He plans to purchase a house and to get a maid, but most vividly he has his eyes on the powerful Ford of the title. Songs like these can be seen as an early version of “name checking,” the practice of mentioning brands, especially high-end or luxury brands, in songs or other popular culture venues. The use of the term “name checking” in this sense comes from hip hop, where mentioning brands has been a hallmark of a genre that owes an important debt to the blues. One need look no further for an example than the first rap song to chart, 1979’s “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, which mentions driving Lincoln and Cadillac luxury cars of the time.12 In the case of “D. B. Blues” and “Going to Your Funeral in a Vee Eight Ford,” the cars themselves are treated as luxury goods, but as has been widely noted, those same markers of prestige and status made them popular sexual metaphors. In Moss’s up-tempo rag “Struggle Buggie,” for instance, the narrator’s lover is figured as an enviable automobile that is “rarin’ to go all the time.” The metaphor’s extension to “good upholstery” and “good tires” is equivalent to pointing out the attractive features of his objectified partner. At the heart of the analogy is that cars and women are both status symbols. As Moss brags in the chorus, “Don’t get mad with me man, ‘cause your buggie don’t ride good as mine.”13 Moss has a great deal of company in drawing car/lover metaphors. As described earlier, Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” is a veritable Hudson Motors parts catalogue with references to the oil, horn, lights, coil, generator, hood, motor, battery, starter, spark plug and even the wires, all deployed as aggressive double entendres: “And when I mash down on your little starter/ Then your spark plug will give me fire.” The figurative conflation of cars and women highlights that the vision of conspicuous consumption offered in the songs of Jefferson, Moss, and Johnson is a decidedly male one in a genre often

12

On name checking brands in hip hop, see Steve Stoute’s The Tanning of America: How Hip Hop Created a Culture that Rewrote the Rules of the New Economy, pp. 128–34.

13

Many scholars of the blues have explored the use of sexual metaphor, to say nothing of direct sexual references, in songs. For example, see Ownby, American Dreams, pp. 118–20.

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but not always dominated by male singers. It is important to note, though, that women blues artists, too, could use automobile and transportation metaphors to sing about sex and relationships. In her 1941 song “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” for instance, Lizzie Douglas (Memphis Minnie) sings, “Won’t you be my chauffeur . . .Yes he drives so easy, I can’t turn him down.” This same song deploys the automobile as a status symbol, as well, as the narrator hopes to buy her chauffeur a “brand new V8 Ford,” which will in turn keep the chauffeur from giving rides to others. The narrator of “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” unlike the narrators of “Terraplane Blues” or “Struggle Buggie,” figures her lover as a chauffeur rather than objectifying him as a vehicle. Still, there are marked similarities between “Me and My Chauffeur Blues” and the songs about cars and sex by Jefferson, Moss, and Johnson. In all of them automobiles figure both economic status and the status to be gained from desirable lovers, and in all of them the road becomes a means not only of getting from here to there but also of navigating relationships or of getting from one lover to another.14

Anxiety But if traveling the road offered the possibility of new opportunities, adventure, profit, and escape from oppression, it also caused anxiety. Black travelers in the time of Jim Crow faced challenges in finding food and lodging that their white counterparts did not, the anxiety-producing implications of “driving while black,” to borrow a phrase from Cotten Seiler (79). The Negro Motorist Green Book provides a record of some of the challenges that even wealthier black businessmen faced. This annual publication provided travelers with lists of hotels, restaurants, garages, service stations, night clubs, barber shops, and beauty parlors that would serve black customers. “With the introduction of this travel guide in 1936,” the 1940 edition proclaimed, “it has been our idea to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable” (3).15 Black travelers often faced worse challenges than those noted by the Negro Motorist Green Book, though. In hostile towns or on remote roads they faced the possibility of harassment or violence. Bluesman Danny Barker recalls the

14

For a biography of Lizzie Douglas and an analysis of her music, see Paul and Beth Garon, Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues. For a briefer introduction, see Renna Tuten’s entry on “Memphis Minnie” in the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 12.

15

Seiler writes that African American writings about traveling in the South during the period reveal a great deal of anxiety. Seiler also gives excellent additional background on the Negro Motorist Green Book. See “So That We as a Race Might Have Something Authentic to Travel By,” pp. 79–80, 83–96.

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road wariness of pianist Little Brother Montgomery, with whom he toured the Deep South in the late 1920s: Little Brother was a master of traveling through the South. I noticed that he never stopped anyplace that was owned or operated by white folks. When he wanted to stop for food or drink he would ask some coloured person where there was a coloured place. He drove slowly and carefully when passing through a community. He watched the road like a hawk, but when we hit the outskirts he’d sigh and relax. (qtd. in Gussow 35) Segregation, discrimination, and racial violence are rarely addressed directly in the early recorded blues, but they permeate the subtext and find their way in via euphemism or displacement. Adam Gussow explains this “paradigm”: an anxious, beleaguered first-person speaker addressing a variously configured and oppressive presence (“the blues,” “my blues,” “Mr. Blues,” and “blues” in [Montgomery’s “The First Time I Met You”]; bossman, lover, bad luck, and the like in countless others), all of which variants are secondary cathexes that enter blues song by way of the subject’s struggle to address his or her primary cathexes, atmospheric white disciplinary violence . . . (35) Greil Marcus speculates that the stranded narrator of “Cross Road Blues,” which is perhaps Robert Johnson’s most famous song, is so desperate because he is “sure to be caught by whites after dark and does not know which way to run” (25). Gussow and Marcus rightly suggest that the “hellhounds,” hearses, and personified blues that populate the early recorded blues could figure the terrorizing and violent realities of racial violence in the Jim Crow South.16 Paradoxically, the very aspects of the road that offered (or at least seemed to offer) empowerment could also cause anxiety. Much of the early recorded blues is animated by the ironies that attend this tension. Conspicuous consumption could provide new means of self-fashioning and attaining prestige, but it carried with it worries that one did not have the newest or the fastest automobile, finest clothes, or most desirable lover (or that one’s conspicuous consumption would draw white attention). The road could offer an escape from drudgery, boredom, or worse, but travel could also cause feelings of loneliness and rootlessness. Separated from the contexts that lent 16

Lawson notes that the ambiguity of images such as Johnson’s “hellhound” is a source of their power: “In the popular culture of blues enthusiasts, Johnson’s verse [in ‘Hellhound on My Trail’] about the hellhound is interpreted to reflect the haunting and existential tragedy of southern black life, but it may be only an artful and creative representation of something that is at the same time both more simplistic and more profound—the desire for freedom of movement” (94).

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a sense of stability to their identity, the narrators of blues songs sometimes seem to become strangers to themselves. There is no guarantee, after all, that good times, let alone deliverance, lie at the end of the road. And the very fact that the road was associated with agency and possibility made it a source of frustration to those who could not travel it. Songs like Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” and “Stones in my Passway” and Moss’s “Broke Down Engine” took the exasperating experience of being stranded on the road and raised it into a metaphor of existential despair: “Standin’ at the crossroad I tried to flag a ride/Didn’t nobody seem to know me, everbody pass me by,” cries the narrator of Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues.” “Some screamin’ Long Island/I’m screamin’ Newport News/I’m still wanderin’ around in Atlanta with these broke down engine blues,” sings the narrator of Moss’s “Broke Down Engine.” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Easy Rider Blues” has a similar dramatic situation: Your easy rider died on the road Man, the easy rider died on the road I’m a poor boy here and ain’t got nowhere to go The road could offer an escape from stale or failed relationships, as Moss sings in “Travelin’ Blues,” Said my babe, she don’t treat me good no more My babe, she don’t treat me good no more I’m goin’ pack my grip, headed further down the road I go17 But separation from lovers on the road could also be a source of worry or despair. If one could use the distance and anonymity of the road to carouse, after all, so could one’s lover. The narrator of Jefferson’s “Long Distance Moan” is torn up by the separation from his lover: Eh, long distance, I can’t help but moan Mmm mmm, I can’t help but moan My baby’s voice sounds so sweet, almost wrecked the telephone He is particularly worried that she has been unfaithful: “Wanna ask my baby, what in the world is she been doin’/Give your lovin’ to another joker and it’s sure gonna be my ruin.” The narrator of Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” to take up

17

Robert Johnson’s “Rambling on My Mind” offers another example of this trope.

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another example, finds himself in the opposite scenario from that of the narrator of “Travelin’ Blues.” Johnson’s narrator follows his lover to the train station, suitcase in hand. But he soon discovers to his chagrin that her travel plans do not include him, for “it’s hard to tell, it’s hard to tell/when all your love’s in vain.” Even as the road offered escape in many cases, then, it often existed in tension with the idea of home, and home is indeed often on the mind of the narrators of the early blues. One traveled for work or pleasure, leaving a lover at home who could be missed, the subject of both desire and fears of infidelity. When Moss sang of the “lonesome road” in “Some Lonesome Day,” it is because the narrator has been kicked out of his lover’s home. In “Midnight Rambler” Moss complains that “My babe, my babe, she don’t ever stay at home.” Jefferson’s “Long Distance Moan,” as mentioned earlier, is focused on the pain of being in South Carolina, perhaps for work, and separated from a lover back home in Texas. The prospect of a house made lonesome could even serve as a warning to a lover, as in Johnson’s “Rambler Blues” when he sang, “Now don’t your house look lonesome, when you baby pack up and leave.” Overall (and this is unsurprising given that we are discussing the blues), the road seems to be a frequent source of anxiety for Johnson, Jefferson, and Moss. Greil Marcus claims that for Johnson “sometimes the road was just the best place to be, free and friendly, a good place to put in the time” (24). But Johnson’s treatment of the road was usually more complex and ambivalent: “He was tracing not only the miles on the road but the strength of its image. It was the ultimate American image of flight from homelessness, and he always looked back: the women he left, or left him, chased him through the gloomy reveries of his songs, just as one eventually caught him” (Marcus 25).18 At times, it is impossible to separate the possibilities and pitfalls of the road in his lyrics. Consider the mordant closing lines of “Me and the Devil Blues”: “You may bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side/So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.” Marcus claims that these lines are “often called in as proof of Johnson’s despair, and they are part of it, but [they are] also his most satisfied lines, a proud epitaph” (26). Johnson is a particularly skilled master of such irony, but it is a trademark of the blues in general.

18 It should be noted that Marcus is perhaps too quick to read Johnson’s songs autobiographically, to collapse the difference between artist and narrator. Johnson’s friend and fellow bluesman Johnny Shines, for instance, describes Johnson as quirky but not tormented. See Gioia, Delta Blues, 182–83.

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A legacy of ambivalence In American popular culture, the road is often treated as an iconic symbol of freedom. The blues do figure it in this way, but, as we have seen, its treatment of the road is often more complex and ambivalent. Perhaps the most powerful image of the road in the early recorded blues is the perplexing crossroad rather than the carefree open road. In terms of popular music, we might juxtapose the early recorded blues by Depression-era black performers with early rock ’n’ roll by white performers in the more affluent 1950s. While the automobile is a status symbol in both (the hot rod replacing the “super six”), traveling the road is a much less fraught experience in the latter. Yet Marcus suggests that Johnson and the blues bequeath their ambivalent treatment of the road—which was often layered with irony and sardonic humor—to the best of rock ’n’ roll. (The point holds true for other genres of popular music too, most notably rap, both of which are overtly influenced by the blues.) For instance, if rock ’n’ roll often celebrates freedom as excess, as a rejection of limits and constraints—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, as the cliché goes—the greatest artists have always recognized that the one-night stand, the needle, and the stage can become prisons in their own right. Marcus suggests that this powerful tension is blues territory. While this study focuses on artists whose recording careers ended by the Second World War, the blues continued even though it has had to share space in the popular music landscape with an ever increasing number of genres. Muddy Waters, or McKinley Morganfield as he was born, is widely considered the most important figure in postwar blues with a long recording and performing career that began during the war and lasted until the early 1980s. Like Johnson, whose music influenced him, Waters came out of the Delta. He initially made its brand of blues his own but eventually brought the electric guitar to the blues, creating the electric blues while also shaping rock ’n’ roll (Rutkoff and Scott; Gioia 202–06). Waters, himself a participant in the Great Migration, both wrote his own songs of the road and recorded songs of the road composed by others. Through his work, the continuation of the road as a theme in the blues is made clear. Robert Johnson’s influence on Waters and the road motif come together in Waters’ recording of Johnson’s “Walking Blues.” In addition, one of Waters’ signature songs, “Rollin’ Stone,” gave a poetic name to the rambler character with lines such as “I’m gonna catch the first thing smokin’/Back, back down the road I’m goin’.” In an interview with Alan Lomax, Waters recalls making up his song “Country Blues” while “fixing a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl and it looked that it run into my mind to sing that

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song,” a recollection that itself seems like the dramatic premise of a blues song (qtd. in Cowley 58). References to travel, trains, and luxury cars including Cadillacs appear in Waters’ songs too. The road as a place of longing and isolation comes through in one of Waters’ most intriguing covers, “Lonesome Road,” a song that had been around since the 1920s and has been recorded by many artists. We see, then, through Waters that as the blues changed, as it expanded with migration out of the South, the road and its attendant themes of consumption, anxiety, and escape remained important. At times, the mythic possibilities of the blues’ treatment of the road have been explored in a way that nearly abstracts mythology from history. This can be seen even in the after-lives of songs from the early recorded blues. We might think of the popular, vigorous, but decidedly more upbeat covers of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues” by Cream and John Mayer. These artists have certainly probed the tragic throughout their oeuvre (Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” to name just one famous example), but their covers turn Johnson’s song about being stuck at a crossroads, with its molasses-drenched guitar and vocal, into a true road song in which the guitar riffs cruise along. The undertones of racial terror in Johnson’s original are consequently muted. But other contemporary artists explicitly build on the blues tradition’s response to racism. Adia Victoria’s 2016 album Beyond the Bloodhounds, for instance, combines a pervading Johnson-esque Gothicism with a frank treatment of racism and racial violence. In the song “Stuck in the South,” Victoria sings, “Oh, I’ve been dreaming of swinging from that old palmetto tree/Yeah, I’ve been thinking about making tracks.” The early recorded blues responded, then, to a complicated historical moment—to a time of rapid change in transportation technology, to the repression and violence of sharecropping and the Jim Crow South, to the Great Migration and the hopes it represented—and they in turn helped to explore the possibilities of the road in the American cultural imagination. In a nation of ramblers, they provided a soundtrack and sensibility for rambling. They contributed to the mythology of the American road while giving voice to the fraught historical realties of their time.

4 Easy street on mud tires: The “heartland” and the frontier of the road in country music Virginia Shay

Who needs a house up on a hill When you can have one on four wheels And take it anywhere the wind might blow? KACEY MUSGRAVES, “My House” (2013)

From the Frontier to the Road

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rom Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road,” to the road trips of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation, to the wild-child motorcycle journeys of Easy Rider, the road as a metaphor for the independence and opportunity of the American Dream has been pervasive in popular culture. The road as a cultural trope that evokes a subjective experience of freedom and American exceptionalism has become important to the consciousness of American popular culture (Slethaug “Mapping the Trope,” 13). Importantly, in Hit the Road Jack, Gordon Slethaug notes the relationship between the ideology of frontier expansion, so formative in shaping American national identity, and the romanticization of the road as a popular-cultural trope connoting infinite mobility and opportunity. Giving the significance of the road a uniquely American context, he traces how the road as a cultural trope became linked

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to “the personal, material, and national achievements and triumphs of the independent traveler seeking primal knowledge, understanding of life, and new opportunities in the West” (“Mapping the Trope,” 23). Frederick Jackson Turner’s remarks on the official closing of frontier space in 1890 did not signify the end of the frontier’s salience as a physical symbol of American exceptionalist values and manifest destiny. Rather, the myth of the frontier, in the face of American industrialization, mobilized its ideology by attaching itself to contemporary images of expansion and westward movement (Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 117); tropes offering mobility and the illusion of independent travel, such as the road and the railway, replaced the rapidly vanishing open plains of the frontier. Just as the cultural forms of the film and novel have taken hold of the road as a trope for exploring the American Dream, particular genres of popular music have pursued that pattern. When Susan Kuyper explores the centrality of the road to American vernacular music, she argues that “just as the road movie transports the viewer, road music transports the performer and the listener to an emotional plane outside him or herself” (59). As a consequence, the road has become a lyrical staple of commercial country music, and has played a lively role in the history and codification of what is a primarily conservative genre of popular music. Whether lyrically evoked by the image of the pickup truck, the dusty dirt road, or the busy interstate, the road functions variously to anchor the country music genre to “noble images of Westward movement” (Slethaug “Mapping the Trope,” 25); the road in popular culture thereby serves as a component of the myths and images that “update” the imagery of the frontier for a contemporary American audience. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s theory of mass media and the “ideal” subject position, this chapter will investigate the function of the road as one of several highly ritualized lyrical motifs in country music, which serve to constitute a fairly conservative, working-class American public with “old-fashioned” values. As we will see, these values become a nostalgic meditation for an imagined American past when the frontier was still open and the American Dream was easily achievable; as Slotkin argues, this mythic imagining of the frontier in American popular culture has often been more fantasy than accurate historical record (Fatal Environment, 94). The popular “Wide Open Spaces,” from the Dixie Chicks’ 1999 album Fly, which is one of the top ten best-selling country albums of all time, reveals a preoccupation with the notion of open frontier space and freedom: “Who doesn’t know what I’m talking about/Who’s never left home, who’s never struck out/To find a dream and a life of their own” (“Wide Open Spaces”). The song’s lyrics articulate values that both the singer’s performative persona and the audience are assumed to share, positioning the longing for “wide open spaces” as a universal and,

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fundamental to country music, an authentic American desire. As a genre, country music has been vigilant about safeguarding its highly self-conscious performance of “authentic” American identity (Albrecht 379–80). In songs like the Dixie Chicks’ “Fly,” and many others like it, country music universalizes a longing for independence, mobility, and travel as a fundamentally American desire, wherein the road becomes an important lyrical trope for experiencing this freedom. Similarly, Jo Dee Messina’s “Heads Carolina, Tails California” literally leaves the destination of the road trip up to chance by flipping a coin, suggesting that the actual destination is irrelevant; what matters is the act of taking to the road in something as simple as a U-Haul van in search of a promised land without having to stop for gas for 400 miles. By imagining a past or even a present moment, where following one’s dreams is possible by turning to open space, country music longs for the realization of the American Dream. Overwhelmingly, taking to the road offers the satisfaction, even if only temporary, of this desire. Performers express the freedom to travel anywhere, and this freedom is made possible by the accessibility of the road; moreover, the road permits them to undergo a renewing, often transformative experience merely by setting out on the road, before they have even “arrived” anywhere.

The South, the West, and the heartland Understanding the economic and social factors that shaped country music’s commercialization is critical to tracing how certain lyrical themes, such as the road, become codified within the genre. Simon Frith asserts that the profitability of recorded music “defines twentieth century pop experience,” noting that “the industrialization of music cannot be understood as something which happens to music, since it describes a process in which music itself is made” (231). In other words, Frith claims that music must not be understood as a pure art form which is then sullied by putting a price on it; rather, the economic imperative to turn a profit is embedded into every stage of a song’s composition and production. As such, the lyrical content of commercial music, in order to appeal to the widest possible paying audience, is likely to capitulate to already salient cultural values, and to be “highly conventional” (Peterson, “Class Unconsciousness”, 39). As country music has become an increasingly popular and commercialized genre since the 1940s, the genre has become invested in reproducing the same themes that contribute to its perception as a genre that “authentically” represents the concerns of rural, blue-collar America: “Country music was born of the trauma of rural people’s adjustment to industrial society. . . . Severed from its working-class origins, country

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music is becoming a refuge for culturally homeless Americans everywhere” (Scherman qtd. in Peterson Creating Country Music, 222). Indeed, that country music could appeal to the working people of America has been an important marketing point of the Country Music Association since the 1960s, as it has asserted that “country belong[s] to a wide spectrum of Americans, cutting across class and geography” (Hill “Country Comes to Town,” 295). As country music has moved further away in time and space from the specific conditions of Southern economic disenfranchisement that led to its creation and expression, the genre has concerned itself, primarily, with attempting to imitate what is authentic, as “song lyrics . . . increasingly load up on signifiers that unambiguously locate the song—and by inference the singer—squarely within the country music tradition” (Peterson Creating Country Music, 228). That the marketing rhetoric of country music has attempted to broaden its appeal by suggesting that any “real” American can listen to and appreciate the values and themes of the genre is crucial for understanding how country music (or “hillbilly music,” as it was called in the 1920s) was engineered to appeal to a blue-collar, conservative demographic, and how it has continued to appeal to a mythologized American past where traditional “folk” values are celebrated. Though lyrical content is only one aspect of the semiotics of music that make meaning, Peterson asserts that “if lyrics cannot be taken as a direct reading of people’s values, recurrent lyrical themes can be used to gauge the range of sentiments and values that have appealed to country music fans over the last 60 years” (“Class Unconsciousness”, 44). Peterson’s claim that the lyrical trends of country music can be used to discern the values and issues most salient to a listening public echoes Norman Fairclough’s work on the ideology of mass media in Language and Power. Rather than suggesting a direct mapping of lyrical content onto precise audience beliefs and values, Fairclough’s work allows us to identify important tropes and images in the music, thereby revealing a range of meaning potentials. Fairclough asserts that “through the way it positions readers . . . media discourse is able to exercise a pervasive and powerful influence in social reproduction because of the very scale of mass media and the extremely high level of whole populations to a relatively homogeneous output” (54). In Fairclough’s view— although he ultimately sees the relationship between popular culture and the beliefs of its consumers as a complex dialectic one—the way that mass media attempts to position its listeners by constructing an “ideal” subject position of “ideal” country music listener (with whom the values and cultural references of the music will easily resonate) is revealing of what values and mythologies might already be salient. Arguing that the coherence of a media text takes for granted a number of shared beliefs and values, Fairclough’s work suggests

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that the implicit or presupposed beliefs embedded therein provide important clues about the kind of subject position the media is constituting and creating. Jason Aldean’s 2012 hit “Take a Little Ride” provides an excellent example of how country music uses its standard tropes (specifically here, the road) to engage the audience’s participation in defining themselves as people of the “real” America. Country music has linked its presentation of “country living” to an “authenticity” of American-ness; the wholehearted adoption of “oldfashioned” values, and often, the underlying beliefs about manifest destiny and the frontier, is equated with a pure, “untainted” American-ness. This notion of certain expressions of American identity being more authentic than others, particularly in country music, has early parallels in popular understandings of the Appalachian South beginning in the nineteenth century, when “descriptions of the region were used either to highlight the improvements of civilization or to show its depravity in despoiling pristine nature; to identify its residents as noble relics of Elizabeth England or debauched by contact with the wrong outside influences” (Peterson Creating Country Music, 215). Early on, the region of the South (and its mediation, as we will examine later, with the West) was inflected with notions of being the “heart” of America, where true “American-ness” could be observed without the sullying influences of urbanization and industrial capitalism. In country music, this association has moved beyond the specific geographical region of the South to encompass romanticized presentations of “country life” in general. As the production of country became more urban, particularly with the development of the more pop-based “Nashville Sound” in the 1960s, “the majority of country stars and industry leaders looked to highlight country folks’ recent migration to cities and insisted that, despite massive changes in their lives and geographies, they would remain country people at heart” (Peterson Creating Country Music, 305–06). In popular rhetoric, then, the notion of being a “country person” was far more mythic and ideological in origins than it was geographically based. Appealing to the “real folk” of America in “Take a Little Ride,” Aldean demonstrates an explicit consciousness of his audience and addresses the listeners who will truly identify with the image of rural life he presents: he asks them to drop down the tailgate, sit awhile, and savor the American heartland (“Take a Little Ride”). Suggesting that those from the “heartland” will be able to identify with and embrace the rural life that Aldean presents, from baling hay to driving around for enjoyment when the sun goes down, the song situates itself ideologically in the idea of the South, suggesting that it is the “real” America, thereby deeply appealing to listeners’ patriotism and feelings about being American. At the same time, the rural pleasures Aldean describes, particularly riding in his Chevy, can still appeal to non-Southern and non-rural fans. The appeal to those from “the heartland” is powerful,

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as it encourages listeners to identify themselves with the “real” America regardless of their geographical origins or location. Moreover, it promotes the notion that there is something fundamentally “American” about a small, agriculturally based town. In contemporary country music, of which Aldean’s song is an excellent example, the road becomes the gateway not just for evoking powerful ideas about mobility and freedom, but for constituting and continually redefining the “heartland”—the “real” America. By examining the ways that the road is used in country music as a cultural shorthand for a network of related mythologies about rural life, “simple” American living, mobility, and the frontier, we may not be able to presume a direct reading of listeners’ values, but the “recurrent lyrical themes” that Peterson speaks of may be used to extract an outline of the values and beliefs about opportunity and mobility that have resonated with American listeners over several decades, which ultimately allows listeners to identify themselves as people of the “real” America regardless of their geographical origin, because “being a fan of country music and its associated way of life may serve as a way that millions of people of mixed ethnic identity can express their imagined place in society against urbane corporate ways in distinction from other nation-, race-, and religion-based ethnic identities” (Peterson Creating Country Music, 218). By directing its content, message, and emotional weight to an “ideal” subject that implicitly comprehends (and even accepts) the signification of important tropes, such as the small Southern town or the old dirt road, country music orients itself toward a particular set of values. When listeners hear and interpret the music, they must draw upon the cultural habitus that allows them to understand the significance of such tropes, thus moving themselves closer to occupation of the “ideal” subject position. As in other media such as film, the road has become a highly condensed lyrical metaphor for the ideologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism that the country music industry has attached itself to since its highly deliberate and self-conscious inception.

Country music and the appropriation of the cowboy In his authoritative text on the history and evolution of country music, Country Music, U.S.A., Bill C. Malone highlights the fairly conservative ideological orientation of country music when he claims that the genre is characterized by “the enduring American impulse to go back to basics, to live at least vicariously a simpler life, and to find a form of music . . . that connotes

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a wholesome lifestyle” (418). Writing as an admiring historian rather than as a cultural critic, Malone’s belief that there is something fundamentally “American” and honorable about the nostalgic desire to live a “simpler life” is reflective of the attitude country music cultivates in its listeners. For Malone, the relationship between the open range of the frontier and musical images of the road is obvious: “Country musicians have not been concerned solely with the Old West, or with the cowboys of yesteryear. They also write and sing about the cowboys who ride the range in pickup trucks” (407). Malone thereby demonstrates the direct relationship, as music has evolved, between the values signified by the cowboy, and the more technologically modern image of the open road. Crucial to understanding country music not just as a body of songs in a particular musical style, but as the fruits of the record industry’s efforts to deliberately engineer music that reached a blue-collar Southern demographic, is an awareness of how country music rebranded itself as a “Western” music, despite having few geographical roots there. Beginning as “hillbilly music” with rural, Southern geographies that utilized “old-time” stringed instruments such as the banjo and the bass fiddle, country music as an industry adopted the more romantic dress and lyrical content of the “Old West,” making the genre’s ideological connection with American exceptionalism and manifest destiny explicit. Despite the fact that cowboys did not actually contribute a significant musical heritage that bears any relationship to country music (Malone 15), “the image of the cowboy as a strong, self-reliant ‘man’s man’ was so much more attractive than that of the ragged, barefoot hillbilly” (Horstman 289). James C. Cobb offers insight into why the cowboy was so much more appealing for country music listeners than the hillbilly, suggesting that “country music’s commercial relevance depended on its ongoing relevance to [the Southern white masses]” (77). In other words, listeners were more likely to “buy” the cowboy as an image than they were to pay for music strongly connected to a hillbilly figure. Malone, admiring country music listener that he is, nevertheless acknowledges that the genre’s adoption of “Western” imagery and themes was somewhat disingenuous, and Richard A. Peterson notes that “the spread of the cowboy image was so complete that virtually all country artists, male and female alike, dressed in Western outfits through the 1940s and tried in every way to project a cowboy rather than a hillbilly persona” (Creating Country Music, 91). Kevin Yuill more cynically summarizes the genre as “the package with which ‘the people’s’ music was sold back to them, with any hint of rebelliousness removed, any urban, black, or commercial origins disguised,

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with spurious ‘authenticity’ complete with ragged clothes and a cowboy hat” (Yuill, Constructing Country, n.p.). Yuill’s work is important for understanding how an initially Southern music became so tethered to the Western cowboy image. The frontier ideology of the cowboy as an American hero working with his hands, living independently, and (important for the genre) having the freedom to move and travel wherever he wanted, appealed to a rural Southern population whose agriculturally driven economy was struggling in the face of a new industrial manufacturing economy during the mid-twentieth century (Cobb 70). Country music, as it was rebranded with connections and roots in the West, “consistently presented a working-class white’s view of continuity and change in an industrializing South” (70), and the range-riding cowboy offered a stable and salient cultural symbol of American identity. Through the prevalence of “singing cowboy” figures in musical Western films, as well as the subsequent adoption of this romantic image by the country music industry, the twangy music was tethered to the image of the Old West, and all its ideological signification of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. Horstman observes that the cowboy was only able to take hold of country music’s imagination because “the romance of the West was firmly planted in the American consciousness” (289), and as the genre evolved, it found ways to lyrically evoke a sense of frontier adventure, opportunity, and escapism even without directly mentioning cowboys, by establishing a relationship between the Old West and the road. Peterson further suggests that imitation and repetition of early country themes and images is all part of the genre’s intense orientation toward the economic profit even in its early stages, as “this institutionalized commercial music machine is inherently conservative . . . since each new song and each new artist created in this way is a close copy of the one before” (Creating Country Music, 228–29). The economic imperative that fueled country music’s development and growth means that themes, images, and ideologies have repeated themselves throughout the decades. In Pierre Bourdieu’s work on language, symbolic power, and signification, he argues that “it is in relation to a market that the complete determination of the signification of discourse occurs” (Language and Symbolic Power, 38). Country music, thus, can be characterized as a distinct discourse with its own themes, motifs, and images that are underpinned by cultural myths about American identity and values, and this potential for imitation and repetition that Peterson identifies is indicative of Bourdieu’s assertion that the economic market not only will influence the symbolic value and meaning of discourse, but will also powerfully shape its trajectory, causing the discourse to repeat and revisit what is economically profitable.

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Ride This Train: The railroad Country music cultivated its relationship with the freedom and independence of movement associated with the cowboy in its many songs about railroads, trucking routes, and the country dirt road, which became a vivid signifier for going off the grid and back to one’s roots. Cobb confirms that early country songwriters had a conservative suspicion and fear of the way the machine (whether train or automobile) might change the social and economic fabric of the South (68), and Kenneth Jackson notes that the highly linear, organized patterns of street grids common to cities were seen as monotonous and even threatening, associated with the perceived corruption and crime of the city (32). Though early country songwriters were ambivalent at best toward the technology that had begun to change the landscape of the South, one early symbol of technological change was fairly positively integrated into the music: the railroad. Rather than threatening the rural Southern ways of life that inhabitants wanted to protect, Cobb argues that “the train simply ran through the region, injecting the fantasy of power, escape, and adventure into a humdrum existence without actually disrupting the traditional folkways and values of the rural South” (68). The train and the railroad have figured in older country music, from Johnny Cash’s 1960 concept album Ride This Train, which featured distinctly Western frontier imagery on the cover art, to more contemporary popular country music, such as Jason Aldean’s 2012 Night Train album, and country songs that explore the romantic imagery of the train tap into the machine as “a symbol—of restlessness, of newfound mobility, of loneliness and separation” (Horstman 310). In a post-railroad, automobilereliant age, the railroad often serves an important nostalgic function in country music, transporting the musician and the listener to an imagined past when life was “simpler” and centered around the “traditional” values of hard work and family. Jason Aldean’s “Night Train” single, off the titular album, romanticizes the notion of listening to a freight train chug past, encouraging the listener to imagine the same freight train sound effects that precede each track on Cash’s Ride This Train album. As the sound of a train precedes each track on Cash’s album, he imagines traveling to a different town, transporting the listener to an imagined American past and referring repeatedly to the American landscape, as viewed from the train, as “the Promised Land.” Cash’s concept album suggests that the railroad and the train provided a means for the listener to imagine and remember his relationship to the American landscape, encouraging a patriotic identification with, in particular, the rural American South—the “heartland” of Aldean’s “Take a Little Ride.”

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The narrative persona in Aldean’s “Night Train” (2012) describes a romantic evening with his significant other, in which they travel a ways off the Old Mill Road in order to listen to the night freight train as it rolls by. In the verse, Aldean longs to drag the night out to last as long as possible, suggesting that listening to the train transports him and his partner to a space of reverie that is outside time (“Night Train”). The fact that they go to a private place to listen to the train pass by makes the activity nostalgic and evocative of the romance Cobb suggests people were able to attach to a train that was passing through. Dorothy Horstman affirms the mystique and fantasy that the railroad provided, suggesting that “unlike the muddy roads, which were fine for going to church or market or to the next town populated by friends and relatives, the shiny steel rails went somewhere—somewhere important” (30). That indeterminate “somewhere” has proven to be ripe with possibility and fantasy for country musicians—it is precisely the vagueness and the assumption that “somewhere” could actually be “anywhere” that has captured the imagination of country musicians and their listeners. The railroad and the train, in country music, became promises of exciting technological advancement, filled with opportunity and adventure. The presence of technological advancement was adapted by country musicians, as “Southern songwriters actually found it possible to harness the imagery of technology to moralist-traditionalist ends” (Cobb 70). The adventure and possibility of going anywhere, which was a more romantic iteration of manifest destiny, was harnessed to the salience of the frontier in the American imagination, as Slethaug affirms (Slethaug “Mapping the Trope,” 20), and popular-culture texts, like country music songs, found ways of transferring those powerful mythologies to the technology and imagery available.

Free-enterprise cowboy: The trucker As the South evolved and evidence of technological change became more pervasive in rural life, the lyrical themes of country music adapted to the cultural symbols present in American consciousness. An important transitional symbol that bridged the gap from songs about trains to songs about roads was the trucking song. In the mid-twentieth century, as agricultural trucking became essential to the industrializing Southern economy, trucking songs became incredibly popular, and as Shane Hamilton notes, an overwhelming number of them were country songs (667). Clearly, something about the established themes and ideologies of the genre lent itself to the concerns and images of trucking music. Crucial for understanding this is the way that

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the figure of the trucker became a kind of twentieth-century “cowboy” or “knight of the road” (Hamilton 670; Skidmore, “Politics, People Moving”, 52); the trucker became a new working-class hero who was powerfully present in the mind of Southern inhabitants. Agricultural truckers in the South (who were often also farmers) were exempt from restrictive regulations that governed trucking in other industries; trucking provided a viable option for struggling farmers to earn more money by transporting their goods to a wider consuming public, and to save on costs by doing the transporting themselves. As such, the practice of agricultural trucking was flavored with romanticized notions of a free-enterprise, independent working-class economy. Similarly, as the automobile became more and more affordable for even working-class families, the road was even more firmly established as an avenue of fantasy and escape. Working-class rural populations who struggled in the highly industrialized economy and felt excluded from the American Dream could play out fantasies of mobility and freedom. It was only natural for these themes to take a firm hold in country music, where fantasies about the virtue and value of rural working-class life were already important components of the world that the genre created. Ultimately, the lyrical themes of traversing the road have drawn from the salient mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, as in Dierks Bentley’s 2011 hit “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go),” in which the lyrics imagine the pleasure of traveling without any constrictions or particular destination. Significantly, in this song the road is not just a gateway for success, but represents the excitement of risk in which the narrator could make a fortune or lose it all. Crucially, the risks and rewards here hearken back to the economic opportunity afforded by highway interstates for Southerners seeking financial opportunity (Horstman 187). As on the frontier of the nineteenth century, striking out often presents a desire to “make it,” economically. Here, the singer’s performative persona weighs the risks of the unknown in economic terms, highlighting the predominantly capitalist values that underpin the American Dream.

The Highway Don’t Care: The comfort of the dirt road Sampling the lyrics from contemporary country songs suggests that the road is more than just an important lyrical trope for the genre; it has become one of the defining tropes that allows the listener to identify the music as “country.” While certainly not a lyrical theme exclusive to country music, the road (and

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the many automotive symbols that reference it) is a key country music trope that continues to shape an audience subject position which is accepting of the old-fashioned longing for an imagined past, when being an American was “simple.” While the highway is variously evoked as a symbol of both opportunity and postmodern isolation, the dirt road becomes its opposite, evocative of a “wholesome,” traditional way of life. In both cases, the type of road and its respective association with either the urban or rural inflects the values and emotions that it is seen to represent. Though these values often vary, they are unified by their evocation of a world built on a frontier, where the city and its associated infrastructure are often associated with the unpredictable, unknown aspects of the future. Conversely, the dirt road and its connection to the rural as a less advanced and industrialized way of living is presumed to be linked to “the country” as both a place and a simpler time. In country music, the highway or interstate often signifies an opportunity for a fresh start in a new place that is unknown and far removed from the origin point in geography; it thereby serves a similar ideological function in country music that the railroad served for rural towns in the early twentieth century. Here, the highway has assumed the ideological function of the frontier; this connection is affirmed in songs like Jo Dee Messina’s “Heads Carolina, Tails California,” mentioned above, and in Miranda Lambert’s “New Strings,” which seeks a fresh start from an unfulfilling relationship by imagining the singer driving “far away from Amarillo” to the far West until she discovers “the missing piece.” Often, the country songs specify a geographical movement via the highway, from the South to the West—a move that is mirrored ideologically by country music’s adoption of Western symbols and images that evoke the romantic frontier imagery of popular culture. Equally often, the highway’s connection to the urban reflects the ways that the city often presents contradictions for the “simple folk” of America— while the highway and the industrialized urban America it connotes provide opportunities to start over, it can also signify the alienation of the postmodern city, bewildering to the small-town American used to the slower, more traditional ways of life and family values embodied by the rural. Rodney Atkins’ “Take a Back Road” (2011) expresses frustrations with the bustle, grind, traffic jams, and gridlock of the city highways, stirring a longing for the polar opposite of the interstate highway—fields of corn and cotton and quiet country roads where the wind can gently blow through his baby’s hair. A reference to dusty paths that go nowhere is juxtaposed with the interstate that presumably goes “somewhere.” While this “somewhere” is often a source of excitement and optimism, it eventually gives way to the alienating anxiety of a too-rapid pace of modern life. The dusty path to “nowhere” becomes a signifier for the rural town in “the middle of nowhere,” and thereby, the comfort of home (Hill “Country

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Music,” 102). American attitudes toward urbanization have been varied and often conflicting (Slotkin, Fatal Environment, 138–39), and country music has represented the nuances of this tension, acknowledging the excitement of traveling on the road to “somewhere,” paired with the relief and comfort of going “nowhere.” Often, for country music, the urban serves as a handy lyrical shorthand for a set of values antithetical to “old-fashioned,” rural ways of living. Ironically, however, the urbanization of country music production since the mid-twentieth century has allowed the genre to expand profitably (Hill “Country Comes to Town,” 294). The realities of commercializing recorded music has meant that country music is recorded and produced in a primarily urban environment, and, even more problematic for fans of “traditional,” “authentic” country music, many country musicians and songwriters have urban, rather than rural, backgrounds and upbringings. The urban origin of musicians who are supposed to sing on behalf of the down-home heartland of America has engendered the metaphor of country music “going to town” (Hill “Country Comes to Town,” 293) to describe its dominance in the recording industry. The relationship between the rural and the urban (and the roads that connect them) becomes a central metaphor for the way that country musicians and fans make sense of the transformations to the industry, reconceptualizing the urbanization and commercialization of country music to still fit within the conservative ideology that underpins it. The transition of the genre’s production from the “authentic” heartland of America to urban centers has drawn criticism from country music traditionalists (Hill “Country Music,” 100), and the industry—in order to satisfy fans’ desire for “authenticity”—has found ways of lyrically affirming “the music’s connection to ‘the people’ while simultaneously developing a more accessible sound to enlarge that category to include urban and suburban dwellers” (Hill “Country Comes to Town,” 306). Tim McGraw’s “Highway Don’t Care” articulates the ideological tensions embedded in the contradictory values represented by the highway and its assumed connection to an urban, more industrialized way of life. While the trope of the dissatisfied romantic partner seeking excitement or refuge from an unhappy relationship by taking to the road to find guidance and renewal is generally popular in country music, McGraw’s song counters the trope by asserting the highway’s disparateness from what “really matters” to the authentic heartland inhabitant—community and domestic ties—as he cautions his departing lover that the highway is cold and impervious to the comfort, love, and togetherness that he embodies. The song emphasizes the ideological tensions inherent in invoking the highway as a symbol in country music; while the road is often sought as an opportunity for a fresh start, the ideology of the heartland also permits the framing of the highway as infrastructure of the alienating, postmodern metropolis.

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The use and status of the road in rural settings have become, in country music, fundamental to the nostalgic, imagined past that the genre sketches; as it creates and engages with the myth of the rural South as the “heartland” of America, country music repeatedly deploys the road and the truck as necessary components of the “experience” of rural life. By asserting the universality of certain road experiences, many country songs implicitly make the road a shorthand for all the traditional, “down-home” experiences and values that the listener associates with rural America. The Wreckers’ “My, Oh My” (2005) explores the advantages and disadvantages of industrial encroachment on the rural South by contemplating the transformation of a dirt path into a paved thoroughfare, a field into a parking lot, and a favorite place to park his Oldsmobile into Sonic and Walgreen’s stores. The paving of once-beloved dirt roads was a tangible measurement of the rural and small town’s industrialization and modernization, and songs like this, which use paved roads as an indicator of how much the town has changed, reveal how engrained the road becomes in sketching the “heartland” of America. The changing of road surfaces becomes a mode of gauging how rural southern America is disrupted, altered, and reorganized by capitalist mass production. Similarly, Brad Paisley’s 2003 hit “Mud on the Tires” underscores another way that the road and the truck are key ideological objects for evoking the world of small-town America and establishing an idealized subject position for listeners wishing to identify as inhabitants of heartland America. He evokes the buying of a new Chevrolet as an important formative experience, framing it as an everyday experience that the hard-working, small-town American can relate to. He also argues that the most authentic small-town experiences, such as going “off the grid” and taking a back road, can only occur with the help of a four-wheel drive truck that allows you to get back to the land and “mud on the tires.” Miranda Lambert’s 2014 number-one hit “Automatic” creates a lyrical catalogue of images that explicitly recreate and long for a past when life was allegedly slow-paced, more wholesome, and more aligned with conservative rural values. In this nostalgic evocation of the past, this female singer remembers a time when people lined up to pay for gas, drove to Dallas to buy a new Easter dress, and got married to resolve problems. Moreover, the song’s title highlights the central metaphor of the song, which compares the fast pace of modern life to an automatic transmission, framed by fond memories of learning to “drive stick” and drive her ’55 just “like a queen” (“Automatic,” 2014). The sketch drawn is of small-town American life that is incomplete without these simple automotive experiences and the fabric of symbols that surround them, such as using a road map and lining up to pay for gasoline. These experiences become fundamental to recollections of

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the old-fashioned past, “back before everything became automatic,” that is evoked for listeners. Similarly, Jason Aldean’s aptly titled “Dirt Road Anthem” from his 2010 album My Kinda Party features the dusty country road as a focal point for the singer’s romantic reconstruction of his past, evoking a nostalgic impression of a simpler time and place. Evoked by the car’s headlights on the dirt road, the singer reminisces about past “good times.” The dirt road, then, becomes the structural and thematic centerpiece of the song. This immensely popular song, which was a hit not just on the country charts but as a “crossover” hit on the main Billboard Hot 100 as well, overtly connects the traditional, simple “good times” to a conservative, Southern rural consciousness. The song signals its connection to an ideology of simple, “wholesome” country folk by expressing appreciation for traditional Southern food like “cornbread and biscuits,” and includes old-fashioned aphorisms such as “if it’s broke . . . we fix it.” Most significantly, the song describes his dirt road reverie of “hitting easy street” while still being attached to a rural environment—“mud tires,” reaffirming the road’s relationship with the American Dream but with Southern rural values still in place. Just as the American Dream extolled America’s frontier lands as an opportunity for anyone, regardless of status or birth, to cultivate his own land, achieve economic stability, and be successful, the dirt road, through its nostalgic evocation of the simple, Southern life, offers a metaphorical “easy street,” whereby working-class Southerners can achieve spiritual renewal, happiness, and access to rural, “authentic” ways of American life. In Aldean’s song that is an anthem for a nostalgic perspective on Southern life, he eschews the conveniences and entertainment of the urban by celebrating the dirt. The rural ways of living connoted by country music, as we have seen, are often more nostalgic illusion, patched together by potent ideology about what it means to be American, rather than actual fact; nevertheless, country music is excessively concerned with its own authenticity, however self-consciously constructed it may be. Country music listeners frequently expect performers and musicians “to authenticate their claim to speak for country identity. . . . For musicians, establishing the right to speak involves knowing all the conventions of making the music” (Peterson, Creating Country Music, 218). The sound of the music, as well as the geographical sites of its production, have been effectively urbanized over the decades; traditional stringed instruments have been replaced by electronically amplified instruments, and, though the “downhome” origins of the music have always been more myth than fact, the industry now openly produces music in primarily urban centers like Nashville. In order to retain its claim to speak on behalf of the “real folk” of America, lyrical tropes are more important than ever for mainstream commercial country music to root itself in the rural, “old-fashioned” lifestyle that its listeners have come to

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expect and relate to over the years. Projecting “authentic” representations of what it means to live in the rural South has been crucial for country music artists to be accepted as “one of us” by country music traditionalists and fans (Peterson, Creating Country Music, 222), and deploying identifiably “country” lyrical themes is a major tool for continuing to constitute an evolving genre. The profit motive that drives the production of popular music means that what defines a genre becomes a feedback loop wherein the genre becomes what its listeners will accept as the genre; country music can be identified as such through its use of recognizably “country” themes (Peterson, Creating Country Music, 228). While the ability of a country musician to use (or adopt) a Southern twang is one of the key identifiers of country music, the lyrical content also situates the music within the genre. Images such as the value of hard work and appreciation of simple, everyday pleasures, like the enjoyment of a cold beer or “a pair of jeans that fit just right” (“Chicken Fried,” Zac Brown Band) are standard country music fare, and they are ideologically underpinned by their implicit constitution of an “authentically” American way of life. The road, through its thematic heritage as an industrialized “frontier” updated for the twentieth century and beyond is a central lyrical trope for country musicians who seek industry and fan acceptance by asserting the authentic “Americanness” of their performance. Both the dirt road and the highway have become lyrical tropes characteristic of and fundamental to country music. Moreover, the audience’s capacity to identify emotionally with the fundamental Americanness of buying a truck, taking to the road for escape or spiritual renewal, or simply to “cruise” and enjoy the simple pleasures of life, becomes a mode by which the listener occupies the “ideal” subject position of the “real folk” of America. Implicitly, country music continues to claim its domain as a source of expression for the voice of “real” America.

5 The tour bus and the road Anaia Shaw

I got on the bus at night time, with all the impressions of Los Angeles in my head . . . And the next morning I woke up but when I looked out the window I saw a completely different landscape. Green as far as the eye could see! I was really flashed! It really gave me the feeling of being on the road. (NICHOLAS HARMER qtd. in Leicher and Schreiner 265)

T

hat music shapes our understanding of the road cannot be denied. As Gibson and Connell write, “music contributes to a celebration in literature, film (the road movie) and the art of the American road (and the railroad)—a prominent aspect of American culture and symbol of mobility in a particularly mobile nation” (Music and Tourism, 172). A cursory Google search for road songs will return hundreds of “best of” lists, no two alike, that can score a road trip or offer a break from the everyday. Of those thousands of road songs, the majority are American in origin—which aligns with musician Bill Payne’s observation that “the power of American music and its culture overwhelms those in other countries” (qtd. in Bonzai 170). However, the appeal of road songs—the thrill of adventure, the freedom, the mystery beyond the horizon—is not specific to any region. In this way, road songs incorporate many of the themes that Gordon Slethaug gathers into the trope of the road, including “the personal, material, and national achievements and triumphs of the independent traveler seeking primal knowledge, understanding of life, and new opportunities” (Slethaug “Mapping the Trope,” 23) and the “quest

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for individual identity, personal transformation, and/or social unity” (Slethaug “Mapping the Trope,” 37). But it is not only the journey that shapes the identity of the road and the traveler—the chosen vehicle also influences the creation and dissemination of stories about travel, the self, and the world. Cars are a frequent subject of songs, such as Johnny Cash’s “One Piece at a Time,” Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” Motorcycles are also represented in the Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack,” Meatloaf’s “Bat out of Hell,” and Merle Haggard’s “Motorcycle Cowboy,” among others. Trains, a staple of travel long before motorized vehicles, have hundreds of songs from numerous perspectives including hobo, prisoner, failed star, and lover. Accordingly, these vehicles are visible in scholarship about the road, such as in Susan Kuyper’s essay “The Road in American Vernacular Music.” Kuyper focuses on the character of the traveling musician whose songs capture “the difficulties of their journeys, their hardships in love, and the loneliness of their life on the road, and also the revelry and entertainment they enjoy” (58). However, over the last sixty years the preferred method of transportation for musicians hasn’t been the boxcar, diesel truck, or bike—it has been the tour bus. This chapter seeks to jumpstart the conversation about how the tour bus impacts the relationship between a musician, the music, and the road. This chapter brings together the historical, the cultural, and the anecdotal to better understand the tour bus and its place in the interdisciplinary study of the road. While the primary focus is on American examples and culture, the tour bus has appeared around the world on both real and fictional highways. It has been one of the most visible symbols of working musicians, representative of the struggles that they face on the road. Yet, although the tour bus is an established element of touring life, the past decade has seen a visible shift in how buses are used and represented—one that has resulted in a type of tour bus that seems to conflict with the established narrative of hard-working, hard-living musicians. To explore the role of the tour bus, this chapter begins with a history of the bus and its incorporation into popular culture. Next it focuses on the development of the tour bus trope in photography, books, and film— drawing from both real and fictional examples of life on the bus. Then it moves to the tour bus as supporting character and place of self-realization and relationship-building in Almost Famous and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Finally, it addresses the growing use of the tour bus as symbol of a lifestyle that increasing numbers of star musicians wish to associate their image with, but don’t necessarily wish to directly experience—and how this apparent conflict only deepens our understanding of the music/road relationship.

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Setting the stage—a focused history of the motorbus Mass transportation by variants of the modern bus has existed since the eighteenth century, and the motorbus has taken on significant cultural and symbolic roles around the world. For the purposes of this chapter, this section highlights the primary advantages and disadvantages of bus travel that have shaped modern ideas about, associations with, and functions of the bus. Without the advantages of cost, convenience, and range that have always been a part of the attraction of the motorized bus, musicians looking to hit the road on a limited budget would not have adopted this particular form of transportation. Even though the bus is historically associated with a lack of comfort, control, and privacy, its advantages still encouraged use by civilian commuter and economical musician alike. Additionally, the fact that the bus necessitated interpersonal interactions could be exhilarating, exasperating, and exhausting—providing passengers with amusing anecdotes about their travels, and providing musicians with inspiration for their next song and opportunities to grow as individuals and as members of the band. All of these features are products of the bus; and a brief history is needed to set the stage for its musical relative—the tour bus. The earliest motorized buses appeared in Britain just after the turn of the twentieth century, with the United States launching its first motor bus companies just a few years afterward. While British buses were used primarily as feeder vehicles for existing railroad lines (Lee), the first American buses were independent of rail systems. In 1907, New York’s Fifth Avenue Coach Company, the first American bus company, switched from horsedrawn coaches to double-decker buses “featuring a closed-in main level, but an open-air upper deck so passengers could enjoy not only the sights along Fifth Avenue, but lots of fresh air and sunshine as well” (Cudahy 99). A decade later, the Chicago Motor Coach Company followed suit and provided bus service along Chicago’s lakefront (Cudahy 102). These buses were essentially city sightseeing vehicles, and their descendants can now be found in any major city. They were easy to implement, since no infrastructure was needed beyond existing roads. Additionally, the mainstream availability of the automobile “made good roads absolutely necessary” (Skidmore, “Politics, People Moving,” 44), allowing bus companies to focus on improving technology instead of advocating for traversable space. Perhaps taking a cue from their British counterparts, electric railway companies in America soon saw the potential for buses as feeder vehicles. Since expanding the bus service was only a matter of adding more vehicles and more stops, they were perfectly suited for keeping up with and enabling the

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growth of suburbs and commerce hubs—a market that streetcars could not reach without significant cost and time invested in additional tracks and power lines. That is why Cleveland Railways bought buses in 1912 and put them in “newly developed residential areas, serving as feeder routes to its existing streetcar network” (Cudahy 105). In California, Pacific Electric prioritized the use of feeder buses “during the 1920s, when the population of Southern California was undergoing a rapid increase” (Bail 12). By 1930, American buses had seen 2.5 billion passengers (Foster From Streetcar to Superhighway, 49), and it was clear that buses were becoming an attractive option for urban travel. But urban sprawl was not the only reason for the bus’s steady rise in popularity and use. The desire to travel, so fundamental to American culture, gave purpose to long-distance vehicles. Although cars were dropping in price to match decreased production costs and increased demand, and offered more comfort, privacy, and control over one’s journey, they were still a luxury for most travelers. Take, for example, a trip from New York to Chicago in the 1930s. Bus companies worked to keep their fares 10 to 20 percent lower than train fares (Schisgall 53), and a ticket for the 900-mile trip from New York to Chicago could go for as little as $8 (Schisgall 44)—the same price as gas for the average 1930s car without the added expenses that a car necessitated (Paper Dragon). This pattern of affordable travel by bus was maintained during and after the Second World War, meaning that even when most postwar American homes had a car in the garage and money to spare (Bryson 400), there was no question that buses were still “the preferred mode of travel for Americans on limited incomes: students going to college, soldiers and sailors reporting for duty or returning home on leave, workers searching for employment” (Jakle and Sculle 201). It is important to note that this push for long-distance travel was not just for practical reasons—it was also for cross-country sightseeing. Motor tours first began in Britain around 1910 and in the postwar period were offered as a way to see battle sites (Taylor 195). In America, “sightseeing by bus was already an accepted and popular pastime in the mid-1920s” (Bail 24). In the 1940s, the Greyhound Corporation advertised “‘amazing America Tours’ . . . sightseeing trips that varied in length from days to months, trips that covered virtually all the country’s scenic and historical attractions” (Schisgall 97). To accommodate curious passengers, buses were specially designed for optimal views of the sights—including enclosed observation decks, skylights, and panoramic windshields (Jakle and Sculle 200). However, these journeys were more than just tourist checklists; they were a way for “travelers to see the real United States, the fundamental aspects of the nation comprised of its ‘real’ people and places” (Jakle and Sculle 201). This desire to experience the authentic America in all its sprawling glory is echoed in a recent interview by director Alexander Payne: “I don’t think that it’s the proper way to think of this

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country as a five- or six-hour flyover” (February 19, 2014). The many hours on the road at all times of the day—driving in all types of weather and interacting with all types of people—produce ideas and experiences that shape American culture—and no plane ride can compete with that. Long-distance bus travel, for sightseeing or more pragmatic purposes, meant passengers were cheek by jowl for extended periods of time—strangers, with different opinions, behaviors, and purposes speeding together along the highway with no escape except for the occasional rest stop. This lack of privacy, combined with the discomfort associated with prolonged sitting, doubtless caused some tension and even misanthropy among the passengers. For example, Jack Kerouac wrote in 1965 that “There’s hardly anything in the world, or at least in America, more miserable than a transcontinental bus trip with limited means” (“On the Road with Memère,” 74). He lamented having to sit in the same clothes for days at a time. However, there were those who accepted those drawbacks and still found pleasure in the trip—and in sharing the trip with others. In 1931, writer Mary Day Winn proclaimed of her 10,000 mile journey by bus that there was “a spirit of camaraderie . . . such as one seldom finds on a train” (14) because you experience everything with others. Her contemporary, author Nathan Asch, shared a similar attitude and wrote that rest stops allowed all passengers to become friends (Jakle and Sculle 202). Relieved, perhaps, at the chance to stretch their legs and purchase more food, passengers could form a sense of community—exclaiming over what had happened thus far on the bus, positing what might come next, and sharing stories. Over the last 100 years, the American motorbus has evolved in use and cultural associations, moving away from its original use as a tool for rail systems. The advantages in cost, convenience, range of service, and social interactions are clear—as are its disadvantages in terms of privacy, control, and speed. However, this balance enabled buses to be perceived as vehicles for exploration and self-discovery, not just methods for getting from point A to point B. And what really informed and influenced this understanding of the bus is not personal anecdotes, positive operating records, or splashy advertisement. What really gave the bus traction was its representation in popular films, novels, music and television.

Getting on board—pop culture and the bus The bus appeared in books and films as early as the 1920s, but its primary role was as set piece or background. Nevertheless, it engendered a cycle of seeing and reading about buses, then riding on the bus, then creating or hearing more stories about what happens on buses. Personal experiences

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merged with pop culture examples, encouraging associations between the bus and travel, adventure, self-discovery, and American culture. Although these early associations may not have contributed directly to the relationship between the touring musician and the tour bus, the bus was inching closer to the spotlight. In the interwar period, most bus imagery could be found on film. In the 1920s, comedians like Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chase, Charlie Murray, and George Sidney found success playing with expectations of the bus—Lloyd used the bus for a chase scene, Chase performed comedic stunts, and Murray and Sidney “miraculously” emerged unscathed from a crash involving two double-decker buses (of course, they weren’t actually on the buses during the crash) (Bail 80–81). Films from the 1930s such as Pennies from Heaven (1935), and The Garden Murder Case (1936) also incorporated buses into the plot to varying degrees. Most notably, the film It Happened One Night (1934), based on the short story “Night Bus” by Samuel H. Adams, romanticized bus travel and gave the Greyhound bus company a real-life boost in ridership (Schisgall 39). That’s not to say that all movie buses had such direct impact on real life—most others, like 1941’s Sullivan’s Travels, were used for a single scene. Nevertheless, by the Second World War it was clear that buses had found space in the American imagination. And as everyday bus use grew, so did pop culture representations of buses. Buses gained even more prominence in pop culture in the 50s, with the release of movies such as Bus Stop (1956) and The Wayward Bus (1957), and the publication of Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). The films, featuring high-caliber stars Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Joan Collins, are set primarily on buses. Characters from all walks of life—cowboy, singer, traveling salesman, burlesque dancer—are on journeys of self-discovery, which is a key element of the road movie genre, where “experiences on the road are more important than the motivation or destination of the journey” (Rayner 159). In On the Road, action in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Denver, and Detroit is punctuated by bus trips—and the narrator Sal briefly finds a romantic interest on just such a trip. These mid-century portrayals of the bus helped cement key elements of what it meant to be on the road in a bus, paying special attention to how one’s life could change between initial boarding and final destination. Since then, the bus has taken on a variety of roles in film and television. Notable examples include the bus as an escape vehicle in The Graduate (1967), a deathbed in Midnight Cowboy (1969), a site of tension and alienation in Forrest Gump (1994), a bomb in Speed (1994), and a microcosm of childhood social strata in The Simpsons. Many of the more recent pop culture buses come from children’s entertainment—Bertie the Bus in stories about Thomas

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the Tank Engine; the eponymous Magic School Bus with its transformational capabilities; and the Knight Bus in the Harry Potter books are just a few examples of buses that indirectly introduced an entirely new demographic to the presence and importance of buses. The bus appeared in popular culture at just the right point in time. Films were becoming more ambitious in scope, sophisticated in technology, and complex in narrative. People of all ages were finding time and money—but not too much money—to hit the road and see the sights of their great country for themselves. And the invention of the television radically altered the habits and desires of postwar Americans. People were now being exposed to the same imagery and themes in a variety of media. The inclusion of buses in those media meant that the vehicle itself and its associations with adventure, creativity, and self-discovery were also brought to the everyday American’s attention. Thus, the bus established itself in popular culture well before the first tour bus hit the road.

Getting from A to B—the short history of the tour bus The tour bus does not appear to have been used regularly in the years leading up to the Second World War, although history shows us that many entertainers—including the Renaissance bard, Restoration acting troupe, and vaudevillian actor—made their living by being on the road. It wasn’t until the 1950s that more attention was paid to how American musicians were traveling from show to show. Even then, the touring musician’s life on the bus was described primarily in terms of function, reflecting the high priority given to cost and convenience over symbolic value. However, it wasn’t long before some of the wealthier artists began putting more of their own personal touches into the tour bus to make it a home away from home. And, just as the repetition of bus imagery in pop culture helped establish the bus as a standard, desirable form of transportation, so too did the gradual increase in attention toward the tour bus make musicians and audiences alike more interested in the possibilities such a vehicle could provide. The musician’s tour bus—sometimes regionally referred to as the band bus, sleeper bus, or entertainer bus—is a key part of the image of the working musician. But it is not quite clear when buses first began shuttling musicians to and from concerts. It absolutely makes sense, though—the bus allowed larger groups of people to travel together with their equipment and luggage, at a smaller cost than other modes of transportation. Keeping the band or bands

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together on the road ensured that they all arrived at the same time, and were able to have greater control over how their things were being transported. Non-musicians, particularly those with an aversion to crowds and dirt, might cringe at the fact that “everyone in the band, regardless of its size, plus a roadie or two, jams into the van along with all the band’s instruments and equipment . . . clothes (clean or dirty, usually dirty) and the typical remnants of junk food packaging and other assorted trash” (Brant 8)—and it is clear from interviews that many musicians were also not pleased with their situation. But the advantages far outweighed the drawbacks, and the tour bus prevailed. One of the tour bus’s first moments in the spotlight came after February 2, 1959—what Don McLean immortalized in “American Pie” as “the day the music died.” The plane that crashed that day, killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, had been chartered by Holly because his tour bus was frigid and experiencing mechanical difficulties. They were only a third of the way through their tour, and the bus had already broken down once in a snowstorm. As a result, many members of the band and crew, including the Big Bopper, were suffering from fevers, frostbite, and other weather-related health issues (Suddath). In Suddath’s article, Waylon Jennings—who gave up his seat on the plane to the Big Bopper and took the tour bus instead—recalls that he and Holly joked about each other’s choices. Jennings even told Holly that he hoped the plane crashed—a joke that haunted him for decades. What was introduced as a saving grace for these rising stars took them to early graves. There is no way to confirm whether this signaled a shift toward bus travel in the music world, but it would not be surprising if musicians suddenly found a cold bus struggling through a winter storm infinitely preferable to facing the same weather in a plane. Indeed, in the decades following this tragedy, the tour bus continued to gain media attention. Photos of Elvis Presley’s 1960s tour bus capture some of the earliest instances of bus customization. The bus had a full shower, queen-size bed, two closets, and a gadget-filled kitchen—and the King himself could often be found at the wheel (Elvis Presley’s Tour Bus). In 1960, country duo Jim and Jesse were given a tour bus by Martha White Flour as part of a television sponsorship deal, resulting in promotional pictures of the brothers on and in front of the bus (Stubbs). Paul McCartney painted a double-decker bus for the Wings’ 1972 European tour, and there are photos of Paul and Linda with the bus in the background (The 1972 Wings Tour bus). Photos from The Rolling Stones’ 1973 European tour include one of Keith Richards and Charlie Watts standing in the aisle of their tour bus (Photos of The Rolling Stones European Tour 1973). As the media tracking of musicians grew, so did the association between touring musician and tour bus.

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These examples of real tour buses were complemented by fictional, autobiographical, and semi-autobiographical representations in the 1960s and 70s. One of these famous representations, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, detailed the trip he and the Merry Pranksters took on their bus, Furthur, from California to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. In her book The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television, Katie Mills examines the interesting blend of fiction and reality in Wolfe’s writing, and details how “the Beat belief in being on the road evolved into the Prankster philosophy of being on the bus . . . [and] the word ‘trip’ took on a double meaning” (86). Even though the Merry Pranksters were not professional musicians, footage shot inside the bus shows that their experience on the bus was very similar to that of a real touring band—they played music, talked, slept, connected, argued, and marveled at the landscape they passed through (Magic Trip). The Merry Pranksters adapted the tour bus, turning what was still considered a primarily functional vehicle into an “exercise in ‘living art’” (Mills The Road Story, 98). They reaped all the standard benefits, suffered through the inevitable downfalls, and proved that the bus could also be a fruitful space for creativity. They were an unconventional bunch, but Furthur’s passengers contributed significantly to the cultural understanding of tour buses. In 1970, two years after Wolfe published his novel, The Partridge Family debuted on television and solidified the relationship between artists/musicians and their tour buses in popular culture. Loosely based on the family band The Cowsills, the Partridge Family used a brightly colored, hand-painted school bus to travel to shows across the country. The bus featured prominently in the show’s first season, was used as the setting for or in the background of promotional photos, and was recreated in Partridge Family memorabilia and toys. As a family show, The Partridge Family understandably toned down drama and conflict in favor of precocious wit and moments of family bonding. This depiction of a lovely and loving family band and their touring life stood in stark contrast to the stories of dangerous excess that dominated the music industry in the late 1960s and early 70s. In fact, within three weeks of the show’s premiere, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin—known for their incredible musical talent and penchant for drugs and alcohol—were dead. Clearly, more was happening on tour—and, therefore, on tour buses—than most musicians were letting on. But despite those dark days, mainstream audiences continued to show interest in tour bus antics; and part of that interest was certainly sustained by the Partridge Family. These examples of the tour bus in postwar popular culture are evidence of an increasing interest in all aspects of the musician’s life, including the act of touring. How did the musician behave offstage? What did he or she do while on the road? What really happened on the tour bus? But this was not yet the

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time of tell-all memoirs. Most musicians did not feel the urge or obligation to share behind-the-scenes information, leaving the tour bus and touring life largely shrouded in mystery. But at least one person was taking note of what he experienced while accompanying musicians on the road—and he went on to make a film that drew back the curtains on what life was like on the tour bus.

Names changed, bus is the same—the tour bus in Almost Famous For whatever reason, few stories about touring musicians—whether in film, memoir, or documentary—paint such a complete picture of life on the road as Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical film, Almost Famous. A “painfully accurate” (Crowe “All Things Come,” xii) facsimile of Crowe’s own experiences on the road as a teenaged music journalist in the 70s, Almost Famous captures the spirit of the traveling musician and shows how important and ever-present the tour bus was to a band on their journey to stardom. Based on Crowe’s time with the Allman Brothers (Crowe “All Things Come,” xii), Almost Famous blends reality with fiction (the band is renamed “Stillwater”), pitting an up-andcoming band and their crew against the road and, often, against each other. As Crowe explains, “the movie is about music, and about how music affects lives, and how it affected my family, and the family of the touring group” (Crowe “All Things Come,” xxi). The film takes audiences behind the scenes to reveal times when the bus is a space both of community and of conflict, and illustrate the vehicle’s symbolic value to the hard-working, hard-living musician. Crowe makes it clear that cost is a primary factor in using the tour bus. The first look at Stillwater’s tour bus is when it rolls up, squeaking and sighing, minutes after Black Sabbath’s sleek, black limo enters the concert venue—a clear juxtaposition of two very different musical and financial statuses. Musicians tumble out and leave the bus in the background as they struggle to gain entrance into the venue. The bus is not customized or fancy, so the band, crew, and groupies must find ways to pass the time with few resources. Some close their eyes, likely sleeping off last night’s excessive partying. Others play board games, read, or goof around with each other. Still others practise their instruments—the drummer beating out a rhythm in the air or on another seat, the guitarist picking out a melody on his instrument. However, the band stops short of using the bus as sleeping quarters. Instead, Stillwater opts to stay in motels—byproducts of the highway culture in America (Bryson 207–09)— that allow them to interact with other bands on the road and party. Given Crowe’s dedication to authenticity, we can assume that the Allman Brothers

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preferred overnighting in motels or hotels. But even though Stillwater isn’t reliant on their tour bus for room and board, it is obvious from Crowe’s script and directorial vision that the vehicle is still integral to the story. Indeed, Stillwater’s tour bus has great value to its passengers beyond its functional worth as a touring vehicle. When the audience is introduced to the tour bus, they are also told that it has a name—and, in a way, a personality. As it rattles its way along the highway, Stillwater’s manager calls out “Come on Doris, you darling bus, you can make it!” There is even a nameplate on the side that could have been used for the band’s name—but it reads “Doris” instead. By contrast, there is only one mention that Stillwater actually has another bus—the crew’s bus—and it remains off-screen for the duration of the film. Doris clearly holds special meaning for the band (and Crowe); when Stillwater is asked to use a plane to fit in more tour dates, guitarist Russell laughs off the suggestion and singer Jeff cries “Doris is the soul of this band! That bus has been our home since we were the Jeff Bebe Band. No way.” And when they eventually do abandon Doris for a plane and fame, it feels somehow . . . wrong. Although this was not represented in the theatrical release, Crowe’s script anthropomorphizes Doris during this painful transition: Doris the bus stays behind in the parking lot, abandoned near a field. The new plane lifts off in the background, as the bus sits alone, as if crying steel tears (“All Things Come,” 135). It is unclear whether the Allman Brothers had such a close relationship to their bus. But it is apparent that Crowe was not immune to the charms of the tour bus or to the comfort its presence, offered amid the ever-changing scenery on the road, provides. Charm and familiarity aside, Doris is still a confined space that the large group of band members, crew, and groupies are forced to share—and, as such, she is often the site of both serious conflicts and positive connections. One scene captures both the fighting and bonding, and how the interpersonal is inextricably connected to music and performance. After a particularly vicious fight between Russell, Stillwater’s lead guitarist, and the rest of the band, he returns to the bus hungover, uncomfortable, and painfully aware of the things he said the night before. As Crowe describes the scene in his script: Tiny Dancer continues on the bus stereo. Russell sits up front, swathed in a large robe, alone and silent. The others have given him a wide berth. He feels silly, and they know it, and he hates that they know it, which makes him feel foolish. . . . The song’s vocal begins. There is only more silence. Then, after a beat, we hear a voice or two, fighting the quiet and singing along. Then others . . . waking up . . . joining in. Then Jeff. Russell hears them and starts to sing along too, louder now, without turning around. It’s a voice everyone wants to hear. Like it or not, this is his family. (Almost Famous, 112–13)

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Unlike the group singing in Get on the Bus (1996), where the relationshipbuilding has a very political undertone, the Almost Famous sing-along represents a period of peace and reconciliation that effectively cleanses the conflict from the bus—at least temporarily. This expression of familial love and acceptance is further emphasized by a short exchange between William, Crowe’s avatar, and groupie Penny Lane during the reconciliation. “I have to go home,” William confides to Penny Lane in the film. She stares for a moment, and then makes a gesture like a magician’s reveal and replies, “You are home.” She isn’t asking William to forget the troubles that have plagued everyone on the tour—just to recognize that this dysfunctional group of people has become a kind of family for him. This is not the end of their interpersonal turbulence—but for a moment, as they are united in song, the band is united against the world. Crowe openly admits that Almost Famous departs from his real experiences in order to tie up narrative loose ends and provide closure for the audience. But in the rest of the film he strives to avoid becoming a “victim of the ‘golden haze of self-reverence’” (“All Things Come,” xiv) by telling the truth, awkward as it may be, about what it meant to be on a tour bus in the early 1970s. The detail he is able to provide about life on the road supported and enhanced the pop culture model of the tour bus. Doris feels, and in many ways is, much more authentic than most other pop culture representations of the tour bus. On the other hand, one of the most famous tour buses to ever grace the silver screen isn’t based on any real-life experience—yet it reigns as one of the most comprehensive portrayals of the tour bus to date.

Foreign land, familiar features—The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert While Doris in Almost Famous is an important set piece and symbol, she is not a major character in the film. However, there is one film where the tour bus is thrust into the spotlight: Stephan Elliott’s 1994 road movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The eponymous bus acts as the site of or background for most of the film, introducing audiences to the idea of tour bus as performative space—not just as a means of traveling between those spaces. More importantly, the action on and in Priscilla demonstrates how performance can transform the tour bus from claustrophobic tin can into a stage for relationship-building and self-discovery. Of course, the three protagonists in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert did not acquire the bus with the assumption that it would change

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their lives and their relationships with each other. Money (or lack thereof) is what drove Adam to purchase a rattling, rusty bus to shuttle himself, Tick, and Bernadette 1800 miles across the Australian Outback—along with a staggering number of costumes, set pieces, and props. Adam christens their “budget Barbie camper: Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”—budget, as Bernadette points out, being the operative term. But before they hit the road, the three performers ensure that Priscilla lives up to her royal title by bedecking her with curtains, throw pillows, daybeds, vanities, and even a tanning bed. She still rattles—but now she is touring vehicle, home away from home, and—in a pinch—backstage green room. As one would expect on such a long road trip, boredom is a frequent visitor to the tour bus. Not even four hours into their 1800-mile trip, Priscilla’s passengers have exhausted their repertoire of sing-along road songs and are growing restless. Soon Adam, Tick, and Bernadette have resorted to petty gossip, games like “I Spy,” snide remarks about each other, and pranks. But with a seemingly infinite highway stretching ahead of them, and the same geographical features passing in variously colored blurs, there isn’t much else to do. The monotonous environment results in conflict, further exacerbated by a lack of privacy and their desire to outperform each other in a battle of wits and insults. In this way, Priscilla is the perfect example of how a tour bus can provide the same road movie experiences as a car, particularly when it comes to “strange encounters, from buddy relations to death-struggles, where pair and triangular relationships work themselves out in the inner space of the car or along the wayside of the road” (Eyerman and Löfgren 65). Although fictional and often outlandish, Tick, Adam, and Bernadette’s responses to the “routine, uncomfortable, and hard” (Brant 4) elements of life on the road feel very real. Conflict inside the tour bus, however, is nothing compared to what the three protagonists face outside of Priscilla’s walls as they try to “stake a claim upon a (human and physical) landscape which seeks to repel them” (Rayner 159). Though claustrophobic, the bus also represents safety and familiarity, creating artificial distance between the three travelers and their harsh surroundings. Indeed, the geography of the Outback is visually intimidating—a number of scenes pan out to show Priscilla or her passengers, ant-like in the middle of an endless expanse of desert and mountain ranges. But the most serious dangers arise when Tick, Adam, and Bernadette—two gay men and a trans woman navigating a world of fear and ignorance—interact with townspeople during rest stops. The first town appears to accept and even celebrate them, particularly when Bernadette drinks another woman under the table. But the next morning it’s discovered that someone has defaced Priscilla—spray painting a derogatory

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exclamation on her flank. The next town violently rejects the trio after Adam, rebelling against the constraints imposed by his older companions, tries to seduce a homophobic local. These are extreme examples of the road movie trope, in which “events act upon the characters . . . [and] objects along the road are usually menacing and materially assertive” (Corrigan 145). However, these events do serve a purpose, as they transform the protagonists’ attitude toward Priscilla. Instead of a mere vehicle or even a prison, Priscilla is their safe-house—a space that will always welcome and nurture them during dangerous times. Just as conflict in Almost Famous gives way to an enhanced sense of community on Doris, Priscilla provides space for the three protagonists to overcome their petty differences and come together to “safely face issues of sexual identity, home, family, and community” (Aitken and Lukinbeal 350). Adam’s brush with serious harm prompts a détente between him and Bernadette, repairing the damage that Adam’s lashing-out had caused earlier. This does not mean that they stop trading barbs—but now, their shared experiences prevent any insult from having a lasting effect on their relationship. In addition to this personal growth, the experience quite literally enables Priscilla’s ragtag bunch to grow in number. When Priscilla inevitably breaks down on the road, the three travelers find an unexpected but welcome ally in a mechanic named Bob. Despite how little he knows and understands of Tick, Adam, and Bernadette’s lives and motivations, Bob finds himself boarding Priscilla and leaving his old life (and wife) behind. He is welcomed in, and the newly lavender-painted tour bus continues on. Bob’s burgeoning attraction to Bernadette adds another layer to this story of identity, vulnerability, and personal growth—further affirming “the road movie truism that experiences on the road are more important than the motivation or destination of the journey” (Rayner 159). Most bus-focused road movies, including Almost Famous, Get on the Bus, and Smoke Signals, delve into the inter- and intrapersonal complexities inherent in bus travel. However, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is the only one to fully explore the bus as intentional performative space. Almost each scene on, in, or around Priscilla is punctuated by a performance or the act of preparing for one. In arguably the most iconic moment of the film, a silver-festooned Adam sits atop Priscilla on a huge glittering high heel, lip syncing the aria Sempre Libera (“Always Free”) from La Traviata while trailing a huge swath of silver fabric behind him. By extending himself beyond the confines of the bus, in open defiance of the menacing people and places they face, Adam has temporarily “conquered the Australian landscape, and found peace within it” (Rustin 139). In this scene, Priscilla is not just a setting or a prop, but an integral element of Adam’s artistic expression. The bus is no

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longer merely functional, with limitations that must be tolerated, but a unique creative canvas for the touring performer. It’s a powerful and enduring image, both in the film and in our cultural imagination. And while the adventures of Priscilla, queen of the desert are fictional, the connection between freedom of musical expression and the tour bus is very real.

The inside scoop—the musician on the tour bus Based on the historical, cinematic, and cultural representations of the tour bus, distinct features have emerged that paint a particular picture of the vehicle as a complex space that can be both positive and negative, can both alienate and connect its passengers, and can provide space for quiet introspection and creative expression. But an important question emerges: Is this image of the tour bus representative of real musicians’ experiences from the last half-century? Do their accounts align with how the public, drawing from pop culture examples like Almost Famous and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, perceives the tour bus and what can happen within it? Given the penchant for exaggeration in fiction, particularly in film, it is both surprising and satisfying that the answer to that question is “yes.” Just like their fictional and historical counterparts, modern musicians often choose to use the tour bus for financial and functional reasons. Those priorities inevitably mean that the tour bus can quickly become rather cramped. Jimmy Ibbotson, long-time member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, described the tour bus as perpetually “pretty crowded with the whole band and crew and our guitars and drums and amps and T-shirts and CDs” (qtd. in Brant 25). And when they first start out, many bands aren’t even in a financial position to purchase an actual bus: “For most bands that haven’t hit it big, the ‘tour bus’ is, at first, actually a car or a tour van. . . . By the time the band has developed a nest egg and has secured sufficient bookings to warrant the expense, it can upgrade to an actual bus” (Brant 8). For example, the Grateful Dead started out with a Dodge station wagon (Scully and Dalton 30), packing it full of people and gear. Cars are too small and/or too expensive; planes are also costly and leave precious instruments and gear to the mercy of airport personnel; and trains run on fixed schedules that are not conducive to the all-hours travel that touring necessitates. The bus really is the only option for the vast majority of touring musicians—and as such, they all have stories to share. The many negative aspects of the fictional and historical tour bus are still in full force now. In the introduction to her book, Brant states that “being on

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the road is routine, uncomfortable, and hard” (4)—and many of the musicians she interviewed agreed. According to drummer Derrick Bostrom, “For even the most seasoned touring band, the long cross-country drives can get pretty monotonous. All you see is mile after mile of the same countryside . . . not to mention the same smelly, crabby, hung-over companions” (qtd. in Brant 136). In his memoir, roadie James “Tappy” Wright—who toured with stars such as Ike and Tina Turner, Elvis, and Jimi Hendrix—agreed: “The tour bus is a funny place, and touring itself quickly becomes claustrophobic and repetitive” (26). Having seen miles of America pass by the bus’s windows in Almost Famous, and the miles of stark Outback that stretch endlessly into the horizon in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, one doesn’t need to step foot on a tour bus to understand what these artists are talking about. Yet, even though the bus can be dirty, uncomfortable, and boring, many musicians see beyond those faults and profess their affection for the tour bus. When Silke Leicher and Manuel Schreiner asked touring musicians to draw something that really encapsulated their experiences on the road, many who participated drew their tour buses. Musician Chris Cain praises his band’s bus, the Mineshaft Canary: “Without it, touring is a waking nightmare. In retrospect I don’t know how we ever did anything without it!” (qtd. in Leicher and Schreiner 250). In the same collection, members of the Swedish band Eskobar also express a fondness for the tour bus: “[we] think a normal person who had a look around the bus would ask ‘How the hell do you manage to spend more than an hour in there?!’ But we have a really good time. It’s not the most comfortable way of living, but it’s the most fun way” (qtd. in Leicher and Schreiner 251). In his 1997 autobiography, Johnny Cash called his tour bus, Unit One, his “cocoon” and rhapsodized: “I have a home that takes me anywhere I need to go, that cradles me and comforts me, that lets me nod off in the mountains and wake up in the plains” (“Johnny Cash’s Bus”). Leicher and Schreiner observe that it was “interesting to find out why and to what extent musicians identify with particular locations. Do they perhaps have a completely different grasp on what ‘home’ means? After all, they are always on the move” (303). Indeed, it seems that at some point, most musicians come to truly view their tour bus as “the rocker’s home on wheels” (Brant 24) regardless of the inconveniences or discomfort inherent in standard tour bus travel—it may just take longer for some to acknowledge that connection than others. Just as some of the most interesting bus scenes in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert involve performance and creative selfexpression, many of the touring musicians’ most interesting anecdotes highlight the bus’s potential as a space for creative production. It appears that the tour bus is a prime creative space for three main reasons. The first reason

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is that being on tour (and on the tour bus) lets the musician see something new—whether that is the life story of a person met on the road, a neverbefore-seen landscape, or a surprising occurrence. For example, Stevie Nicks found songwriting inspiration on the road, as “meeting all those people and becoming immersed in their problems provides any number of interesting scenarios” (Brant 38). Jimmy Ibbotson recalls he once considered writing a song about “the teenage waitress in Sheraton, Wyoming, who almost got on the bus with us” (qtd. in Brant 28). Creativity was not limited to just music—in 1996, Dave Bidini gazed out the windows of his band’s tour bus, Das Bus, and wrote in his diary: I promised myself that I wouldn’t fall prey to writing endless paragraphs about the majesty of my native soil, but sitting here looking at the moonish, blue snow-fields pooling into the magenta sunrise, I have to express a word or two about how astonishing this country is to travel over. (145) The second reason the tour bus is often the site of creativity on the road is less romantic than the first, but no less important. Simply put, musicians create on the bus because that is one of the few things they can do to pass the time between stops—besides sleeping, eating, or watching the scenery fly by. For example, Dolly Parton has been tremendously productive on her tour bus, the Gypsy Wagon—she wrote all of the music for the musical version of 9 to 5, as well as her 2008 album Backwoods Barbie while traveling from concert to concert (“Episode 13—Tour Bus”). James Parsons from the band Spearmint, another Leicher and Schreiner interviewee, took time to sketch the interior of the tour bus “on the move . . . as we hurtled down the Autobahn” (265). Footage from inside the Merry Pranksters’ bus, Furthur, shows them playing music, philosophizing, and passing around the camera (Magic Trip)— and, of course, Tom Wolfe was jotting down ideas that would eventually turn into The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Again, the tour bus is more than just the method of transportation—perhaps calling it a muse would be going too far, but its influence on the touring musician is clear. The third reason the tour bus engenders creativity is that musicians are in the same place as their recording gear, meaning that new ideas can be captured for later polishing. It would have been more difficult to do before the age of the iPhone, but examples such as mandolin player Bill Monroe, whose impromptu fiddle lesson was captured on a 1966 audio tape, indicate that musicians didn’t need fancy equipment to record straight from the bus. Today, however, entire studios can be installed in tour buses. Producer Timbaland, rapper 2 Chainz, and pop star Carly Rae Jepsen all have recording studios on their tour buses (Timbaland Bus Tour). And for those artists who feel the need

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to record while on tour but do not have an in-house (or in-bus) studio, Tribal Brand’s Mobile Recording Studio—an average-looking coach on the outside— is chock-full of the latest in recording and production technology. According to their website, Tribal Brands has helped Madonna, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, and more, “generate fresh, exclusive content without spending time and money in a recording studio” (Mobile Recording Studio). For years, pop culture imagery of the tour bus and touring life abounded, while musicians stayed largely silent. It was therefore possible that the features, benefits, and drawbacks of the tour bus that the public gleaned from films, television shows, and books were exaggerated or entirely fabricated. However, it seems that real-life musicians have many stories to tell of their time on the tour bus—and those stories match up well with our understanding of the tour bus. The bus is the best option financially. It is not without its downsides, but, at the end of the day, it is the musician’s home away from home. And, most importantly, the tour bus does inspire and support the musician’s continued creativity. These insights confirm that the tour bus is an integral part of the touring musician’s life. It signifies a commitment to creativity, a desire to commune with others, and a love of the road.

Hotels on wheels—the “new” tour bus To think about the tour bus is to visualize a vehicle, acquired primarily for financial and functional reasons, that quickly becomes a second home; consistently serves as a space for personal and interpersonal growth; and offers musicians a private stage for creative expression. This archetype of the tour bus is a product of over 60 years of historical and cultural representations, combined with musicians’ anecdotes and an overall understanding of the role of the motorbus in our lives. However, in the past decade a different breed of tour bus has captured the imaginations of the general public and eclipsed the traditional touring vehicle in terms of media exposure. This “new” tour bus reflects a shuffling of priorities among high-earning musicians. No longer concerned about making—or saving—enough money on a tour to finance their next project, twenty-first-century music stars take highly customized, expensive tour buses on the road. These celebrity tour buses are luxurious reminders of the cultural status of the musician, and seem to have very little to do with the traditional image of the dirty, messy realness of touring life. Instead, they support the artist’s well-crafted image—the glamor and worldliness that audiences expect of their idols. The practice of customizing a musician’s tour bus to better reflect his or her public image is not a twenty-first-century phenomenon, but only a few

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twentieth-century musicians had the resources to make many changes. However, even then, an extravagant tour bus was often also the musician’s long-term mobile home—and this justifies, to some extent, its price. For example, Willie Nelson had the same bus for 13 years, which gave him plenty of time to make it his home. Auctioned off in 2012, the Honeysuckle Rose featured “sleeping for six, a standup shower, plenty of audio-visual equipment from the 80s and 90s and western themed murals—complete with Texas Flag painted on the back” (Thunder). The bus reflected Nelson’s aesthetic taste, cowboy values, and star status. Similarly, Johnny Cash spent more than $550,000 in 1980 (approximately $1.5 million today) turning his tour bus, the JC Unit One, into a second home for his family—one that boasted four sleeping compartments, a rotisserie, four televisions, and a table salvaged from wood in Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters (“Johnny Cash’s Bus”). These tour buses, although they were famous in their own right, were not just for show. Ultimately, they remained the most efficient way to go on tour, particularly when Nelson and Cash teamed up with fellow country superstars Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson to form The Highwaymen, touring on the Honeysuckle Rose in the late 1980s (Thunder) and on the Unit One in 1991 (MotoArigato). Although functionality was slightly overshadowed by the displays of personal wealth and taste, Cash and Nelson’s buses still pale in comparison to the top twenty-first-century tour buses. Unlike Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson’s long love affairs with their tour buses, many of today’s superstar musicians use different buses for every tour. For example, each of Taylor Swift’s four tours has featured a new bus, each with its own unique features and levels of grandeur. In a video from her first tour in 2006, Swift is seen playing an impromptu set inside her bus which, while clearly a good quality vehicle, was largely unadorned and clearly housed several people (CMNTexas). However, by her 2009–2010 Fearless tour Swift was a global sensation—her tour consisted of 106 shows in four continents— and the tour bus she customized for this journey reflected that celebrity status. Gone were the days of sharing space with band and crew (the only other person staying with Swift was her mother), and sacrificing comfort for financial reasons (Kotb). Not only did this tour bus have expensive furniture, multiple flat screen televisions, chrome appliances, and a queen-sized bed—it also boasted a fireplace and a flip-down treadmill (Preston). The Fearless bus was Swift’s way of celebrating her newfound success. For Swift, the Fearless bus marked the achievement of a lifelong goal—but it also helped establish a precedent for other musicians who would rise to the same level of fame. In the last three years, numerous artists have taken great pleasure in showing off the comfort and luxury in which they travel to an increasingly interested public. For example, Katy Perry personally escorted cameras onto

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her 2011 double-decker European tour bus, which boasted a walk-in closet, enormous lounge area, and a fireman’s pole (Ravasia). The musician’s desire to show his or her tour bus, and the audience’s desire to see it, even spawned a television series called Celebrity Motor Homes, which takes viewers into unbelievably expensive and extravagant buses. One of the most ostentatious tour buses featured on Celebrity Motor Homes is that of Nickelback front man Chad Kroeger. Kroeger’s 2012 tour bus features ostrich leather trim, marble and leather furnishings, a king-sized bed, and a large, beautifully tiled shower that, as Kroeger proudly explains, is “one of the biggest showers I’ve ever seen on a tour bus” (Nickelbackhun 1). The video clip also reveals that each member of Nickelback has his own tour bus—yet another extravagance, and another way in which the twenty-first-century tour bus departs significantly from the twentieth-century fleet. A final way in which this new tour bus differs from the traditional tour bus is its use as advertising space for the musicians and their tours. Even a well-known bus such as Willie Nelson’s Honeysuckle Rose would only elicit reactions from audiences who knew what the murals covering the bus signified—to others it would have been a strange but indecipherable phenomenon. Likewise, Johnny Cash’s JC Unit One could send “rumors spreading in each town along the route as excited fans spotted the fabled ‘JC Unit One’ on local roadways” (MotoArigato). However, those audiences would have to know what clues to look for, as Cash only had the bus’s name painted behind both sets of rear tires. Only real fans, already anticipating Cash or Nelson’s arrival, would associate the sight of their mysterious vehicles with the musicians who were actually on board. Conversely, many of today’s superstar buses are now covered with the musician’s face and name, as well as the name of the tour. Taylor Swift’s Red (OfficialRED13) and Miley Cyrus’ Best of Both Worlds (Shannahan) vehicles are two examples of this promotional tactic, literally spreading word that the musician had arrived as the bus threaded its way through town. Some buses feature the name of the tour’s sponsor, since that company likely paid for the bus as well. Virgin Mobile placed its logo prominently on Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball bus (Gagapedia). Nivea went beyond that, using its sponsorship of Rihanna’s Loud tour to promote its own products and imagery—the image of Rihanna on the Loud bus was taken directly from Nivea products instead of the artist’s album or other creative products (Newman). And even if there are no direct references to the musician on board, there are often obvious clues—for example, Beat the Street operates a fleet of “purpose-built sleeper coaches exclusive to the entertainment industry” (“About Us”) with their name emblazoned on each one. Clearly, one of the new tour bus’s primary purposes is to promote the musician and their corporate associations, to sell more tickets, and to set the bar for the glamour and spectacle that would unfold on stage.

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When musicians begin earning enough money, the tour bus is often one of the first things to receive upgrades—particularly if the musician owns the bus and wishes to use it to house family, take other musicians on tour, or just feel at home. These improvements would enhance comfort and privacy, and demonstrate the musician’s increased control over the act of touring— all things that the less wealthy musician could only dream of. But recently, the tour bus that used to be more economical than a motel room seems to have turned into a five-star hotel on wheels. Real beds, high-end appliances, and rich décor are now standard features of the music superstar’s tour bus. Compared to this excess, Elvis’ tour bus sounds positively quaint; Doris and Priscilla look cramped and dirty; and musicians who do ride the grimier, older buses seem far less attractive. The new tour bus challenges the archetype of the tour bus, which was so carefully constructed over decades of pop culture and real-life examples, and had been the only type of tour bus for 50 years. It is clear that these mobile mansions are more than just a phase, which prompts the question—what is happening to the tour bus?

A fork in the road—dealing with differences and looking ahead This era marks the first time in the tour bus’s history that a distinctly new form has unsettled the traditional conceptualization of tour bus travel and those musicians who make use of it. Does the dominance of the highly customized, luxurious tour bus in today’s media signal the demise of the original tour bus— the functional yet inspiring vehicle? Logistically, that is unlikely to ever happen. Every day, a new band hits the road to try their luck and attain some level of fame, and they will continue to use those road-weary buses to pursue that dream. Yet it is clear that the new breed of tour buses is here to stay. So the question remains: what will become of the trope of the tour bus, torn as it is between being the only option for struggling acts and being just another extension of a superstar’s life of luxury? As shown from the numerous anecdotes in this chapter, working musicians have to face “extremely long hours of travel, broken-down half-assed vehicles, constipating fast food . . . cheek-to-jowl living, fatigue, boredom, and loneliness” (Brant 2), after which they must put on a show worthy of their audience. But it is all done in the name of music: k.d. lang states, “I don’t think true musicians . . . have any choice” (qtd. in Bonzai 2), and Guns N’ Roses cofounder Izzy Stradlin adds, “they suck it up and soldier on, hoping that somewhere along the road there might lay a little adventure” (qtd. in Brant 8). Consequently, the tour bus has become a symbol of the true musician, a

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stalwart storyteller willing to bear financial, physical, and emotional pain just for the chance to share him- or herself with the audience. By contrast, today’s music superstars like the ones discussed earlier go to great lengths and incur significant costs to ensure that their tour buses reflect their level of success and wealth. The tour bus thus becomes a literal representation of the larger-than-life image of the superstar musician—one that seems to threaten to eclipse the original symbolic meaning of the tour bus, particularly for younger generations who see only the glamour and none of the grit and grime. Yet because they continue to use tour buses (even just to travel from airport to venue), these stars benefit from that long-held association between the bus and musical dedication—even though it may have been years since they could be counted among the struggling multitude. And although no one may ask the question, it’s very possible that continuing to use the bus is a way to pay homage to humbler beginnings, and to acknowledge how far a star has come. Therefore, this shift in the style of today’s tour buses should be interpreted as an expansion and maturation of the trope of the tour bus, not an extinction of its original meaning. In concluding his chapter, “Mapping the Trope: A Historical and Cultural Journey,” Gordon Slethaug describes a similar environment of change that surrounds the trope of the road: “[it] has undergone many permutations in the last hundred and fifty years and, though an enduring presence in American culture, it is never completely the same” (38). What the road symbolizes in American culture has expanded and adapted to the everchanging cultural landscape. The trope of the road is never entirely stable, as “culture attaches new meanings in each era” (Slethaug 38)—but from a century and a half of historical, cinematic, literary, and technological representations, it has only become more interesting and more entrenched in culture. It appears, then, that the major differences between the traditional tour bus and today’s superstar bus do not signal a competition between these two forms, but instead point to new identities and meanings that the bus can potentially adopt. At only 60 years old, the tour bus is still a very new addition to the cultural understanding of the road and of the role and image of the musician. Perhaps, then, this moment in time represents a sort of adolescence wherein a crisis of self will eventually result in a more complex and intriguing identity. What is clear is that as long as the relationships between music and the road, the musician and the tour, and the self and the journey are alive and well, the tour bus will continue to drive along our highways—and take our imaginations along for the ride.

6 Band on the ruins: Meditations on music and motion Warren Leming

Chicago roots—late ’50s, early ’60s

I

was a budding high-school beatnik who read Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957, and with my Russian-born partner in crime, Alex, read poetry, frequented jazz clubs, and sowed our version of bohemian decadence in high-school corridors. Proviso East High School was a bastion of jock supremacy and philistine indifference, but it also had a tiny teacher contingent sympathetic to our Cause, if only we could define just what that capital ‘C’ Cause was. Alex, way ahead of me in aesthetics, turned me onto Chicago Jazz, the pleasures of poetry, and The Blue Note, a Chicago club that booked the likes of Max Roach and Duke Ellington. Studs Terkel was an occasional MC too. My sister’s collection of 45s were what I danced to in our folks’ basement where, defying Midwestern Puritan codes, we were allowed beers and the frenzy that rock music could produce. It wasn’t that I responded to what Ricky Nelson, with his nice-boy good looks—leveraged with “greaser” attire and hairstyle— represented, but it was hard at the time not to get some grease on you. Many years later, doing a play with Grease co-writer Jim Jacobs, I found the high-school universe he and lyricist Warren Casey dramatized so marvelously was pretty much the one I knew, with the difference that I was anti-Grease yet schooled in the Greaser lore Jacobs and Casey turned into a franchise. The songs

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sweetened what I knew was a darker picture than this blockbuster enterprise portrayed, but they undeniably tapped into a vibrant musical world that the obscure rockers I danced to in the basement had trail-blazed. Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” later became a sort of anthem for The Who. But Cochran, whose blond good looks might have taken him to an Elvis-like fame and fortune, died in a car crash at twenty-one. The road giveth and the road taketh away. Chicago, like other rust-belt cities of my youth, did not offer the glittery promise one gawked at on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet TV show with its gleaming swimming pools, lithe California girls, goofy Mom and Dad platitudes, and growing-up Ricky, who with his guitar seemed to charm all America. Yes, the Nelson family consisted of awful horrendous squares, irredeemably so, but somehow Ricky’s guitar and ballads did the trick even for the lost and lonely souls trapped in Chicago, Akron, Cleveland, or Youngstown in the slow decay of industrial areas, then still alive with postwar energy and manufacturing money. Yet, we must not forget what a drab world the American ’50s was, with its opening salvo in Korea, fought to a stalemate while the US Air Force bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age and beyond, thereby guaranteeing that North Korean regimes would be among the most repressive in the world (see Cumings The Korean War). TV had just reared its ubiquitous leveling head, although some early programs smacked of a keen intelligence never again allowed to re-appear. The kids rocked on, but pop music, unless you really dug for it, was still the canned Lucky Strike Hit Parade of tap-dancing hucksters. For those of us counting the hours until we were free of the high-school horror we were living, only the occasional bit of music reflected our true condition: isolation, yearning, and dreams of Beat glory. Ain’t no cure for the Summertime Blues. So here we were at the Gates of Boredom that had defeated our parents, aunts and uncles, and drove us to the intellectual extremities of existential doubt that Sartre and Brecht wrote of. And suddenly with the release of Kerouac’s On the Road, the answer, such as it was, was there. And on we drove through rust-belt towns that once flourished and now lay victim to not-sofree market forces which we could see even then were ruining local economies and were channeling wealth to the miniscule top at a rate not seen since Jay Gould screwed each and every investor as he piled up his railroad fortune.1 Rock, of course, crisscrossed with folk as well as gospel. In Chicago in the late ’50s and early ’60s, I worked as a young banjo picker at a time when folk had resurfaced with the Kingston Trio, whose breakthrough hit was an old mountain ballad called “Tom Dooley,” picked up by their banjo player,

1

A ruinous situation only belatedly coming to official notice through such works as Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (London: Penguin, 2013).

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Dave Guard. They turned into a money-minting college act, which owed the foundations of its popularity to the folk-music movement in the ’30s, cultivated by the long-erased American Communist party (Lieberman). Concurrent with banjo studies, which got me out of the University of Illinois (Champaign Urbana) in six months, I formed a brief alliance with Jim (later Roger) McGuinn who would back Bobby Darin, the Limelighters, and a number of folk acts before putting together the Byrds in Los Angeles.2 McGuinn was way ahead of the curve and mastered the 12-string guitar and the Seeger-style long-necked banjo in time to pick up the essentials of Pete Seeger’s song list and that of Bob Gibson, then a fixture at the Gate of Horn, Chicago’s preeminent folk club and cabaret. Gibson was to meet up with Paul Sills, a founder of Chicago’s Second City, and to pair up with Bob Camp, another singer of real ability. They knocked everyone dead but got caught up in unauthorized pharmaceuticals and thereby avoided fame but for word-of-mouth that persists. The Gate was the core of the new folk scene and featured the legendary Lord Buckley and Severn Darden, the great Second City improvising wit and magical presence. That much of the folk scene carried over into the rock of the ’60s and ’70s is evidence that folk was not just something that Dylan put behind him, but was the basis for much of the electric eclectic scene that changed American music and then conquered the Anglophone world. The secret, our manager and I discovered, was original material. Record companies, those blind dinosaurs of yore, slowly realized that if you owned publishing rights, they went on paying dividends long after the tune had been released, and hit or missed. Dylan, who reconfigured himself on leaving Minnesota for Manhattan, was a folkie briefly but long enough to ensure that he would not end up broken, and forgotten, as had Guthrie.3

The Wilderness road band tours— early 1970 and 1971 Early ’70s. Bound to tour the Midwest, but looking West, we pulled out of Chicago, Mondo our equipment/sound man and the rest of the Wilderness Road Band in that creaky cranky VW van we used to haul equipment, a vehicular 2

For a view of McGuinn on the 1976 Rolling Thunder tour see Sid Griffin’s Shelter From The Storm (New York: Jawbone, 2010).

3 For the latest warring renditions of the saga see Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric (New York: Dey Street Books, 2015) and Edward Renehan, Dylan at Newport, 1965 (New York: New Street Communications, 2015). Dylan tries to explain himself in Chronicles, Volume One (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

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testament to abiding poverty.4 The four bare tires and dicey transmission were worrisome marks of several years the van spent traversing the Midwest with its hippie inhabitants, all somehow barely getting by. So I picked up a tape of Eddie Cochran material to ease the inevitable spells of boredom and tensions of another road trip in the otherwise salubrious company of our road manager Ron, roadie extraordinaire Mondo, lead singer Nate, Tom on drums, and his brother Andy, a disaffected Vietnam vet, on bass guitar. In addition, we had Lou on guitar and vocals, and me on banjo, guitar, and vocals. Though we started out as brothers allied against the deadening forces of mainstream conservatism, peace does not always reign within bands, and Lou, who was an early recruit to the band, came from a Navy family and objected to our playing anti-War gigs. A few months later—for me—it finally came down to Lou or the band, and I talked it out with him one night, explaining that some of our onstage theatrical performance and our gigs were going to remain antiWar, and that the band backed me in this. He then said that he could not perform with us, and it was over for him. Lost track of him, only to learn years later that, after a divorce, he’d gone back to Virginia and his family and had died in his beloved Mustang while driving. Massive heart attack. As “Summertime Blues” crackled, I adjusted the headphones and thought about Cochran and that school of now faceless rockers who had pervaded my teens: Ricky Nelson, Gene Vincent, Dale Hawkins, and others.5 None really cracked the big time, but their take on teen life, ripe with hormonal angst, certainly had gotten to me. There is a whole wide world of road tunes, ranging from Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” which our band covered, to Bobby Troupe’s “Route 66,” to which The Rolling Stones did admirable justice. Rock, bluegrass, blues, or R and B, the road plays a crucial part in most American lives, whether riding it, building it, or just listening to songs about it. You can’t avoid it. Does wanderlust infect every American? Or is it just that, when life gets rough, you like to feel you can step out on the road and find a way out? We had taken enough roads as a band to be profoundly road weary, but if there were gigs to be played and a little money to be made, was there a choice? Americans have a ceaseless fascination with movement, and we were “almost” making a living playing gigs here, there, and everywhere. Our movement on this tour consisted of two cycles, the first from May to August 1970 focusing on the Midwest as far as Denver and the second from November 1970 to January 1971, taking us to California. In the first cycle, we followed the road from Chicago to Denver, Colorado but initially focused 4 For background on the band, which produced two albums (Wilderness Road and Sold for the Prevention of Disease Only) go to www.wildernessroad.net. 5

One of the best books on rock is Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom (London: Pimlico, 2004).

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mainly on the roads where Illinois joins Indiana and Iowa—highways 40, 81, and 66. We played lots of college dates in and around Chicago—the best of which were at the University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University. Other gigs, though, were not so well-mannered as the college campuses tended to be. Playing a road house in Ames, Iowa, we were mercilessly heckled by a guy about mid-point in a crowd of several hundred. Our drummer Tom, midst a tune but without missing a beat, nailed the heckler in the forehead with a drumstick pitched from at least thirty feet away. The guy went down and did not get up. We later saw him, rather wobbly, leaving the club with friends supporting him. Such are the wages of sin of music tours on the road. How he hit the guy at that distance and with that accuracy remains a mystery but is also a lesson on the challenges of taking rock ’n’ roll on the road. After Ames and Iowa City, I drove with friends to meet the band in Denver. We wanted to stay on Larimer Street at the hotel that once housed Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) from Kerouac’s On the Road. Though following in the footsteps of Cassady and Sal, it felt strange to remember that most of our band had read Kerouac’s book in 1957 while in high school. Like Joplin, we wondered whether we owed more to the Beats than to Kesey and the Hippies. After Denver, we turned around and came back to Chicago, but this first tour of a couple of months was followed almost immediately by our late fall/ early winter tour West via the South. We started in Chicago, went South as far as Tennessee, then overland to San Francisco and L. A. still following the example and logic of Kerouac. We bunked in motels coast-to-coast and crashed, as was then possible, in enough homes to be thankful that we qualified as attractively “homeless” figures for the many people kind enough to take us in, feed us, and let us bed down. Times were different. As a friend later put it: “In those days I left Chicago with a dime in my pocket, hitched to California and came back a month later, with a dime in my pocket.” But living out of sleazy motels was not easy. We were in the Alamo Motel somewhere in Tennessee, when I almost missed a sound check, having fallen into a deep sleep just prior to the show, worn out by working the equipment truck with Mondo in addition to partying a little too hard. The Alamo, like the Tropicana in L.A., had a swimming pool overgrown with what looked to be life forms still unknown to biology. When I asked the manager why the pool was never used, he responded: “No one wants to go near it since we found a dead dog in it. Think the water killed it.” Similarly disgusting, the motel room walls were coated with a thick layer of tobacco smoke, so much so that you could write your name on them. We did so, leaving what might have been our only “mark” on the Southern part of the tour. As Easy Rider made clear in 1969, the Southern locals were hostile to us long-haired, hippy-garbed, neo-country groups who would satirize commercial radio, religion, and pro-War politics.

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We were completely at odds with everything in that place where radio reports were drumming on about civil rights issues and “agitators.” So many kids we encountered at these shows—performed in roller rinks, abandoned movie theaters, ancient vaudeville venues, and even outdoor driveins—were lost, caught up in some amphetamine dream, and too dispirited and afraid to do what we had done: get the hell out. As Mondo used to say, “Get up, and get out. You want me to draw you a picture?” The road isn’t just an adventure or a lark, it can be salvation, or at least the best chance for kids snared in backwaters. Those treks of ours from gig to gig, town to town, polyester-sheet motel to run-down motel, greasy spoon to greasier spoon, exerted a decidedly unromantic downside in sheer fatigue, in the mind-numbing bleary stare of whoever the designated driver was on the all-night run. The history of automotive fatigue needs to take pride of place in the burgeoning annals of Beatnik heroism. Many were the nights when desperation for sleep outstripped the craving for the radio-triggered reveries that only a merciless cross-country cruise can conjure. The driver required caffeinated monologues of whoever rode shotgun, and I recall wonderfully dubious oral essays on dating rituals, the Chicago Cardinals football team (long gone), and other esoterica, including an allegedly unexpurgated history of the blues. As Kerouac testified, long babbling soliloquies are a sacred by-product of road trips, especially at night, inspired by the incessant rap of a Neal Cassady wannabe, for the Muse too requires long stretches of empty highway in order to flourish.6 Cochran hadn’t lived all that fast a life, truth be told, and his music spoke even to those who found his toothy grin and ducktail haircut an affront to our Beat attitudes. Like Nelson, he was a California-raised, showbiz type who got the attention of a beady-eyed manager and the entire apparatus that surrounded such denizens of fame, which craftily eluded me and my peers. The split between Greaser and Beatnik culture still reverberates in the important nuances that distance the Beat black-only wardrobe from the greased-back hair and leather of the Punk. Imagine Presley poised on the greaser side and Brando (after The Wild One) on the other side as Beat guru set loose on an unsuspecting Hollywood. Sure it was myth, but then we young Americans lived on myths—better myths, we thought, than those our elders cherished.7

6

For a glimpse of Cassady past his prime but still rolling, see the footage of him in the 2011 documentary, The Magic Trip.

7

Richard Slotkin is hard to beat on the touchy subject of dominant American myths. See his trilogy: Regeneration Through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan Press, 1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the American Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (New York: Atheneum, 1980), and Gunfighter Nation (New York: Atheneum Press, 1992).

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When televised banalities outweigh local ennui, then you head out to that storied West Coast space where moms and dads play minor supporting roles to kids who drive tangerine-flake custom cars packed with younger versions of Doris Day and Tuesday Weld (see Wolfe The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine). Flee to a place where the beach and the surfer reign supreme and Kid Culture long ago triumphed at the drive-ins or the car-hop restaurants (in Chicago it was Skip’s). Route 66 coincidentally will take you straight there, from North Chicago to Santa Monica, where The Beach Boys ruled. The seductiveness of California also surfaces in the ’60s with the Seeds, then hippie-ish Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and then the myriad of bands we all can name promoting the West Coast as a miraculous “happening” where even homeless artists had a shot at sitcom exposure and residuals. Mondo and I made a long truck-trip, with all the equipment, to a club in San Francisco where we hoped to audition and sign for Warner Reprise because Columbia had taken a very pronounced pass on us as “not commercially viable.” However, the Rolling Stone review of our first album, which was a rave, had apparently whetted appetites at Warner Brothers for what we had on offer: country-flavored rock melded with onstage theatrics and songs like Nate’s “Heavily Into Jesus” which mocked modern commercial religion and contained anti-war remarks throughout. We closed our performances with a neon cross covered with the American flag—all of this revealed by a supercharged explosion triggered by some ignition material laced with phosphorus. Our stance was clearly anti-establishment, and we held that image when we moved along to L.A. where we met briefly with legend Kim Fowley. We headlined at the Whiskey a Go Go on the Strip in L.A. where we encountered more of the legendary “soft pharmaceutical industry” and its reps. However, our encounters with the storied West could not put to rest our dis-ease about some of our favorite singers on the American scene. Cochran had sort of gotten it right. He scribbled some great songs, delivered them with the savvy and panache of a studio musician, traveled far and wide to gigs, got some real attention, and, just as things were peaking, died wrapped in the surgical steel embrace of a Cadillac on lonesome Rock Star Victim Boulevard. His exit meant eternal Teen Fame, for it came at the top of his game. He thereby joined Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, all of whom one foggy February night in 1959 began busking the streets of Paradise, their earthly burdens ended in a crumpled Cessna smoldering in a cornfield, a result of endless one-nighters that killed many others more slowly. From sudden death on the road, though, spring the legends: Johnny Ace a suicide playing Russian Roulette before going on stage; Sam Cooke dead at the hands of a motel owner protecting her turf; and Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix all overdosing. I recall morose late-night discussions in our

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hurtling van about how Cochran and Nelson, who died in 1985 while barnstorming in a leased C-47 to yet another gig, had “made it,” while we were still mired in the rust-belt debacle. The English, however, knew how to move. In faraway England, Pete Townshend, whose pricey guitar-smashing antics already won The Who untold amounts of free press, also heard Cochran singing from that impossible enviable America (Townshend). English working-class lads sensed that these self-absorbed teen lyrics, born of poor Southern-boy ambitions crossed with the sunny idiot logic of California dreams, would handsomely reward those who repackaged juvenile angst for fun and profit. The Brits also always were, and still are, smitten by Kerouacian visions of the open road, the very one we were always on. Townshend, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Stones, and all of that horribly inauthentic British blend of American myth, incarnated in the epochal “English Invasion,” scrambled to get into the right place at the right time. Where Americans beheld only high-school trivialities and beery banality, the Brits saw teens relishing postwar perks they had been denied. England, they knew, hadn’t won the Second World War because if it had, where was the booty? In rationing or overcrowded housing? The Yanks were living at a scale materially that had every Mod and Rocker, no matter what their other differences, drooling. So English bands worked harder, toured longer, and it paid off. Some even sashayed into the rock pantheon. Luck and talent could get you out of Liverpool. The LP made it possible to market to anyone in a matter of weeks. It was transnational, and, at first, the Americans, unlike the hungrier English, had not a clue as to what was going around. As the Stones came to know so well, if you are first in the Game, you define the Game. America, for them, was both the road and the place where you “arrived.” The Mob with its sex acts and gambling had been expelled from Havana, so Vegas became the free-form entertainment Mecca, which seemed to consist of “Rat Pack” crooning and antics that Sammy Davis, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Peter Lawford dished out to an audience of the hopeless losers who’d go for that shit. But the English, and wide swathes of a Europe bombed flat, looked at postwar America with its gigantic suburban projects, monstrous cars, millionaire movie stars, swimming pools, and bikinis and couldn’t help but ask, “Where’s mine?” My Cochran meditation shifts to early Elvis, before he’d been made a corporate clone, a slave to Colonel Tom Parker’s dire visions of success. I did the usual mental check of comparing the late bloated Elvis with the early Rock-a-Billy Elvis with Bill Black on bass, and Scotty Moore on guitar. Compare Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” to what Elvis did with it, and he ain’t half bad. Knew where to take it. The poor white and the poor black fused into Elvis in the limelight as Sam Phillips at Sun Records finally found what he sought for so long: “a White kid who can sing Black.”

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Phillips unloaded the first Presley material to RCA for $35,000. The tracks today would be worth millions, which is what the King fetched up for Parker, a con man and shyster. Selling out in the music biz means keeping your mouth shut and signing where directed. Elvis, like John Belushi, and so many such victims never really had a clue beyond wanting so desperately to make it (Leming Amnesia). It really wasn’t fair what happened to those with enough talent to perform and no talent for finding out who they really were. It hadn’t been their fault. America denies its victims the grace of self-knowledge and in its place encourages toxic personality blends of overweening ambition plus clueless incomprehension. The road won’t always save you from it. Is it ever any different? Our manager Ron started as a reporter in Baltimore. On the showbiz beat he’d met Little Richard whose real name was Richard Penniman, a Georgia-born-and-bred gospel singer who’d seen enough of the Jim Crow South to equip him with a hustler’s instincts and to refine a piano and vocal style that still creates chills. Somewhere there is a Mercury Records promo film of Penniman doing a stint with an English back-up band. He’s astounding. There’s none of the coy camp of a Jagger, though he was more than up to Warholian high jinks. Little Richard created storms no teen could resist. He stomped and pouted, laughed, and preached, crooned and shouted something very like the blues, but it had been revamped into something only he uniquely possessed. The real ’50s rock sound emanated from this goldlame-suited presence, and there has never been anything like him before or since. On the road Ron described to us an evening doing an interview with the man as he lounged in bed with a fellow performer. No road, no Little Richard. Bless the road, this time. You did not want to be in a car with black passengers in the early ’60s in the South. Imagine what traveling in the South in the ’50s was like for a black performer, in a black show-business setting served by venues on the TOBA (Tough on Black Artists) circuit. Little Richard produced a series of stompers in the ’50s: “Long Tall Sally”, “Tutti Fruiti”, and reworked up-tempo blues tunes which became hits. White performers, like simpering Pat Boone, took these hits and made them white cross-over successes. The black musical genius keeps being refitted to white audiences. “Race” records of the ’30s were marketed to blacks and had equivalents in the white South on labels like Okeh. In 1960 I visited Woody Guthrie’s home in Okemah, Oklahoma, to discover that Guthrie befriended blacks and Indians and therefore found himself excluded from not-so-polite white society.8 One of the things I learned on the road is that it has taken a disturbingly long time for them to forgive him.

8

See the 2013 documentary American Road, which addresses this side of Guthrie.

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Little Richard left showbiz in the mid-’50s to preach with a Pentecostal Church. He did some gospel albums, and from time to time he returns to the ungodly precincts of pop and cranks out the good old stuff. But audiences, as they say, have moved on, even though he is—hands down—one of the two or three best rock singer instrumentalists ever to go on the road, step on a sweat-stained stage, and pound a helpless piano to perdition. And if there is a rock ’n’ roll heaven, he will sit at Her Right Hand forever and ever. Amen. At this point in our long rickety van ride, we stop and stumble into yet another greasy spoon where we’ll down the death-ball burgers and fries which make up the Poor Man’s menu on which we must thrive. As background music, a Beatles tune plays. And yes, they changed the game—despite the fact that I, and I was not alone, wearied of the celebrity blitz around them; the cute tales that kept the tabloids ringing up sales; the various pomposities to which they would succumb. But the moptops still had about them (“Sergeant Pepper” be damned) enough that was fresh and original to keep them in the public mind to the present moment. For some of us, though, they became an object lesson, and ultimately a drag. Still, Lennon’s death was a genuine tragic moment engineered by that saddest of phenomena, a fan gone mad. Pop always pointed toward death, and romanticism is a romance with fatality too. Clutching a copy of Catcher in the Rye, this kid put five bullets in the one guy who had about him enough life and imagination to transcend even The Beatles. The rest of the band members were just happy to escape dead-end lives that Liverpool had patented for the EnglishIrish poor. Lennon had a battle-axe to grind and never let anyone forget it; not for him McCartney’s public relations genius. He admirably applied his acerbic cynicism to all walks of pop life. A working class hero was something to be. Of Ringo and George, let us not belabor their side-man status, and of McCartney’s le Grande Artiste poses, remember, it was enough just to have gotten to London with Epstein paying the fare. Bless them in all their successes; in the legend that has gotten so far beyond them as to make their consignment to nostalgia a holy event. Trust the song and never the singer, and please no more masses said for George Martin or his ilk. Is it not enough that there is a museum in Cleveland composed of the silent corpses who were once so alive that they could make one dance? Of the Maharishi let us not speak except to snicker into our rock souvenir T-shirts. Our lead singer Nate did a tremendous over-the-top version of Larry Williams’ “Bony Moronie.” Williams, like Little Richard, did some great mid’50s material. “Short Fat Fannie” was one I remember. He was a real dude, Williams, but by the ‘60s the classic ’50s material had been dumped, and so he tried his hand at other forms, but it was a bit late. He toured, did some records, but he’d been consigned to the has-been train, and once on it, it’s

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almost impossible to get off. I don’t know how it finished for him, but I do know that when Nate did “Bony Moronie,” no matter what the venue, what the weather, what the crowd, it got to me every time—an elegant, sustained piece of rock perfection. Categorized as a nonsense tune, the critics could not see the genius at the heart of that riff, or the vibe it produced. Nate saw it and made it work. Larry, the universe thanks you, and as we developed our band’s ’50’s alter egos “Ricky and the Balloons,” thanks from us too. But let us come back to rock band benedictions for the road, that place where America is always going and never quite arrives. We returned to Chicago after our trip to California, but in late 1972 we went west again, playing at the Montana State Fair when word came in that our road manager Harvey had freaked out, abandoned us, and, as they say, gone to Texas. Harvey, a cousin or some such of Albert Grossman, Dylan’s Svengali, had done a great job for us, but, beaten down by the god-awful food, continual traveling, and endless debates with roadies, club owners, and motel keepers, he crashed and went AWOL, never to return. It was emblematic. The road, and the music it inspired and enabled, is a glory. But the road for any traveling band was one long hassle, whether for digestible fare, a place to crash, or worst of all, the club owner who would not pay. Our fallback guy remained the inimitable Mondo, whose genius as a soundman and rock-solid set-up abilities kept us on tour long after our day should have been over. You have to have a roadie of genius, and a soundman with infinite chops to stay out there and get the job done, and Mondo had done that for us. It is no small thing to keep a band, a truck, and a sound system percolating away on the road. Of that brave band, one is now dead, the rest are scattered across the landscape, and our souls are still reverberating with that message Whitman delivered long ago: “The only home of the soul is the open road.”9 The rest is silence.

9

See especially the essay on Whitman in D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990).

7 “All that road going”: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks, and The Beach Boys’ Smile Dale Carter

The road will be made, and soon, and by individual enterprise. The age is progressive and utilitarian. It abounds with talent, seeking employment, and with capital, seeking investment. The temptation is irresistible . . . to reach the golden California . . . and to own a road of our own to the East Indies, . . . following the track of the sun to dip in the western ocean. . . . Let us vindicate the glory of Columbus by realizing his divine idea of arriving in the east by going to the west. . . . Adopt the road. THOMAS HART BENTON, 1854

T

hough “golden California,” “following the . . . sun,” and a “dip in the western ocean” might all come to mind when thinking of The Beach Boys, the Missouri politician Thomas Hart Benton’s encomium—“adopt the road”— was no less integral, over a century later, to the profile of the group whose recordings provided a soundtrack of the West Coast surfing subculture in the early 1960s. Led by chief songwriter, arranger, and producer Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys were scarcely devoted to the same aims as Benton, of course: during the mid-nineteenth century, Benton was advocating Federal support for transcontinental railroad construction. Yet the temptation of the

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road—ultimately the highway and the automobiles that it carried—appeared just as irresistible, at least in many of the group’s songs during their early, most commercially successful, phase from 1963 to 1966. If, during this period, teenage romance and surfing itself furnished two of The Beach Boys’ major lyrical themes, then the road and how to use it—whether in a sports car or “woody”—hot rod or drag racer—provided the third. How, after all, could surfers get their boards to the beaches, and how could young men impress their girlfriends, reach hamburger stands, or pursue their dreams of freedom and escape, if the car and the asphalt were not available? Partly in spite (and partly because) of The Beach Boys’ success, from the mid-’60s onwards, Brian Wilson added to his abiding interest in vocal, instrumental, and studio innovation a growing desire to revise The Beach Boys’ image, not wanting it to appear faddish or parochial as other musicians moved beyond pop culture’s youthful preoccupations. At first this concern involved a narrowing of the romantic focus: in parts of The Beach Boys Today (1965) and Pet Sounds (1966), the lyrical and thematic emphasis shifted from youthful relationships and beach culture to notions of the self and individual states of mind. Later, Wilson’s attention moved beyond identity to its historical, geographical, political, cultural, and ideological contexts. Smile was not released as intended; instead a stripped-down recording called Smiley Smile appeared in 1967. It was not until 2004 that most of the original work was produced in Brian Wilson Presents Smile, which for convenience sake will be referred to as Smile in this chapter. Though work on this album led Wilson away from the early Beach Boys’ themes (in the process exacerbating the conflicts within the group that would help prompt its abandonment), it retained the concern with mobility. Wilson did not need to “adopt the road” as it had never been abandoned, but work on the Smile album widened and re-graded the road, traced its full length, and identified its costs and benefits. This chapter, then, describes the route Wilson took. It begins with the musical, cultural, political, and historical circumstances of The Beach Boys’ musical journey. It then considers the importance of Smile’s trajectory as both affirmative and critical in moving beyond well-established tropes of westward American movement in cultural, technological, and popular musical history. After a brief discussion of the album’s musical and lyrical aesthetics, the chapter next analyzes its articulations of national declension: a falling away from an original, innocent vision of America into sinful experiences that are offset only by an abiding light on the horizon. Thereafter, the chapter pursues Wilson’s conception of this light as it guides Smile’s pilgrims onto roads long promised but less traveled, leading toward a postimperial, postindustrial, multicultural, and spiritual regeneration. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the recording as a countercultural, liberal, and ultimately radical recovery vehicle.

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The vehicle, the CD itself, took much longer to arrive than anticipated, and was by that time traveling under different colors: credited to the solo artist Brian Wilson rather than to his group, The Beach Boys. The discussion in this chapter is based on the CD released in 2004, which offered new recordings of the songs Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks had originally worked on in 1966–1967. Some of these songs were virtually unchanged, others were re-edited or completed, one or two with additional lyrics and/or new titles. For Wilson and Parks this recording constituted the definitive version: partly because it was finished, unlike widely circulated bootleg versions of many of the original recordings; partly because it resolved issues that had not been dealt with when their original work was suspended in the spring of 1967, notably the sequencing of the songs and structure of the album. In 2011 a five-CD box set of the original studio recordings from 1966 and 1967 entitled The Smile Sessions was released by Capitol Records. Taken from the original masters, and featuring vocals by The Beach Boys, the running order of songs on The Smile Sessions version of the album was consistent with their sequencing on Brian Wilson Presents Smile, which implicitly confirms the status of the latter.

Roads to redemption Wherever he was going, to extend the driving metaphor, Brian Wilson did not get there alone. His earliest Beach Boys’ car songs—initially the B-sides of singles, then the car-themed album Little Deuce Coupe (1964)—were written with collaborators Gary Usher and Roger Christian, the latter a devoted auto enthusiast or “gear head” (White Nearest, 169–70; Carlin, Catch a Wave, 33, 39–40; Steven Gaines 93, 107–08; Beard “Shut Down,” 21–23). When, in the course of 1965, Wilson began to play down the romance of the road, he continued to work with co-writers (who again served mainly as lyricists): most commonly Beach Boys’ lead vocalist and long-standing co-writer Mike Love, and then, for the Pet Sounds album, Tony Asher. This practice was maintained when The Beach Boys’ leader invited keyboards player, session musician, arranger, and former folk revivalist Van Dyke Parks to join him in writing songs for his next project. Parks himself was scarcely immune to the appeal of travel: he had abandoned his studies at Carnegie Tech in Cleveland and moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to join his older brother in a folk music duo, inspired to head west in part by his reading of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), with “all that road going,” as narrator Sal Paradise calls it at the novel’s conclusion. By the time Parks first met Wilson three years later, however, his experience as

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a touring musician had tempered his romantic notions of the road, perhaps becoming more attuned to the novel’s combined skeptical and ecstatic view of the road as life. In this regard Parks found common cause with Wilson, who had abandoned touring with The Beach Boys at the end of 1964 because of the demands it entailed. By this time, too, the death of one of Parks’s brothers, in an autobahn accident in Germany in 1963, had brought home the real human cost of Dean Moriarty’s visions of highway immortality. Part of Parks’s disillusionment with a too-rosy view of the road might also have come from the public impression, recounted by drummer Dennis Wilson after 1966 tour dates in London, that The Beach Boys were juvenile and outdated because of the matching, candy-striped shirts they wore on stage.1 Though justifying Brian Wilson’s desire to innovate musically and stylistically, occasional taunts from fans were significant less as an index of waning popularity—their standing had never been higher in the UK than during their late 1966 visit—than because of Wilson and Parks’s reaction to them. For Parks in particular, the behavior of some fans in London irritated his nationalist hackles, raised first by the popularity of The Beatles in The Beach Boys’ homeland and later by The Rolling Stones’ appropriation of American soul and rhythm ‘n’ blues. If The Beatles were both a creative and a commercial challenge to Wilson, then to Parks the “British invasion” bands were fifth columnists; the American musical road was not simply being given over to foreign drivers: many of them were passing in stolen vehicles (Priore, Smile 25–27). To learn that one of the most successful and innovative of homegrown pop groups was being teased across the Atlantic only added stylistic and patriotic insult to artistic and marketplace injury. Recalling his initial reaction to the various cover versions on The Rolling Stones’ second album, 12 × 5 (1964), Parks told Erik Himmelsbach that “from a nationalist standpoint” he had been “alarmed that we were abrogating our rights as Americans in popular music to commercialize our own experience” (67). Yet Parks was no xenophobic isolationist, and, as he recalled for Tim White, he “thought The Beatles were doing a good job and . . . was even more impressed by their record production” (“Van Dyke Parks” 42). Not only did Parks’s debut solo MGM single “No. 9” (1965) pay veiled tribute to a scene from The Beatles’ second feature film released that same year, Help!; he also spent many hours listening to the group’s work in an effort to understand their methods (Robbins interview; Anderle interview). If this study suggested 1

Van Dyke Parks has typically associated Dennis Wilson’s lament with The Beach Boys visit to the UK in November 1966, in particular to a performance at the Royal Albert Hall (though the group did not appear at that venue during this tour). Other accounts have implied similar experiences prior to the late 1966 European tour. See Priore, Smile 89; Carlin 97; Badman 156.

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appreciation, however, it also signified a desire to salvage musical and national pride. Keen “to wrest this trophy back from the English who’d preceded us,” Parks saw his invitation in late 1965 to work with Brian Wilson as an “opportunity . . . to champion the interests of a group that was on the pinnacle of American representation of music” (Hoskyns 84). Insofar as Parks saw The Beach Boys as “the most powerful tool for the Americanization of the globe” (Himmelsbach 12), it offered a chance to fight back. With albums such as The Beatles’ Revolver further raising the stakes during 1966, Smile was intended to become the means whereby Wilson and Parks articulated a distinctive, home-grown, star-spangled, copy-protected musical vision (McCulley 22). If such ambition made sense within the prevailing popular musical context, in other ways it seemed incongruous. Thus work on Smile proceeded even as US military commitments in Vietnam grew, bringing dissent, resistance, and social and political divisions in reaction to mounting casualty numbers, both Vietnamese and American. Though Parks has spoken in various terms over the years about the war’s explicit influence on Smile, he certainly came to the project at a time when many who shared his environmentalist and civil rights commitments were increasingly questioning their country’s values and behavior, and losing hope of reforming public policy.2 Moreover, the burgeoning Los Angeles countercultural circles through which Parks and Wilson first met were no closer to the nation’s prevailing social and cultural norms than the New Left was to its government (McBride 110–36; Carter “Mystic,” 169–76). Radical movements had often wrapped themselves in the stars and stripes, and the nation’s founding documents were now being tied to calls for bombing halts or troop withdrawals, further action against segregation, and the classification of LSD as a religious sacrament. Still, for musicians with their ears tuned to the youthful counterculture, a patriotic pursuit was not in 1966 the most obvious way either to invoke creative inspiration or to win over growing rock audiences. Yet the route Wilson and Parks chose was designed to take them in the right direction, even if they abandoned the pursuit before their goal was reached. Seeking now to reclaim the American road, Wilson and Parks determined that their project would “go west,” to borrow the celebrated phrase of nineteenthcentury newspaper editor Horace Greeley: Smile would take the form of a physical journey, east to west, from Plymouth Rock across the continent and onto Hawaii, retracing the American historical experience. In the context of 2

Compare, for example, the language of the Port Huron Statement, founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society, in June 1962 with that of SDS president Carl Oglesby, in his address to an anti-war rally in October 1965. In the latter, Oglesby gives passionate voice to a sense that patriotism was being rendered untenable by a “corporate liberal” establishment devoted not to national ideals but to the quest for power, profit and the maintenance of a violent, reactionary foreign policy: Students for a Democratic Society 163–64; Oglesby 178–83.

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armed conflict and the arms race, of segregation and alienation, Wilson and Parks set out more precisely to interrogate the American experience. Insofar as the nation and its people had lost their bearings, the album would revisit the country’s highways and byways, reappraising both territory and cultural, ideological, psychological, mythical and spiritual mappings. As if updating Jeremiah’s Biblical lamentations, however, on Smile Wilson and Parks also evoked the United States as a “redeemer nation,” to use the cultural historian Ernest Lee Tuveson’s term (Tuveson vii–viii; Beard, “Parks,” 6–7). They sought to recover, readopt, or retrace viable routes into the nation’s inheritance: to look for signs of roads closed or forgotten, turnings not taken or vehicles abandoned, which might enable the nation to make good on its initial promise, to lead the people from a latter-day wilderness of tears to the long-lost city upon a hill.

Travel arrangements There is no need wholly to accept the so-called “frontier thesis” to credit Frederick Jackson Turner’s claims about the influence of westward movement in American history. Whether as track, wagon trail, river, canal, railroad, or highway, transport and its arteries have been integral to national development. Not only has “road going,” to restate Jack Kerouac’s phrase, long played a key role; given its colonial heritage, the United States no less than Dean Moriarty was born on the road. Not surprisingly, then, movement has been prominent in the discourses and tropes, images and icons, myths and symbols used to articulate national identities: from the early Puritan errand into the wilderness through postrevolutionary and nineteenth-century notions of frontier conquest and manifest destiny. Western cattle drives, Conestoga wagon trains, the California gold rush, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the exploits of figures ranging from Johnny Appleseed and Daniel Boone to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—all were significant contributions to a national imaginary in which mobility and national identity became closely associated. If physical movement has long been integral to the American historical experience, its ways and means have also informed American music. In earlier years, the railroad had been an abiding subject in the nation’s folk song, providing stock subject matter for blues, hillbilly, and country musicians; it remained a staple through the coming of rock ’n’ roll and beyond as suggested by “Rock Island Line,” “Midnight Special,” “Freight Train,” “The Wabash Cannonball,” “Smoke Stack Lightning,” and “Mystery Train” (Archie Green; Norm Cohen). Once the locomotive gave way to the internal combustion engine, road songs became just as common, whether telling of dirt tracks or interstate highways, of cars, trucks, taxis or buses. Again, titles such as “Route 66,” “Rocket 88,”

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“Roadrunner,” “Crosstown Traffic,” and “No Particular Place to Go” indicate the subject’s ubiquity. By the time Brian Wilson began writing car-themed songs for The Beach Boys in 1963, he was sounding a well-established theme, though the trope has been far from static. In railroad songs the train was typically perceived as a means of escape (from lovers, creditors, bosses, or jail); car songs often imagined more than the prospect of physical liberation alone: at times, indeed, the car constituted a desirable destination in itself, whether as club-house, workshop, bedroom, or home away from home— unless broken down, stuck in traffic, or out of gas. Smile‘s musical journey through the American historical landscape followed similar routes, yet its contexts and remits were novel. Once the leading “British invasion” groups had appropriated the nation’s popular musical clothing, Parks recalled, the aim was to redress the situation with something more made-to-measure; for whereas British musicians had mastered some formal aspects of rhythm ‘n’ blues, they might struggle to produce or even mimic the kind of work he and Wilson envisaged, soaked in the very stuff of American experience and identity: there was, after all, no “free land” or frontier mythology in Britain, and neither the Thames nor the Mersey were the Mississippi or the Missouri (Badman 151; Carlin Catch a Wave, 97–98). In pursuing its chosen trajectory, Smile would incorporate historical, cultural and musical tropes less as formulaic conventions than as patterns and waypoints lending themselves to adaptation and redirection (Solomon 6–7). Drawing on these images of westward movement and the road helped Wilson and Parks craft a collection of songs that could interrogate the nation and its past, and explore possible redemption or rehabilitation. One measure of Smile’s distinctive movement is provided by its modes of travel. Whereas many observers celebrated the automobile as the sine qua non of American existence (as Marshall McLuhan put it not long before Wilson and Parks first met, the American was “a creature of four wheels” (232)), the closest Smile comes to the internal combustion engine is a half-buried allusion to a truck in “Cabin Essence.” While the title “Surf’s Up” was suggested by Parks as a rejoinder to those who had ridiculed The Beach Boys’ stage dress, the absence of automobiles from Smile suggests a more abrupt gear change. Perhaps Wilson’s infatuation for them had now been exhausted; perhaps Parks as lyricist had no wish to adopt the vocabularies of his predecessors; perhaps both men thought of cars as part of the problem more than of the solution (Priore Smile, 89; Carlin Catch a Wave, 97; Steven Gaines 197).3 The album’s 3

During work on Smile, Wilson recorded a monologue on the subject of smog in Los Angeles, in which he included “the growing automobiles” [sic] in his list of air pollution’s primary causes. This did not preclude him buying Parks a new car, however, in order to improve his lyricist’s mobility as soon as they had agreed to collaborate on the project.

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historical orientation surely exercised an influence, of course: a recording that addressed the nation’s past could only to a limited degree reference a form of transport that came after the age of western expansion; the automobile’s cultural profile certainly had more to do with innovation than tradition. But if the car itself has virtually no place in Smile, other, older forms of transport do: from railroad and ocean liner to bicycle and surfboard. The range may seem haphazard: locomotives and ships clearly played major roles in the nation’s growth, the train in particular as its most significant nineteenthcentury transport innovation; bicycles, by contrast, appear juvenile or quaint (though paved roads were first developed for them), while surfboards, though exotic, seem merely recreational. Yet the selection is far from coincidental, for Smile is in part a collection of forgotten or long-lost road songs using abandoned vehicles to explore less-traveled routes and their unmapped contours. “The Republic” may have “thunder[ed] past” the “old nations of the earth . . . with the rush of the express” train during the nineteenth century, as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (3) put it, while extending its overseas reach via merchant fleets and blue water navies. But perhaps its bicycle riders and surfers, because left in the dust or wiped out, witnessed what those who rapidly overtook them ignored, and embodied what they sought to cast off. Read in terms of its modes of transport, Smile entertains the possibility that pursuit of the nation’s original goals, whether divinely ordained or constitutionally prescribed, might involve a movement against its technological grain, leading in some ways back, rather than forward, in time. The album does not necessarily imply that the road to redemption will only be found once the car and the industrial order it symbolizes have been abandoned; like Kerouac’s On the Road, however, it does suggest that any quest for salvation may move into a higher gear only when “all that road going” has been conceived in other, new—very different, perhaps, in some regards, very old—ways.

Mapping the territory While Smile evokes themes of movement integral to the nation’s history, its historical representations do not take simple chronological form, from past to present; nor do its portrayals of movement follow a single, continuous, linear geographical trajectory, east to west. Wilson’s compositional aesthetic at this time has been described as “modular” and “mosaic,” indicating that any one song might have numerous components (in different keys, say, or with varying forms, rhythms and tempi); that those components (chord relations, key combinations, tonal or melodic patterns) might be re-used,

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in identical or variant form, in other songs or in multiple conjunctures; and that—in combination with, say, melodic inversions and transpositions—such recombinant techniques might extend the scope of what a song, whether individually or as part of a set, could express.4 Though words are not the same thing as music, the close collaboration between Wilson and Parks ensured that the idea of modular composition could be applied as readily to textual as to other aspects of their work. Emphasizing that his lyrical contributions needed to fit the musical materials presented to him, Parks noted that the latter appeared “highly anecdotal,” embodied “short spasms of enthusiasm,” and took the form of “sections that weren’t connected.” These qualities lent Wilson’s work (in Parks’s words) a “cartoon consciousness,” a characterization as salient as mosaic or modular vis-à-vis Parks’s efforts to signify historical experience in words. Cartoons, however, conjure up notions of the juvenile and the comedic rather than the historical. No more promising, perhaps, was Parks’s observation that Frank Holmes’ original album artwork constituted “a natural extension [of] the cartoon consciousness,” or his reference to its presence in the practices of other contemporary visual artists (Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, say): outside of post-structuralist academic historiography, the relevance of aesthetics to historical representation may be no more obvious than that of cartoons (Munslow; Jenkins). Yet it was not pop art’s emphasis on the now that mattered but on the image (not least its taste for bold, instant, flashbulb iconography: something also characteristic of the cartoon). It was here, in the tableau rather than the chronicle, the outline more than the detail, that keys to Smile‘s articulation of the American past lay. For while Parks felt it “important to capture the . . . conquering of the continent” in his lyrics, he did not intend “to tell an audience what to think” but to help it “feel that experience.” Given the modular nature of the music, he imagined the objective might best be achieved by evoking “mental images” via “anecdotes and snapshots of . . . western expansion.” It is in just this fashion—by way of low-resolution, high-connotation, archetypal sketches of agents, subjects, scenarios, and contexts intersecting in a mosaic of fragments and a palimpsest of puns and allusions—that expansion, the road, its riders and ridden feature in Smile as constituent parts of the American experience and national imaginary (Beard, “Parks” 3, 4–7).

4

The most detailed musicological analysis of Wilson’s compositional methods is Philip Lambert (253–87), which refers to “modules.” “Modular” is used in Leaf’s film Beautiful Dreamer. Daniel Harrison uses the term “mosaic” in the Don Was documentary Brian Wilson. See also Harrison 42–52.

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Errand into the wilderness Other than a passing allusion to Theodore Roosevelt’s cavalry forces in Cuba, there is little explicit sign of transportation or the road in “Heroes and Villains,” Smile‘s formal point of departure and the first piece Wilson and Parks wrote together. Yet the song is suffused with movement and encapsulates a number of the album’s main concerns (Beard “Parks,” 3). Measured in its opening line, for example, the distance between “this town” (common shorthand for twentieth-century Hollywood) and “the city” (the “city upon a hill” of Puritan New England) is at once physical, temporal, moral and spiritual: the narrator, conceived as the American Adam, and subsequently drawn west by Lady Liberty’s promise of innocent romance, is now “lost and gone,” or fallen from grace, his archetypal errand into the wilderness less a quest for salvation than a descent into worldly, material corruption.5 Paved with good intentions, the road to national self-realization may be sanctioned as manifest destiny—the pursuit of independence and democracy, the cultivation of self-reliance and material progress, the extension of law and Christianity—but is nonetheless built on the land of other inhabitants with prior claims. However fertile the territory, intoxicating the appeal, and pacific the intent, Turner’s fantasy of “free land” and frontier mobility led to conflict, violence, and imprisonment. Having long since departed the city (whether model of Christian charity or crucible of brotherly love), the narrator and the people he embodies inhabit a world of temptation and rivalry, of weaponry and insecurity: where Benjamin Franklin’s benevolent precepts—healthy, wealthy or otherwise—give birth to Theodore Roosevelt’s self-righteous imperial practices; where heroes and villains, good guys and bad, seem indistinguishable; and where the shots fall where they may. Within the song’s iconographies of decline, though, lie signs of that most American of tropes: the road to redemption, the second chance, the prospect of rebirth. As Wilson’s long, step-wise descending melody lines in “Heroes and Villains” suggest the fall, only to be followed by brief, ascending semi-tones hinting at recovery, so Parks’s lyrics intimate signs of life after death: the body and spirit of Lady Liberty dance in spite of the bullets raining around her; the flame she carries for the narrator refuses to be snuffed out; and Uncle Sam’s children, poetic progeny of their historic affair, imply a fresh start: innocent

5

Van Dyke Parks’s lyrics to “Heroes and Villains” and other Smile songs can readily be located online, for example at the “Cabin Essence” website (http://www.surfermoon.com). The complete album lyrics are also included in the booklet that accompanies the Brian Wilson Presents Smile CD as well as in the book that accompanies the five-CD box set of original 1966–67 studio recordings, The Smile Sessions.

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products of this wild western romance and potential future beneficiaries of redemptive atonement. As the enduring light suggests, however much villainy appears to pervade this embattled, violent, seemingly amoral frontier state, the Holy Spirit is not extinguished; the song’s nagging, insistent and oftrepeated charge—“just see what you’ve done!”—implies a sense of guilt and thus a desire for restitution that may enable recovery. If “Heroes and Villains” imagines western expansion estranging the nation from its spiritual ideals and ideological precepts, it also includes them—recognizes their place, however paradoxical—within that movement: both part of the problem and part of the solution. Made repeatedly in “Heroes and Villains” and echoed melodically elsewhere, the abstract charge relating to western expansion grows more specific as Smile gathers evidence and calls witnesses and defendants. In “Roll Plymouth Rock,” movement is related to territory, and in particular to what frontier myth deemed “free land” but what to prior inhabitants constituted home, livelihood, and holy ground: “the church of the American Indian.” In “Cabin Essence,” questioning concerns the railroad, the means whereby such territory became incorporated, particularly during the post–Civil War decades: “Who ran the iron horse?” If this is one of the album’s unanswered questions, Wilson’s intense, driving music nonetheless encapsulates the overwhelming power afforded to those who controlled this means of transport. By naming the post–Civil War small farmers’ association, the Patrons of Husbandry or “Grange,” meanwhile, and by alluding (via Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Hiawatha) to Native Americans, Parks’s, lyrical counterpoints to the locomotive’s string section drone identify those subject to the iron horse’s agenda. In making more land commercially viable, the railroad no doubt also made conflict between natives and white farmers and ranchers more likely; in “Cabin Essence,” though, divisions have less to do with race or ethnicity than with power: the power of those who run the machines and the power of the machines they run literally and metaphorically to override the natural world (Carter “Cornfield,” 3–5, 9–10). Whereas Parks and Wilson were informed by environmentalist anxieties about modern industrial society, Thomas Hart Benton over a century earlier had spoken within a very different context, one in which the natural world seemed an obstacle or threat to, rather than a victim of, mankind’s dominion. His was a world in which the specter of explorer Stephen Long’s “great American desert,” not of the dust bowl or of air pollution, was foremost; a world in which a powerful, transcontinental railroad was associated with prosperity and vitality rather than impoverishment or exhaustion. But where the Missouri senator’s strategic vision of westward expansion once led, Smile follows. The railroad, for example, was to Benton in large part a means to

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an end: the realization of the commercial gains allegedly to be had in the Far East in the wake of Admiral Perry’s mid-nineteenth-century opening of imperial Japan to American merchantmen (a faith later embodied in visions of the great China market). Accordingly, just as “Cabin Essence” entertains the continental, railroad-driven part of Benton’s design, so “Roll Plymouth Rock” invokes its trans-Pacific, steamship-based, maritime extension. Again, those who stand in the way of powerful interests (whether military, commercial, political, social, or cultural) risk paying a price, for what the coal-fired locomotive enabled on the mainland, its nautical equivalent carries beyond the coastline: the “ocean liner” not only steams across the Pacific; it also presses the social structure it embodies upon native islanders, starting in Hawaii.6 Insofar as they stand behind them, the “Indians” who cheer the ship and its waving company are less Sandwich Islanders bidding the voyagers welcome than mainland Native Americans only too happy to see them move elsewhere. Whether as ceremony or prayer, Thanksgiving by this point has become a decidedly mixed blessing. Particularly when viewed alongside Frank Holmes’ cartoon treatment of “Roll Plymouth Rock” drawn for the illustrated booklet that was to accompany Smile, the song’s original title hints at further extensions to its historical field. “Do You Like Worms?” may seem an enigmatic question in isolation, but signifies once conceived in relation to the silk worm: source of the commodity that (in the wake of Admiral Perry’s opening of Japan) would become a key component of trans-Pacific trade and (in the context of the economic crisis of the 1930s) a symbol to the Japanese of the perils of dependence it might entail (Iriye 5–6; Storry 177–78). Not only does this reading highlight the title’s commercial sales-pitch qualities (further evidence of Parks’s pop art-related aesthetic); it also provides a material link between Benton’s mid-nineteenthcentury utilitarian vision and what Time-Life-Fortune publisher Henry Luce would in 1941 dub the American Century, catalyzed in part by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor later that year. Given the later historical context within which Wilson and Parks wrote, allusions to this vital early thread (literal and metaphoric) in the extension of American interests across the Pacific carried particular contemporary resonance: silk may no longer have been Japan’s main staple export to the United States in the 1960s; as Frank Holmes’ drawing suggested, however, having gained an Oriental foothold over a century earlier Uncle Sam was now discovering, in the quagmire of Southeast Asia, that he had opened a real can of worms.

6

See also Frank Holmes’ commentary on and illustration for “Roll Plymouth Rock” (at the time entitled “Do You Like Worms?”), where he portrays the ocean liner as a household steam iron, in Priore (Smile, 183).

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Smile’s historical and geographical odyssey picks up in “On a Holiday” where “Roll Plymouth Rock” leaves off, with the latter song’s ocean liner now recast as a pirate ship making landfall on islands formally annexed by the United States in 1898 with the support of Hawaii’s (mostly non-indigenous) mercantile and land-owning elite as well as interests in Washington who shared Benton’s strategic ambitions (Daws 240–53, 265–92; Kent 56–68; Merk 228–36, 255–56). If such contexts and motives recall those shaping continental western expansion, reference to a “shanty town . . . in Waikiki” extends the link to similar material costs (Whitehead 153–77). The song’s initial pirate reference may, as Domenic Priore has written, tacitly invoke those who removed, copied, and distributed without authorization recordings from the original Smile sessions (lyrics in this case were not written on that occasion but during completion of the work in 2004) (Priore Smile, 85, 115). Given the congruent positions occupied by “Heroes and Villains,” “Roll Plymouth Rock” and “On a Holiday” within Smile’s overall structure, however, it is difficult to imagine these pirates as emblematic solely of musical bootleggers. A brief lyrical allusion to the Caribs, early embodiments of the demographic costs of colonial New World penetration, only adds to the song’s recognition of the damage inflicted on successive native cultures. Yet in beckoning back eastward to the city upon a hill, “Heroes and Villains” had signified that the nation, now fallen from its founding ideals into dispirited, embattled existence, still had a redemptive potential. In looking westward to Hawaii, “Roll Plymouth Rock” had likewise invoked the possibility of salvation. Such a prospect is pursued in “On a Holiday.” The very title (etymologically indicating a holy day) hints at the new direction, and signs of a road to redemption recur throughout the song. Thus, lyrical allusion (via Bob Cole and Rosamond Johnson’s song “Lazy Moon”) to Laurel and Hardy’s Hollywood comedy Pardon Us (1931)—the film’s title is particularly salient—suggests that, where law is Puritanical, those judged violators may be less villains than heroes, and that their getaways may be correspondingly justified: perhaps these pirates signify the prospect of a revolt against and an escape from damaging orders of existence? (Johnson and Cole).7 The lifting of prohibitions, or inhibitions, on this holiday may also be associated with the plotting of new ideological directions: having followed a starboard (or rightist) course to bring

7

Published in 1903, Johnson and Cole’s “Lazy Moon” was first recorded and released by vocalist Billy Murray with orchestral and choral accompaniment in 1906. The Laurel and Hardy film Parson Us (1931), in which Oliver Hardy sings the song, presents the comic duo as a pair of Prohibitionera bootleggers on the run from prison; eventually recaptured, they inadvertently trigger a prison uprising and then inadvertently help quell it, the film ending with their pardon and release. Parks’s lyrical allusion to the film via this song was noted by MacAndrew [sic] (consulted August 1, 2005), to which I am indebted.

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them west, these pirates then choose not to toast their arrival with drink tainted by genocidal history; instead, a taste of port (that is, a turn to the left) implies a need for new departures. Moreover, whereas in “Roll Plymouth Rock” allusions to Thanksgiving had reflected ironically on a romanticized whitewashing of colonial dominion, here Plymouth Rock is rolled over and the symbol of respectful mutual aid is given a second chance. Not only does the nature of the roundelay (or “round-a-lei”) performed at the party hint at such potential (in the song phrases are repeated, just as phrases from elsewhere on Smile recur here): its origins also point to Thanksgiving’s collaborative essence. The song and accompanying dance are French while the script is written and accompanied by native inhabitants, who thus help call the tune, literally and metaphorically. A division of capital and labor is not the purpose of this occasion, either: recreation—the re-creation, the Eucharist—is freely shared. As if to revive Uncle Sam’s broken native romance in “Heroes and Villains,” meanwhile, music’s healing powers here enable the heart to be restored, blessings to be given—perhaps even pardons to be granted—across a truly ecumenical community. Thanksgiving is, of course, a holiday, not the everyday. Its ritual reenactment here may briefly invoke a “long ago” American Dream but cannot realize it, any more than dancing around the lei in an intoxicated, carnivalesque state can eradicate the burdens of history. Yet “On a Holiday” describes only the western edge of Smile’s geographical odyssey, not the end of its trajectory. In ways that make the recording a descendant of both colonial-era captivity narratives and Herman Melville’s early industrial age Moby-Dick (1851), there remains a return from the errand. That return entails a reorientation wherein what Thomas Hart Benton had called the “divine idea of arriving in the east by going to the west” impels national redemption. The journey is to be made, however, neither by steam train nor by ocean liner but via more small-scale forms of transport by way of which life will be brought back to the continent: from Smile’s enchanted Pacific village, through its embattled frontier town, and onwards, toward its dispirited founding city.

Off the beaten track One might expect this vision of national redemption not to feature such embodiments of nineteenth-century westward expansion as the iron horse and the ocean liner, given their social costs. The absence of the automobile on the road to recovery is in some ways more surprising. Not only is this vehicle typically considered an agent of individual liberation, social mobility, and popular democracy; it had served precisely such purposes within The Beach

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Boys’ early iconography (Bottles 53–57, 69–70, 211–12, 243–45, 249). Yet neither the internal combustion engine nor the asphalt highway has much of a presence here. Their limited nineteenth-century profile may, as noted earlier, explain it. But if, like Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks had been disenchanted by life on the road for a professional musician, then in his writing for Smile he was correspondingly skeptical as to its benefits for the nation. Thus in “Roll Plymouth Rock” the “ribbon of highway,” upon which Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” (1944) had once seen potential, becomes a dreamflattening “ribbon of concrete.” In “Cabin Essence,” meanwhile, a truck driver, modern highway folk hero, survives only on the hard shoulders of life, barely noticed between land and dust, and reliant on faith as much as the little cash he can muster. Such images stand in striking counterpoint to the celebrations of automobility common in earlier Beach Boys songs (Carter “Cornfield,” 5–7). If the road to recovery in Smile appears unsuitable for conventional vehicles, other options—less damaging, powerful, or market-driven—do exist. Referred to explicitly only once on the album (in “Roll Plymouth Rock”), the bicycle and rider are at first glance just as enigmatic as the worms that had featured in the song’s original title. Their provenance lies, however, in the socalled “bicycle rider” playing cards popular in many American social settings (not least saloon bars) from the late nineteenth century onwards. The fact that the figure, in Parks’s words, seemed “a natural extension of an image from the cantina” in “Heroes and Villains” hints at its significance, given the latter song’s articulation of many of the album’s subsequent concerns (Beard “Parks,” 3). That salience is at once historical and symbolic, for the reverse of the cards portrays the rider as a winged angel seated on a bicycle within a landscape, an image that in the context of the song suggests a conflation of Uncle Sam, secular hero and villain, with the so-called “American Adam,” fallen innocent and penitent sinner: cycling between heaven and hell, the rider pursues God’s kingdom on earth yet lays nature waste in the process, seeks good but repeatedly turns evil.8 Though the rider is identified only once by name, the musical motif accompanying his appearance recurs across Smile: typically in association with lamentations or questions, as if he were channeling some divinely inspired national conscience. Though incongruous, the figure crops up elsewhere in frontier culture and society well beyond the confines of the cantina, as an 8

The figure of the “American Adam” is associated with the cultural critic R. W. B. Lewis. In his The American Adam, Lewis posited an “American myth [that] saw life and history as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race. . . . It introduced a new kind of hero . . . an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race, an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling” (5).

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emblem of less-traveled ways or rarely used means. Thus, in one of Frederick Remington’s little-known western landscapes, The Right of the Road—A Hazardous Encounter on a Rocky Mountain (1900), a bicycle rider appears alongside a horse-drawn carriage, seemingly challenging its place both on the nation’s rights of way and in the public imagination. Likewise, at the beginning of one of Smile’s barely recognized sources, Frank Norris’ novel The Octopus (1901), the protagonist—interestingly, a poet named Presley— wheels his bicycle past a San Joaquin valley cantina, reflecting on the impact of agribusiness harvests shipped on California’s rural roads while wondering what the railroad whistle he hears in the distance might say, for good or ill, about his own prospects (3). Unlike Andrew Carnegie’s all-conquering steam train, Frank Norris’ earth-shaking commercial octopus or Teddy Roosevelt’s imperious rough rider, the bicycle does not rush by, squeeze out or sprint ahead, drawn westwards by Benton’s irresistible temptations; recurring periodically on Smile, as in Norris’ novel, its rider is as much subject and witness as authority or agent: a symbolic chorus commenting on the nation’s successive chapters and verses.9 Insofar as the bicycle rider signifies the country’s latent conscience, he implies not only a need to atone for sins past and present but also the potential for redemption. It is appropriate, then, that in “Heroes and Villains” (where the figure originates) and “Roll Plymouth Rock” (where he is named) the final word is left, melodically, then lyrically, to his cyclical chorus, for even as he chides and cautions, the bicycle rider also heralds recovery. Indeed, having begun with intimations of decline, of national romance, and pastoral dream falling prey to violent division, conflict, and imprisonment, “Heroes and Villains” ends with the rise of a new generation and implicit hopes for revival and the restoration of innocence. In effect, the song reenacts Frederick Jackson Turner’s myth of the frontier as a locus of national identity-formation, though not its implied American exceptionalism. In spite of its recurring presence in these songs and its association with childhood, though, salvation in Smile is not pursued by bicycle alone: its symbolism and placement suggest that the rider serves primarily to turn things over and around, morally and spiritually. Nor does the road to recovery start in the continental west of Norris, Remington, Benton, and Turner. It

9

There are yet other ways of reading the figure of the bicycle rider. One approach associates it with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, having initially synthesized the psychedelic LSD-25 in 1938, five years later unknowingly ingested a small dose in his research laboratory at the Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Company in Berne. Wondering if the hallucinations he subsequently experienced were somehow linked to the chemical, he subsequently took a measured dose, noted its initial effects, then began to ride home on his bicycle and (as the oft-told story has it) experienced the world’s first (in truth, second) LSD “trip” en route. See Stephens 25–28.

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starts where the recording’s second Thanksgiving takes place and where this children’s story commences, as far away from Plymouth Rock (and the European inheritance) as would seem possible: across the Pacific, upon the Sandwich Isles. Taken literally, of course, the bicycle alone would be singularly ill-suited to retrace the nation’s tracks (or plot a new course) from such a starting point. Hawaii is, however, synonymous with another medium of transport: surfing. Again, one would no more consider surfing from Honolulu to Los Angeles than elect to cycle from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, say; yet in spite— perhaps even partly because—of their impractical, off-road status, bicycle and surfboard are complementary vehicles of recovery on Smile. Whereas railroad and steamship belong to westwards expansion, surfboard and bicycle point in other directions. They are less agents of historical transformation or physical mobility (maritime or terrestrial) than symbols of potential transcendence, social and cultural, psychological and spiritual. Insofar as they are associated with the surfboard, these functions are most clearly signified in another of Smile’s pivotal songs, “Surf’s Up.” Lyrically as intricate, condensed, and allusive as “Cabin Essence” (with which it forms a structural homology on Smile), “Surf’s Up” moves from initial evocations of an aristocratic, hierarchical, tacitly colonial and old-world order to ultimate visions of a new, implicitly democratic and egalitarian one (Siegal 61–62). To succeed a declining civilization whose high-cultured tones lapse gradually into silence by way of nostalgia, denial, or somnambulant incomprehension, it heralds a rising youth culture: one devoted to song, love, and play, and inspired by children’s native wisdom. While following this departure from the beaten track might prove difficult, such a turn would be neither violent nor patricidal: for, even as its title hints at a serfs’ uprising, “Surf’s Up” is far from a call to arms or class conflict. Indeed, whereas in “Heroes and Villains” bullets had rained all around, arresting life and liberty in their tracks, here the rising—at once popular and traditional—is peaceful and inclusive. Quoting Wordsworth’s “the child is father of the man” and alluding to religious symbols, folk expressions, and popular rhymes embedded in its preceding sections, the song’s final stanzas imply that rejuvenation will even salvage vital aspects of the old order (Wordsworth 207, 209).10 If the conventions, traditions, and faiths of that order have lapsed into disrepair, done damage, or fallen into disrepute, the children will find in (and release from) them their still-valuable spirits: folk spirits, the spirit of labor, the Holy Spirit. They will salvage broken beliefs and rehabilitate broken men rather than abandon them on the nation’s roadside—and they will do so “aboard a tidal wave.” 10 The line occurs in Wordsworth’s 1802 poem “My Heart Leaps Up,” which was in turn incorporated into his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807).

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Recovery vehicles The Smile album describes a complex topography from east to west and across national history, but in an episodic and non-linear fashion. The roads it follows vary in their nature, have diverse trajectories, and suit different vehicles. As it negotiates landscapes of conquest and resistance, moving from decline and fall through atonement and redemption like some latter-day Pilgrim’s Progress, so the scales by which the voyage is measured multiply and change: from history to nature, from geography to spirit, from politics to consciousness. By the time the record concludes with “Good Vibrations,” the narrator’s catchy, romantic, seemingly throw-away line—“I don’t know where but she sends me there”—has taken on meanings its co-authors could scarcely have anticipated when the song’s words and music were originally written.11 Where, exactly, Smile was leading is a good question. In 1854, Thomas Hart Benton had proposed to extend the nation’s manifest destiny through “golden California . . . to the East Indies.” Others had repeated his admonitions, though Horace Greeley’s “go west” advice of 1871 was directed less at the Republic itself than at individual citizens in search of a better life. Looking back at his collaboration with The Beach Boys’ leader, Parks told Wilson biographer Peter Ames Carlin that “the whole record seemed like a real effort toward figuring out what Manifest Destiny was all about. We’d come as far as we could, as far as Horace Greeley told us to go. And so we looked back and tried to make sense of that great odyssey” (Carlin Catch a Wave, 98). But the result of this retrospective exercise is as open to interpretation as the odyssey itself. One reading might treat Smile as a kind of cultural getaway vehicle. As the album fills with snapshots and soundings of the nation’s historical experience, so the journey looks like hard going: surfaces are uneven, potholes prove a menace, and verges become strewn with wrecks and road-kill. In response, even before reaching its final destination, the recording starts to veer offroad; borne beyond the fray by playing-card bicycles and Hawaiian surfboards, it increasingly engages its material world in imaginative terms, absorbing history into fiction, turning from politics to culture, treating landscapes as mindscapes. Describing in words and music the selfsame critical territories

11 One of The Beach Boys’ most celebrated and successful songs, “Good Vibrations” began life before Van Dyke Parks started to work with Brian Wilson. Though he did contribute some arrangement ideas to, and played organ pedals on, the song during production prior to its release as a single in late 1966, Parks declined Wilson’s invitation to complete work on its lyrics. The version included on Brian Wilson Presents Smile combines lyrics written by Mike Love and Tony Asher, and in this sense is an exception to the norm on the 2004 release. See Priore, Smile 42, 45–48, 55; Carlin Catch a Wave, 89, 92–95.

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then being negotiated between New Left and counterculture, Smile traverses the fault-lines they share; guided by the former’s critical analysis, it follows the latter’s visionary course.12 Its journey ends not with political reform or social revolution but cultural rejuvenation and individual rebirth. The latter trope, originally articulated in familial terms in “Heroes and Villains,” becomes by the time of “In Blue Hawaii” an individual rite de passage, with Uncle Sam resurfacing as the American Adam, his slate wiped clean. His children—the surf aces of “Surf’s Up,” blessed with native wisdom, unsullied by the past, and members only of the Thanksgiving Party—then lead the way along the mysterious path to freedom, the latter more a state of mind or an existential condition than a physical or political course of action.13 “Good Vibrations”— born of play, song, and love—elevate and liberate all. A second reading of the album might find Smile’s quasi-psychedelic, utopian motion less a solution than an evasion, and thus perhaps even a problem. From this perspective, while the critique of manifest destiny and the depredations it legitimated is salutary, Smile’s rejuvenation exercise risks becoming (to borrow Thoreau’s phrase) an improved means to an unimproved end. “On a Holiday” may, for example, make Thanksgiving egalitarian and cooperative in comparison to its status in “Roll Plymouth Rock,” but it remains a Christian observance. The replacement of ocean liner by pirate ship is also scarcely reassuring. If the missionaries and planters who made of Hawaii a quasicolonial outpost in the nineteenth century were supplanted by the military and tourists, then gaining statehood in 1959 scarcely marked an end to its subordination. Surfing, vital expression of native culture and identity, may no longer have been disparaged and suppressed in the name of Christian morality as it once had been; still, the coming of mass tourism saw it appropriated, its history rewritten, and its purposes redefined in the interests of American commercial interests—as well, ironically, as its youth culture: Smile’s pirates, then, are not solely bootleggers (Walker Waves, 83–103). As a result, within Uncle Sam’s optic the colonial gaze is replaced by—or absorbed into—the tourist gaze (Skwiot). Hawaii becomes part of an enduring vision in which the exotic and primitive, newly credited as the authentic, are manufactured and

12

In this reading, Smile turns on the conclusion that mobilized countercultural disaffections from the New Left’s conventional political premises: the belief that the seductive, all-absorbent, onedimensional nature of the corporate liberal-economic, social and political order at home, combined with its destructive, imperialist behavior abroad, made transcendent withdrawal the only option. On the relationship between the New Left and the counterculture see (for example) Rossinow 99–124.

13

On surfing as an existential condition, and surfers as a proto-countercultural community, see Wolfe, The Pump House Gang, 320–22; Chidester and Priore 229–37, 268–73; Priore Look!, 93–98.

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reproduced in mass cultural and mass market forms, from tiki architecture to exotica music: intersecting and mutually reinforcing expressions of an alien imposition (Starr 50–52; Kirsten; Connell and Gibson “No Passport,” 51–75; Toop 114–32). From this skeptical vantage point, Smile’s voyage is in part an extension of The Beach Boys’ career trajectory. The inspiration surfing provided for the group’s formation and the Hawaiian iconography it drew upon are likewise part of the larger postwar star-spangled cultural appropriation of trans-Pacific peoples and practices. From The Beach Boys’ early surf-related singles through the exotica compositions on Pet Sounds and beyond, its members brought into, cultivated, and reaped the rewards of that investment. While Smile recognizes the sufferings of and damage done to native ways of life, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and clearly appreciates the associated cultures, the latter serves the needs of its surfing children over those of the indigenous inhabitants, who continue to lack agency. There is no place on the album for the kind of active opposition to settler or tourist appropriations of surfing that Isaiah Walker has documented in his reappraisal of its history in the islands, wherein it is understood as not only an embodiment of native culture, history and identity but also a locus of nationalist resistance to American—more precisely, nonHawaiian—dominion (Walker “Hui Nalu,” 89–113; Walker, Waves). From this perspective the recording effectively engages in a variant on the expressive practices that Philip Deloria has explored in his study of non-native cultural engagements with mainland tribal lives, Playing Indian. This reading is, however, tangential and ungenerous. A third, more sympathetic, approach to Smile might engage it neither as a naïve countercultural vision of the nation’s history transcended nor as an apologetic yet one-eyed liberal call for atonement in the face of the country’s mistakes, now assumed into the past. Rather it might emphasize the album’s insistence upon the potential for thoroughgoing transformation born of a radical union of multicultural traditions and resources. In this version, national mythology tempered by experience can foster redemption insofar as it is transformed through the cultivation of new, native-inspired visions of community. Far from escaping history or evading the material bases of American life, Smile both signifies and embodies a productive return from (rather than just a commercial return on) Hawaii. The notion of surfing from the islands back to California may be fanciful, but it symbolizes just the kind of mutually beneficial collaboration down-played in or written out of the other readings. Mainland exposure to surf culture originated with the pioneering, voluntary work of early twentiethcentury native Hawaiian masters, in both surfboard design and surfing techniques; but from the 1950s onwards, such generosity led neither to neocolonial appropriations nor to nationalist resistance but to the development of

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a multi-directional, trans-Pacific surfboard industry: a network of enthusiasm, knowledge and skilled labor in which technical expertise and material benefits were (and are) shared (Gibson and Warren 1–25). Smile’s articulation of such a beneficial union, at once historical and material, social and cultural, resonates in its very fabric: sound. Just as the surfboard and surfing migrated from Hawaii to California, so too did the Hawaiian guitar. As Tim Brookes has shown, to follow the historical trajectory of this guitar from the late 1890s onwards, eastwards (not westwards) across the Pacific, is to trace the lineaments of what, by way of the electric guitar, would almost sixty years later become rock ’n’ roll. This “Hawaiian Invasion,” as Brookes calls it, was not purely an indigenous exercise either, but—much like surfboard design and manufacture—a function of contributions by many cultures and communities, in this case Iberian, Hawaiian, and American: new world and old; native, colonial and settler (Brookes 48–57, 76, 78, 80). No less (indeed rather more) than surfing, the electric guitar enabled The Beach Boys to make music; along with many other instruments on the album, its good vibrations resonate throughout. Perhaps, finally, Smile’s co-writers also found in these designs on Hawaii another, though non-musical, instrument to advance Smile’s critical yet patriotic re-assertion of the nation’s cultural identity—this time in the face of a rather more recent Atlantic invasion. Whatever else they might have been, from Plymouth Rock to Diamond Head, the first colonizers were not American but British. If Wilson and Parks were scarcely coming up against latter-day Captain Cooks, when joining forces between 1965 and 1967 they certainly hoped to drive back a more recent British advance guard: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and more. Striking this particular chord, though, was barely necessary, given the skill, ambition, and creativity on display here: at any time, over any distance, against all-comers, Smile set a new track record.

8 “Happiness is the road”: Bob Dylan Susan Kuyper

B

ob Dylan, perhaps more than any other American musician, has been obsessed by the reality and the metaphor of the road. In his imagined memory, he wanted to go on the road from age ten, and he was still on the road sixty-five years later when he received news of his Nobel Prize in Literature. His lyric output has a mother lode of road references and themes. First, Dylan’s own sense of destiny, spiritual enlightenment, and self-mythologizing come together most powerfully in his songs. Second, embedded in his songs are myriad allusions to highways and destinations specific, generic, or imaginary. Third are songs about other singers, outlaws, hobos, and especially lovers—all of them using the road and the language of departure, homecoming, and separation as the main tropes and framing devices.1 Many of Dylan’s song titles reference the road. Even the many biographies and critical studies of Bob Dylan echo those same titles to salute the iconicity of the road in his canon. Robert Shelton entitles his study of Dylan No Direction Home, and Martin Scorsese uses that same title for his documentary of Dylan. Larry Ratso Sloman’s book about Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour is On the Road with Bob Dylan. Howard Sounes’ biography is called Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. Victor and Jacob Maymudes’ memoir is entitled Another Side of Bob

1

The author would like to thank Special Rider Music for permission to quote from Bob Dylan’s lyrics.

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Dylan: A Personal History on the Road and off the Tracks. Both Clinton Heylin’s second book of song summaries and Olaf Bjorner’s website on Dylan’s touring are called Still on the Road. In 2015, Sexy Intellectual Studios released a documentary on Dylan’s years in the folk scene, 1961 to 1965, entitled Roads Rapidly Changing. In 2016, Britta Lee Shain released Seeing the Real You at Last: Life and Love on the Road with Bob Dylan, a memoir of her travels with him in the mid-’80s. Bob Dylan’s legacy was created on the road. Dylan’s lyric output of the last fifty years is so vast, his presence so enigmatic, and his character so unique that critics cannot leave him alone. Writers are compelled to search for the parameters of his massive intelligence, profound vision, quixotic poetry, and innate musicianship. Biographers scour his daily life; scholars parse his texts; those who lived and worked with him share their memories; and Dylanologists record every performance, hoard records and artifacts, and trace all possible sources. The world showers him with accolades and awards that speak to his iconic status. The music world has given him the highest honors: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988; the British NME Award for Best Songwriter, 1976; Grammy awards including Lifetime Achievement in 1991 and several Hall of Fame songs; #1 Songwriter of All Time by the Rolling Stone Readers in 2011; and the Recording Academy’s 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year. The world of culture and arts has also recognized the larger impact of his work: the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1990; Kennedy Center Honors, 1997; Academy Award for Best Original Song, 2001; Quill Award for Biography, 2005; Pulitzer Prize Citation, 2008; National Medal of Arts, 2009; Amnesty International tribute album called Chimes of Freedom, 2011; Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2012; Academy of Arts and Letters membership, 2013; and the latest trophy, the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. Some awards were given for specific songs, some for larger canons of work. Some were given for the way Dylan fundamentally changed American music as noted in Bruce Springsteen’s 1988 introduction at Dylan’s induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: “He invented a new way the pop singer could sound, he broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and he changed the face of rock and roll forever and ever” (Hedin 203). His Pulitzer Prize citation mentioned “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power” (Pulitzer.org). The Nobel Prize in Literature “was awarded to Bob Dylan for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” (The Nobel Prize). Some awards even recognize his inimitable character. Jack Nicholson, in presenting him the Grammy Lifetime Achievement in 1991, noted Dylan’s “constant state of restlessness that . . . enabled [him] to seek newer and

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better means of expressing the human condition with words and music; for living [his] creative life fearlessly and without apology, and leading the way no matter how the times change” (Nicholson). The White House honored him as “one of the most influential American musicians of the 20th century. . . . Known for his rich and poetic lyrics, his work had considerable influence on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and has had significant impact on American culture over the past five decades” (White House). This chapter recognizes the magnitude of his musical canon and contributions to both poetry and music, but the focus will be on his use of the road as a foundational part of his musical career, sense of spiritual development, and his lyrics. According to Kurt Jacobsen’s definition in Chapter 12 of this volume, “Road music is music that either one, invokes the road as explicit theme, or two, is encountered while passing through strange regions, or three, heightens the road experience, whatever the origin of the song or subject of its lyrics”— and all are at play here. Part of this focus and related methodology will be the way in which Dylan has mythologized himself through the use of the road. Critics such as his biographer Robert Shelton have pointed out Dylan’s tendency to self-mythologize in songs about lovers, but no one has written about this selfmythologizing as it relates to theorists and mythographers such as Joseph Campbell whose works were very popular when Dylan was in school and whose framework—intentional or not—corresponds to the personal and career moves Dylan made and how he perceived them.

Dylan: Getting away, reinventing himself, and going on tour One who has made the road his and our own is Bob Dylan (aka Robert Zimmerman) whose life (1941–) spans the decades of automobile dominance and expansion of the American highway system and whose songs use the road in powerful literal and metaphorical ways. These songs are also in the playlists of our memories, often as milestones of our own travels and lives. Dylan himself is a famous traveler, a roadie on a “Never-Ending Tour.” His musical touring started in early 1964, continued almost unabated but for an eight-year interlude; future tour dates are still methodically announced on bobdylan.com. On a deeper level, Dylan’s entire life can be organized around his travels, from getting around and out of his hometown Hibbing, Minnesota, to going to New York City, and then on to world-encompassing tours. The challenges and possibilities he saw throughout these journeys relate to his tendency to see himself mythically and heroically.

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As with many teenagers in the mid-’50s, Robert Zimmerman was fascinated by cars. His father bought him a pink and white ’51 Ford convertible, which he soon repainted. He also got a Harley motorcycle (McDougal 14), although he sold it after nearly hitting a small child running across the road. The convertible served as his initial escape from Hibbing. Often with his girlfriend Echo, he explored ever-greater distances, driving from his home to Grand Rapids or Minneapolis, even north to International Falls and the Canadian border or into Wisconsin (Shelton 47; McDougal 21–23). In these early travels, Dylan indicated a special connection to Highway 61, “the main thoroughfare of the country blues” from Duluth to “the deep Delta country.” In his mind “it was the same road, full of contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood” (Dylan Chronicles, 240–41). So deep was this youthful commitment to mobility and the music of the Mississippi River that in the early ’70s Dylan bought back one of his first cars and suspended it from the ceiling of his new mansion near Malibu (Sounes, 278). Robert Zimmerman knew Hibbing wasn’t big enough for his visions and aspirations, and in his comments and lyrics he indicated that getting away physically and emotionally was necessary. As Shelton remarks, though, “he was never detached from family or friends, . . . he dreamt a lot. . . . He was going to do something very different. He dreamed of what he was going to be . . . an architect, or an astronaut . . .” (41). Dylan himself said of his vision: “I could transcend the limitations. It wasn’t money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot” (Chronicles, 9). After high school graduation, he spent some time pretending to attend the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis: mostly he slept on couches and “borrowed” records; he needed to be on the move. He wrote in an early 1963 song “Long Time Gone” that his mind got “mixed with ramblin’” at a young age despite his parents’ tender nurturing. He envisioned himself passing through others’ lives like a mirage, passing through crossroads and drifting from view (Lyrics 28–29). His first important road trip outside his own environment was to the West: in the summer of 1960 when he was nineteen years old, Dylan hitchhiked to Denver, the traditional way for young folks to get around. There he played a few not very successful gigs (Sounes, 57). To assuage his unrelenting restlessness, in January 1961 he hitchhiked and carpooled to New York City, and settled in Greenwich Village: in his words, he crossed the country in a four-door sedan, ’57 Impala—straight out of Chicago, clearing the hell out of there—racing all the way through the smoky towns, winding

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roads, green fields covered with snow, onward, eastbound through the state lines, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, a twenty-four-hour ride, dozing most of the way in the backseat, making small talk. My mind fixed on hidden interests . . . eventually riding over the George Washington Bridge. (Chronicles 8) The exhilaration of that trip, the thrill of crossing that bridge echoes in this account. In the liner notes to the Biograph album, he continues in a fantasy mode: “Going to New York was like going to the moon. You just didn’t get on a plane and go there, you know. New York! Ed Sullivan, the New York Yankees, Broadway, Harlem . . . you might as well have been talking about China. It was some place which not too many people had gone [to], and anybody who did go never came back” (William Henry Prince). Dylan’s early writings about his restless youth fed his fantasy for a new life: whether real or imagined, he was in a “zone unknown,” as Joseph Campbell would describe it. His is an archetypal call to adventure that Campbell says “signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (58). In Dylan’s case, there is a great deal of self-invention and self-mythologizing, and he draws frequently on myth-making as part of his identity. Indeed, since Campbell was widely read in high school and university English classes when Dylan was in school, it is tempting to think that he might have unconsciously or consciously absorbed some of those ideas about being a hero and experiencing the stages in a spiritual quest. He certainly thinks of himself and his journey as larger than life and has been quick to express that to many people over the years. A related book of some importance to this self-mythologizing is Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Shelton finds that mythology central to Dylan’s relationships, particularly in his later album Desire: “I began a dogged search for clues and allusions,” he writes, “that became my voyage through the wild and unknown country of myths and dreams that have lured Dylan” (462). Shelton traces the album title through the New Orleans’ streetcar, Marlene Dietrich’s western, Blake’s answer in “The Question,” Eliot’s Four Quartets, and above all Robert Graves’ The White Goddess: Graves showed how the patriarchal structure of the Judeo-Christian religion attempted to erase the ancient worship of the Goddess. . . . Desire . . . is a giant step forward in the breadth of his mythological thinking, moving toward a summation of themes that have long absorbed him: apocalypse, personal or societal; identity; the hero’s quest for love, knowledge redemption, liberation. (465)

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But Dylan’s self-mythologizing began much earlier than the Desire album and was deeply implicated in the influence of the American myth of the road. An important part of Dylan’s new life and self-mythologizing in New York City was his idolization of Woody Guthrie. Dylan supposedly visited Guthrie, then hospitalized in New Jersey with Huntington’s disease, soon after arriving in New York City (Reineke 126). The meeting may be apocryphal, but Dylan’s esteem for Guthrie was real, as Varesi notes of Dylan’s liner notes to The Times They Are A-Changin’: Woody never made me fear and he didn’t trample any hopes for he just carried a book of Man an’ gave it t’ me t’ read awhile an’ from it I learned my greatest lesson . . . . (32–33) Initially, Dylan aspired to Guthrie’s legacy in folk music and political activism. Dylan wrote that with Guthrie, “America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The god-awful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write” (Chronicles 86). Dylan’s first album immortalized the bond between himself and Guthrie with his autobiographical “Talking New York,” in which he writes his own story that begins with rambling, and “Song to Woody” in which he deliberately invokes Guthrie’s empathy. The influence of Guthrie on Dylan`s life was everywhere present as Dylan “wandered farther and farther from his Fourth Street [Greenwich Village] base. He had hardly relaxed after one compulsive road trip before planning the next . . . New Haven. Long Island. Wherever there was a festival or a folk event, he absorbed it and then moved on” (McDougal 83). This legacy culminated in the ultimate protest song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the iconic road question: “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” (Lyrics 53). In Dylan’s self-mythologizing, Guthrie is clearly the kind of near-magical presence or guardian figure who would aid in his identity and spiritual transformation (Campbell 72–77). In 1962, Dylan took Albert Grossman as his agent. Grossman was wellknown in downtown New York City: he hung out in coffee houses in Greenwich Village, produced the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, managed the amazing Odetta, and created the very successful Peter, Paul, and Mary. He saw lots of potential dollars in the folk music world (McDougal 59–60). He saw lots of dollars in Dylan, becoming his manager, friend, sponsor, advisor, travel companion, tour organizer, landlord, and part owner of Dylan’s lyric output. He eventually became a leech whom Dylan had to sue.

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David Gates contends that Dylan’s move to New York City, the influence of Guthrie and his subsequent career as folk singer, even perhaps his association with Grossman, were significant parts of Dylan’s attempt to redefine his life, create his own myth about the impermanence of his early life, and pursue a new personal and musical identity. In August 1962, Robert Zimmerman deliberately created a new persona, legally changing his name to Bob Dylan in time for his first tour and recording sessions in London, England. Later, in a 1964 interview, he said that as a youth he wanted to be free but couldn’t because parents “want you to be what they want you to be. So I started running when I was ten. But always I’d get picked up and sent home.” He added: “I tried again and again, and when I was eighteen, I cut for good. I was still running when I came to New York. Just because you’re free to move doesn’t mean you’re free” (Hentoff 35). This is an example of Dylan creating his own legacy: he adds a profound human truth about the road and freedom to this whimsical (wishful) memory. As David Gaines notes, “From the beginning, part of Dylan’s self-creation has been about transit, movement, Huck Finnish running away from home” (85). Dylan further developed this hero legacy in a 1962 quasi-autobiographical, poetic piece, “My Life in a Stolen Moment,” delivered in a New York City Town Hall concert in April of 1963. The first fifteen lines list Hibbing’s landmarks: open pit ore mine; schools, churches, grocery stores, a movie house, and a jail; football games; souped-up cars; and a main drag from which you can see past the city limits. “Hibbing’s a good ol’ town,” began the refrain, “I ran away from it when I was 10, 12, 13, 15, 15½, 17 an’ 18/I been caught an’ brought back all but once” (4). He described his false start at university life, and finally his fanciful journey to the South and West, ticking off cities and highways as if flipping through the road map of America. He supposedly thumbed his way to Galveston, danced his way from Gallup, New Mexico to New Orleans, rode freight trains, and hitchhiked on highways 61, 51, 169, 37, 66, and 22, Gopher Road, Route 40, and the Howard Johnson Turnpike. He got from Shreveport to Madison, and in a four-door Pontiac with four others drove east to the Hudson tunnel ending up in Gerde’s Folk City. After mistakenly going to Florida in May, the narrator scrambled back to South Dakota where an unsuccessful visit with a friend in Sioux Falls got him moving again. He lists Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota as the states he visited, looking up old pals and learning that their road and Dylan’s own were of “two different kinds” (“My Life,” 6). Perhaps this self-mythologizing narrative was fortified by Dylan’s first American professional tour, which took place in early 1964. Victor Maymudes, chauffeur and “tour manager,” remembered they were “taken with social and political imperatives of that moment. I wanted, and Bob wanted, to see and hear and feel America first hand . . . Jack Kerouac had promoted odyssey—the great American road trip. We decided to hit the road” (68). Maymudes, Dylan, the folk singer Paul

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Clayton—an eight-year-older “folklorist par excellence” (Heylin Behind, 145–46), and a reporter Pete Karman (reportedly asked by Suze Rotolo to keep a watch on Dylan’s womanizing) hopped in Dylan’s new blue Ford station wagon.2 Clinton Heylin, a Dylanologist of long standing, claimed “the primary motivation for the trip was to find enough inspiration to step beyond the folk-song form, if not in the bars or from the miners, then by peering deep into himself.” He noted that the songs Dylan scribbled by hand or typed out on a portable typewriter in the backseat were sourced in the concept of travel (Heylin, Behind, 147–48). Dylan finished the ode to the pied piper of sleepless nights, “Mr. Tambourine Man.” He also wrote the lyrics for “Chimes of Freedom,” in which, on one “wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales of the disrobed faceless forms of no position,” and in the list of those forms are the refugees on the “unarmed road of flight,” the “ones condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting,” the “searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail” (Dylan Lyrics, 116–17). Dylan traveled to new artistic heights and celebrity status in his first tours. D. A. Pennebaker documented the first international tour in 1965 in the film Don’t Look Back. Wilentz points out, “the film is about Dylan on the edgy cusp of change . . . on the move, far beyond where some of his fans wished he would stay, and although he has not yet arrived at his next destination, it will be closer to the world of Allen Ginsberg” (157). He traveled to new audiences overseas; he took his songs to new dimensions as in “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Talkin’ the John Birch Paranoid Blues.” He effortlessly wowed fans, signed recording contracts, befriended other musicians like Joan Baez, and made history. At the height of his early success, however, Dylan faltered, stopped, and changed direction. The May 17 Manchester Free Trade Hall concert followed by the 1965 summer Newport Festival indicated Dylan’s stylistic right turn as he left the folk crowd and set out to restructure rock and roll. Jim Rooney wrote soon after the Festival: Bob is no longer a new-Woody Guthrie. . . . The highway he travels now is unfamiliar to those who bummed around in the thirties during the Depression. . . . The mountains and valleys he knows are those of the mind—a mind extremely aware of the violence of the inner and outer world. “The people” so loved by Pete Seeger are “the mob” so hated by Dylan. In the face of violence, he has chosen to preserve himself alone. No one else. And he defies everyone else to have the courage to be alone, as unconnected . . . as he. (qtd. in Paul Nelson 47–48)

2

An aside from Victor Maymudes’ son Jacob: the blue Ford they rode in is presently an “art installation in the front yard of Garth Hudson, a member of The Band. It’s now growing grass and trees out of the trunk and windows. It’s truly taken on a life of its own” (Maymudes 84).

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Dylan’s defiant stance in front of the masses who didn’t understand what he was trying to achieve qualifies as the hero defending his integrity in a showdown with destructive forces. Dylan fit Campbell’s hero “who, by his courage in the fiery furnace, his unreadiness to break down and grovel before a popular conception of the character of the All Highest, had proven himself capable of facing a greater revelation than the one that satisfied his friends” (148). Robert Shelton confirms that Dylan’s folk-rock was re-visioning and expanding the entire concept of popular music. His catchy “Blowin’ in the Wind” had not changed lives, so Dylan had to shake up the music and lyrics, even by adding absurdity and the grotesque. He was “pitting his loneliness against that of the lonely crowd”; he was also following his Mr. Tambourine man “into decadent, alienated, surrealist, existential sensation and vision.” Heylin points out that Dylan’s combining and messing with popular musical forms (country blues, R and B, and Appalachian folk into “musical moonshine”) shook the very heart of the music industry; the categories of music used by the Recording Industry Association of America and Billboard magazine were now moot (Heylin, Behind, 223). Dylan had already freed himself from the limitations of any style. “The notion that he should adhere to an image created in the press, or a style of music one group of fans liked, was ridiculous to him, and he certainly did not see himself as a spokesman for his generation” (Sounes 262). Another hero characteristic was his sacrifice of popularity: he and his band performed in front of disgruntled, folk-hungry crowds night after night in a grueling series of concerts. Dylan was determined to perform songs he could sing with integrity, “for the renovation of the world” (Campbell 93). But, in 1965, after touring extensively in Europe and America, Dylan and the Band were musically and emotionally exhausted. Night after night, boos and heckling greeted their electric sound. Dylan wrote in his Chronicles, “all the mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul . . . I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all” (109). Dylan’s mysterious, legendary, possibly apocryphal motorcycle accident, his abandoning the stage, and his withdrawal to New England heralded his next stop on the heroic journey. In 1965 Dylan married Sara Lownds, a model with pale skin, dark hair, and sad eyes. They had four children together and he adopted another from Sara’s previous marriage. Dylan wrote and played music with his friends in the “Big Pink.” As McDougal notes, in these years Dylan changed physically “from the frizzy nicotine-stained hipster depicted by photographer Daniel Kramer on the slightly out-of-focus cover of Blonde on Blonde, to a quiet, studious family man captured on camera by Woodstock photojournalist Elliott Landy” (McDougal 150). During this time, Sara became the iconographic comforting, nourishing mother, and goddess—young and

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beautiful—who would restore his cosmic balance (Campbell 116). Though this mythic wholeness was not to last, it was intense and infused with the same self-mythologizing that first characterized Dylan’s move to New York City and meeting with Guthrie. Dylan biographer Robert Shelton hints that Sara contributed to this self-mythologizing: she “had a Romany spirit, seeming to be wise beyond her years, knowledgeable about magic, folklore and traditional wisdom” (227–28). Dylan depicted her as the “graveyard woman,” the “junkyard angel” of “From a Buick 6” (Lyrics 173) or the “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (Lyrics, 211). Paul Nelson in the Blonde on Blonde liner notes called this a haunting portrait, a “celebration of woman as work of art, religious figure and object of eternal majesty and wonder” (Shelton 325). Dylan had met a goddess, but this was not to last. Dylan’s 1973 album Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the soundtrack album for Sam Peckinpah’s film, included “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” After eight years out of the public eye, Dylan himself was knocking on life’s door, ready to leave New England, bury his guns, and go out into the world again, knowing his own voice and confidant of the road ahead. Tour ‘74 “was the first major stadium tour of the rock era” with forty shows, huge theaters and stadiums, and a wide range of geographical locations in just six weeks (Sounes 274). The first concert opened with a rewritten “Hero Blues” that demonstrates Dylan’s incredible sense of life’s journey: “One foot on the highway, and one foot in the grave” (Sounes 275). The fans adored him, and the tour “turned into a media festival, a homecoming, a quasi-religious demi-political rally for new fans and old” (Shelton 429). The tour “caused audiences to review their last thirteen years, their own successes and failures, their direction home, or away from home” (Sounes 274). Shelton quotes Time magazine: “Never in the history of American rock has a tour aroused so much public interest . . . it seemed a moment for a legend—and an era—to live again: Geoffrey Stokes concluded the final Madison Square Garden concert was a ‘quintessential . . . American event’” (qtd. in Shelton 430, 434). The 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue was also legendary. Like a pied piper, Dylan gathered a motley group of performers for a mad music romp around the eastern United States. Based on a democratic ideal, “the original theme was to play for the people” (Sloman, 198). Described by Caveney (153) as a “concept tour, a mixture of theatre and music which would also be filmed” and by Maymudes (170) as a “curious show,” Sloman, who chased the Revue as a journalist, called it “a caravan of gypsies, hobos, trapeze artists, lonesome guitar stranglers, and spiritual green berets who came into your town for your daughters and left with your minds.” Dylan brought along his now-distant wife Sara and their children, his mother, his minders, and a film crew who would film the movie Renaldo and Clara on site and without script (Sloman). Not much later, in September, 1977, he played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” for

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the pope who replied with his sermon on “Blowin’ in the Wind”: “It is not the wind that blows things away. It is the wind that is the breath and life of the Holy Spirit, the voice that calls and says, ‘Come!’” (Sounes 426). His 1978 “Alimony Tour” was a commercial event complete with manager, back up musicians, and stage crew. He needed money after his divorce. He also needed to fight the hero’s battle for salvation: a silver cross thrown on to the stage during a concert prompted Dylan’s turn to Christianity. In Campbell’s terms, Dylan is “the hero [who] transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands—and the two are atoned” (147). For the next several albums, the road imagery related to his journey of faith. The albums of 1980 and 1981, Slow Train Coming, Saved and Shot of Love, state his belief in the “Man up on the cross,” the “kingdom called Heaven,” and the “one road and it leads to Calvary” (Lyrics, 409, 432). Dylan wrote as an outsider, exiled, on the road: “if my love is real . . . they’d like to drive me from this town . . . ‘Cause I believe in you” (Lyrics, 405). Dylan is “pressing on/To the higher calling of my Lord” for one must “shake the dust off of your feet, don’t look back” (Lyrics, 430). Faith was a walk. Dylan headed to the “City of Gold”—a city of light, love, grace, peace, and hope. By the end of the third Christian tour, attendance dwindled to nothing, and Dylan added golden oldies to the playlist and praised not Jesus, but Leadbelly, who could sing children’s songs and prison songs and still be the same man (McDougal, 294). The 1981 Shot of Love was proof, Wilentz asserts, that Dylan was “moving on.” In the title track he wrote: “Don’t even feel like crossing the street and my car ain’t actin’ right,” so a “shot of love” is the answer (Lyric, 440). The singer in “Every Grain of Sand” is tempted in life, but “onward in my journey I come to understand” every hair, every grain of sand is numbered (Lyrics, 451).3 The post-conversion years led Dylan to an artistic desert. He sailed the Caribbean with his children in 1982, and 1983 ended with the release of Infidels that explored the “end of times” on a more personal level, as in the enigmatic “I and I” (Behind, 552–54). Though noontime, the singer/poet forces himself down the “darkest part” of the road, “into the narrow lanes” (Lyrics, 475). Appearances on David Letterman, successful European tours, music videos, charity performances with the Stones, Willie Nelson, and Belafonte

3 Chuck Plotkin, the producer of Shot of Love, remembers Dylan as always late to these recording sessions in part because of driving challenges. Once Dylan was late by two hours because he had taken the wrong exit off the freeway and got lost in East Los Angeles. Dylan supposedly had his mind on higher things: “He got lost because he is actually present where he is. He is not just simply following some map. He doesn’t want to be following some map back to the same spots day after day . . . He just takes a new route that he’s never taken and ends up someplace that he’s never ended up . . . The guy’s a songwriter” (qtd. in Sounes 341).

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were highlights of the next two years. In 1986 Dylan toured with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers (True Confessions tour) for the money. In July of 1987 he agreed to another short stint with the Grateful Dead, another turning point in his heroic journey. “The person who, under Grossman, had never been known to make a foolish move was now more interested in shekels than a strategy for rebuilding a career that came from nowhere and looked to be heading straight back there” (Heylin, Behind, 608–09). Dylan, frustrated by the falseness of the old songs, walked out of the first rehearsal. He was mysteriously drawn into a small neighborhood bar where some “jazz cats” were playing in the back and “something out of the ordinary happened”: The singer . . . wasn’t very forceful, but he didn’t have to be; he was relaxed, but he sang with natural power. Suddenly and without warning, it was like the guy had an open window to my soul. . . . I knew where the power was coming from and it wasn’t his voice, though the voice brought me sharply back to myself. I used to do this thing, I’m thinking. (Chronicles, 149–50) Dylan elaborated on this psychic experience simultaneously in spiritual terms and road language: It was like parts of my psyche were being communicated to by angels. . . . The previous ten years had left me pretty whitewashed and wasted out professionally. Many times I’d come near the stage before a show and would catch myself thinking that I wasn’t keeping my word with myself. . . . My performance days in heavy traffic had been grinding to a halt for a while, had almost come to a full stop. . . . I hadn’t actually disappeared from the scene, but the road had narrowed, almost was shut down. . . . I was lingering out on the pavement. (Chronicles, 147) Dylan returned to the rehearsal and kept trying to find integrity in his performing. “I knew I could perform any of these songs without them having to be restricted to the world of words.” Eventually he breaks through: I just did it automatically out of thin air, cast my own spell to drive out the devil . . . Everything came back, and it came back in multidimension. . . . Immediately, I was flying high . . . I had a new faculty and it seemed to surpass all the other human requirements. . . . It was like I’d become a new performer, an unknown one in the true sense of the word. In more than thirty years of performing, I had never seen this place before, never been here. If I didn’t exist, someone would have to have invented me. (Chronicles, 153)

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This last statement is critical to Dylan’s sense of himself, his spiritual purpose, and his journey of fulfillment, the phrasing a variation of Voltaire’s 1768 comment, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” In Dylan’s myth of himself, he is very much about his father’s business, though that sense of mission does put on a new face from time to time. He also frames this enlightenment in geographical terms: he is in a new place, a place he’s never been before, the place he has been searching for in all his travels. He has been tested and has, as Campbell notes about the hero, gone through “the agony of breaking through personal limitations” inherent in “spiritual growth and moving on to ever-expanding realization” (190). After another loss of confidence, he had yet another epiphany in a concert in Switzerland: “It’s almost like I heard it as a voice. . . . ‘I’m determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not.’ And all of a sudden everything just exploded . . . I sort of knew—I’ve got to go out and play those songs. That’s just what I must do” (Heylin, Behind, 616). He had received his “boon,” the “symbol of life energy” (Campbell 189), and had begun the journey back over the threshold on his way home. He was now the hero with the power to share his boon with his fellow man (Campbell 193). With his new sense of self and direction, still casting himself as a hero, Dylan now began to work “the service of the public” as a kind of bodhisattva (“he whose being is enlightenment”), the compassionate one who would bring all creatures to enlightenment (Campbell 150–51). Incredible creativity and openness returned, and in a 1989 meeting in London with Elliot Roberts, the “Never Ending Tour” was set in motion. Dylan wrote: “There was nothing evolutionary about what I was about to do, no one could have expected it. Without knowing as much, I had a gut feeling that I had created a new genre, a style that didn’t exist as of yet and one that would be entirely my own. All the cylinders were working and the vehicle was for hire” (Chronicles, 155).4 Previous Dylanologists noted a profound change from 1988 to 1989. The hero was indeed heading home. Dylan returned to singing solo tours with a small band. Starting in the small theaters, attracting a new audience, Dylan’s endless touring began. He recorded more than thirty albums, and continues to record. Among the albums he released was the greatly feted Time Out of Mind album in 1997: “The songs, as Bob said, had to do with the ‘dread realities of

4

Dylan had a new bus for this tour. Though he had always insisted on traveling with the band, Victor Maymudes had talked Dylan into ordering a private bus. For a while, Bob continued to ride the band bus while the personal bus trailed empty behind. Gradually, because motorbikes were kept in the rear for recreational rides, because his dog rode along, and because it provided privacy for the visit of his secret wife and daughter, Dylan spent more and more time on the bus, eventually using it exclusively (Maymudes 205–27).

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life rather than the bright and rosy idealism popular today’” (Sounes 426). In October of 1997 he appeared on the cover of Newsweek under the headline, DYLAN LIVES. It was as if he had been resurrected. “It is a spooky record, because I feel spooky,” he told Newsweek, adding “I don’t feel in tune with anything” (Sounes 426). On December 7 Bob accepted the Kennedy Center award he had previously refused. “He’s a gypsy at heart, you know, and loves it. I think he’d rather live in his bus than anything else,” Sam Shepard said of Dylan (qtd. in Sounes 432–33). In the summer of 1999 he performed in Duluth, where as a teenager he had heard Buddy Holly play three days before his death in a plane crash. “‘You know, I was born right up on that hill over there,’ he said, nodding to the north of town. There in the gloaming, on the other side of the 35 freeway— an extension of Highway 61” (Sounes, 433). In May of 2000 he received the Swedish Polar Music Prize (Polar Music), and in March of 2001 an Oscar for his “Things Have Changed” song for Curtis Hanson’s movie Wonder Boys (McDougal 451–52). The warning in his 1963 hit “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that “the old road is rapidly agin’/Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand” (Lyrics, 81) changed to a statement of fact: the road is now bad, the Bible predicts the world will explode, he is trying to get far away from himself and “people are crazy and times are strange” (Lyrics, 574). On September 11, 2001 Dylan released a new album, Love and Theft, full of southern geography, sacred references, and observations on aging (Wilentz 273). Many of the lyrics were “borrowed” from a variety of sources, including a translation of a Japanese samurai’s Confessions of a Yakuza, an act of love and theft (Sounes 370); Dylan borrowed music from songs from the 1920s through the 1950s (Wilentz 268). In 2002 Dylan returned to perform at the Newport Folk Festival, a huge gesture of reconciliation, albeit with a wig and white hat. Dylan’s autobiographical Chronicles: Volume One was published in 2004, and his three-season Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan in May 2006 added to his outreach (Wilentz 320). The album Modern Times of 2006 contained re-energized poetry, some concerning companionship and acts of compassion on the “pathways of life” and “far down the street” (bobdylan). Wilentz summarized this time of intense creativity: he produced two albums of original music; a large retrospective of previously unreleased recordings; an album of traditional carols and pop Christmas songs; the first volume of his memoirs, Chronicles; a full-length feature film; a three-anda-half-hour television documentary, directed by Martin Scorsese, about his early life and career; a major museum exhibition in Europe of his sketches and gouaches (with clear artistic debts to Norman Raeben); and Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan. (Wilentz 287)

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He released his first Christmas CD, Christmas in the Heart, in 2009, donating the proceeds to Feeding America (Wilentz 332). The hero has come home, he will go with us, will live life with us. He will wear the thorny crown as we do; he will not abandon us. Having covered a total of “808 Cities, 2,503 Shows, and 1,007,416 Miles” (“808 Cities”), the Never Ending Tour continues, each season with a new name. (Bjorner’s website “Still on the Road” carefully collates tours, concerts, and recording details of the tours from 1960 to the present.) Indeed, Dylan was on the road when the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize was announced. In this way, he has put himself in the league of legendary, even Homeric, heroes on an odyssey as noted at the beginning of Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home (2005): I had ambitions to, ahhhhh, set out and find—like an odyssey, goin’ home somewhere, set out to find, ahh, this home that I’d left awhile back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was but I was, ahhh, on my way there . . . I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home. (Wilentz 320) He is doing the hero’s work, and that work is on the road. “A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing,” Bob once told the New York Times. “I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it. I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy” (McDougal 408). In Chronicles, Dylan fondly remembered his grandmother: “She was filled with nobility and goodness, told me once that happiness isn’t on the road to anything. That happiness is the road. Had also instructed me to be kind because everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle” (Chronicles 29). She had seen the hero in him, knew his destiny, and blessed his journey. Dylan now has returned to us, come home to America, crossed the threshold, granting his boon to our history, culture, theaters and auditoriums, CD players, radio stations, playlists and streaming media, and even to the AARP magazine. He is now content with “all directions home,” having redefined the concept of home as where he is, where the truth is. Victor Maymudes knew it was healthier for Bob to be active and on the road: “It’s much better for his mind and physical ability to be in demand and under pressure of a captive audience to perform” (226). Dylan considers himself to be a simple man who performs a trade like a plumber, carpenter, or stone mason. He sees himself as a musician; that’s his trade, and musicians play concerts on the road. Musicians do not stop only to pick up again at a later date. That’s the simplicity of the musical road on the Never-Ending Tour—his sense of spiritual purpose.

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Highways, destinations, and travelers in the songs If Dylan’s life and career are tied to the road, so is his rich heritage of songs about different kinds of roads, time periods, travelers, and states of mind. Some of the route songs are about travel on specific highways to well-known places; others become metaphors for history, politics, an imagined surreal life, or even dreams; and still others blur past, present, and future as they evoke universal journeys—both positive and negative. Travelers, too, are part of the road iconography and present the same variety as do the highways: some travelers are past and present song writers whom Dylan admires; others are wild con men, outlaws, hobos, gamblers, and even satanic figures; and some concern the narrator himself caught in a hallucinatory dreamscape that he is unable to escape or correct.

Highways There are many allusions to actual highways. Dylan’s 1962 “Highway 51” (Bob Dylan)5 referred to the highway that ran from New Orleans to Madison, Wisconsin, a favored route for migrant southern blacks and one firmly tied to Dylan’s early identity with R and B and folk music: “Yes, I know that highway like I know the back of my hand/Running from up Wisconsin way down to no man’s land” (bobdylan.com). Although “Highway 51” was written by Texas bluesman Curtis Jones, Dylan freely adapted it, perhaps in part because, as Shelton suggests, the title self-consciously evokes and pays tribute to such music precedents as Big Joe Williams’ “Highway 49,” Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues,” Nat King Cole’s “Highway 66,” and Guthrie and Seeger’s “66 Highway Blues” (Shelton 121). The Highway 61 Revisited 1965 album and its featured track reveal Dylan’s expanding roadmap. He positions his personal journey’s starting point as Highway 61 for it reached further than Highway 51’s endpoint in Wisconsin, heading past Minneapolis to Duluth, bringing southern black music to Dylan’s own doorstep: it “links America’s most alienated group, southern blacks, with the singer, alienated at his end of the road” (Wilentz 281). The lyrics of the song “Highway 61” (Highway 61 Revisited) are almost nonsensical, but the first stanza in a kind of African American dialect refers to that highway as the place where the Biblical Abraham is to surrender his son’s life to 5

Hereafter, as in this instance, Dylan’s album will follow the song in parentheses, except for “Big City Blues” and “Dusty Old Fairground” which were not collected in albums.

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God, which by a circuitous route leads tragically to the Third World War—an apocalyptic image that seems to haunt Dylan. Dylan’s real and mythical highway trajectory was not just north and south, but also west to east as recorded in his move to New York City. One song, “Talkin’ New York,” from his 1962 debut album Bob Dylan, describes his heroic mandate to leave Hibbing, Minnesota and his subsequent mad drive into New York City in the dead of winter (Lyrics, 3–4). At the opening of his massive collection of poetry, Bob Dylan: Lyrics 1961–2012, is a picture of the typed manuscript of “Big City Blues,” a rough draft with many scribbled corrections and the date 1961 clearly typed for posterity that portrays the wanderlust of the hero who’s “got to keep movin’ on” (Lyrics, 2). These songs set the pace for the narrator to wander on routes that chase through the streets, cities, and states of the United States. Each traveler has a different reason for, and reaction to, the journey. “Dusty Old Fairgrounds” describes the drudgery but ultimate pleasure of the circus performer as he travels from St. Petersburg, Florida through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and back again. In this first-person narrative, the “I” laughs at the freedom signified by that blurry white line that whizzes by on the highway as the troupe answers the call of the next “dusty old fairgrounds” (Lyrics, 76). Even the title “Meet Me in the Morning” from the album Blood on the Tracks implies a journey, and he sets the meeting point as “56th and Wabash,” a fictional intersection, but an imaginable urban commute is immediately conjured (Lyrics, 340). Contrary to the eager anticipation or the celebration of freedom in some songs, there’s uneasiness, guilt, and paranoia in the travels of the “Wanted Man” in the Nashville Skyline album track; he is “on the lam” through California, Buffalo, Kansas City, Ohio, Mississippi, Cheyenne, Colorado, Georgia, El Paso, Juarez, Shreveport, Abilene, Albuquerque, Syracuse, and Baton Rouge (Lyrics, 247). In “Tangled Up in Blue” from the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, the singer travels many highways to many destinations: he drives to the East Coast, abandons the car out west, works in the great north woods (or Santa Fe in later versions), New Orleans, and Delacroix, and ends up on Montague Street. Sounes asserts that the timeline is as jumbled as the destinations: Dylan “wrote the songs on Blood on the Tracks so that the past, present, and future of travel were evoked at once. This was particularly true of “Tangled Up in Blue,” where the meeting of the lovers, their relationship, and the narrator’s reflection on the relationship were all jumbled together” (Sounes 282). Even if his destinations were not clear and the time could not be unraveled, even if lovers felt the same but had different perspectives, his future was on the road “headin’ for another joint” (Lyrics, 333). There are also metaphysical, visionary, dream road songs in which the road is a metaphor for history, politics, an imaginary surreal life, or dreams. In the first two lines of “Talkin’ World War III Blues” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan),

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the narrator dreamed he “was walkin’ into World War Three.” He tells the psychiatrist about walking through a lonesome New York City, ringing the fallout shelter bell, trying to talk to a man who screams and flies away thinking he was a Communist, calling up the operator just to hear the time, and driving a Cadillac down 42nd Street—“good car to drive after a war,” he wryly comments (Lyrics, 65). Similarly, “Series of Dreams” (Bootleg Series Vol 1–3) explores nightmarish scenarios that make the journey of life hazardous: everything stops in a place where even a “kid-friendly umbrella” becomes a weapon. Some of these dreams are filled with Sisyphean running or climbing (Lyrics, 539), but, as McDougal notes, there is no exit in this “harrowing glimpse inside his [Dylan’s] skull” (McDougal 392).

Travelers In other route songs, Dylan pays tribute to the travelers—both real and imagined troubadours who celebrated their journeys in song. Often these various travelers are walkers who may not have many of the same options as those who go by vehicle or perhaps are more attuned to looking and seeing carefully and deliberately. This is very much in keeping with Walt Whitman’s prototypical “Song of the Open Road” with its litany of people who walk the streets and road, and Dylan also pays tribute to those—particularly musicians—who have gone on the road before. In “Song to Woody” (Bob Dylan), Dylan is a long way from home “walkin’ a road other men have gone down.” He pays tribute to Woody Guthrie’s extensive career and ability to appeal to rich and poor in a tired world that “looks like it’s a-dyin an’ it’s hardly been born.” In the process, he tips his hat to older folksingers Cisco Houston and Leadbelly, “an’ to all the good people that traveled with you.” He ends the song with these prophetic, wishful words: “Somewhere down the road someday/The very last thing that I’d want to do/Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too” (Lyrics, 5). He defines this hard traveling in the Planet Waves track (1974) “Going, Going, Gone” as “walkin’ the road . . . livin’ on the edge . . . just got to go/Before I get to the ledge” (Lyrics, 318). Other travelers have not been as fortunate as Woody or the singer-persona: “Only a Hobo” (Bootleg Series Vol 1–3) reflects on a victim of the road, an old hobo lying in a doorway, “A blanket of newspaper covered his head/As the curb was his pillow, the street was his bed/One look at his face showed the hard road he’d come . . .” (Lyrics, 102). In “I am a Lonesome Hobo” (John Wesley Harding), the hobo analyzes his fall from grace—“I did not trust my brother”—and advises us to “hold your judgment for yourself/Lest you wind up on this road” (Lyrics, 230).

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“Rambling, Gambling Willie” (Bootleg Series Vol 1–3) follows a real-life gambler Will O’Conley, in a surreal journey to the White House and to the railroad yards; he sails down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then he is off to Cripple Creek in the Rocky Mountains. Though he “had a heart of gold,” supported his family, and lived without ostentation, he’s shot through the head by another irate gambler. The moral? “Make your money while you can!” (Lyrics, 11). In “Down the Highway” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), Dylan uses the guise of a gambler to sing about his loss when his girlfriend Suze Rotolo left for Italy: “Well, I’m walkin’ down the highway/With my suitcase in my hand/ Lord, I really miss my baby/She’s in some far-off land . . . Please don’t take away my highway shoes” (Lyrics, 57). Much later, in “Ain’t Talkin’, Just Walkin’” (Modern Times), Dylan straddles reality and the metaphysical as the lyrics ramble through the verses of life, from the mystic garden of Eden to the “last outback, at the world’s end”: “As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden/The wounded flowers were dangling from the vines . . . Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’/Through this weary world of woe . . .” (Lyrics, 619). There is no company, no consolation for the yearning heart, no paradise around the bend, just hard “travelin’.” “Desolation Row” (Highway 61 Revisited), creates a hallucinatory dreamscape where lives of travelers are damaged, reversed from good to bad, or cut short (Lyrics, 181). Shelton described this poem as the “rock vision of contemporary apocalypse” with its strange catalogue of objects, places, characters, and events: postcards from the lynching of three blacks in Duluth; the beauty parlor and the circus that allude to performing venues in Greenwich Village and the messy way of making folk music work; Cinderella, the poor made good, left sweeping; Romeo banished, again possibly in Greenwich Village; the fortune-telling lady, who could be improving the world, gone inside; Cain and Abel, the murderous brothers, and the hunchback of Notre Dame, the ugly good guy, left outside; and the Good Samaritan leaving for the carnival (Shelton 282). According to David Tuffley, this song is deeply embedded in the twentieth-century experience: Desolation Row is a counterculture destination, though more a state of mind than an actual place. The name probably comes from combining the best of Desolation Angels (Kerouac) with Cannery Row (Steinbeck). Jack Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, and wrote The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels from his life transforming experiences on the peak. It has also been suggested that T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland was an influence on Desolation Row. Musician Al Kooper asserts Desolation Row is set in Greenwich Village in New York City, based on personal contact with Dylan.

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Even Dylan’s classic “Mr. Tambourine Man” (Bringing It All Back Home) creates a walker on an empty street “too dead for dreaming.” The singer asks the tambourine player to be his pied piper: “play a song and I will follow you . . . Take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,” he begs, “Down the foggy ruins of time . . . Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow” (Lyrics, 152–53). Wilentz noted that in an interview Dylan had referenced Fellini’s film La Strada (The Road) as one possible source, though he also claims that “the song is not a direct translation of anything else; it is about precisely what it says it is about—an artist, at his wit’s end, looking for respite from his distress if only for a night, and turning to a shadowy musical spirit to play him a song that he will follow” (97). The most significant road song is “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). This 1962 question-answer lyric goes far beyond the usual boundaries. The father asks his darling blue-eyed son the simple but dangerous parental question: Where have you been? The answers are as hard as the rain. The son (the hero, Dylan) has stumbled, walked, stepped, been in front of six crooked highways, seven sad forests, a dozen dead oceans. He has seen “a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,” has heard “the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,” and met “a white man who walked a black dog.” Asked what he’ll do next, the son replies he’ll walk: I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest Where the people are a many and their hands are all empty Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison And the executioner’s face is always well hidden Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten Where black is the color, where none is the number And I’ll tell and speak it and think it and breathe it And reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it And I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’ But I’ll know my song well before I start singing (Lyrics, 60) Dylan knew his songs well before he started singing. This is the hero, the Christ-like figure standing on the water, preaching his message of salvation and redemption.

Love songs and the trope of the road Although many of Dylan’s poems specifically reference highways and their many travelers, his love songs especially depend on the road as a narrative

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and descriptive element. Critics have been quick to see an auto-mythological development in them, particularly in the love relationship. In some songs, the woman is near and comforting; in others she is far away, becoming a source of sadness, confusion, or even relief. Sometimes the singer banishes the woman; sometimes he begs her to stay home or return home. In some songs it is the singer/male who is far away, or planning on leaving. The choice will be difficult and absolute: he has to decide between the road (sometimes freedom) and his lover (sometimes loss of freedom). A few songs anticipate a lover’s imminent return, and a few ask the lover/woman to accompany him on his travels. In many of his early songs, Dylan uses the road to create the agony of dysfunctional love. Early on, Dylan had taken on the mantle of the folk singer, and these “lonesome” songs are typical of that tradition. In the 1962 song “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), the singer begs to stay: “I’m a-walkin’ down the road/With my head in my hand . . . Just-a one kind favor I ask of you/‘Low me just-a one more chance” (Lyrics, 67). In another more elegant 1963 separation song, “Tomorrow is a Long Time” (Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits), the singer uses road language to express a similar deep yearning for a lost lover: “If tomorrow was not an endless highway/If tonight was not a crooked trail . . . Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all” (Lyrics, 41). Christopher Ricks adds a beautiful twist to the interpretation of its last two lines: “If only she had lived a truth, and lived it by me” (413). In the 1963 “Absolutely Sweet Marie” (Blonde on Blonde), the singer is lonely and impatient about waiting for his sweet Marie even when he’s sick, the object of hate, or caught in traffic (Lyrics, 206). The meeting Dylan wanted at 56th and Wabash was with his unkind, departed lover, for whom he had even “struggled through barbed wire fence . . . outran the hound dogs” (Lyrics, 340). Dylan’s quintessentially British ballad, “Girl from the North Country” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), renders the sadness of a lost love more profound by adding huge geographic and temporal distance, with a harsh climate thrown in: “So if you’re travelin’ in the North Country/Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline/Remember me to one who lives there/She once was a true love of mine” (Lyrics, 54). Dylan often uses walking, and the accompanying andante tempo, to depict a departing lover’s rancor. He’s “walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe” in the 1963 song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan): “Where I’m bound, I can’t tell/But goodbye’s too good a word, gal/So I’ll just say fare thee well” (Lyrics, 61). The crossroads have been a powerful image in musical lyrics at least since Robert Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues,” and Dylan used this metaphor often. In the 1964 “Mama, You Been on My Mind” (Bootleg Series Vol 1–3), the singer

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says: “Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat/An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at/Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that/But mama, you been on my mind.” Even more powerful is the 1964 “One Too Many Mornings” (Times They Are A-Changin’): From the crossroads of my doorstep My eyes they start to fade As I turn my head back to the room Where my love and I have laid An’ I gaze back to the street The sidewalk and the sign And I’m one too many mornings An’ a thousand miles behind. (Lyrics, 87) In the 1964 track “Restless Farewell” (Times They Are A-Changin’), the narrator describes his professional and personal crossroads as he leaves folk and turns to rock, leaves old friends, and heads for new horizons: “But to remain as friends/And make amends/You need the time and stay behind/And since my feet are now fast/And point away from the past/I’ll bid farewell and be down the line” (Lyrics, 97). This determined departure is reiterated in Dylan’s 1964 or 1965 hit “Farewell, Angelina” (Bootleg Series Vol 1–3): “I must follow the sound/The triangle tingles/And the trumpets play slow/Farewell Angelina/The sky is on fire/And I must go” (Lyrics, 161). Dylan’s heroic journey takes him through the obligatory valley of goddesses (see Campbell 109). These goddesses were the many women who peopled his path to stardom. After his first New York girlfriend Suze Rotolo left for a break in Italy in 1963, he wrote “Down the Highway” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan): “Well, I’m walkin’ down the highway/With my suitcase in my hand/ Lord, I really miss my baby/She’s in some far off land” (Lyrics, 57). By the song’s end, he’s walked from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Statue of Liberty: only a distance that spans the United States is large enough to contain his restless, lonesome spirit. Dylan also sends off his women. The word “babe” in “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (Another Side of Bob Dylan) adds an edge of disdain. In “I’m okay, you’re expecting too much”, he asks his woman not just to leave, but also to disappear: “Go ‘way from my window/Leave at your own chosen speed . . ./Go lightly from the ledge, babe/Go lightly on the ground . . ./Go melt back into the night, babe/Everything inside is made of stone” (Lyrics, 131). The 1965 “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (Bringing It All Back Home) begins, “You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.” Baby Blue is sent into a surreal, restless world peopled with gun-toting orphans, gamblers on

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the highways, an empty-handed painter on the streets, seasick sailors rowing home, and reindeer armies going home: Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you The vagabond who’s rapping at your door Is standing in the clothes that you once wore Strike another match, go start anew And it’s all over now, Baby Blue. (Lyrics, 159) Shelton suggests the song is Dylan’s personal “farewell on several levels”; saying farewell to Baby Blue is also a farewell to his woman, to the political Left, or to his “own youthful illusions” (277). In the 1965 “On the Road Again” (Bringing It All Back Home), the singer is incredulous that his lover had to ask why he doesn’t stay when her world is so incredibly weird. In the first verse he wakes up to frogs in his socks, mama in the icebox, and daddy in a Napoleon Bonaparte mask! The list gets stranger in the subsequent four verses: grandpa’s cane is a sword, grandma prays to pictures, uncle steals what’s in his pockets. “Honey, how come you don’t move” is his final comment as he implores his love to move in with him (Lyrics, 147). The road songs of Dylan’s time with Sara, whom he married, either beg his goddess to go with him, ask her if he can stay, or describe the comfort of staying and NOT going out on the road. In the 1966 “Pledging My Time” (Blonde on Blonde), the lover needs to leave but wants his “baby” to travel with him: “see you make him smile/Everybody’s gone but me and you/and I can’t be the last to leave/Won’t you come with me baby?” (Lyrics, 192). Choosing to stay is a joy in the 1969 “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (Nashville Skyline): “Throw my ticket out the window/Throw my suitcase out there, too . . . Cause tonight I’ll be staying here with you” (Lyrics, 246). In “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” (John Wesley Harding), he willingly, consolingly, stays: “Close your eyes, close the door/You don’t have to worry anymore/I’ll be your baby tonight” (Lyrics, 235). In the 1969 song “Lay Lady Lay” (Nashville Skyline), he offers his “Lady” a night of love, implying the less pleasurable option is moving on: “Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile/Until the break of day . . .” (Lyrics, 242). This invitation is repeated in the 1974 “On a Night Like This” (Planet Waves): “I am so glad you came around/Hold on to me so tight” (Lyrics, 317). Dylan was still eulogizing Sara in the 1974 album Planet Waves. “Tough Mama” is the “Dark Beauty” with “that long night’s journey in your eyes,” the “Sweet Goddess/Born of a blinding light and changing wind,” and the “Silver Angel/With the badge of the lonesome road sewed in your sleeve”

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(Lyrics, 319). Dylan’s 1974 “Shelter from the Storm” (Blood on the Tracks) is the standout goddess song. The goddess repeats her invitation at the end of each stanza: “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” She is a refuge from the road, from the wilderness, from the formless creatures in the zone unknown: ‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form “Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm.” (Lyrics, 345) The goddess is not greater than the narrator, though she promises more than he is capable of comprehending. The hero, on his journey from the wilderness, takes her as she is with kindness and assurance. The 1975 album Blood on the Tracks and the 1976 album Desire develop the goddess theme in various settings, some geographic, some cosmic. The song “Sara” (Desire) nostalgically eulogizes the “Sweet virgin angel, sweet love of my life,” “radiant jewel, mystical wife,” “glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow” (Lyrics, 369–70). In the haunting “Mozambique” track of Desire, he dreams of love and beaches, of “magic in a magical land” (Lyrics, 360). He and his Magdalena are together on the run, racing on horseback in the 1975 “Romance in Durango” (Desire), and he imagines God appearing at the wedding “with his serpent eyes of obsidian” (Lyrics, 366). The lover portrayed in the 1975 “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” (Desire) is described as if in a spirit world: his lover’s father is an outlaw king, her sister “sees the future,” her mother has a heart “like an ocean, mysterious and dark,” and his lover herself is referred to as “Isis” and “Oh, Sister” both referring to the Egyptian goddess, the daughter of Earth and Sky, the goddess of marriage, and wife to her brother Osiris. As Shelton remarks, Isis, one incarnation of the Empress, was a mother goddess, patroness of navigation, the sorrowing wife whose tears formed the Nile. She was also the redeemer whose magic mysteriously reconstituted and revived the body of her slain husband-brother, Osiris. A moon goddess identified by her heifer horns, Isis also instituted marriage. Osiris anointed her as queen of Egypt, leaving her to rule while he rambled throughout Asia to conquer without violence, disarming strange people with his gentleness, his songs, and his music making. (464) Shelton points to two crucial themes in the “Oh, Sister” track (Desire): “Death and rebirth, and time lost, stolen or threatened, are the Faustian questions of

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the alchemist who seeks spiritual perfection and redemption” (463). Dylan equates this quest for perfection with the hero’s spiritual journey: “We died and were reborn and then/Mysteriously saved . . .’’ (Lyrics, 362). As Campbell points out, “only geniuses capable of the highest realization can support the full revelation of the sublimity of this goddess” (115). But Blood on the Tracks is not only about Sara as goddess; the album marks the beginning of their break-up, which might have been reflected even in that album’s 1974 “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” where the lover is resigned, though mentioning he would still journey to look for his love in “old Honolulu, San Francisco, Ashtabula” (Lyrics, 339). Many of the love songs in this period concern the woman who left. In the 1986 “Brownsville Girl” (Knocked Out Loaded), co-written with Sam Shepard, the singer pines for his long-lost lover: “You know I can’t believe we’ve lived so long and are still so far apart.” He remembers driving with her to San Antonio, over the Rockies, across the Texas panhandle, and into Amarillo. “You know,” the singer concludes, “I feel pretty good, but that ain’t sayin’ much/I could feel a whole lot better/If you were just here by my side to show me how” (Lyrics, 510–11). The 1997 song “Million Miles” from Time Out of Mind exaggerates this geographic separation, which also implies their emotional distance: “Well, I’m tryin’ to get closer but I’m still a million miles from you” (Lyrics, 563). In the 2001 song “Sugar Baby” (Love and Theft), he is still asking his lover to “get on down the road”: “You went years without me/Might as well keep going now” (Lyrics, 597). Sometimes the lover asks his woman to return after a long absence, and his impatience is palpable in “Can’t Wait” (Time Out of Mind): “While I’m strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind/I left my life with you somewhere back there along the line/I thought somehow that I would be spared this fate/But I don’t know how much longer I can wait” (Lyrics, 570). Sometimes a mutual separation is best as in “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” (Blonde on Blonde): “Then time will tell just who has fell/And who’s been left behind/When you go your way and I go mine” (Lyrics, 203). “The Narrow Way” (The Tempest) explores love and life as a long road . . . a long and narrow way.” Separation is a given, and life’s journey is to find togetherness: “If I can’t work up to you/You’ll have to work down to me someday” (Lyrics, 648–50). The love-song genre in Dylan’s hands grew up and got real, and the road references make those songs lyrical: for example, “frozen traffic,” “the dark side of the road,” “tomorrow . . . an endless highway/tonight . . . a crooked trail,” “ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, Babe,” “goodbye is too good a word,” or “I’m strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind.” The poetic phrases and the clear images linger in our minds, occasionally tripping us up in our own journeys with memories of how these songs affected us.

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Conclusion What boon does Dylan, the hero, have to bestow? What wisdom can he bring us as we journey together? The hero’s ultimate task upon returning from his mysterious adventures is to “render back into the light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark” (Campbell 208). Three Dylan events in 2015 give evidence of what he now brings us: the release of a new album, an interview with AARP, and an acceptance speech at the MusiCares Person of the Year Award ceremony. First, on February 3, 2015, Dylan’s thirtysixth album (Shadows in the Night) was released, featuring tunes recorded by Frank Sinatra from the ’40s and ’50s. The American Songbook was one style category he had always known but had not yet recorded. In this 2015 album he “uncovers” the songs, “lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day” (Album cover, Shadows in the Night). The second notable event was the interview with AARP after the album’s release. The idea of Dylan choosing AARP as his publicity channel is “speechdefying,” and Robert Love, the interviewer, boasts: “Dylan goes where he has rarely gone before in public conversation” (AARP Entertainment). At one point Love reminded Dylan of his grandmother’s advice that “happiness is the road,” Dylan obliged Love with a riff on happiness: “Certainly there’s no permanent happiness . . . Life has its ups and downs, and time has to be your partner, you know? Really, time is your soul mate” (AARP Entertainment). Dylan himself seemed happy, content on the road of life, but acknowledged that “as long as there’s suffering, you can only be so happy. Does money make a person happy? . . . People have to create jobs, and these big billionaires are the ones who can do it” (AARP Entertainment). These words echo his lyrics from more than fifty years before: “If I can’t help somebody/With a word or song/If I can’t show somebody/They are travelin’ wrong . . . I’m just a long time a-comin’/An’ I’ll be a long time gone” (Lyrics, 28–29). Third, Dylan’s acceptance speech for the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year Award referenced the hero’s road he has traveled. He said, “I’m glad for my songs to be honored like this. But you know, they didn’t get here by themselves. It’s been a long road and it’s taken a lot of doing.” He honored the genealogies of several of his hits, confessing that “John Henry” was the direct antecedent to “Blowin’ in the Wind” (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan).” In reflecting on the song “Highway 61” (Highway 61 Revisited), Dylan cited Big Bill Broonzy’s song “Key to the Highway” (“I’ve got a key to the highway/I’m booked and I’m bound to go”) as the source for these lyrics: “Georgia Sam . . . asked poor Howard where can I go . . . Howard just pointed with his gun/And said that way down on Highway 61.” He sources “The Times They Are A-Changing” and the phrase “Come gather ‘round

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people wherever you roam” (“The Times They are A-Changin’” from “Times They Are A-Changin’”) as part of the American “come all ye” folk-song tradition (Roberts). As part of honoring the genealogy of his music, Dylan told Shelton he couldn’t creatively live anywhere but in America “because I understand the tone behind the language there” (Shelton 480). His lyrics provide a detailed atlas of the United States; the places, journeys, and travelers in his songs tell an American story. Most importantly, he gives us these songs and words without prejudice, as our united heritage. Dylan also in some ways spiritually resembled Blind Willie McTell, traveling endlessly, performing endlessly, sharp to the wiles of the world, taking things from everywhere but fixing them up his own way, composing new songs and performing old ones that were sometimes sacred and sometimes secular, but neither black nor white, up nor down—that had reference to everybody. (Wilentz 335) Paul Zollo asked if there were “better places in the world than others to write songs?” Dylan replied, “It’s not necessary to take a trip to write a song. What a long, strange trip it’s been, however. But that part of it’s true too” (“Excerpt,” 217). In his recent album, Shadows of the Night, Dylan includes Jerome Moross’s song for the movie The Cardinal, “Stay with Me,” a reflection on life’s journey, a life of human proportions (a heart not humble, eyes that fail to see, and a tendency to wander) on a stumbling, wandering walk, seeking shelter, and the companionship of God. These boons remind us that Leonard Cohen once described Bob Dylan as “a figure that arises every three or four hundred years. . . . He represents and embodies all the finest aspirations of the human heart” (McDougal 382). Bono called him “an ancient voice that tells you that you need to know where you come from” (Lethem and Bono 255, 258). Dylan, the hero, has passed us Guthrie’s “book of man” to read awhile. Dylan told David Gates in 1997, “Sooner or later you come to the realization that we’re not who we were. So then what do we do?” Gates concluded: “You keep putting one foot in front of the other.” Gates then goes on to note that the first song called “Love Sick” in Time Out of Mind begins, ‘‘I’m walking, through streets that are dead” and remarks, “It’s one of the great Bob Dylan opening lines. How many roads must a man walk down? It’s the darkest one yet, but the point is he’s walking” (Gates 243). Dylan, is “still on the road, heading for another joint,” but the hero is always home, out there on the road.

9 “Apology and forgiveness got no place here at all”: On the road to Washington D.C. with Bruce Springsteen Chad Wriglesworth

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n November 11, 2014, more than one hundred thousand music fans and military veterans made a pilgrimage to the National Mall in Washington D.C. for The Concert for Valor, a free Veterans Day concert that was designed to raise national awareness for the 2.6 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Backed by global corporations such as HBO, Starbucks, and Chase, the evening boasted stage appearances from celebrities such as Jack Black, Jamie Foxx, Meryl Streep, and George Lopez, as well as simulcast tributes delivered by Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, and President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. The inspirational testimonies and rousing stories of patriotism were broadcast to millions of home viewers and radio listeners, but for those who traveled to the National Mall, the evening was all about witnessing a diverse lineup of musical performers, ranging from Jennifer Hudson and Carrie Underwood, who belted out anthems of national and military pride, to Metallica and Eminem, who came to satisfy the rougher edges of America. The Concert for Valor progressed into the darkness without question or incident until Bruce Springsteen arrived and changed the musical and political tone of the night by invoking past and present memories of the Vietnam

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War and its cultural aftermath. This started with a collaborative and gritty performance of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s anti-draft song “Fortunate Son,” followed by Springsteen’s solo set later in the evening that included an acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” an often misunderstood protest song that tells the story of an unemployed and disillusioned Vietnam veteran who lost a brother in Khe Sanh. The narrator of the song, who in the 1980s was still “ten years burning down the road” with “nowhere to run” and “nowhere to go,” was inspired by Bobby Muller, a veteran and anti-war activist whom Springsteen collaborated with to increase awareness for “Vietnam Veterans for America” during the 1980s (Springsteen, Born to Run 1975; see Masciotra 10–11; Cullen 91–92). Springsteen’s acoustic and unusual delivery of the song at The Concert for Valor caused confusion, but made one thing painfully clear. While much of America had moved beyond the Vietnam conflict, the unnamed veteran from the 1980s was still somewhere out there on the streets, now “forty years burning down the road,” still with nowhere to run and nowhere to go (The Concert for Valor).1 Many journalists and fans responded to Springsteen’s performance at The Concert for Valor with hostility, ranging from confusion and accusations of betrayal to name-calling and slander, but these naysayers entirely missed the point of his trip to Washington D.C. Organizers of The Concert for Valor were attempting to manufacture a new cultural beginning—an ideological roadway away from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—toward an unfettered vision of ever-expanding hope, patriotism, and economic progress. While Springsteen’s music does celebrate the complexities of American identity with pride and optimism, at The Concert for Valor he refused to endorse new routes toward renewal without passing through memories and reverberations of the Vietnam War, the all-too-often neglected cultural wound that Springsteen has written about, remembered, and performed for more than forty years. The political tenor at The Concert for Valor first changed from a spirit of celebration to anger when the Zac Brown Band closed their set by inviting Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl on stage for a group performance of “Fortunate Son.” When the New Jersey icon strapped on his Fender Telecaster, fans erupted with cheers of excitement, but some in attendance believed they were hearing calls of derision. Confused listeners jumped on social media, asking why Springsteen, the all-American rocker and performer of “Born in the U.S.A.,” was being booed from a stage set to honor military veterans. A listener named Carrie asked, “Why did Bruce 1

“A digital recording of The Concert for Valor is available through HBO GO.”

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get booed off stage?” while Andi Gomez asked, “Were ppl booing at Bruce Springsteen Or Dave Grohl?” (Carrie; Gomez). What the audience actually heard was a long standing ritual performed by Springsteen’s followers, a playful and droning call of affection that fans call “‘BROOCE’-ing,” which to the outside ear is easily and often confused with booing (see Keane; Sawyers 100). This confusion was by no means an isolated incident. Springsteen’s performances, often known to be politically charged, have produced similar responses of ambiguity from audiences, most notably at a performance in Madison Square Garden on June 12, 2000. That night Springsteen and the E Street Band performed “American Skin (41 Shots),” a weighty and racially charged anthem about American citizens responding to racial uncertainty with eruptions of violence. More specifically, the song speaks into the political controversy surrounding the death of Amadou Diallo, an immigrant who was gunned down by four officers of the New York City Police Department in 1999. After the shooting, it was learned that Diallo was a strict Muslim, a new African immigrant (yet to learn English), and a man completely unarmed. At the time of the shooting, officers were looking for a suspected rapist and when they called out to Diallo he reached for a wallet containing his identification papers. Officers mistook the wallet for a gun and fired forty-one shots in a matter of seconds. Springsteen performed the song in Atlanta, right before the band arrived in New York City for a ten-day stand at Madison Square Garden. Fraternal organizations that stood in solidarity with the New York City police officers called for a boycott of Springsteen’s shows, but the performances went forward as planned. When Springsteen sang “American Skin” to a sold-out stadium on the opening night, Joh Pareles, a reporter for the New York Times observed, “It would have been difficult to hear the difference between boos and the perpetual rain of ‘Bruuuuuce!’ cheers called out by fans. At least one observer shared his thoughts by planting himself at the foot of the stage with both middle fingers extended toward the man at the center microphone” (qtd. in Carlin Bruce, 405). The political tension at The Concert for Valor was subdued compared to that at Madison Square Garden, yet when Springsteen stepped on stage to play “Fortunate Son,” a message that many in attendance did not come to hear, the reactions were similar to that volatile evening in New York City. The Zac Brown Band had just finished a series of patriotic country tunes about honoring soldiers and the American flag—including a snippet of “God Bless the U.S.A.”—but this homage quickly unraveled when Springsteen, Grohl, and Brown lit into a fiery rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Vietnam War–era protest song that sent sparks of confusion flying throughout the National Mall. President Barack Obama, the nation’s commander in chief, had opened the night’s festivities with a simulcast speech that was marked

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by dignity and honor. Now, leaning into the first verse, Grohl was firing back an angry rant about blind patriotism, the absurdity of songs like “Hail to the Chief,” and American citizens being sent to war by a 1960s government that was intoxicated by its own military might. By the time Springsteen and Brown joined in at the chorus of “Fortunate Son,” Twitter feeds were already lighting up the night. As many were voicing dismay on iPhones and androids, Zac Brown was picking up the second verse about economic disparity, bribery, and tax evasion, ironic realities that Starbucks and Chase—two of the global enterprises that sponsored The Concert for Valor—had both been accused of in recent months. All of this was missed by the masses. Instead, audience members such as Dave Holzem tweeted out disgust to HBO and the performers on stage: “I guess nobody was concerned about the meaning of this song? Nice insult to veterans!!!!!!!” (Holzem). Another listener and veteran, Tammy Ellis, directed her rebuke straight at the performers: “You should be ashamed!! As a vet, I am offended at your lack of respect. You need to apologize. I am a vet and a fan” (Ellis). For others in the crowd, the decision to play “Fortunate Son” evoked nothing short of fighting words: “Why would you shit on those that serve in the military on Veteran's Day at concert for vets?” (BabyGirlHarlow). Or as another listener put it, “Fuck you guys, too” (Mr. X).2 The song transitioned into a guitar solo and final verse reserved for Bruce Springsteen, who offered a grinding tirade on his Fender Telecaster and then proceeded to chastise the federal government for its collusion with corporate greed, economic injustice, and the production of thoughtless wars. With the US Capitol looming like a beacon of equity over a night manufactured to radiate hope and new beginnings, Springsteen called on the words of John Fogerty’s “Fortunate Son” to tell a darker history of a greedy nation and its wars: “Some folks inherit star spangled eyes, Ooh, they send you down to war, yeah. And when you ask them, ‘How much should we give?’ All they answer is more! more! more!” (The Concert for Valor). The musical indictment wound down to a dramatic halt, but the public conversation was by no means over. As historian Kim Servart Theriault observes, “when we remember Vietnam, whether the war itself or the era that surrounds it, we bring up an uneasy past” (421). At The Concert for Valor, this was an understatement. From the perspective of veterans and general listeners who gathered at the National Mall to hear stories of patriotism and the hope of new beginnings, playing “Fortunate Son” was completely out of line, meaning that someone needed

2

For a transcript of HBO’s twitter feed during and after the performance of “Fortunate Son” at The Concert for Valor, see: https://twitter.com/hbo/status/532335523990618112

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to be held responsible for steering fans away from the future and into an unwelcomed past. The Zac Brown Band may have initiated “Fortunate Son” with Grohl and Springsteen, but in subsequent days The Boss took the heat from journalists and media sources. Fox News hosted a rather predictable debate on the issue, while other news platforms—ranging from liberal to conservative— delivered their own two cents on the performance. Justin Wm. Moyer of The Washington Post was sympathetic to the political nature of “Fortunate Son,” yet also called the performance a complete failure because so few people in attendance understood why the song was being played at The Concert for Valor. This sentiment was echoed by Colette Moran, a listener who tweeted: “Ummm . . . Why are they playing an anti-patriotic song ‘Fortunate Son’ at the Concert for Valor? And why are they cheering?” (Moran). Truth be told, the song left many in attendance dumbfounded, but as Moyer notes it was ultimately Springsteen’s third chorus confession that he “‘ain’t no military son’” that “really got people’s dander up on the Mall” (Moyer). Other journalists were less sympathetic. Ethan Epstein of The Weekly Standard accused the singers of being “tone-deaf” and questioned their intelligence for playing an “anti-war screed” at a pro-military “Veterans Day event sponsored by HBO and Starbucks, in front of the Capitol Building” because this was obviously “not the place for it.” From Epstein’s perspective, invoking the Vietnam War was a terrible choice because “Fortunate Son is . . . an anti-draft song, and this concert was largely organized to honor those who volunteered to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq” (Epstein). More extreme reporters, such as John Nolte, attempted to speak on behalf of betrayed veterans by calling Springsteen a “left-wing millionaire and rock-n-roll welfare queen,” an ego-driven liberal who deliberately came to insult a US military that had apparently “fought for the right of an aging rocker to sucker punch them from out of the blue” (Nolte). In order to engage Springsteen’s participation in The Concert for Valor on more critical terms, it is important to revisit his early years in Freehold, New Jersey, more specifically, how the town was—and remains—intimately connected to the Vietnam War. As Kevin Coyne observes in Marching Home, Freehold is an industrial town with a rich tradition of enlisting service men and women for wars dating back to the American Revolution. Springsteen’s father, Douglas Springsteen, was one of more than 900 citizens from the town who served in the Second World War, and Springsteen’s uncle was the last of twenty-one men from Freehold who died in the conflict (Coyne viii). As Bruce Springsteen grew up during the 1960s, Freehold’s once booming industrial economy was “hit hard by changing times and new technologies” that eventually drew the population down to less than 12,000 (Sawyers 340). In songs like “Factory” on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), Springsteen

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tells the story of men like his father, war veterans of the Second World War, who returned and wandered from job to job, finding more stability in six packs, cigarettes, and violence than promises of an American Dream. By the time Springsteen graduated from high school in 1967, the Vietnam conflict was escalating and a new generation of young men from Freehold “assumed that if the government was sending men into battle now, then there was a good reason for it” (Coyne 315). One of those men was Bart Haynes, the drummer in Springsteen’s first band, The Castiles (1965–68). Haynes had just finished his senior year at Freehold Regional High School and “joined the US Marines, hoping to earn a better rank and assignment for having enlisted rather than waiting for the draft” (Carlin Bruce, 35). Springsteen remembers Haynes as a funny and loose kid, a young man who went off to boot camp and came back in uniform, laughing and joking with Springsteen and The Castiles about his future overseas before his deployment (see Phillips and Masur 133; Born to Run 2016, 73). Away from the spotlight and bravado of the band, however, Haynes’ optimism about Vietnam was already fading to black. Jimmy Higgins, a Freehold veteran of the Second World War who returned from service and became a local undertaker, remembers encountering the eighteen-year-old near Main Street shortly before his deployment. Higgins recalled how in uniform Haynes still looked like “the quiet, diligent neighborhood boy who had once done odd jobs around the funeral home—cutting grass, trimming bushes, painting. But an unfamiliar heaviness seemed to have settled upon him.” Haynes told the undertaker that he was making his final rounds, “saying goodbye to everybody.” Death felt imminent, and the young man told Higgins that “the next time you see me you’ll be burying me” (Coyne 314). Higgins assured Haynes that things would be fine, but five months later, in October of 1967, Haynes was on patrol in the Quang Tri Province at the northern edge of South Vietnam when his company was hit with a barrage of mortar fire (Carlin Bruce, 38; see Born to Run 2016, 73). Springsteen remembers that Haynes “was the first soldier from Freehold to die in the Vietnam War” (Born to Run 2016, 73). Haynes’ prophecy was fulfilled when his body, along with another solider from a separate incident, were sent back to Freehold and buried by Jimmy Higgins (Coyne 320). Despite the loss of Bart Haynes, The Castiles continued to establish their musical identity in working-class New Jersey, and they did so within the shadows of an older and more experienced band called The Motifs. The group was headed up by brothers Ray and Walter Cichon. Ray played lead guitar and mentored Springsteen by teaching him new solos and passing down old guitars (see Born to Run 2016, 84). Walter, the front man of the band, played the tambourine, wore leather boots and striped T-shirts, and sang with a style influenced by the British Invasion. Walter was far less approachable than his

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brother Ray, to the extent that Springsteen pays tribute to the local star as a god-like figure who grabbed hold of his imagination. He remembers: Walter Cichon was another story entirely. The longest hair on man or beast I’d ever seen. The first true star I’d ever been close to. A full-blooded rock ’n’ roll animal with the attitude, the sexuality, the toughness, the raw sensuality pouring out of him, scaring and thrilling all of us who came in contact with him. Walter was not your everyday guy but something vastly different. . . . A shaman, a rebel, a Jersey mystic and someone you could not completely believe entered the world through the same human loins as you did. (Born to Run 2016, 84–85) Walter’s freedom ended when he was drafted to Vietnam in 1967. A few months later, in March of 1968, Cichon’s company came under fire in the Kon Tum Province of South Vietnam. It is believed that he received a head wound while his unit attempted to secure a hill. The company was forced to withdraw under enemy pressure, and a recovery team was sent in to locate his body, but to this day Walter Cichon remains missing in action, another victim of a war that Springsteen watched spiral into what he later called “a subversion of all the true American ideals” (Phillips and Masur 133; see Born to Run 2016, 83). Bruce Springsteen’s anger and frustration about the Vietnam War was soon played out on Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973), an album largely made up of ostracized narrators who are attempting to leave behind narrow-minded towns that are complicit in violence and hypocrisy. In a song titled “Growin’ Up,” Springsteen tells of a local outsider—a veteran of sorts—who survives the warzone of his youth and becomes the commander of the streets. Armed with a guitar and the blues, he organizes a band of misfit pirates to set sail over the town. They use rock ‘n’ roll to bomb out the restrictions placed on them. The rocker-outlaw finds idealistic hope in music, asphalt, and gasolinefed cars, but even at this early stage of artistry, Springsteen realized that roads beyond the Vietnam War might be impossible for some veterans to travel. Instead, as Gary Smith observes, many became wanderers, or made up a class of “working people for whom the American Dream is a taunting, cruel, and ungraspable abstraction” (303). This assertion is by no means exaggeration. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, war veterans constitute “9 percent of the US population, but 23 percent of its homeless,” while the US Department of Veterans Affairs estimates the “number of homeless Vietnam veterans is more than twice the number of soldiers—58,000—who died in the war” (Tritle 175). “Lost in the Flood,” the last song on Side A of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., tells the story of another Vietnam veteran, a lost and forgotten

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“ragamuffin gunner” who has returned to New Jersey looking “like a hungry runaway.” Roads to a promised land lead to violence in the streets, unemployment, and physical and emotional abuse hits him from all sides. The “dull-eyed and empty-faced” soldier, never able to fully escape the mud-soaked warzone of his past, finds temporary solace on the streets by racing “a Chevy stock super eight” at the local race track. One stormy night, however, with “Bound for Glory” painted in “red, white and blue flash paint,” he says goodbye to the past and takes a head-on suicidal trip into an oil and bloodstained wall, giving the town’s onlookers what they wanted and cheered for, “a real highwayman's farewell” (Greetings). Appropriately, Side A of the album then ends with a spinning turntable and a needle stuck in the spinning grooves of the Vietnam War. For more than forty years, Springsteen’s music has suggested that ideological and physical roads away from the Vietnam War are not stories of liberation and triumph, as some might choose to believe, but negotiated movements into a future that is tenuous at best. Springsteen’s most wellknown, and perhaps misunderstood, songs about the American road appear on Born to Run (1975). While his earlier albums were arranged in the tradition of Bob Dylan’s poetic ramblings about specific people and places, the tracks on Born to Run have more spacious lyrics and a stylized sound designed for a mainstream rock audience. As Dave Marsh notes, at the time of recording, Springsteen was trying to emulate producer Phil Spector’s “wall of sound,” an orchestrated and highly layered method of recording that generates a presence of mood and sonic effect rather than a mere background for a lyric (Two Hearts, 129). Springsteen, who was obsessive about the type of sound and mood manifested on the album, explains that “my early albums were about being someplace and what it was like there” while “Born to Run is about being nowhere at all” (Marsh Two Hearts, 97). Springsteen’s attention to a gritty, but highly operatic style of rock, along with a cast of characters that listeners could imagine themselves inhabiting or knowing, produced an album about the American road that is among the most memorable in modern rock history. In the opening track titled “Thunder Road,” a screen door slams behind a woman named Mary—a sort of American everywoman—whose hopes and dreams are threatened by the passing of time. Her beauty has faded since high school graduation, but a seductive speaker still beckons her to embrace the open highway. Mary is lured into the man’s car for one last chance at freedom, a highway to redemption where lovers can remember the lure and taste of the night horizon. The opening song on Side B, “Born to Run,” echoes this sense of liberation and promise to be found on the American road. The speaker addresses a woman again, this time named Wendy. He confesses how their town is slowly killing them. The means of escape is to ward off adulthood by

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taking to the streets in gas-fed machines of steel. Fueled on passion for each other and against all signs of conformity, the speaker promises that they will embrace an open road to freedom until they are exhausted by its limitless possibilities. When heard in isolation, “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” produce illusory messages about the hope to be found on Springsteen’s version of the American road, but these songs must be placed within the architecture of the entire album. When making Born to Run, Springsteen was particularly attentive to the structure and symmetry of the album, placing four tracks on each side—with each side beginning with a song of optimism and liberation about the road—while the closing tracks on each side, “Backstreets” and “Jungleland,” tell darker narratives about the futile desire to escape one’s place and position in society. The first song, “Backstreets,” is a bittersweet memory of past days spent between a speaker and a lover named Terry. Like the previous songs of optimism, these lovers escaped a place of confinement by running against time, but truth and lies have now caught up with them. The speaker, left in a state of jaded despair, describes the absence of his lover as a haunting memory that torments what little faith remains in his heart. In a similar way, the final song on the album, “Jungleland,” tells of Magic Rat, a character who drives across the state line of New Jersey—where fast cars, music, and lovers reign over the alleys and the night. Images of poetic beauty erupt into a dance of violence, until Rat is murdered by the realities of his own dreams and desires. The final image of the road that Born to Run offers is not as a place of freedom, but a paradoxical space where people seek hope and freedom, but often find themselves trapped—or even killed—by societal pressures and confinement. As Springsteen’s popularity increased with Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) and The River (1980), personal memories of the Vietnam War era resurfaced and went on tour with the E Street Band. Before playing “The River,” a centerpiece of the world tour, the frustrated rocker ritualistically confessed his own story of being drafted for Vietnam in 1968.3 On the Live 1975–85 album, Springsteen tells about being fresh out of high school— fighting with his father about the length of his hair, staying out too late, and the direction his life was going. Douglas Springsteen, the jaded veteran of the Second World War, wanted his son to make a plan. Springsteen had one—a plan to escape from Freehold—but tells the crowd, “I could never explain it to him.” By now thousands of people are calmed to silence by the sound of a keyboard playing an innocent lullaby and the confession of a vulnerable rock

3

Springsteen tells a similar version of this story in his interview with Kurt Loder for Rolling Stone.

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star performing his identity as a teenage son. Springsteen tells how he got in “a motorcycle accident” and was “laid up in bed,” when his father called in a barber to cut his hair. Their fight escalated and peaked with words of hatred. Douglas Springsteen told his son, “Man, I can’t wait ’til the Army gets you. When the Army gets you they’re gonna make a man outta you. They’re gonna cut all that hair off of you and they’re gonna make a man outta you” (Cullen 90; see Live 1975–85). In 1968, Springsteen had already dropped out of Ocean County Community College and abandoned hope for a draft deferment. When his draft notice arrived in the mail, he thought how Bart Haynes was sent off to Vietnam and “didn’t even know where it was” (Born to Run 2016, 73; see Live 1975–85). Like Walter Cichon, he never came back. Reflecting on that moment in his life, Springsteen remembers that “I’d had two close friends, Walter and Bart, killed at war and I had no intention of joining them” (Born to Run 2016, 99). With more and more young men sent overseas, the town of Freehold had become a firsthand witness to “the disproportionate governmental sapping of the working class for soldiers to conduct the Vietnam conflict” (Smith 307). After staying up all night with friends, a group of young men boarded the bus to take their physicals and exams. Exposed to the inequity of the draft, Springsteen remembers the moment in the following way: I remember bein’ on that bus, me and a couple of guys in my band, and the rest of the bus was probably sixty, seventy percent black guys from Asbury Park. And I remember thinkin’, like, what makes my life, or my friends’ lives, more expendable than that of somebody who’s goin’ to school? It just didn’t seem right. (Loder) A concussion from the motorcycle accident combined with a strategy to fail the written test, earned Springsteen 4-F classification, ending his chances of going to war (see Born to Run 2016, 100–03). When Springsteen tells this part of the story on the Live 1975–85 album, the crowd cheers and whistles, but the dejected confessor quiets them down saying, “It’s nothing to applaud about.” After a pause, Springsteen tells the crowd about coming home after the physical and finding his mother and father waiting for him in their dimly lit kitchen: My dad said, “Where you been?” And I said, “I went to take my physical.” He said, “What happened?” I said, “They didn’t take me.” And he said, “That’s good.” (Live 1975–85)

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A slow roar builds from the fans, and Springsteen overtakes them with a mournful harmonica that opens “The River,” followed by the words, “I come from down in the valley / where mister when you’re young / They bring you up to do just like your daddy done,” sealing a tenuous moment of solidarity between a confused teen and a veteran father over the misguided handling of the Vietnam War (Live 1975–85). After recording Born to Run (1975), Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), and The River (1980), some of Springsteen’s most intricately arranged albums, the rising rock star leaned toward minimalism with the release of Nebraska (1982), a stark album that remains his most emotionally demanding to date. In earlier songs like “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road,” and “Racing in the Streets,” the “highway is a path to liberation” a place that lures listeners onto the backs of motorcycles and into the front seats of hot rods (Sawyers 352). The car is a means of fulfilling sexual desire, finding escape from conformity, and a way for the tainted outcast to find spiritual redemption and belonging. However, as Frank P. Fury observes, when listeners enter the acoustic landscape of Nebraska, “the car can no longer offer deliverance from the individual’s problem” and it becomes an expression of “metaphorical imprisonment” (85). In “My Father’s House,” for example, a nameless narrator searches for the warmth and stability of an estranged father, but ends up lost, cold, and alone on a dark highway that withholds the reconciliation he desperately seeks. The Nebraska recording sessions also brought forward an early demo version of “Born in the U.S.A.,” a fast-moving solo and acoustic take that was cut from the record early on by producer Jon Landau. The song had the same lyrics as the eventual mega-hit of 1984, but it was played to a different melody and sounded like another folk protest song about the Vietnam War. When Landau heard the early version, he felt that “it didn’t even seem like a particularly good song. It was a real odd thing, and it was not like anything else on the Nebraska album. And it was not like any other thing I’ve ever heard from Bruce—it sounded alien” (Marsh, Two Hearts, 257). “Born in the U.S.A.” was eventually recorded in a different style for an entirely different album, but illusory attempts at escaping the Vietnam War on the open highway still weighed heavy on the Nebraska tracks. “Highway Patrolman” tells the story of two brothers—one who served in Vietnam— while the other remained home on a farm deferment. Joe Roberts, the narrator of the song, describes himself as an honest working man, while his brother Franky, who went off to war in 1965, came back mean and unpredictable. While Franky is away in the army, wheat prices plummet and Joe—unable to keep the farm—takes a job as a highway patrolman. The question of loyalty to state over family arises when Joe is called to a roadhouse, where he finds a young man beaten and bloodied. Franky is the culprit and the patrolman sets

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down the highway to hunt him down. With the lights of Franky’s old Buick in sight, Joe chases him to the Canadian border, pulls to the side, and then watches his brother’s car vanish into a dark highway of something far less than freedom. On The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), the perspective of attempting to outrun the Vietnam War becomes more spiritually, economically, and socially nuanced. In “Youngstown,” for example, Springsteen tells of a spiritually burdened veteran who comes home from Vietnam and takes up a job working in the factories and mills of Youngstown, Ohio, a place of deep history that forged military implements from the Civil War to the Vietnam conflict. The narrator takes pride in the multiple generations of family members who protected the Union and took down Hitler, but he is now tormented by war machines that send thousands of men to die overseas for unknown reasons. When the complicit laborer’s working days come to an end, he suspects that he will not be called to heaven, but will instead spend eternity atoning for his work in a guilt-ridden inferno where war and death are fed by the industrial forges of hell. In another song on the same album titled “Galveston Bay,” Springsteen navigates an interconnected story between Le Bin Son and Billy Sutter, two veterans of the Vietnam War in search of the Promised Land in Galveston, Texas. For fifteen years, Le Bin Son fights alongside American soldiers, and, with the fall of Saigon, he brings his family to Texas to settle into a town that reminds him of the deltas back home. After working as a machinist, the new immigrant saves up money to buy a shrimp boat with his cousin, but soon faces threats of violence from a Ku Klux Klan that wants to burn out the presence of refugees who are taking over their harbor and fisheries. Threats are made, and Le Bin Son takes a man’s life in self-defense. Seeking retribution, veteran Billy Sutter plots to murder the Vietnamese immigrant, and as Stephen Hazan Arnoff observes, “their parallel paths of economic and social violence rooted in the war they share” gets played out in a new land that has betrayed both of them (198). On a night prepared for death, Billy confronts Le Bin Son on the peer of Galveston Bay with knife in hand, but then wordlessly lets him pass unharmed. The following morning the two men kiss their loved ones goodbye and throw their nets out over Galveston Bay, a small sign of hope amid an unspoken conflict that still haunts them. In January of 2014, only months before The Concert for Valor at the National Mall, Springsteen released an album titled High Hopes that contains a song called “The Wall,” a track inspired by his own visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The song was written in 1997, right after Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa made a trip to Washington to D.C. to attend the Kennedy Center Honors, where Bob Dylan was among the artists being recognized. In an interview with Dave Marsh from the radio program Live from E Street Nation,

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Springsteen shares how they went to the memorial to pay their respects to Bart Haynes and Walter Cichon. He remembers that they visited “in the day and I found Walter's name. I'm not sure if I found Bart Haynes. Bart Haynes was the drummer in The Castiles and he was our first friend that was killed overseas, and then Walter" (Marsh Live). Shortly after Springsteen returned home, singer and songwriter Joe Grushecky sent him a few newspaper clippings about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, along with lyrics to a song about the site. This gesture prodded Springsteen to articulate his own experiences in Washington D.C. Since its Veterans Day dedication on November 13, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become “a national healing shrine,” what many describe as a place of secular ritual and “pilgrimage,” but not in the temporal sense of The Concert for Valor (Berdahl 88, 98; Theriault 427; see Tritle 169). According to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, within a few months of the memorial’s opening, more than one million people had already visited the wall. Sample polls taken in 1996 and 2000 suggest that somewhere between 23 and 26 percent of Americans have now visited the memorial, which “translates into annual visitation by around three million American adults,” making it the most often visited memorial in Washington D.C. (Hagopian 351). Much like the style of Springsteen’s song “The Wall,” the power of the memorial comes through its minimalistic design and its subdued presence among the marble monuments that surround it. As Daphne Berdahl observes, “situated between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, the two black granite walls are wedged into the earth of America’s most sacred and symbolically loaded landscape” (88). The memorial is a symbolic wound, a place where people come to remember their individual pasts, and in doing so, potentially become part of a collective act of national mourning and healing. “The Wall” tells of someone who comes to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in order to remember and reconnect with a fallen friend and soldier named “Billy,” a local singer with “high boots and striped t-shirt” whose band was “the best thing this shit town ever had.” In the liner notes to High Hopes, Springsteen tells how Billy is an adaptation of his own remembrance of Walter Cichon: [“The Wall”] was inspired by my memories of Walter Cichon. . . . Though my character in ‘The Wall’ is a Marine, Walter was actually in the Army, A Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry. He was the first person I ever stood in the presence of who was filled with the mystique of the true rock star. Walter went missing in action in Vietnam in March 1968. He still performs somewhat regularly in my mind, the way he stood, dressed, held the tambourine, the casual cool, the freeness. The man who by his attitude, his

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walk said “you can defy all this, all of what's here, all of what you've been taught, taught to fear, to love and you'll still be alright.” His was a terrible loss to us, his loved ones and the local music scene. I still miss him.4 The memories of freedom and mobility that Springsteen speaks of being embodied in Walter are now accessed through a name etched and encountered on the Vietnam Wall. The designer of The Wall, Maya Lin, states that the deliberate “use of names was a way to bring back everything someone could remember about a person. . . . The ability of a name to bring back every single memory you have of a person is far more realistic and specific and much more comprehensive than a still photograph” (4:10). Another distinguishing feature of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is its polished granite surface, which mirrors the etched names on the wall back onto faces of viewers as they gaze into the black stone. The reflective gaze of the viewer is made evident through the speaker of Springsteen’s “The Wall,” who looks into the memorial and finds his own hardened tears looking back at him. As Kim Servart Theriault observes, many people who come to the wall, “often erupt into tears—again making pain and mourning visible or even acceptable—bringing the subject of the war from hiding and perhaps helping society to heal or scar over” (426). These tears communicate the relational dimension of the wall, how it invites the viewer to look into a name and revisit the life of the memorialized person now embodied in stone. Memories and mourning become part of an interdependent emotional relationship that is then taken home with visitors. The transformative power of encountering and remembering names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is heard in Springsteen’s introduction to “The Wall” at a performance in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Boss regularly interacts with fans through his stories, but on this occasion of introducing “The Wall,” the memories of the place and the names written upon it moved him to the edge of tears as he spoke of Bart Haynes and Walter Cichon. Their absence, as he remembered, “was a tremendous loss. To our neighborhood. To our town. To that thing inside of you that feels somehow, that the best should get their shot.”5

4 In the liner notes to High Hopes, Springsteen clearly attributes “The Wall” to the memory of Walter Cichon; however, when the song is performed live, Springsteen often mentions Bart Haynes and Cichon together, occasionally dedicating the song to the memory of their lives. This has been the case at performances of the song in Somerville, Massachusetts (February 19, 2003); East Rutherford, New Jersey (November 16, 2005); Virginia Beach, Virginia (April 12, 2014); and Charlotte, North Carolina (April 19, 2014). 5

See the recording of Springsteen performing “The Wall” at Charlotte, North Carolina (April 19, 2014). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3m0BXVKPu0

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Over the years, “The Wall” may prove to be Springsteen’s most powerful and significant song about the Vietnam War era, largely because it is a personalized account of a collective experience of loss and mourning that is now identifiable to millions of listeners. The narrator, like many who visit the wall each year, brings his own tokens of affection—a poem along with “cigarettes and a bottle of beer”—personal gestures of friendship, solidarity, and familial affection for those who did not return. This is a common practice. As Lawrence A. Tritle observes, not long after the memorial opened in 1982, visitors began a ritual of leaving objects at the wall, and “by 1993, more than 250,000 objects had been left” (167). Federal park rangers still collect, catalog, and store these objects each day, ranging from letters, photographs and flowers, to more unusual artifacts: These include an unopened package of cookies and Kool-Aid returned to the parents of a soldier killed in action, delivered at last; dolls and teddy bears, and locks of hair left by sisters and daughters of the dead; and perhaps most haunting, graduation tassels and even diplomas. (Tritle 173) These objects, whose meanings and intentions are retained by the givers, become integrated into the memorial and are part of its changing moods and expressions. This sense of emotional and material flux gives the memorial a living sense of vitality that permeates the minds of visitors. When the narrator of Springsteen’s song prepares to leave the wall, he catches a side glance of decorations and memorial flowers that remind him of the blood Billy spilled in Vietnam. After visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Springsteen and Patti Scialfa attended a ceremonial dinner as part of the Kennedy Center Honors event, and wound up sitting near Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense (1961–1968) when Bart Haynes and Walter Cichon were killed. A year before Springsteen visited the memorial, McNamara had published a controversial memoir on the Vietnam War titled In Retrospect (1996), confessing that when it came to drafting nearly 650,000 young men, “we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why” (xx). After visiting the memorial earlier that day—and being struck with the memories of Haynes and Cichon—Springsteen remembers how it was an “unusual experience that night of sitting a few tables away from Robert McNamara” (Marsh). The tension of Springsteen’s wordless encounter with the former US Secretary of Defense gets played out in “The Wall.” While standing at the memorial, the narrator attempts to conjure up better days by recalling Billy— much like Bart Haynes—hanging out in his uniform and joking about being shipped off to Vietnam. But the permanence of loss that stands before the

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speaker cannot be overcome. The visitor attempts to get Billy caught up on current events and tells the deceased soldier about McNamara’s apology. Then, in one of the most memorable lines of the song, the narrator responds by stating “apology and forgiveness got no place here at all, here at the wall” (High Hopes). At first glance, these words appear to be directed at politicians like McNamara, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon, men largely responsible for placing the names on the wall; however, this line of reprimand resonates with the speaker as well. The narrator, transported back in time, speaks to Billy as though they are still teens. He apologizes for not making it out last year, but claims it was because there was no one to drive him. Brought back to reality and the time and space set between them, the narrator reminds himself that the living must now navigate their own stories of suffering—and then says farewell to Billy by placing his hand on the wall. Given the provenance of the composition of “The Wall,” there is a sense that the weight of separation also falls upon Springsteen, who with the passing of time has risen from a local, working-class guitar player from Freehold, to a multimillion dollar voice for the working class, marginalized, and forgotten in society. In his autobiography Born to Run, Springsteen talks about maturing into adulthood and carrying a heavy dose of “survivor’s guilt” about the war. He wanted to connect with servicemen who went to Vietnam and fought is his place, but also writes that “all I know is when I visit the names of my friends on the wall in Washington, D.C., I’m glad mine’s not up there” (103). Some of Springsteen’s sorrow is worked out through the speaker of “The Wall.” The nameless visitor is critical of the politicians whose decisions wrote the names of the fallen on the Veterans Memorial, but on the evening of the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, Springsteen was among that elite class of men and women who travel past the National Mall in limousines before eating with the wealthy on Pennsylvania Avenue. Looking at Billy’s name on a black face of granite, one can imagine Springsteen—once a gangling kid from New Jersey—reaching out to touch the wall and asking Walter, the rock giant of Freehold, “if your eyes could cut through that black stone, tell me would they recognize me” (High Hopes). When Bruce Springsteen returned for his solo set at The Concert for Valor, he did not play “The Wall,” but as he looked down the National Mall toward the Vietnam Veterans Memorial it was evident that Bart Haynes and Walter Cichon were still performing somewhere in his mind. When playing “The Wall” live, Springsteen has introduced the song as a “short prayer” for the nation. On this occasion, with the black memorial hidden in the darkness of the National Mall, Springsteen transferred that prayer to his opening song “The Promised Land,” by introducing it as “a prayer for all our recently returned vets, who deserve the best care this country can give them” (The Concert for Valor).

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While Springsteen played, organizers of The Concert for Valor displayed a moving mural of the Utah desert as a backdrop, signifying the open highway of possibilities that Springsteen was supposedly singing about. However, when framed from the perspective of military veterans, the men and women who have “done [their] best to live the right way,” the song takes on a more complicated meaning. In this context, a more honest rendering of “Promised Land” acknowledges that for veterans who feel trapped by circumstances beyond their control, the vast desert highway is no longer open and limitless, but merely another route to “some mirage” that can make men and women feel “so weak [they] just want to explode” (Darkness). Springsteen transitioned into the next song, “Born in the U.S.A.,” by strumming a few unrecognizable chords on a twelve string guitar. He described the number as a song he wrote thirty years ago, but one that “still holds” (The Concert for Valor). He continued by playing through several bars with an open tuning slide that transformed the twelve-string into something foreign and unidentifiable—sounding more Southeast Asian than American— taking listeners back to that acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” from the Nebraska sessions, when the song “sounded alien” and out of place (Marsh Two Hearts, 257). After a full minute of playing an unknown guitar solo with a slide, Springsteen dropped into a blues pattern and belted out the first lines of the 1980s’ hit. The words were familiar, but the entire rhythm and delivery of the lyric were upended and toppled. Without the familiar synthesizer and the driving pop of the snare drum, the crowd was thrown into another moment of confusion. One viewer named Jeff tweeted out: “Why does Bruce Springsteen redo his hits like this? Born In USA version sucks! He should do it the way we know!” Another called the acoustic styling “the oddest version of Born in the USA I’ve ever heard” (Horse Capture). Yet, in many respects, negative remarks about the song were coming from a small minority. Many in attendance called the acoustic set potent and stirring, and as one listener observed, reclaiming “Born in the U.S.A.” from the 1980s, turned it into a song that “a lot of people probably heard . . . for the first time tonight” (Campbell). Hearing “Born in the U.S.A.” for the first time was exactly what was called for at The Concert of Valor. Maybe people listened to the story of the disillusioned veteran who was shipped off to Vietnam, only to return home to nothing but trauma and instability. Maybe the teller of the story reminded listeners that if we wanted to help him out we need look no further than the penitentiaries or around the fires stoked by the homeless in our cities. When “Born in the U.S.A.” was released in 1984, the wandering veteran was already “ten years burning down the road,” but decades later at The Concert of Valor, he was now “forty years burning down the road,” still with “nowhere to go . . . nowhere to go . . . nowhere to go” (Born in the U.S.A. 1975; The Concert for Valor). Maybe someone listened

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as Springsteen repeated those lines over and over, reminding everyone that there are still disillusioned Vietnam veterans out there, lost, confused, and still “Born in the U.S.A.” Springsteen closed his set at The Concert for Valor by giving the crowd a memorable version of “Dancing in the Dark,” but even that feel-good tune sounded moody and uneasy. Given the negative response that many in attendance gave The Boss that night, the title of the closing number was not only ironic, but also quite appropriate. Before taking his leave, Springsteen raised his guitar into the air, a gesture of thanks to the crowd—and to all veterans—including the more than 58,000 names on the National Mall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In many people’s eyes, Springsteen had pushed a political agenda by coming to The Concert for Valor to sing about the Vietnam War, but he actually played it quite safe. He gave the crowd and organizers exactly what they wanted, even if the music was played on his own terms. It could have been worse. He could have exposed the wound hidden in the darkness at the edge of the National Mall. He could have taken everyone back to face “The Wall.”

10 “But people are strangers”: Lyric narratives and ethics on Paul Simon’s roads Alexander Hollenberg

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lthough aficionados of Paul Simon’s music may not at first consider the road as a particularly dominant lyrical motif in the singer-songwriter’s expansive collection, Simon transforms the road into a space of and for narrative. That is, beyond being merely a symbolic setting, or site of contemplation, the road also becomes a space of complex and curious happenings for many of Simon’s speakers and narrators. Of course, contemplative moments still occur along Simon’s roads—his lyrics, famously cerebral, have often been cited for their “folk rock formalism and . . . academic poetic style” (Holden 73)—and such meditation is central to the shifting modes of ethical negotiation that this chapter argues are central to Simon’s road music. However, this mode of lyrical introspection, which is so pervasive in twentieth-century poetry, often manifests in Simon’s road lyrics by means of the careful mediation of experienced incidents—of events—on the road. I suggest, then, that when Simon does sing about the road, it typically comes into being through a conspicuously hybrid form, what James Phelan has identified as “lyric narrative.” If, for Phelan, lyric can be defined rhetorically as “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion about his or her meditations on something” (635), and narrative is “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion for some purpose(s) that something happened” (631), then lyric narrative occupies a space between the two. Indeed, Simon’s road

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lyrics persistently supplement and reimagine the American road narrative by mobilizing moments of contemplative critique that are specifically occasioned through the lyric form. But what is the nature of such critique? How does the road become a space of transformative, or at least, alternative ethics? And alternative to what? This chapter examines the ways Simon’s road songs operate as modes of aesthetic wandering—that is, as texts that explore the uncertainty of the road as it oscillates between a space of escape and a site of encounter, where notions of the strange and the estranged are persistently negotiated, and where form itself wanders beyond established folk byways. In early songs, such as “America” and “Papa Hobo,” and later ones such as “Hearts and Bones” and “Graceland,” the road figures as a prominent site of ethical inquiry, but such ethics, I argue, are always productively intertwined with narrative (and musical) discourse. Paying particular attention to the ways Simon’s lyric narratives stage relationships and relationality on the road, this chapter asks how Simon’s songbook constructs the road lyric as an exploration of responsibility and, more largely, a dynamic search for an ethically viable version of America.

“America” and shared narrative construction It is telling that Simon cites Chuck Berry as his “first really major influence” and that “Maybellene,” in particular “was one of [his] favorite Chuck Berry songs and records” (Zollo Songwriters, 93). The song invokes a powerful romance of American automobile culture in the mid-1950s. As the narrator is “motivatin’ over the hill” in his V-8 Ford, he lays his sights upon Maybellene in her Cadillac (lines 4–7). Here, the road manifests as a space of pursuit and male power: if the “openness” of the road signals a degree of mobile freedom for Berry’s speaker, then it is a freedom only available to him. Maybellene, by the end of the narrative, is “caught” (line 27), and the repeated refrain—“Oh, Maybellene, why can’t you be true?” (line 1)—further suggests that the road is no outlet, no escape from gendered power and the stasis of convention, but rather a space in which such conventions are repeated and re-inscribed. In fact, Warren Belasco reads “Maybellene” as a reenactment of frontier identity formation. Drawing on George Pierson’s, The Moving Americans, Belasco argues that the “motivatin’” within Berry’s song is an expression of the regenerative “frontier-style movement” that operates within America even when the literal frontier is closed (263). Furthermore, according to Belasco, “Both mass motoring and African-American based popular music

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would take over where Turner’s West left off. . . . Each offered the crucial chance to ‘strip off the garments of civilization,’ . . . to reestablish contact ‘with the simplicity of primitive society’” (263). Through his invocation of Frederick Jackson Turner’s reductive (and ethically dubious) primitivism, Belasco neatly packages “Maybellene” within a familiar teleology of America. He hears in Berry’s song a narrative of progress, a progress marked by a “free” and rejuvenating movement toward a more dominant American character and life. If the innocence of “Maybellene” rests in its energetic approval of masculine freedom on the road—a freedom constituted through an obverse, feminized lack—then Simon’s “America,” from the Bookends album, suggests a productive counter-narrative. Critics have pointed to its “panorama of restless, paved America” and its “drama of shared loneliness on a bus trip with cosmic implications” (Holden 73). Pete Fornatale similarly gestures at the ways its characters, Kathy and the unnamed narrator, navigate an ambivalent nation “between despair and hope, optimism and disillusionment” (89). But more than this, “America,” through its narrative structuring—through its insistence on dialogue rather than monologue, and through its self-consciously nonteleological sequences—presents a subtle yet forceful ethical revision of Berry’s frontier-style movements. In Simon’s song, as the couple moves through Michigan, Pittsburgh, and New Jersey, they do so in an effort “to look for America” together (line 4). Notably, America is conceived in this lyric narrative as an ambiguously shared space. Throughout, the narrator attempts to dialogue, directly addressing his companion Kathy at multiple moments. Though Kathy directly responds only once, this dialogic attempt situates American space as potentially relational and plural rather than singular. Part and parcel to this spatial revision is the way the song questions the very physicality of America. The portability and ephemerality of the speaker’s “real estate” suggests an ironic awareness of America not as a physical land but as a metaphoric space (line 2). Michigan is not real; it is a “dream” (line 6). America is imagined only in terms of “look[ing]”—that is, as not yet fully conceived, conquered, or possessed. Indeed, from the very beginning, Simon’s song sets itself up as a contestation of frontier values that would privilege physical dominance over the land. According to Turner, to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which

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comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. (227–28) In Simon’s “America,” such embodied mastery is absent. Dominant individualism is replaced by sharing—of space, of dreams, and, importantly, of narrative itself. The bus, for example, is a space between spaces, a temporary and uncertain site whose ethical value derives not from a fixed destination that will ultimately be possessed but through the sharing of stories that occurs within it. During the song’s interlude, the “laughing” and “games” that Simon’s lovers play within the moving space represents a moment of shared narrative construction: the two collaboratively recreate a fellow passenger as a spy with a bowtie camera (lines 9–12). Here, characters adopt roles of both narrator and narratee; they both speak and listen to each other. The storygame, valuable insofar as it simultaneously attends to and lampoons the Cold War containment culture that produces such fear, testifies to the ways in which narrative mediates the exigencies of historical context. If Turner argues that the frontier occasions a demonstrable artistic “lack,” then the shared aesthetic of these two characters points in a decidedly different direction: that is to say, in the act of building a story together—however small and anecdotal—the two lovers actively compensate for their feelings of loss amid a dominant and “aching” narrative of fear that threatens to overwhelm them (line 18). Thus, this moment of storytelling, insofar as it reimagines the pair not as isolated from the world but as active participants in the construction of new story-worlds, revises Turnerian power as aesthetic power. More than this, it is a moment of mutuality as opposed to dominant individualism, where perspectives and voices, while not perfectly wedded, move closely toward each other, accountable as they are to the larger story that they can only tell together. The interlude enacts, more abstractly, what I would like to call a moment of aesthetic wandering. To wander is to suggest an encounter with American space marked more by curiosity and engagement than linearity and closure. To wander is to defer progress, both national and narrational. Simon’s lyric narrative produces a decidedly different ethics from Berry’s “Maybellene” precisely because its discourse time slows down during the interlude to allow for this mutual story-game to occur. This bridge is also where narrative and lyric productively mingle: as listeners, we are confronted with a pause in the progression of the larger road narrative, though, curiously, this pause manifests as a story-within-a-story, or hypodiegetic narrative. The slowing of discourse time, in other words, engenders a narrative that is simultaneously progressing and not progressing. Whereas the vigorously advancing thrust of “Maybellene” is enacted through the straightforward recuperative

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transition from disequilibrium to equilibrium (Maybellene flees, Maybellene is caught), Simon’s discourse is much less sure of itself. Just as America is itself something only ever “look[ed] for” and never found, Simon’s discursive technique implicitly promotes a decelerated and aestheticized relationship with one’s national space. The musical discourse of “America” is similarly germane to such wanderings. Musicologist James Bennighof notes that Simon “varies the harmonic focus on the tonic to convey varying degrees of motion that are expressed in the text” (35). Further, the idea of travel is itself constituted through a “bass line that focuses clearly on the tonic by traveling resolutely, one step per three-beat measure, down the scale from the tonic note D to the subdominant note G” (35). This bass line is repeated throughout the song, but as Bennighof observes, its repetition is also marked by variation. During the bridge, it is “slightly altered” and in the final verse it is juxtaposed with “some varied harmonies” (35, 36). On one level, such modified iterations signal the productive possibilities of aesthetic wandering: just as the lovers’ story-games allow them to manage a dominant cultural fear by playfully reimagining a nonthreatening form of otherness, the bass line variations suggest a creative encounter with sonic “difference.” On another level, such musical repetition may in fact work as an important counterpoint to the narrative text. Bennighof argues that the bass descent “emphasizes that time is passing once again” (35). Indeed, the interlude, with its slowing of discourse time, is also an attempt on one diegetic level to “kill time.” On the bus, the lovers “play games with the faces” and later “look at the scenery” (lines 10,15). If the musical discourse is thus reminding its listeners of time’s forward movement, Simon’s characters themselves are at odds with such progression. They prefer to linger within the moment—and within the space of the bus itself—and allow their imaginations to wander beyond the limitations of the temporalized space in which they find themselves. In this sense, the musical counterpoint helps to generate a significant temporal dimension to the story-world against which the two lovers implicitly differentiate themselves through their shared acts of narrative construction, on the one hand, and personal acts of chrono-resistance, on the other. Significantly, Simon also offers conspicuous geographical markers that differentiate his characters’ travel from the westward push of the American frontier. The song’s spatial movements track roughly eastward, from Michigan to Pittsburgh to New Jersey. For Turner, American development is constituted through the spatio-temporal movement West: The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record

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of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system. (198) If Turner’s thesis relies upon a teleology of national development that clearly privileges the move West into “free lands” (211), Simon’s “America” is, in essence, a symbolic move backward. Subtly, Simon’s narrative dissociates itself from Turner’s social evolutionary model whose “progress from savage conditions” relies upon an uncomfortable slippage from contact to trespass to cultural extermination (Turner 202). Instead, Simon’s ethics are constituted through moments of intra-narrative responsibility. Not only is the interlude’s moment of shared story construction predicated upon the capacity to remain accountable to another’s imaginative constructs but, at the same time, one’s aesthetic wanderings are consistently accompanied by limitations: the reality of (musical) time emphasized by the repeated bass line punctures the illusion of complete freedom or escape from one’s national (con)text.

A note on “Papa Hobo” and unnarrated autopia Whereas in “America,” narrative deceleration constitutes a significant ethical revision of national identity formation, in “Papa Hobo” narrative progression all but stops. While there are small, momentary happenings within the song, it does in large part tend toward lyric within the lyric-narrative hybrid model. In and of itself, this is no remarkable thing; however, the relative stasis of the song helps to communicate a heightened critique of its subject matter: the failed autopia of Detroit, or what urban critics from as early as the 1950s would call “an empty dream” (Foster “Automobile”, 34). The imagistic quality of Simon’s lyrics produces a potent disjunctive effect, as the epicenter of American automotive culture—with its concomitant promise of movement— idles amid the smog. This immobility is emphasized through Simon’s shortened line-phrases, often constructed as standalone prepositional phrases (“In the morning” [line 4]), ambiguous imperatives (“Sweep up” [line 11]), apostrophes (“Detroit, Detroit” [line 15]), and other various nonprogressive grammatical constructions. Whereas a song such as Bruce Springsteen’s

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“Born to Run,” is similarly critical of an urban space that exists as an antithesis to mobility, calling it a “death trap” and “suicide rap” (lines 6–7), Simon’s lyric is no paean to car culture or its liberating possibilities. Laurence Goldstein suggests that poets of the road face a particular challenge when attempting to communicate road experience through lyric: “Traversal of the open road has the paradoxical effect of making elements of the landscape more organically related—hurled together in the field of vision an accelerated speed—and more discrete because seen by glimpses” (237). Simon, unlike Springsteen, disengages. He removes the speed from automotive culture, and, as such, transforms the autopia into a contemplative and disjunctive space. In fact, the series of disconnected images that comprises Detroit in this particular song produces not merely a dystopic setting, but an “unnarrated” space.1 It is a space of indeterminacy, of gaps, where story presents itself but then quickly disappears. The second (and final) verse, in particular, presents us with situations that both demand and refuse narrativization as the narrator hints at events and actants but never wholly follows through. Who is Papa Hobo? How has the speaker been “sweeping up tips” (line 12)? What did the weatherman lie about in Detroit? Bennighof asks similar questions, concluding that the song “epitomizes Simon’s inclination to make use of textual ideas that seem intriguing in their own right, regardless of the degree to which they can be synthesized into a coherent narrative or message” (57). While I agree with this formulation, I would also argue that such questions are the consequence of a text that challenges the very ethics of interpretive synthesis. That is to say, by suggesting the possible presence of narrative without revealing it, the song demands that we withhold our interpreting selves; it solicits moments of interpretive self-abnegation where we might refuse to impose our own forms of narrative closure upon the disjunctive space-as-other. Whereas “America” privileges shared acts of narrative construction, “Papa Hobo” questions such co-creation between audience and teller. The text implicitly resists our interpretive mastery over it; the story-world, because of its implied-yet-missing incidents, is unknowable. This is, in essence, another layer to the idea of aesthetic wandering discussed above. “Papa Hobo’s” simultaneous opposition to and invocation of narrative offers its listeners potential imaginative pathways without ever forcing one upon them. And while, in a sense, “free,” these interpretive wanderings are still ultimately accountable to the reality of the lyrical unnarration.

1

According to Gerald Prince, unnarration refers to “the ellipses underlined by a narrator, indicated through a retroactive filling in, or inferable from the significant lacunae in the chronology of events” (118). For Robyn Warhol, it solicits readers “to participate imaginatively in co-creating the narrative” (623).

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Ethics of distance in “Hearts and Bones” “Hearts and Bones,” released in 1982, returns to a more conjunctive narrative structure. As with “America,” it tells the story of two lovers; however, here they are older, married then separated, traveling to the American Southwest and back again. A mature song in both subject and structure, it is less concerned with the discovery of a shared place within the American space than it is with the borders—physical and affective—that arise between people who may no longer be able to share narratives. When writing about this song in particular, critics often move quickly to biography—a mode of explication in which Simon himself has participated. Simon has famously noted that the song’s first line, “One and one half wandering Jews,” was written about his former wife, Carrie Fisher, who was half Jewish (Zollo Songwriters on Songwriting, 100). Still, the song is much richer, narratologically, when we consider more fully the opening scene in which those one-and-a-half Jews wander through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. Unlike “America,” this narrative is told extra-diegetically in the present tense, with zero (panoramic) focalization. This perspectival separation from the scene engenders an expansiveness to the national space that is augmented through the narrator’s diction: the repetition of “wandering,” for example, removes any presupposed linearity from the journey and also productively juxtaposes against the structural signification attached to “the arc of a love affair” that is the two lovers’ relationship (line 9). Further, by repeatedly invoking the character of the wandering Jew, the text moves toward a contemplation of diaspora itself. To construct identity here as diasporic is to recognize American identity as always already spatialized—as constituted through the navigation of one’s setting. Interestingly, this follows a key Turnerian assumption that construes spatial identity as predicated upon the idea of the Western frontier “as the line of most rapid and effective Americanization” (188). For Turner, America is thus an assimilative space, whereas Simon indicates the ways American space may constitute and reaffirm alterity. The Spanish “Sangre de Cristo” engenders a significant border within the text: the diasporic Jewish identity does not superficially “belong” here culturally or religiously (line 5). That’s not to say the space is uninviting; certainly, the rainbows and “mountain passes slipping into stone” suggest the opposite (lines 10–11). But the apposition of Spanish and English does gesture toward the heterogeneity of American space and, moreover, to the idea that intercultural spaces cannot ever be perfectly reduced or comprehended by a singular, monological perspective. Subsequently, Simon’s panoramic narrative technique contributes a substantial ethical layer to the text that would otherwise be lost were

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the focalization internal. Though it subsumes both characters’ individual perspectives, it does not synthesize them into a cohesive and coherent whole. As with the heterogeneous space, the larger narration is dialogic. The song’s bridge, for example, observes interpersonal resentment in terms of unbridgeable space: the characters resist each other’s plans and, subsequently, question each other’s love (29–40). By construing the failing relationship through a decidedly spatial rhetoric (a possible trip to Mexico), where the reluctance to cross national borders reflects a larger inability to traverse intersubjective borders, and where wandering transforms from an act of interpersonal and (inter)national discovery into a potentially isolating experience, the lyric narrative effectively contemplates the potential incommensurability of diasporic identities within and between themselves. To ask, in other words, why one cannot love another for “where I am” is to recognize that the ethical problem of how to love—of how to be with another person—is a problem exacerbated by the shared experience of space, rather than solved by it (line 40). While for Turner American identity is redeemed through coordinated and collective travel westward, in “Hearts and Bones,” such shared moments on the road lead to more entrenched, guarded borders. The song ultimately bears out this separation. By the end of the narrative the wanderers “return to their natural coasts” (line 43), the pluralized noun affirming that they have not returned to the same coast. Key to Simon’s larger lyrical voice across his oeuvre, according to Paul Zollo, is his capacity to “hold both sides of a question at once” or “demonstrate a marriage of opposites” (Songwriters on Songwriting, 88). Such Frostian ambivalence (consider poems such as “Fire and Ice” and “Home Burial”) is, in “Hearts and Bones,” a consequence of the narrative focalization. The simultaneous vision of both actors and both coasts removed from one another solicits an aesthetic experience more in line with witnessing than judgment. Though the characters’ emotional call and response shows that they are participating in a difficult process of judging each other, Simon’s larger narrative does not ask the same of its audience; rather, we quietly observe, withholding ourselves from choice, wandering between perspectives. The “arc of a love affair” within the space of this song is only ever waiting to be “restored” (line 50). So too does the narrative arc end ambivalently, with the pair speculating “who had been damaged the most” (line 46). Nonetheless, this narrative reluctance toward a clear resolution of instabilities is compensated by Simon’s move, in the final verse, into a lyric mode that envisions an ideal unity of “hearts and bones” that “won’t come undone” (lines 54, 53). The contemplative move by the extradiegetic narrator serves to imaginatively construct a possible world for the two wanderers of the narrative. Although the story ends on a moment of failed intersubjectivity,

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where it is better to wander alone than together, and thus care of the self trumps care of the other,2 here the narrator supplements that narrative “reality” with lyrical possibility. In effect, this narrator wanders away from the story-world and its geographic borders, refusing to accept the narrative’s uncomfortable remainders. While a narrator who is at odds with his own story may appear as an aesthetic weakness, such self-division, I would argue, enriches the larger song. The lyric revision testifies to both the emotional and aesthetic difficulty of remaining “distant” from others, whether they are one’s stories, one’s characters, or one’s lovers.

Collaboration and colocation in “Graceland” There is more written about Graceland than perhaps any other of Simon’s albums. Academics and music journalists alike have found much critical fodder surrounding the album’s collaborative production with South African musicians in the midst of the 1980 U.N. cultural boycott against apartheid. According to the U.N., Simon did in fact violate the terms of the boycott, which “request[ed] all states to take steps to prevent all cultural, academic, sporting, and other exchanges with South Africa” (Maren 22). Simon, for his part, reiterated his own complete opposition to the apartheid system, as well as his refusal to perform in South Africa (Maren 23). Such remarkable saturation of popular music into the realms of global politics and institutionalized racism, while not unheard of, was (and is) especially pronounced with this album. Moreover, this visibility brought especial clarity to the complex intertwining of ethics and aesthetics. Several critics at the time expressed their hesitations over an album that, though deeply mired within a repressive political context, refused lyrically to engage in those politics. Robert Christgau, for example, argued in 1986 that Graceland “circle[s] around an evasive ideology, the universalist humanism that is the secret intellectual vice of centrist liberals out of their depth. It’s not so much what Simon says as what he doesn’t say” (188). That Simon’s collaboration with black South African musicians and his adaptations of umbaqanga (Soweto-based “township jive”) could be potentially appropriated by an apartheid regime determined to prove to the world the morality of its system was a justifiable fear. If Graceland’s aesthetic sharings were to become a signifier not of cultural vitality but political legitimacy, then it would threaten 2

Simon returns to this theme later in his career in “Another Galaxy,” another song about bordercrossing: “There is a moment, a chip in time/When leaving home is the lesser crime” (lines 7–8).

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the act of stigmatization so central to the anti-apartheid strategies of many in the international community. Similarly, Louise Meintjes argues that Graceland is a “polysemic sign vehicle that comes to stand for social collaboration” (37), but such collaboration, in fact, serves to construct a deeper ethical ambiguity: Graceland’s music and metacommentary are not presented as discourses about power discrepancies based specifically on race and located specifically in South Africa. It is left up to the individual listener to make sense of the musical collaboration in her or his own terms. This equivocation permits multiple and often conflicting paths of inference. It can thus serve the interests of various and even opposing sociopolitical groups. These may even include groups that Simon and the collaborating musicians would not choose to support. (39) While, surely, the “individual listener” is involved in a process of interpretation that is inevitably personal, this does not mean that texts do not solicit certain types of readings, some of which are more relevant than others. In the case of Graceland, South Africa is always a specific intertextual location, regardless of lyrical denotation, precisely because of the inextricability of musical discourse with story, of form with content. Simon’s story-worlds on the album are grounded by black South Africa, by Soweto, and by musicians such as Chikapa “Ray” Phiri and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. In other words, South Africa is constitutive of the narrative worlds Simon creates. The road narrative of “Graceland”—township jive and American pop—is especially provocative because it is a discursive act of co-location. In this song, specific geographic markers of the Mississippi River and Memphis help trace a route through the American South as the autodiegetic (character) narrator tells of a road trip with his son, “the child of my first marriage” (line 13), and his tentative belief that they will be “received/In Graceland” (lines 15–16). It is a pilgrimage that not only imbricates the political upon the personal but also fuses racial and national signifiers. As Christgau observes, it is unsettling that “somehow the world’s foremost slave state is a haven of grace” (184). Clearly, the song negotiates some troubling antitheses: in its discursive move toward racial collaboration, it also locates a historic center of American oppression as the redemptive destination—a destination at which the characters never arrive. This lack of arrival within the narrative is particularly significant because, like “Hearts and Bones” before it, it constitutes, at best, an ambivalent resolution of narrative instabilities. By the end of the song, the pair will “maybe” be received in Graceland (line 54), but maybe not. If the outward purpose of the road trip is to get somewhere, that fusion of person into place—that immersive experience—never actually occurs.

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That such fusion never transpires within the story is significant with respect to the musical discourse itself. Christgau, drawing upon David Copland’s study of South African music, In Township Tonight!, uses “syncretism” to describe the album. Syncretic music, according to Christgau “reconciles different or opposing principles” but simultaneously allows each element to “retain its integrity” (181). Syncretism, then, in contrast to fusion or integration, presupposes the autonomy of distinct musical modes; it is a discursive technique that privileges juxtaposition over synthesis and vacillation over smooth resolution. I suggest, then, it is through his discursive choices—through his conscious layering of umbaqanga and American rock—Simon demonstrates an implicit awareness not simply of the liberating power of collaboration but of the potential losses that may occur when aesthetic collaboration transforms into aesthetic assimilation. Certainly through its musical forms, “Graceland” testifies to the aesthetic value of intercultural sharing, but its syncretism also suggests that over-sharing may undermine the integrity of the other. Thus, when the characters travel “through the cradle of the civil war,” readers (but not listeners) will note the lack of capitalization in the original liner notes. Bennighof argues that this enriches the symbolic resonance of the historical reference with “its possible application to domestic strife” as well as national strife (112). I would argue the image is even richer than that. Given that the song is structured through distinctive umbaqanga rhythms, given the commanding presence of such players as guitarist Ray Phiri, bassist Bakithi Kumalo, and drummer Vusi Khumalo, and given the apartheid context against which these players are composing, this image stands as a potent reminder of the very real and very present historical moment of racial subjugation that informs the album as a whole. This is to say, the “civil war” stands not only as a distant image of a shared national past, but as an image of another nation’s potential future. Importantly, it is through such symbolic wanderings that “Graceland,” as a whole, becomes a co-locative narrative. The propitious American topography of redemption comes into being only through the presence of its bleak South African counterpart. Consequently, the song retains the integrity of a radically diverse set of cultural experiences. Such syncretism—in musical and narrative technique— bespeaks an ethics of collaboration that is hyper-aware of itself. The South African jive structure does not allow the conventional American road narrative structure to overwhelm the interpretive process. This is, in a word, just as much a song about South Africa as it is about America. More than that, the umbaqanga form compels subtle changes in the standard organizing principles of popular American music: if “Graceland” starts out as a fairly typical pop song in terms of its narrative lyric structure, where verses correspond to narrative exposition and choruses to lyric contemplation, the jive rhythms do not allow for such familiar segmentation. As Bennighof notes, Simon’s

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choruses move toward the expository, whereas the third verse is especially heavy with commentary: The evolution of rhetorical function is one of several means by which Simon uses the structure of the song to reflect the desire for transformation that is expressed in the lyrics. Others are more specifically musical. Most striking among these is Simon’s treatment of the melody, which varies in some interesting ways from chorus to chorus, but to a remarkable degree among the three verses. (112) Indeed, the South African jive structure of the song, in its influence over narrative discourse, compels Simon to wander away from familiar pop forms. The insistence of the umbaqanga aesthetic mode as an autonomous yet accountable form demonstrates a larger skepticism toward the assimilative power of dominant and popular modes of discourse. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that in the final verse the narrator contemplates, with some ambivalence, the fact of obligation: it is wholly unclear whether he feels “obliged to defend/ Every love” or not (lines 51–53). To whom are we beholden? How does such obligation come into being through our lives and through the aesthetics by which we choose to construct those lives? In its wanderings between aesthetic forms, between histories, between nations, “Graceland” makes such ethical questions powerfully present.

Wanderings and directions The intersections between ethics and aesthetics within Simon’s road songs are multiple and complex. Although this discussion is by no means exhaustive, it does gesture at the ways Simon’s formal techniques reimagine the road— and lyric narrative itself—as a compelling space of interpretive negotiation, wonder, and wandering. Whether Simon’s roads are sites through which frontier identities are revised, hermeneutic responsibility is reconsidered, intersubjectivity is challenged, or where collaborative aesthetic action is itself reconceived as a sign of the complex accountabilities between self and other, they all testify to the potent inevitability of encounter within American life. In one lesser-known lyric, “Cars are Cars,” Simon writes, Cars are cars All over the world But people are strangers They change with the curve. (lines 19–22)

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A simple observation, Simon’s recognition of the ultimate strangeness of people—their irreducibility, their mutability, their otherness—despite the potentially homogenizing spaces that surround and sometimes overwhelm them, gestures at his own aesthetic motivations. To encounter and explore such strangeness through art is to respond to what is, in Simon’s lyric narratives, an ethical necessity: to listen beyond the borders of our understanding.

11 Gender is over: Transgender narrative homecomings, punk music, and the road Evelyn Deshane

Introduction

I

n 2014, with a photograph of transgender actress Laverne Cox on the cover, TIME Magazine declared that the Western world was at a “Transgender Tipping Point” (Steinmetz). Since then, more depictions of transgender characters, some of whom are written and played by trans actors, have been cropping up in our popular media, and discussions about issues that affect transgender people are happening more often. In 2016, questions concerning “the bathroom bill” in North Carolina seemed to be on everyone’s mind and still are since the state legislature confirmed that decision. The bathroom bill is the common name that surrounds statutes or legislation put into place that regulate the use of public facilities, specifically bathrooms and change rooms, and who can use them. When North Carolina governor Pat McCrory put into place the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act (also known as bill H2), he declared that, in government buildings, people could only use facilities that matched their birth certificate. Many news media outlets dubbed the law “AntiLGBT” because of the way in which it places transgender people at odds with their birth certificate and especially those who do not “pass” by cisgender beauty and gender expectations (Tan). Furthermore, the law publicized the common trope that transgender women are the most dangerous people to

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have in women’s bathroom, since they could be men in disguise and attack other patrons, especially children (Villarreal). Though this topic has been around for decades (see Villarreal’s full article for a comprehensive history), North Carolina’s policy became symbolic for the more negative aspects of this “transgender tipping point” in the West. Many businesses (such as PayPal) pulled upcoming projects from North Carolina, actors boycotted the state, and several musicians like Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, and Pearl Jam refused to play in North Carolina as a way to protest the law. Laura Jane Grace of the punk band Against Me! was among the musicians who protested, but her method was slightly different. After coming out in 2012 as a transgender woman, she has become one of the more iconic public figures in this transgender tipping point. But instead of boycotting North Carolina for its treatment of transgender people, she and her band went directly into Durham. Before the show, they printed the H2 bill on toilet paper and stocked it in the club’s bathroom and halfway through their set, Grace burned her birth certificate on stage. What Grace notes in her many interviews and Twitter updates about the stunt is that—though she is of the group that is precisely affected by the bathroom bill the most (since she is a trans woman who does not always pass1)—she must play the club and continue on tour. Unlike Springsteen and other musicians who protested, Grace cannot opt out of the trans issues presented in this tipping point precisely because she is trans. Instead, she must find a new way to exist in this space—and in her case, make her music and her band also exist, and rebel against, this new narrative placed over a space like a bathroom, a stage, and a state. “What better way to get a fire going?” Grace said in an interview with Michelle Ruiz in May 2016 for Vogue magazine. “I came to North Carolina to be reborn.” By burning her birth certificate on stage, Grace ultimately accomplished two things: she engaged in a new ending to her transgender narrative, one that critiqued and countered the standard transgender medicalized narrative, and she protested the H2 bill in a way that allowed her existence as a trans woman to become valid in a specific and highly contested location. This second point has been the most elusive for Grace on her personal journey of identity, because at some point in her earlier career as a punk musician, she has played in North Carolina as Tom Gabel. As transgender scholar Jay Prosser notes, Grace’s journey for identity, like most other transgender narratives, derives 1

Trans women tend to be the most vulnerable people using public bathrooms, especially trans women of color, as documented in Pittman’s article. Though Grace is white, and therefore occupies a privileged position, she is still at risk for this violence because she is openly trans and a celebrity making her more visible in these kinds of spaces.

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its meaning through the constant movement of the road and the search for a home. As I explore in this chapter, there was no way for Laura Jane Grace to end her transgender story other than by going on tour in North Carolina. Her gender story must be a road narrative, even in a country that doesn’t seem to want her to exist.

Transgender storytelling Transgender people, and the stories they tell about themselves, have been undergoing the same type of re-interpretation of old rules, policies, and narratives that Laura Jane Grace’s story epitomizes. The typical “transgender narrative” that most cisgender people in the West are familiar with is one that has a typical narrative trajectory: the transgender person notices a difference in childhood, they become upset by that difference, they seek to fix this difference through the help of doctors and surgical forces, their desired gender is created, and all prior trauma becomes healed. Christine Jorgenson, one of the first people in the United States to publically transition into a trans woman, is the best-known example of this narrative structure, which is documented in her A Personal Autobiography. Chaz Bono, Janet Mock, and Jennifer Finney Boylan are all modern examples of this narrative as well. Their stories posit two main ideological structures. First: The transgender narrative is a medical one, steeped in and dependent upon doctors’ approval and surgical intervention. Second: It is also a personal story of self-realization or selfdiscovery; inherently, it is a story that fits the genre form of an autobiography. At their core, both of these structures remove the validation of gender identity from the transgender person’s perspective and focus on cisgender and institutional approval. Even the ways in which the transgender self-discovery happens must occur in a very narrow and specific trajectory that is dependent upon a religious underpinning. This religious narrative hinges on confession, as Eva Illouz notes in her book Cold Intimacies on the subject of therapeutic or “self-realized” (47) narratives. These autobiographies function on the basis that everything has divine hidden meaning and purpose in the subject’s (and in this case, the autobiographer and transgender person’s) real life: “In the same way that human miseries are explained by the assumption of a hidden divine plan,” Illouz writes, “in the therapeutic narrative, the choices that seem detrimental to us serve some hidden need and purpose” (47). These detrimental choices in the transgender autobiography include the trauma of misrecognition of the gendered self, an un-accepting family, and in Grace’s case, a long documented problem with alcohol and relationships (Grace True Trans).

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Since the transgender narrative depends on institutional approval, the very act of North Carolina’s H2 bill reinforces the trauma and struggle that seem to go hand-in-hand with the self-discovery narrative. In order to use the public facilities in North Carolina and therefore obtain institutional approval, a trans person must have had the required surgery in order to be reissued a birth certificate that matches. In order to obtain the surgery in many states, including North Carolina, a trans person must have therapeutic approval, which often means telling their gender story in a form that fits Illouz’s definition. Therefore, obtaining transgender surgery often becomes a measure of selfwill and mental ability, a way to seek individuation through tools that are fundamentally flawed. As Judith Butler and Dan Irving have pointed out, the medicalization of the transgender person’s body hinges on the same ideological structures I’ve documented, while also complicating the bodily narrative of productivity and dis/ability. Irving points out how surgery regularly will be denied to members of society who cannot be “productive” due to illness, disability, or queerness (45), while Butler tackles the specific language of gender dysphoria as a disorder2 and the way in which it pathologizes the trans person. The term “dysphoria” comes from the Greek meaning “difficult to bear”; when combined with the psychological language of a disorder, someone with gender identity disorder (GID) experiences a difficult-to-bear feeling about the gender they were born into at birth. Butler acknowledges that this diagnosis codes the transgender patient with pathological language, thereby imbuing their life with suffering and more trauma in order to make it intelligible to the medical institution. Once it becomes intelligible to the medical institution, the construct of an idealized transgender patient emerges, along with an accompanying narrative. This diagnosis and narrative, Butler writes, makes assumptions about fathers and mothers, and what normal family life is, and should have been. It assumes the language of correction, adaptation, and normalization. It seeks to uphold the gender norms of the world as it is currently constituted and tends to pathologize any effort to produce gender in ways that fail to conform to existing norms (or, fails to conform to a certain dominant fantasy of what existing norms actually are). It is a diagnosis that has been given to people against their will, and it is 2

Butler’s article was published in 2004, when a diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder was needed to medically transition. In 2012, the DSM-V dropped the “disorder” and replaced the diagnosis with gender dysphoria (Beredjick). I’ve continued to use Butler’s article because her critique of the medical system is still valid. Even when dropping the “disorder” a diagnosis is still medically necessary and relevant in order to transition, which still makes the patient’s situation as fraught as before.

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a diagnosis that has effectively broken the will of many people, especially queer and trans youth. (277) Butler critiques the medical practitioners who reinforce (and therefore make many trans people reinforce) this problematic and essentialized narrative. However, she also acknowledges that this diagnosis is often quite necessary in order for insurance to cover the costs of surgery, and for those trans people who need/want surgery, she does not critique them for following this line of thought, only encourages them to challenge this thinking in their day-to-day world (290). With these critiques in mind, the transgender narrative becomes especially fraught. Either trans people conform to a problematic narrative that has been approved by institutions run on cisgender standards of gender identity and beauty, or they fail that narrative and create their own stories which rebel against this narrative (which, in turn, still derives meaning from the first ideological system). Both the transgender successes and “failures” end up feeling caught between two places and express this fraught interior, psychological landscape by externalizing it onto physical locations. When Christine Jorgensen began her gender transition, she was labeled an “ex-GI” by newspaper outlets and then said to finish her transition as a “blonde beauty”; this identity swap was framed around her travel to Sweden to complete her last surgery before coming back to America as Christine (Prewitt). Her physical body changed through/after an act of travel, thus linking the transgender narrative itself to the trope of the journey. This association between transgender identity and the road has been teased out even more within popular culture, autobiographies, and film adaptations to the point where the very act of going on the road becomes an act of gender transition— even if, by the end of the narrative, the trans person has not received the “final” surgery. The act of travel itself is what matters, and for someone like Laura Jane Grace who has made her living going on the road to play music, she must continue on—even if it means going to North Carolina. Though Bruce Springsteen has been one of the champions of the road in the past several decades (as other writers in this book have documented), his refusal to enter the state ultimately enables a disavowal of the transgender person’s place in a culture of rebellion and protest. As I’ve stated earlier, Grace cannot opt out of going to North Carolina because she cannot opt out of being trans. The bathrooms in North Carolina are no different than the bathrooms anywhere else in the United States for a trans person, which means that she could experience violence by entering this space. So, instead of a boycott, she must find a way to exist in a space that does not want her to exist. Therefore, the best way to do this is to go on the road once again, in hopes of re-affirming

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her gender identity through the act of travel, while also carving herself a new niche in her punk rock community. As it turns out, it’s not the first time Grace has needed to revisit, and rebel against, where she came from.

Against Me!’s National Myths Against Me! was formed in Gainesville, Florida in 1997. At the time, Laura Jane Grace went by the name Tom Gabel and was active in many of the political and anarchist punk communities. In many of Against Me!’s earlier EPs, their anarchist roots are visible through song lyrics and the band’s early photos where they are often sporting mohawks, political buttons, and anarchist symbols. Their first full-length album, Against Me! Is Re-Inventing Axl Rose and their second, Against Me! As The Eternal Cowboy, are the clearest depictions of their anarchist and punk roots, though all of their albums embody punk music style and aesthetic.3 In the song “Reinventing Axel Rose,” the band explicitly links being on the road with their early themes of anarchy. In the first verse of the song, they describe tour life as done for the sake of a plate of food and a place to sleep, and lament and decry the other bands (especially Guns N’ Roses) that count people at the doors and are only concerned with profit. The act of exploring the United States becomes one that is imbued with political meaning as they seek to debunk the “National Myth[s]” (a song title from an earlier EP) of war, profit, and democracy and let everyone know that they are anarchists in a song that declares it (“Baby, I’m an Anarchist”). As Gordon Slethaug documents in earlier chapters of this book, the link between rebellion and the road is especially apparent in the 1950s and 1960s Beat Culture, though by the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Against Me! were traveling, popular media had stopped associating the road directly with rebellion. With the massive highway system put into place, along with a transit and railway system, ways of traveling the United States allowed for people to explore—but also reach their jobs. Movies and TV shows from this era depicted the highway system as something that allowed people to reach their full potential and accomplish 3

When I call Against Me! a punk band, I draw on Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, where he notes that punk style can be “a form of Refusal, [where] the elevation of crime into art (even though, in our case, crimes are only broken codes)” (2). He also notes that “expressive forms and rituals of those in a subordinate group . . . who are alternatively dismissed, denounced, and canonized; treated at different times as threats to public order and as harmless buffoons” (2) can have the same type of style and resonance in punk music. The majority of Against Me!’s lyrics, early or late era, embody a type of refusal as I will continue to document through their past with the anarchist community and gender identity narratives.

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all they needed within a capitalistic system. It’s this capitalistic productive model that Against Me! rebels against in their music, while also taking part in the same system they disavow in their lyrics in order to circulate their music. By playing as a punk band, a genre that Dick Hebdige declares as embodying refusal, Against Me!’s early career documents their attempts to refuse the very life and institutional structures—especially the iconic image of the road— which simultaneously allows them to have success. In the band’s DVD, “We’re Never Going Home”, they continue to link their identity as a punk and politically conscious band while also seeking a way to re-invent themselves under the weight of the capitalistic system. Between concert footage and long shots of the American landscape, the DVD splices in discussions with Fat Mike of NOFX and Fat Wreck Chords (who would later produce their next album) and other people trying to convince the band to sign to their major label. These interviews highlight the complicating factors of the typical “American Dream” and breadwinner ethic, thus displaying what Barbara Ehrenreich described as the “male revolt” (13) seen in most road narratives of the 1950s and 60s—several decades later. Interestingly, on the back of the DVD case, Grace remarks that the tour DVD isn’t representative of who they were as people, only “who we were right then.” The need to view the band, and the personalities of those in the band, as existing in only this specific moment in time becomes yet another marker of the band’s cognitive dissonance comparing what they want to embody ideologically with what they end up needing in order to support the pragmatic side of their career. This cognitive dissonance would only grow as their band became more popular and, simultaneously, as Tom Gabel’s gender identity refused to remain dormant. Their next album was called Searching for a Former Clarity and takes the external and aggressive narrative of an anarchist punk band and starts to represent the need for Grace, the lyricist of the band, to turn inwards and deal with feelings of gender dysphoria. At the time, as Grace notes in True Trans from the 2014 AOL series, she was aware of gender transition when she was young, but wanted to avoid it. She would cycle through phases of believing that she could maintain this image of Tom Gabel, a hyper-masculine and aggressive punk rock anarchist, and often sublimate her desires to become someone more like Joan Jett or Madonna into song writing. In the title track on the Searching album, Grace writes of a deep need for forgiveness about many issues—but her statements about cross-dressing on the title song become even more telling when viewed with the later understanding that she would come out and transition to become a woman. Other songs such as “The Ocean“ and “Thrash Unreal” from the subsequent album New Wave also mirror the inward journey and narrative styling that is common in

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many stories and autobiographies from transgender people. As transgender author and cultural theorist Jay Prosser notes, “transsexual autobiographies underline the continuing importance of narrative for transsexual subjectivity . . . where transsexuality would heal the gendered split of transsexuality [and] the form of autobiography would heal the rupture in gendered plots” (9). Because transition is a “barely livable zone” (12) to Prosser, his main goal in his work Second Skins is to make the transgender person an “authorial subject” (9) on their life and to move away from the highly removed and theoretical methods of discussing trans identity (such as institutional approval and the medical narrative as I’ve discussed earlier) and toward one that also leads to embodiment. For Prosser, “narrative is not only the bridge to embodiment but a way of making sense of transition”; moreover, the narrative story behind the transition itself is the “link between locations” (9), thereby making it a story that is one of consistently searching and moving toward a home. As stated earlier, the transgender narrative is often associated with a journey, but it is a journey where the end goal is surgery, which will lead to the healed gender body and a home in that body. Moreover, the metaphors of the road can be used as a vehicle to express the same type of “barely livable zone” (12) and as a “link between locations” (9) itself; the road becomes a dual, liminal space where belonging and freedom are everywhere and where the land/country itself rejects the person who is on the road, thus mirroring the state of being born in the “wrong” body (a narrative trope that Prosser discusses further). This push-and-pull of the road comes up continuously in Against Me!’s lyrics where they can be searching for an “Edenquest” in earlier songs or where they can never go home again because they will not be the same people when they get there. But while some of the earlier songs link politics with the road and touring, as their music style and lyrics evolved—and I argue, as Grace slowly began to accept her status as a transgender woman— the connection between anarchism drifted away and was completely revised to become the transition-as-travel narrative I’ve discussed earlier, and Prosser has also noted among transgender autobiographies. The shift away from the anarchist perspective is probably the strongest on the song “Americans Abroad” from the album New Wave. The song discusses touring in the most visceral way yet. The lyrics describe the golden arches of McDonald’s and the thrill of expanded horizons and the success of the band, but with a somber note of possible conformity. By acting and participating in this new scene where the band is backed by a major label, appears on Billboard charts, and has been called sell-outs by the former community that used to accept them (as Grace recounts in True Trans), they are forced into a new landscape where Coke and companies they despised have already traveled. Against Me!, and especially Grace, start to see the road as a place

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for conformity, not rebellion. As this realization happens, so does her gradual acceptance for her need to transition. The repeated lines of the song express a nostalgic longing for her anarcho-punk community—but also her former masculinity. The punk community is one that is notorious for being hypermasculine and aggressive, as seen through figureheads like Henry Rollins, Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, and through the rebellion of the Riot Grrrl movement (Leblanc). Grace became one of the guys through her act of touring with Against Me!, though she often resented the hyper-masculine atmosphere (True Trans). Her words in this song can then represent her need not to identify with these men, like not identifying with Coke and corporate sponsors, but since she’s on the stage and performing as Tom Gabel, she’s not so certain she can disavow herself from any identity yet. As we progress to the next album, White Crosses, the anarchist label is dropped completely with the song “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” when the line in the middle of the song declares the revolution a lie. The band has completely left behind their anarcho-punk roots, but with each track the nostalgia that marks this former time period heightens and grows—while Grace’s gender identity and the tension that surrounds it becomes unmanageable.

Gender is over As Jay Prosser notes, “the body of the transsexual becoming is born out of a yearning for a perfect past—that is, not memory but nostalgia: the desire for the purified version of what was, not for the return to home per se (nostos) but to the romanticized ideal of home” (84, emphasis mine). In the songs “Americans Abroad” and “I Was A Teenage Anarchist,” Grace and her band begin to realize that the idealized way in which they wanted to exist in the music scene—and the American landscape—simply will not work; to re-invent Axl Rose or become an eternal cowboy cannot happen since those ideas were nostalgic and romanticized, and these ideas only became stronger when the band rebelled against them. By signing to a major label and obtaining success, they became the thing they sought to change. Once they realized this, instead of opting out of the narrative itself, they sought to confront it in their lyrics and subsequent music videos. As the band went on, the same cycle of nostalgia and its romanticized narrative also affected Grace and her transition. In the song “The Ocean,” Grace writes about the hypothetical woman version of herself; the entire song is framed through a conditional “what if” scenario, not a lived reality of becoming a (trans) woman. The song itself then becomes a landscape for her to create an extended romantic fantasy about

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living by the ocean, having a husband, and calling herself Laura. Similarly, the song “Thrash Unreal” is told from a third-person point-of-view that focuses on a woman in the punk community, how she ages, and what her life has become from living in the past. In an interview on her AOL series, Grace confesses that she wanted to dress up “in drag” for the music video of “Thrash Unreal” as a way to align herself with the woman character in the song. The director vetoed the choice and instead made Grace play in a house party while shirtless, something which Grace hated and was miserable filming (True Trans). When reflecting on these instances, Grace falls into the exact alignment with the self-realization narrative where her prior suffering, especially that of her drinking and dysphoria, now has divine and eternal meaning: she was really transgender all along. The reason her characters/speakers in her lyrics have been wandering alone and feeling lost, along with her anger at the super-aggressive and masculine punk rock community, also have new meaning and understanding. Grace’s “rupture in gendered plots” (Prosser 9) becomes resolved through autobiography in the exact way Prosser and Illouz outline in their texts. More than this, Against Me!’s political themes and critique of national rhetoric can also be viewed as part of the transgender vein of storytelling that Prosser describes. Since the trans narrative hinges on a romanticized nature of the past, and the body itself is transformed into an internal landscape where the trans person must explore in order to finally come home to themselves, nationalist themes often emerge alongside transgender storytelling. The British novel Sacred Country by Rose Tremain is probably the best example of this; in one of the first editions of the book, the cover contains an image of a naked woman who has been bisected and her skin/body turned into an open terrain. The “sacred country” that Tremain explores in this novel about a transgender man is explicitly tied to the British country’s politics and historical era, but also the strife and personal problems of the main characters. Similarly, both the novel Breakfast on Pluto by Patrick McCabe and the film version deal with a transgender woman and her tenuous relationship to the Irish Republican Army. The Crying Game, known as one of the first instances of the “big reveal” moment in transgender cinema (Connelly 78), deals with the same IRA influence on the main characters. Even the medical texts surrounding trans literature are inherently influenced by the European war history, as Pagan Kennedy recounts in her book The First Man-Made Man, since the first plastic surgery for soldiers is what allowed for doctors like Harry Benjamin and Michael Dillon to develop techniques that would also be used on trans women and men. In the shadows of each story about a trans person, whether fictitious or pulled from real life, is another story of imperialism and military history, making the road narratives they engage in caught in a similar

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liminal space: embracing the nation, but also being rejected by it. Moreover, the feeling of being in a body that does not belong to the transgender person thereby also creates a feeling of un-belonging in a physical time and place— something that North Carolina, through the enactment of the bathroom bill, makes visceral. By demanding the birth certificate that marks the transgender person as different, it disrupts the narrative they wish to tell about their lives and simultaneously ejects them from a physical space like a bathroom or an entire state. As Laura Jane Grace remarks in her Vogue interview with Michelle Ruiz in May 2016, “As if a birth certificate is some kind of eternally binding document. I never had any say in what was put on it. No one asked me. And yet, it’s the birth certificate that becomes “the ‘ticket’ [for traveling through the United States].” Grace is already well familiar with the trappings of national rhetoric and has worked on critiquing it when she wrote her prior albums. In her 2014 Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Grace has songs that form her transautobiography, coming-home narrative (such as “True Trans Soul Rebel” which explicitly references home), but she also still evokes and critiques national images and rhetoric (such as in “Osama Bin Laden as the Crucified Christ”). Since Transgender Dysphoria Blues is the first album she wrote and recorded as an out transgender woman, it becomes her chance to become the authorial subject and produce an autobiography, which she then extends in her 2014 AOL series called True Trans, and then in her 2016 memoir entitled Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout. It’s in these subsequent texts where she discusses her life without metaphors or disguised in song lyrics and uses her public image to focus issues related to transgender identity, while also gathering a new fan base of trans, queer, and other LGBTQ youth. Though she enacts the typical transgender narrative discussed before, including vying for institutional/medical support by going on hormones, she does not do so uncritically. Because of her past with the former anarchist dream of an “Edenquest” and her former need to destroy the “National Myth” that built up America, Grace realizes that her identity as a transgender woman was just as susceptible to the exact same type of nostalgic and idealized longing that she struggled with before. In an interview with Rolling Stone, she remarks, Over the last three years, I’ve been on a roller coaster of gender— putting out a record, touring, doing interviews, constantly talking about myself and how I’m relating to gender. And personally, I’ve been dealing with new experiences as an out trans person. I got to the point where I felt like, “Yes! I do not want to fucking think about gender! I just want to exist.” (VozickLevinson)

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For Grace, the state of simply “existing” in the previous quotation is more than just being an out trans person; it means that the standard ending of so many trans autobiographies simply does not work in the same way as doctors, cisgender people, and institutions say it does. According to the criticism of Butler and Irving, as discussed earlier, the medical institution does not always allow trans people to transition, especially if they are people who disrupt our ideas of what normal gender, body, and beauty ideals look like. Many trans men and non-binary people cannot obtain surgery because nothing exists for them (Currah 333). Moreover, even if there were surgery and it were easily accessible for trans people, the implicit need to have it in order to have an ending itself still hinges on the faulty ideological notion that the trans body is a deficient one and must be fixed. While Grace may have embraced the idealized narrative of the trans person at first, falling in line with the appropriate tropes (especially in 2014’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues and her AOL series), like her experience with the anarcho-punk community filled with cognitive dissonance, she had to move beyond it. Her “moving beyond” the typical transgender narrative becomes visceral in the same way she and Against Me! moved beyond their anarchistic roots: they must go on tour once again. Grace already knows she can’t go home again because she’s been declaring it since her first band DVD. To go home, in the trans context Prosser draws on in his work, means Grace must stop telling stories because the final ending of surgery is over, and therefore, the autobiography must end. Because telling stories is precisely what Grace does so well in Against Me!, she refuses to stop. Instead of giving her autobiography a final ending, she works on making the “barely livable zone” (Prosser 12) of transition meaningful once again by playing more music and taking to the road. On her 2014 tour, Grace donned a T-shirt that declared “Gender is Over (If You Want It)” (Vozick-Levinson). The shirt was made by cofounder Marie McGwier and was given to Grace to wear while on tour; Grace wore the shirt endlessly, and then gave the shirt to charity to raise money for trans causes when the tour was over. The shirt, to Grace, represented a way to “karmically clean the slate” from that tour and all the past experiences she’s had with gender. By declaring that gender was over, but not her story, her music, or her travels with band, she was able to feel much freer after “coming off from the road” (Ruiz).

Conclusion “Goodbye gender,” Grace declared as she burned her birth certificate on stage. The fan-made video of the punk singer waving goodbye to her birth certificate

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quickly became viral (Ruiz). Grace’s burning of her birth certificate provides a nice ending to the story of her gender transition, effectively eradicating the last piece of evidence of herself as the male Tom Gabel—but it’s also not quite the whole story, either. As documented through Jay Prosser’s and Eva Illouz’s writing on autobiographies, along with Judith Butler and Dan Irving’s critique on the transgender medical system, what we know as the typical transgender narratives are ones that are inherently based on cisgender standards and institutional approval, and institutional approval is something that Grace has never wanted. Grace’s career and legacy as the super-masculine anarcho-punk singer from Gainesville, Florida, who started Against Me! in 1997 will not disappear with a simple flame, but what burning her birth certificate does is remove the power from the H2 bill that claims she needs to have one in order to use a women’s bathroom. By coming to North Carolina when so many musicians tried to boycott the state, Grace also demonstrates a middle ground in the polarizing debate on trans issues in current political and media discourse. It’s impossible to opt out of the bathroom bill debate as a trans woman, but that does not mean she needs to feel trapped by it. By continuing to tour, Grace challenges the rules and regulations of a state by existing in a physical space and landscape that does not want her to exist. Moreover, by touring and traveling, she allows her gender story to derive continuous meaning from the road by resisting that final ending of surgery (and final ending of going home). Burning her birth certificate is one of many things Grace has done to carve out a new niche for herself, her band, and her music since coming out as transgender in 2012. By waving goodbye to gender, she enacts a new narrative—one that doesn’t end with success or failure, but one that derives meaning and purpose through constant traveling and the creation of new music. Laura Jane Grace and Against Me! already knew a long time ago that there is no such thing as going home. There was and only will be movement from one place to the next.

12 Knowing the score: Road movie soundtracks and cinematic verities Kurt Jacobsen

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oad music really is pretty much anything you slip into your car’s cassette/ DVD slot or find as you grasp a greasy radio dial while hurtling headlong and sore-eyed “through the long American night” (Jacobsen “Driving”). Yet, as the unapologetic Kerouac reference in the preceding sentence implies, much of the road music we cherish today derives from widely broadcast cultural touchstones, including soundtracks undergirding, and sometimes overburdening, the storylines of feature films that have shaped the public “juke box” repertoire, such as Easy Rider (1969), Thelma and Louise (1991), and Forrest Gump (1994). Evoking the fleeting, furtive feel of a bygone era, or peeling open the inner worlds of protagonists, has been a valid musical device in cinema since bowtied piano players accompanied silent movies. Sheer emotional manipulation, however, is less appreciated, although the difference can sometimes be difficult to distinguish. Cable series Sons of Anarchy or True Detective unabashedly lean on rock and folk music all the head-bashing way, with the former series’ obligatorily opening and closing with music-driven montages, which, whatever else they do, have the redeeming virtue of introducing audiences to worthy under-the-radar artists they otherwise might not stumble upon. Still, music, no matter how splendid or spirited or seductive, has yet to salvage a downright awful film.

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No major movie launches without lots of music, and heartstrings are there to be tugged, so it’s not easy for anxious filmmakers to resist the temptation to make music do some of the artistic work that the script and the performances should be shouldering. Often enough music is an asset and an organic element in the story, but sometimes (and indeed too often) it is a desperate audio cloak for a crummy production riddled with story gaps, stick figure characters, and sheer implausibility. This chapter examines which is which, and why, among notable postwar road-themed films. In addition to the aforementioned trio, I discuss in the following order the pertinence of soundtracks to the stories crafted in Cold Mountain (2003), Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), Dead Man (1995), Bound for Glory (1976), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), Inside Llewyn Davis (2014), Paris, Texas (1984), Almost Famous (2000), Smoke Signals (1998), Powwow Highway (1989), Wild at Heart (1990), the recent On The Road (2012), Transamerica (2006), and The Beach (2000). I address them roughly in chronological order of the successive eras that the film stories depict. If ever a film was salvaged by a stellar soundtrack, comprised mostly of revved-up traditional tunes, Cold Mountain it is. The film makers drained a superb novel of much of its dramatic power with miscasting, lazy pace, and desultory direction. Yet director Anthony Minghella remained alert to the beguiling sway of Appalachian music. Screechy fiddles and twangy guitars are as vital as musket fire or romance to making the film watchable. Appointing T Bone Burnett as music coordinator alone enlivens any stale film by a light-year leap. Road music is music that either one, invokes the road as explicit theme, or two, is encountered while passing through strange regions, or three, heightens the road experience, whatever the origin of the song or subject of its lyrics—and all are at play here. An example of the third alternative is the bone-chilling chorale Idumea for the ghastly Battle of the Crater—a backwoods Carmina Burana bewailing the tragic butchery inside a grisly pit of hell near Petersburg in 1864.1 T Bone Burnett performs his usual artistic miracles—as also in his Coen Brothers collaborations, discussed below—with modern compositions such as his own exquisite “Like a Songbird That Has Fallen” mixed among venerable folk-song classics “Wayfaring Stranger” (rendered by Jack White), the high-pitched aching “I Wish My Baby Was Born,” the measured and meditative “Am I Born to Die” and hard spare beauty of “The Cuckoo.” This nasally high mountain music is aural glory that sticks with you all the way

1

Missing in the Battle of The Crater sequence is the slaughter of black Union soldiers who were shown no quarter by Confederates. See Kenneth C. Davis, The Hidden History of America at War (New York: Hatchette Books, 2015), 113–14.

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down the slope. “Wayfaring Stranger” seems virtually musician-proof. It matters of course why you are on the road, whether you were lured or shoved there but, regardless of the reason, wayfarers of any epoch ultimately crave a true home for themselves, “no more to roam.”2 The lyrics are as high concept as any crass Hollywood mogul demands and as profound as any questing pilgrim, carrying “the cross of self-denial,” desires, which is why there are a million versions and why there will be millions more. Music rarely has served the grim emotional subtext of a film so well as Bob Dylan’s melancholic spur-jingling score for Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), a sublime sagebrush-strewn elegy for the degeneration of the vast Wild West into a captive of capitalism. As the film opens, business behemoths, especially railroads, banks, and big ranchers, are moving in and rubbing out smaller desperados (Bold 68).3 Pat Garret (James Coburn) must track down renegade Billy (Kris Kristofferson), a former trail comrade. “Us ole boys oughtn’t be doing this to each other,” a bleeding gang member taunts Garret, as he slithers for a better shot at him. Bandits, like rock bands, are by definition always on the road—except of course for corporate bandits who, as Woody Guthrie reminds, rob you with a fountain pen instead of a six-gun, a high-leveraged credit default swap instead of a switchblade. Billy, whose scripted charm is historically based, may be a figment of the screenwriter’s imagination, but the remorseless “civilizing” commercial processes director Sam Peckinpah depicts are dead accurate.4 Aging outlaw Slim Pickens memorably dies down by the riverside Knocking on Heaven’s Door as his wife weeps at the inevitable end of measly outlaws who lack teams of lawyers on retainer. Pat Garrett pursues Billy under the streaky pastel New Mexico skyline while tinny first- and second-string guitar notes echo in the hollows of his own evermore gnarled spirit. Few men strode through hell so harrowingly and willingly as bottled-up, sold-out, and hungover Pat Garrett in what was Coburn’s finest screen performance. Given who the so-called good guys are, Peckinpah’s sympathies emphatically lay on the side of the lumpen banditos. “Billy, they don’t like you to be so free”—a theme Jack Nicholson’s raffish lawyer character ruminates over in Easy Rider—is the takeaway lesson.

2

On this point see Ron Primeau, Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press, 1996).

3

“Between 1850 and 1857 railroads got 25 million free acres and millions in bond loans,” says Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper, 1980), 220.

4

See the 2012 PBS documentary Billy The Kid (Billy The Kid. Dir. John Maggio. PBS documentary. First aired 01/09/12), which attests that scriptwriter Rudy Wurlitzer and actor/singer Kristofferson got much more right than wrong about their sympathetic portrayal of the Kid.

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Neil Young’s nerve-jangling score for Jim Jarmusch’s deliriously deadpan Dead Man (1995) approaches the grit of Dylan’s acoustic lament for the loss of the West, or the loss, at least, of cherished myths. A bespectacled, plaidsuited Clark Kent of an accountant (Johnny Depp), worthless job offer in pocket, naively rides the rails straight into buckskin hell, into a West stripped of any frippery of reason, where swindles and betrayals are the order of the day. Lying in wait is the town of Machine, a cowpoke Mahagonny, decorated with skulls, sewage and firewater lunacies. A tragi-comic tryst with a fetching whore makes a wanted man of our hero overnight and, as he flees an evil posse seeking frontier justice, Neil Young’s solo electric guitar, like a diabolic bellows, belches cold crackling cavernous notes over the whole surreal pursuit. The tenderfoot, who discovers his inner Wyatt Earp along the way, acquires an outcast brave as a gloriously insolent Sancho Panza sidekick while bloodthirsty (one’s a genuine cannibal) bounty hunters nip at their heels. The fugitives struggle by horseback and canoe across a gravely wounded land, where goofiness and terror intertwine, until they arrive at the last-rites tribal village where a long, lingering mournful guitar note propels an exit to dismal eternity, an unconsoling kind of freedom. And the experience leaves long-inthe-tooth Lone Ranger TV fans pondering that maybe kimosabe really meant “stupid fucking white man” all along. If you ain’t got the do-re-mi, boys, it’s kind of hard to be free in commodified America. Woody Guthrie, Dylan’s avatar, was the untameable effervescent font of twentieth-century pre-rock road music: “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Ya,” “Hard Travelin’,” “Goin’ Down that Road Feelin’ Bad,” “Dusty Old Road,” “Pastures of Plenty,” and a lot more indisputable classics. Hal Ashby’s Bound for Glory (1976) focuses on Guthrie’s Depression-era travels, with his subversive palette of songs (creditably sung by actor David Carradine) spread out before us as the pure democratic Americana they are. “You sure as hell don’t look like much,” a natty radio producer announces to woefully ragged Guthrie and then asks, “How do you sound?”5 The iconoclastic director Ashby, “a hippie before there were hippies,” according to his cinematographer Haskell Wexler, clearly fine-tuned himself into Guthrie’s roaming rebel wraith. As drenching rain pours down and the bosses’ thugs encircle an Okie encampment, Guthrie, this rowdy incarnation of the “outside agitator,” plays “Pastures of Plenty,” reinvigorating weary migrants with their right to fight for a decent living. And, yes, “This Land is Your Land” ought to be the national

5

Steinbeck understood, if not necessarily approved of, the syndrome. “You got to be awfully rich to dress the way you do,” a man of modest means he encountered on the road remarks to the sloppily attired author. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (New York: Bantam, 1962), 238.

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anthem, with its radically democratic verses restored and revered,6 among which are the blunt poetic lines: “There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side, it didn’t say nothin’; That side was made for you and me” (Stevenson).7 One can detect why Guthrie wasn’t welcome in the realms of the “one per cent” then or now. Nothing but murder, or Huntington’s chorea, can deter Guthrie, but the road is hardest on his kin.8 “You don’t think nothin‘ about runnin’ off whenever you get the urge,” his first wife sobs. Well, the wayward minstrel had organizing to do, playing songs like “You Can’t Scare Me I’m Stickin’ to the Union” against all the vicious force employers can muster. Anybody who can’t be pinned down is always an object of suspicion for authorities. Outsiders are threatening because they know the local way of life isn’t as “natural” as natives believe or their masters want them to imagine.9 Flight is what most people choose over fight, but for Guthrie they were synonymous. He sallied off to joust with heartless tycoons, propaganda merchants, hired thugs, cops, scabs, monogamy, boredom, inertia, and a mile-long procession of inner demons too. Striding and strumming through a mill singing “There’s a better world a coming, can’t you see?” Guthrie, not for the first or last time, gets badly roughed up and his guitar (which “kills fascists”) shattered. This is what lack of real democracy looked like. In 1976, the year of the film’s release, one could argue that dust bowl desperation and sweatshop hardships were gone forever, but Guthrie and associates knew the enemy well and realized it was not so, but only needed the right unfavorable circumstances to rekindle. The bosses loathed Guthrie because, as Kurt Vonnegut later remarked, “all they want is an unfair advantage”—and Guthrie and kindred hard travelers inconveniently pointed it out wherever they went (Vonnegut, 46).

6

One of the best and least availed of aids to understanding Guthrie’s lyrics is Guthrie himself. See David Marsh and Harold Leventhal, eds. Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait of Woody Guthrie (New York: Harper Collins, 1990). Also see the provocative but fair-minded analysis in Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 7

The “higher institutional” approach, as former Yale president Bartlett Giamatti termed it, to Guthrie is dismissive condescension, which is exemplified nowhere better than in Joe Klein’s Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Bantam, 2006). Britain’s BBC, for some odd reason, has a special animus against Guthrie, consistently portraying him as a political dupe or a dope or both in its documentaries.

8

On this period see Robbie Lieberman’s My Song is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism and the Politics of Culture 1930–1950 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

9

See Alfred Schutz’s work on the theme of the stranger.

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Guthrie and Hal Ashby are a heck of a hard act to follow. How hard is illustrated by viewing Bound for Glory and following it immediately with the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000). The Coens conjure up three Depression-era goofs meanderingly on the run from a Deep South chain gang. Is the film sheer travesty, or inspired parody, or a blend of both? I lean toward the verdict of travesty, but whatever it is, T. Bone Burnett sure makes it work musically. Harry McClintock’s ruefully wry “Big Rock Candy Mountain” starts the quirky proceedings, which we are duly informed are “based upon the Odyssey.” Cut to the Cool Hand Luke convicts syncopatedly swinging sledgehammers on the sweltering roadside and singing to keep time and despair at bay. Yet O Brother quickly comes to feel like leafing through a crinkly Time-Life Book about the 1930s and unwisely appointing smartass modern middle-class white boys to bring those sepia photos to some semblance of cinematic life. Still, you can’t beat the score, which hardly has anything to do at all with what’s going on in any of the episodic scenes. A blind man prophesizes the long slapstick trek led by a vain dolt (George Clooney) whose brain seems soggy from all the pomade seeping into his skull over all the years. This cornpone Ulysses is enraptured with the calculating salesman’s creed of “winning friends and influencing enemies,” despite an indifferent record of success. Still, the music, by itself, is great. A ghostly white-clad congregation wafts through the fugitives’ camp singing “Fly Away.” The sweetly sung hymn bathes the low-life runaways with a brief aura of innocence by association. They run into a black guitarist who, in the mode of the legendary Robert Johnson, casually confesses that in exchange for musical fame he sold his immortal soul (John Lewis) and defends himself, saying “Well, I wasn’t using it.” The escaped cons huddle around campfires that, unlike Bound for Glory, are populated mostly by dull, blank-faced drifters, not far removed from Breughel’s idiot peasantry. We are not in Guthrie’s land anymore, Toto. The dim-witted lads blunder into a Klan jamboree where Ralph Stanley’s “O Death,” head-scratchingly senseless in this context, fires up a mass calisthenics routine inspired partly by Busby Berkeley and partly by the witch’s castle guards in Wizard of Oz. A KKK rally wouldn’t be caught dead singing that doleful dispiriting song, but it sounds ominous, and that is all that counts for the Coens.10 Our wayward voyagers soon lip synch “Man of Constant Sorrow” and “In the Jailhouse Now” and serendipitously hit it big

10 Who listens to lyrics anyway? It is macabrely comic that Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” for another example, is widely regarded as a super-patriotic anthem despite the lyrics conveying the opposite message—the story of a man who feels betrayed by his country, or the leadership of it. See Chapter 9.

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on radio. Music, the lads gleefully find, is all about peddling politicians and other packaged products, which differs a trifle from how Guthrie saw it. “I think I have proved that a folk singer,” Guthrie scribbled, “to sing what the people have thought and are thinking, is forced to turn his back on the bids of Broadway and Hollywood to buy him and his talent out.” He further said, “Every folk song that I know tells how to fix something in this world to make it better, tells what is wrong with it, and what we’ve got to do to fix it better. If the song does not do this, then, it is no more of a folk song than I am a movie scout” (Marsh and Leventhal 88). Clooney reunites with a petulant backwoods Penelope but detects marital discord, not bliss, beckons when his “adventuring days are over.” So why not hop on a freight train, or, better still, on the running board of a spiffy V8 Ford and roar into tabloid legend? Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) introduced much of urban America to Grand Old Opry icons Flatt & Scruggs. Zesty banjos and fiddles perk up the 1930s milieu, which is intensely drab except for bright bursts of gunfire during bank robberies, car chases, and a final bushwhacking. Bonnie and Clyde hit the road because they loath, or are rejected by, their homes where little is on offer except humdrum, hardscrabble lives. So the seeping stink of self-hatred is swiftly left way behind as they grab at the low-rung trinkets of an economic system they know is no friend of theirs. That they morph into folk heroes says more about exploitative relations between foreclosure-happy banks and the populace than it does about the supposed virtues of the outlaws who rob those banks.11 Apart from the good looks of Dunaway and Beatty, a jaunty innocence, encouraged by a Foggy Mountain Boys score, entices audiences to identify with them against all the mean-eyed “cop soul” foes in pursuit.12 Even if the gun-toting couple were plainly punks, they were arch-individualists too, weren’t they? Well, Americans already are “divided and conquered by internalizing the lone hero stance,” Philip Slater exasperatedly observed of this bedrock trope (154). “Individualism makes it impossible to grasp what the system is.” Individualists of this blinkered breed are bound for dead ends. They fought the law and the law won, for all it mattered.

11

By 1933 “half of all home mortgages were technically in default,” according to William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, The 1930s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2002), 7. “As a boy during the depression,” writes a Marine colonel, “I observed the killing of US Marshals and acts of anarchy by solid, god-fearing farmers in South Dakota and Iowa triggered by tax foreclosures on their farms and the panic induced by the bank holiday. The nation came close to open rebellion at that time,” says William Corson, The Betrayal (New York: Norton, 1968), 286–87.

12

Kerouac’s remarks on the “cop soul” are well worth reading in On The Road (New York, Viking Press, 1957), 65–69.

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Enter postwar America and a Greenwich Village in the early 1960s brimming with sorrowful but ambitious folkies. In Inside Llewyn Davis (2014) the Coen Brothers brush aside Guthrie and his radical ilk for the fictitious exploits of a morose folkie neurotically stuck in a dead end no matter where he goes.13 Again, due mostly to T. Bone Burnett, the tunes—“Fare Thee Well,” “Death of Queen Jane,” and “Hang Me Oh Hang Me”—are passable enough faux folk ditties. Viewers of a certain age still may hunger instead for the genuine fare of Judy Collins’ sublime farewell songs, Dylan plaintively wheezing, “Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?” or even Roger Miller’s deliberately dopey “Dang Me, They Oughta Take a Rope and Hang Me.” Llewyn wants to make it big— what else is there?—but he is just a tad too ethical to barter his crabby soul away, so cruel nemesis awaits on the road in the forms of cats abandoned, women recoiling, and lucrative gigs lost. Ah, it takes a worried man to sing a worried song. The most dismaying conceit here is that Llewyn is supposedly based on Dave Van Ronk whom he resembles about as much as Pol Pot resembles Gandhi.14 Van Ronk, unlike aesthete Llewyn, was a life-long radical in the Wobbly tradition (with no time for the “catechism quoters” of the Communist Party) whose irrepressible arch humor erupted in delicious seditious entertainments like The Boss’s Songbook. The sourest scene is Llewyn’s abject failure to enchant a beady-eyed Albert Grossman figure (played by F. Murray Abraham). Van Ronk actually found himself forced to approach Grossman, then owner of a major club, for a paying gig only because his guitar was stolen during a mugging on the road to Chicago (Van Ronk 88). That is as close to colliding with the rambunctious spirit of Van Ronk, or the Village at the time, as this glum film ever gets. The Coen brothers nimbly refashion folk memory into a pleasing shape for folks just like themselves. And they do it so well. Get your motor running as you head out on the highway, assuming you possess a reliable jalopy or pricey Harley and need not get around by humble thumb or Greyhound bus. In Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” became the thundering rock anthem for aspiring nomads, guiding Captain America (Peter Fonda) and buckskin Bucky (Dennis Hopper), fresh from a big drug deal, into a bold realm of stainless frolicking freedom

13

For background on the era see David Hajdu, Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina (New York: Picador, 2011); Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000); and Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

14

For a potent eyewitness antidote, see Warren Leming, “Lost Books: A Review of Dave Van Ronk’s The Mayor of MacDougall Street,” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture 13, nos. 3–4 (2014).

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that they don’t deserve and don’t get. Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” kicks off this fractured fairy tale for a reason. How can one confuse these disaffected drug dealers with Whitman-esque exemplars of the open road? The soundtrack smoothly changes gear with the regional terrains as well as desired moods— country, California rock and a psychedelic Kyrie Eleison ushering us up to a Mardi Gras rag in New Orleans where they drop acid in a grotesque gothic graveyard. The guys are less countercultural heroes than forerunners of the twenty-first-century banking buccaneers (“the pusher don’t care if you live or die”) who roam and wreck entire nations with impunity (Perkins). Our heroes wear leather and fringe jackets instead of pinstripe suits but the intent is much the same, espousing a pygmy-eye view of the American Dream as making a bundle and moving on.15 The flashy high-handlebar motorbikes on which they travel are exciting and glamorous and dangerous gadgets—Dylan nearly killed himself on one in 1966—and so are cultural fetish objects conveying a primordial and, for that matter, mentally retarded sense of ersatz freedom. Watch any biker movie from The Wild One (1953) to Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) and see if you resist a sneaking admiration. For an antidote, watch Hells Angels Forever (1983), an “in-house” documentary propelled by a medley of shitkicker odes plus Bo Diddley, Willie Nelson, The Grateful Dead, and the ballad “Ride on, Sonny,” a tender tribute to allegedly misunderstood leader Sonny Barger.16 The American flag decorates some bikes, as in Easy Rider (though less often than Confederate flags or swastikas), so they must be okay, although the mythic mobility of bikes clearly is beside whatever the real purpose of the club is. Bikers are corporate America’s favorite rebels because they are trying to muscle marginally into a rigged system, not challenge it. Aggrieved burly Angels on camera bemoan public paranoia about them since deep down they really are just old-fashioned hard core Republicans. Sounds about right. In the gospel according to Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), a slimy anti-war activist, wearing what looks like a war surplus Wehrmacht jacket, wallops his girlfriend while gallant Gump in snazzy army uniform hastens to the damsel’s rescue. Good ole boys, you see, never have been known to mistreat their delicate Southern belles. (In Hells Angels Forever several club wives earnestly explain that they get punched by their husbands—mostly military veterans, by the way—only when they “deserve it.”) Malicious hippies apparently managed to prolong and undermine the Vietnam War as well as to

15

On the pseudo-philosophical underpinnings of Wall Street rapacity and conceit, see Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

16

For a clear-eyed (and also black-eyed) view of the gang at the time, see Hunter Thompson, Hell’s Angels (New York: Ballantine, 1976).

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drench our brave defenseless servicemen in spit, exactly as delirious rightwingers claim.17 The film, which differs quite drastically from the novel, is a dedicatedly dishonest depiction of history that fist-pumping patriotic Hell’s Angels must adore (Jacobsen, “Cinematic”). The overkill use of music is similarly cynical. Iconic tunes by various singers and groups—the Byrds, the Doors, the Mamas & the Papas, Joan Baez, the Supremes, and many more—are inserted into scenes with a numb, literal-mindedness befitting The Lawrence Welk Show. Gump trundles across our country’s amber waves of grain to Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way.” Creedence Clearwater’s “Fortunate Son” graces a Vietnam chopper flight for the four hundred and forty-fourth time. Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” scribbled about a minor Sunset Strip riot, says beware of a “man with a gun over there” as a firefight breaks out. Get the idea? A short furious ping-pong match is overlarded with shards of three premium-priced songs. What a generous music budget! The soundtrack amounts to a disconnected jangly string of sounds aimed to tug at raw emotions, one tune linking mechanically up with another like an audial Lego set to arouse an impression of authenticity. Lawrence Grossberg, among other analysts, describes the re-purposing of symbols and tropes to serve unrelated commercial ends, which is what advertising, and this film, are all about. Far from a feral road rebel, Forrest Gump, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, is the “ultimate conformist,” as Bruno Bettelheim summed him up, steadfastly doing what he is told and reaping unlikely booty for it. Just about every film made about an army or a band is a road movie. So Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) deserves a special mention (and recall in Stone’s Platoon that musical taste—Motown versus rockabilly—defines the factions within the feuding unit.) Note the boy Jim Morrison, the Admiral’s unruly son, gazing at a fatal car accident on an Indian reservation as his family’s station wagon creeps by and he absorbs a departing Comanche soul. Morrison’s “The End” later forms the perfect shamanic lament for Apocalypse Now, another road movie in military guise (Jacobsen Pacification). Millions of dumbfounded young Americans went whether they liked it or not to Vietnam, where the road West plunged into the Far East because the world is round and you get there by pressing implacably on until someone finally stops you.18

17

See Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

18

See Richard Drinnon, Facing West: Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997) and Bruce Cumings, Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendency and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

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Paris, Texas (1984) is a mordant yarn of Love’s Labors Lost (or Cast Away) with Ry Cooder’s sleek slide guitar animating it as much or more than any other cinematic device in Wim Wenders’ kit. Cooder’s mournful notes amplify the “feel” of arid desert and urban landscapes and insinuate us into the remote, sad-eyed characters played by Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski. No one can surpass Cooder’s guitar (consider his Southern Comfort and Johnny Handsome soundtracks too) for conjuring up an uneasy menacing milieu all by itself. From the opening pan of Travis (Stanton), a lean leathery man with a blighted mind, swigging water from a crumpled plastic jug in a picture-postcard wasteland, as birds of prey swirl above, to the final shot of this self-sacrificial loner driving off into the void, Cooder musically bolsters the story. Wenders’ nocturnal shots also anticipate a lot of graphic comic art: dark Sin City isolates silhouetted against a velvet green Houston street corner— and enchained by beautiful lonesome echoing chords. Only Lucifer, some sedentary folks suspect, can invent such unnerving unearthly music. Maybe Cooder clinched a deal at a lonely crossroads somewhere . . . Almost Famous (2000), by contrast, is director Cameron Crowe’s sly affectionate memoir of his child-prodigy, music-critic days, chronicling a rock scene in 1973 replete with temptress groupies, tear-out-the-walls touring, and a strangely naïve Rolling Stone editor. The band tour is a tie-dyed grind of truck stops, cruddy motels, inebriated fans, and casual betrayals (like trading devoted groupies to the next band for a case of premium beer). In the neon-lit crucible of the road, you get deflowered, disillusioned, derided, tested, teased, and turned inside out and around. You get burned clean. It is where our tempest-tossed juvenile journalist becomes the archetypal embedded reporter and manfully manages to wriggle free. If only he had set an example . . . The tour bus barrels across classic American terrains where Bonnie and Clyde, Pat Garret and The Kid, and Woody Guthrie once were at large. This road is where, as urged by rock writer and virtual saint Lester Bangs (as portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman), you strive to tell the truth and almost nothing but. Everything, including snippets from The Who, David Bowie, and Lou Reed, climaxes in a peak moment when an angelic groupie anoints the budding scribe and announces “You are home” on the rollicking vehicle as Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” triggers a group sing-along—“count the headlights on the highway”—and the whole venal bickering bunch is healed, at least until the next bend in the road. How much farther do we go? Singer Jim Boyd enigmatically answers “until we know” in Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals (1998), a seriously comedic film that intertwines physical and emotional distances—one usually generates the other—and interrogates their somber meanings. Real questing is nosing

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around until you stumble into the right spot way the hell out there or way the hell within. Two young modern braves venture off their Idaho reservation to Arizona to pick up the ashes of a “father who was always leaving“—they could be Woody’s kids—and begin with a lift from feisty Native American ladies driving in reverse gear because their auto and their lives are stuck in it. Going to the US, fellas? “That’s as foreign as it gets,” a sassy lass reckons. On a bus trip the boys take, the Eaglebear Singers intrude with the delightfully snide “John Wayne’s Teeth,” chanting “Are they false, are they real? Are they plastic or are they steel?” Jim Boyd arrestingly sings of “ghosts who wear the same dirty sheets every day as one more piece of us dies,” of love affairs as broken treaties, and of renting a car and driving “a million miles away.” Native American musicians Boyd, John Sirois, Andre Picara Jr., and others keep the emotional activity stoked. Dar Williams’ “Road Buddy” pokes fun at a highway tripper beset by petty thefts, lousy drivers, vile fast food, and asking why “you’re my road buddy, but I’m lonely all the time?” Been there, felt that. Wrapping up, Waj Ji Leh Yihm a lilting New Age-tinged chorale by the superb Native American female trio Ulali builds to a crescendo as credits roll and a poet ponders, “How do we forgive our fathers? Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us too often or forever, when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all? . . . If we forgive our fathers, what is left?” Whew. Hear my low whistle? Portentous tom-toms and flutes start Powwow Highway (1989), but the score proceeds into big-time names such as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” (yes, again) and the concluding Robbie Robertson song “Sweet Fire of Love,” blissfully performed by U2. At the Montana Cheyenne reservation all the gloomy shacks, scrawny dogs, and red dirt trails almost achieve a junkyard chic on screen. Speaking of which, phlegmatic Philbert (Gary Farmer), suddenly struck with desire to go on a pilgrimage, snaps up the grottiest specimen in the used-car lot as his trusty steed. (Flicking the plastic Virgin Mary off the dashboard is a particularly nice touch.) Pry his meta-vintage Buick’s brown rust mottled carcass onto a canvas and it can plausibly hang in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Something like it surely does. Along the way Joe Ely’s “Lord of the Highway” flings a droll dart at romantic notions of the road, especially when one really doesn’t want to be on it. Philbert gets fast-talked by Wounded Knee veteran Buddy into chauffeuring him down to Santa Fe to bail out his sister, framed by a political rival on the reservation. Off they figuratively gallop and up comes a skirmish with a bigoted salesman, a glorious CB-radio exchange about the theological intricacies of White Cloud, the “Cheyenne Jesus,” a Black Hills detour to a holy place to drop off a Hershey bar offering, and knee-deep wading in pneumonic cold

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sacred springs. And it’s all because reverent Philbert insists on stopping at every significant Native American landmark, which of course is nearly every inch of the countryside. They don’t want their lands back, do they? Philbert also keeps a tame but temperamental tarantula nestled in his glove compartment as “good medicine,” which is as good a segue as any into the rarefied David Lynch zone, where multitudes of bizarre behaviors are mere manifestations of the new norm so far as his jaundiced directorial vision of modern life go. Lynch’s grand guignol Wild at Heart (1990) plummets audiences into a folie à deux world revolving around trying-too-hard-to-be-sultry Lula (Laura Dern) and ex-con boyfriend Sailor (Nick Cage), who burbles upon his release from prison that his snakeskin jacket “represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom,” which is all we need to know about taking any comings and goings here the least bit seriously. Sailor’s sub-Elvis impersonation soldiers waveringly on while vampy Lula is moved to moan that this “whole world is wild at heart and weird on top,” which is the dead opposite of the attitude of the willing traveler, who ordinarily welcomes that state of affairs. The road is where you bump into strangers who are weirder than you are and often are better human beings to boot. But maybe one isn’t factoring in the sleaze-ball Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) or triple-charging small town mechanics lurking nearby.19 Apart from Elvis’ and Gene Vincent’s music, Chris Isaak injects high octane noir tunes like Wicked Game to nudge things musically along. Lynch has some pointed fun with a roadside scene in which Lula frantically twists the car radio dial searching for something other than distressing recitations of reports of mutilations, rapes, and necrophilia in the “real world”—which is lot more news than one customarily locates amid all the reactionary reverends and talk radio blowhards. Lynch mystifyingly also pelts us with a zillion gratuitous Wizard of Oz references as broomstick witches, good and bad and indifferent, flit all around the farce. Thelma and Louise (1991) rather less witchily is a tragi-comic weekend trip gone horribly wrong but kind of right too. And without a shadow of doubt, in the right hands, a solo electric slide guitar is the supreme instrument, the king and queen alike of road music themes, as Hans Zimmer proves again here with deftly placed trickles of long, lingering, yearning notes. Imagine what transpires if a pair of Woody Guthrie’s disgruntled nubile ex-wives get together and, urchinless, go off for a retaliatory spin in a green Thunderbird. Amid the bars and roadside attractions, the emancipated ladies sing lustily along with radio songs, snap a double selfie (before the advent of cell phones), bump 19

The role of diabolical small town mechanic is played to slovenly perfection by Billy Bob Thornton in Oliver Stone’s 24 carat gem of a black comedy, U-Turn (1997).

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off a roadhouse Romeo-turned-rapist, pick up and are fleeced by a lanky sociopath, and flee the law. “I’ve had it up to my ass with sedate,” Thelma declares. And how! So they must hurtle off the nearest cliff. It was never more crystal clear than in this denouement that tragedy, as Slater perceived, is intrinsically conservative, stumping mindlessly for a restoration of the preceding order, however unfair and biased it is (111). The girls at least roar to their doom accompanied by a damned good soundtrack. Sometimes it’s Glenn Frey (“Part of Me, Part of You”) or Martha Reeve (a cover of Van Morison’s Wild Nights) or Marianne Faithful (“Ballad of Lucy Jordan”). Sometimes it’s just the merest tickle of banjo strings, or an electric guitar noodling around, because that is what the ladies are doing, noodling around until they are about to be swatted by a bunch of overgrown boys with mirrored sunglasses and big badges. Chris Whiteley’s woo-hooing “Kicking the Stones“ is great warpath music and B. B. King’s “Better Not Look Down” is forgivably foreshadowing. “Something’s crossed over in me and I can’t be going back,” Thelma tells Louise. “I just couldn’t live” like that anymore. Many a journeyer gets it. Walter Salles’ commendable but misfiring (mostly because of miscasting) crack at Kerouac’s On The Road (2012) commences well enough with a spooky bristling batch of elongated guitar notes as Will Hanson’s “Home” breathes a heady blend of keen anticipation, fear of disappointment, and of sheer relief to leave behind the past and what it made of you, at least for a spell.20 “I was a young writer and I wanted to take off,” Kerouac almost adequately explained. Like the Smoke Signals searchers, Sal Paradise (Kerouac) visits his father’s grave before embarking with Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) to look for, among other things, Moriarty’s absent deadbeat Dad in Denver. “How do we forgive our fathers . . .?” Swarms of hoodlum poets and writers in the late 1940s and early 1950s howled for divinity and decency and diversity. Kids understood when they read the Beats what tweedy critics refused to comprehend. As Burroughs gnomically remarked, “You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already.” Restlessness and dissatisfaction festered within many youths fearful of “growing up absurd” when Kerouac came along and pointed to the open road (Goodman). It didn’t have to be his road, potholed with his preoccupations, quirks, and blind spots; it could be your own holyboy road or madman road or Whitman road. Salles, for all his casting errors, captures some of this refreshing questing spirit.

20

The actors portraying Kerouac and Luanne are nothing like the actual people or their representations in the book. The actor playing Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady) comes closer but could have popped a few pep pills to get himself there.

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After crafting a captivating soundtrack for Motorcycle Diaries, composer Gustavo Santaolalla deftly guides this swinging and swaying enterprise in On the Road. The soundtrack is a net plus. Santaolalla’s “God is Pooh Bear” comes across as a skittish urban madrigal backed by a Phantom of the Opera organ and bongos pounded on by Mohawk raiders. “Keep it Rolling” is a suitably breezy drum- and cymbal-driven accompaniment for a beat writer’s sacred walkabout. “Memories” reminds one of frenetic themes for 1950s TV detective shows. Then there has got to be jazz and more jazz, and there is more jazz by the estimable likes of Slim Gaillard, Dinah Washington, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie so that T-shirted Beats can yell “Go, Go, Go” until early morn. A flute dirge is right for “I Think of Dean,” who was so irrepressible and so untrustworthy. Transamerica (2006) is a twitchy bittersweet confection exploring the alchemical shape-shifting of gender roles and of parent-child relationships during a road trip. Bree Osbourne, formerly Harry something, is on the brink of “sexual reassignment” surgery to cap off a devoutly wished metamorphosis into womanhood. Bree’s gender euphoria, alas, is interrupted when she finds she first must retrieve her unwelcome discovery of a teenaged son, an outcast street hustler, spawn of a youthful experiment with heterosexuality. After the first tank of gas, and plenty of mutual misrepresentations, they both begin to peel off their many-layered masks. Bree, a bi-gender parent, for lack of a better term, indefatigably corrects her street-smart son’s erratic diction and coarse manners all the way home, wherever that turns out to be. If Star Wars’ R2-D2, like Pinocchio (another “sexual-reassignment” fable, at least in the Disney version), transformed into a person, Bree is precisely the prissy, punctilious if well-meaning one he would become. As happens, it takes a hitchhiking stranger to open up a necessary and revealing chat between the dueling pair. Bree devoutly has been “living stealth,” blending in, learning to look “authentic.” Now she finds herself camping out, interpreting the cry of the loon, lunching in an Ozark eatery, and blazing into Dallas to join an a capella “Home on the Range” at an engagingly genial transgender party. The Village People must already have been booked. Actress Felicity Huffman uptightly playing a man unconfidently playing a woman makes this film a comedic delight to watch. Dolly Parton finishes up the credits with her rousing Oscarnominated “Traveling Through.” Finally, The Beach (2000) is a 1990s odyssey for footloose Western backpackers abroad craving escape from one another (“the only downer is that everyone had the same idea”) or hoping to gang up exclusively with the coolest among themselves insofar as they can discern what cool is—usually someone sporting skin-deep beauty and deep pockets. You understand why they feel that fickle way when you glimpse the festering neon human anthill of

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Bangkok’s Khao San Road, which is as repellent a scene in its own gruesome way as the Battle of the Crater. Ever try Snake blood? Ever swig liquor from a flask with a green flaking reptile floating in it? Want a souvenir Zippo made from a downed Huey? Want some smoke? Want a girl? A boy? What you want. Baby, I got it. Ah, the touts’ never-ending symphony. In a putrid paper-thin walled Thai guesthouse, Daffy (Robert Carlyle) sizes up hollow-man Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) exactly for what he is but inexplicably slips him a map to a secret island Eden run by “people with ideals, not the usual fucking traveling wanks.” Daffy’s generous act, on a bit of reflection, is really pure premeditated sabotage. If by their works ye shall know them, then Richard is a rooting-tooting bona fide Jonah, an outwardly harmless dude who unwittingly spreads hideous misfortune wherever he strays. Or, given his utterly juvenile Vietnam War obsession, imagine him as a reincarnation of Greene’s “quiet American” Pyle, “a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm” (Greene 62).21 Richard tips manic Daffy over the edge and into slitting his wrists; he distributes a map he swore to keep secret and thereby gets four ensuing adventurers murdered; the baby shark kill he gloats about leads to gruesome demises for two utopia members; and, pièce de résistance, he contrives to get absolutely everyone expelled from this mini-garden of Eden. He never ever connects the dots. Behold Richard as gormless personification of termite-like touristic ruin, only he wrecks the tiny paradise for fellow conceited voyagers, which is an uncannily nice irony. In short, wherever you go, there you are.22 Road music nowadays is what you haul along from home, which earlier migrants obviously did as well. The score is jam-packed with relentless thrumming, metronomic, seizure-inducing electro pop of the over-processed clubbing kind that fills sweaty, slippery dance floors. But the other half of the soundtrack contains some memorably wistful works, especially “Porcelain,” “8 Ball,” “Voices,” and even the pop hit “Pure Shores.” Off Richard inevitably careens in a Rambo headband into a 3D Vietnam film fantasy of macho men who ditch the discomforts of morality for simple life-or-death decisions, decisions that rarely occur in that way. DiCaprio’s head even pops up through a floorboard like Martin Sheen’s assassin face emerging from the dark river in

21

Also see Kurt Jacobsen, “Revisiting The Quiet American.” Economic and Political Weekly. October 18, 2003.

22

To put it less succinctly but just as accurately; “American travel writers rarely encounter their destinations as innocent terra incognita. Instead, prior associations, projections, fears and fantasies created a kind of cultural baggage that accompanied and could easily outweigh the traveler’s literal baggage.” Leslie Butler, “Historicizing American Travel, at Home and Abroad.” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 1 (April 2011), 240.

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Apocalypse Now. One can imagine Richard in a sequel awaking in Bangkok muttering, “Bangkok. Shit, I’m still in Bangkok,” which is just another mobile spot he does not want to be stuck inside of with the My Lai Blues again. “Mine is a generation that circles the globe in search of things we haven’t tried before,” Richard self-importantly intones, “and if it hurts it’s probably worth it.” Yeah, right. The Beach is a supremely black comedy about travel that may not know it is one. And, yes, travel usually broadens the mind if you start with a mind that is capable of broadening.23 There are lessons you may not want to learn. There are souvenirs you don’t want to bring back. Sometimes all you have left to show is more mileage on the car or a smeared stamp in an expired passport. Ah well, the music, some of the music anyway, remains.

23

On this familiar phenomenon see Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims Progress (New York, Wordsworth Editions, 2010).

13 Conclusion: “The miracle of serendipity” Gordon E. Slethaug

I

n an interview about his film Almost Famous with film critic and entertainment journalistTodd Gilchrist, Cameron Crowe quoted John Lennon who said “that music is a big rushing river and there are many tributaries that lead into that river. But the river is a constant, it never changes . . . music will always be a single essential language shared by everybody, and it continues to be, regardless of format, price, social networking, sex, nationality, concert tickets or technology.” Crow goes on to say of himself that “in the years of covering and touring with artists for RS and other publications, I never ran across a single musician who wasn’t transported while talking about or playing music they loved. It was always my common ground as a reporter. I love music too. It wasn’t a job to me. It was a miracle of serendipity” (Crowe Birth. Movies. Death). Cameron Crowe’s embracing the miracle of musical serendipity is critical to a consideration of the relationship of music and the road because it centers on the importance of music in all its forms—something consistent and valuable in itself that needs to be listened to and studied—but also as an interdisciplinary tool linked to various modes of transportation, interactions with the media, and connections to different audiences. The fact that there are many songs about mobility and the road that have remained so popular over a long stretch of time, in some cases centuries, suggests that road music is “a miracle of serendipity” deeply emotional, cultural, and archetypal to old and modern audiences alike. As Kuyper notes in “The Road in American Vernacular Music,” “I’m just a poor

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wayfaring stranger” is one of several road songs that came from the nineteenthcentury musical folk tradition, that “have to do with travelers, the roads they traveled, the stories they told, and the horses and wagons, boats and schooners they rode” (55), and that are still among the most popular today. And there are many more such examples before and since that time. This present collection of essays has identified many of the ways in which the music of the road has entered American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Before that were the folk songs of travel transmitted orally from Europe to America and those that arose from the uniquely American community development experience on the East Coast and then of moving from the Northeast to the South and the West as the country opened up to increasing settlement. But the United States’s rapid development of electrical, automotive, broadcasting, and recording technologies cemented the relationship between music and the road and brought into existence new songs, musical movements, themes, and venues along with special values and attitudes that advanced alongside these. The development of rail lines and broad new highways that connected East and West as well as North and South became road themes in themselves in music as they facilitated the rapid movement of people and music from area to area. Accompanying that, of course, were idealizations of mobility, speed, freedom, and independence. As Knepper and Tuten note of the blues (Chapter 3) and Shay notes of the country-western tradition (Chapter 4), with improved roads and transportation systems both African American and Euro-American musicians were able to move about more easily within their immediate communities and across long distances for vocal and instrumental gigs. As the musicians traveled, the blues spread across the South and up the Mississippi River and East Coast, while Appalachian folk and country music also spread, becoming increasingly identified with the frontier values of the West, creating a new hybrid form of country-western music. But the lyrics of blues and country-western musicians showed strong misgivings about the value of the transportation enterprise as well. African Americans felt the anxiety of traveling under Jim Crow laws in the South even as they engaged in the Great Migration to the North, but many others were also concerned as roads and streets marched over the landscape, consuming forests, farms, residences, and sometimes even villages, and as the traffic increased, affecting the quality of life. In this way the rural agrarian and small-town Southern and Midwestern life so often celebrated in blues and country-western music surrendered in part to urban commerce and industry, prompting some inhabitants to move on, leaving family and friends behind. So the blues and country-western road music are at once celebrative of speed,

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mobility, and progress and distressed by the losses of community and an uncomplicated way of life that accompanied them. As pointed out by Kuyper (Chapter 8), the folk music of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan that emerged after the Great Depression and the Second World War shared some of the social discomfort of the blues and countrywestern musicians, and this was reinforced by the folk music, rock ’n’ roll, and strong emotions that emerged from singers like Bruce Springsteen following the Vietnam War. Whether the Depression era, the Second World War, or the Vietnam War, some felt that America had come perilously close to extinguishing hope, compassion, equality, and even civilization itself. As the American economy rapidly expanded in the ’50s, however, families became financially secure and were able to spend on vacations and leisure, and, as folk music changed to rock ’n’ roll, some of the worry seemed to disappear. Spurred on by Kerouac’s On the Road stressing travel, speed, and bebop and by The Beach Boys’ music beckoning from the warm beaches of California to the young people across the United States, travel by car and bus seemed adventurous, fun, inexpensive, and more-or-less worry-free. As Shaw and Leming both stress (Chapters 5 and 6), some young people and musicians wanted to travel individually in their own cars, but others wanted to travel collectively on public and tour buses to take advantage of all the opportunities that America seemed to offer for personal development, cultural awareness, and musical alternatives. Travel became increasingly comfortable, and the expanses, vistas, and spanking new cities of the West offered an allure which the confines and aging structures of Eastern and Midwestern cities seemed unable to provide. However important that moment was for the development of youth culture and rock ’n’ roll, that center could not hold. The civil rights protests of the ’60s spread across the nation, and many of the cities burned in both East and West. Just as significantly, the unpopular Vietnam War took its toll on the American psyche and pocket book as it dragged on without resolution, costs escalated, and young soldiers came home in body bags or with serious psychological and social adjustment disorders. Folk music began to disappear, uplifting Beach Boys’ tunes seemed out of place, and rock ’n’ roll and movies turned darker, as discussed by Jacobsen (Chapter 12). While not the same from entertainer to entertainer or period to period, as pointed out by Kuyper, Hollenberg, Wriglesworth, and Carter (Chapters 8, 10, 9, and 7), the music of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and The Beach Boys changed with the times, restructuring their music and lyrics and incorporating songs of protest. Of these four musical groups, Springsteen stands out as maintaining significant protests over a long time, though all of them continued to query and redefine the American character and experience. While Knepper and

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Tuten, Shaw, and Shay all include female musicians in their discussions of the various kinds of musical lyrics of the road (Chapters 3, 5, and 4), it is Deshane in Chapter 11 who takes up the banner of transgender identity and the music of protest in her discussion of the trans singer Laura Jane Grace (aka Tom Gabel), who has been waging a musical war against restrictions placed on the LGBT community, especially that of bathroom usage by the North Carolina legislature in 2016. Thus, while road music is often perceived as either macho or straight, it, too, has a place for alternative ways of perceiving reality and performing sexual identity. This volume, then, has considered a number of different factors and issues in the relationship of music and the road during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but there is still more that can be done. Road studies might further explore the complexity of road songs thematically and musically at both micro and macro levels. An analysis at the micro level could further investigate the narrative complexities of the musical road that have been noted by Hollenberg in Chapter 10, for most road songs have important stories to tell. Among others, an analysis of these stories might consider reasons for the traveler’s desire to get away from home or some other location by whatever means possible—on foot, horseback, or some kind of vehicle whether on land, sea, or air—in order to discover his or her own identity. This might be one thing or many: simple wanderlust, wish for freedom from conventional values, hope for improving economic and social circumstances and hitting the big time, craving to perform musically in front of new audiences, or something other still. As indicated in many of the songs studied in this collection, getting away might be very lonely but also might well involve or evoke continuing or new relationships. Exploring and defining these relationships in road music would be important not only to assess the various constructions of identity and character development, but also to help in considering road songs where relationships consist of the kind of pastoral, affectionate, or transcendental camaraderie that Walt Whitman’s narrative hero hopes to achieve in “Song of the Open Road” (Slethaug “Mapping the Trope,” 15), or finding what it is that constitutes simple enjoyment of the company of fellow musicians who are on tour together. Because getting away can involve leaving—or getting together with —important family members, partners, or lovers, a study of road songs dealing with such personal bonding, relationships, of community would be very interesting, Then, too, besides intense camaraderie, affection, and love, these relationships might have strong downsides that need to be further considered, involving lonesomeness, abuse, or the many “dread realities of life” that Kuyper notes and Howard Sounes finds typical of Bob Dylan’s songs (426). On the macro level, it would be good to find out more about the synchronic changes over time that might be seen in these road songs as well as diachronic differences from place to place in one period of time. For instance,

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synchronically, we could explore what accounts for changes in lyrics from an emphasis on naïve, innocent, and fun times with many beats per minute in the road music of the ’50s and ’60s to the strident and aggressive protest road songs of the ’70s and ’80s that often slow the music down. Certainly, issues related to the civil rights movement, feminism, the Vietnam War, and the pressures on the middle class have radically changed the tone and tenor of many road songs over time, but how pervasive and consistent are these changes and what happens diachronically within a particular period? Are there differences from the Eastern to Western parts of the United States and from North to South as suggested by Easy Rider, or are such differences in road music largely imagined, especially in the age of social media? Yes, and where is the social media with reference to the music and experience of the road? Fundamental to changes in road songs over the second half of the twentieth century has been a refocusing and reassessment of gender in which masculinity becomes softer (e.g., Paul Simon’s songs) and women’s place in relationships and the social order stronger as indicated in countrywestern lyrics or the film Thelma and Louise. But within the critical studies’ trinity of gender, race, and class, what does road music suggest about race and class? Paul Simon’s hybrid music with South African blacks seemed an attempt to bridge racial and national chasms, but how pervasive and central is this in road music in general? As indicated in the Introduction, the blues initially signified black music and country-western whiteness from the standpoint of the content, singers, and audience, but how much of this has changed and is still changing? Certainly, Dylan and Springsteen have the utmost sympathy for the hobos, ne’er-do-wells, and forgotten classes who have been forced to go on the road with few resources to back them up, but how pervasive is this tendency to sing of the seriously disadvantaged in American road songs of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries? With country-western artists such as Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton, has the presence of female artists and subjects appreciably changed? And what about that largely forgotten category of age in road songs that seem to perpetually belong to the young? These issues or gender, race, class, and age need to be much more strongly scrutinized in studies of music and the road. Then, too, what about road lyrics and melodies that seem intensely personal, confessional, and religious? Dylan and Simon stand out in such a consideration because both singers have indicated strong personal ties in the relationships they sing about. Then, too, as Kuyper noted, Dylan suffered very low audience numbers in the years immediately following his conversion to Christianity and did not really rise until he stepped back from evangelizing on tour, raising the question about the role of religion and faith in rock ’n’ roll road songs as opposed to country-western where they seem more broadly accepted.

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Of course, this should also lead to a further consideration of the canons of road tunes by particular artists. The five that exist in this volume—The Beach Boys, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, and Laura Jane Grace—are important milestones in this endeavor, but there are many more who could be considered dating back to the ’60s and running right into the twenty-first century: Johnny Cash would certainly be one, Taylor Swift another, and Dolly Parton a third. Then again, the canons of road tunes by famous artists should remind us that road music is not a single thing but many kinds of popular songs that cluster under that generic umbrella. Folk music, the blues, rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, country-western, and punk are subgenres at the top of the road-music list, but there are others that could be added, including bebop, contemporary rap and hip hop, as well as earlier soft jazzy songs by crooners like Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Bing Crosby himself who contributed to the road mystique through his role in the seven “Road to . . .” movies. No study has really looked at significant differences among the subgenres of road music either in terms of the music itself or in the handling of the themes lyrically and instrumentally. The very nomenclature of the “blues” would seem to suggest that road songs of that subgenre might inherently be more sad and despondent than those of folk songs or rock ’n’ roll, but is that so? Can rock ’n’ roll or folk songs not deal with the sad and disheartening so intensely and persuasively? Also, the notion of mobility might seem to demand a strong and fast rhythm that supports it and is easy to remember, even when the song is melancholic, but is that the case as well? Additionally, what about the music of road films? The film music that Jacobsen discusses refers to actual road songs by important bands, but other kinds of music in road films are mainly instrumental in providing back-up. This study has identified that kind of phenomenon in Bonnie and Clyde when the bank robbers escape in their car to the sound of fast-paced rhythmic banjo and fiddle music, but there are many others that raise questions. What of certain kinds of jazz and bebop in On the Road, both as described in Kerouac’s fiction as well as Walter Salles’ film? The various Star Wars films also come to mind because John Williams often uses Wagnerian-like leitmotifs to bring together mobility, character, and music. Research by musicologists and popular culture theorists in this area would be very helpful for a more musically comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of music and the road. A related area of study might be the way in which road music is simultaneously physical, cognitive, and affective. In exploring information design, Saul Carliner finds that good design must consist of all three at the same time: the physical concerns the actual selection of content, shape, and structure of the work and the way in which the audience navigates it; the

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cognitive concerns the message, attainment of goals, and intellectual design of the piece and the way in which the audience is able to understand and use it; and the affective concerns the way in which mood and emotional response is created and how comfortable the audience is with it. This framework seems intrinsic to the connection between art and the audience reaction regardless of the medium, and it would be interesting to learn how road music critics could use this framework as a means of understanding the artistic structure and integrity of the music and its impact on the listener of the music and reader of the lyrics. In this miracle of musical serendipity, we might further explore dominant themes of America, the road, and road music discussed in the various chapters. In “‘But People Are Strangers’: Lyric Narratives and Ethics on Paul Simon’s Roads,” Hollenberg begins this interrogation in noting how Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the frontier reflected and affected attitudes to masculinity and male independence in the American West that become part of the myth-making and exceptionalism-oriented ideology of the road in American popular music. In “Easy Street on Mud Tires: the ‘Heartland’ and the Frontier of the Road in Country Music,” Shay notes that this myth plays a very important role in country-western road music. In “‘All That Road Going’: Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and The Beach Boys’ Smile,” however, Dale Carter notes that Wilson and Parks revisited Turner’s main assumptions about American exceptionalism in order to transcend some of the dark legacy of manifest destiny as it affected the indigenous victims as well as those in Asia who eventually stood in the way of American expansionist policies. It would, then, be enlightening to know how Turner’s frontier thesis or other social myths and gender identification differ from road music subgenre to subgenre. This celebration of Western masculine values is, however, only one form of American ideology that needs to be further explored in road music. We have seen how some musicians such as The Beach Boys and Paul Simon coming out of the ’60s were initially not so attuned to the failures of the American system, while others like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan saw themselves as social and political activists from the start. Eventually all of them had songs that showed discontent with social injustices and some with political and military injustices in the American system as well. These reflections suggest the question whether some subgenres of road music lend themselves more to dissent and political activism than others, and, if so, what kind and how? Or are these expressions of dissent inherent in the politics of the period and not related to genre? Another area of inquiry for exploration of the road in America is how it might differ from cultural group to cultural group. This volume has looked at some forms of African American, Euro-American, and, briefly, Native American road

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music, but has not looked at Latina/Latino forms, or other ethnic subgroups in the United States that might have differing musical traditions and understandings of the road. Since this volume has focused entirely on road music in America (with the exception of Shaw’s foray into the Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), we might also ask about road music in other countries. Australia, Germany, and Sweden have long-established road-film traditions, and, while many of their films use American road music, we need to ask whether musicians in other countries have adapted their own music and lyrics to road music coming from the United States, or whether they have their own distinctive forms that could be useful to adapt in North America. As a director, Wim Wenders might be a case in point because he has taken the American road film into Germany and shown that he is adept at directing road films that appeal to both European and American audiences, so it might be interesting to compare his use of road music in all of his films from the viewpoint of what kinds of adaptation have been taking place. And what about the road music and road films of non-Western countries? Both China and India have developing road film traditions and might well have different kinds of musical traditions related to them. Consequently, a comparison of road music-traditions and practices internationally would be extremely helpful. Akin to this topic of road music and national and international identity is that of roads themselves. In the ’20s and ’30s, before there were major identifiable roads, blues and jazz traveled north to St. Louis and Chicago from the Mississippi delta upon the Mississippi River itself and over the South and up the East Coast to New York City on small roads on land as well as by sea, journeys that mark the establishment of two major forms of American music. As noted by Kuyper, Bob Dylan specifically identified Highways 51 and 61 running from the South to North as marking the transformation of Northern music, diversity, and identity. To that we should add country-western road music as it moved from the South to the West and back again. Likewise, Jack Kerouac’s embracing of Route 66 in On the Road marked the importance of that road on mobility and music in the ‘60s, and Kerouac fans still come from various countries to travel along that road in homage to Kerouac. Warren Leming riffs off Kerouac’s novel for his account of touring with his band in and around Chicago as well as down South and out West. For him it was reading Kerouac and traveling on Route 66 and other modern interstate freeways like Highway 81 that took him out of Chicago, opening up new musical and geographical spaces for him. Following this line of thinking, how might we identify and define roads and their music? Much has been written about the blues and jazz in this respect (though not road music as such) but very little

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about other roads, especially those in the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first. To this, of course, must be added the further consideration of band tours. Certainly, there are some famous band tours such as those of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan that have been written about on the internet and in biographies, but there is room for so much more comparing these tours up to the present time with those like Taylor Swift’s. These tours need to be more strongly assessed with regard to road music per se, and that suggests questions about very contemporary road music as well as that of well-known musicians from the second half of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first. Are there new kinds of rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues road songs that are developing as a result of these national and international tours? And how might such tours affect the local music nationally and internationally? Finally, there is the age-old question of the vehicle itself in road music. The little deuce car of the ’50s was replaced by the Corvette and Thunderbird of the ’60s and ’70s, but we need to consider what cars are sung about and filmed in the contemporary period. There may be no one iconic car, but perhaps the iconic bus has replaced the iconic car. Discussions by Shaw, Kuyper, and Leming all have a certain focus on the bus, ranging from the difficulties of taking a band on tour to celebrations of particular buses as important parts of tours, even to naming them and thinking of them as having agency. The bus has clearly changed from a cheap mode of transportation to an exclusive one, but also from a lonesome and alienating journey to one filled with laughter and community. Bob Dylan’s personal bus and that of his band emphasizes family and musical community on tour. The bus in Paul Simon’s “America” similarly emphasizes the kind of affection and community that can only be discovered on a long-distance bus ride. And the bus that Thomas and Victor in Smoke Signals ride from northern Idaho to southern Arizona also emphasizes a struggle for community, but still others have centered on sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Perhaps, then, it might be possible that the car has come to be seen as an icon of loneliness and the bus an icon of community in contemporary road music and road films, but such a thought warrants a much more extensive investigation in popular road music. In short, while this edition is rich in its coverage of many new and different aspects of music in relation to the road, there is much additional important work to be done, and it is the hope of all the contributors of this volume that this first step will be followed by many others.

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Index Acuff, Roy 38 adventure 6, 8, 10, 12, 17, 20, 22, 24–7, 36–8, 43, 47–8, 50, 64–6, 73, 78–9, 87, 93, 100, 133, 154, 218 The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. See films aesthetic wandering 176, 178–91 African and African American 2, 6, 12–13, 20, 23–4, 29, 31–3, 40–2, 47, 50, 144, 159, 176, 184–7, 222, 225, 227 Against Me! 190, 194–201 Albums and songs Against Me! As the Eternal Cowboy (2003) 194 Against Me! Is Re–Inventing Axl Rose (2002) 194 “Reinventing Axl Rose” 194, 197 “Baby, I’m a Anarchist” 194 “National Myth” 194, 199 New Wave (2007) 195, 198 “Americans Abroad” 196–7 “The Ocean” 195, 197–8 “Thrash Unreal” 195, 198 Searching for a Former Clarity (2005) 195 Transgender Dysphoria Blues (2014) 199–200 “Osama Bin Laden as the Crucified Christ” 199 “True Trans Soul Rebel” 199 White Crosses (2010) “I Was a Teenage Anarchist” 197 AOL Series True Trans 192, 195–9 Tranny 199 Adia Victoria. See Victoria, Adia aesthetic assimilation 186

Aldean, Jason 61–2, 65–6, 71 My Kinda Party (2010) 71 “Dirt Road Anthem” 71 Night Train (2012) 65 “Night Train” 65–6 “Take a Little Ride” (2012) 61, 65 Allen, Woody 212. See also films Allman Brothers 82–3 Almost Famous. See films American Adam 116, 121, 125 dream 7, 13, 49, 57–9, 67, 71, 120, 162–3,195, 211 exceptionalism 57, 62–64, 67, 122, 227 expansion 57–58, 114–15, 117, 119–20, 123, 227 frontier 1, 5, 7, 22, 26, 38–9, 57–72, 100, 112–13, 116–17, 120–2, 176–9, 182–3, 187, 206, 222, 227 identity 4, 8, 21–2, 26–8, 35–6, 38, 52, 57, 59, 61–2, 64, 71, 74, 86, 94, 108, 112–13, 122, 125–7, 158, 176, 178, 180, 182–3, 228 (see also identity) myth/mythology 6–7, 11, 20, 26, 39–40, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66–7, 70–1, 100, 102, 112–13, 117, 121–2, 126, 134, 194, 199, 206, 211–12, 227 redemption 10–11, 109–22, 124–6, 133, 186 (see also redemption) transformation 5, 11, 70, 74, 123, 126, 228 (see also transformation) anarchism 194–200 apartheid 13, 31, 184–6 Appalachia 21, 61. See also the South

256

INDEX

Appalachian music 7, 61, 137, 204, 222 Ashby, Hal 15, 30, 206, 208 Asia 30, 33, 118, 152, 173, 212, 227 Atkins, Rodney 68 “Take a Back Road” (2011) 68 Atlanta 6, 24, 41–2, 52, 159 authenticity American 61, 64 musical 15, 69, 71, 212 personal 25, 64, 82 autobiography. See semiotics of the road automobiles. See transportation automobility 27, 121 autopia (automobile utopia) 180–1 backpackers 217 Badalamenti, Angelo 17 Baez, Joan 16, 136, 210, 212 Baker, Houston 24, 39, 44, 47 Barker, Danny 50 the bathroom bill of North Carolina 189–90, 199, 201 The Beach. See films The Beach Boys 2, 9–11, 14, 30, 101, 107–27, 223, 226–7 All Summer Long (1964) “I Get Around” 30 The Beach Boys Today (1965) 10, 108 Brian Wilson Presents Smile (2004) 10–11, 108–9, 116, 124 “Cabin Essence” 113, 116–18, 121, 123 “Do You Like Worms?” 118 “Good Vibrations” 124–25 “Heroes and Villains” 10, 116–17, 119–23, 125 “In Blue Hawaii” 125 “On a Holiday” 119–20, 125 “Roll Plymouth Rock” 117–22, 125 “California Dreamin’” 2 Little Deuce Coupe (1964) 2, 10, 30, 109 “No. 9” (1965) 110 Pet Sounds (1966) 10, 108–9, 126 Smile (intended album) 10–11, 107, 111–27, 227

The Smile Sessions (2011) 10–11, 109, 116 Smiley Smile (1967) 10, 108 Surf’s Up 113, 123, 125 “Long Promised Road” 2 Beat Generation/Beats 8, 26, 32, 37, 57, 81, 95–6, 99–100, 194, 216–17 The Beatles 9, 102, 104, 110–11, 127 Help! (see films) Revolver (1966) 111 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” 104 Beat the Street 92 bebop 8, 29, 223, 226 Bellow, Saul 37 The Adventures of Augie March 37 Bennett, Chester Arthur. See Howlin’ Wolf Bentley, Dierks 67 “Free and Easy (Down the Road I Go)” 67 Benton, Thomas Hart 107, 117–20, 122, 124 Berry, Chuck 2, 113, 176–9 “Maybellene” 2, 176–9 “No Particular Place to Go” 2, 113 The Big Bopper 9, 80, 101 bikers 211. See also transportation Bjorner, Olaf 130, 143 Black Sabbath 82 Blind Blake 7, 42 Blind Lemon Jefferson. See Jefferson, Blind Lemon the Blues artists 1–2, 6–7, 24, 39–55, 96, 100, 138, 149, 163, 199–200 city/urban Blues 41, 144–5 country Blues 6–8, 24, 39–55, 132, 137 Delta Blues 7–8, 24, 39–55 gospel Blues 15 Piedmont Blues 6–8, 24, 39–55 songs 38, 39–55 Texas Blues 6, 24, 40–1, 144 Tradition 1–2, 6, 15, 24, 38–55, 96, 98, 100, 103, 110, 112–13, 132, 136, 138, 144–5, 149, 155, 163, 173, 199–200, 219, 222–3, 225–6, 228–9

257

INDEX

Volkswagen Blues (see Poulin) Bob Dylan. See Dylan, Bob Bonnie and Clyde. See films Bono, Chaz 155, 191 Boone, Pat 103 Bound for Glory. See films Bourdieu, Pierre 64 Bowie, David 213 Boyd, Jim 16, 213–14 Boylan, Jennifer Finney 191 British/English invasion” of popular music 102, 110, 113, 162 “Key to the Highway” 154 broadcasting 1, 157, 203, 222 Broonzy, Big Bill 154 Buckingham, Lindsey 16 Buddy Moss. See Moss, Buddy Burnett, T. Bone 204, 208, 210 “Am I Born to Die” 204 “The Cuckoo” 204 “Death of Queen Jane” 210 “Fare Thee Well” 210 “Hang Me Oh Hang Me” 210 “I Wish My Baby Was Born” 204 “Like a Songbird That Has Fallen” 204 Burnside, R. L. 8 “Greyhound Bus Station” 8 Bus. See transportation bus tours. See semiotics of the road Butler, Judith 192–3, 200–1, 218 The Byrds 2–3, 15–16, 97, 212 “The Ballad of Easy Rider” 15 “Wasn’t Born to Follow” 2–3 Camp, Bob 97 capitalism 13, 61, 205 Carliner, Saul 226 Carter, Dale 10, 24, 107–27 Cartier, Jacques 35–7 cartoon consciousness 115 Cash, Johnny 34–5, 65, 74, 88, 91–2, 226, 229 “One Piece at a Time” 74 Ride This Train (1960) 65 The Castiles 162, 169 Chapman, Tracy 74 “Fast Car” 74 Chicago 8–9, 33, 37, 40, 42, 47, 75–6, 95–101, 105, 132, 210, 228

Cichon, Walter 162–3, 166, 169–72 civil rights 10–11, 23, 29–34, 38, 100, 111, 131, 223, 225 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 23, 32 Clapton, Eric 55 “Layla” 55 Cochran, Eddie 9, 96, 98, 100–2 codes/coding 4, 22, 25–9, 34, 58–9, 95, 192, 194 “Summertime Blues” 96, 98 Coen Brothers 204, 208, 210 Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark 2–3 Cohen, Leonard 2–3, 155 Cold Mountain. See films Cold War 178 Cole, Nat King 144 “Highway 66” 144 Collins, Judy 210 Como, Perry 226 The Concert for Valor 13, 157–74 confession. See semiotics of the road conspicuous consumption 6, 40, 43, 48–9, 51, 55 Cooder, Ry 213 Johnny Handsome (1989) 213 Sin City (2005) 213 Southern Comfort (1981) 213 corporate greed 7, 111, 125, 160, 205 ways 25, 62, 211 counterculture. See semiotics of the road country music/country-western music 1–2, 6–7, 25, 37–8, 41, 48, 57–72, 80, 91 99, 101, 112, 159, 211, 222–3, 225–8 cowboy. See semiotics of the road The Cowsills 81 Creedence Clearwater Revival 16, 212, 214 ”Fortunate Son” 158, 212, 214 Crosby, Bing 2, 226 Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young 9, 101 “Crosstown Traffic” 113 Crowe, Cameron 16, 28, 35, 82–4, 213, 221–2 Cyrus, Miley 92 Dallas

24, 41–2, 70, 217

258

INDEX

Darin, Bobby 97 Davis, Sammy 102 Dead Man. See films the Delta 1, 6–7, 24, 42, 47, 53–4, 132, 168, 228 Delta Blues 7, 40–2, 47, 53 Deshane, Evelyn 34, 189–201, 224 diachronic 224–5 Diallo, Amadou 159 dialogue/dialogic 12, 177, 183 diaspora/diasporic 182 Didley, Bo 211 dirt roads 6–7, 58, 62, 65, 67–72, 112, 214 discourse/discursive 12, 31, 34, 60, 64, 80, 84, 112, 176, 178–9, 185–7, 201 Dixie Chicks 7, 58–59 Fly (1999) 58–59 “Wide Open Spaces” 58 The Doors 16, 212 Douglas, Lizzie. See Memphis Minnie Dudley, Dave 98 “Six Days on the Road” 98 Dylan, Bob (aka Robert Zimmerman) 2, 9, 11–12, 14–15, 27, 30, 34, 97, 105, 129–55, 164, 168, 205–6, 210–11, 223–9 albums and songs Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) 129–30, 150 “Chimes of Freedom” 136 “It Ain’t Me, Babe” 150 “Big City Blues” (1961) 144–5 Biograph (1985) 133 Blonde on Blonde (1966) 137–8, 149, 151, 153 “Absolutely Sweet Marie” 149 “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” 153 “Pledging My Time” 151 “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” 138 Blood on the Tracks (1975) 145, 152–3 “56th and Wabash” 145, 149 ”Meet Me in the Morning” 145 “Shelter from the Storm” 97, 152

“Tangled Up in Blue” 145 “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” 153 Bob Dylan (1962) 145–46 “Highway 51” 11, 144 “Song to Woody” 134, 146 “Talking New York” 134 Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 (1971) 149 “Tomorrow is a Long Time” 149 The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1–3 (1991) 146–7, 149–50 “Farewell Angelina” 150 “Mama, You Been on My Mind” 149 “Only a Hobo” 146 “Rambling, Gambling Willie” 147 “Series of Dreams” 146 The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6 (2004) “Talkin’ the John Birch Paranoid Blues” 136 The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9 (2010) “Hero Blues” 138 “Long Time Gone” 132, 154 Bringing It All Back Home (1965) 148, 150–1 “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” 150–1 “Mr. Tambourine Man” 136–7, 148 “On the Road Again” 2, 151 Chimes of Freedom (2012) 130 “Chimes of Freedom” 136 Christmas in the Heart (2009) 143 Desire (1976) 133–4, 152 “Isis” 152 “Mozambique” 152 “Oh, Sister” 152 “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)” 152 “Romance in Durango” 152 “Sara” 152 “Dusty Old Fairgrounds” (1973) 144–5, 206 The Essential Bob Dylan (2000) “Things Have Changed” 142

259

INDEX

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) 145, 147–50 “Blowin’ in the Wind” 2, 134, 136–7, 139, 154 “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” 149 “Down the Highway” 147, 150 “Girl From the North Country” 149 “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” 148 “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance” 149 “Talkin’ World War III Blues” 145 Highway 61 Revisited (1965) 144, 147 “Desolation Row” 147 “From a Buick 6” 138 “Highway 61” 144, 154 Infidels (1983) 139 “I and I” 139 John Wesley Harding (1967) 146, 151 “I am a Lonesome Hobo” 146 “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” 151 Knocked Out Loaded (1986) 153 “Brownsville Girl” 153 Love and Theft (2001) 142, 153 “Sugar Baby” 153 Modern Times (2006) 142, 147 “Ain’t Talkin, Just Walkin” 147 Nashville Skyline (1969) 145, 151 “Lay Lady Lay” 151 “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” 151 “Wanted Man” 145 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) 138, 205 “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” 138, 205 Planet Waves (1974) 146, 151 “Going, Going, Gone” 146 “On a Night like This” 151 “Tough Mama” 151 Saved (1980) 139 Shadows in the Night (2015) 154–5 “Stay with Me” 155 Shot of Love (1981) 139

“Every Grain of Sand” 139 Slow Train Coming (1980) 139 The Tempest (2012) 153 “The Narrow Way” 153 Time Out of Mind (1997) 141, 153, 155 “Can’t Wait” 153 “Love Sick” 155 “Million Miles” 153 The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) 134, 142, 150, 154 “One Too Many Mornings” 150 “Restless Farewell” 150 “The Times They Are A-Changin’” 142, 154 awards 130–31 concerts 137, 143 films The Cardinal, Dir. Otto Preminger (1963) 155 Don’t Look Back, Dir. D.A. Pennebaker (1965) 136 No Direction Home, Dir. Martin Scorsese (2005) 2, 129, 143 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Dir. Sam Peckinpah (1973) 15, 30, 37, 138, 204–5 Renaldo and Clara, Dir. Bob Dylan (1978) 138 Wonder Boys, Dir. Curtis Hanson (2001) 142 radio Theme Time Radio Hour with Your Host Bob Dylan (2006) 142 tours Alimony Tour 139 Never Ending Tour 11, 34, 141, 143 Rolling Thunder Revue 97, 129, 138 Tour ’74 138 True Confessions Tour 140 writings Chronicles 97, 132–4, 137, 140–3 Bob Dylan: Lyrics 11–12, 129–55, 225 “My Life in a Stolen Moment” 135 Eaglebear Singers 214

260

INDEX

“John Wayne’s Teeth” 214 East/East coast 6, 16–17, 20, 25–7, 40, 107, 111, 114, 120, 124, 145, 179, 222, 228 Easy Rider. See films Edenquest 196, 199 “8 Ball” (from The Beach score) 218 electric/electricity 4, 15, 22, 54, 75–76, 81, 89, 97, 127, 137, 206, 215–16, 222 Ellington, Duke 95 Elliott, Jack 38 Ely, Joe 16, 214 “Lord of the Highway” 214 Eminem 157 Epstein, Ethan 104, 161 Eskobar 88 E Street Band 159, 165 ethics 175–88, 227 alternative 176 collaborative 184–7 focalized 182–3 negotiated 175, 187 transformative 176 exceptionalism. See American exceptionalism Eyre, Chris 16, 213 Fairclough, Norman 58, 60 Faithful, Marianne 15, 216 “Ballad of Lucy Jordan” 216 films and TV series About Schmidt (2003) Dir. James L. Brooks 16–17 The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Dir. Stephan Elliott 74, 84–8, 228 Almost Famous (2000) Dir. Cameron Crowe 28–9, 35, 74, 82–4, 86–8, 204, 213, 221 Apocalypse Now (1979) Dir. Francis Ford Coppola 212, 219 Bandits (2001) Dir. Jonathan Lynn 3 The Beach (2000) Dir. Danny Boyle 204, 217, 219 Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Dir. Arthur Penn 2–3, 14–15, 30, 204, 209, 213, 226

Bound for Glory (1976) Dir. Hal Ashby 13, 15, 30, 164, 204, 206, 208 Brokeback Mountain (2005) Dir. Ang Lee 34 Bronco Billy (1980) Dir. Clint Eastwood 2 Bus Stop (1956) Dir. George Cukor 8, 28, 78 The Cardinal, (1963) Dir. Otto Preminger 155 Cold Mountain (2003) Dir. Anthony Minghella 204 Dead Man (1995) Dir. Jim Jarmusch 204, 206 Don’t Look Back (1965) Dir. D.A. Pennebaker 136 The Doors (1991) Dir. Oliver Stone 16, 212 Easy Rider (1969) Dir. Dennis Hopper 3, 14–15, 30, 57, 99, 203, 205, 210–11, 225 Elizabethtown (2005) Dir. Cameron Crowe 16, 34 Forrest Gump (1994) Dir. Robert Zemeckis 16, 34, 78, 203, 211–12 Fried Green Tomatoes (1992) Dir. Jon Avnet 34 The Garden Murder Case (1936) Dir. Edwin L. Marin 78 Get on the Bus (1996) Dir. Spike Lee 34, 84, 86 The Graduate (1967) Dir. John Schlesinger 14, 28, 31, 78 Grapes of Wrath (1940) Dir. John Ford 25 The Great Gatsby (2013) Dir. Baz Luhrmann 27 Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004) Dir. Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg 34 Hell’s Angels Forever (1983) Dir. Richard Rush 211–12 Hell’s Angels on Wheels (1967) Dir. Richard Rush 211–12 Help! (1965) Dir. Richard Lester 110 Honkeytonk Man (1982) Dir. Clint Eastwood 2

INDEX

Inside Llewyn Davis (2014) Dir. The Coen Brothers 204, 210 It Happened One Night (1934) Dir. Frank Capra 78 La Strada (1954) Dir. Federico Fellini 148 Magic Trip (2011) Dir. Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney 81, 89, 100 Midnight Cowboy (1969) Dir. John Schlesinger 28, 78 My America, or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997) Dir. Renee Tajima-Pena 34 No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) Dir. Martin Scorsese 2, 129, 143 O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) Dir. Coen Brothers 204, 208 On the Road (2012) Dir. Walter Salles 204, 216–17 Pardon Us (1931) Dir. James Parrot 119 Paris, Texas (1984) Dir. Wim Wenders 15, 204, 213 Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973) Dir. Sam Peckinpah 15, 30, 37, 138, 204–5, 213 Pennies from Heaven (1935) Dir. Norman Z McLeod 78 Platoon (1986) Dir. Oliver Stone 212 Powwow Highway (1989) Dir. Jonathan Wacks 16, 204, 214 Renaldo and Clara, (1978) Dir. Bob Dylan 138 Sideways (2004) Dir. Alexander Payne 17 Simpsons (2007) Prod. James L. Brooks 34, 78 Smoke Signals (1998) Dir. Chris Eyre 16, 34, 86, 204, 213, 216, 229 Speed (1994) Dir. Jan de Bont 78 The Straight Story (1999) Dir. David Lynch 16–17, 34 Straw Dogs (1971) Dir. Sam Peckinpah 37 Sullivan’s Travels (1941) Dir. Preston Sturges 78

261

Thelma and Louise (1991) Dir. Ridley Scott 15, 32, 203, 215–16, 225 Transamerica (2006) Dir. Duncan Tucker 204, 217 Two–Lane Blacktop (1971) Dir. Monte Hellman 3 The Wayward Bus (1957) Dir. Paul Wendkos 28, 78 When Harry Met Sally (1989) Dir. Rob Reiner 34 Wild at Heart. Dir. David Lynch. 1990. Film. 204, 215 The Wild One (1953) Dir. Laslo Benedek 100, 211 Wizard of Oz (1939) Dir. Victor Fleming 208, 215 Wonder Boys, (2001) Dir. Curtis Hanson 142 Zelig (1983) Dir. Woody Allen 212 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 27, 37 The Great Gatsby 27 Flatt & Scruggs 14, 209 Fleetwood Mac 16, 212 “Go Your Own Way” 212 “Fly Away” 208 Fogerty, John 160 “Fortunate Son” 160 Foggy Mountain Boys 209 folk music/folk songs 1–2, 4–8, 11, 15, 20–1, 23, 27, 30, 41–2, 96–7, 109, 112, 130, 134–7, 142, 144, 146–7, 149–50, 154, 167, 175, 203–4, 209–10, 222–3, 226 Foo Fighters 158 Ford, Henry 27 Ford, John 25 Ford, Stacilee 3, 5 Forrest Gump. See films “Fortunate Son”. See Creedence Clearwater Revival Franklin, Benjamin 27, 116 The Autobiography 27 Franzwa, Gregory M. 36 Oregon Trail Revisited 36 freedom. See semiotics of the road freedom Riders 29 Freehold, New Jersey 161–2, 165–6, 172

262

INDEX

“Freight Train” 112 freight trains 6, 21, 43, 65–6, 135, 209 Frey, Glenn 15, 216 “Part of Me, Part of You” 216 frontier. See American frontier Frost, Robert 183 “Fire and Ice” 183 “Home Burial” 183 Gabel, Tom 190, 194–5, 197, 201, 224. See also Laura Jane Grace Gaillard, Slim 217 Garfunkel, Art 10, 12, 14, 31 gender 1, 5, 7, 29, 34, 176, 189–201, 217, 227. See also masculinity in semiotics of the road cisgender 189, 191, 193, 200–1 dysphoria 192, 195, 198–200 female 2, 16, 35, 63, 70, 189–201, 214, 224–5 identity 190, 194–5, 197, 199, 224, 227 male 26, 28, 31–2, 49–50, 63, 143, 176, 189–201, 227 narratives 190–4, 196, 198–201 transgender 189–201, 217 Gibson, Bob 97 Gilchrist, Todd 221 Gillespie, Dizzy 217 Ginsberg, Allen 136 Grace, Laura Jane 189–201, 224, 226. See also Tom Gabel as well as Against Me! Grand Old Opry 14, 209 The Grateful Dead 87, 140, 211 Graves, Robert 133 The White Goddess 133 greaser culture 95, 100 Great Depression 2, 7, 14–15, 24–5, 28, 30, 42–3, 45, 54, 136, 206, 208–9, 223 Great Migration 6, 23–4, 40, 47, 54–5, 222 Grohl, Dave 158–61 Grossman, Albert 105, 134–5, 140, 210 Grushecky, Joe 169 The Guess Who 8 “Bus Rider” 8

Guns N’ Roses 93, 194 Guthrie, Woody 9, 12, 15, 30, 37, 97, 103, 121, 134–6, 138, 144, 146, 155, 205–10, 213, 215, 223 “Dusty Old Road” 206 “Goin’ Down that Road Feelin’ Bad” 206 “Hard Travellin’” 206 “Pastures of Plenty” 206–7 “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Ya” 206 “There’s a Better World a Comin’ Tell You Why” 207 “This Land Is Your Land” 15, 121, 206–7 “You Can’t Scare Me I’m Stickin’ to the Union” 207 Guthrie, Woody and Pete Seeger “66 Highway Blues” 144 (see also Pete Seeger) Haggard, Merle 74 “Motorcycle Cowboy” 74 Hanson, Will 216 “Home” 216 Hark, Ina Rae 2–3, 15 Haynes, Bart 162, 166, 169–72 heartland 7, 13, 31, 57–72, 227. See also Midwest Hendrix, Jimi 3, 15, 81, 88, 101 Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) 3 “Are You Experienced” 3 “Break on through to the Other Side” 3 “If Six Was Nine” 3, 15 Heylin, Clinton 130, 136–7, 140–41 The Highwaymen 91 highways 6, 8–9, 11–13, 15–16, 19–20, 26, 28, 31, 33, 38, 43, 53, 67–71, 74, 76–7, 82–3, 85, 94, 99–100, 108, 110, 112, 121, 129, 131–2, 135–6, 138, 142, 144–51, 153–54, 164, 167–8, 173, 194, 204–5, 210, 213–14, 222, 228 blue highways 26 highway 22 135 highway 37 135 highway 40 99

INDEX

highway 49 144 highway 51 11–12, 135, 144, 228 highway 61 12, 132, 135, 142, 144, 147, 228 highway 66 99, 135, 144 highway 81 99, 228 highway 169 135 Howard Johnson Turnpike 135 Interstate Highway System 26, 28, 228 Route 40 135 Route 66 9, 16, 20, 98, 101, 112, 228 hillbilly music 7, 60, 63, 112 hip hop music 49, 226 hippie 8, 31, 98–9, 101, 206, 211 Hollenberg, Alexander 12, 175–188, 223–4, 227 The Hollies 8 “Bus Stop” 8 Holly, Buddy 9, 80, 101, 142 Hollywood 14, 30, 34, 100, 116, 119, 205, 209 “Home on the Range” 217 Hopkins, Lightnin’ 7, 41 House, Son 7, 41 Houston 15, 24, 41, 213 Houston, Cisco 146 Howlin’ Wolf 7, 41, 47 Hudson, Jennifer 157 Ibbotson, Jimmy 87, 89 identity 4, 8, 21–2, 26–8, 35–6, 38, 52, 57, 59, 61–2, 64, 71, 74, 86, 94, 108, 112–13, 122, 125–7, 133–5, 144, 158, 162, 166, 176, 178, 180, 182–3, 190–9, 224, 228. See also American identity Illouz, Eva 191–2, 198, 201 “In the Jailhouse Now” 208 independence. See semiotics of the road individualism. See semiotics of the road Inside Llewyn Davis. See films Irving, Dan 192, 200–1 Isaak, Chris 215 “Wicked Game” 215

263

Jacobsen, Kurt 2, 14–15, 131, 203–19, 223, 226 Jakobs, Jim Grease 95 Jarmusch, Jim 206 jazz 8, 24, 29, 95, 140, 217, 226, 228. See also bebop Jefferson, Blind Lemon 1–2, 6–7, 24, 40–1, 44, 48–50, 52–3 “Black Horse Blues” 44 “D B Blues” 44, 48–50 “Easy Rider Blues” 52 “Long Distance Moan” 52–3 “Rabbit Foot Blues” 44 “Sunshine Special” 44 Jennings, Waylon 80, 91 Jepsen, Carly Rae 89 Jett, Joan 195 Jim and Jesse 80 Jim Crow laws (begun in 1890) 6, 23–4, 40–1, 43, 46–7, 50–1, 55, 103, 222 Jo Dee Messina. See Messina, Jo Dee John, Elton 16, 213 “Tiny Dancer” 83, 213 “John Henry” 22, 154 Johnny Shines. See Shines, Johnny Johnson, Blind Willie 15 Johnson, President Lyndon B. 172 Johnson, Robert 1, 6–7, 15, 24, 40–4, 47, 49–55, 144, 208 “Cross Road Blues” 41, 51–2, 55, 144, 149–50, 213 “Hellhound on My Trail” 51 “Love in Vain” 52 “Me and the Devil Blues” 44, 53 “Rambler Blues” 53 “Rambling on My Mind” 52 “Stones in my Passway” 52 “Sweet Home Chicago” 47 “Terraplane Blues” 44, 49–50 “Walking Blues” 46, 54 Joplin, Janis 81, 99, 101 Jorgenson, Christine 191 journey. See semiotics of the road Kennedy Center Honors ceremony 130, 142, 168, 171–2 Kent, Rolfe 17

264

INDEX

Kerouac, Jack 8–9, 26–9, 36, 57, 77–8, 95–6, 99–100, 102, 109, 112, 114, 135, 147, 203, 209, 216, 223, 226, 228 Dahrma Bums (1958) 148 Desolation Angels (1965) 147 On the Road (1957) 1, 8–9, 26–9, 36, 78, 95–6, 99, 109, 112, 114, 209, 216, 223, 226, 228 Khumalo, Baghiti 186 Khumalo, Vusi 186 King, B.B. 15, 216 “Better Not Look Down” 216 King, Martin Luther 32–3 Kingston Trio 8–9, 96 The Kinks 9, 102 Knepper, Steve 6–7, 39–55, 222–4 Kristofferson, Kris 38, 91, 205 Kuyper, Susan 4–5, 11, 34, 39, 58, 74, 129–55, 221, 223–5, 228–9 “Kyrie Eleison” 15, 211 Lady Gaga 92 Ladysmith Black Mambazo 185 Lambert, Miranda 7, 68, 70 “Automatic” (2014) 70 “New Strings” 68 lang, k.d. 93 La Traviata 86 Lawford, Peter 102 Leadbelly 7, 41, 139, 146 Leming, Warren 8–9, 95–105, 210, 223, 228–9 Lennon, John 104, 221 Lewis, Jeffry 8 “Roll Bus Roll” 8–9 LGBT 5, 189, 199, 224 Lightnin’ Hopkins. See Hopkins, Lightnin’ Limelighters 97 Lin, Maya 170 Little Brother Montgomery. See Montgomery, Little Brother Little Richard 9, 103–4 “Long Tall Sally” 103 “Tutti-Fruiti” 103 Lockwood, Robert 47 Los Angeles 15, 32, 73, 97, 109, 111, 113, 123, 139

Lownds, Sara 12, 137–8, 151–3 Lynch, David 16, 215 McCabe, Patrick 198 McCartney, Paul 80, 104 McClintock, Harry 208 “Big Rock Candy Mountain” 208 McGraw, Tim 69 “Highway Don’t Care” 69 McLean, Don 80 “American Pie” 80 McNamara, Robert 171–2 McTell, Blind Willie 155 Madison Square Garden 138, 159 Madonna 90, 195 Makeba, Miriam 31 Malone, Bill C. 62–3 Mamas and the Papas 16, 212 “Man of Constant Sorrow” 208 manifest destiny. See semiotics of the road Martin, Dean 102 Masekela, Hugh 31 mass media. See media Maymudes, Victor and Jacob 129, 135–6, 138, 141, 143 Meatloaf 74 “Bat out of Hell” 74 Media 1, 4, 5, 22–3, 29, 58, 60–2, 79–80, 90, 93, 138, 143, 158, 161, 189, 194, 201, 221, 225 Memphis 185 Memphis Minnie 50 “Me and My Chauffeur Blues” 50 Merry Pranksters 29, 81, 89 Messina, Jo Dee 7, 59, 68 “Heads Carolina, Tails California” 59, 68 metafictive 14–17, 35, 38 Metallica 157 “Midnight Special” 112 Midwest/Midwestern 7–9, 15, 17, 25, 27, 95, 97–8, 222–3. See also heartland Miller, Roger 210 “Dang Me, They Oughta Take a Rope and Hang Me” 210 Minghella, Anthony 204 miracle of serendipity 221–9

INDEX

Mississippi Delta 1, 6, 24, 31, 41–2, 48, 228. See also the Delta Mississippi River 13, 21, 31, 113, 132, 147, 185, 222, 228 mobility. See semiotics of the road Mock, Janet 191 modernity. See semiotics of the road Montgomery, Little Brother 51 “The First Time I Met You” 51 Morganfield, McKinley. See Waters, Muddy Morison, Van 216 Wild Nights 216 Moross, Jerome 155 “Stay with Me” 155 Morrison, Jim 101, 212 “The End” 101, 212 Moss, Buddy 2, 6–7, 24, 40–7, 49–50, 52–3 “B&O Blues No. 2” 44 “Broke Down Engine” 44, 52 “Cold Country Blues” 47 “Going to Your Funeral in a Vee Eight Ford” 49 “Hard Road Blues” 45–6 “Joy Rag” 43 “Midnight Rambler” 53 “Some Lonesome Day” 53 “Struggle Buggie” 43, 49–50 “Travelin’ Blues” 47, 52–3 “Undertaker Blues” 44 “When the Hearse Roll Me from my Door” 44 The Motifs 162 Motown 212 Moyer, Justin Wm. 161 Muddy Waters. See Waters, Muddy Muller, Bobby 158 multicultural 108 Musgraves, Kacey 57 “My House” 57 My Morning Jacket 16 “Mystery Train” 112 myth/mythology 2, 6–7, 20, 26, 39–40, 55, 58, 60–2, 64, 66–7, 70–1, 100, 102, 112–13, 117, 121–2, 126, 129, 131, 133–5, 138, 141, 145, 149, 194, 199, 206, 211–12, 227. See also American myth/mythology

265

narrative 4, 8, 12–13, 16–17, 20–2, 26–7, 31–2, 40, 66, 74, 79, 84, 120, 135, 145, 148, 165, 175–88, 189–201 complex 11, 79, 224 counter 177, 179 dialogic 178, 182–3 focalization 183 hypodiegetic 178 instabilities 185 lyric 12, 175–88, 227 medicalized 190, 196 mobility (see semiotics of the road) modernity (see semiotics of the road) personae 66, 145 postmodern 17 progress 177–8, 180, 191 road 4, 16, 27, 32, 176, 178, 185–6, 191, 195–6, 198 (see also semiotics of the road) structure 177–9, 181–2, 186, 191 transgender 189–201 unity 40, 175–88 un-narration 181 National Mall, Washington D.C. 14, 157–74 Native American 16, 36, 117–18, 214–15, 227 Nelson, Ricky 9, 95–96, 98, 100, 102 Nelson, Willy 35, 91, 139, 211 New York City 2, 9, 21, 27, 30, 42, 131–2, 134–5, 138, 145–7, 159, 228 Nickelback 92 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band 87 Nixon, President Richard 172 Nobel Prize 129–30, 143 Nolte, John 161 nostalgia 6, 24, 104, 123, 197. See also the road Obama, President Barack and First Lady Michelle 157, 159 O Brother Where Art Thou. See films On the Road. See Kerouac On The Road (2012) dir. Walter Salles. See films Oregon Trail Revisited. See Franzwa

266

INDEX

Paisley, Brad 70 “Mud on the Tires” (2003) 70 Paris, Texas. See films Parker, Charlie 217 Parks, Rosa 29 Parks, Van Dyke 10–11, 107–27, 227 Parton, Dolly 35, 89, 217, 225–6 Backwoods Barbie 89 9 to 5 89 “Traveling Through” 217 The Partridge Family 34–5, 81 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. See films Peckinpah, Sam 15, 30, 37, 138, 205 Pennebaker, D. A. 136 Perry, Katy 91 Petty, Tom 16, 140 Phiri, Chikapa Ray 185–6 Picara, Andre, Jr. 16, 214 Piedmont 2, 6, 40, 42 Piedmont Blues 40–3 popular music 3–4, 6, 54, 58, 72, 108, 110–11, 113, 130, 137, 176–7, 184, 227 “Porcelain” (from The Beach score) 218 postmodern 14–17, 33–8, 68–9 Poulin, Jacques 35–8 Volkswagen Blues 35–8 Pow Wow Highway. See films Presley, Elvis 9, 34–5, 80, 88, 93, 96, 100, 102–3, 122, 215, 229 progress. See semiotics of the road Prosser, Jay 190, 196–8, 200–1 protest/protest songs 13–15, 28–34, 38, 134, 158–60, 167, 190, 193, 223–5 Pulitzer Prize 130 punk music 100, 189–201, 209, 226 “Pure Shores” 218 Puritans 20 quest. See semiotics of the road race 1, 5, 10, 23–5, 29–33, 50, 62, 103, 112, 117, 121, 185, 207, 225 racism 55, 184

radio

1, 9, 23, 30, 38, 99–100, 142–3, 157, 168, 203, 208–9, 214–15 rap music 49, 54, 89, 100, 226 rebel. See semiotics of the road rebellion. See semiotics of the road recording 6, 10, 31, 35, 40–2, 45, 47, 54, 89–90, 107–9, 114, 116, 119–20, 123–4, 126, 130, 135–7, 139, 142–3, 158, 164, 167, 170, 222 redemption 10–11, 109–22, 124–6, 133, 148, 153, 164, 167, 186 Reed, Lou 213 Reeve, Martha 15, 216 rhythm and blues (R&B) 110, 113, 226, 229 Richard, Little 9, 103–4 Richards, Keith 80 “Ride on, Sonny” 211 Rihanna 92 Riot Grrrl movement 197 Roach, Max 95 the road. See semiotics of the road road music. See semiotics of the road “Roadrunner” 113 Robertson, Robbie 214 “Sweet Fire of Love” 214 rockabilly 212 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 130 “Rocket 88” 112 “Rock Island Line” 112 rock ’n’ roll 1–4, 6, 8–10, 13–14, 27, 29–30, 54, 89–90, 96–9, 101–5, 111–12, 127, 130, 136, 138, 147, 150, 158, 161, 163–5, 167, 169, 172, 175, 186, 194–5, 198–9, 205, 210–11, 213, 223, 225–6, 229 anarchist rock 195, 199 folk rock 175, 203, 137 pre-rock 206 punk rock 194,198 Rodgers, Jimmie 38 “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride” 38 “Train Whistle Blues” 38 Rolling Stones/The Stones 9, 80, 98, 102, 110, 127, 130, 139 “Route 66” 98

INDEX

12 x 5 (1964) 110 romance of the road. See semiotics of the road Rotolo, Suze 136, 147, 150 “Route 66”. See Bobby Troupe rural 2, 6–8, 24–5, 40–3, 46–7, 59–72, 122, 222 Salles, Walter 216, 226 Santaolalla, Gustavo 217 “God is Pooh Bear” 217 “Keep It Rolling” 217 “Memories” 217 Motorcycle Diaries music 217 On the Road music 217 Scorsese, Martin 2, 129, 142–3 The Seeds 101 Seeger, Pete 97, 136, 144. See also Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger self-mythologizing 129, 131, 133–5, 138 semiotics of the road 2, 4, 19–38 activism 11, 134, 227 adventure 6, 8, 10, 12, 17, 20, 22, 24–7, 36–8, 43, 47–8, 50, 64–5, 73, 78–9, 84, 86–8, 93, 96, 100, 133, 154, 218, 228 anti-establishment 13, 29, 101, 111 authenticity 15, 25, 61, 64, 69, 71, 82, 212 autobiography 27, 35, 88, 172, 191, 196, 198–200 automobile (see transportation) buddies 15–17, 85, 214 bus (see transportation) camaraderie 8, 28, 77, 224 capitalism 13, 61, 205 car (see transportation) class 1, 5, 7, 11, 14, 25–7, 30, 32, 58–60, 64, 67, 71, 102, 104, 123, 162–3, 166, 172, 207–8, 225 community 8, 11–12, 17, 24–6, 29, 34, 38, 42, 48, 51, 69, 77, 82, 86, 120, 125–6, 185, 194, 196–8, 200, 222–4, 229 counterculture 3, 111, 125

267

cowboy 7, 28, 39, 62–7, 74, 78, 91, 194, 197 desire 6, 13, 25, 27, 38, 51, 53, 59, 63, 67, 69, 76, 79, 85, 90, 92, 108, 110–11, 117, 133–4, 152, 165, 167, 187, 191, 195, 197, 205, 211, 214, 224 discovery 22, 27, 36, 38, 79, 182–3, 217 (see also self-discovery in this semiotics list) dream (see American dream) ethnicity 5, 117 family 8, 11, 16–17, 25–6, 28, 33–5, 42, 47, 65, 68, 81–4, 86, 91, 93, 96, 98, 121, 132, 137, 147, 167–8, 191–2, 212, 222, 224, 229 freedom 2, 4–6, 8, 10–13, 15, 17, 20–2, 24–7, 29, 31, 33, 39, 44, 51, 54, 57–9, 62, 64–5, 67, 73, 87, 108, 125, 130, 135–6, 145, 149, 163–5, 168, 170, 176–8, 180, 198, 210–11, 222, 215, 222, 224 frontier (see American frontier) gender (see gender) hero 2, 10, 14–15, 20, 22, 64, 67, 100, 104, 116–17, 119–23, 125, 131, 133, 135, 137–41, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152–5, 206–7, 209, 211, 224 highways (see highways) identity (see identity as well as American identity) ideology 10, 26, 57–8, 60, 64, 69, 71, 184, 227 independence 2, 4, 7–8, 12, 26, 30–2, 57, 59, 65, 116, 222, 227 individualism 4–5, 27, 31, 38, 177–8, 209 liberation 8, 24, 26, 113, 120, 133, 164–5, 167 love 5, 12, 21, 24, 28–9, 35, 37, 42–3, 45–6, 48–53, 69, 74, 84, 90–1, 113, 116, 123, 125, 130–3, 139, 142–3, 145, 148–55, 164–6, 170, 178–9, 182–4, 187, 213–14, 221, 224

268

INDEX

manifest destiny 7, 36, 58, 61–4, 66–7, 112, 116, 124–5, 227 masculinity 10, 16, 34, 197, 225, 227 mobility 2–6, 8, 10–11, 17, 20–2, 24–7, 29, 33, 38–9, 44, 57–9, 62, 65, 67, 73, 108, 112–13, 116, 120–1, 123, 132, 170, 180–1, 211, 221–3, 226, 228 modernity 8, 26, 28–9, 38 money/economy 4, 7–8, 14, 25, 28, 30–1, 40, 42, 47, 49–50, 59–60, 64–7, 71, 75–6, 79, 85, 90, 93, 96–8, 118, 125, 132, 139–40, 147, 154, 156, 160, 168, 200, 209, 218, 223–4 issues 2, 25 plenitude 8, 14, 28, 30, 71, 76, 79, 90, 96–7, 158, 223–4 problems 13, 25, 47, 60, 64–5, 85, 96, 118, 125, 139–40, 160, 168, 209 rewards 24, 38, 40, 49, 67, 93, 98, 223 status 7, 50, 67, 82, 87, 90–1 nostalgia 6, 24, 104, 123, 197 opportunity 24, 27, 39, 43, 50, 57–8, 62, 64, 66–9, 71, 73, 75, 111, 223 postmodern (see postmodernism) progress 14, 107, 116, 124, 157–8, 177–80, 223 protest 13–15, 28–34, 38, 134, 158–9, 167, 190, 193, 219, 223–5 quest 22, 27, 73–4, 114, 116, 133, 153, 196, 199, 205, 213, 216 race (see race/racial/racism) rebel/rebellion 2–5, 15, 29–30, 32–4, 37–8, 63, 81, 86, 163, 190, 193– 5, 197, 199, 206, 209, 211–12 relaxation 24–5 road music 1–5, 7, 16, 27, 34, 37, 58, 131, 175, 203–4, 206, 215, 218, 221–2, 224–9 romance 2, 10, 16, 33–4, 38, 48, 57, 61, 63–71, 78, 89, 100, 104, 108–10, 116–17, 120, 122, 124, 152, 176, 197–8, 204–5, 210, 214

self-determination 25, 40 self-discovery 27, 77–8, 84, 191–2 self-invention 22, 27, 133 speed 1, 3, 26–7, 29, 38, 45, 77–8, 150, 181, 222–3 spiritual 3, 10–12, 22, 38, 71–94, 108, 112, 116–17, 122–3, 129, 131–4, 138, 140–1, 143, 153, 155, 167–8 synchronic 224–5 technology (see technology) tour 8–9, 11, 28–9, 34–5, 51, 73–94, 97–105, 110, 129–31, 134–43, 165, 190–1, 194–7, 199–201, 213, 221, 223–5, 228–9 tourist 20, 76, 125–6, 218 train (see transportation) travel/travelers 1–3, 5–9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19–38, 39–55, 58–9, 64–7, 69, 73–94, 97–105, 109, 112–14, 122, 130–2, 134, 136, 141, 144–55, 157, 163, 172, 179, 182–3, 186, 193–4, 196, 199–201, 206–7, 211, 215, 217–19, 222–4, 228 the West 7, 21–2, 26, 30, 36, 41, 47, 58–59, 61, 64, 68, 101, 107, 120, 132, 179, 182, 190–1, 206, 222–3, 228 Shabalala, Joseph 31 Shain, Britta Lee 130 Shangri-La 74 “Leader of the Pack” 74 Shaw, Anaia 8, 73–94, 223–4, 228–9 Shay, Virginia 7, 57–72, 222, 224, 227 Shelton, Robert 129, 131–3, 137–8, 144, 147, 151–2, 155 Shines, Johnny 6, 43, 47 Simon, Paul 2, 9–10, 12–14, 30–2, 175–88, 223, 225–7, 229 albums and songs Bookends (1968) 177 “America” 2, 176–82, 229 “Duncan” (1972) 12 Graceland (1987) 184–87 “Graceland” 2, 12–13, 31, 176, 184–7

INDEX

Hearts and Bones (1983) 2, 31 “Cars are Cars” 12, 31, 187–8 “Hearts and Bones” 2, 176, 182–5 Paul Simon (1972) “Papa Hobo” 2, 12, 176, 180–2 Surprise (2006) “Another Galaxy” 12, 31, 184 The Simpsons 34, 78 Sinatra, Frank 102, 154, 226 Sirois, John 16, 214 Slethaug, Gordon E. 1–17, 19–38, 57–8, 66, 73–4, 94, 194, 221–9 Sloman, Larry 129, 138 Smile. See The Beach Boys Smoke Signals (1998) dir. Chris Eyre. See films “Smoke Stack Lightning” 112 social evolution 180 social media 158, 225. See also media Son House. See House, Son Sounes, Howard 129, 132, 137–9, 142, 145, 224 the South 6–8, 11, 13, 15, 23, 25, 29, 31, 40–2, 44, 47–8, 50–1, 55, 59, 61, 63, 65–8, 99, 103, 135, 186, 222, 228 South Africa 12–13, 31–2, 184–7, 225 space/spatial 12, 21–2, 38, 41, 54, 58–60, 66, 75, 78, 81–8, 90–2, 101, 165, 172, 175–9, 181–3, 187, 190, 193, 196, 199, 201, 228 complex 87, 165, 175–6, 178 confined 83 creative 81, 84, 88, 178 democratic 4 dialogic 12, 183, 187 frontier 58 gendered 176 indeterminate 181 inner/introspective 66, 85, 87, 90 liminal 196, 199 lonely 41 narrative 175, 178, 181, 188 national 178–9, 182, 193 open 21–2, 38, 58–9 paradoxical 165, 176

269

performative 84, 86 physical 21, 82, 101, 172, 178, 190, 193, 199, 201, 228 shared 54, 91, 177–8, 183 transformative 176 traversable 84, 178 urban 181 Spearmint 89 Springfield, Buffalo 212 “For What It’s Worth” 212 Springsteen, Bruce 2, 9–10, 13–14, 30–2, 74, 130, 157–74, 180–1, 190, 193, 207–8, 223, 225–7 albums and songs Born in the USA (1984) 158 “Born in the USA” 2, 13, 32, 158, 167, 173–4, 208 “Dancing in the Dark” 174 Born to Run (1975) 13, 162–7, 172 “Backstreets” 165 “Born to Run” 2, 13, 164–7, 169, 175, 181 “Jungleland” 165 “Thunder Road” 2, 13, 74, 163–7 Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) 161, 165, 167, 173, 175 “Factory” 161 “The Promised Land” 65, 168, 172–3 “Racing in the Street” 13, 167 The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) 13, 68 “Galveston Bay” 168 “Youngstown” 168 Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973) 163–4 “Growin’ Up” 163 “Lost in the Flood” 13, 163–4 High Hopes (2014) 168–72 “The Wall” 168–74 Live in New York City (2001) 165–6 “American Skin (41 Shots)” 159 Live 1975–85 (1986) 165–7 “The River” 165, 167 Nebraska (1982) 13, 167, 173 The River (1980) 167 “Born in the U.S.A” 167 “My Father’s House” 167

270

INDEX

“Highway Patrolman” 167 book Born to Run (2016) 172 and Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” 13, 32, 158–61 Springsteen, Douglas 161, 165–6 Stanley, Ralph 208 “O Death” 208 Star War films 217, 226 Steppenwolf 2–3, 15, 210–11 “Born to Be Wild” 2–3, 15, 210–11 “The Pusher” 15, 211 Stimela 31 Stone, Oliver 212, 215 The Stones. See The Rolling Stones story-telling. See narrative Sugar Hill Gang 49 “Rapper’s Delight” 49 The Supremes 16, 212 Swift, Taylor 35, 90–2, 225–6, 229 syncretism 13, 32, 186 T-Bone Walker. See Walker, T-Bone technology 1, 4, 22–7, 55, 65–6, 75, 79, 90, 221 electrical/electricity 4, 22 productions 79, 90, 221 transportation 4, 23, 26–7, 55, 65– 6, 75 (see also transportation) Thelma and Louise. See films Thornton, Big Mama 103 “Hound Dog” 103 Timberlake, Justin 90 tourism/tourist. See semiotics of the road tours. See semiotics of the road Townsend, Peter 9, 102 trans 85, 189–201, 224. See also gender in addition to transgender narrative Transamerica. See films transformation 5, 11, 69–70, 74, 79, 123, 126, 134, 187, 228 transgender narrative 189–201 transportation 5, 19, 22–3, 25, 34, 38, 40, 43–6, 48–51, 54–5, 65–72, 74–5, 79, 89, 108,

112–14, 116, 120, 131, 176, 180, 221–22, 229 automobile 1, 4, 6, 8, 10, 16, 22–9, 31–4, 38–9, 43–6, 48–51, 54–5, 65, 67, 71, 74–6, 85, 87, 96, 101– 3, 108–9, 112–14, 120, 131–2, 135, 139, 145–6, 163–5, 167–8, 176, 180–1, 187, 203, 209, 212, 214–15, 219, 223, 226, 229 Buick 138, 168, 214 Cadillac 49, 55, 101, 146, 176 Chevrolet 61, 70, 164 Corvette 229 Dodge 44, 48–9, 87 Ford 28, 44, 48–50, 132, 136, 176, 209 Hudson 44, 49 Lincoln 49 Mustang 98 Oldsmobile 70 Packard 44, 48–9 Pontiac 135 Thunderbird 15, 215, 229 V-8 Ford 49, 176 bicycle 74, 114, 121–4 boat/ship 17, 20–2, 27, 114, 118–23, 125, 168, 206, 222 bus 1, 6, 8, 12, 16–17, 23, 28–9, 34–5, 39, 43–4, 53, 73–94, 112, 141–2, 166, 177–8, 210, 213–14, 223, 229 building community 8, 12, 16, 28–9, 34, 38, 73–94, 178–9, 214, 229 civil rights protests 23, 29, 34 tours 8, 28–9, 34–5, 73–94, 141–2, 213, 229 horse 21–2, 43–4, 48–9, 75, 120, 122, 152, 206, 222, 224 motorcycle/bike 15, 57, 74, 132, 137, 141, 166–7, 211, 217 mules 39, 43–4 ocean liner 114, 118–20, 125 plane 17, 35, 44. 77, 80, 83, 87, 133, 142 railroad/train/locomotive 1, 6, 21–5, 28, 36, 38–9, 43–4, 47, 49, 53, 55, 58, 65–6, 68, 73, 75–7, 87,

INDEX

96, 104, 107, 112–14, 117–18, 120, 122–3, 135, 139, 147, 194, 205–6, 209, 222 surfboard 108, 114, 123–4, 126–7 tractor 6, 17, 43 trucks and truckers 1, 6–8, 25, 33, 43, 58, 63, 65–7, 70, 72, 74, 99, 101, 105, 112–13, 121, 213 Tremain, Rose 198 Troup, Bobbie 98 “Route 66” 98 Tribal Brands 90 True Trans. See Against Me!: AOL Series True Trans Turner, Frederick Jackson 5, 22–3, 58, 112, 116, 122, 177–80, 182–3, 227 Turner, Ike and Tina 88 Tuten, James 6–7, 39–55, 222–4 2 Chainz 35, 89 Underwood, Carrie 157 U2 214 “Sweet Fire of Love” 214 Ulali 16, 214 “Waj Ji Leh Yihm” 214 Umbaqanga/Soweto township jive 13, 31, 184, 186–7 urban/urbanization 2, 6–7, 9, 15, 23–5, 27, 40–2, 61–3, 68–9, 71, 76, 97, 102, 145, 180–1, 209, 213, 217, 222 Valens, Richie 9, 80, 101 veterans 13–14, 32, 157–74, 211 Victoria, Adia 7, 55 Beyond the Bloodhounds 55 “Stuck in the South” 55 Vietnam/Vietnam War 10, 13–15, 31–3, 98, 111, 157–74, 211–12, 218, 223, 225 Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall) 168–74 Vincent, Gene 215 “Voices” (from The Beach score) 218 Volkswagen Blues 35–8

271

“The Wabash Cannonball” 112 Walker, Jerry Jeff 38 Walker, T-Bone 7, 41 wander 8, 21, 37, 39, 46, 52, 98, 134, 145, 155, 162–3, 173, 176, 178–87, 198, 218, 224. See also aesthetic wandering Washington, Dinah 217 Waters, Muddy 7, 41, 47, 54, 55 “Country Blues” 54 “Lonesome Road” 55 “Rollin’ Stone” 54 Watts, Charlie 80 “Wayfaring Stranger” 21, 204–5, 221 Wenders, Wim 15, 213, 228 Whiteley, Chris 15, 216 “Kicking the Stones” 216 Whitman, Walt 22, 57, 105–6, 146, 207, 211, 216, 224 “Song of the Open Road” 146 The Who 96, 102, 213 Wilderness Road Band 8, 97–8 Sold for the Prevention of Disease Only (1973) 98 Wilderness Road (1972) 98 Williams, Big Joe “Highway 49” 144 Williams, Larry 9, 104–5 “Bony Moronie” 104–5 “Short Fat Fannie” 104 Wilson, Brian 10–11, 107–27, 227 Wolfe, Tom 81, 89 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test 81, 89 Kandy-Kolored Tangerine 101 The Pump House Gang 125 The Wreckers “My, Oh My” 70 Wriglesworth, Chad 13, 157–74, 223 Zac Brown Band 72, 158–61 “Chicken Fried” 72 “Fortunate Son” 158–61 “God Bless the U.S.A” 159 Zimmer, Hans 215 Zimmerman, Robert 131–2, 135