Bob Dylan (20 page)

In that sense, there are no true open road songs in rock ’n’ roll at all—no good ones, anyway. By definition, the open road has no fixed destination on it. It’s the “Endless Highway,” as the Band titled their worst song; “The road goes on forever,” as Greg Allman drones in “Midnight Rider,” setting the stage for the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man” and everyone else’s Sorry-babe-the-road-is-calling-me number. It’s Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” or a hundred songs like it—none of them with the terrific sense of fate in the Marshall Tucker Band’s hard, lovely “Can’t You See,” where the singer pledges he’ll run away from himself “ ’til the train run outta track.” It will? That blues line is the stopper in the song. What will the singer do then? He doesn’t know, but he knows he’ll have to make up his mind.

You get the same feeling in Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” If you’re lucky enough to hear it in your car with some room in front of you, the chords demand more speed; each time Springsteen presses down on a word or a guitar string he presses your foot down on the gas. But even as he sings “These two lanes will take us anywhere,” you know, somehow—
he’s
saying it, somehow—that the singer and his girlfriend have nowhere to go, that they’ll never even make it out of town. The reality of confinement in this affirmation of escape is what gives the song its tension, its power. It’s no accident that Springsteen’s next road song after “Thunder Road” was “Racing in the Street.” It’s a couple of years later, and the hero is older, tired. His girlfriend is even more tired than he is. The anywhere those two lanes would take them is reduced to how fast the hero can race a couple of city blocks on a bet, while his girlfriend stays home.

With these songs, we’re talking about cars, about money, about ownership, about privacy—but that’s not where the American open road song started. It started in 19th century ballads, and it took shape in early 20th century blues and country music. The open road song was the song of a man with no money, nowhere to
go, and no home he’d accept. So he left—he took to the road, walking, or hopped a freight car. There was a thin edge of fun in some of the songs, but most were somber, finally doomed. The highway was Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway,” which can be a terrifying song.

The setting that these old songs called up was always social. The singer was leaving his community, his family, his familiar milieu of friendship, love, obligation, piety, work, and respect. You were born, you did what you were expected to do, and you died; it was, to some, a prison, and so these singers got out, or imagined that they did. Confinement put the element of fantasy into the enormous landscape. When the Mississippi blues singer Robert Johnson sang “Dust My Broom” in 1936, “Chicago” functioned in the lyric as a place as distant as “the Philippine Islands”; “California” was a place as mythical as “Ethiopia.” In a manner that is both inspiring and pathetic, it wasn’t experience that sparked so many blues and country road songs, it was wish. The road, in other words, was a utopia, and utopia means nowhere.

Before going back in Chuck Berry’s and Bruce Springsteen’s front seats, we have to stop and remember that when the likes of “Dust My Broom” were being written, the road meant vagrancy, the equivalent of people we see living on city streets today. In Berkeley, where I live, at a coffee bar where I go every morning, I’ve seen the same five or six homeless men for five or six years. They have no homes—no houses—but they have a place where they live: they don’t move. It wasn’t so in the twenties and thirties, when vagrancy was a crime; people without money and without hope of getting any lived on the road. It wasn’t a romantic adventure. The hobo camps Robert Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers knew were a world of fear, starvation, alcoholism, theft, rape, and murder. Yet sometimes, it was also a world of familiarity, friendship, love, obligation, and respect.

That’s the thin edge of affirmation you can hear in the road songs of the time—a very thin edge. In the twenties, as a young man, the future Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas hopped
a freight from his home state of Washington (he’d been to college, he had the world in his grasp) and landed in a hobo jungle in Chicago. He squatted with the bums, ate their food, maybe he drank their Sterno, but they could tell he didn’t have to be there, and they told him to leave—not because they thought he was slumming, but because they didn’t wish their life on anyone.

We’re all familiar with road movies: not Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney in
Two for the Road,
but two men on the lam from this or that, lots of chase scenes. The geography of the country is always a good setup, good visuals, you can fill an hour and a half without trouble. The fact is, I can’t remember the title of the last road movie I saw, the one with Robert de Niro and Charles Grodin, the one where all the money runs out but in the end the rich guy pulls a few hundred thousand out of his secret money belt and gives it to the poor guy, but that isn’t what road movies were like in the thirties. As the road song was being invented, the road in road movies went nowhere, as in
The Grapes of Wrath,
or
Wild Boys of the Road,
a Warner Brothers film about scared teenagers looking for comradeship when they had no reason to expect anything but death. That’s why the road songs of the prewar period always carry a sense of
going down
—not exactly of failure, because success is not even a possibility, but of disaster, or surrender, an acceptance of the fact that you can’t do whatever it is you want to do, that you can’t be whatever you want to be. You can’t even begin to imagine what you’d really like to be, where you’d really like to go. On that road, with no money, no family, no one to meet, every place is just like the last place, and the last place is just like the place you’ll be next.

The ruling modern American myths of the road are Jack Kerouac’s novel
On the Road
and the movie
Easy Rider
—I confess I never read the book or saw the movie, because both seemed stupid every time anyone told me about what I was missing. I did see the Albert Brooks movie
Lost in America,
where a rich businessman, inspired by
Easy Rider
and with Kerouac sugarplums in the back of his mind, decides to go “on the road” to “discover America,”
selling his house and buying an $80,000 van—well, things get tough, so what the hell, he takes the job in New York he’d turned down. Just as there is no open road when there’s a fixed destination, there’s no open road when you can always go home—and these middle-class exercises in Columbus, Part 2, were always fixed. It doesn’t matter that in the end of
Easy Rider
Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper get killed by rednecks: they were slumming. Jack Kerouac went home, moved back in with his mother, and became a right-wing crank. The myth lives, he’s still celebrated annually as the apostle of anarchy, the champion of the freedom to do everything and say everything. But freedom is tricky. On the road, slumming, he wrote in
On the Road
that, yes, under this great sky, I wished I was a Negro, full of life and instinct and . . . And, James Baldwin wrote in response, I wish I could have seen you read that stupid passage on the stage of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and I wish I could have been there to see what happened next. They actually had a hook at the Apollo, but I think Baldwin had something more vehement in mind.

A song about the open road that doesn’t contain these contradictions, these confusions, is a lie—and that’s why, finally, listening to “Free Bird” is no more satisfying than listening to James Taylor sing “Fire and Rain,” listening to him sing about how much he cares about himself, or for that matter listening to Patti Smith sing “People Have the Power,” listening to her sing about how much she cares about everyone else. It’s safe stuff—no thinking required, no need for a sound that carries doubt or a melody that insists on uncertainty. “Free Bird” is freedom, “Fire and Rain” is sensitivity, “People Have the Power” is noble—if it’s that easy, we have nothing to worry about.

There are a lot of rock ’n’ roll road songs: songs about a performer being on the road. This road is usually boring, tiresome, but most road songs just shove a little déjà vu or ennui into the fun and games. Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” doesn’t, and that’s why it’s a real road song: there’s no end to this road, he doesn’t want to be on it, but he has no choice. He’s no wild boy on the road, he’s
no tramp, he’s got a job—but he’s not his own boss. He doesn’t even believe in what he’s doing as he sings the song, but he doesn’t know how to do anything else. So he writes a song about what he’s not doing, and what he’s not doing is what he wants to do: to leave his audience changed, make history, leave a mark.

Aside from “Night Moves,” “Turn the Page” is Bob Seger’s finest song. It’s slow, like a bus going down Route 66, which is always slow no matter what the speedometer says—despite its famous, exciting song, Route 66 may be the most boring highway in the U.S.A. The way Seger sings his song, every word seems to question, to undercut, every other. The song is all weariness, a story about the need to get up for the next show, which doesn’t turn out well enough to justify the effort. There are details: Seger wrote the song in the early ’70s, when to go through many territories between San Francisco and New York with long hair was to get hate stares that hurt, that humiliated, that said, “I’m a law-abiding citizen, and if I weren’t you’d already be dead.” Seger captures it all in his tone: there’s no self-pity in his voice, only shame. This is a road to nowhere—the tour will never end, because he will never be a success—whatever that means. Here’s where a song vanquishes its own realism, because it didn’t work out that way for Bob Seger. Today he lives in Hollywood, in a penthouse, he’s a millionaire many times over, but the tune still rings so true you say “Good! You deserve it! Even if you never write another decent song!”

A few years after “Turn the Page,” Seger made “Against the Wind,” a lovely song, a huge hit, a sort of follow-up to “Turn the Page.” Seger was insisting, explicitly, that no matter how big his bank account, he was still on the road to nowhere, running, escaping, and though in formal terms, in terms of elegance and style, “Against the Wind” was a better song, it was worthless. I love “Against the Wind”—all the romanticism of the middle-class road song is there, which is, at bottom,
Sorry, Mom, the road is calling me—
but I know the song is false, and I know it cost Seger nothing to write it. I know it cost the man who wrote “Turn the Page” everything he had to write that song, and that’s why it hurts to listen to it. In “Turn the Page” Seger is William O. Douglas, lacking
even someone to take the trouble to tell him to get lost, that he has something better to do with his life.

The open road, as an idea, as a vision of the geographical endlessness of America, makes a promise: it will be a place of surprise, where anything can happen. But as the song of the open road developed over the decades, the open road became the road you already knew, that you knew in your bones, the road you could drive without thinking, without looking. The road song became a cliché that a good songwriter or singer has to consciously
resist
—the writer has to trip you up. The songwriter has to make you say, as you drive the street you’ve driven all your life, barely conscious, Hey, wait a minute. What’s that tree doing growing out of the middle of the road?
That
was never here before!

This is what happens in Bruce Springsteen’s music—as the girl on the doorstep in “Thunder Road” turns into Caril Fugate, standing on her front porch in “Nebraska.” You remember, or you’ve heard about it: in 1958, Charley Starkweather drove up to his girlfriend Caril’s house in Lincoln; after killing her parents and her baby half-sister, they took off. They were on the road, where they could do anything they wanted to do, and then, as Springsteen has his Starkweather say, tracing the map with his finger, singing in a voice that so plainly comes from beyond the grave,

Starkweather and Fugate lived out a road song; twenty-four years later, in 1982, Springsteen finally wrote it. But it was already there. They didn’t know what they’d find, they didn’t know how far they’d get, but they knew two lanes could take them anywhere. They got caught—but, as Starkweather wrote to his father, facing execution, “for the first time me and caril had more fun.” Springsteen doesn’t shrink from such facts in his song; he goes beyond them. He has Starkweather talking like a man who thinks: “They
declared me / Unfit to live / Said into that great void / My soul’d be hurled”—well,
that’s
a road song, the promised land, eternity. Promised land—what it really means is that you can do anything you want to do—it means that the feeling of movement you get from the open road makes you want to do things you’d never want to do if you weren’t on it. Who hasn’t felt this? Who hasn’t driven flat out with a good song on the radio, and felt invulnerable? What songs were Charley Starkweather and Caril Fugate listening to, loving, saying yes, that’s me, that’s us, the car accelerating, the two of them knowing the feeling that nobody could touch them, you can’t catch me—what songs did they care about, in 1958? A lot has been written about Starkweather and Fugate: there have been TV documentaries, the film
Badlands,
but no one has ever asked that question. Starkweather is dead; Fugate isn’t talking.

The open road in modern American song finally has to come back to Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”: absolute freedom containing absolute confinement, or vice versa. If the open road song means a song where there is no fixed destination—if we have to rule out “Route 66”—“It winds from Chicago to L.A.,” no detours permitted—then there are two more songs worth mentioning. One is Springsteen’s “Stolen Car,” which came out in 1980, on
The River,
the same album that produced “Hungry Heart,” his first top ten hit.

“Hungry Heart” was a lie like Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” though not a fraction as good a song. A guy with a family on his back walks out and never comes back: that’s all you know about him, and all you need to know. “Stolen Car” is the other side of the song: no bouncy chorus, no singalong melody, but spare, quiet, pure death that won’t come. The song is short, but its real time is described in lines from the blues: “Minutes seem like hours / Hours seem / Just like days.”