J Highway 61 Revisited, ' Revisited Again: Myth of the Open Road in Rock ’n’ Roll hen I was invited to talk about pop music and the idea of the open road, the first song I thought of was Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” which came out in 1964. With perfect exuberance and unparalleled verve, it told the story of “the poor boy,” who sets out from Norfolk, Virginia with “ California on his mind.” So he takes off — and inside a few minutes Chuck Berry and his hero have mapped the continent. The poor boy has to go by bus, car, train, and finally (he can’t believe it) airplane, first class. There are breakdowns and disasters at every turn, but there are always people to help him, and he keeps going. The best moment comes when he’s up in the air, “ working on a t-bone steak” (“ a la carty,” goes the line, and you can see Chuck Berry grinning; he knows how to pronounce it, but he knows the poor boy doesn’t) and the moment is so complete you wonder why the plane ever has to come down. The arrival in Los Angeles is an anticlimax. Nothing could match the journey the poor boy’s just made. This is a song of freedom: a get-away. It’s also a song about money: although the poor boy has none of his own, he has friends and he’s never lacking. It’s a song about space: the whole lift of the performance, the singing notes on the guitar, the wild life of the melody, each element is dependent on a big country, a country too big to really understand, an expanse so large and varied no geography textbook can truly explain it. And it’s a song about confinement. Chuck Berry made trips across the country before he wrote “ Promised Land” — bone-rattling bus trips on the barnstorming, one-night-stand rock ’n’ roll package tours of the ’50s, with the white performers staying in decent hotels and eating in restaurants, while, in a lot of the country, blacks like Chuck Berry bunked in flops and ate out of paper bags. Berry also made nice, 14-hour flights from coast to coast when he went to Hollywood to mime his hits in the movies — but that wasn’t what he was talking about in “ Promised Land.” When he wrote the song in the early ’60s, he was in prison, framed on a Mann Act charge. He was fantasizing. What would it mean to get away, what would it feel like, to go wherever you wanted to go, to meet people, to smile and get a smile back? What would it feel like to see a different place every hour, instead of the" same cell every day? Because as a songwriter Chuck Berry was always a realist, he made the poor boy ’s journey troublesome. And though to himself he was a cynic, to his audien< was a romantic, so he gave the trip a happy ending. And because as a songwnter he knew that it s detail that makes a song work, that locks a song into a listener s mind, he y had to get the details right — and that was a problem. “ I remember having extreme difficulty while writing ‘Promised Land,’” he said last year in his autobiography, “trying to secure a road atlas of the United States to verify the routing of the Poor Boy from Norfolk, Virginia to Los Angeles. The penal institutions were not so generous as to offer a map of any kind, for fear of providing the route for an escape.” By Greil Marcus Illustrations by Leah Anton Graphic Design by Connie Gilbert 18 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989 19
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