Listening to this wonderful song, thinking about the images of movement and play the American landscape offers, you have to stop and think about the song Chuck Berry would have written if he hadn’t been in prison—about how his version of the open road would have been different if he’d actually been on it. What’s missing from “Promised Land” is control: mastery, the singer’s hand on his own fate. n the '50s, when Chuck Berry was just hitting the charts, when he had no big money in the bank, he never sang as “the poor boy” :just the opposite. He was a driver. He. had his own machine—first a V-8 Ford, then a Cadillac—and where he went was up to him. “Maybelline,” “You Can’t Catch Me,” “No Money Down”—the road was his. By the end of “ You Can’t Catch Me,” he’s airborne: in the ’50s, everyone believed that in a few years cars would fly, and Chuck Berry never missed a trick. But the emotion at the end of “ Promised Land” isn’t triumph, isn’t the unlimited sense of release you feel as “You Can’t Catch Me” fades out—it’s a feeling of relief. He made it; he got there; it’s over. There’s nothing left to say. The story is finished. The fact that the freedom behind this great tale of the open road was a fantasy—a prison cell—tells us something about open road songs: in rock ’n’ roll, they’re fantasies, and mostly cheap fantasies at that. Sooner or later you’re going to have to figure out where you want to go, which means you have to acknowledge that you start from somewhere, that you’re not absolutely free. You’ll carry the baggage of your place and time with you. You’ll never get rid of it. You can go anywhere only if you come from nowhere, and no one comes from nowhere. 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”; it’s a place for the “ Ramblin’ Man”—the Allman Brothers’ biggest hit, one more Sorry-babe-l-got-to- go-the-road-is-calling-me number. It’s like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “ Free Bird” or a hundred others—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 “until the train runs outta track.” It will? That ancient 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 decide. The road doesn’t go on forever. ou get the same feeling in Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” one of the great driving songs. 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 corifinement 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 his hero is older, tired. The hero’s girlfriend is even more tired than he is. • The “anywhere” that those two lanes would take them is reduced to how fast the hero can race in 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 took shape in early 20th century blues and country music. The open fbad 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 blues and country 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 to Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen in their cars, we have to stop and remember that when blues and country road songs 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 '20s and ’30s, 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 ’20s, as a young man, 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. e’re all familiar with what Hollywood now calls “road movies”: two men on the lam from this or that, lots of chase scenes. The geography of the country is always a good set up, 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 ’30s. 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. Every place is the same —the road is a prison cell. The great 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 too 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, 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 thpse 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, of course, 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—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 20 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989
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