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 Ithink James Baldwin had something a bit 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 us. It’s safe stuff—no thinking required, no need for a sound that carries doubt, 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 deja 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 derails: 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 of course it didn’t work out that way for Bob Seger. Today he lives in Hollywood, in a penthousd', 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!”' few years after “Turn the Page,” Seger made “Against the Wind,” a beautiful 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, basically, 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”—“Here I am, up on the stage again, playing the star again,” Seger sings—he’s nobody. He’s 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 cliche that a good song writer 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, “Through the badlands/ Of Wyoming/ I killed everything/ In my path.” Ten days, ten dead, more or less. 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, 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 splits: 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, a death that won’t come. The song is short, but its real time is described in a line from a ’30s blues: “Minutes seem like hours/ Hours seem just like days.” The Promised Land left my home in Norfolk, Virginia, California on my mind, straddled that greyhound and rode him into Raleigh And on across Caroline. We stopped at Charlotte, We bypassed Rock Hill. We never was a minute late; We was ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown, R ollin' out o f Georgia state. We had motor trouble that turned into a struggle, Half-way across Alabam. And that Hound broke down and left us all stranded In Downtown Birmingham. Right away I Bought me A through train ticket. R idin ’across Mississippi clean. A ndi was on the Midnight Flyer out o f Birmingham. Smokin ’into N ew Orleans. Somebody helped me get out o f Louisiana. Just to help me get to Houston Town. There are people there who care a little about me. The story in “Stolen Car” is the same: a husband leaves. But that is all that is the same. “I’m driving a stolen car/ Down on Eldridge Avenue/ And they won't let a poor boy down. Sure as you 're bom, they bought me a silk suit. They put luggage in my hand, A ndi woke up high over Albuquerque on a jet to the Promised Land. Workin ’on a T-bone steak, I had a party fly in ’over to the Golden State, When the pilot told us in thirteen minutes He would get us at the Terminal Gate. Swing low, chariot, come down easy, Taxi to the TerminalLine; Cut your engines, and coolyour wings, And let me make it to the telephone, Los Angeles, give me Norfolk, Virginia Tidewater 4-10-0-0, Tell the folks back home, this is the Promised Land callin ’and the poor boy s on the line. Each night I wait to get caught/ But I never do.” The song is too slow for someone who says he’s driving—you can feel him moving down the street, Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989 21
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