Oh God said to Abraham kill me a son T T ■ Abe says man you must be puttin 'me on God say no Abe say what God say you can do what you want Abe buLthe next time you see me cornin' you better run. WellAbe says where do you want this killin' done Godsays out on Highway Sixty-one. Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose Welfare Department they wouldn 't give him no clothes H e asked poor Howard where can I go Howard said there s only J T9 Sam said tell me quick m a n I got to run O f Howardjust pointed wN ■ - ( And said that way down on ?ay 61. WellM ack the Finger said to H e said I never engaged Louie the King In this kind of thing before I got forty red white and blue But Pe s I think it can be shoe strings Anda thousand telephones that don t ring ten miles an hour, five miles an hour, passing one cop car after another, as he moves, waiting—but the cops don’t care, the woman he left doesn’t care, it’s as if he’d never been born. He drives in a circle. “She asked if I remembered the letters Iwrote/When our love was young and bold/She said last night she read those letters/ And they made her feel/ One hundred years old.” That seems young to him, now. The detail that “Hungry Heart” slides over is present, the people are real. As the man drives round and round his town in a circle—maybe he’s been doing it for weeks, years, maybe he’s the guy people point to and say, “You know him, the guy who always passes here at 4 PM, as if he’s expecting someone to notice him”— but like a homeless man on the same corner for five or six years, no one acknowledges his presence. The story he’s telling is like a story guitarist Roy Buchanan, who killed himself last month, once told, a story about the tiny California town he grew up in: “Sometimes it gets so lonely here you feel like you could fire a gun inside yourself” —and, he didn’t say, because he didn’t think he had to, no one would hear it. The man singing “Hungry Heart” is out on the open road of “Free Bird” and “Ramblin’ Man.” The man in “Stolen Car” is in his house, his prison cell, fantasizing, like Chuck Berry as he wrote “Promised Land.” The open road has beDo you know where I can get rid o f these things A nd Louie the King said let me think for a minute son And he said yes^ S ^ ^ I think H can be easily done Just take everything down to Highway 61. Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night Told the first father that things weren't right My complexion she said is much too white He said come here and step into the light he says hmm you 're right Let me tell the second mother this has been done But the second mother was with the seventh son And they were both out on Highway 61. Now the rovin gambler he was very bored H e was tryin ’to create a next world war He found a promoter who nearly fell o ff the floor very easily done W elljust put some bleachers out in the sun And have it on Highway 61. come an image of itself—which, perhaps, is what it always was. There’s one more road I want to talk about—Highway 61, which you all know. When I first heard Bob Dylan’s song “Highway 61 Revisited” in 1965, I was transfixed. Instantly, it was a mystical road to me, a place of visitations and visions. Two thousand miles away from where I lived, it was plainly a place where anything could happen; where, the song said, if you knew how to look, you could see that everything had already happened. Highway 61 was the center of the universe. Bob Dylan was saying that if you think hard enough, see clearly enough, you can understand that the whole of human history, every possible combination of story and syntax, is right before your eyes, that the open road is the road you know best. The song explodes. L istening to “Highway 61 Revisited” today, it doesn’t matter to me that I know the open road is a narrow, classbased, sexist, racebased theme in American music. Think about it: where are the great road songs from Motown, from Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett—sorry, “Mustang Sally” isn’t it. Aretha Franklin? The only open road song from Al Green is about wandering from bar to bar in search of God. For these people, you can’t leave home until you’ve settled your affairs at home, and if you leave, what you get is not freedom but exile. Can you imagine Prince singing a song about the open road? Just to ask the question exposes its triviality. What would the idea have to say to him? And “Little Red Corvette” is not about a car— although it might be the ultimate internalization of the image of the open road. Bob Dylan came out of the tradition of ’20s and ’30s blues and Country singers. Getting out of here, down the highway, 500 miles from my home, not knowing where you’re going, leaving everything behind, what’s next? No one, certainly no nice, middle-class, Jewish, ex-college student from Hibbing, ever carried it off so convincingly. When Dylan sang the old blues song “Highway 51” on his first album in 1962, he made it real. He caught the feeling of two hundred years worth of songs and the expanse of 48 states in his voice. The way Bob Dylan sang on his early records, he could have been bom in Virginia in the seventeen hundreds, turned up for the Gold Rush in California in 1849, headed up to Alaska in the 1890s, made it down to Mexico in 1910—the road was the story, it told the story, the story told you. When I came to Minnesota in 1966, all I wanted to do was get behind the wheel and get out onto Highway 61— 1 was sure transcendence was waiting there, at every entrance. I pulled into the highway, and of course it was just like pulling onto any highway. Nothing happened. Still, the song lost none of its force, and it still hasn’t. “OUT ON HIGHWAY 61!” Dylan was shouting, and no singer could put more inflection, more wit and irony, into a shout than the Bob Dylan who was singing in the mid- ’60s. Abraham gets the command to sacrifice his son—out on Highway 61, God says. A man has to escape, from what we aren’t told—Highway 61 is the only route. Garbage has to be dumped (a thousand red, white, and blue shoe strings, you get the idea) Highway 61 is the place. A drama of miscegenation, incest, and racism is played out—where else? And, finally, the last verse. There’s a gambler, he’s got a great idea—let’s put on the next world war. He meets a promoter- well, he’s shocked, but he’s got an answer. “We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun/ And have it on...” That was 1965. In 1974, when Bob Dylan and the Band toured the country for the first time in eight years— and, in those days, adjusting for the inflation that has taken over pop culture, eight years was like a century. Bob Dylan and the Band played “Highway 61 Revisited,” which they’d never played in the ’60s. The song was the only one that upset them, that confused them, that forced them to acknowledge, as musicians, that they didn’t know where they were going— that produced, as guitarist Robbie Robertson said, “a moment of panic,” a change on the guitar that pushed the song onto a road it had never travelled before, an unmapped road. Put some bleachers out in the sun, and watch the end of the world. Why not? The open road is full of surprises. Anything can happen. In this song, everything does happen, and so casually. Why not? You’re out on the open road, no metaphor, now the thing itself. It’s a fact, an experience you’re reporting. Just as the open road has no fixed destination, it has no fixed beginning — Sorry-babe-the-road-is-calling-me won’t do. What’s so shocking about “Highway 61 Revisited” is that its two lanes, which will take you anywhere, describe a place where people actually live, where they have fantasized, where they are stuck. The song could have been called “No Way Out.” There is only one song I know with that title; “I got you, I got you—and there’s no way out" runs the chorus. All the road movies, all the chase scenes, all the flights of all the free birds come to a halt in “Highway 61 Revisited.” You can hear a man at the height of his commercial and mythic success announcing that freedom is confinement—anything can happen, he says, but only at home. He is fantasizing everything within the confines of the familiar; like Chuck Berry in “Promised Land,” he is admitting that the journey is not up to him. The open road song goes back too far—to a time when there were no roads, only wandering. Daniel Boone wanted elbow room, the country had it, he went looking for it. Other people followed in his footsteps; their tracks became roads. Eventually, those roads reached the end of the continent; then they doubled back, and crisscrossed the continent with highways. The strangest open road song is Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again” —“We rjnight even/ Leave the U.S.A.,” Al Wilson sings. But this isn’t real. “ Highway 61 Revisited” is: what’s real is the insistence that the open road is your own ground, your own street, where anything can happen. I believe that it can, and I believe that looking for surprise wherever it is that you live is better than looking for surprise where you’ve never been and don’t belong: where, in the end, like Kerouac and Peter Fonda, you’re slumming. I remember reading an Allen Ginsberg poem in about 1970, where he said, “The cosmos vibrated at my feet in Kansas.” “In Kansas?" I said to a friend with disdain—“what sort of cosmos vibrates in Kansas?" But now I know Ginsberg should have named the town, and the street, as Bob Dylan named “Highway 61.” “Look,” my friend said, “anyone can get the cosmos to vibrate in Japan, or China, or India. But to get the cosmos to vibrate in Kansas—that means he was really there.” Allen Ginsberg wasn’t slumming. Unlike his friend Jack Kerouac, he wasn’t looking for what he wasn’t, he was trying to become what he wanted to be, what he already was. The cosmos still vibrates for me in “Highway 61 Revisited.” Whenever I think of it, when I’m driving—you don’t hear it on the radio anymore, but you can call it up out of memory—the number of the highway I’m on doesn’t matter. As a clich6, the open road is a dead end; starting from nowhere, that’s where it leads. Yet as an enclosed metaphor—as with “Promised Land,” a reach for freedom out of a prison cell, or Springsteen’s “Stolen Car,” which was never stolen, or “Highway 61 Revisited,” just the local road — anything can happen, and you’ll recognize it, understand it, weigh its costs. This, Ithink, is what the notion of the open road is about today. When we can fly across a continent that once took months to cross in a few hours—and see nothing; it no longer matters how long it takes to drive it, walk it—the fastest time defines the place. But the idea of the open road in your own town, in your own mind, in your own cell is a contradiction in terms, and that is why the idea cannot be closed off. As a fact, the open road is now a fantasy; as a fantasy, we will never get off it. “The publication of this essay is supported by American Icons, a Walker Art Center education program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the law firm of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi. ‘The Open Road’ was originally presented as a lecture at Walker Art Center on 4 October 1988.” Greil Marcus’ latest book, A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, will be published this spring by Harvard University Press. His book Mystery Train remains an essential read on music in our culture. Leah Anton is a Twin Cities artist. Designer Connie Gilbert is a regular contributor to the Clinton St. Quarterly. 22 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1989
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