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Road to Reunion

Songs to soothe the savage beast over the long haul

By Johnny Angel

There's a big difference between what sounds great in the car and what makes it in a club. I mean, I loathe most house music down to the core of my jaded soul, but its mantra-like choruses and repeating samples can make a hypnotic moment in a packed house. To listen consciously to that cochlea-whipping whilst sitting in five-o'clock traffic, however, would cause me to jump out of my skin or into the Bay.

And a lotta treasured rock & roll sounds out of context in the settings that make for dance Valhalla. Kinda punctures my long-standing tenet that good is good wherever you go, and that there's no need to contextualize the righteous aural thunder. But in our fractured culture, I also have finally succumbed to the theory that every sound has a place and a reason to be in that space.

It's funny how even the time spent going mobile has to be accompanied by a varying soundtrack. Lately, I've been favoring the recidivist funk In Yo Face series on Rhino while stuck in bumper-to-bumper. There's something strangely calming about "Sex Machine" and "Me and Baby Brother" and the like--all rump-shaking masterpieces--when you can't move forward in the maw of civilization, yet you squirm madly in your seat to that syncopated beat.

Conversely, U-Roy's Sessions record, a droning, rock-steady bit of rub-a-dub feels wonderful while Highway 1 cruising, as do the Gregory Isaacs and Toots and the Maytals greatest hits discs, for me anyway. I assume this combination of long-haul trucking and spiritual reggae sounds might qualify as a dangerous sedative.

But I gotta confess that my favorite driving discs of all-time come from that staple of truck-stop stands everywhere--George Jones. It's not that the Possum's deep, clench-jawed croon evokes mythic America (or any of that romantic bullshit they teach you in Rockcrit 101), or that somehow we become one with the truckers and the RV's and the so-called "real people" that most of us (including Ol' George himself) copiously avoid on a daily basis. It's that for me, Jones' honky-tonkin' rockers and melancholic ballads are sing-alongs that don't drip with saccharine--they accompany that lonely feeling of long-distance drives like no other music.

Because when you get out of a club setting and it's just you and the highway, all of the carefully computed big beats and permutations fade away. I was listening to John Lee Hooker's terrifying "Decoration Day" on the way over here today, and it struck me how this simple one-chord stomp and its I'll-leave-flowers-on-your-grave lyric, was umpteen times more effectively fierce than a thousand Goths trumpeting the joys of death over pounding drum machines.

If you wanna know if a record is gonna stand, sit down, fire her up and drive on.

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