[Landline] Driving music
Features nothing about the election disaster
Friends,
A quickie, from off the top of my head to yours…
1. DRIVING MUSIC
“There's three great American inventions—one is duct tape, one is hot glue, and the other one's putting radios in cars.” —Terry Allen
Driving north to Tucson on a two-lane highway in the old Chevrolet truck a few months ago, I was listening, as I always do, to an AM station, as the countryside — cattle, cottonwoods, cacti — sped by. To amuse myself, I’ve had a rule for the last couple of years of only listening to one station, and I only listen to it in AM, even though they broadcast in FM. I’m not sure how I arrived here — maybe it was a process of elimination — but it’s a Tucson station1 with live deejays that only play pop hit oldies, mostly ‘60s/’70s/’80s.
Having been born in 1970, there’s a triple nostalgic pull for me listening in this way because I remember hearing many of these songs the first time around… on AM radio… in a car. For me, this is these songs’ native habitat, and I suppose, in some weirdo way, I am happy to return there occasionally and find everyone still doing their thing. And despite the inevitable drivel and pap, I’m still hearing new, fascinating nuggets that reframe my understanding of this culture’s past, and thus, the present. (A major revelation for me was the two rounds of colossal electric guitar rippage on the Carpenters’ 1972 proto power ballad, ‘Goodbye to Love’; another was Lobo’s 1972 hit ‘I Want You to Love Me,’ which could be the template for every Spiritualized epic ballad since 20012.)
On Sunday mornings, this station replays complete Casey Kasem American Top 40 broadcasts from the ‘70s — always a mindblow to hear the gems and the crap and the really massive hits you’ve heard thousands of times and the other massive hits that everybody has forgotten, not just from one-hit wonders but from big stars.
But it’s also often a pleasant, diverting listen because by nature the countdown is just so all over the place: folksinger soft rock, church-adjacent soul, disco hits, glam stompers, urbanized country, pop balladry, truck driver rock, novelty tunes, etc. No track sets up another track in tone, rhythm or content. The only thing that connects them is that all the songs were mass-popular at that moment in time, in this nation.
Even knowing that’s the case, you can still be shocked by the odd song that comes along. Or at least I can be. As happened that Sunday morning this past May, when driving along, I tuned in to what turned out to be a re-broadcast of the May 3, 1975 American Top 40 and what should come on but something like this3…
Incredible! Following ‘Hijack’ by Herbie Mann, coming in at number 25 is Kraftwerk, sounding absolutely, thrillingly outre. Here, look where it fit in:
What weird bliss to randomly hear this 20th century ode to driving, while driving, on the most mainstream radio broadcast possible. And, again, it was revelatory—I guess I knew intellectually that this song had charted in America, but it was another thing entirely to hear this ultra-foreign (utterly German, utterly electronic, utterly futuristic) song nestled in its native time-habitat between Grand Funk, Gordon Lightfoot and Minnie Riperton. How odd, how beautiful. Imagine the young circuits being rewired by this hot radio moment in 1975.
Car radio, what an invention.
(By the way: incredibly, “Autobahn” was released 50 years ago this month.)
2. ALSO IN NOVEMBER: HAPPY BIRTHDAYS FOR SPACEMEN 3
Last week was November 19 — a holy day in this house, when we celebrate the improbable, cosmic fact4 that on November 19, 1965, Spacemen 3's Pete Kember (aka Sonic Boom) and Jason Pierce (aka J. Spaceman) were both born, in the same hospital, in Rugby, Warwickshire.
There oughta be a plaque!
3. UNPREPARED
Regarding birthdays: having recently suffered my 54th (!?!), I’ve perhaps not surprisingly been hitting repeat during the last couple of weeks on this poignant but ultimately triumphant new tune by Julian Cope (who himself turned 67 last month). It is, in part, about dealing with getting to be an age you never expected to reach, and—spoiler alert—features the immortal not-dead-yet lyric "I really thought I was toast/Yeah but I'm not toast/I'm making a toast, yeah!”:
‘Done Myself a Mischief’ is off Cope’s typically provocative/poignant/comical/bardic and downright catchy new album ‘Friar Tuck,’ available for now only on cd via his website at headheritage.co.uk
4. CONTINUING IN A NOSTALGIC/ANNIVERSARY MODE
We published this sucker exactly 20 years ago…
Colossal, on-deadline collective effort. Hat tip to John Coulthart on the gorgeous cover artwork, which exceeded all our expectations; design by the legend that is W.T. Nelson.
Read the cover feature online, here. Still can’t believe that amongst all the other incredible moments that were part of constructing this piece, I got to quiz clever devil Kenneth Anger about what exactly he was up to at the exorcism — and beforehand, in the men’s rooms of the Pentagon. Oh, Kenneth. Glad to help set the record straight — or slanted, as it were…
5. BACK TO THE ROAD
You can’t drive forever. Sooner or later on the road trip to the relatives’ you need a rest stop. Which, if you think about it, is a really special place. As Claire Carlson wrote in “The Humanity of the American Rest Stop,” a visionary piece published in September by The Daily Yonder that is probably my favorite American essay of 2024: "The rest stop is my favorite form of public infrastructure. Besides libraries, there are few places I can think of whose primary function is to serve everyone who stops in, regardless of income status."
Carlson continues:
The rest area was first created to accommodate travelers’ needs as they began driving longer distances on America’s new highway system. But since, they’ve become one of the few examples of a public space where you can exist without feeling pressured to spend money. Eisenhower’s 1950s highway legislation prohibited commercial establishments from operating at public rest stops (with a few exceptions like vending machines), in order to drive business toward small towns instead of consolidating it all in one stop. This makes them gloriously free of the pressure to spend money, which is an alarmingly hard thing to find in public these days.
I have a whole catalog of favorite rest areas. There’s one roughly halfway between the Oregon coast and Portland that I stop at every chance I get. A short hiking trail takes you through the forest, and it’s lovely enough to forget the heavily-trafficked bathroom just a few hundred yards away. If you visit in the fall, you can watch salmon migrate in the creek that runs through it.
Of course, I’ve also been to less than pleasant rest areas (there’s a stop near Tri-Cities, Washington that comes to mind…), but at every one I’ve been to, I’m impressed by the government’s decision, years ago, to accommodate the biological needs of millions of strangers. The humanity in this decision makes it even sweeter – the government said yes, we see your undeniable need to pee, and we will give you a place to do it for free.
Imperfect as the public rest area might be (funding is unequal across states, which can lead to shoddy upkeep or closures), they represent a vision of a world that could be.
Read the rest of this brilliant piece here…
and pass it along, because we definitely need more thinking/doing like this right now. (Ha, okay, maybe some of this Landline was about the election disaster after all…)
More soon. In the meantime,
keep singing along,
Jay
SR82 in Southern Arizona
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Not a criticism at all, just an observation. As the dude says, convince me I’m wrong!
Obviously I heard a different week’s broadcast than this particular clip, but it’ll do. All praise to the archivists!
The term “cosmic fact” is © Phil Franklin, 2024, all rights refried.
Excellent edition! Kraftwerk amidst a sea of Super '70s hits, probably no less shocking now than it was then. And yes, there ought to be a plaque. P.S. I understand Friar Tuck is getting a vinyl issue in January should anyone care -- I have a copy on order with Norman Records.