Somebody Thinks This Is Somewhere...

Finally

2011-11-02T05:57:00.000-07:00

All these witterings with added bile, cant and balderdash now available as an ebook from Amazon.

Oh and it has a cool(ish) map of the route too.

Memphis

2010-09-23T20:37:00.002-07:00

Top tune, vile video.

Muskogee

2010-09-23T20:37:00.001-07:00

The opening lines are lies.

Cape Cod Girls

2010-09-23T20:28:00.001-07:00

Walking To New Orleans

2010-09-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

I'll tell you what I'm gonna do... because I like your face... because I like your face... and I don't like many...

The Tube was, on consideration, better than Rockpalast. And was so good they got to make GOLD like this.

WARNING: Does contain some STING. But it was good then. And the documentary is still good now, Sting aside. You can see the whole thing on youtube. Make an hour for it.

I Wish I Was In New Orleans

2010-09-23T20:19:00.000-07:00

Rockpalast may have been thee greatest music TV show of all time. Odd that it's from Germany.

If You Go Down To Hammond

2010-09-23T20:17:00.000-07:00

We'll always love you but... that's not the point.

Witchita

2010-09-23T20:08:00.000-07:00

Map Ref 41°N 93°W

2010-09-23T20:04:00.000-07:00

What TV show booked Wire? We didn't know TV was so good back then. We had no idea how bad the future was going to become.
My Bloody Valentine and David Byrne have both covered this tune.

St Augustine

2010-09-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

The oldest continuously occupied European-established city and port in the United States. Whatever.
Deserves a proper video though.

Guilty pleasure

2010-09-23T19:54:00.001-07:00

But North or South?
Lazy Welsh bastards.

Williamsburg

2010-09-23T19:52:00.001-07:00

Excellent.

The Great Salt Lake to Laredo

2010-09-23T19:37:00.000-07:00

Before they became cocks..

Post approved application to the cock club. (Still good.)

Arkansas

2010-09-23T19:21:00.000-07:00

The hits keep on comin'

I'm So Bored With The USA

2010-05-24T20:26:00.000-07:00

31st March - 13th April
Buffalo NY/Toronto ON

Not really. And I don't think The Clash were either. Their American influences became ever more apparent on their sleeveless shirts. Americans revere them much more than we Brits do now. But I am tired and want to go home. I crave some Warburtons bread and a pint of bitter. And decent cheese as standard. That said, I don't want to leave Buffalo. My friends are here. It helps that those friends get me free drinks and entrance into shows too but even if they didn't, I'd wish I could stay here. Damn immigration laws and damn private health care.

It's been a long trip. I ought to thank all the people who let us stay with them or showed us around or hung out or just cared. I know that might be boring to read so feel free to skip ahead. It won't bother me. I'm more worried about missing someone off the list. But thems the risks... so thank you... Michael, Tara, Geoff, Daryl, Alexis, Erik, Donny, Chantal, Mark, Tim, Sharon, Zeno, Lorelei, Mike, Meri, Mike, Missy, Kevin, Jeff, Donna, Michael, Louise, Jon, Kelli and Ward.

The one state I'd urge you all to see is Montana. Bozeman could be a place to live. And I liked a lot about California way more than I thought I would. New Orleans I owe a second visit too. Being ill there was shameful. Atlanta too. Though God knows I'll never forget the Clermont Lounge. Or Jumbos Clown Room in L.A. On the other side of the fence, I can't imagine me ever setting foot in Oklahoma again. I wish we'd had the time to visit the northern states, the Dakotas especially. And I really wanted to see some more of Kentucky if only so I could write about their state song My Old Kentucky Home which used to open with the the following lines...

The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,
'Tis summer, the darkies are gay

Darkies? Seriously? Fucking Hell!
And it doesn't stop there. Verse two has the line...

The time has come when the darkies have to part

And verse three, not wanting to be left out, has these charming couplets...

The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darky may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow;

Now it was written back in 1852 and no doubt such a word wouldn't have caused offence back then. Truth be told the whole lyric is, if anything, pretty sympathetic to the darkies' plight. (Though not in any way advocating emancipation or any such foolish notion.) But what really amazes me about the song is this - it stood proudly extant as the official song of the state of Kentucky until... 1986. Then the Kentucky General Assembly changed the word darkie to the word people. Phew.

But I know I have to go back and hear those good folk of Kentucky sing that song. Maybe at the University of Kentucky football games.

I ain't done with these songs and this country yet.

The Night Of The Johnstown Flood

2010-05-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Monday 29th & Tuesday 30th March - Days 49 & 50

We so wanted to go and see the National Great Blacks In Wax Museum in B'more but it was closed on Mondays (grrrrr). It sounds great though. A waxworks dedicated to African American history that's slap bang in the middle of the hood. We said hi as we drove past anyway. We read some reports on Trip Advisor and a lot of them talked about how bad the neighbourhood was. We figured that was nonsense. We were wrong. So we left town and headed north for Johnstown, PA.

Nearly full circle. Just 120 miles from our first stop in Youngstown, OH. And another Bruce Springsteen song. Sort of.

Highway Patrolman is a typical Springsteen acoustic folksong from the album Nebraska. It has lots of geographical references in it: Ohio, Michigan, someplace called Perrineville and even Canada. But the one that intrigued me most comes in the chorus.

Me and Franky laughin' and drinkin'
Nothin' feels better than blood on blood
Takin' turns dancin' with Maria as the band played
"Night of the Johnstown Flood"

I wanted to hear this song Night of The Johnstown Flood. I'd never even heard of it before. Not surprising really, because there wasn't a song called Night of The Johnstown Flood back then. I guess Springsteen figured there should have been or maybe there was a song about the flood with a different name. However, there is now a song called Night of The Johnstown Flood. It came out this year and it's by a band called The Rock Creek Jug Band. I'm surprised it took so long.

So with no song to investigate I had to check out the story of the flood itself. Holy hell what a disaster. On May 31, 1889 after days of heavy rain, a dam burst 14 miles upstream from Johnstown. It took 57 minutes for the 20 million tons of water in Lake Conemaugh to reach Johnstown, a steel town of about 30,000 people. 10 minutes later over 2000 people were dead. And the town was completely ransacked. The photos of the devastation are truly incredible.

What made the tragedy even more upsetting was the cause. The dam had been built to store water for a canal system. But when the railways killed the canals, the dam and the lake it created became the home of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. A very private and exclusive club for the wealthy families of Pittsburgh. Guess what? They didn't really spend the required money and effort to keep the dam secure. After the flood, the victims tried but failed to recover damages from the dam's owners. The only silver lining was that public indignation at that failure helped change American law from "a fault-based regime to strict liability".

The town did recover. In fact, the efforts to re-build it drew donations from around the world and the whole operation was instrumental in the development of the American Red Cross. But I'm almost ashamed to say that the only thing that seemed worthy of a visit to the town was the Museum dedicated to the flood. Thankfully, the museum is good enough to justify the visit. The pictures and articles from before and after the flood are really fascinating. And they show a good 15 minute film which tells the story well. The newpaper coverage, the silent movies that were made about it and the numbers of sightseers who came to see the town afterwards suggest that at one point in history this flood was as famous as any other disaster. And amazing little details like this made me wonder why I'd never even heard of it:

"Train driver John Hess, sitting in his locomotive engine, heard the rumbling of the flood and, correctly assuming what it was, tried to warn people by tying down the train whistle and racing toward the town by riding backwards to warn the residents ahead of the wave. His warning saved many people who were able to get to high ground. But at least 50 people died, including about 25 passengers stranded on trains in the town. Hess himself miraculously survived despite the flood picking up his locomotive and tossing it aside."

It seems impossible to figure out what history and popular consciousness will forget and what it will remember. But for a while Johnstown had the world looking at it. And now... well... it's not on the radar. The little town looks like it's been hit by another disaster... an economic one. Which is bad, but just too common for people to care about. There must be thousands of dying towns in America. Probably always has been. There have been enough songs written about them. Johnstown is in a very remote part of Pennsylvania. Like Virginia, it's way more... way more... if not red-neck then maybe backwoods. It's not really going to draw many day trippers. Long gone are the days when the likes of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club sought their kicks in these parts. And I can't really blame them.

I had thought I'd spend the last night on the road in a town that didn't have a song about it but ought to have had one. So much so that Springsteen imagined one for it. It seemed paradoxical but this non-existent song made the case for my theory better than any real town or real song. But the thought of staying in town was too depressing. The green lushness of Virginia seemed very far away. We were surrounded by bleak, black, bare pine trees and covered by an ashen grey sky. Our friends in Springville, near Buffalo were just four hours away. But the night was going to fall before we could make it back there and the deer carcasses on these dark, twisty roads made us less than eager to try making it there. When it gets dark in America, it really gets dark... roadside lights ain't as common as they are in the UK. So we tried to get as far as we could before night fall. We passed through Punxsutawney, the town of Groundhog Day. We drove around a few hotels and motels but couldn't bring ourselves to stay in one. There was something about this part of the world which was not working for me. In the end we pulled into a chain motel in Du Bois (pronounced, surprisingly, Dew Boys, not Dubois as in Blanche) because, in the words of Uncle Monty, the sky did bruise. And disaster... it was a dry county. I noticed the gas station didn't have a wall of refrigerators packed with beer like every other one we'd been in and I thought that was strange. But when Walmart had no booze I knew we were in trouble. Luckily there was one bar in town. But finding the door into it was something they didn't want to come easy. It was around the back, tucked away under an iron staircase. It looked like a classic cottaging spot to me, but it had been a long day and I needed a beer. Happily I didn't get buggered. But I felt shagged. This town seemed a piss poor place to spend the last night. Getting pissed seemed to be the only way to deal with it.

When we woke up on Tuesday I couldn't wait to get out of the motel, the town or the state. Things seemed to improve pretty much as soon as we crossed back into New York. Within two hours we were driving through Ellicotville, a prettier little ski town than anyone would imagine could be found within 60 minutes of Buffalo. When we'd seen it last back in January it had been, if not quite arctic, then at least alpine-esque. The slopes were now clinging to some paultry grey patches of snow. The hills were shedding the stuff like a cygnet sheds its grey plumage. The sun was out. We stopped and bought sponge candy and micro brew beers and headed back to the arms and bosom of our friends in Springville.

Baltimore

2010-05-10T06:55:00.000-07:00

Monday 29th March - Day 49
(a.m.)

I sold the farm to take my woman where she longed to be
We left our kin and all our friends back there in Tennessee
I bought those oneway tickets she had often begged me for
And they took us to the streets of Baltimore
Her heart was filled with laughter when she saw those city lights
She said the prettiest place on earth is Baltimore at night

Hard times in the city
In a hard town by the sea
Ain't nowhere to run to
There ain't nothin' here for free
Hooker on the corner
Waitin' for a train
Drunk lyin' on the sidewalk
Sleepin' in the rain
And they hide their faces
And they hide their eyes
'Cause the city's dyin'
And they don't know why
Oh, Baltimore
Man, it's hard just to live
Oh, Baltimore
Man, it's hard just to live

Clearly a lot happened between 1966, when Tompall Glaser and Harlan Howard wrote The Streets Of Baltimore, and 1977 when Randy Newman wrote his song Baltimore. In just 11 years Baltimore went from being the "prettiest place on earth" (at least in the eyes of a bar loving runaround) to a dying city. Fast forward to 2002 and the premiere of the TV series The Wire which, for the next 6 years, depicted Baltimore as a city FUBAR. Fans of the series (though apostles would be a better word than fans) think it the greatest TV show ever made. And I do consider myself to be a fan. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend you spend £60 and buy the box set. If you doubt me then click here and let Charlie Brooker convince you.

The Wire is set in the hood or the hoods of Baltimore and they look like desperate places. Empty ramshackle rows of townhouses which have clearly been abandoned by the city authorities. They look like this.

And this.

And if you get the chance to go round the back of the houses they look like this.

Total urban decay. And, sad to say, an area where nearly all the population is African American. That's no surprise is it? But how could it be? How could things be so bad for one race in a society? Especially in a society that believes all men are created equal. Because as I see it for ghetto children there is no equality in terms of opportunity and provision. Now The Wire is mostly filmed in streets just like those pictured above. If you watch it you get used to seeing locations just like those. I certainly got the impression that they did most of their filming in a very small localized area. I figured they went to the worst part of the city and filmed it there. I was wrong. They went to lots of different places and here's why... these kind of areas make up a massive chunk of the central area of the city. When we drove around it we couldn't believe how block after block was the same. Right off major roads, sometimes right on major roads. This landscape is the norm for many, many people. I don't know what proportion of the 637,000 citizens of Baltimore live in neighborhoods like this, but judging by the sheer number of bad blocks then it's a lot. Wikipedia tells me 22.9% of the population live below the poverty line. That's 150,000 people living below the poverty line in a city that's less than 40 miles from the White House. That's not right. Driving around it made me feel everything from shame to anger and on to gratitude and then right back to shame.

Then as we were driving down North Gay Street, in the midst of all this decay, we came across one of the most magnificent buildings we'd seen on our trip.

This is the American Brewery (wouldn't you know) built in 1887 by John Frederick Wiessner, a German immigrant (wouldn't you know). It looked magnificent though it had been empty and derelict for years until Humanin, a non-profit organisation, took it over in 2005 and saved it. They then set about using the building to start a regeneration project that they hope will save East Baltimore. I admire their ambition.

Baltimore depressed the hell out of us. It didn't scare us like East St Louis. There were too many folks on the street for that. Lots of folk ignoring the rain, but I guess street life is the only life they know (ahem.) The Wire taught us about the corner boys, the foot soldiers of the drug gangs who deal from street corners. They were there. Only they looked a lot older than the guys in the TV show. There were operating businesses too. A swanky looking rim shop just like in The Wire, but more typically it was corner stores and liquor stores. They looked like they were outposts in a war. It was a mess. Impossible to think how it could be restored. It took over $20 million just to restore that brewery.

Only a few days earlier Congress had passed Obama's health care bill and the day after that we'd tuned into Rush Limbaugh, the notorious right wing talk radio host, and he opened his show with the words, "America is hanging by a thread". He may well be right, but not because of the health care bill. I find it hard to imagine how a country with ghettos like these streets of Baltimore can possibly be looking ahead to better days. This country needs fixing but I don't think it'll get fixed. The will isn't there. Not yet at least. Americans who listen to Rush and Hannity and Glen Beck still think America is just great. They're in denial. They don't want to see the problems. Of course all those people who voted for Obama were voting for change so maybe I shouldn't be too pessimistic. But I fear that it won't last. In the end America can forget about change because they can just sweep their poor under the carpet and let places like Baltimore and East St Louis decay, hoping they won't fester and bring forth some kind of revolution. And sad to say I get a stronger sense of revolutionary fervor from the right wing of America. The scary future might be a lurch towards the right under the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. God help us all if that happens.

Oh Shenandoah

2010-05-06T16:13:00.001-07:00

Sunday 28th March - Day 48

If you thought yesterday was a dull day to read, well this one isn't even going to reach those low thrills. So be warned.

Following on from the joys of the Blue Ridge Parkway we planned to drive along the Skyline Drive today. But the weather had other ideas. The road has risen before us a lot on this trip (and not in the good way that Johnny Rotten was singing about on Rise.) And, unlike in Britain, when the road starts to climb here it keeps on climbing. For miles. Sometimes it's an ear popping fast ascent and other times, like today, it's a looong slooow steady engine droning cruise which takes you into the clouds. Literally. When we reached the entrance to Skyline Drive we were in fog. And fog, Carol tells me, is a cloud that has touched down. We couldn't see more than 50 yards. The toll booth/entrance to the Skyline slipped slowly into vision from the mist, looking like something from a John Le Carre cold war novel. The Skyline Drive pretty much carries on where the Blue Ridge Parkway leaves off. It was created in the same era, it's very high up (clue in the name) and it runs along the Blue Ridge. But it differs in three ways ways: 1) it's shorter, just 105 miles long 2) it's in the Shenandoah National Park and 3) they charge you $15 to drive it! That's another thing that's starting to make me value Britain a little bit more. We don't have to pay to go into our National Parks. True the car parks within the parks ain't cheap but it seems pretty standard to have to pay to drive through a National Park in America. We have yet to pay for that privilege. We would have down in Yellowstone, but as all bar one of the roads road is closed in winter we didn't even have the option of paying. Because yesterday's drive was so beautiful we would probably have paid up today, but there's not much point driving the Skyline when you can't see the sky. Or the edge of the road. Or the 3000 foot drop that's just over the edge of the road. So we turned around and headed for Baltimore.

The song that brought us to this part of the country in the first place is probably the oldest song on our list. Oh Shenandoah is a classic expression of love for either a girl or a place. I've always read it as being about the place but some think it's about an Indian chief's daughter. Either way, as it's folk music there are different versions so you can suit yourself. My money is on the original being about the land because it was a sailor's song, and given that there's going to be another girl in the next port I think that what the sailor is yearning for is home.

To my ears it sounds like an Irish ballad. And seeing as how it's been in existence since at least 1882, it's not surprising that it doesn't sound 'American'. Britannia was still ruling the waves back then with the help of men from all over her empire. So I expect that the old world supplied the main cultural influence on the men who wrote songs about the new world. And according to the mighty Wikipedia a man called J.E. Laidlaw of San Francisco reported hearing a version sung by a black Barbadian on a ship from Glasgow in 1894. But it fascinates me that though the music still sounds British/Irish, the songwriter clearly sees himself as American and that land as being his land. The USA may have been less than 100 years old when Oh Shenandoah was first penned but already the white settlers were prone to a sentimental romanticisizing of the place that was every bit as heartfelt as any Irish ballad.

Is this a well known song in the UK? I'm not so sure. I'm from an Irish family and got bitten by the folk music bug when I was a youth though I doubt my non-folk loving contemporaries would know it. But any serious muso should know it. Everybody from Bruce Springsteen to Bryn Terfel has sung it. Instrumentalists cover it too and they are equally diverse... from Bill Frisell to James Galway to Keith Jarrett. It's become a standard for classical crossover tenors and jazz soloists with an eye on some sales. And of course it's meat and drink to the folk, country and bluegrass gangs. Others who couldn't resist it include Robeson, Dylan, Van the Man, Judy Garland and Jimmy Rodgers. Ok so not everybody... Slipknot haven't done it (yet) but Thin Lizzy did so you get my point. Here's a couple of versions you might like...

So we drove through Shenandoah and it was wet and green and looked like Ireland. A bit. It also looked at times like it was home to the sort of men in the film Deliverance. You know, the ones who liked pigs. Looking at America from across the water we think the rednecks live far south, or out west. But they live all over. We were picking up Washington radio stations while driving past shacks that looked like they were auditioning for parts in teenage slasher flicks. Not too many Democratic Party members in those parts I suspect. And yes, appearances can be deceptive, but the local radio talk show made me pretty sure the appearances were accurate. The hot topic of debate was the Virginia Governor's willingness (seemingly nailed on) to sign a bill which will change things for members of the public who have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Up to now those poor oppressed free citizens were not allowed to carry their guns into places that served alcohol. Unbelievable I know. You may have the right to carry the gun but not into a joint that served alcohol. Despite the cross my heart swear to die promises that they wouldn't get steaming drunk and start shooting... they still weren't allowed to take that concealed weapon into a bar. Or a restaurant. Or anywhere that sold booze. But Let Freedom Ring, the gun lobby had seemingly convinced the Governor that it was downright evil to stop good, God-fearing, gun-loving citizens from taking their heat into a bar. So now (or soon) you can sit next to your buddy at the bar as he glugs his Miller, or your wife in a restaurant as she sips a cheeky little chardonnay, and still get a boner because you can feel that cold steel strapped to you.

The words "fucking" and "insane" spring to my mind.

The shacks and radio show told me I had to get out of this place. So I put my foot down and headed for Baltimore, Maryland. Or as it's also known (because of the gang wars)... Bodymore, Murderland.

(For unbiased reporting of all gun law issues I cannot recommend ammoland.com. But I can recommend it for scary mentalists who love guns waaaaaay too much. Fancy some Gun Talk Radio? You got it.)

Buckner Live

2010-04-08T10:14:00.000-07:00

As promised... a little taste of the Richard Buckner show we saw when we were in SF.
This is one guy, one guitar and a few pedals.

It's not everybody's cup of tea. But I love it.

Amanda Barker.mp3

Thanks to Berkeley Mike for taping it. (That's something else that happens way more in America than it does in the UK.)

The Blue Ridge Mountains

2010-04-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

Saturday 27th March - Day 47

That was a number 2 hit record in the UK in 1975. No wonder we needed punk rock. (Though in no way should that statement be construed as a slight on Laurel & Hardy. They were brilliant.)

Anyway. Glory hallelujah I recovered. Saturday morning came with lots of sunshine and a sense of wellness. It was a lovely day and we spent it driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Which, as this helpful little map shows aren't just in Virginia.

But they are blue. Ridge after ridge each one a little further away then the last get progressively blue as the peaks become ever more fuzzy in a haze that's created by the sweat of pine trees. No seriously... the trees release this chemical called Isopreen and that's what turns the haze blue. It sure is pretty though. It really does looks like this.

Now we've spent a lot of time on this trip on interminable interstate roads that will make any British driver appreciate the beauty that surrounds our motorways. Not every mile of them of course but take the M62 eastwards out of Manchester and try and say that the Pennines aren't beautiful. (Don't go west out of Manchester for heaven's sake... that way leads to Mordor, or Liverpool as it is also known.)And it seems a long time since we had a really beautiful drive. Maybe it was back in New Mexico. But the Blue Ridge Parkway is one of the most beautiful roads I have ever had the privilege of driving along.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a single lane road. It's classified as a National Parkway and runs for 469 miles from North Carolina to Virginia (where it becomes Shenandoah's Skyline Drive.) It's a very special road, most of it is over 3000feet high and the land on either side of the road is maintained by the National Park Service. It was commissioned as part of FDR's New Deal though it wasn't completely finished until 1987. FDR and his policies are hated by right wing Americans who fear anything socialist. But if our current depression (which I think is mostly bollocks) were to lead to anything as wonderful as the Blue Ridge Parkway I'd be very surprised. I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it before. Or seen it in any number of car commercials. It's a road made in advertising heaven. Maybe it's good that it's not so well known because it's pretty empty. We joined the parkway at Asheville and drove for over 300 miles and most of the time we didn't see many other drivers at all. It's not as wonderfully lonely as Wyoming but it's a welcome change for us British drivers and reminds us just why driving in Britain is mostly hellish.

Maybe the roads were particularly empty because the it was still considered out of season. I've been surprised by how much things shut down here for winter. There were parts of the Parkway that were still shut for the season despite it being April and sunny. But it's mountain country and the road is thousands of feet high. Or maybe it's quiet because there aren't any modern attractions on the roadside and America has become so used to it's strip mall lifestyle that it doesn't want to be too far away from a big parking lot, a Subway and a Dollar General. But if so then praise the lord and pass the people some more burgers because a road as lovely would be spoiled by over use. See the English lake District on a Bank Holiday weekend for details.

If you want to look at it using google maps then click here. But better still... go and see it yourself. It's really special. It's 460 miles long and not one billboard. Happy 75th birthday Blue ridge Parkway.

Asheville NC

2010-04-08T10:03:00.001-07:00

Friday 26th March - Day 46

After 46 days on the road I am tired of the radio. No, not tired... fucked off. We must have listened to nearly a thousand radio stations whilst we're on the road. Admittedly we don't stay with them long. But they don't stay with us long either. You have to turn that dial real often in America as the signal disappears so quickly. In Britain, radio is the king of the road. You can listen to Radio 4 from one end of the country to the other, or at least switch to Radio Scotland when you get north of the border. Other national stations are available, including Radio 1 to 5 and Talk Sport. But when we hit a good station here chances are it's going to be gone in 20 to 30 minutes of interstate driving. Radio seems to be a very local medium. Take today as we drove up through Georgia into South and then North Carolina. Our good friend Ward texted us a frequency to tune into. WNCW has a weekly half hour Zappa show and we caught the end of it. They were even playing San Bernardino. But the signal was weak and came and went. It was broadcasting out of Greenville but it just wasn't designed for road warriors. Swings and roundabouts I guess. With all these small stations you get some crazy stuff. You can always listen on the internet but that's no good in the car.

What has surprised me most about radio in America is that Country is king. It is by far and away the most common format for a radio station to follow. In some parts of the country it's damn near the only format you'll hear. The next most universally found format would be Christian radio. They vary a lot. In more metropolitan areas they play Contemporary Christian Music which I often find fascinating. In the more rural parts there's more focus on preaching and bible studies. One was seriously preaching that what lay at the root of most of the world's ills was a belief in Evolution. That sort of stuff is fascinating to listen to and does a disservice to the vast majority of card carrying church members. If you think all Christians are reactionary nutters then you really need to get out more. Or at least outside your own circle. I was also fascinated by how often the theme of the preaching was fighting pornography. Seriously and blimey. I wonder if there is a market for Christian porn? There is Christian heavy metal after all so why not? It would be for use by married couples obviously. We could set a lot of it in the courts of the kings of Israel. Watch this space, this time next year I'm going to be rich. In the south east we came across a few Christian community stations that had "Swap Shop" type shows. Guys would ring in and offer something like a trailer that they wanted to exchange for a pick up. Bafflingly, a lot of those callers wanted to swap guns. One of them was offering a sniper rifle with a scope. Praise the Lord and pass the ammo.

No matter the format of the station you do hear the same songs again and again and again. All the songs on Guitar Hero II that Brits had never heard of and wondered why they made it onto the video game... they are all on the radio all the time. Stuff like Crazy On You by Heart or Jessica by The Allman Brothers Band (it's the Top Gear theme tune), these things get played daily somewhere in America. One thing that struck us was how seldomly we heard black music. The one track by an African American that we heard repeatedly was this one:

How many place names? A few. Anyway. Today was another sick day. I did hope to go see this place called Helen in Georgia which is the subject of this song by Wayne Robbins & the Hellsayers.

All Roads Lead To Helen.mp3

In case you're too lazy to click the link, Helen is a fake Bavarian town set in the Georgia mountains. 35 years ago the good folk of the declining logging town (the population today is only 420) came up with the idea of changing the appearance of the all the buildings in the town so it looked like an alpine village. Brilliant. And now it's a little tourist hot spot. But I had my own fever and so we headed to Asheville, NC which, according to the Lonely Planet, has the highest per capita freak ratio of any town in the country. It's a college town of course, it has a food co-op and street kids with dreads drumming. It's a couple of thousand feet high, on the edge of the Blue Ridge mountains, so it's cold as well as cool. Not that we saw much of it. Still ill (did you spot that one?) I went to bed early. But at least it was in a motel that Richard Buckner stayed in. It also had a sign up in the foyer which said local people wern't allowed to check in. When I asked the woman behind the desk why, she said she didn't know. Weird.

Oh and Asheville was home to the 1930 Country act The Callhahan Brothers who had a song called Asheville Blues. This is them singing Springtime in Texas. The whores.

Atlanta

2010-04-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

Wednesday 24th and Thursday 25th March - Days 44 & 45

I almost forgot another Mississippi tune... Hendrix's Peace In Mississippi.

Which was also covered by Earth who are one of my favorite bands. When we were planning this trip a must-see place for me was Tallahassee simply because Earth have a tune called Tallahassee.

Apart from being a great track, it also intrigued me why this doom metal band from the north west would write a song about the capital of Florida. Looking at the video for the track I'm guessing some bad shit went down in that town. Bad shit is, or at least was, par for the course for Earth's main man Dylan Carlson. He lost years of his life and music to smack and he will be forever infamous as the man who bought the shotgun that Cobain killed himself with. He was also the man who gave Cobain his first singing gig. Funny how that isn't as well known.

But I remain one of the few Brits who've been to America and not been to Florida. The reason for this is after NOLA we headed straight for Atlanta. Another boring long drive just so I could be ill in the house of another friend. 468 miles and a seven hour drive. First of all through Mississippi, where the ratio of crazy drivers to people who want to live seemed to be about 1:3. Still at least that kept things interesting. The I-65 which cuts across the south west corner of Alabama was the most boring drive I've ever done. There's just a lot of bare trees. Hardly any exits and at times not a single radio signal to be picked up. Funny thing is that the first time I ever drove in America I took the same route, only going south, and I found it fascinating. Coming from Britain where motorways are congested and six lanes of traffic are separated by a thin strip of metal, a big ass American interstate with its huge meridian and no signs of life by the side of the road blew my mind.

Atlanta looked huge but I can't really tell you much about it because I was ill again. We stayed with another Postcarder, handsome Jon, who looks like a young Keifer Sutherland, has beautiful southern manners and likes to smoke natural products. I've been meaning to go and enjoy the high life in Atlanta with Jon for a long time but my timing was really bad. Not only was I ill, but Jon had a work conference starting the day after we got there. Still we could go out for one night right? Well, half a night. After a few tacos we were about to move on to the next whiskey bar (little Alabama Song reference for you there) when I started shivering like a skinny stripper in a northern town. It was time to go to bed. And it wasn't even 11.

I managed a little better the next night. Enough to take in an Irish bar (where they have a monthly Father Ted night - respect!), the house where the woman who wrote Gone With The Wind lived (sort of... they rebuilt it), a sports bar (with English soccer on) and the Clermount Lounge. The sleaziest strip club I ever saw. And I swear we went on the recommendation of a woman (thank you, Louise.) The Clermont Lounge is Atlanta's first and longest continually-operating strip club (opened in 1965). Located in the basement of the Clermont Motor Hotel (now out of business) on Ponce De Leon Avenue, in the Poncey-Highland neighborhood. Seriously, the Poncey-Highland neighborhood. It sounds and looks like a location from a noirer than noir trashy novel. It's a remnant of a former America, just like an AA baseball field in a hick town. That's why Louise liked it. It was amazing. I can't really bring myself to describe the dancers because it would seem cruel. And I don't want to be cruel. But if I were to, I'd be using words like cellulite, droopy, bloated. Still more power to them. And their fans. Especially the smooth dude in the silk Lionel Ritchie World Tour bomber jacket. There was a good little bar band and a super hot tattooed bar tender (Sandra Bullock's hubby would have dug her.) Seemingly it's where celebs like Brad Pitt like to come to party when they are in town. I wish I hadn't been ill. If I'd stayed longer I might have become drunk enough to spend a little more money in there.

We also didn't get to see the star of the Clermont, an African American woman called Blondie who is at least 50 but can crush a beer can between her jugs.

Mississippi

2010-04-03T12:04:00.001-07:00

Things we missed in Mississippi.

GODDAM. This country is too big.

NOLA

2010-04-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Monday 22nd and Tuesday 23rd March - Days 42 & 43

I was just ill in New Orleans. After 41 days of travel and a week at SXSW we drove 512 miles in 8 hours and went out in the French Quarter. Drank, ate, slept and then woke up feeling very ill. I think I beat the throat cancer but now it turned into lung cancer. I was coughing up some nasty phlegm. We were staying with another Postcarder, Michael, and his wife Louise, who also have a super cool place to live. It's a Creole cottage, and it has its very own bar. Here's me looking very comfortable there. You may also notice that I have somehow brought the spare tire from our car into the bar. I don't know how that happened. I've been eating such healthy food here in America. And drinking moderately. Now I know you'll blame the booze on my illness but even though we did have lovely cocktails, as well as some food (deep fried chicken, the south is a lot like Glasgow) and some more drinks in a dive bar that we had to go in because they were playing War Pigs, that is not why I woke up ill on Tuesday. The usual cure of breakfast proved too weak for whatever was ailing me and despite it being a beautiful day in NOLA I couldn't take advantage of it. Michael and Louise both work from home so I really tried to stay up. I even went and sat in the Cathedral of Saint Louis for half an hour. It reminded me of the famous Brendan Behan quote “I'm a Communist by day and a Catholic as soon as it gets dark.” Sadly Jesus chose not to cure me and even though NOLA looked like no other American city I just had to go back to our hosts and rudely sleep through the day. Though I recovered enough to go out for some food and drinks again that night, I can't really tell you much about the city. But here are some random observations:

1)It looks like a former French Carribean colony and is all the better for that.
2)The sidewalks are shot (and I'm pretty sure they were before Katrina). Seriously broken up sidewalks like you'd see in a war movie.
3)You can drink on the streets! (Watch your feet.) It's a 24 hour drinking town. One bar even has a launderette in it.
4) The city has a lot of cemeteries. We visited the one where Buddy Bolden is buried. Somewhere. No one knows where though. (If you are not familiar with Buddy Bolden then I suggest the novella Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje. I give you a money back guarantee that you'll enjoy it. But you will need a proof of purchase if you want to claim on that.)
5) The road called Elysium Fields is the finest civic failure I've ever seen. It was meant to be the Champs Elysees of NOLA but it just never took off. So it's a very wide boulevard with a grassy meridian and very few signs of life. You can check it out on Street View. It looks like this:

Talking of signs of life, Michael took us for a ride around the Lower 9th. It wasn't what I was expecting and it's certainly no East St Louis. Maybe the sun had a lot to do with that. Certainly Brad Pitt does. Now we saw a lot of Katrina/Lower 9th stories in the UK but I was completely unaware that Brad Pitt had set up a charitable foundation called Make It Right to get some amazing homes built in the Lower 9th. Places that look like this...

and this...

and this...

I don't know, maybe it's possible that it's common knowledge and I'm just ignorant. Highly possible. But assuming it's not, it strikes me as odd that stories like this don't get much coverage. I wonder why. Still it's amazing to see these modern structures rising up amongst the condemned and abandoned shacks and urban prairie.

Oh and if you are wondering why there's no mention of music on this page (other than Buddy Bolden) it's because there are no songs that mention New Orleans. None whatsoever.

What English Folk music at SXSW taught me

2010-03-28T20:16:00.001-07:00

Actually it started back in Kenmore, Western New York. In a shop called Spiral Scratch. A more unassuming record shop you could not find. I defy you to. It carries vinyl mostly. It's the underground incarnate. It's a model for how there might still be a future for a retail outlet in the music business. As long as the business aspect comes second to the music aspect. I imagine the rent on the shop is very low. James Ellroy loooowwww low. Which might mean we'll never see its likes in the UK. Too bad. Anyway. I bought thisthere. John Barleycorn Must Die by Traffic. Just $4 on vinyl. It reminded me of a record by a young British folk artist called Tim Van Eyken. Back in 2007 his version of Barleycorn picked up the award for Best Traditional Track at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Ever since I've been meaning to pick up Stiffs Lovers Holymen Thieves, the album that spawned the track. When we were in the astounding Amoeba Records in LA (another very viable model for a 21st century music retailer) I checked out the used English folk CDs and what do you know. Banged it in the CD player in the mighty Terrain and what's the first line on the record?

01 Barleycorn.mp3

"There came three men from out of Kent." That's right, a geographical reference. And there's plenty more where that came from on the record: Ratcliffe, Worcester City, passages from England to Australia. English folk music is full of English place references. Of course it is. It's folk music.

This was reinforced whilst watching the English Folk Music showcase at SXSW. Nevermind that the bill included a band from Scotland and that the star of the night for me, Olivia Chaney, did tunes from Ireland and France. It was billed as Looking For a New England, which meant it could be marketed as English and attract Arts Council money with postcards based on Marmite and Newcastle Brown Ale. Traditional fare. Just like the music. And I mean that in a good way. That's what people who love British folk music want by large. New versions sure, but old stuff. Stuff that feels old. There's a version of Barleycorn in manuscript that dates back to 1568. Even the stuff from the more recent centuries that was performed by these young turks from England (and Scotland) had plenty of geographical references.

And then it struck me. Of course American rock and pop music is full of geographical references. It's folk music. This is true of hip-hop and jazz too. So like all folk music it sings about place. And I'd been asking the wrong question. It's not why do Americans sing about America so much, it's why do British rock and pop acts not mention British places as much? And the answer is because when Brits make rock and pop music we're contributing to American folk music. That's why the Beatles talk about Jojo from Tucson Arizona and Mick Jagger doesn't meets birds in gin-soaked bars in Twickenham. We love this music so we want to make it authentic. Of course, from time to time we'll chuck in a few British places but it can sound a little forced or ironic. Or maybe a throwback to older British folk traditions that no doubt underpin rock 'n' roll.

When driving through LA listening to a classic hip-hop radio station it hit me just how very "American" the music was. I'm sure listening to a few jigs and reels in a pub on the west coast of Clare has a similar effect. The music comes from the people of that land. Then I drove past an African American church and thought how "American" gospel music is. Same for rock 'n' roll. I know I'm in danger of picking up an award for stating the bleeding obvious, but it's all too easy to miss woods for trees. And I think in the UK we are prone to forgetting that this music came from a different land and a different people. Even if their roots lie back in the old countries things changed.

It was all so obvious all along.

SXSW

2010-03-26T19:55:00.003-07:00

Tuesday 16th to Sunday 21st March - Days 36 - 41

SXSW is hard. It's not like Glastonbury. You don't get to hang out in a field and get in touch with your inner hippy. You get to hang out with some older hippies and realise they look that bad because running around after music is hard. We took it easy this year. So we didn't see the 50+ or 70+ bands of previous years. We only saw the following bands. (Youtube links for the best ones.)

Brent Best
Lil Cap'n Travis
Glossary
The Atlas Moth

The Cardinal Health
Chip Robinson
Brent Best (again)
Javelina
Priestess
Wanda Jackson

Pink Nasty
Smokey Angel Shades
Get Cape Wear Cape Fly
Billy Bragg

Middleman
Slow Club

The Crookes
Slow Club (again)
Pete Molinari

Quest For Fire

Bobby Bare Jr
The Wooden Birds
The Cave Singers
Centro-Matic

The Law
Twin Atlantic
Gadarene
Olivia Chaney

Jackie Oates
Trembling Bells
Jakob Dylan (with Neko Case & Kelly Hogan)
The Unthanks
Todd
Gina Villalobos and the Midnight Voices
The Waco Brothers
The Legendary Shack Shakers
Chuck Prophet & the Mission Express

Two Cow Garage
The Capstan Shafts
Through The Sparks
Best Coast
Slow Club (once again)
The Black Angels

And even though we took it real easy it still bloody hurt. It didn't help that we stayed in three hotels during the week but still... I am too old for this. My throat is hurting. It might be cancer. Well... it might be.

Fredericksburg

2010-03-26T19:55:00.001-07:00

Monday 15th March - Day 36

Fredericksburg is the German capital of Texas. Lots of hun went to German seemingly. The 2000 US census recorded 47 million people claiming German heritage, the largest single ethnic group in the USA. And yet the apparent influence of German on the culture is very small. I guess two world wars helped undermine that. Fredericksburg is very small but it's still very German. The main street is also called Hauptstrasse. Not sure how the locals pronounce that but it's still very cute, if not a little weird, to see German architecture in the town. Sadly it's overrun with day trippers and chintzy gift shops. It's to Texas what Bowness-on-Windermere is to the Lake District.

To make matters worse the grand Bavarian Inn (pic above) was closed. Monday seems to be a day when a lot of things close in small tourist spots in America. At first it seemed dumb to us but then I guess Americans with their 3rd world vacation time allowances don't do long weekends. Still Tuesday would surely be a better day for a place to have it's day off wouldn't it? We ate at the Auslander Biergarten which at least served real German beer even if it didn't serve real German food. When it comes to serving up Euro grub its the cheese that lets America down. I'd say the only Europeans who would be happy with the quality of the cheese served in American restaurants would be the Dutch. (The perfunctory "belegen" signifier tells you all you need to know about the paucity of Dutch cheese culture.) God know Britain isn't France but our cheese choice is made to seem like the haut-est of cuisine compared to the almost ubiquitous limited options of American, Swiss or Provolone.

But I didn't come to slag off America. I cam to enjoy it. And even though I'm not sure if the tunes on itunes and AMG called Fredericksburg are about this town we were mostly here to kill a day before SXSW. And to salute the town because to Fredericksburg's enormnous credit the pact that was signed by the towns folk with the Comanche Indians in 1847 (known as the 1847 Meusebach-Comanche Treaty) is believed to be the sole pact between whites and Native Americans that has never been broken. Wow! That is shameful shit isn't it? European settlers really fucked American people up didn't they? So lets hear it for the damen und herren of Fredricksburg. Even if there is another unbroken pact with injuns those good folk of Fredericksburg deserve respect because their treaty was the only treaty made between private citizens and the Comanche, which was endorsed by the Federal government. It seems you can trust a Fredericksburger.

And finally the Ditzel motel that we stayed in was really sweet. It had chickens roaming round the front and back and we had the room next to reception so we could get a strong wifi feed. Which might not recommend the place to the business traveller but made it ever so appealing to us. Check this street view screen grab out.

Luckenbach

2010-03-16T06:36:00.001-07:00

Sunday 14th March - Day 35

I haven't mentioned the landscape for days have I? That's because it's pretty dull. And today was the dullest of all. The I-35 stretches from Laredo, Texas, on the U.S.-Mexico border to Duluth, Minnesota, at Minnesota Highway 61. I assume it's a trip to do it from start to finish. It ends up in the birthplace of Dylan after all. But the I-35 corridor that runs from Denton TX to Austin TX is horrible. It's the Texan answer to the M6 between Birmingham and Manchester. Only being Texan it's bigger... 228 miles of traffic. Even on a Sunday. It was sunny too which always makes traffic worse for a rain lover like me. OK it wasn't bumper to bumper, but not far off. And when we got to Austin, a city I love (though as it gets bigger I love it less and less) it really was bumper to bumper, 5 miles an hour stuff. And seemingly all because there was a kite festival in Zilker Park. They should never have given those hippies gas money.

In retrospect, we probably could have made better use of our time than heading to Denton. Especially because it gave us only two nights before we had to be in Austin for SXSW. And nothing between Denton and Austin had any appeal for us. So we set our sights on staying in Fredericksburg and visiting Luckenbach on the way. A total of 312 miles but most of it was awful interstate. The only highlight of the trip was a rest stop when I rang my Mum back in the UK as it was Mother's Day over there. In a 10 minute conversation she was able to bring me up to date with three deaths. (She likes to do that. I expect she's not alone in that.) So RIP to my old headmaster Mr McNally, my uncle Tommy (who I met twice maybe - Mum came from a big family) and the ex-husband of another relative. Happy Mother's Day all.

When we finally got past Austin the countryside started to improve. Texas Hill Country is greener than you'd imagine Texas to be. It undulates a little bit too so even though it's not outstandingly beautiful it comes as welcome relief. It is also home to a legendary country music venue in Luckenbach Texas.

Luckenbach is an unincorporated community. Which means it's not part of any municipality. It appeals to the sort of people who fear big government and believe in the myths of freedom. The sort of people who have bumper stickers that say, "If you think you can trust the government... ask an Indian" but those Indians probably wouldn't trust a man with a bumper sticker like that either. Anyway, that's not why Luckenbach is famous. Nor is it the fact that citizens of the town claimed that one of them had launched the first airplane years before the Wright Brothers. Which seems unlikely for a town that at its peak only had a population of 492 and fell back to just 3. That was when it put up an ad that read "Town — pop. 3 — for sale." And somehow someone thought that was a good deal. Hondo Crouch, rancher and Texas folklorist, bought it for $30,000 in 1970, in partnership with Kathy Morgan and actor Guich Koock. Hondo used the town's rights as a municipality to govern the dancehall as he saw fit. I may scoff, but if Crouch had lived he'd have seen his investment pay off. In 1973, Jerry Jeff Walker, backed by the Lost Gonzo Band, recorded a live album called Viva Terlingua at Luckenbach Dancehall. That album became an outlaw country classic. Four years later (and a year after Crouch's death), Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson immortalized Luckenbach with the song 'Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)'.

I have to apologise here for previously taking the piss out of guys who tape themselves covering songs on guitar so they can post them on Youtube. At least they aren't making slide shows to accompany records so they can post them on Youtube. (The only people sadder than the slide show artists of Youtube are the bloggers who embed the works of those visionaries.)

In the book Are You Ready for the Country? author Peter Doggett wrote that Jennings later told audiences that 'he hated the song and admitted "The guys that wrote the thing have never been to Luckenbach. Neither have I"'. However, many now have. Notable concert appearances in the town have included Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Lyle Lovett. Sadly nothing of that quality was on show when we rolled in on Sunday afternoon, the now traditional time to sit out by the creek and have a beer. The old store which sells Luckenbach Texas Population 3 stickers and t-shirts and stuff was actually as cool a vendor of tourist tat as I've ever seen. And if someone really good was playing in the very rustic dancehall then I'd consider selling a kidney or even a gonad if it got me a ticket. But based on what I saw, Sunday afternoons there might be a bit lame if you want great music. The band were terrible and the crowd was made up mostly of guys who had spent way too many hours polishing their Harleys and growing their bellies. If you dig big shiny hogs (either biological or mechanical) then a sunny Sunday afternoon in Luckenbach Texas is for you. If you're in the neighbourhood... it might be worth a look to see what's on.

But Myths are fragile. Sometimes it pays to stay away.

Denton

2010-03-14T21:42:00.003-07:00

Saturday 13th March - Day 34

Denton, TX

For the past few days I've been waking up with a very sore throat. I think I'm knackered. I feel knackered. We did 7 hours driving on Thursday and 5 hours on Friday. Thankfully today we only did 3 hours but because we were trying to get into to town in time for a free concert where they were going to open the gates at 3pm, we had to get up early and drive pretty hard. I mention this because I have nothing to tell you about Denton Texas. I wanted to see the town. It's supposed to be nice. I love Damien Jurado's song Denton, TX too. But all we did was check in to the motel, and go sit in a field and see a disappointing show.

Band 1. If a band called Star Death & White Dwarfs were going to be any good they were going to be metal. And unashamed of admitting to a familiarity with Games Workshop products. Sadly they were hipsters who did a cover of Madonna's Borderline. Not good.

Band 2. Midlake are a very dull live band.

Band 3. I love the Flaming Lips but this show was a disaster. The power went out three times.
Still it had its moments:

If not for the music then at least for the spectacle.

Then we went to bed. This country is too big. And Texas is too big in itself. The sun has rose and the sun has set and I ain't got through Texas yet.

Oh-no-klahoma

2010-03-14T21:42:00.001-07:00

Friday 12th March - Day 33

America likes to maximize its pleasure. Things can't just be good, they have to be "the best!" When we were in the beer bar Stout in LA a fellow customer urged us to try the burgers there. "You'll hear this a lot" he said, "but seriously these are the BEST burgers in LA." We went back the next night and they were good burgers but I don't know if they were the best burgers in LA. I'm not sure such a thing could be objectively demonstrated to exist. But because of the guy's claim we had really good burgers and were left feeling a little disappointed. We've now learnt that the so-called best burgers, cocktails, strippers or whatever won't be as outstanding as the acclaim would lead us to expect.

I mention all of this because today we visited our first Hall of Fame. It's another example of America's desire to maximize pleasure. No point listening to a band that's not in the rock 'n' roll hall of fame is there? (Well yes, of course there is.) Even things like music have to be quantified in terms of quality. Halls of Fame are not a big deal in the UK. They did set one up for English football in 2002 but I can't tell you a thing about it. And I expect that's true of nearly all English footy fans. But apart from that one, I'm not sure there are any other Halls of Fame in the UK. So, of course, I really wanted to take in a Hall of Fame somewhere on this trip and in Anadarko Oklahoma we got our chance.

We didn't really know what to expect from the National Hall of Fame for Famous American Indians (unfamous American Indians need not apply) but our hopes weren't high when we drove through the arse end of Anadarko (no relation to Donnie Darko) where one house that seemed to still be occupied had been half flattened by a tree. It was no East St Louis.... but not far off. The Hall of Fame was actually pretty sweet. Though garden of fame would have been a more accurate description. Each inducted Famous American Indian has a bust set on a plinth, and these are set out around a lawn. There is a small information center where we got chatting to a lovely 80 year old "full blood Kiowa" woman. She really was delightful company until she came out as a racist. In the info center were three busts that had fallen from their plinths when a tornado had ripped through the town last year. When she told us about the tornado and how bad it had been we said we'd seen a tree lying on a house as we drove through town. She asked whereabout in town and when we described it to her she said "oh, black town". That sounded odd - was black town her name for the part of Anardarko where the black community lived? Turned out it was as she revealed to us her low opinion of African Americans. She even said "I'm a racist." OMG. Then went on about how the Indian braves wouldn't scalp a black man. She also revealed how she was the only Indian in town (she didn't use politically correct terms like Native American) who voted for McCain. Obama wasn't her guy. I'm sure she could have talked to us all day but, horrified and confused, we made our excuses and left.

The motels in Anadarko didn't look too appealing so we pushed on for Lawton Oklahoma the subject of the Lightnin' Hopkins song Lawton Oklahoma Blues. I'd guess that at least 90% of the town have the blues. It doesn't look like it would be a pretty town at the best of times, but it looked particularly ugly when we got there a day or two after a severe ice-storm. Every street had massive piles of dead wood that the storm had brought down. Lawton's pretty big for a grim town in the Oklahoma panhandle. It had plenty of hotels too which puzzled us. Why would anyone want to stay in that town? Why would so many people want to stay? The only thing I can think of that would explain it is the Comanche Nation Casino. Whatever the cause, getting a room wasn't easy. We tried America's Best Value Inns which are usually one of the cheapest motels but it was $90 a night. We then found a strip with a row of independent motels that looked a little seedy. They all advertised jacuzzi suites too which made them seem like they might book out rooms by the hour. We checked into one and then checked right back out. I'm not a fussy man and I'm not a hygiene freak but the room smelled so damp that I pulled back the bed cover to discover a pillow with three mould colonies growing on it. The receptionist offered to swap the pillow but we were out of there. As we drove away we saw a street sign saying 'No Cruising' which made me reconsider the musclebound guys who had been looking at me in the car park of the motel. I thought maybe they didn't like the look of this long haired bloke... now I think this strip of motels may be where Oklahoma's rural gay community comes to party.

We did eventually find a motel and then went to check out the casino. Well, there really didn't seem to be anything else to do in town. The Comanche Nation Casino wasn't much smaller than the Reno casinos. But it didn't waste much space on restaurants and bars. Or gaming tables for that matter. The folk of the Oklahoma panhandle clearly just love to play slots. It was 11 o'clock on a Friday night and the place was packed. It was pretty horrible. Which all in all was becoming our impression of Oklahoma. Take this exchange which happened when the security guy at the casino asked for our ID and we showed him our UK driver's licences.
"UK... where's that? Ukraine?"
"Er... no it's the UK."
"Where's that?"
"You know... the United Kingdom. We're British"
"Well, I don't know, I'm from Oklahoma."

Horrible.

Amarillo

2010-03-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

Thursday 11th March - Day 32

Why do people write songs about places? Why did Neil Sedaka decide to set this irritating catchy pop song in Amarillo, Texas? Well, seemingly it was the only place he could find that rhymed with pillow and willow. It's not a terribly well-known song in America. However, in the UK and in Germany it's huge. Tony Christie, a poor man's Englebert Humperdink, made it a hit in 1971. And then in 2005 it was re-released for charity with a video fronted by the British comedian Peter Kay. Kay is a rare comedian who is popular with the broadest of mainstream markets as well as making really clever cult TV shows. (Phoenix Nights is a tremendous series set in Bolton, Lancashire not Phoenix, Arizona.) The video is a rare and stupifying collection of British household names many of which will be complete unknowns to Americans. It's willfully and unashamedly cheesey and makes me feel conflicted. But it has to be saluted for being the only pop video to feature Shaun Ryder & Bez from the Happy Mondays as well as Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen. And if that isn't weird enough, then you can add Shakin' Stevens and Heather Mills to the mix. And five dwarves wearing Bolton Wanderers footy shirts.

I've got nothing to say about the town as we just used it as a rest stop on the way to Denton Texas where there's a free concert happening on Saturday. The west Texas landscape didn't look that inspiring... though we did see real tumbleweeds. And we drove past what claimed to be the largest cross in the western hemisphere. It looked identical to one we saw in Ohio. Very odd indeed. The sign promised us a "spiritual experience never to be forgotten" but, heathen fools that we are, we passed on that. I might save myself for the biggest cross in the world, but I guess I'll have to go to the eastern hemisphere for that. Which is surprising because my money would have been on America being number 1 in that field.

Highlight of the day though was seeing the real place that inspired the body shop (garage) from the movie Cars. It's called the U-Drop Inn and it's in a town called Shamrock. It's not operational anymore, but that's the price of progress. The interstate goes right by the town but back in the golden days Route 66 went right through the heart of it. Modern roads save time but we lose lots of other stuff. Still at least they had the good sense to preserve the building. It's beautiful.

Lyrics Quiz 4

2010-03-13T22:31:00.000-08:00

So so easy. So so easy.

1. I went from Phoenix, Arizona, All the way to Tacoma, Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A.

2. I'm going to Wichita, Far from this opera for evermore

3. Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit

4. I'll look for you in old Honolulu, San Francisco, Ashtabula,

5. In South Carolina, there are many tall pines

6. The desert's quiet, Cleveland's cold, so the story ends we're told

7. See the girls in California, im hoping its gonna come true

8. Holly came from Miami FLA

9. Left my home in Georgia, Headin' for the Frisco Bay

10. I met a gin soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis.

Truth or Consequences

2010-03-10T00:31:00.001-08:00

Tuesday 9th & Wednesday 10th March - Days 30 & 31

We took the highway till the road went black
We marked Truth or Consequences on our map
Last to Die - Bruce Springsteen

I first became aware of a town called Truth or Consequences back in 1989. What an incredible name for a town. And looking at it there on the map, stuck in the arse end of New Mexico, it was impossible not to be seduced by the romance of the name. Surely it was linked to some morally fraught real-life cowboy drama. There had to be a gripping story behind the name. We didn't have the internet then so I couldn't just check it out on wikipedia. Which protected me from the sadly prosaic truth... Truth or Consequences only took its name in 1950. And it did so to be part of a publicity stunt for a radio game show of the same name. The show later became a TV show. Seemingly it's very well know amongst Americans of a certain age.

Ok, so it may not be as legendary a story as I'd hoped for, but it was still enough to make me want to check out the place. Plus the town used to be called Hot Springs, so after discovering the joys of hot spring bathing in Chico, Montana there was no way we were going to miss T or C. It was here or Las Cruces. But all I knew about that place was that there's a jail there.

But that would probably have been okay too as I fell in love with New Mexico. Arizona had great skies, as did Wyoming and of course Montana. But none of them could compete with the skies in New Mexico.

Enormous. With Simpsons title-esque clouds rolling over almost constantly. The land was pretty cold too. As soon as we crossed the border from Arizona we saw a ghost town. A place called Steins. I thought places like this just didn't exist anymore. Or if they did, they didn't look like they make 'em look in the movies. But in New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, they do. I don't know why Land of Enchantment is the New Mexico state nickname. But it fits like a glove. It seems like a cross between the wide open plains of Wyoming and the arid deserts of Arizona. It's a curious mix of sunshine and cold which I've never experienced before. Driving along in glorious sunshine I'd have guessed the temperature was in the low 70s. But it was barely above 40. And the reason is altitude. T or C sits at an elevation of over 4800 feet. That's higher than any point in Britain or Ireland. Thats very high. It's also very windy.

From what I could see of the good folk of T or C, plenty of them were well used to being very high. The town is an oddball mix of vaqueros and new agers all brought there by the hot natural spring waters that bubble up in the town. There are seven lodges in town that you can check into and partake of the waters. We spent a while cruising round trying to pick the right one and I don't think we could have done any better. La Paloma is a bit new age, which might put some off, but it's run by a very down to earth child of Aquarius who reminded me of Chuck Barris. When he checked us in he told us about how the natural springs in the area had been sacred to the native Americans and how the land around was a place where they didn't even hunt. Geronimo, he said, had hung out around here, possibly right at our feet, as the La Paloma baths were filled naturally unlike some of the other lodges where they had to drill down to reach the water. He had a respectful admiration for the way the Indians lived before the white man came. He described the area around as the church of the American Indians and talked animatedly about how terrible it must have been to have people come in and blow up your church. He even used the T word. We bonded.

La Paloma has 8 little two room cabins, which used to be used by construction workers on the Elephant Butte dam. Our little home was as cute as pie. All second hand furniture and full of character. Walking in we both knew one night wasn't going to be enough. And after our first bath we were certain. Five rough around the edges but wonderfully basic baths were housed in a very plain almost agricultural white washed concrete building. Water temperature ranged from 93 to 105°F and they were so relaxing that they even made the piped in new age music sound good. We could use them anytime we wanted, even in the middle of the night. Sorry we have no pictures of us inside the bath house. But here's a shot which I think gives you an idea of how they made us feel.

Three other things we discovered about T or C, NM.
1) It has an Italian restaurant called Bella Luca which is way better than a town of that size or in that part of the world has a right to expect.
2) Property prices in the area doubled when plans to build Spaceport America just thirty miles away were announced. That's still in the pipeline.
3) And it's home to the artist Delmas Howe. I hadn't heard of him either. But if you are a fan of gay cowboys then his art is for you. And I'm not trying to make a joke there.

Howe loves New Mexico and his adopted home town of T or C. And it's easy to see why it's a fit for him. There's a mix of people here that you wouldn't get in a big city or a more accessible state. But I did read that at some of Howe's recent shows there had been some anti-gay demonstrations by the more conservative folk of the town and that was a little depressing. But it's out of character with the town as far I can tell. Having said that, Howe's recent works have left the cowboys of his Rodeo Pantheon behind and he's now working in the same style on a series he calls Stations. These paintings combine what he calls the "sexual theater" found under the piers of NYC in the 70s with the images of the stations of the cross. It's a little more provocative.

Oh and yeah... people have written songs about the place. But not as many as you'd think. The most notable act would be The Soledad brothers. But I'd also like to draw your attention to a guy called Drew Danburry who has a song called Artex Died In Truth or Consequences, NM. He also wrote a song called It's Illegal To Frown In Pocatello which is based on a real life true fact. The city of Pocatello, Idaho (also the place where Judy Garland's character in A Star Is Born was... er... born) once passed a law making it illegal to frown. I wanted to go there but it just didn't happen. I would, however, like to direct you Drew's video tribute to Britney Spears. Be warned, many of you will hate this. I, however, love it.

Yuma and Tucson

2010-03-10T00:30:00.002-08:00

Sunday 7th & Monday 8th March - Days 28 & 29

We spent our first night in Arizona in a town called Yuma. Damien Jurado has an uncharacteristically cheery song called Yuma. And back in the late 50s Johnny Cash sang the theme song for a TV show called The Rebel, which was about a confederate soldier called Johnny Yuma who wonders the west helping folk. Sort of like Kwai Chang Caine did in Kung Fu, or the dog with no name in The Littlest Hobo. There's also a story by Elmore Leonard called Three-Ten to Yuma which spawned two films, one from the 50s and one from this decade, and Frankie Laine did the theme song to the first one. Plus, if you stick Yuma into the iTunes shop you'll find quite a few other artists you've never heard of who've written a song called Yuma. And I'm really not sure why. Yuma is pretty non-descript. It does have a cool-sounding name and it is pretty much on the border with California making a good stopping place for road trips across the south west. Which may be why it has more than its fare share of neat old fashioned motels. Like this one. Sadly we'd already checked into a crappy budget Travelodge before we saw it. We'd already turned down the chance to spend upwards of $80 to stay at some of the more upmarket chains. Yuma had tons of them too. But we're on a budget. Top tip for future road trippers... don't just go for the motels at the side of the interstate. The other side of town usually has the ones that managed to survive after they built the bypass. That's where the character and value lie.

So because we spent ages driving around town looking for a place to stay, I can say with hand on heart that Yuma looked pretty dull. There's a prison there and Cesar Chavez was born nearby. Who? I'm glad you asked that because I've been asking the same question for years. It seems to me that there are as many streets and avenues and boulevards named after Cesar Chavez as there are named after MLK. The man's birthday is a public holiday in 8 states and Stevie Wonder refers to him in the song 'Black Man' which is on Songs in the Key of Life.

Farm workers rights
Were lifted to new heights
By a brown man

If that's whet your appetite to know more about the man, then here's his wiki page. (I wonder why left-wing American heroes don't have a high profile in Britain's popular knowledge of America?)

The big benefit to Yuma though was Mexican TV. Mexican wrestling is insanely addictive. It makes WWE look like it was scripted by Shakespeare and acted out by Olympian athletes. Mexican Deal Or No Deal was fantastic if only for the sexy banker. (Surely there is something to be learned about a society by how they revamp internationally known TV shows.) But best of all, Spanish language ESPN showed English Premier League football live. So we went to Walmart, bought beer and had a TV party.

We only stayed in Yuma because it was about halfway between L.A. and Tucson. From L.A. we could have gone to Flagstaff, AZ and then on to the Grand Canyon. Or to Phoenix. But we had read so many good things in the travel sections of the broadsheets about Tucson being a really cool little city that we decided we wanted to see it. And in retrospect... I think we should have gone and seen the Canyon.

I have long suspected that I don't share enough in common with Sunday paper travel journalists and Tucson confirmed that for me. Tucson isn't terrible. But it's not that great either. It has this hotel that people rave about called The Congress which is a nice funky boutique hotel but nothing so special. And on 4th Avenue it has an "alternative" neighborhood with hippie shops and food co-ops and bars and the like, but it feels like it hasn't really changed since it got gentrified in the 90s. And about 30% of the shops were closed on the day we visited. It reminded me of visiting a northern English mill town on half day closing back in the 70s.

On the plus side, we did see some Warhols for free at the city art gallery and some original Ansell Adams prints at the University's Center for Creative Photography. Being in the university district made me suspect that the reason the town doesn't feel so energetic is because students have changed. Students seem a lot less radical than they used to be. They seem much more clean cut and focused on careers. Maybe I'm talking crap though. I have nothing to back that up other than the impressions I got from looking at the kids on campus. I'm probably just jealous of their youth and good looks. Part of the problem is that Tucson is really out of the way and overshadowed in size by Phoenix. There is a really nice-looking music venue in town but looking at the listings it seems they get good acts once a month. That's why they can advertise the good acts in street art. It's cool but it also says this town hasn't got enough going on.

Tucson, like Yuma, has more than its fair share of old motels and this time we found a great one.

I'm sure I'm being too hard on Tucson. It's surrounded by amazing landscapes and it did allow us to see Saguaro Cactus. They are the classic ones with protruding arms that animators always put in cartoons set in the west like Deputy Dawg. They only grow in the Sonoran Desert and there are thousands of them alongside I-8. They all look different and can live for up 200 years. It's not as thrilling as seeing an American eagle, but it's as close as plant life gets to giving you that kind of thrill.

The best thing about Tucson though... we stayed in a motel where Elvis once stayed. And it was one of the best motels we've stayed in. Sadly we didn't get to sleep in the King's room. It was already occupied when we checked in. But the Flamingo Motel was just great. I was sold by the history and the sign. But reading the reviews on trip advisor it seems that for some Americans things like that are not a good sign. I guess that's why places like the Holiday Inn Express can charge twice what these old motels charge.

But they can't give you this...

...or a room where Elvis slept.

Little Fluffy Clouds

2010-03-10T00:30:00.001-08:00

Saturday 6th March - Day 27

It's just too big... can't fit it all in.

That's a phrase I've heard a hundred times if I've heard it once... but now I'm saying it myself. And not just about America. I'm talking about California. We've just spent 9 of the last 10 nights in this messed up bankrupt state and we haven't even scratched the surface. We could have spent 56 days in this state, though I wouldn't really want to. I'm pretty sure we could have spent 56 days in L.A. alone... and perversely I'd have liked that. There would still be songs to visit. But we're here to see America and today we headed south and east towards Arizona... taking in a couple of song landmarks on the way.

For starters we headed down the San Bernadino Freeway... just like this.

07 San Ber'dino.mp3

If you didn't like that... then face it, you don't like rock 'n' roll. I accept that some of you harbor prejudices against the likes of Frank Zappa (even though there are no 'likes of Frank Zappa') but listen again and this time fast forward to 3:25 and I defy you (and you know who you are) to dismiss Johnny Guitar Watson. Damn! That last two minutes of boogie with Johnny Guitar singing like he was a preacher possessed by a spirit of one kind or another... that's a combination that goes back to the source of rock 'n' roll. That track, when it came on the car stereo, demanded I turn it up and drive like a reckless absconding fool down Interstate 10 into an increasingly dull concrete hinterland that stretches... what, 50 miles? east of Los Angeles. It made me pity all those fools who live so close (and yet so far) from a great, great city. It made me think of Scousers.

Beyond San Ber'dino nature starts to take over. And it's very different from Northern California. It's a hot, semi desert like nature. However it's not really desolate because you have to pass through the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm. There are over 3000 turbines. Massive turbines on both sides of the road. It's a surreal and thought-provoking landscape just outside of Palm Springs. Beyond that we passed a place called 29 Palms. Which, as well as being California's answer to Seven Oaks, is the name of a song (with dreadful verses but a catchy chorus) by Robert Plant. In the early 90s, Grunge was so influential that they released that Zeppelin Box Set which sold so well. And on the back of that exposure Robert Plant had a new hit record and even sang it on TOTP. Strange days. (The video btw is an outstanding period piece. I bet that woman is regretting not wearing a bra now. Gravity always wins.) At about that time Plant also recorded a song called Big Log. I think it's about a place in America. I hope it's a about a place. (Though I know I've had bowel movements that would inspire me to write a song if I had any musical ability.)

Shortly after 29 Palms we headed due south on Highway 86 until we joined up with Interstate 8 which pretty much draws a line under South California. It passes two places right on the border with Mexico called Mexicali and Calexico. Do you see what they did there? Clever huh? Its something that happens elsewhere in the states too, like Texarkana. Can you guess where that is? Calexico is also of note to us as it's the name of that great band from Tucson Arizona. (I fully intend to start a list of bands named after American places. There are a ton of them. What have we got? Bradford?)

The last section of I-8 was truly astounding. You see that big, sand-colored area on the screen grab of the map below?

Well, that's exactly what it is. Sand. Big, honest to goodness, Lawrence of Arabia sand dunes. Spectacular. The most desert-like desert I've ever seen. (As long as I ignored the sand buggies and the quad bikes racing over it.) Oh and that white line on the picture - that represents the border with Mexico. Well that's there too. Only it's not white. It's a a bloody ugly border fence. It looks like this. And guess what? I don't like it. Though based on what they say on the radio I think most of those right wing talk shows hosts love it. (They seem to blame California's bankrupcy on illegal immigration.) Never liked the idea of walls to keep people out. Always associated them with... I'm trying not to use the F word here... erm... with "controlling regimes". Who started it anyway? The Romans? At least Hadrian built a cool-looking wall. And to compound my liberal (kneejerk?) reactions... a little further down the road there was a road block where we all had to slow down and say hi to officers from the US Border Patrol. It reminded me of my family holidays in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s. In case your wondering... that's not a good thing. I guess America feels it has enough Mexican restaurants now. And that may well be true. But a wall? Wow. I had no idea.

Luckily, by the time we crossed the state border into Arizona, I-8 was too far from the international border and my lily-livered sensitivities could forget the wall and concentrate on verifying that Rickie Lee Jones wasn't kidding when she talked about the skies in her childhood home. In case you're wondering what I'm talking about.... it's Rickie Lee Jones who got sampled here.

Rickie Lee told the truth. Arizona skies are amazing.

________________________________________________________________________________

P.S. Alan Parsons spoke the truth too. Watford skies... not so amazing.

I Love L.A.

2010-03-09T23:11:00.000-08:00

Thursday 4th & Friday 5th March - Day 25 & 26

"Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at the bum over there man he's down on his knees"

I really didn't think I would. But I do. I love L.A.

Most Brits I know who've been there didn't like it. I think they were expecting New York in the sun. Lots of Americans slag it off too. But I'm with Randy and Young Dre. I love L.A. Maybe the key is to stay away from downtown. That's what we did. But Hollywood and Santa Monica and Venice Beach and Compton. LOVED it all. We only intended to stay for one night... we stayed for three. L.A. is like America turned up to 11 and at the same time it's like nowhere else in the country. In fact L.A. is a country in its own right. Like the Bay area, it's full of little cities that sit cheek by jowl and have their own character and scene. One Postcarder called Oliver, who's from Germany but spent years studying in America and never wanted to leave, said what fascinated him about the country was the contradictions. L.A. lives up to that. For example, the traffic is insane but there are pedestrians and cyclists everywhere. They drive like assholes but say hello on the street. And here's my favorite example of how America contradicts expectations and manages to reinforce and demolish stereotypes - mainstream American beer is shite and yet America has the most passionate, vibrant and commercially successful beer makers in the world. Budweiser is piss poor beer. It tastes of nothing. And yet Budweiser is the number 2 selling beer brand in the world. What's number 1? Bud Light! Holy Mary mother of God is there no hope? But yes, there is actually. Alongside the Buds and the Coors in the cabinets in the gas stations there are always a handful of microbrew brands. We went to a fantastic bar called Stout that has about 30 different world brews on tap and a hot barmaid who knows a great deal about beer. She was happy to talk IBUs. When was the last time a British barmaid, or man for that matter, told you what the IBU of your beer was?

We went to Stout with Kev Lathrop, another Postcarder, who then took us to a great and incredibly cheap Thai restaurant on Sunset Strip that made me think of the kind of joints frequented by LAPD detectives in James Ellroy novels. The furnishing looked pretty old. From there we went to a strip joint called Jumbo's Clown Room. Kev says it was my idea, I say it was his though I didn't need persuading. It's where Courtney Love used to dance. And it's not really a strip joint, because the girls don't take their clothes off. Admittedly they aren't wearing very much, but still there's not even a nipple. I was hoping to see pasties which have fascinated me since I bought this Tom Waits album back in the 80s. I was hoping for the kind of place that Benjamin took Mrs Robinson's daughter to in The Graduate. Carol was just hoping she wouldn't be the only woman in there. Well, I was a little dissapointed because the pasties were only visable through sheer mesh fabric but Carol was happy there were plenty of women in there. Was it seedy? Well a little, but not sexually seedy. Was it erotic? Not really, though the dancers were fit, in both senses of the word. Was it enjoyable? Hugely. Some of the moves those dancers pulled on the pole were breathtaking. Pole dancing ought to replace synchronised swimming at the Olympics. And here's the thing, it was everything we expected and nothing like we expected. It was also like being in a scene from a movie which I guess is what brings a lot of the hopefuls to the town in the first place.

Santa Monica wasn't as posh as I expected. It has the air of a nice middle class home counties town like Chalfont St Peter, only it's sunny and has an amazing ocean front drive and a beautiful beach. And the people are much healthier. And then right next door is Venice beach which is a bit like some of the more touristy parts of Amsterdam, only it's sunny and has an amazing ocean front drive and a beautiful beach. And the people are much, much, much healthier.

Moving across large swathes of America at this kind of pace really highlights how different so many of these places are from one another. And L.A. mirrors that too. Each part of town, each little city in its own right, is very distinct. And one man's Los Angeles is... well it's not the same as another man's Los Angeles.

You can see and hear that in I Love L.A, by Young Dre. Is it a cover version of the Randy Newman tune? I really don't know. I presume Young Dre is aware of the Newman song I Love L.A. because they play it at the sports stadiums when the Dodgers, the Kings and the Lakers win. They even play it when the Galaxy win. I can't hear any similarity other than the title. But maybe that's the point. This is another L.A. the one immortalised, some would say glamourised, by west coast rappers like NWA and Snoop Dog. And thanks to those guys one of the places I definitely wanted to see in America was Compton. I'd never heard of Compton before NWA released the incendiary Straight Outta Compton. They made it sound like a war zone. But that came out in 1988. NWA are closer in time to Neil Young writing about Ohio than they are to today's music. I figured a lot would have changed in Compton in 22 years. Crack isn't the curse it once was and I'd read about major changes designed to revive Compton. One which was aimed at combatting gun violence was called the Gifts for Guns Program. It gave citizens the chance to turn in a gun to the cops in return for a $100 check for various goods. This begs the question, how cheap must a gun be in order to make $100 seem like a good deal? But I felt pretty sure that Compton was going to be OK.

I knew that according to the murder stats, Compton was no East St Louis. Still, reputation counts for a lot. When I shared with Postcard that I'd been to East St Louis some folks told me there were worse places. This is typical of Postcard, we'll have a pissing contest about anything. Say you've been somewhere scary and someone else will say "it's not as scary as...". After driving through the parts of East St Louis we drove through, I couldn't imagine a more dangerous place. But some Postcarders took it upon themselves to say places like Southwest DC, West Philly or Baltimore were worse. But again, the murder stats don't back this up. One Postcarder, Eric who lives in St Louis, did back me up by saying East St Louis was very intimidating and worse than any other American neighborhood he'd seen. He even said "East St Louis makes The Wire look like Melrose Place". And Postcard being Postcard someone fired back at Eric "Have you ever driven through Baltimore?" not expecting the reply "Born there, grew up there, been through there recently, lost in neighborhoods that freaked me out. East St Louis has parts that are bleak in a very, very different kind of way".

Now the point of all this is to say I felt I'd seen the worst kind of urban deprivation in America and I also felt that bluster and hype might inflate the sense of danger about some cities. My favorite video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas certainly did that. But the gangs of Los Santos (the mythical L.A. in the game) were clearly based on the NWA hay day. So I fully expected things to be a whole lot better. And I was right. Compton seemed fine. More than fine. Poor, but not insane like East St Louis. There were bustling strip malls and great Mexican food joints (we stopped and had fish tacos) and there was even a Par 3 Golf Course. Like so many other American stories as presented in song, Compton as presented in song by West Coast gangsta rappers is a myth. Only 40% of the 90,000 residents are African American so it's just not the hood that Ice Cube and Easy E made me imagine. It's true there ain't many white folks in the city and I'm sure there are major Hispanic street gangs, but it's a mixed place. And I think that changes the atmosphere. Of course, people still get robbed and shot in Compton but I bet they do in Hollywood too. If I'm honest, I'm sure I'd feel safer walking the streets of Hollywood at night than I would the streets of Compton. But I wonder how much of that is subconscious racism on my part. The only irons we saw on a beautifully sunny day in Compton belonged to the old boys at the Compton Par 3 Golf Course.

I told you L.A. was full of surprises.

Hollywood Nights

2010-03-09T21:27:00.001-08:00

Wednesday 3rd March - Day 24

The aim today was to get to L.A. From Santa Cruz that's 339 miles and 6 hours of driving though one big chunk of that, 250 miles to be exact, was going to be on Interstate 5. Easy.

This gave us time to go and check out the beach and the wharf at Santa Cruz. It was cold and wet, just how I like it, but it still shocked me to see guys surfing. Now I can't really comment because I can't swim (yes that's right, I can't swim, it's no big deal) but it looked very cold and very dangerous. And admittedly very exciting. And attractive. I'm guessing no good surfer dies a virgin.

But as cool as it was, watching these guys ride waves which looked about 4 foot high (though I have no idea how they measure these things), it wasn't as thrilling as seeing pelicans and sea lions up close.I once saw a pelican eat a pigeon in St James's Park in London. No one beleives me when I tell them that story. But Santa Cruz pelicans are too mellow for that. They just hang out at the fish counter on the wharf all day like loafing oafs in all night chemists. (I hope these hidden lyrics are being spotted by at least someone.) Sea lions by the way are huge. I don't know if these snaps demonstrate how huge. But even Kevin Smith would agree that they are too fat to fly Southwestern. They wear it well though. And we did squeal like children when we saw them lolling on platforms under the wharf. Oh and yes the seagull with the attitude at the top of the page was also from the wharf. Not as thrilling as seeing a pelican or a sea lion, but he was another Santa Cruz slacker. (Anyone who lives near the sea knows that ALL seagulls have an attitude but these guys did seem a little mellower.)

Anyway, enough of the third rate (ok fifth rate) natural history commentary. It was 11:00 a.m. when we left Santa Cruz and we fully expected to be in L.A. before sunset. The first hour or so was another incredibly beautiful drive across another car commercial worth road and Interstate 5 was as long and as straight and, some would say, boring as advertised. I passsed the time by monitoring our fuel consumption. If you have no nerdy qualities then please feel free to skip forward now, but for those of you who get distracted by numbers then this bit is for you. The car has one of those displays that tells you how many miles you have left in the tank. This can go up as well as down depending on how you're driving and as California is one of the most expensive states for gas we really wanted to make every drop last. The display will also show the average fuel consumption and the instantaneous fuel consumption. So when I managed to get behind a truck I could use the slipstream to increase our instantaneous MPG and therefore the number of miles in the tank went up. Trust me this stuff can be fascinating for some of us. Anyway the important point is that when we were about 75 miles away from L.A. we had, according to the car's calculations, enough gas to be able to cover 125 miles.

Then we hit the Grapevine. It's a stretch of road that climbs to a height of over 4000 feet to pass over the Tehachapi Mountains. It climbs really quickly too. Within about 10 minutes my ears popped 7 times. It's so steep that it works as a sort of bottleneck for trucks which is why the interstate swells to 6 or 7 lanes in some places. It also guzzles gas. Fuel consumption was down to single figures on the climb and at this point we had no idea how high the pass was. Maps don't tell you this kind of thing. The temperature gauge which had been in the 60s all day fell to just above freezing. Darkness was falling, traffic was crazy, the road was like the up haul of a big dipper and the prospect of running out of fuel at the top of a mountain bigger than any in England was becoming more and more real with every dropping digit on the car display. By the time we were down on the other side of the mountains the car reckoned it had less than 20 miles left in the tank. But now we had to contend with L.A. traffic. 7 lanes of some for the most dangerous driving I've seen outside of Italy. People switch lanes like someone promised them a bunch of virgins in paradise. I missed at least three exits due to either cowardice, discretion or both.

It was all worth it in the end. As we drove through North Hollywood this came on the radio.

01 Hollywood Nights.mp3

Something told me I was going to like L.A.

Santa Cruz (You're not that far)

2010-03-05T17:17:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 2nd March - Day 23

There really isn't much in Nevada. We faced a seven hour trek to Vegas, or we could go back to California and head to the coast and south. (Nevada's capital Carson City was just 30 minutes away, but I'm sure that's a poor man's Reno. The only thing in its favour was that I thought it had been immortalised in song by the Boo Yaa Tribe (America's premier Samoan family Hip-Hop group. But actually there were rapping about Carson City, CA.) Vegas or Southern California... two major iconic American locations but really when it comes to their place in song... as much as I love Elvis and ZZ TOP... there really was only going to be one winner.

So in just 4 hours or so we could expect to be in the quaint port of Santa Cruz which, unlike Vegas, wasn't that far. At least not in American terms. It did however mean another trip over the Sierras. But as we'd breezed over that 7000 ft high road pass yesterday and it looked pretty spring-like, we weren't worried. We also were not aware that overnight someone pressed the winter rewind button. Today we couldn't see the peaks. We climbed into cloud. Cloud that was chucking down first rain, then sleet and then snow. Actually down is the wrong word. The wet and the white stuff was coming on horizontally and slush was building up on the road, so switching lanes to pass the crawling trucks meant risking a little fishtailing. Not that all trucks were crawling, the empty ones were just as eager to switch lanes. I had flashbacks of the trucks in the TCR TV ads from years ago. I'm on the wrong side of the road, in a car as big as anything I've ever driven, at an altitude that doesn't exist where I come from and I have to fight the trucking maniac from Duel on a road covered in Slush Puppy. I'm not sure I can take much more of this. So Southern California has to be a good idea.

The route took us back to Berkeley and through at least half of those Bay Area cities. Which means I do now know the way to San Jose. Which is nice. Traffic was heavy but, with the mountains far behind us, the late afternoon sunshine bathed the houses lining the hillside of Oakland in a lovely golden light. Things were looking good and the Pacific was calling. My only reservation was that we were heading for Santa Cruz. And why you might ask? Well because I hate The Thrills.

If ever there was a band that should be sued for a breach of the trade descriptions act it is Dublin's The Thrills. In case you are lucky enough to have forgotten them, they became very popular in 2003 with an album called So Much For The City which they wrote when on holiday in Santa Cruz. The tossers. What a bunch of face slappable miserable derivative gits. Part of me applauds them for being into what was then a not too fashionable sound, but the shallow and souless spin they put on the west coast sound sucked. That it sold tons of copies and lead to them sharing a stage with folks like Ronnie Wood and Peter Buck just pisses me off even more. Still I guess the fact that these lazy Jackeens should go all the way to Santa Cruz to record a record is related to this all-pervasive power of American place in popular music. And plenty of other artists have tracks called Santa Cruz too. People as different as J.J. Cale and Bobby Vee and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band have recorded tunes about the town. As have a number of Hispanic artists (though they may be singing about any of the many place outside of the USA called Santa Cruz.) But curiously there more than a few British musicians who have penned tracks called Santa Cruz. These include Fatboy Slim, Lloyd Cole and most impressively Martin Simpson and Aidan O’Rourke who are two of the biggest names on the UK folk music circuit. (I do mean real folk not Laura Marling stuff.)

Maybe the reason the town is so popular is because in 1992 it became one of the first American cities to approve marijuana for medicinal use. Santa Cruz also became one of the first cities in California to test the state's medical marijuana laws in court after the arrest of growers by the DEA. The case was ruled in favor of the growers. But don't think that means the town is a just a hippie enclave. There certainly is that element there and young white kids with dreadlocks and guitars hanging around. (I expect they inspired Pat Metheney's track Santa Cruz Slacker. Click here for Jazz. Great!) But it would be wrong to define the town by that side of it alone. Those kids are hanging around outside an odd mix of posh boutiques and surf shops and liberal coffee shops and two downtown independent movie theatres. And then there's the boardwalk and the wharf - a very old fashioned, little bit grotty, seaside resort. We of course stayed in a sketchy motel in that part of town. The Sea Breeze Inn has definitely seen better days. When we parked up we did wonder about the shouting coming from one room. And alarm bells should have started ringing when I surfed the TV and found myself watching the same four channels again and again. Four TV channels in America? That's not the level of freedom that terrorists hate. And later when we left we were intimidated by the three scowling 40 somethings sat smoking by the pool, which was still 3 months away from its annual clean. Now I can't be sure but I think it was two of them, one male and one female, who we heard having a stand up fight later that night. The voices shouting things like "Get your fucking hands off me" and "Bitch just kicked me! What the fuck!" certainly had the same lived-in qualities that we'd seen in the trio of smokers. But we were too polite to peep through the curtains and check. So while outside on the balcony, doors were being kicked and insults were being hurled, inside our room sheets were being drawn up... the better to cower behind. The row receded when the male protagonist left, but I knew he would be back. I didn't think it would take him until 4 in the morning to get high enough to return, but there you go. Maybe he was struggling to come up with a reason to return. In the end he had to settle for a really lame one... "Give me my water back bitch. You've got my fucking water on your floor!" His voice sounded wrecked. His mind probably was too because he started hammering on another door. Which brought out a guy who sounded like Hulk Hogan. "What you kicking my mother fucking door for. Mother fucker." More people got involved but we wisely didn't. Eventually the police arrived and the water seeker, who no doubt had seen this movie before, was escorted away whilst shouting insistently "I'm not resisting, I am not resisting." All in all a pretty exciting night. It certainly made up for the lack of TV channels.

Reno

2010-03-05T16:33:00.000-08:00

Monday 1st March - Day 22

Lots of songs make me want to go see a place. I want to see the places mentioned in the song. I want to see what the songwriter saw. That wasn't likely to happen with the song Reno. But I still wanted to go there.

Some of these songs I just love so much it's like a pilgrimage. Bruce's story of a desperado getting laid by a hooker in the poor man's Vegas is one that breaks my heart very time I hear it. The poor john can't help but think about another woman, even as his new temporary girlfriend is going down on him. His 100 bucks (I'm presuming he didn't pay the extra $50 for the ass) didn't get him what he wanted. Not even close. And yet Springsteen doesn't think it could have been any other way.

Somehow all you ever need's
Never quite enough you know
You and I, Maria, we learned it's so

All the lost souls don't end up in San Francisco. Some of the more ordinary lost souls look for temporary relief in Vegas or, if they have less money to play with, Reno.

It's just over 200 miles from Berkeley to Reno. The last third of which took us over the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains. At over 7000 feet high, the roads at the top were lined with snow but it looked like old snow and the sun was shining. The ski resorts were still relatively busy but you could sense spring in the air. We were sure glad we weren't driving this road in the kinds of weather we saw in Nebraska and Iowa.

The eastern base of the mountains marks the border between California and Nevada. Two very different states. Nevada is mostly desert and mostly (86%) owned by the Feds. There are only two cities of any great size and one of them dwarfs the other. There are 2.6 million Nevadans and over 1.8 million of them live in the Las Vegas Metropolitan area. Reno is the next largest city and that, including the surrounding area, has a population of just over 300,000. Demographics like that are behind the reason why Nevada has such liberal laws regarding gambling, marriage, divorce, prostitution and other fun stuff. Back at the beginning of the 20th century, Nevada's population was the smallest of all the states and shrinking. People had come to discover silver in the mines but the barren desert land wasn't much fun to live in. So, just like Wyoming did when they offered women the vote, Nevada decided to offer something that other states didn't. According to historian Lawrence Friedman, Nevada's "strategy was to legalize all sorts of things that were illegal in California. After easy divorce came easy marriage and casino gambling. Even prostitution is legal in Nevada, in any county that decides to allow it. Quite a few of them do."

Folks go to Vegas for holidays but when it comes to Reno "the biggest little city in the world" it's strictly cash and gash. And maybe some meth.

It might look pretty good in this picture... but that's about all there is to it. There aren't that many casinos in town, but they are pretty big. Not that that's helping - one of them called Fitzgeralds has gone out of business. It closed down on November 30, 2008 and yet it still stands like the corpse of a dinosaur on the strip. You can peer through the glass doors and see a cavernous black room full of unwanted machines.

We stayed at Circus Circus and had a good time. We made full use of the 2 hour happy hour when margaritas were just one dollar! We ordered a caesar salad to share and it was too big for the both of us. God knows how America doesn't have an obesity problem. And we joined the casino's loyalty scheme which gave us both $10 to play on slots. Not being gamblers we cashed out as early as we could and walked away with $14. Which wasn't far off being half the cost of the room. High rollers we ain't... though I do have dreams about the slot machine we played.

Is that how it starts?

All The Lost Souls Welcome You To San Francisco

2010-03-05T15:34:00.000-08:00

Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th - Days 20 & 21

So we spent Saturday in SF. Drinking at Vesuvio where the bar manager, Mike, is another Postcarder. Vesuvio is an old Beat hang out, so the 6 hours spent there sitting at the bar, buying drinks from a barman and a friend... it was a little Neal Cassady fantasy day. San Francisco does have a very different vibe from other big American cities I've been in. It's the home of the hippies after all. And of course there is a big gay community. And there are way too many songs about the place. Here are just a few:

Eric Burdon and the Animals - A Warm San Francisco Night
American Music Club - All The Lost Souls Welcome You To San Fransisco
Call Caedmon - Ballad of San Francisco
Vic Damone - Christmas in San Francisco
Arctic Monkeys - Fake Tales of San Francisco
John Lee Hooker - Frisco Blues
Buddy Guy - Hello, San Francisco
Butt Trumpet - I Left My Gun In San Francisco
Tony Bennett - I Left My Heart in San Francisco
Scott McKenzie - If You're Going to San Francsico
Flowerpot Men - Let's Go to San Francisco
Sony Holland - On a San Francisco High
The Animals - San Franciscan Nights
Judy Garland - San Francisco
Brian Wilson & Van Dyke Parks - San Francisco
Alkaline Trio - San Francisco
Beach Boys - San Francisco
Cordelia's Dad - San Francisco
Olsen Brothers - San Francisco
The Village People - San Francisco (You've Got Me)
Richie Havens, Phoebe Snow - San Francisco Bay Blues
Chris Isaak - San Francisco Days
Cab Calloway - San Francisco Fan
NOFX - San Francisco Fat
Mickey Newbury, Joan Baez - San Francisco Mabel Joy
Jim Nemeth - San Francisco Rose
Marty Robbins - San Francisco Teardrops
Sanford Clark - Streets of San Francisco
American Music Club - The Grand Duchess Of San Fransisco
Global Deejays - The Sound of San Francisco

Plenty of evidence of SF's gay heritage there, so I'm going to pick out a song by American Music Club.

AMC is one of those bands where really only one member counts. In this case it's the songwriter Mark Eitzel who grew up in an American military family overseas but now lives in SF. He seems to epitomise the way San Francisco has become a haven and a home to non-mainstream Americans. Eitzel's gay for a start, though he was for a very long while the lover/carer of a woman who loved to self-medicate. His music is not cheery. Here's an exchange from an interview with the celebrated writer Dave Eggers that sums Eitzel up...

DE: The album you've made is pretty bleak.
ME: The world is bleak.

My fellow Brit Postcarder Girvan is a big fan of Mark Eitzel. So I asked him to share with us why he likes his music so much.

"He is one of the best songwriters in the world. We know this is true
because Rolling Stone said it in 1992. His official bio brings this
up, but not before informing us that he is bald. He has certainly
written many of my favourite songs. He has an excellent turn of
phrase, and the ability to be extremely funny and crushingly
depressing, often in the same song. He also has a voice that makes the
hairs on the back of your neck stand up (although mostly live, he can
hold back a bit on the records). He is very unpredictable - you never
know what mood he's going to be in for a show, but you can always get
something out of it. But mostly I like Mark Eitzel because he has the finest monobrow in rock."

On Sunday night we went to see another show by another screwed up musicians. Wait, hold that because I'm not sure that Evan Dando is a screw up. I just think he doesn't care about career stuff. He played a solo show at a joint called Cafe Du Nord which is in one of SF's gay neighbourhoods. And yes he did sing Big Gay Heart. (Watch him sing it on Top Of The Pops back in the 90s here. I know, I was surprised too.) Dando still looks beautiful, in fact he may be even more beautiful than he was when he was the lead singer in The Lemonheads. He still has a beautiful voice, in fact it may be even more beautiful. For an hour and a half he just stood on stage and fired off one great song after another. He ought to be a huge star, but it seems to be his choice that he isn't. A few years ago he was due to play about 4 shows at the SXSW festival. He played the first and then cancelled all the rest. It seems he likes to party. Well he looks and sounds great on it.

SF is a hell of a town. We didn't give it enough time I know, but one of the things that really freaked me out was just how familiar it looked. And not because of having seen it on TV. But because I've played it in a video game. A couple of years ago I got totally hooked on a game called Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. It's a game where you run around, steal cars, shoot people, run wet ops for the CIA, bust up gang bangers, have illegal car races etcetera. The game is set in a mythical US state called San Andreas which has three main cities: Los Santos corresponds to real-life Los Angeles, San Fierro corresponds to real-life San Francisco and Las Venturas corresponds to real-life Las Vegas. They did such a good job that when we were driving around certain parts of SF I kept recognising landmarks.

Fake Tales Of San Francisco

2010-03-04T00:15:00.001-08:00

Friday 26th - Day 19

"Yeah, I'd love to tell you all my problems
You're not from New York City, you're from Rotherham"

If the weather had been good we would have driven down the north California coast. But it wasn't. It was raining like it would if Noah moved to Manchester. It made us decide to head back inland, but not before looking at the Mendocino coastline again. I know inclement weather isn't everyone's cup of tea but it works for me. Two sugars please! Man, the Mendo coast was amazing today. The sea was a gorgeous jade green, but it was angry. Neptune was losing his rag big time. Huge brilliant white spumes of foam would spurt upwards as the breakers crashed against the rocks with an apoplectic fury. All beneath not a sky but a dark grey blanket of cloud. Literally awesome. And, but for the bone crushing rocks, I could see why the north California Pacific is loved by surfers. We sure weren't in Blackpool.

Each day on this trip it feels like the roads are trying to outdo their predecessors with a mixture of beauty and terror. Sometimes the roads are aided by the dark, sometimes by traffic, sometimes by altitude and sometimes by the weather. Today after 10 miles on the coastal road (Highway 1) we struck inland on Highway 128. It took us through 55 miles of highland Mendocino county wine country and through a massive rain cloud. How massive? I'd say about 55 miles massive. Insane rain. Every river, every stream, every gulch, creek, rivulet and slight crack in the fields were foaming, frothing bodies of boiling cafe au lait. Erosion in action.

We stopped at a vineyard and did a bit of tasting. The cheeky sods were charging 5 bucks a piece for tasting. They should have been grateful to get anyone through the door on a day like that. They did wave the fee if you bought something. So of course I did.
I went for a half bottle of their dessert wine thinking it would be the cheapest option. Wrong. It was the most expensive option. Still the label is very pretty, reminds me of a classic Barclay James Harvest album cover. We got drenched running from the car to the restrooms. Turned out there was only one restroom so we had to share or one of us would have had to get drenched a couple of times more. I'm sure they thought we were up to something.

We had lunch in a town called Healdsburg. Ate some soup from a small unit called Love Farms. Everything they sold they grew. It was cheap and delicious. We got to hold an Ostrich egg. Weighed as much as a head I'd say.

But we couldn't stay. San Francisco was beckoning us. We were going to stay with another Postcarder. To use the Lord of the Rings personality test, most Postcarders would be classified as Dwarfs - grumpy curmudgeons. Our host in Seattle, Zeno, would probably be an Elf, but one who had gone a little astray. However, our SF host Berkeley Mike must be considered a Wizard. When it comes to knowledge of classic rock 'n' roll he's your man. He's seen just about everyone. Been to some of the most iconic concerts of all time. And many of his stories sound like the outtakes from a Cheech & Chong movie. Berkeley Mike is called Berkeley Mike because he lives in Berkeley. Now apologies if you know this, but Berkeley isn't in San Francisco, it's just 15 minutes away but it's a separate city. As is Oakland, and Palo Alta and Napa. In fact, there are 50 cities in the Bay area. Don't believe me? Then click here. I expect there are songs about many/most/all of them. But I'm not going to look them up. We did look at them all, from a hilltop above Berkeley just as the sun slid below the horizon and 7.4 million people were turning their lights on. It was stunning. You can't see a sight like that in the UK. Though you probably can in South America. Maybe Europe. I think it's we, the British and Irish, who are the oddities. We're like Hobbits.

Now in a city, whoops, in a collection of cities, with 7.4 million people there are lots of places to see music. Still we felt very lucky that Richard Buckner (see post about The Showboat Motel Casper Night) was in Berkeley that night. We have a recording from the show. If I get permission then I'll put it up here. But until then let me tell you he was stunning. I spoke to him afterwards and asked him about the Showboat Motel and his night there. He didn't give up too much detail, just that it was at a point in his life when he was living on the road, his stuff in storage and the name of the motel just seemed to be a metaphor for his life. The next line too... "the river's high and losing." Richard is, in his own words "not touring much", I don't think that's his own choice. I hope we're not losing him. He used to be a big enough small act to be on local SF TV.

Volkswagen used a Buckner track in one of their TV commercials. I can't find that ad now but I'm sure it used to be on Youtube. The world has no taste.

Mendocino... where life's such a groove

2010-03-04T00:12:00.000-08:00

Thursday 25th - Day 18

Mendocino. Beautiful word isn't it? Not sure where I first heard it. I doubt it was the song that the Sir Douglas Quintet are singing in the video above. Because I'd never heard of the Sir Douglas Quartet until I heard their leader Doug Sahm singing on an Uncle Tupelo record. Uncle Tupelo made less of a splash in a UK than a gnat pissing on his knees, so what chance for one of their obscure heroes? The Sir Douglas Quintet were a bunch of rock 'n' roll loving long-haired cowboys from Texas that managed to ape British Invasion sounds whilst still laying the ground work for Tex-Mex music. Too unusual for Britain, they did have quite a following in continental Europe. Our loss. Play that video above again and if you can tell me that Mendocino is not a stone cold classic pop song then you are a better liar than me Gunga Din.

Anyway... I know I further fell in love with the sound of this place when I heard Willie Nelson and Lee Ann Womack sing this song.

Rockets and fourths of July... I know it's borderline cheese. But I don't care... mark it up as a guilty pleasure if you like. These two people could sing about Scunthorpe and make it sound romantic. (Funny how no one from the old world thought to name a place in the new world after Scunthorpe.)

But back to the point. Mendocino. I reckon it was Kate and Anna McGarrigle (mum and aunt of Rufus Wainwright) who I first heard sing about that mystical place. This was during my folky days.

The lyric certainly echoes our trip.

I bid farewell to the state of old New York
My home away from home....
And it's on to... Indiana
Flat out on the western plain.
Rise up over the rockies and down on into California...
And let the sun set on the ocean.
I will watch it from the shore.

Our trip took us from fom Weed, set in glorious sunshine beneath the 14,000 foot high Mount Shastra, down 169 miles of Interstate 5 before heading north west towards the coast. We felt sure that the old snow that still lay on the corners of the sidewalks in Weed was the last we'd see before next winter and the next 71 miles was a joy. Drifting and falling past the sparse traffic on long slow bends for about 70 miles, looking at gorgeous scenery... it was like being in a TV commercial. Our car's a big car, it doesn't have much acceleration but this road suited it perfectly. It felt like I was driving with a balletic grace. No seriously.

Once on the flat again it was just another dull cruise control schlep of a freeway drive. But that was a mere intermission because things changed in a big way when we left the interstate to head for the coast. Highway 20 is a 129 mile long one lane road that takes in beautiful rolling countryside and delightful pretty little vacation towns alongside Lake Clearwater before transforming into a dark and treacherous homicidal switchback rollercoaster through the Jackson State Forest. The first bit looks a lot like Wales, the second part reminded us of Italy and the final section was clearly a place where Orcs live.

I think the writer of Mendocino County Line lost his/her love because he wasn't brave enough to cross the county line... that's why the song says We used to be so happy once upon a time... but the sun sank west of the Mendocino County line. If you stay east of the county you can fish and sip cocktails in Clearwater. But if you are brave enough to drive with the cowboys in their pick ups and cross the forest you get to Mendocino. And it's very, very pretty. It's posh and homely all at once. It feels very un-Californian, more akin to a New England seaside town. And what a setting. The cliffs that the Pacific (hello to you again) have been attacking for... well for ever... have eroded into arches and land towers which can be reached only by the birds. We saw Pelicans! Whilst we were listening to Pelican on the car stereo. No wonder people write songs about a place like this.

Sadly we couldn't afford to stay in Mendo (as I'm sure the locals call it) so we drove 8 miles up the coast to Fort Bragg. Which has at least one thing that Mendo doesn't. Pathos. Actually it has tons of things that Mendo doesn't have... like a Starbucks and lots of cheapo motels and the desolate sense of a coastal town they forgot to shut down. Though no doubt when the weather gets better the surfers will come back and all will be well again. And I'm sure Mendo, with its cosy houses and alternative therapy classes, doesn't want what Fort Bragg has and vica versa. It's a yin and yang thing. And long may they continue to co-exist.

And yes people do write songs about Fort Bragg too. They ain't household names, nor ever likely to be... but local acts keeping that American place song tradition alive.

These kids called Work Clothes have something. Maybe they'll get in touch and tell us why they wrote a song called Fort Bragg Summers. I'm sure it was the pathos of the place.

Oh yeah... Fort Bragg also has a cross section of a redwood tree that was 1,753 years old when it was cut down. Blimey.

Spent A night In A Town Called Weed

2010-03-02T23:49:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 24th - Day 17

There's this town in Northern California called Weed. When I saw it on the map I laughed out loud. If you had a dumb sense of humour then you would too.

I really wanted to go there, but how was I going to find a song about Weed the town? There are plenty of songs about weed the drug. One of them might have been about the town of course, but I didn't want to listen to a ton of blunted buffoons praising the herb. So I figured that Weed the town would just be something I'd drop into the funny town name pub conversation the next time it came up. (I always tell people about the time I went to Twatt in the Orkneys.) But Weed was sitting right in the middle of sparsely populated southern Oregon and northern California which had to be traversed if we were to go to San Francisco and beyond. If only I could find a song about Weed. I was talking about this dilemma with ex-postcarder Michael Broadhurst last year and he said "But you do". He was right too. Jay Farrar, the main songwriter of Uncle Tupelo, has a song called California which starts with the lines...
"Walked the streets of San Francisco,
Spent the night in a town called Weed."

Now I didn't recall the line because the song it came from isn't that good. When I first heard it I wondered why Jay Farrar, a writer of alt country songs about American ennui that could be coruscating and almost mystical, would come up with a song title as bland and as cliched and as overdone as California. In Jay's defence his song does also contain the lines...
"It's been said before,
But it's worth saying,
No one could dream a place like California.
It's been written before,
But it's worth repeating,
No one could dream a place like California."

Though I disagree. California has been done to death. And even if a songwriter did come up with a new insight on the Golden State then they really ought to come up with a better title. AMG has 1264 instances of songs called California. Admittedly some of them will be different versions of the same song but that's more than evened out by all the California Girls, Dreams, Suns, Nights, Hotels and other assorted rock cliches. So although I don't agree with Jay that it bears repeating, I am grateful to him for mentioning the town of Weed in song and thereby validating my childish desire to see it.

And it was well worth it. Weed is a sweet little town that's pretty high. Nearly 3500 feet high, which is higher than anywhere in England. Established in 1897 the town takes its name from its founder Abner Weed. You can call him Mr Weed. He was a timber baron who went on to become the Senator for California. So you can call him Senator Weed.

If I was mature I'm sure I wouldn't find it at all funny that there's a Weed Bakery, or that you can play Weed Bingo. But in reality I was giggling all the time in Weed. The police car that said Weed Police nearly made me wet myself. But best of all... the teenagers in Weed do actually go to Weed High. And if that isn't silly enough, the school's team is the Cougars. Weed High Cougars? C'mon! (For those not familiar with what Cougar means in modern slang parlance click here.)

So sorry it's not a great song Jay... but thanks for visting the town. And nice to see you got a t-shirt to prove it.

Portland City Center

2010-03-02T23:48:00.001-08:00

Tuesday 23rd - Day 16

Seemingly there are more strip clubs per capita in Portland than any other city in America. Well it is in the Beaver State. And we did see quite a few near our gritty motel. But don't let that statistic mislead you. The strip clubs are cheek by jowl with vegan restaurants and rock climbing centers. And the roads all around them are filled with cyclists. Portland is the beating green heart of Oregon.

When we were in Seattle we got to drive in a car pool lane and we knew we weren't in the midwest anymore. Not in terms of political demographics. Well, Portland seemed even more liberal, even more alternative. How alternative? One of those strip clubs is a Vegan Strip Club.

Radicalism, activism and alternative lifestyles are everywhere you look in Portland... on flyers, posters, badges and t-shirts. Things other than the norm seem to offer themselves to all your senses. When we turned on the radio we heard left wing talk shows. When we drank we had the widest range of micro-brews to choose from. And even our olfactory picked up the scent of something different. The smoking room we got in the Executive Lodge smelled like an Amsterdam coffee shop that was hosting a meeting of Grateful Dead fans who were living with multiple sclerosis. Maybe if I'd gone into the upmarket adult store a few blocks from our motel then I could have exposed other senses to some new alternatives. (Is that a cheap gag? No, it costs $49 and is made from environmentally friendly leather alternatives. And the tattooed woman behind the counter was more than happy to show me how to fit it.)

According to wiki, Portland is well known as a hub of American DIY youth culture especially Zines. It hosts the Portland Zine Symposium and is home to major zine distributors such as Microcosm. Wiki also tells me that it's the home city of The Worlds Oldest Teenage Drag Queen Pageant. Radical!

Portland is divided into four quarters. And every road exists in each quarter. So there are four 1st Avenues: North East 1st, South East 1st and I expect you can guess the other two. Now what's tricky about that is you would imagine North East 1st would run into North West 1st. But it doesn't, it runs into the Willamette River. The west side seemed more upmarket. It had the downtown area, except Portland weirdly uses the British term City Centre. It's even on road signs. I haven't seen any other American cities do that and it's one of those terms that seems to need explaining to many Americans when they first visit the UK. Anyway, we stayed (as you might have guessed) in the East. An odd cross between an industrial estate and a hip neighbourhood. We has a huge new Whole Foods supermarket nearby and a bar which was showing two soccer games at midday on a Tuesday. (Stuttgart drew with Barca and ManU beat West Ham.) There were about 20 souls in there which seemed another indicator of alternatives. Our favourite local hang out though was the 24 hour Voodoo Doughnuts I love the place. It was a big, slightly run down room with 5 pinball tables and it looked like it had been decorated by a fanzine editor. They are clearly radical because they don't spell it d-o-n-u-t. Great food (the vegan doughnuts were a revelation), great coffee and great merch ('I got VD in Portland' was a bumper sticker that caught my eye.) It made me wonder why we don't have independent business like that in the UK. My hunch is it's all about the space. We don't have enough and so rents are high. Lots of the vibrant small shops that give areas like East Portland their counter cultural vibe clearly couldn't compete with Starbucks. But there's room for them all here. And, it seems, a willingness to embrace them. The city council made the Portland Creme Voodoo Doughnut the Official Doughnut of Portland.

We spent two days in Portland and pretty much fell in love with it. It rained there. The first proper rain I've seen for months and that was welcome. It has the greatest bookshop I have ever seen. Powell's Books is a seriously magnificent shop. But it's more than a shop. It's a powder keg. There's nothing as revolutionary as a bookshop. And this one is a big keg. It takes up a whole city block. (They also have a great online shop. One that is much more 'bookey' than Amazon.)

I wish we'd had longer in town. I wish I was young enough to be able to consider moving to the city. Seriously, I liked it that much. It struck me as having a really strong and healthy 'scene'. Almost like what I imagine Seattle had before grunge blew up. Or Manchester in the late 70s. But the funny thing about Portland is that it doesn't seem to have a definitive music style. Acts like Modest Mouse, Pink Martini, Sleater-Kinney, The Shins, Blitzen Trapper, The Decemberists and the late Elliott Smith are all non-mainstream but in quite different ways. And they are just the famous ones. Judging by the huge number of acts in iTunes with songs about Portland lots of radical kids are into the city. Some old ones too. I could imagine Portland throwing up a scene if it weren't too busy creating it's own revolution. Maybe more of the old firebrands need to hook up with crazy kids. I wonder if Jack and Loretta did more than just duet in Portland.

Support Your Local Serial Killer

2010-02-25T23:10:00.000-08:00

When we passed through Tacoma it reminded me that Neko Case, who grew up there, wrote a brilliant song called Deep Red Bells which is about the Green River Killer who was responsible for at least 48 murders. I've already mentioned Springsteen's Nebraska (about Charles Starkweather) so it's got me to thinking about other songs about a serial killer (or similar) who is associated with a particular city.

Sufjan Stevens wrote a song called John Wayne Gacy, Jr on his Illinois album which is about a man who between 1972 and 1978 raped and murdered at least 33 young men and boys.

Zappa has a song called The Illinois Enema Bandit which is about Michael H Kenyon who in 1975 pleaded guilty to a decade-long series of armed robberies of female victims, some of which involved sexual assaults where he would give them enemas.

And finally Elliot Smith wrote the brilliant Son of Sam which is about David Berkowitz who killed six people and wounded seven others in the course of eight shootings in New York between 1976 and 1977.

Given that serial killers usually have a patch, it follows that a song about one would be a sort of a place song.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Welcome to Aberdeen

2010-02-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

Monday 22nd Day 15

I'm letting Carol, a native of the original Aberdeen, write about our trip to Kurt Cobain's hometown. Take it away Carol...

People often like to interpret coincidences as somehow meaningful rather than pure chance. As a teenager in Aberdeen, Scotland I was thrilled to discover that Kurt Cobain grew up in Aberdeen, Washington. I'm not sure what I thought the deeper meaning was, but it had to be significant, right? Now, 20 years later, as we approached Aberdeen WA another coincidence... Get Together by The Youngbloods was playing on the radio.

Spooky!

As we entered Aberdeen we saw a sign with the words 'Welcome to Aberdeen. Come As You Are', the second line a subtle memorial to Kurt added to the sign in 2004. We passed through the usual strip malls towards downtown Aberdeen - what little there was of it. A couple of blocks further on, we stopped by the Tourist Information office where Ged managed to find A Walking Tour of Kurt Cobain's Aberdeen. I don't need to tell you what's on it, you can see for yourself here.

We drove (a walking tour? Really?) round some of the many spots where Kurt lived/slept. This included the Melvins' drummer Dale Crover's house where Kurt would sometimes sleep in a cardboard box on the porch. Unfortunately it seems that his last Aberdeen residence (a "ramshackle hovel" according to the walking tour) has been razed. We could get a pretty good idea what it was like though from the surrounding properties. The two houses next door had been gutted and were cordoned off with police tape. I'd describe it politely as a deprived area. I can say a couple of good things about it. It was very close to downtown. Actually, on second thoughts, I can't think why that would be a good thing. However, a real positive was my new number one thrift store just around the corner. Kurt might even have got his lovely green cardigan there...

The shift from the transitory life Kurt was living in Aberdeen to the fame and wealth he achieved with Nirvana was huge and, though it's extremely sad, it's not surprising he found it so difficult to deal with.

Thank you Carol. I checked on iTunes and there are lots of songs called Aberdeen by acts I've never heard of. (Obviously ignoring Scottish legends like Andy Stewart and the Aberdeen FC Squad.) I'm guessing these songs are about Kurt's hometown. But I can't be bothered listening to songs I'm sure are shit. However I will recommend the work of the great Damien Jurado who seems obsessed with Aberdeen and its nearby small (seriously small) cities of Hoquiam (Kurt's actual birthplace) and Montesano. He has songs named after both of these, namechecks them in other lyrics and even has a band with his son named Hoquiam.

Seattle

2010-02-23T01:12:00.001-08:00

Saturday 20th & Sunday 21st - Day 13 & 14

Lots of songs about Seattle. They just don't spring to mind easily. I suspect it's because the word Seattle is just too damn anglo-saxon to sound cool. Not that it stops people trying...

Roy Ayers - I Did It In Seattle (I know, I know... this blog has sorely under served the Jazz world.)
PiL - Seattle
Perry Como - Seattle
Jelly Roll Morton - Seattle Hunch (Score two for Jazz.)
Steve Vai - The Boy From Seattle
Nirvana - Francis Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle
The Brighton Port Authority - Seattle

And there's a ton more by acts I've never heard of. In fact, the far from comprehensive All Music Guide lists 115 songs called Seattle. Plenty of these pre-date the 90s, but Seattle became ground zero for the commercial rebirth of ROCK in the 90s thanks to grunge and the bands who played it (or denied they played it).

Seattle may have been the focal city for the world when it came to grunge, but the whole of Washington State was home to disaffected white kids who liked heavy music. Kurt Cobain was from Aberdeen, The Melvins were from nearby Montesano. The witch Courtney Love named an album after the state's capital Olympia which also spawned the much better female rock band Sleater-Kinney who took their name from an intersection in the city. But Seattle was the magnet that drew in the kids and it was where bands like Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and others formed.

Now everyone knows it rains a lot in Seattle and as such it's easy to jump to the conclusion that a dreary landscape fuels such intensely miserable music. But... news just in... Seattle is beautiful. And just like Spokane, Seattle hosted the World's Fair too. But unlike Spokane, Seattle got a worthwhile and lasting landmark out of it namely the wonderfully retro-futuristic Space Needle. Built in 1962, it's only 184 metres high, so it's not a super high structure. But looking like it's steeped straight out of The Jetsons it's as cool as hell. And as it's not that high it's a lot more fun to go up than say the CN Tower in Toronto. It's certainly high enough to see how unique Seattle is as a city, surrounded as it is by mountains and lakes and the huge Puget Sound. So I don't buy into this idea of a miserable, rain drenched city being the key factor in the birth of grunge. (Besides I love rain.)

Now admittedly the weather this weekend was beautiful... we hit 60°F! (Frigid Bones has now officially retired). And I can't dismiss the influence of the Harlem Globetrotters who were in town and when we visited the Space Needle we were surrounded by lots of kids on a high from seeing another defeat for the Washington Generals (yeah, take that whitey!) So maybe I was swayed by the mood... but still... what stood out for me was how... and forgive me for using this word... alternative Seattle is. I did hear it's the "least churched state in the union" but that's not what I mean. I'll give you an example. Some bars declare themselves hate free zones and we saw one with the sign "If you are racist, sexist, homophobic or an asshole, do not come in." (I passed the test on the first three criteria... just missed out on the last one.) There was certainly a big gay presence in the city. And walking round the Capitol Hill bars did put me in mind of the Northern Quarter in Manchester. Another independantly minded city, based far away from national media capitals that was once the focus of a music scene.

That said... it's high time both those cities kicked up some worthwhile new shit. Or at the very least some props ought to be given to the city for spawning Earth a pivitol band in the doom/drone/stoner/sludge spectrum which is so much more relevant today than grunge. They even gave Kurt his first gig.

The One Where We Saw A M*-**g Eagle

2010-02-23T01:01:00.000-08:00

Friday 19th - Day 12

Actually we saw the eagle yesterday. But I mention it today because when we told the lovely lady at The Lewis & Clark Motel this morning she couldn’t have been less impressed. It was like someone visited Liverpool and said "I saw a scally today." But sod her, because it was amazing.

We were coming over the Bozeman pass (5819 ft) and just ahead of us on the side of the road was a bird which seemed to be about the size of a Labrador. It was picking at the carcass of some road kill with its back towards us and something, maybe the sound of our car, made it take off. Holy cow it was huge, its legs were so beefy they could have filled Wayne Rooney’s shorts. As it started to fly off we pulled alongside it and each passing second brought its head into clearer view. We already knew it was an eagle but the thrill wasn’t complete until we could see it’s snowy white head and bright yellow beak. It took about 5 seconds to get past it but it was such an adrenaline rush… “Look… it’s an eagle, it’s an eagle… oh my god it’s a mother-fucking eagle!!!” Trust me, no other profanity fitted and no other profanity has ever been more appropriately used. The beast looked like it wouldn’t hesitate. It was the cock of the mountain and the king of the air and it didn’t give a toss who knew. Wow. The woman in the motel said “I guess it must be impressive if you ain’t seen one before… I grew up seeing moose in my back yard.” I’d like to say something derogatory about growing up in the middle of nowhere, but I can’t because her middle of nowhere is ace.

And whilst I'm tidying up... I also forgot to mention that when we went to the hot springs, I had to buy a pair of hot spring appropriate shorts first. We stopped in a town called Livingston and went to one of the busiest thrift stores I’ve ever seen. It was right next door to the Chemical Dependency Treatment Centre so I guess it was well positioned. I bought a pair of North Face shorts for $2 and couldn’t help but think of Paul Calf’s immortal line “I’m not wearing dead man’s pants.” (Pants, dear American friends, means male knickers in the UK.)

Anyway… we passed over a few high passes on our way through Montana and I’m not sure where the Rockies started or ended. According to this map there are 66 separately named mountain ranges in Montana (it does what it says on the tin) but on the big map it just says Rocky Mountains. Regardless, they are beautiful and snowy February is just the time to see them.

Friday’s plan was to make it as far west as possible so we wouldn’t have so far to drive on Saturday to make our appointment with Seattle Postcarder and genuine one-off Zeno Seiler. We had three destinations in mind. Each in a different state. A pathetic 210 miles would take us to Missoula in Western Montana. A more impressive 366 miles would land us in Coeur d’Alene in the middle of the narrow Idaho panhandle. Or if we pushed on just another 33 miles we would make Spokane in western Washington.

Nanci Griffiths has a song called Midnight in Missoula. Unfortunately it’s from the later part of her career. The part that was built upon the truly sappy From A Distance rather than the great new wave of country honky-tonking tunes she was slipping out in the 80s. I expect many will disagree with me, but Nanci used to be cool. How cool? Well, cool enough to do acid with Townes Van Zandt. And that Nanci would have been right at home in Missoula as, between 2004 and 2006, the north west of Montana reported the highest rate of illicit drug use in the USA, with 9.5% of the populace being lovers of Marijuana. They loved it so much that in 2006, voters in Missoula County passed Initiative 2, which set possession of pot to be the lowest priority for law enforcement. Funny thing was… marijuana arrests actually went up in the next 2 years! Old habits die hard for cops I guess.

But we flew (see what I did there) past Missoula and as we crested what was surely the Rockies we began to come down to earth in Idaho. I don’t know if it was coincidental or if the border marks a real change in climate, population and landscape, but Idaho was instantly different to Montana. It was bathed in sunlight and the mountainsides were covered in firs and small houses. The state is known for growing potatoes (there’s even a candy bar called an Idaho Spud) but in the panhandle they dug coal and metals not spuds. The narrow valley that leads to Coeur d’Alene looked like it had been populated during a gold rush with houses crammed in, in no discernable pattern on the hillsides.

Coeur d’Alene literally means "heart of an awl" but no one really knows how it got its name. It is in a beautiful spot though, based around a large lake, surrounded by pine covered hills that hold several ski resorts. When we passed through, the sun was shining and the temperature gauge was reading 50° F. It looked idyllic but we passed on through because…
1) There aren’t any good tunes about Coeur d’Alene (the most notable is by Dean Magraw who is one of those guitar virtuosos whose talent is only matched by their pointlessness) and
2) Coeur d’Alene used to be home to an annual march by the thankfully now bankrupt Aryan Nation.

So Spokane beckoned. A place I’d never heard of before I began researching this trip. Never even heard it mentioned. Which is why I thought it was pronounced Spok-ANE, as in window PANE. But the e is silent and it’s pronounced Spok-ANN as in Ann of Cleaves. I ought to have heard of it I guess, it’s relatively big (200k population) and it was the birthplace of Bing Crosby. It was also the site of the 1974 World's Fair but I have no real idea what the World's Fair is. I just know that sometimes a city will say hey we hosted the World's Fair like it’s a big deal. Maybe it is. If you stick Spokane into iTunes you’d find about 25 tracks named after the town, but most of 'em are crap… except this one.

Now if Tom T. Hall doesn’t want to be in Spokane then neither do I. That feeling only intensified as we drove into town on insanely busy four lane roads that had beggars at every intersection (they even have drive-thru begging in America). We’d just spent 4 days in Wyoming and Montana… we couldn’t cope with this.

I had one more place up my sleeve. A town called Ritzville another 61 miles west. A two bit hayseed town that somehow became immortalized in a song by Seattle Grunge pioneers Mudhoney. As time was on our side because we’d made great progress today, we went for it and pulled into town at about 6. I wanted to like Ritzville. I really did. It has what is surely the world’s only quilt & liquor store.

But Ritzville didn’t like us. There were two motels that we weren’t scared of in town. And we had a coupon for one. When you stop at rest stops on the Interstate they have these free magazines full of coupons to get a discounted stay at a motel. We had one that would get us a room in the branch of America’s Best Value Inns in Ritzville for just $40. But there was a real nice looking independent motel called the Empire and it said rooms from $36 on the sign outside so I asked there first. The guy said a room for two would cost us $43 so I showed him my coupon for his rival which was just 100 yards away and asked him if he wanted to match that price. He shook his head said he couldn’t. What? For three bucks he was going to throw away a booking? I didn’t care about the three bucks as much as I cared about not checking into a motel run by a simpleton. It wasn’t like it was high season in a popular tourist destination. So off we went to America’s (and Ritzville’s) Best Value Inn. There was a sign on the door. “Back by 7. Sorry for any inconvenience.” What? Well we know a sign when we see one (and this one was taped to the door so we couldn’t miss it) and pressed on. I could have gone back to the Empire, but pride and common sense made a further 45 mile drive to the next town inevitable.

Going back to Ritzville, don’t ask why
It’s as good a place as any to go and die

We spent the night in a town called Moses Lake. There are a couple of tunes about it on iTunes. One by an act called Janie and Joe who I have nothing to say about. The other is by a band from Utah called Forgotten Charity. They have 97 fans on Facebook and their song The Ghost of Moses Lake is pretty good in a Postal Service kind of way.

Apologies for the long bloody post. But it was a long bloody day. 500 plus miles.

I'm Moving To Montana

2010-02-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

Thursday 18th - Day 11

I might be movin' to Montana soon, Just to raise me up a crop of Dental Floss

I used to think the Frank Zappa song Montana was sort of taking the piss out of the simple cowboys of Montana. I thought it captured one of the intrinsic tensions in America, namely being home to communities as diverse as the liberal outlandish folk of big cities like LA and the conservative homely folk from the remote parts.

I don’t know, maybe Frank was just joking. By and large you don’t have to listen to the words Zappa sings. He himself said words were only used in songs to help people who were too dumb to really understand music. I’m not going to take him literally, but there’s some truth in it I’m sure. (Certainly the best bit of the song Montana is the solo. And Tina Turner’s backing vocals.*)

Even if Frank wasn’t joking, I can now say that Montana is much more complicated than that. And we just had a great day. (Possibly even a contender for the Top 5 vacation days of all time list.)

We woke to snow. But snow with sunshine and a big blue Montana sky. Big Timber looked like the setting of a Stephen King novel last night… now it looked like a rural paradise. The Crazy Mountains were a stunning backdrop to this little town. (That's it in the picture above.) Even the firearms in the local store looked amazing. There must have been 500 different kinds of rifles. And they all looked beautiful (to me, Carol disagrees on this). It must be easy to become a gun nut in a town like this.

Then we set off for a place called Chico Hot Springs.
No connection to music about America there… just pure self-indulgence. About 30 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, at an elevation of more than 5000 feet, in the wholly appropriately named Paradise Valley, is a resort called Hot Springs. Resort is too grand a word but I’m not sure what else to call it. It’s not a village, it’s a hotel and a bar and a spa and a pool where you can bathe in hot natural mineral water. We spent a couple of idyllic hours there just bathing in the open air, under a deep blue sky, in glorious sunshine, drinking in the views and a beer. The air temperature was below freezing but the water was close to 100 F Fahrenheit. The pool has been there since 1897. I can give you a money back guarantee that you would love it if you went. I can’t swim (gasp) and I don’t normally care for these sort of things but I’m so glad I went. And we really had to drag ourselves away.

We ended up in a town called Bozeman. What do you mean you don’t know any songs called Bozeman? There are four different acts with tracks called Bozeman on sale in the iTunes shop right now. (Other MP3 vendors are available.) Take your pick…

1) Bozeman by “hardcore punk/ noise rock” band Steel Pole Bath Tub who actually come from Bozeman (That’s another category of place name song the This Is Our Home)
2) Bozeman by Carolina Still; a band from North Carolina who play “old-time, bluegrass, hillbilly, Americana, honky tonk, rockabilly and punk.”
3) Bozeman by Donerail, a rock 'n' roll band from Portland Oregan
4) Bozeman by Tim Barry who is the lead singer of a punk band called Avail from Richmond Virginia but also writes (sort of sappy) Americana folk music.

(Actually pick Steel Pole Bath Tub. They are the best of the four by a long way.)

Now why would a town called Bozeman have four tracks written about it? Well because it’s bloody ace that’s why. I said Casper reminded me a little bit of Austin Texas, but Bozeman is way closer. In terms of the vibe and the population if not the architecture. It’s a small, buzzing, creative oasis in a rural state. But it’s even more independent than Austin. So instead of the awesome Whole Foods (the best supermarket I ever saw) Bozeman has it’s own just as awesome (only smaller) Bozeman Community Food Co-Op http://www.bozo.coop/ It’s a small town of just 30,000 people but it’s young and it’s growing. It’s full of people who look like they snowboard and it gave birth to Steel Pole Bath Tub.

It’s just a shame it’s named after it’s founder John M. Bozeman (1835 - 1867) who in 1860 left his home in Pickens County, Georgia and headed west in search of gold. But then in his own words saw it was more profitable to “mine the miners" than to mine for gold. So to grow his market he blazed what’s known as the Bozeman Trail, which was basically a massive fuck you, might is right, two fingered salute to the Shoshone, Arapaho, and Lakota nations. And we all know how that ended up.
Montana is very white. According to the 2000 census… 92.9% white. And Native American people are the next biggest ethnic group but they account for only 7.36% of the population. We Europeans sure did overrun this place didn’t we? (See previous Little Big Horn post.)

As much as I like Bozeman (and I like it a lot) it does concern me that the only Native Americans I’ve seen in Montana were at a rundown gas station on reservation land and working at the Big Horn Monument. I guess that’s how the reservation works. It seems a shitty deal to me. Up there with East St Louis… which reminds me that we haven’t seen an African American since we left Missoula.

Still I managed to suppress my liberal guilt and enjoy Bozeman with its shops and bars. And we especially enjoyed the motel we stayed at, The Lewis & Clark. I could go on about the banana bread breakfast, the free cup cakes and apple cider, the two cute cockatiels, the jigsaws and the steam room and all manner of things you don’t expect from a cheap motel. But I’d rather say just look at it.

All American readers know who Lewis & Clark were but I’m guessing most Brits don’t. They were two British explorers who mounted the first overland expedition undertaken by the United States to the Pacific coast and back. The only reason I ever heard of them was thanks to the Long Ryders.

This kind of awareness of a nation’s history inspires a lot of American popular music. Not so much British music. As we’ve been driving we’ve been listening to a lot of right wing talk radio. It’s repugnant to our left wing sensabilities but it’s also entertaining. But either way it's happening. At night on TV the news channels have more space for op ed pieces. America is so much more politicized. I think because it's still fighting over what America is. In Britain, I don't think we give a shit. Not nearly as much. Why is that?

Of course there are swings and roundabouts to this. Montana was home to the Unabomber and on the news tonight there was a story about a guy who lived in Austin Texas who flew his plane into the tax offices. People are closer to being agitated all the time. And some of the right wing talk show hosts like Sean Hannity and Glen Beck seem to think a revolution is coming. America seems so vast and so diverse that I wonder if it can hold together. I could live with living in Montana, not sure if I could live with living in America. (Hey that's a James Brown song!)

*According to legend, Tina Turner heard a rough cut of the song and volunteered herself and her girls The Ikettes to sing backing vocals. Afterwards she called her then-husband Ike into the studio to listen. After a minute Ike goes… "What the hell is this shit?", and left.

Casper to Big Timber

2010-02-18T23:46:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 17th - Day 10

Montana. It’s another beautiful word isn’t it? I’m convinced the beauty of the names here in America helps when it comes to song writing. It’s just not cool to write a song called Derbyshire. Anglo Saxon words don't sound pretty. Better than Dutch though, but we don’t have towns with names like Missoula or Helena. Of course there are American towns named after British towns… but not many that get popularised in song. Besides the towns in Montana that are named in the British vernacular tend to lean towards that Native American tradition of plain speaking proper nouns… so they have a different charm from say Burton-on-Trent. Places like Twodot, Montana. Or Big Timber, which is a town in a county called Sweet Grass.

Now Big Timber, Sweet Grass, Montana sounds like a place I'd like to see. And not just because it reads like the cast list of a porn film. I also found three songs named after the place without even really trying. But it wasn't really on the route I wanted to take.

I confess that I didn't know all these songs and places before I started to plan this trip. (No shit, right?) So when drawing up a route I’d look for distinctively named towns on the map and then drop them into the itune shop or All Music Guide. (AMG often threw back songs by the sort of people who post videos of themselves covering songs on youtube. I don’t hold with the idea that the popularity of an artist, or the lack of it, is any indication of quality. Well, usually I don’t, but there are some lonely souls out there who have taken the time and the trouble to put themselves on AMG and yet they and their recordings don’t trouble Google in any other way. Those guys are usually unheard of for a reason. But I digress.) So when planning the journey north from Wyoming to Montana I wanted to go through Yellowstone, and there are more than a few songs named after that National Park. (Not so many called Lake District though.) However Yellowstone is closed for the winter. Mostly. The only road in that’s open in the winter time comes in from the north west and we were in the south east. So now we had to go round Yellowstone, Big Timber became a target. Albeit one that was 358 miles away from Casper. That's over 5 hours of interstate driving. But this is not the mid west. The interstate in Wyoming is gorgeous and thankfully Montana took over just where the Equality state left off. We stopped off at the site of Custer's Last Stand (I know the last song posted doesn’t fit the format but it just felt right). And we learned that those mountains that we had seen grown from pale shadows on the horizon to fully blown fir and snow covered beasts were not the Rockies, but the Big Horns. Which take their name from Big Horned Sheep. (Stop sniggering.)

Montana was snowier than Wyoming. (Yes we were going north, though we were still only a little further north than Bordeaux in Europe.) And as the sun was making the snow look all slick and shiny and the big blue sky seemed bigger and bluer than ever, Montana was pushing Wyoming for the title of most beautiful state so far. At least it was until we hit the outskirts of Billings. From there the I-90 west bound was pretty grim. Fortunately, night fell as we moved beyond a really grim-looking oil town called Laurel so we couldn’t see much apart from the lights of trucks driving towards and past us at 75 miles an hour. Or to put it another way... night fell, so unfortunately we couldn’t see much apart from the lights of trucks driving towards and past us at 75 mph. I tried to keep up with them because it meant I could see where the road curved, but as it twisted between what I now know are the mountains of Montana (it does what it says on the tin) I would lose a bit of nerve and ease off the gas only to leave us isolated in the darkness. If it wasn't for the satnav I wouldn't have had any idea where and which way the road turned next. (Am I starting to sound like the Woody Allen of drivers?)

Evidently we survived and pulled into Big Timber at about 8:00pm. It looked deader than all the skunks we’d seen (and smelled) on the edge of the highway that day. It was very, very dark. So dark we couldn’t see the Crazy Mountains which the town lies in the shadow of. And yes they really are called the Crazy Mountains. They used to be called the Crazy Woman mountains, but I can’t decide if they shortened the name to make them sound less or more scary. We passed on the Lazy J motel because it looked like a hybrid of the kind of motels I associate with Anton Sigur and the one run by Norman Bates. We also passed it by because we are pussies. We did settle on the Big Timber River Valley Inn, and the man behind the desk seemed nice enough. But I wasn’t going to let my guard down. This is the state where the Una Bomber lived. And this is the town that inspired Himsa, a “metalcore/melodic death metal band” from Seattle, Washington to write a song about it. Himsa are scary. Their name comes from the word Ahimsa, which in Sanskrit means "to abstain from causing harm". Removal of the "A" gives the word opposite meaning. Himsa literally means 'violence' in Sanskrit. That’s pretty twisted imho. As is the video to their song Big Timber. You might want to have an adult with you when you watch this.

Little Big Horn

2010-02-18T08:39:00.001-08:00

We saw the site of the battle of Little Big Horn. Made me think of this Roy Harper song. (Manifest destiny my arse.)

I Hate The White Man.mp3

The Showboat Motel Casper Night

2010-02-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 16th - Day 9
The whole of the USA was there to choose from, but the one non-negotiable destination was Casper, Wyoming. A city of less than 50,000 people in the middle of the least populated state in the union? Yes. And this is why.

The Ocean Cliff Clearing.mp3

Richard Buckner could well be my ultimate favorite artist. He has written songs that have gripped my mind for years. Yes, pop music is great and rock 'n' roll is even greater, but most music has its limitations. You'll excuse me for being precious here (I swear I'll be crude again soon) but Richard Buckner makes art. That's why he hardly sells any records and a few years ago said he was retiring from music. (He didn't, thankfully.) The Ocean Cliff Clearing is not an easy entry point into Buckner by any means and it still baffles and intrigues me after over a decade of listening to it. If you do a Google search for the lyrics you'll find a lot of lyric sites draw a blank for this tune. (Yes, I am that cool.) And as for the ones that do... well I think they get them wrong. Quite a bit. But even when I can be sure of the words he's singing, I don't know what they mean. Carol and I used to jokingly shout "All together now" and then sing along with the line "The Showboat Motel Casper Night" not knowing that Casper was a city and that within its limits there is a motel called The Showboat. But once we knew that we had to visit it. And that enthusiasm wasn't dimmed when we read the following reviews on Trip Advisor...

“There were about ten thuggish people hanging around the lobby, the desk clerk was more involved with hanging out with what looked to be locals. This hotel felt very unsafe."

“If I would not have had a touch of a stomach flu when I checked in, I would have immediately checked out.”

“We weren't looking for anything fancy, just a nice, clean place to sleep. We didn't get any of the above.”

“We thought it was odd that it wasn't carpeted.”

And... the crowning glory...

“I do NOT appreciate being solicited in the lobby of a motel while I am obviously checking in - or at any other time - during that visit.”

Didn't see any of the above sadly (the no soliciting sticker on the door is working) but we did see a motel that time forgot. The landlady (or Madam?) was an imposing figure with old school sailor-style tattoos on both of her formidable forearms. I'm not sure what she made of us, but she couldn't have hated us because we were given the room next to the lobby just so we could get wi-fi. We couldn't complain about the cleanliness of the place. Not that we would have dared. One member of staff was a Hispanic looking youth dressed like a south London wannabe gangsta and his job seemed to be standing in the lobby staring at the TV with the kind of focus you normally only see on a predator when it's closing in on a kill. And special mention must go to the little Asian cleaner who seemed to be vacuuming every time we stepped outside our room. She didn't even stop when we were checking in which meant I had to ask the boss to repeat herself at least ten times.

But what really made the place special was the decor. Every wall was made out of some weird kind of white pre-fabricated material that looked like it had been designed for an industrial unit or a lunatic asylum. It would make a great location for a slasher movie. The Marriott it isn't, but a lot of these chain motels are crappy. The Showboat isn't entirely independant, it's now under the umbrella of the National 9 brand, but it's a special place and long may it live. (Of course it might be a little different in the summer when it's full of cowboys and oil workers.)

Casper was a pretty special little town too. It put me in mind of Austin Texas, only smaller, colder and poorer. (Plus no no annoying UT students.) It had a real nice western wear store called Lou Tauberts which has been there since 1919. And two movie theatres (or cinemas as we'd call them) in the tiny downtown area. There was a brew pub selling 1$ drafts and another selling penny pints. Which are just what they say they are... a pint for a penny. And... an independant record shop called Sonic Rainbow that was totally cool and yet a little upsetting. It carried the smallest stock of CDs I've ever seen. Not sure if that's down to the evils of downloading or just the size of Casper. But I can't imagine it will be there for long. Is it telling that they don't have a website, just a myspace page?(It did have cool Earth and SunnO))) posters on the wall - though nothing by them in the racks.)

Casper is great. I don't know what kind of hell Richard Buckner went through that night he stayed at the Showboat, but I'm glad it inspired him. All together now...

By the way, Wyoming is the most beautiful part of America I have seen so far. The drive from Cheyenne to Casper was stunning. The way houses were scattered randomly across the fields on the outskirts of towns had the same sort of feel as alpine villages in the summer, only set in rolling, scrub grass covered dunes on the edge of British golf links, then stretched out onto a very wide canvas and framed with Wild West rocky outcrops. It's like they took the mesas of the south west and put them in the north. It's colder, but you still feel there are cowboys and injuns beyond the horizon. The landscape is magical, and I thank either geology, God or Bob Ross for it. I'm a serial tourist, I (almost) always go back to the places I visit but I think Wyoming is the only spot from this trip that I'm sure I want to see again. (Except for maybe ESL - but that's because I missed the strip clubs this time.)

And one other thing about Wyoming. It's nicknamed 'The Equality State' because it was the first state in the union to grant women the vote. That was back in 1869. Though a local told me it was granted because the horny cowboys wanted to do anything they could to lure more females to the state.

Frigid Bones needs a new name. No snow today and we finally broke the 40°F barrier.

I Can Still Make Cheyenne

2010-02-16T20:24:00.000-08:00

Monday 15th - Day 8

This blog has become less and less about music. I'm becoming more preoccupied with tales of near-death experiences. I'm hoping by the time we get past the Rockies we'll be in kinder climes. The rain of Seattle will remind me of Manchester and all will be well again.

I was concerned about what would happen today, already a little anxious about driving on these roads in these conditions surrounded by crazy drivers. Then the Weather Channel had footage of a 43 car pile up on a bridge in Kansas City that looked insane.

But we didn't want to stay here. Besides we have a schedule to stick to. We're due to land in Seattle at the home of another Postcarder on Saturday. If we were to lose a day then it would make it much more of an inconvenience to stay with someone who had to get up for work early the next morning. I know, it's one of the drawbacks of being a free-loader. So the schedule said we had to make it to Cheyenne in Wyoming by the end of the day. Bad news... that's 477 miles away. Good news... it's just one road. Bad news... it was the road that got closed yesterday, has drifting snow and crazy drivers.

Inspired by the George Strait song I Can Still Make Cheyenne we left the motel at 8am, the earliest start yet. The temperature was 13°F which was bad for two reasons: A) That's minus 10.5° C which is the coldest daytime temperature I've ever experienced. And B) I do have a touch of triskaidekaphobia. Daunted, we set out to join the slow moving line of pussies on I-80. A line that grew steadily as, in the 20 miles it took us to reach Lincoln, we saw at least 20 vehicles in the ditch or the meridian. One of which was an overturned Ford pickup truck and another a mangled semi. For the first two hours of the day we did less than 80 miles. It was very tense. And then we both nearly had coronaries when a lump of ice about the size of a cricket ball flew off the back of a tow truck (driven at speed by a crazy in the outside lane) and smashed straight into our windscreen. It didn't break the windscreen but I couldn't tell if there was a chip in glass. Paranoia took hold and I didn't want to use the windscreen washer in case it cracked the glass. So now not only were we experiencing a living death in the slow lane we had to peer out of a snow and crud encrusted windscreen too.

At a conservative estimate I'd say we saw at least 50 vehicles wrecked or abandoned on I-80. It was really hurting my brain to understand why. But then an Iowa native explained, "Wise and prudent drivers are able to stay on the road in weather even much worse than this. The nob-washes that end up in the ditch are often folks who were born around here and falsely believe that they are genetically pre-disposed to have excellent winter driving skills, and therefore drive as fast as they like regardless of the road conditions. When I see ditched cars a sense of Darwinistic superiority wells in my chest. Winter driving skills are a myth. Fear is the rule on the road".

Good to know. And now I can feel self-satisfied again. And enjoy driving through the state.

The Cash Brothers - Nebraska.mp3

Back on the road things were getting better... as we headed further west the weather cleared, the snow in the fields started to thin out and the flat Nebraska landscape transformed from a desolate frozen nightmare into a benign if dull rural plain. We started to breathe again. And pulled into a rest station to test the windscreen. It passed.

Ten minutes later we were back on the road. Twelve minutes later we both shat ourselves when a chunk of ice about the size of a paving slab flew off the top of a truck and headed at speed straight for the windscreen. We instinctively cowered as it homed in. We instinctively screamed as it smashed against the glass. I instinctively swore blue bloody murder. And then instinctively patted myself on the back for ditching the Cobalt and upgrading to this truck when I saw that the window was still intact. It was the biggest spike of adrenalin I'd had since East St Louis. I am so ready to do an endorsement for the GMC Terrain.

By the time we reached Wyoming the snow was completely gone, as was most of the traffic, and the landscape had ceased to be rural. It was now more like the rough rolling grass plains that I'd describe as moorland. Like the Pennines or Northumberland. Though unlike those beloved Northern English badlands, the sky was blue and big and the sun was yellow and big. And on the far western horizon, sketched in the faintest shade of grey... a massive mountain range. (I'm presuming they are the Rockies.) Wyoming was seducing me.

Cheyenne was a little disappointing though. It's not a good sign when a city doesn't seem to have a downtown. But the people were really friendly - a sign of living in the least-populated state in the union I guess. You run in to people being dicks a lot less often and so you are nicer. It's enough to make people whistle.

Why do people put videos of themselves doing covers on youtube? Seriously?

The Diary of Frigid Bones: A massive change, but then we did cover nearly 500 miles. From 13°F (-10.5°C) this morning to a giddy 38°F (3.3°C) by mid afternoon in Wyoming.

Des Moines to Lincoln

2010-02-16T08:56:00.000-08:00

Sunday 14th - Day 7

Tom T. Hall - It Sure Can Get Cold In Des Moines.mp3

The Weather Channel is like Crystal Meth. It’s that addictive. It could be worse than Meth, I’ve never tried it but a friend of mine (let’s call him Lavern) has and he says World of Warcraft is harder to kick than Meth. Well, I think my Weather Channel addiction must be up there with Laverne’s Warcraft habit. I watch it every morning before hitting the road and every night before hitting the pillow. I love it so much I wonder why there’s no Weather Channel in the UK? I guess the answer is because the weather isn’t extreme enough. Here, it is. And this morning in Des Moines we woke up to another blanket of snow. But as we weren’t staying in a motel… no Weather Channel. But despite the layer of fresh snow lying on top of the season-long accumulation on the ground, and despite the big soft fluffy flakes floating down, our host Tim said we’d be ok and Interstate 80 would be clear.

So we set off with the temperature gauge at 16 F and poor visibility. We crawled through downtown Des Moines but saw very little of it before hitting a scary, slushy Interstate 80.

Now forgive me for going on about the weather but it is insane at the minute. The Weather Channel is calling it February Fury. Places in the south are getting snow. Places like Dallas. And even eastern seaboard cities who get bad weather are getting record snow falls that they can’t cope with. The federal government in DC have been staying at home because of snow, just like school kids. But here in the depths of the mid west they’re used to snow, they know how to deal with it, right? Well if that’s so then how come the interstate between Des Moines and Omaha Nebraska is littered with vehicles that have slid off the road? A lot of American motorways don’t have a central reservation they have a meridian. That’s what they call the 25 foot wide grass strip that runs between the traffic flow. And on the other side of the hard shoulder there’s a ditch or a borrow pit. This does mean that if you screw up you end up marooned on grass or, in this weather, submerged in snow drifts. On the 136 mile stretch between Des Moines and Omaha we must have seen 15 cars in the meridian or the ditch. What gives? Don’t these folks change their driving style when the weather’s bad? Fuelled by Fear and concentration I was gripping the wheel with a white knuckle intensity and sitting up ram rod straight. Yesterday the only road casualties we saw in Missouri were dead deer (man I wouldn’t want to hit one of those) but today these farm boys seemed to be flying off the road with gay abandon.

Then we saw Omaha and it looked so grim and hideous, like someone took all the 10 ugliest Arndale shopping centres and slapped them together. It occurred to me that the car crashes weren’t accidents, people were doing it on purpose to avoid going to Omaha.

Omaha despite, or maybe because of, the grimness has quite a few songs written about it which have been recorded by artists as diverse as Groucho Marx, Johnny Otis, Big Joe Williams, Stan Freberg, Moby Grape, Preston Love, John Stewart, Damian Jurado, Waylon Jennings, Chicksaw Mud Puppies, Counting Crows and Pat Methany.

But we didn’t intend to stop there ever. The main reason for visiting this state was this:

The song is inspired by the actions of Lincoln, Nebraska native Charles Starkweather, who, in 1958, went on a killing spree during a two-month road trip with his teenage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. Their story also inspired the movies The Sadist (1963), Badlands (1973), Natural Born Killers (1994) and Starkweather (2004). And a made-for-TV movie Murder in the Heartland (1993) is a biographical depiction of Starkweather starring Tim Roth. (They also so fascinated the young Steven King that he kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about them.)

The song is also the title track of my favourite Springsteen album. I wanted to drive from Lincoln right across Nebraska listening to Nebraska. However the weather didn’t want us to get there. After Omaha the number of abandoned vehicles increased. Not so much because of falling snow but because of winds blowing snow drifts across the highways. Nebraska is a flat state, it’s part of the northern plains and there’s not much to stop the wind. Some sections of the road were temporary white outs. The smart and the scared (I was the latter) were crawling along in the inside lane. The young and the dumb were whizzing past us on the outside. And no doubt causing the kind of accidents that eventually caused the state troopers to shut the highway. Just 20 miles from Lincoln we were all shepherded onto exit 186 only to spend over an hour crawling to a town called Ashland. Sometimes the traffic would be stationary for so long the drifting snow would start to build up on the side of the car. We tried a back road but that was worse. The drifting snow was so bad it was like going through a car wash, but with snow instead of water. In the end we turned around and headed back to towards Omaha and checked into the first motel we saw. It was like Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in there. By 4pm the motel (which was so crappy it didn’t even have a lift/elevator - not a big deal I know, but if you’re an overweight American it is) was full. It turns out that the Interstate had closed because of a fatality on I-80. A semi had crashed into a car killing the 20 year old woman who was driving it.

Iowa Songs

2010-02-15T20:14:00.000-08:00

I know, I know I should have been doing this all along for each state. But it's tiring... all this driving. Besides that's what the 1200 songs tab at the top is for. Sort of. Or at least it will be. When it's done.

The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines - Joni Mitchell
It Sure Can Get Cold In Des Moines - Tom T Hall
Des Moines - The Drams
DMI Trap - DMB (Des Moines Boyz) (Not easy keeping it real in Des Moines)
Iowa City - Eleni Mandell (Lovely stuff)
Iowa City Adieu - The Autumn Defense
Keokuk - Ferrell Stowe
Leland, Iowa - Kevin Costner & Modern West
Sioux City Sue - Gene Autry
Spillville, Iowa - Tim Neumark
Iowa - Dar Williams
Iowa - Slipknot
Iowa Indian Song - Bing Crosby

and

Map Ref 41°N 93°W - Wire (The Snow Queen stopped me seeing this landmark.)

Des Moines via Marysville

2010-02-15T06:12:00.000-08:00

Saturday Day 6
From St Louis to Des Moines... no fast roads. Look at all the interstates in East Missouri, they go east to west. No one wants to go to Iowa. Except us.

We headed north because tonight we're staying in Des Moines. Staying with a guy from the Tom Waits list which is called Rain Dogs. And the reason why is because of this song called Burma Shave which was on Tom Waits' 1976 album Foreign Affairs.

07 Burma Shave.mp3

The song is a story about a young buck who just jumped his parole and passes through a small dying town called Marysville and whisks this young girl away from her dull life. For a short while anyway. Then they both die in a car wreck. It's terribly romantic. Anyway, each verse of the song ends with a reference to this place called Burma Shave.
He says... I guess you'd say I'm on my way to Burma Shave
Then she says... I'd rather take my chances out in Burma Shave
And then after the fatal crash the lyric goes... Just a nickel's worth of dreams and every wishbone that they saved, lie swindled from them on the way to Burma Shave

Now Burma Shave is a brand of shaving foam. But not one that's sold in Britain so, like the East St Louis reference, that was lost on me. As was the reason behind it being used as a place in the song. Between 1925 and 1963, Burma Shave was advertised on highways with a series of small signs, spaced for sequential reading by passing motorists. Each sign would be the line of a funny poem and the last sign was almost always the name of the product. I found this out when someone gave me a cassette of an interview with Waits and he mentioned this kind of advertising having an effect on him. He remembered one of the poems which went...

Don't drive along
With your arm out too far
It might go home
In another guy's car
Burma Shave

Waits said that as a child when he saw these he didn't realise what Burma Shave was, he thought it was the name of a town. A town that was always being sign posted, but somehow his dad never got there. So it became a mystical place to him, a sort of Shangri-La. And that's why he used it as the destination for the two star-crossed lovers in his song.

The song is such a great song lyrically. With just a few lines it painted a very clear picture of the protagonists and the town Marysville which is described as "nothing but a wide spot in the road." So it was another must see for me. However... there are at least 10 Marysvilles in the USA. Plenty of Maryvilles too. So I asked the Rain Dogs list and this guy Tim helped me try and get to the bottom of it. Anyway to cut a long story short we came to the conclusion that there was no specific Marysville.

But Tim suggested one near Des Moines that would fit the bill as much as any other place where a young woman would say everyone in this stinking town has got one foot in the grave and I thought that would work. Burma Shave is a mythical place and so is Marysville. This one was close enough, it had a railway nearby like the song mentioned, the countryside around was farmland which tied into the images of the song. So we set off from mild St Louis where snow was only lying on north facing roads. Seriously weird driving down roads with 6 inches of snow on one side and not a drop of the white stuff on the other. It was 306 miles but no interstate so we were looking at 6 hours of driving. During which time the snow by the side of the road thickened and the number of country music stations on the dial did likewise. If only it was good country. But then I could say the same about the rock stations. We passed through Hannibal, MO which had the front to call itself America's Home Town because it was the childhood home of Mark Twain. He lived there from the age of 4 to 18. I love Twain for many reasons, not least because he disproves the maxim "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and
any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brain."

Hannibal MO is also the name of a song by a band/artist called Dolorean. It's a cheery murder ballad though one with a twist because I'm not sure the narrator kiled his girlfriend, he just chickened out of the suicide pact. Still he got convicted. I also like it because his girlfriend was going to study creative writing on the east coast... so some might say she was asking for it. You can listen to the maudlin track here. I have no idea why the track is called Hannibal, MO, nor why the writer set this peculiar murder ballad here. I'm hoping blog reader and Dolorean fan Heather will tell us.

Anyway we did make it to Marysville, though each turn onto a smaller road filled me with fear as they became ever more icy. And for good reason. Marysville is nothing but a widespot in the road. A snow covered widespot. Just houses scattered across a field really. I'd go for a ride with a guy who looked like Farley Grainger if it helped me get out of that place. Marysville makes John Cougar's home town look like London. There's small towns and then there's small towns. America needs to start using terms like hamlet and village it would help. As would not calling two cow sheds and a shack a city. You can see Marysville on this Google Map grab. There's no street view, but I'm sure it got overlooked for very different reasons than East St Louis.

I like that it has its own cemetery. For a town with a population of just 54 people. I told you it was depressing.

The Diary Of Frigid Bones. It was over 30, just, for most of Missouri. But it had fallen to about 24 by the time we reached Tim's house. It had also started to snow. Ominously snow.

East St Louis

2010-02-12T21:51:00.000-08:00

Friday (day 5)

I Broke Down In East St Louis, the Kansas city line...
Train Song, is my favourite song on my all time favourite album. I bought Franks Wild Years by Tom Waits in 1985. I was on a day trip, to Liverpool of all places, with a girl called Nicola Clark who broke my heart on at least three occasions. I had no idea where St Louis was at that time and until recently I didn't know that East St Louis is a separate city from St Louis. It's just across the Mississippi river, but it's separate. It's even in a different state - Illinois rather than Missouri. I just assumed East St Louis was the Eastern part of St Louis, like the East End of London is still London. What was also lost on me was that East St Louis is not the sort of place you want to break down in.

East St Louis has one of the highest crime rates in the United States. According to the FBI's data of 2007, its murder rate hit 101.9 per population of 100,000 which is far worse than other notoriously dangerous cities. If you've seen the TV show The Wire you'll know that Baltimore, Maryland is often referred to as Bodymore, Murderland because of its high murder rate. Well Baltimore's murder rate (43.3) is just over 40% of East St Louis's. The population of East St Louis is 98% African American, so it's no surprise to learn that it's poor. Nearly a third of the residents live below the poverty line and poverty leads to crime and crime plus guns equals murder. So for those who know, East St Louis is shorthand for "Don't Go There Whitey" and most Americans do know and that's why it crops up in songs and movies and TV shows.

Well I really wanted to see some of it for myself. I didn't plan on going at night and I didn't plan of staying in town but after scoping out the look of the place on Google Maps street view I thought it didn't look too bad. And because there's a famous Casino there called Casino Queen, which has the awesome tag line "The Loosest Slots" (fnaar, fnaar) and was the subject of a song on Wilco's first record. It's also got a few strip bars and I was starting to think it was one of those places that people think are worse than they are. Sure it was going to be a bit sleazy but not dangerous. In the mid 90s I lived in Brixton in South London for a while and quite a few folks (always white) thought I was brave. Of course it was just nonsense and Brixton was fine. I reckoned East St Louis would be the same.

But OMG East St Louis scared the living shit out of us. I have never seen as blighted a place as that. Carol's seen slums in India and I've seen a slum in Pakistan but East St Louis was frightening. In fact you can't really compare the two. Because for all the poverty in Asia, it's not like that in these poor places in America. There are cars in East St Louis, sure many of them are wrecks but there are some big cars too. And no doubt lots of consumer goods like TVs in the houses. But just as surely there are guns too and that's what scares us Brits. And it's far worse than those Baltimore streets in The Wire. It's all detached houses, though many of them look like shacks, and in the 15 or so blocks we saw there were at least 10 burnt out houses. In the yards of some houses there were numerous big mean-looking dogs, and looking down some forsaken streets we saw guys pushing shopping carts just like Bubs in The Wire.

What made the trip even scarier was we ended up there by mistake. We'd just been to see the Cahokian Mounds and were on our way to Sauget. Both are really interesting places that I only learnt about from Uncle Tupelo songs. Sauget is a village of less than 300 residents but it has been blighted by some really big, bad, polluting industry. And the Cahokian Mounds are the remnant of an ancient civilisation that died out in the area in 1400. The biggest mound there was the largest man-made structure in North America until the 20th century. It's a World Heritage site and curiously unknown or uncared for by Americans. But we didn't make it to Sauget because the TomTom satnav took us through East St Louis. And not the part with the strip clubs. As we got further and further into the residential area and the neighbourhood was getting worse and worse, the satnav kept directing us down roads that just didn't really exist anymore. These parts, I have since learned are called "urban prairie" and they spring up where where vacant buildings have been torn down and whole blocks became overgrown with vegetation. I started trying to navigate by sight but every turn just seemed to make things worse. In the end I had to do a 5-point turn (it's a big truck) and head back towards the highway which took us to Casino Queen and there we sat coming down off the fear inspired adrenalin rush.

If you check this Google map out, you'll see that they didn't sent the Street View cars down the residential side streets.

View Larger Map

So back to Tom. And you really don't want to be like the hero of Train Song, the eponymous Frank of the album title. East St Louis is the last place you want to break down in. It's rock bottom and you'll want to go back home. But as Tom says a train can take you away from here but a train can't bring you home. That line always moved me. It seems to express a sentiment that lies at the root of many American place songs. The pull of the frontier can create a yearning that can lead you astray. And you only realise what home was after you left it.

What's really depressing though is that East St Louis is home to many. And having seen it I'm ashamed for America and for the whole of the western world the the systems we live by. East St Louis has been a hell hole for years and very little has been done to save it. As Detective Bunk says in The Wire "Some shameful shit right here."

First Snow In Kokomo

2010-02-11T21:15:00.001-08:00

First Snow In Kokomo.mp3

One of the first and few tunes Aretha penned herself. And not the place the Fake Beach Boys tortured us with. We were going to go but snow stopped us. I think that is ironic. Either way didn't want to not share this tune.

South to Cincinnati

2010-02-11T21:02:00.000-08:00

Despite the last post being all about KSU, we didn't get snowed in in mid Ohio. We just got moving. So forgive this brief(ish) catch up.

Wednesday (day 3)
Mid Ohio looks so rural that it's shocking to look at the map and see how far east the Midwest stretches. It didn't snow overnight but it was very, very cold and still very, very white. The roads were cleared in a way that would put every British council to shame. Driving was still frightening, especially when the wind blew the snow across the road and little snow devils would dance and snake alongside the wheels of the cars in front.

We headed south. Aiming for Cincinnati. I think Cincinnati is a beautiful word. I always assumed it was a Native American word, but it actually has a worryingly imperialistic background. In 1790, Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, chose the name after the Society of the Cincinnati, which lauded George Washington as being akin to Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who was called to serve Rome as dictator. It still a beautiful name wherever it comes from. And it sounds good in a song. Here are just a few: Cincinnati Lou by Merle Travis, Cincinnati, Ohio by Connie Smith, South of Cincinnati by Dwight Yoakam, Susie Cincinnati by The Beach Boys and The Lights of Cincinnati by Scott Walker.

The landscape changes a lot when you get to Cincinnati. Instead of flat plains, it's a place of steep and numerous hills. It's not a pretty city - the residential areas we passed through look a lot like some of the older parts of Eastern cities like New York or Philadelphia. They look a bit run down, though it was a horribly grey day so the weather didn't help. The city is on the Ohio river. That's where its fortune came from in the early 19th century when steamboats made the Ohio the main trade route of the northern states. So it's a working town, a blue collar place. And like Buffalo it's sports crazy with the stadia of two major sporting franchises right in the middle of the city. The Paul Brown stadium is the home of the Bengals and the modestly-titled Great American Ball Park is home to the Reds. You can see both of them as you drive across the scary bridges that cross the Ohio into Kentucky. So many American bridges look they were made out of a giant's Meccano set. And they scare the hell out of me.

In the evening we dropped by the home of another postcarder, who like many of those people is a musician. His band Magnolia Mountain were voted best American act in the 2009 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards and are about as professional as an outfit can be while holding down regular jobs. The band were rehearsing at Mark's house and we dropped by to watch them. First tune they played when we arrived was called A Little South of Birmingham. And they didn't even know the rationale behind the trip. Watching these 7 people play together with such ease, and their ability to change things in the music without the need for a didactic demonstration really rammed home to me the difference between musicians and non musicians. I love music but I can't play it. I was in a band when I was 16 but The Gigha Mumyz were very primitive. I'd describe us as avante garde, but unusual or peculiar would be better words. Think Pere UBU with less talent and more fun. Anyway I digress. After the rehearsal I was asking the band about why they thought there were so many songs about places in America. The first answer, probably the obvious one, was it's so big. But one member expanded on that to say the place you came from in America defined your culture. And I think that could be key. In the UK it's your social status that defines you first. Or at least it used to. Why else would middle class art school students suddenly act all uncouth when they joined a rock n roll band?

Frigid Bones' Diary: Started off at an insanely low 14° (-10°C) but soared to at least 20° F (-4°C) by mid afternoon.

Thursday (day 4)
Our first 300 mile day. Split between Indiana and Illinois. Indiana is one of those states with way more songs about the state than songs about towns within it. But even then it's hardly served well. If the weather hadn't forced us south we'd have gone to Kokomo just to pay homage to Aretha. I'd say The most famous song about the state is surely Indiana Wants Me by R.Dean Taylor, who as a white Canadian is surely the strangest man to ever get a Motown contract. But that's not as strange as the video... be warned the effects aren't very special.

The song is one of those jaunty little pop songs, where people only really listen to the chorus, so they don't notice it's about some nutter who killed a man because he said something rude about the nutter's girl. And now the nutter can't go back to Indiana. Which isn't too bad really. I'm not sure I want to either. Actually when we were driving north from Lawrenceburg we hit police road blocks, so maybe R. Dean did go back.

Goal one today was Seymour Indiana, the birthplace of John Cougar Mellencamp. Not the coolest guy in the world I'm sure. He does have two very silly surnames after all. But Mellencamp (or Cougar if you prefer) has built his career on a lot of songs about the Midwest. Even Brits know (and love?) Jack & Diane, those two American kids growing up in the heartland. Like Middle England, the Midwest is pushed by conservative media as the heartland. The sort of place where real Americans live good lives in small towns. That mythology lies behind Cougar's (or Mellencamp's if you prefer) song Small Town. Even if you didn't know the song you could guess a lot about it. According to the song, John tried the city but he moved back to his small town. He even brought his fancy-ass city wife home with him and she loves it too.
Thats her on the left. So maybe I shouldn't take the mickey out of Cougarcamp too much. And surely it made sense to go to the town that spawned him and see if I could get a sense of the wonder of small towns.

The plan didn't work. First of all it's not that small. I saw a lot smaller on the way there. And apart from a bar called Bubba's Place (which was closed) there was nothing I could see in Seymour that held any interest for me. I think when he says Small Town he means Dull Town. I'm not as adverse to strip malls as many folk are but Seymour looked as dull as hell. At least kids growing up there today have the Xbox to stop them from writing corny songs.

So we headed out of town and headed for Illinois. On the way we saw a lot of churches. I thought Texas loved Jesus but from what I saw Texas has nothing on
Indiana. All the main Protestant denominations like Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, as well as lesser spotted species like Menonites. Though my favourites were the independent ones that kept it simple: Christian Church or Bible Church. And when you couldn't see a church you could still see lots of signs advertising churches, or Christian camps or Christian Centers for the Treatment of Addiction. It's another way in which Britain and America differ greatly. Church attendance is plummeting in the UK but here the market is booming. Even Jack & Diane knew they wouldn't escape it. "Gonna let it rock, Let it roll, Let the Bible belt come down, And save my soul."

Frigid Bones' Diary: It thawed out today. Hit 33° F by the time we reached St Louis. Above freezing!

O-hi-o

2010-02-10T21:30:00.001-08:00

Ohio.mp3

In a nutshell then... for anyone who doesn't know what the song Ohio is about... on May 4th 1970 some students at Kent State University in Ohio were protesting against the US invasion of Cambodia. The National Guard were called in and somehow the troops discharged 67 rounds, killing 4 students and wounding 9 others. And Neil Young wrote the powerful protest song Ohio. When I was planning this trip I knew the site of the tragedy was somewhere I had to visit.

KSU is a big college, it even has its own airport, but as big as it is I did expect the site of the shooting and the memorial to the victims to be easy to find. The events were recently voted the most memorable Ohio news story of the past 75 years so surely a sign or two would lead me to the spot. Well after half an hour of driving round the snow bound campus I began to suspect that maybe the powers that be didn't really put too much effort into remembering their past.

To be fair there is a large-ish memorial on the grounds. But a "granite plaza" with a "granite sidewalk and bench" is easily overlooked as just some non-descript street furniture. And yes there are plans to build a visitors center, but the low cost sign that told us this really didn't inspire much confidence. This year is the 40th anniversary of the shootings so I'm not going to hold my breath for the visitor's center. Disappointed, we moved on to the car park next to the memorial. There, spread out over about 40 yards are the four spots where Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder died. I'm glad the spots are marked but the manner in which this has been done seemed to be a new low for KSU. To start with it's in a car park and each death bed is marked with 6 short pillars. Set amongst the cars of the current students they look like spaces that have been set aside for repairs. The campus seemed to me to have as many car parking spaces as Manchester City Center. So why they had to cram as many cars as possible into the land that lay between the four fatal spots beats and disappoints me.

There is a little more to the site but you only find that out when you read about it. Looking at the young and happy faces of the current students standing in that car park was confusing. They seemed indifferent to the tragedy. I wanted the ground to be in some way revered. But at best the spots looked common place. At worst, an inconvenience.

I've often wondered if the song Ohio, as good as it is, should really have been called Kent State. Maybe then people would remember better. Maybe then the University would have stayed in the spotlight. Maybe then the memorial wouldn't be so disappointing. But Ohio is a more beautiful word than Kent so Neil gets a pass on the grounds of poetic license.

As I was leaving the campus, I started to wonder if having a memorial mattered. It was 40 years ago. That war is over. Perhaps I was being too precious about it. Then I turned on an Ohio talk radio station and heard the right wing host banging on about Iran and its suppression of student protests. And I wondered... when he'd been preparing for his show... did Kent State even cross his mind?

Youngstown to... fail

2010-02-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

The plan for today was to go to Sandusky, the Roller Coaster Capital of the World. Why go and see a place with an amazing amusement park in the middle of winter? Well there's the appeal of seeing things at their worst. The sort of feeling that I like to think inspired Morrisey's "coastal town that they forgot to shut down" line. Come Armageddon and all that. But Sandusky is also the name of of a jaunty little instrumental track on the Uncle Tupelo album March 16-20, 1992. To be honest, I don't think visiting the place would have given me any insight into why the tune was written or why tunes are named after places, but it was on the way to Detroit and I really wanted to see Detroit. Yes I know it's meant to be a hell hole, and that Lonely Planet recently listed it as the no.1 city they didn't want to visit. But what nonsense, I mean... c'mon, it's the home of Motown and the MC5, it's the birthplace of Techno and the nursemaid of House. Plus there's Eminem and Kid Rock. Not to mention all the kickass tunes named after the city: Panic in Detroit, Detroit Rock City, Detroit is Burning... in fact there are so many songs about that city that there's even a wiki page that lists them.

And then there's this one... a classic of the genre...

But the Weather Channel was on Def Com 2 this morning and with threats of up to a foot of snow landing in Detroit, we decided to head south and west and try to outrun the snow. By about 12 we saw our first jack-knifed lorry (truck) in the central reservation so we started to think about getting off Interstate-71. But the exit lanes looked so bad I passed a couple by on account of my lack of nerve. A couple of others I passed because they weren't visible. We had hoped to have made it to Cincinnati or at least Dayton (home of the greatest indie rock band of all time) but now even Columbus was looking unlikely as the snow was coming thicker and faster all the time. Then I got lucky, the car in front of me started to indicate that he was going to take the next exit so I thought I'd follow him. It nearly went tits up when he started to fishtail but at least that meant I was able to learn from his mistakes.

So here we are, stuck on the outskirts of a town called Bellville, which is the name of a Django Reinhardt but I expect that's about some gypsy dive in France. So after just two days, the plan to only stay in towns with songs named after them has failed. We walked across the road to the Amish restaurant but it was closed due to the weather. (What has happened to the Amish? One brochure we saw for an Outlet Mall boasted valet parking for Amish horse drawn buggies.) So we were forced to have a crappy BK burger. We're now faced with driving the 4 miles into town or buying diner from the Shell Gas Station across the road. Pray for us.

The only saving grace of today was a short detour to Kent State University to see the site of the shootings that inspired the Neil Young song Ohio. I'm not going to write about that now though, I'm going to save it just in case we're snowed in tomorrow.

Frigid Bones Diary: It was about 30°F most of the day, then fell to about 22°F when it was snowing. I always thought that too cold to snow line was more made up nonsense. For British readers... thats 0°C and -6°C. i didn't go out tonight.

Ohio Songs

2010-02-09T05:05:00.000-08:00

I'm sure there are many more songs about places in Ohio and I wish I had the time and the wherewith all to make a definitive list. But it's a Sisyphean task. Especially in this day and age. Nine times out of ten when you throw a town name into itunes it'll find a song about the place. I just checked and there is a song called Life in Girard by a band called The Kissing Party. But I can't be sure if it's about Girard, Ohio. When punk rock enabled folks to make music and release it on an indie label that was a good thing. Paradoxically the digital age allows many, many more people to make and release their music through the Internet. That is a bad thing because far too much crappy music gets out there. Anyway while we're deciding to go today to escape the coming storm here's list of songs about Ohio.

Akron - Bob Neuwirth
Downtown (Akron) - The Pretenders
My City Was Gone - The Pretenders
Cincinnati Lou - Merle Travis
Cincinnati, Ohio - Connie Smith
Lights of Cincinnati - Scott Walker
South of Cincinnati - Dwight Yoakam
Susie Cincinnati - The Beach Boys
The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati - Possum
WKRP in Cincinnati - Steve carlise
Cleveland Rocks - Ian Hunter
Hello Cleveland - Mono
If You Believe In Cleveland - The Young Fresh Fellows
Look Out Cleveland - The Band
Columbus, Ohio - Jeffrey Lewis
Cuyahoga - REM
Dayton Ohio 19 Something and 5 - Guide By Voices
Fort Recovery - Centro-matic
Hamilton County Breakdown - Robbie Fulks
Ohio - Neil Young
Sandusky - Uncle Tupelo
Youngstown - Bruce Springsteen
All the Lilacs in Ohio - John Hiatt
Miss Ohio - Gillian Welch
Ohio - Lambchop
Ohio River Boat Song - Bonnie Prince Billy

(I wish there was a way to use the tab key to space things out in a blogger post.)

Addendum: Life In Girard is about that wonderful little Ohio city. So I PASS! hurrah.
Listen to song here.

Buffalo to Youngstown

2010-02-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

Car hire can be disappointing.

A Chevy Cobalt was not what I was expecting. If I wanted to drive an uninspiring little suburban car I could have stayed in the UK.

However disappointment can be overturned. At a price. For about $10 a day the car hire company said we could upgrade to anything. This included a whale called a Lincoln Town Car and a super "bitching" Camaro but with thousands of miles of winter driving ahead of us we went for a GMC Terrain. I don't know much about cars (next to nothing really) but I know what I like. And I like a lot about this car - from its heated leather seats to its parking camera which displays who you are about to back over as soon as you slip into reverse. The last car I owned was a Skoda Fabia, which didn't even have a CD player. Well I've leapfrogged that old technology and I now have a car with a USB port so I can play me some MP3s. And as soon as I find where it is I plan to use it. There have been some teething problems. It did take me about 25 minutes and two stops in a strip mall before we made it on to a highway. But that's partly to do with being a GPS virgin and I am sure that I will be feeling like Jay-Z soon. However the main reason for loving this car... is SNOW.

The plan today was to make it to Youngstown Ohio. A classic example of a once mighty industrial steel town which fell hard and fast in the 1970s. It's also the subject of a Springsteen song of the same name. Bruce (I'm sure he won't mind me calling him Bruce) weaves the growth and demise of the town into a history of conflict, from the Civil War to Korea. He links the loss of young men in combat to the loss of a generation in a town with no jobs, no hope, no future. It's a classic example of an an American place song. And as I prefer the Boss when he's not in full on E-Street band mode, it's a tune I can return to again and again. So I was pretty excited to be checking into a Days Inn just 4 miles away from the city. We'd had a beautiful drive through the frozen vineyards of Western New York. Lake Erie was frozen like a giant frosted donut and the setting sunlight on the snow was picture postcard perfect. But just one mile off I-80, as we drove through a place called Girard (one of those places that calls itself a city even though it only has 50 miles of road) we hit sludgy, days-old, uncleared snow. And moving down the edges of the grey snow banks... pedestrians. According to the city's website "The splendor of our four seasons keeps the street department busy year-round. With a staff of nine, the department provides snow removal, street sweeping and street repair services." Busy? Seriously? My hunch is that at least half of that ( men team are known to Tony Soprano. Buffalo did such a great job of clearing much heavier snow so I was in no frame of mind to try out my untested snow driving skills. I felt really glad to have spent the extra dollars on that fat ass American SUV. I only hope my former colleagues at Greenpeace in Amsterdam can forgive me. (Though in my admittedly weak defence the GMC Terrain has way better fuel economy than other vehicles in its class. Ting!)

So in full on American mode we went to Walmart, Taco Bell and then back to the hotel to watch the Weather Channel. It's not looking good. I had hoped to try and push on to Youngstown tomorrow morning before going to Sandusky. But there's a massive snow storm on its way. Plans may change.

Frigid Bones Diary: It was about 28°F most of the day, then fell to 18°F by the end of the day. For British readers... thats -2°C and -8°C.

Buffalo

2010-02-07T10:55:00.000-08:00

In the film Once Upon A Time In America, Robert De Niro plays a New York gangster who, when the shit hit the fan, exiled himself to Buffalo. As an old man he comes back to NYC and refers to Buffalo as the "asshole of the world." I didn't really know where Buffalo was at that time but the idea of an American city being that bad seemed incredible to me. Even more so when I found out that Buffalo was in New York state. Of course back then I didn't really have an idea of how big America was. I didn't realise how big New York state was or that Buffalo was so much further north and so much colder than the Big Apple itself. Years later I saw the cult movie Buffalo 66, written and directed by Vincent Gallo, a native of the town. He did a pretty good job of making the town look pretty shitty. And of making me want to spend some time here.

Buffalo it's true is not the city it once was. In numerous studies you'll find it listed as one of the 10 poorest cities in the country. But statistics like that only really reflect the poverty/wealth of the quarter of a million or so people who live within the city limits. The greater Buffalo–Niagara–Cattaraugus Combined Statistical Area (as it's snappily called) is home to 1,254,066 residents. Like all former industrial cities, the money moved to the suburbs and surrounding area. And thats where the friends I've just spent two weeks live, but Buffalo is still the city they play out in. I've eaten out so much here I'm sure I've put on 10lbs. And in the process I've almost become as obsessed as every local is with naming my top 5 places that serve Buffalo Wings. Now even if a city did invent the fried chicken wing it still seems worryingly self absorbed to debate with this much energy which place makes the best ones. We are talking about what is essentially a fatty, greasy fried food. That said I can tell you that Gabriel's Gate makes the best ones. I will concede that the wings at the 911 Bar do come close but Kelly's Corner is totally over rated. And I will happily fight anyone who disagrees with me. (And yes I do now look a little bit like Star Wars kid.)

But there's more to Buffalo than just food. It has a music scene that I wish my hbome city of Manchester could sustain. There's a choice of live shows pretty much every night of the week. I'm sure I'll come back to this later but there is so much more live music in America than the UK. Last Friday I went to a CD release party for a local band called Tuco. The guys in the band all have jobs, and I'm sure they don't ever foresee themselves making a living from their music but they have a CD out. As do lots of other bands in the town such as Roger Bryan & The Orphans who take the time and the trouble to put their own albums out on vinyl as do my favourites from this town Johnny Nobody.

Alongside food and music in the Holy Trinity of Buffalo obsessions is sports. One of the landmarks of the city, which you can see as you drive in, is the field of the AAA Baseball team the Buffalo Bisons. It's a beautiful retro styled stadium right in the middle of the city. It has a homely feel that evokes sports, simpler, purer past. Sadly it's called Coca-Cola Stadium and before that it was Dunn Tire Park. This is America after all. But Buffalonians love all sports, even the Lacrosse team sell out their games. And there's a kind of die hard commitment to the towns clubs that I know from being a soccer fan in Britain. And I like that. When sport is treated as entertainment, as it often is in the USA, it loses something for me. I can't get as emotionally involved with a movie as I can with my team.

The two biggest sports in town are Hockey and American Football. Everyone loves The Sabres who continue to make the play-offs in the NHL without ever threatening to really win it. And though the football team the Bills, have been pretty poor in recent years, they do hold an impressive record that tells you much about America. Between 1990 and 1993 the Bills played in four consecutive Superbowls. They remain the only team to have done that. Only one other team has made three consecutive appearances. So the Bills should be heroes right? Sadly Buffalo lost all four games and instead of being lauded for their incredible achievement they are derided. Thats why Ice Cube rapped "I won't choke like the Buffalo Bills." It seems to me that being number one is so important that being number two becomes more shameful than being number three.

Lyric Quiz 3 (Mini Buffalo edition)

2010-02-02T22:04:00.000-08:00

We're due to leave Buffalo tomorrow. I promise the blog will become more interesting after that. Until then here's another lyric quiz and because some of you have done so badly on the previous quizzes (stand up the good Dr Girvan Burnside) I'm going to give you the artists as well as the lyrics. All you have to do is name the songs that name check the City of Buffalo.

1. And it's a long way to Buffalo, It's a long way to Belfast City too - Van Morrison
2. Truckin, up to Buffalo, been thinkin, you got to mellow slow - The Grateful Dead
3. What is it about Birmingham, what is it about Buffalo - Ani DiFranco
4. Cos I'm the one with the fat mad skills, and I won't choke like the Buffalo Bills - Ice Cube
5. It's 2 a.m. and traffic's slow, Another ladies' night in Buffalo - David Lee Roth

Buffalo Is Cold

2010-02-02T21:14:00.000-08:00

We just saw James Blackshaw in Buffalo. If you don't know James Blackshaw then you can thank me for introducing you to his music after checking out the youtube video below. James is an English boy who plays instrumental compositions on his 12 string acoustic guitar. He does so beautifully, with notes tumbling and falling like the colours in a kaleidoscope. The fingers of his right hand move like little robotic limbs while his left hand, when it's not simply resting, moves with a languid grace. In technical terms he is the most impressive musician I've ever seen. But I'm not a musician so I might not be qualified to back that claim up. However I can say without fear of contradiction that watching James perform is delightfully hypnotic. Both visually and aurally.

I mention this because James had played a gig in NYC the night before and had taken an 8 hour Greyhound bus trip to get to this snowy cold city. Now if you take an 8 hour bus trip out of London you will be pretty close to running out of towns and cities to play in. I find that more often than not what lies behind the differences between British and American culture is the scale of the two countries. The more time I spend here the more differences I notice. Like why can you see so much leg under the door of an American public bathroom door? Seeing underpants around the legs of musicians I admire is not helpful. But the big difference I'm noticing right now is the cold. Being Brits James and I exchanged a few words about the weather in Buffalo before his show. Words like "fucking hell it's cold" and other undeniable truths.

I say undeniable truths but actually I think someone is lying about the world. The latitude of Buffalo is 42.886N. Which is further south than Nice and all of the Cote D'Azure. Which is different from Buffalo in many ways. But mostly because it's warm. Even when it's not warm in Southern France it's not this cold. I know science tells us the explanation for this is the Gulf Stream. But when I'm this cold and I try and I'm supposed to be further south than Biarritz and I'm asked to believe it's because the sea is a couple of degrees warmer off Blackpool then I'm starting to lose enough trust in science to think that the flat earth society might be on to something.

It doesn't help either that Americans use Fahrenheit. When people here say it's minus two they don't mean minus two Celsius, they mean minus two Fahrenheit. Now minus two Celsius is cold. It's below the freezing point of water right? and having grown up in the North of England I'm pretty familiar with it. Minus two Fahrenheit is minus 17 Celsius. Which is below the freezing point of my brain. When Britain had a cold snap recently the temperature in a town in Cheshire fell to minus 18 Celsius and every TV news broadcaster sent a crew to report on it. When it's minus two Fahrenheit here... no one bats an eyelid. Which is probably as well because it might freeze shut.

Postcarders

2010-01-19T07:05:00.000-08:00

Location Canada. Toronto to be exact. Staying with one of my very best friends. Next week I'll be in Western New York staying with other equally good friends.

Most of my dearests aren't my nearests. And that is down to something called Postcard. Or to use its formal name Postcard From Hell. People who use Postcard are called Postcarders and as I'm going to staying with a few more Postcarders in the next couple of months I thought I'd better explain a little about them.

Postcard is a mailing list for fans of the now defunct Alt-Country band Uncle Tupelo. Now there's a sentence that requires some explanation.

1) Alt-Country is, or was, a genre of music that never really made much impact in the UK. Music nerds will argue (try and stop them) about what Alt-Country is. Does it differ from Country Rock or Americana (the label most often used nowadays to describe Country-tinged music of limited appeal) or even the dumbly named Cow-Punk? You probably don't care but questions like that can drive certain 40 somethings I know to bicker like the Peoples' Front of Judea.

2) The place where many of these socially awkward 40 somethings get to bicker is, of course, the internet. Now back in the day before bands had their own websites with forums where the future stalkers of America could argue with each other, fans were self reliant and created mailing lists. Basically, you subscribe to a mailing list and then any email sent to the list appears in your inbox. Lots of bands or artists have had mailing lists dedicated to them, but today most of these lists are dead or dying. Doubters is the name of the list for a guy called Richard Buckner and I get maybe 30 emails a year from that list. The Tom Waits list which is called Raindogs is a little busier, with maybe 5 or 6 messages a day. But Postcard is something else. I get about 200 emails a day from Postcard... a list that was set up for fans of a band that split up 16 years ago.

Postcard is unusual. We don't talk about the band it's dedicated to that much. Some people on there don't even like the band. And yet every day, about 100 people engage in chat and debate and banter. It probably won't surprise you when I say it's mostly men. It's probably even less surprising when I say it can be pretty juvenile and debates often descend into flame wars, or as we call them on Postcard... Douche-Offs (as in who can behave like the biggest douche-bag). Sometimes people even get so het up that they make threats of physical violence. But don't worry, it never comes to that, mostly the threats come from people who look like star wars kid.

3) In the mid 90s someone I used to know bought a CD at a car boot sale and left it at my house. (For the benefit of American readers, a car boot is a trunk, and a car boot sale is when 100s of people, fill their trunks with junk, and drive to a field and hold a giant yard sale.)

The CD was by a band I'd never heard of called Uncle Tupelo. (And note the presence of an American city in that name.) But when I put the CD in the player and pressed play I liked what I heard. Then after 29 second I loved what I heard.

01 Graveyard Shift.mp3

Country music was still something very few people in the UK would admit to liking. In fact very few people did like it. But I was one and I took comfort in the fact that my two favourite radio DJs, John Peel and Andy Kershaw, also knew that there was such a thing as good country music. I remember Kershaw once said, before playing something by Willie Nelson or George Jones, "Never trust a man who doesn't like Country music". (This was of course before Kershaw lost it and became untrustworthy himself.) But fewer people listened to Peel than they claimed, and fewer still listened to Kershaw. And this was before Johnny Cash released his American recordings and made it hip to like (some) Country so there really was little hope of sharing a love of Patsy Cline or Emmy Lou Harris with my contemporaries. But Uncle Tupelo sounded like they were doing for Country what the Pogues had done for Irish music. They sounded to me like Nirvana covering The Allman Brothers. They sounded totally new, but also, I suspected, like something I wasn't going to find in record shops in Manchester. I had to turn to the internet for information.

I was gutted when I found out that Uncle Tupelo had already split up. But at least I found out they had other records and they played a style of music called Alt-Country. And so did lots of other bands like Whiskeytown and The Scud Mountain Boys and Marah. I was excited about a whole new field of music which had passed me and most of Britian by, but now lay in front of me waiting to be consumed. I was a hungry kid in a sweet shop. And thanks to this mailing list called Postcard I was able to find other kids who had already stuffed themselves with this stuff and were only too happy to tell me more about it.

I know I wouldn't be here in this kitchen in Toronto, Ontario today if it weren't for Uncle Tupelo and Postcard. Especially Postcard. Because it has always been about so much more than Uncle Tupelo or the genre of Alt-Country. Through Postcard I learned about bands like Guided By Voices and The Minutemen - truly great indie pioneers of music. Because of Postcard I attended SXSW when that festival was not really on the radar of the British music media. Because of Postcard I read the book Our Band Could Be Your Life and learned that contrary to what I'd been taught, America was way more punk rock than the UK. Because of Postcard I made friends with people who live thousands of miles away from me. Because of Postcard I'm here and so are you.

Options

2010-01-11T18:19:00.000-08:00

View STTIS Master in a larger map

View as a larger map to be able to access the second page of potential destinatons.

Lyrics Quiz 2

2010-01-10T19:17:00.000-08:00

Ding, ding. Seconds out, seconds out, round two, round two.

Now then, mostly easy, though number 6 might be trickier than the others.

1. Till I found myself in Mobile, Alabama

2. Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota, Buffalo, Toronto,

3. With so much drama in the L-B-C
(L-B-C = Long Beach California)

4. Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River

5. Catching an all-night station, somewhere in Louisiana

6. They went on for ever and they... when I... we lived in Arizona

Answers will be published in April at the end of the trip. Winners will be notified much later.

56 Days

2010-01-10T07:41:00.001-08:00

When we decided to do this thing we figured we'd have upto 3 months to do it in, 90 days being the term of a visitors visa to America. Back in August we booked a flight (a one way flight!) to Toronto (I know it's in Canada) and started planning. A week with friends in Toronto and a week with friends in Buffalo meant the trip could start on the 1st of February. Or, if you're an American, February 1st. It seemed like a nice date to start. The end would come sometime in mid April as Carol is due to start teachig English at an unspecified Japanese University at the end of that month. So all in all, we were looking at being on the road for up to 75 days. Or maybe 70, as 10 weeks seemed such a nice round number

Now being a romantic fool I really liked the idea of buying a car and selling it at the end of the trip. But after doing the math/s it was obvious that the practical realities of hiring a new car that came with breakdown cover and insurance was simply too good a deal and so the foolishly romantic notion of buying a somewhat older car with a little character was left on the shelf. The attraction of a new car is especially strong as we plan to head west from Buffalo through the midwest and then northwest up towards Seattle. Friends who've done America in a cheap old beat up mini-bus didn't head north in the winter months. And they still had plenty of repair bills.

So after sighing and moving on from that minor dissapointment I looked into hiring a car for 10 weeks and hit another problem. Here's a fact to bore people with down the pub tonight... hire cars get serviced every 56 days. I don't know if this is a world wide rule or just an American one, but in the USA after 56 days on the road you have to return the car to the hire office. Of course you could just hire another one, but the problem is you have to take the car back to the hire office you picked it up from or face a one way charge (which could easily have been $1000.) So if we had to be back in Buffalo 56 days after pick-up then that seemed like it would be the end of the trip. And though 8 weeks isn't as nice and as round a number as 10 weeks, it's still fairly nice. It's two months after all. If both those months is February, and it isn't a leap year.

So we're limited to 56 days. Which means we'll visit less places. Then again, we'll spend less on motels. It also means we can spend a little longer in Toronto and Buffalo before we embark and that means we can watch the Superbowl with friends before heading out on Monday 8th February. Or February 8th if you prefer.

Stop one will be this place

All American Songs (...a start.)

2010-01-02T04:25:00.000-08:00

So you don't think America is self obsessed?

America - Simon & Garfunkel
America - Neil Diamond
America - Tracy Chapman
America - Jewel
America - Prince & the Revolution
America - Nas
America - Spinal Tap
America Drinks And Goes Home - Frank Zappa
America Snoring - Grant Lee Buffalo
America's Sweethearts - Fall Out Boys
American Baby - Dave Matthews Band
American Bad Ass - Kid Rock
American Fool - John Mellencamp
American Gangster - Jay-Z
American Girl - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
American Girls - Counting Crows
American Idiot - Green Day
American Life - Madonna
American Man - Velvet Revolver
American Nights - The Runaways
American Pie - Don McLean
American Psycho - D12
American Ride - Toby Keith
American Saturday Night - Brad Paisley
American Soldier - Toby Keith
American Superstar - Flo Rida
American's Abroad - Against Me
American X - BRMC
America's Greatest National Pastime - The Byrds
America's Most Blunted - Mad Villain & Quasimoto
America's Next Freak - FM Static
America's Suitehearts - Fall Out Boy
2 Of America's Most Wanted - Snoop Doggy Dog
An American Dream - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
An American Tune - Paul Simon
Ashes Of American Flags - Wilco
Bleed American - Jimmy Eat World
Coming To America - Neil Diamond
French Kissing In The USA - Debbie Harry
I'm Proud To Be An American - The Tubes
In America - Charlie Daniel's Band
Jesus Children Of America - Stevie Wonder
Last Great American Whale - Lou Reed
Last Of The American Girls - Green Day
Little America - R.E.M.
Living In America - James Brown
Miss America - Styx
North American Scum - LCD Sound System
R.O.C.K. In The USA - John Mellencamp
Spirit Of America - Beachboys
The American Ruse - MC5
The Americans - John Mellencamp
The New American Way - Dropkick Murphys
We're An American Band - Grand Funk Railroad
White America - Eminem

...and not forgetting...

America, Fuck Yeah - Team America World Police

Now that list doesn't include tracks by Canadians such as The Guess Who who sang about an American Woman, or Brits like the Clash who claimed I'm So Bored With the U.S.A. (I think they were lying) but even leaving out the foreigners I'm sure there are many, many more songs than this. However the point stands... America is obsessed with itself. (And I with it.)

Lyrics Quiz 1

2009-12-24T13:50:00.000-08:00

Now then, now then, guys and gals while you're all waiting for this epic trip to begin (early February since you ask) hows about a little distraction by way of a lyrics quiz?

See it's not just the titles of songs that name check American towns... there are countless references to American towns and cities in the lyrics of so many songs. So can you name the 12 songs that these lines come from?

1. Got a wife and kid in Baltimore Jack

2. Across the north and south, to Key Largo, love for sale

3. Danny says we gotta go, gotta go to Idaho

4. Jojo left his home in Tucson Arizona, for some California grass

5. Standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona

6. New Mexico ain't bad Lord, the people there they treat you kind

7. Seven years in Michigan

8. Working for a while in a fishing boat, right outside of Delacroix

9. Cause they'll be rockin on the bandstand, in Philadelphia PA

10. I was born in a trunk, in the Princess Theatre in Pocatella, Idaho

11. Well I broke down in East St. Louis, on the Kansas City line

12. She lives in Mojave in a Winnebago, his name is Bobby, he looks like a potato

I think half of these are dead easy and the other half are... er... dead hard. Except number 7, it's dead, dead hard.

And in the spirit of today's pin-up and the host of one of the greatest radio shows of all time... you can have bonus points if you name the artist most commonly associated with the song too.

I'll post a link to the answers later.

Probably.

Why are we?

2009-12-10T11:30:00.000-08:00

I’ve been obsessed with how many songs there are about American towns for a long time.

How long? Well I’d be tempted to say for as long as I can remember, but that would be silly. Except my memory isn’t what it was... so maybe it’s not that silly. But I’m sure my fascination with this musical tradition started before I was even aware that it was a tradition. As a teenage music fan I’d come across a song about some exotic-sounding city in the USA and I'd be intrigued. These places always sounded magical to my ears. Even if I had little or no idea what they were really like I’d be smitten with them. Sometimes a song would have been the first time I’d even heard of the place it was about. But that and the best efforts of British punk rock didn’t diminish the appeal of these distant metropoleis. (1) Even when I wasn’t sure if the place in question was a metropolis or a shit hole.

Back in the late 1970s I was a teenage muso and the highlight of any month would be a trip into town, on a bus to buy an LP. Actually, the trip back may have been the highlight, as it gave me a good 30 minutes to studiously analyse each record’s sleeve notes and track listing. And if I was really lucky... the lyrics too. I’m pretty sure I’d never heard of Baltimore before I bought Randy Newman’s Little Criminals (1977). If I’d seen the word Baltimore written down I might have guessed it was someplace somewhere, maybe in Ireland or Scotland, but I was pretty clueless I’m sure. Luckily the lyrics were printed on the back of that record, so before I’d even heard the song my imagination had been captured by this place which sounded like hell. Now, Manchester was a pretty grim place back in the late ‘70s but it seemed like paradise compared to the town Newman was singing about.

Hooker on the corner, Waitin' for a train
Drunk lyin' on the sidewalk, Sleepin' in the rain
And they hide their faces, And they hide their eyes
Cause the city's dyin', And they don't know why

The language was key of course. Sidewalks and hookers sounded exotic to me. Certainly more exotic than a pavement or a tart (as The Sweeney called them). And I’m pretty sure they would have sounded exotic to most teenage music fans in the UK at that time. In much the same way that the American songwriter Joe Pernice says words like ‘forecourt’ in Smiths’ songs sounded exotic to him. Still, since that day I’ve always wanted to go to Baltimore but when I tell Americans that I want to see Baltimore, they always ask why. At least they did before the success of the TV show The Wire, though that paints an equally grim picture of the city too, so I still have to explain myself. But I can’t really explain why because I’m not sure myself. Somehow I fell in love with some no doubt foolishly romantic idea of sleazy decaying towns. Maybe it was me, maybe it was Manchester (which was in a bad state of decay back then), or maybe I should just sue Newman.

That passion for songs about American cities and towns never left me and I started keeping a list. But there are so many songs that the list of places I wanted to see just kept getting bigger and bigger. Over 1200 songs and i know it's nowhere near complete. Still these songs have been calling to me. Especially the ones about places that I’d never heard of before or the ones that turned out to be about shitholes. New York and L.A. didn’t intrigue me half as much. Well, not until I heard songs about the underbellies of those towns. Take the song Straight Outta Compton (1998) by NWA, I still don’t understand how anyone can listen to that and not want to visit that neighbourhood. Though it seems I’m in a minority on that too.

But before I lead you into thinking I just want to go to bad ass places, remember how I said that i was intrigued by places that I'd never heard of before too. Well I also want to see the sleepy, boring, one horse towns in the middle of nowhere. Coastal towns they forgot to shut down and the soul sapping streets of suburbia. If a town inspired someone to write a song about it, and thats all I really know about that place then I want to go there. Places like Wichita, Mendocino, Lodi and Cincinnati. I mean who can resist a town called Twodot, Montana or Bald Knob, Arkansas. I even want to see the Tallahatchie Bridge that Billie MacAllister jumped off.

So this is blog will be a record of a trip into what I hope are the rarely seen but oh so common depths of the heart of America. I may not be Alan Lomax, but I’m game. Thankfully my wife Carol is game too. And if you’re game three then please do feel free to follow our journey here. Comments are always welcome, as are suggestions and even, if you’re so inclined, hospitality.

Muso Corner: I'm sure you all know Randy's version of Baltimore and Nina's too. But have you heard this cover by the late Billy MacKenzie. Pretty stunning.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

2009-12-08T04:52:00.001-08:00

This is where the title of this blog comes from. (In case you weren't big on music.)

02 Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.mp3