Road Music: Various Artists - Gusto Records 1978

I'm afraid I'm going to have to start off this entry with a confession; I didn't realise until after I got it home that this was actually a double album in a non gatefold sleeve (boo!), and even though I sat down to listen to it, I didn't have the legs to make it all the way to side 4. If 'Road Songs' had come on a CD then I would probably have been happy enough to sit down and let the whole thing wash over me in one sitting, but the physical effort involved in getting up, turning the disc over and cueing up the tonearm four times is only not a chore when you're listening to something you're actually enjoying. And whilst that may be a sneak preview of where I'm going with this, truth be told I wasn't enjoying myself. Not really. But assuming that side 4 doesn't turn into 'Trout Mask Replica', I'm confident that I'm heard enough of 'Road Music' to get and then give you the gist of what it's all about.

Sarcasm aside though, I think my comments above raise a valid point in context. Albums devoted to driving music are nothing new; a search on those terms on Amazon throws up a truck full of multi-disc box sets. "Driving Songs - The Ultimate Collection", "Now That's What I Call Drive", 'Greatest Ever Driving Songs', 'Driving Rock', '40 World's Greatest Driving Anthems' - these are the tip of a fairly hefty iceberg and all are stuffed to the gills with soft rock, 80's power ballads, anthemic indie, 70's AOR standards and you can pretty much guarantee 'You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet' and something by Aerosmith will be on every single of them. Blasting these out at max volume in the car can transform the dreariest Monday commute into an open topped drive down the Pacific Coast Highway with the ideal partner of choice in the passenger seat, and there's nothing quite like belting out "Cause I'm as free as a bird now, and this bird you'll never change, oh, oh, oh, oh" as you pull into your dedicated parking space at the office. Such harmless fantasies are the social Vaseline that makes life bearable. Almost.

My point is though that, as good as these songs sound in the car, they have a life of their own outside your vehicle too; these are songs to drive to, they are not songs about driving. 'Road Songs' is a different sort of beast. These are mainly songs about driving. And not driving just any old thing - these are songs about driving trucks. Huge, eighteen wheel trucks. And driving them long, long distances. Don't believe me? Just take a look at some of the song titles: 'Six Days On The Road', 'Truck Driving Son Of A Gun', 'Give Me Forty Acres To Turn This Rig Around', 'Endless Black Ribbon', 'Overloaded Diesel', 'Truck Drivin' Man' - there's no ambiguity here. And whilst this stuff may have purpose in the 'cab' of your 'rig' as you haul lumber across the Mason Dixon line, it would surely be a very dedicated trucker who'd want to listen to songs about their job in the comfort of their own home once they'd parked up for the night.

Which means that the ideal medium for this would surely have been cassette (or 8 track cassette)? Something you could listen to on the move anyway; who would want four sides of this stuff on cumbersome vinyl? Well my answer to that is 'I have no idea', and that's really kind of my main 'problem' with 'Road Songs' - ultimately, it offers a peek into a world that's totally alien to me. My only knowledge of the way of the trucker comes from Beck's 'Truck Driving Neighbours Downstairs' ("Whiskey-stained buck-toothed backwoods creep. Grizzly bear motherfucker never goes to sleep") and I'm not sure that's enough to count as a valid evidence base. In a world of long distance love, heavy loads, CB radios, saucy female hitchhikers, state lines and endless run-ins with 'the man', I'm an outsider looking in with no real desire to be on the other side of the window. Tant pis? Who can say?

I'll be here all day if I run through this lot track by track, but suffice it say that, musically, we're talking straight country cliché here. Fiddles, banjos, steel guitars and shave and a haircut rhythms - 'Road Songs' plays it strictly Saturday night bar band chicken wire old school. Nothing wrong with that but, again, the fact of having four sides of this in one place works against it far more than the actual content itself; songs about truck driving present a very narrow palette, and by corralling a bunch of samey sounding songs with the same samey theme and lumping them all together makes it difficult to distinguish between them with any clarity. Some are flat out humorous, some are wryly tongue in cheek, some are morality tales delivered with the same gravity as a cancer diagnosis while others are so OTT with mawkish sentimentality they need their own trucking equivalent of a sick bag (step forward Red Sovine's 'Teddy Bear' - "Dad had a wreck about a month ago, he was trying to get home in a blindin' snow. Mom has to work now, to make ends meet, and I'm not much help, with my two crippled feet")
 
In isolation each would probably have more of an impact, but when they follow on like a steady parade of trucks in a convoy they eventually blur into one, with each song indistinguishable from either the last or the next until the steady drip turns into a form of water torture that only served to grind me down. Which is why I found three sides quite enough thank you. Saying that, I'm going to give the talking blues of Coleman Wilson's 'Passing Zone Blues' from 1961 a special mention in dispatches. Wilson's wry, machine gun wordplay puts me in mind of Dylan's 'Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues' and it's quite wonderful in it's own way. It's the only song here that I'll return to anyway. For the rest, well some of it is 'shit', some of it isn't, but none of it is really for me.