Sarre-Chasm
What I Did on my Summer Vacation
by Jon Sarre
I took a long car ride: Portland, Oregon to Minneapolis, Minnesota and back again. You can probably imagine the scenic splendor of the interstate highway system with its oasises of fast food and gas hell which only break up the monotony of long stretches of inhospitable country with blue signs that read “No Services This Exit” as the fuel gauge inches further into “you should have stopped thirty miles ago, fuckhead” territory. Perhaps you can even see the crank-fed truckers, the Postum-gulping RVers and the ubiquitous frustrated-to-the-point-of-driving-into-the-guard-rail moms and dads with their sniveling, whining brats and those Jesus fish decals mounted to the back of their fucking ugly-ass mini vans. Ah, the knocking and pinging of the engine, the smell of fresh diesel, that Sieg Heil Führer Garth New Country station that comes in clear as a bell on an otherwise static-jammed band when you’re feelin’ lucky enough to chance it with the car radio. Did I mention the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota?
My lovely traveling companion and I had someplace to go on the Northern Minnesota shore of Lake Superior (a tourist-fleece-trap by the name of Grand Marais, where “last call” at the bar was a negotiable affair, nice). We found ourselves driving on scenic Highway 61, made famous by that formerly Jewish Minnesota-born folksinger, Dylan something or other… She’s driving and pointing out landmarks (the North Country was where she grew up) and I’m watching mirages disappear on the two-lane stretch of blacktop, wondering if Dylan just felt particularly provincial the day he wrote “Highway 61 Revisited,” or whether he actually heard something in the rocks that bounce off the road and rattle against the muffler or in the low moan of the wind as it comes through a partially cracked window. “Yes, no, what’s it to ya and what do you think?” Would be the answer offered by the Bob Dylan in D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back. Calculated contradictions to hide the man behind the curtain was what set the ’60s Dylan apart from the straight-forward Elvis and the dough-faced Beatles; the Bob Dylan everybody knows nobody knows. That geezer at the Grammys, the one staring at that Soy Bomb guy is someone else entirely, an impostor if you will.
He has some big shoes that’s for sure, a pop star/rock’n’roller/ folk poet/bard/jester/comic/joker/ fool/cynic/ myth debunker/myth in itself/icon/iconoclast/king/bum/ sap/seeker/fabulist/primitivist/activist/rabble-rouser/establishment figure. Like him or not, Dylan embodies the cranky restlessness (that used to be?) symptomatic of the American spirit: A fearless fraud who’s caught with more hats on than he could ever wear, but still won’t tell ya which one is his, or maybe I think somebody said something to the effect of “America’s not a place, but a state of mind.”
Hell, I can’t make heads or tails of him most of the time, but when he’s at his best, like on, say, “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” or [insert your favorite here], then there’s enough stuff which’ll resonate in the quick of yer cold hard soul and even Greil Marcus couldn’t intellectualize the life out of that with a tedious pseudo-scholarly post-structural Francophile comparison to a dead Marxist ether-addict who’s even a nonentity to the “radical” teaching assistant you had for introduction to Philosophy 101 that semester you attempted college and… Uh… I was… oh yeah, we spent many hours in the car in the company of Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, Johnny Thunders, the Stooges, Supercharger, Gaunt, Zen Guerrilla, The Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Sonny Boy Williamson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker.
In Itasca, Minnesota, we crossed the source of the Mississippi River: not much to see, running water which gathers steam as it flows southward, taking with it the hopes and dreams and more hopes of failures, fools, and the lucky few. The river erodes the geography and takes regional cultures with it, further and further south, to The Delta. I can’t even begin to imagine the stories carried by that river which starts as a trickle in some undistinguished berg. The Mississippi was the ultimate highway for American music: country, blues and gospel, along with their bastard offspring, rock’n’roll. That all developed along the river and its surrounding countryside: sharecroppers, tenant farmers, freedmen, hillbillies, darkies, and po’ white trash all drinking from the same cup.
That’s weird when ya think of how fragmented things are today. I caught about an hour of MTV recently and saw videos (when they play ’em) running one after another, each tailored toward a different tiny slice of the demographic pie. If ya tuned into to see/hear hip hop, you’re gonna change the channel when that new Garbage clip jumps on.
More choices has more and more vicious circled out to mean only more junk to sift through. Worse, most people don’t even care enough to look (as an experimental example, flip through this mag and read a review of a band you’ve never heard of; you may end up doing yourself a favor). When music was harder to come by (i.e. when a traveling band or the radio were the only ways to hear), it was doubtlessly more precious than in this post-consumer recycled society we live in now. Even if Chuck Berry and Elvis were prohibited by Jim Crow from going to high school together, you’d better believe they knew each other’s musical history. That’s a history too few people understand to have existed. In a time when the twenty or so year history of punk rock (as a movement, I mean, that’s to say I’m leavin’ ? and Iggy out of it) is left obscure due mostly to laziness (I’m talkin’ ’bout ‘zine writers weaned on Rancid who think NOFX is old school punk), the selective musical plundering and thievery which produced The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan just doesn’t happen any more. It’s all neo-ska, neo-swing, neo-Joni Mitchell, Beatles’ stepchildren, neo-cockrock, post-Kraftwerk, another look at Burt Bacharach, disco revisited, imitation Dylan and no-depression country. In these times, it’s sad to say, reactionism equals adventurism. Nothin’, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, but the past is all around you. Your Cherry Poppin’ Daddy is Cab Calloway in a reverse minstrel show, but Cab can’t sue cuz he’s dead. So roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky we need a neo-neo-classical baroque of ages. These dead horses we’re runnin’ now need a rest.
