Transportation in American rock
So far considering only trains and automobiles. Rock is shorthand for rock and rock-adjacent. I am not a musician or a music critic.
A cursory consideration1 of modes of transportation in American popular music suggests that when you want to run away, you drive off in your car (unless you're Bruce Springsteen, in which case you stop to pick up a girl, unless you're on a motorcycle, which comes with a girl). Of course, there are also questions, including but not limited to who's going to drive you home, whether a fast car is fast enough to escape the life you've been handed, etc.
Trains present a larger and more complex set of possibilities: You may hear them in the distance, mourn that they don't run no more, take them to Georgia, Detroit, Buffalo, or really anywhere, provided it's a one-way ticket. You may of course also work on the railroad (either to pass the time away or to prove your manhood against a steam drill). There also exists the possibility that identification with the train may eventually gain you (and by extension your fellow passengers) as a native son of your own country.
The other day I was trying to think of “Trouble in Mind,” or more specifically “Trouble in Mind” as performed by Ronnie Gilbert on her album with Holly Near. A lot of people have recorded the song, but none of them sound quite like Ronnie (and of course none of them start with Holly Near saying “Tear it loose, girl” before Ronnie’s classically trained near growl comes in and makes a lament into a rousing fuck you to heartbreak, depression, and suicidal ideation. I was trying to remember it specifcally for the line “I’m going to lay my head on some lonesome railroad line / And let the 2:19 pacify my mind,” but because my brain doesn’t work quite right anymore what I came up with instead was the line “I’d lay my head on the railroad track waiting for the double E / But the railroad don’t run no more / Poor poor pitiful me”—which in turn led me down a weeklong Warren Zevon binge (just the music part, not the lawyers guns money booze debauchery part). Zevon, as it turns out, is a massive trains in songs guy, which means he is my kind of guy, as my general rule is that if there’s a train in your song, I will like it.2
A more or less random sampling from my brain brings up “Nighttime in the Switching Yard”
Listen to the rhythm of the train go by
Listen to the train whistle whine
and “Keep Me in Your Heart for Awhile”
There's a train leaving nightly called when all is said and done
Keep me in your heart for awhile…
Engine driver's headed north to Pleasant Stream
Keep me in your heart for awhile
These wheels keep turning but they're running out
of steam
Keep me in your heart for awhile
and “My Ride’s Here” (which manages to incorporate both trains and automobiles)
I was staying at the Marriott
With Jesus and John Wayne
I was waiting for a chariot
They were waiting for a train
The sky was full of carrion
"I'll take the mazuma"
Said Jesus to Marion
"That's the 3:10 to Yuma
My ride's here..."
A long time ago a guy I used to know pointed out that “I Been Working on the Railroad” has a disturbingly anti-labor message, because really, who works “just to pass the time away,” particularly at a grueling, physically taxing job to pass the time away and not because, say, they need a paycheck. My mother streneously objects to this reading for reasons I can’t remember, but I have been thinking about it ever since.
So we have trains as a place you work, trains as a means of escape, trains as a means of imagined escape, trains as a means of escape through death, and, on rare occasions, trains as a way to get back home or to claim your place in the world and make your home accept you (not quite the “when you have to go there, they have to take you in” school of home, but close.
That we can encapsulate all those things in an engine hurtling down steel rails fueled by steam or diesel is, to me, a minor miracle. At least that’s what the dispatches from my overactive brain are telling me this morning.
Which is to say “what my brain has been chewing over for the past 48 hours or so.”
There are notable exceptions, of which the biggest is Soul Asylum, because I hate that fucking song.