Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel. And get someone to sit in the backseat and film everything–turn it into a music video. Top-40 radio, at its zenith in 1957 or 1965, was made for the car, and the car was made for music videos. Even if, from what I remember, MTV seemed oblivious to this during its early- and mid-‘80s heyday.
Three driving videos that I’ve grouped together–two rather similar, the other markedly different. Think of them as the music-video equivalent of a road movie. I’d be adding two more if there were room enough: a fan video for Yo La Tengo’s nine-minute “Blue Line Swinger” that partly takes place in a car (I’ve already got Yo La Tengo penciled in for “I’ll Be Around”), and a driving-related video for Hot Chip’s “The Warning” that I once wrote about on a 2010 Facebook countdown of my 100 favourite songs. That second one is evidently gone, leaving me with this snippet from what I wrote at the time:
I love the video clip (not sure if it’s the band’s or homemade). Any video of “The Warning” should absolutely involve a long, contemplative car ride, followed by some spirited thumb wrestling.
The fact that it’s been pulled from YouTube tells me it too was homemade. Anyway, I absolutely love driving videos. I’d even go so far as to say that this blog is the remnants of two books I once tried to write and couldn’t: a book on power-pop, and a book on listening to music in the car. When I started the power-pop book, I came up against the fact that whatever it was I heard in Fudge’s “Girlwish” (or, to take a more famous example, the Flamin’ Groovies’ “Shake Some Action”), I just didn’t have the words to convey that. So, a few years later, I tried again, but this time I began with a list of songs that could only very loosely be described as power-pop, with the intention of writing about the experience of being out driving in the middle of nowhere–I had left Toronto a few months earlier and moved to St. Marys–and listening to Tame Impala’s “It Is Not Meant to Be” or A.C. Newman’s “You Could Get Lost Out Here.” Same problem: I couldn’t find the words to convey what that felt like. (Or else when I found them, it quickly became redundant to use them 50 times over.) So now this. Instead of trying to verbalize “Motor Away,” I can play off a video as a helpful shortcut.
Like a few videos I’ll write about here, I don’t know if the one for “Roadrunner,” a whirlwind early-‘70s jaunt through the streets of Boston, was user-uploaded or commissioned, long after the fact, by either Jonathan Richman, some contingent of Modern Lovers, or Rhino Records (who reissued the first Modern Lovers LP on compact disc in 1989). My best guess is Rhino; it’s just way too perfect a visualization of the song to be homemade, unless there was somebody out there in 1972 shooting all this footage and thinking, “One day there’s be something called music video that will eclipse the car radio in getting pop music out to the world, and then after that there’ll be the internet and YouTube so I can make it available to everyone instantaneously.”
I’ve never been to Boston, but I’ll trust the second user comment on YouTube–“can’t believe how much Boston has changed since, but to see that someone captured the city in all of its former glory is a beautiful thing”–that this is indeed the city that Jonathan Richman celebrates with such rapturous affection. Everything is speeded up drastically, non-stop for the duration of the song, so I can’t say for sure if we ever actually drive past the Stop & Shop* (which, reading up, concerns a store in Richman’s hometown of Natick, Massachusetts, not Boston) or what other local landmarks zip by. Everything is not rendered in one continuous single shot, even though it more or less feels like that–the effect is dizzying. Faster miles an hour, indeed: the song, the video, and especially the world we live in today, where I can watch this sitting at my desk.
If the journey in “Roadrunner” is undertaken purely for the joy of the thing itself, there’s an actual destination in Guided by Voices’ “Motor Away,” the same destination found in R.E.M.’s “Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars)”, Pavement’s “Box Elder,” and any number of novels and films: the journey from here–this town, this city, this place–to not-here, to somewhere else out there, because everybody knows this is nowhere.
When you motor away down the icy streets
You can’t lie to yourself that it’s the chance of a lifetime
You can be anyone they told you to
Oh, why don’t you just drive away?
Come on
Speed on
We’re inside a car again, but this time mostly driving through farmland, far from the city. The exterior footage rolls by at normal speed, but, in keeping with the song, the visuals are no less joyous than in “Roadrunner”: the driver, a young woman, sings along with GBV while gesturing, laughing, and mugging for the camera wildly (even flipping a middle finger at us at one point). In another world, “Motor Away” would have been the song playing during Claire Fisher’s epic leave-taking scene in the final episode of Six Feet Under, instead of the very ordinary “Breathe Me” by Sia–although, at barely over two minutes, it would have needed to be looped two or three times to get to the finish line. And the tone would have been slightly off–the defiance heard in Robert Pollard’s vocal was not really part of Claire’s mindset as she drove away, nor would it have necessarily paired up well with the collage of future deaths that closed out the series. But I think it would have worked beautifully anyway.
More suitable–perfect, in fact–would have been the Shins’ “The Past and Pending.” Six Feet Under’s final scene runs just over six minutes; “The Past and Pending” clocks in at 5:20, so with a little massaging, the timing would have worked out. The tone of Six Feet Under’s collage is deeply elegiac, as is “The Past and Pending.” Claire is driving in the here and now, but she’s thinking about the life she’s leaving behind, while simultaneously flashing forward to the future; the connection to the Shins song is right there in the title. I’m needlessly trying to redo Six Feet Under’s final scene–really, it’s pretty great as is, song notwithstanding.
What you do get in the actual “The Past and Pending” video is a melancholy, sometimes visually breathtaking drive through some rolling countryside, shared by a photographer, somewhere in his mid-30s, and his travel companion, an older gentleman who may or may not be his grandfather. I’m going to assume they’re driving through New Mexico, home of the Shins. (Haven’t been to Boston, haven’t been to New Mexico; as Marion Cunningham once said on Happy Days, “Howard, I’ve got to get out of the house more.”) The visuals are worlds away from the primitive, washed-out choppiness of the “Roadrunner” (because old) and “Motor Away” (because DIY) footage: bold colours, serene, still, picturesque. This is The Straight Story to “Roadrunner”’s Bullitt. They drive slowly, and they don’t speak; a stunning expanse of mostly cloudless, pastel-blue sky lies overhead. Now and again, they stop the car and the photographer snaps a photo, one of which he passes to the older man, possibly soliciting his approval. Where are they going? They’re headed for wherever the song’s key line takes them: “And lose yourself in lines dissecting.” In the video’s last shot they’re now driving through gray rain in twilight, and four photographs can be seen sitting on the front dash.
Before I ever discovered the “Past and Pending” video, that was one of my favourite songs to throw on the CD player and drive around to–sometimes three, four, five times in a row. The landscape where I am, at least to the untrained eye, isn’t markedly different from what’s seen in the video. Inspired by such sojourns, I shot my own video soon after arriving in St. Marys, documenting the 20-minute drive from Stratford into town. I took my camera, held it in place against the driver’s window with my left arm, and focused all my attention on the road in front of me; not totally safe, I suppose, but I rationalized that the extra attention compensated for the one-handed navigation. Anyway, after I transferred the footage onto my desktop, I added Grachan Moncur III’s “When” overtop–a song I rank right alongside John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”–and uploaded it to YouTube. You may or may not be able to view it: it was initially flagged for copyright violation, but it now seems to be viewable by anyone (search my name + drive). With all due modesty, I’d put it up against any of the three videos I’ve written about here. Meanwhile, the Feelies’ “Slipping (Into Something)” is still out there, waiting to be turned into the greatest driving video ever made. If you’re somebody who loves driving videos as much as I do, please, make that happen.
*Almost a year after writing that, CNN reported that 32 “underperforming” Stop & Shops in five Eastern states would be closing; their list included a Stop & Shop on the Boston Turnpike, but not the one in Nattick that Richman name-checked.
we don't want to know 