The High Strung: Detroit to Seattle

Detroit, MI to Seattle, WA. Here’s the set up, it was a 4-day drive, and Derek has 25 days worth of music on his Itunes. Derek and I drove the stuff to the west coast, and Josh flew on the day of the show to meet up with us. Music, comedy and movies were an integral part of the drive. Movies take up a huge chunk of time in an alternate reality, so that’s helpful when you have 44 hours of driving to kill. But the music was just as good, especially for whoever is driving, I mean, it’s tough to watch a movie and drive at the same time. So here’s a little run down of the more memorable music moments in the drive.



First off, I realized a while ago, maybe three years ago that the very best music for driving is Hank Williams Sr. Something about that tic tack bass rhythm, you can guess it was a way to get that train track feel, and it works for tour vans too. So with that in mind, I became a Son Volt fan after doing 17 shows with them. Jay’s voice is one of the most beautiful voices I’ve ever heard, and he’s got some gem songs out there, especially when driving. So Derek and I listened to the song “windfall” off of their first album, Trace about 8 times on the way. It’s a mid-tempo country tune about driving. But the kind of driving you might do with the windows down, and a pair of sunglasses. I’ve played out Hank Williams, and my Best of Bluegrass tape was nowhere to be found for this trip. So we discovered a New Riders of the Purple Sage album. A couple of great tunes on that thing too. I’m a sucker for anything Jerry Garcia, and he’s the featured pedal steal player on some of those early N.R.o.t.P.S. albums.



One sequence of music we listened to started in the morning. First thing is, we slept in the truck somewhere in the southern Minnesota stretch of I-90. In the morning we cleaned up the mess in the truck and ended up finding a small one-hitter with year old pot resin caked in it. It was our friend Jeff’s pipe that I remember him losing last summer when he was on the road with us. So it’s funny, we’ve been driving around for a year with that in our truck. Anyway, Derek thought it’d be nice sometime in the drive to hit the resin, and then we’d ditch the pipe. This morning I started driving. I wanted to hear some high plains music, something like Bonnie Prince Billy, I dunno, I thought it’d be nice for that stretch of South Dakota coming up. We didn’t have any, and Derek made fun of me for wanting to hear that! He made a snoring sound, and went to sleep himself in the loft of the van. So I found Elliot Smith’s Either/Or. I love Elliot Smith, but in our truck you can’t hear the delicacy of his guitar playing, and in headphones there’s maybe nothing I wanna hear more than that lo-fi quality of his recordings, but in the truck everything one likes about Elliot Smith is lost over the roar of the diesel. I had to turn it off. So I put on The Bends by Radiohead. Of course it was good, but it didn’t feel right. I wanna hear something more organic sounding when I’m driving through Indian reservations, through badlands, etc…



Finally I found that if I wrote the name of a band in the search section of I-tunes, I could shuffle all their material without interference. So I popped in the Grateful Dead. I mean it should have been a no-brainer; this is when they are perfect. The Dead are one of those bands that when it’s the three of us, we all feel right at home with. We each have our personal tastes, but the Dead is one we all can get along with and really enjoy. So Derek and I shuffled through 7 of their albums. Aoxomoxoa, Blues For Allah, Dick’s Picks Vol. 3(disc 2 only), Mason’s Children (a non-official collection of early material), Two From The Vault, Wake of The Flood, and Workingman’s dead.

Derek decides he wants to smoke the grass now the Dead has locked into our mentality. It’s the natural order of things. BUT!!!! He can’t find where he hid the pipe. The music was amazing; we heard their albums, their live material, every type of Grateful Dead one can enjoy. The early material from Mason’s Children, songs like “Mason’s Children” and “Stealin’”sound like garage rock. Then you get into some 70s stuff that doesn’t sound as cool, but the songs are great, and groovy. Workingman’s Dead is such a great album. It’s got the country I needed, and the quality of the recordings is so real. I think if you cut into an old oak tree, and put a needle from a record player in it, you’d hear this album. Gorgeous. Now the live stuff is good because it lasts forever. I think for most people, that’s the reason they hate the Grateful Dead. But if you pay attention to every instrument, within those jams, it’s more fun. And what else do you have to do while you drive, right? You’ll begin to notice how weird Bob Weir’s guitar playing is; it’s like idiot savant guitar. What can I say, I’m a Deadhead, I’ve seen 10 shows in my life, and I have a picture of Jerry taped to my overdrive pedal! By the way, I hate that the super hipster haircut magazine, The Fader, who refuses every time we have a new record out to review it, has put Jerry on the June issue’s cover. I don’t want hipsters to start liking the Dead. They are my band, and I don’t want some fucking cocaine snorting, tight pants haircut asshole thinking he’s on top of this trend of liking the Grateful Dead. Fader can have Mos Def and Death Cab for Sleepy, but don’t go around bastardizing a truly good band. They probably don’t even talk about the band, just him, and what kind of heroin he used to do.

So a couple of hours later, I’m still driving, and we get rolled by the fuzz. Fuckin’ A. Man, we NEVER travel with drugs, no pipes, no stuff, nothing. Once in a while I might have a beer in the back seat, that’s about as illegal as we get. But Derek and I found that fuckin’ pipe, and Derek can’t remember where he hid it. The cops say we had a light out---it’s all bullshit. They give us a warning about the light, and then take me into the car. I’m shootin’ the shit with him, talking about his satellite radio, the band, whatever. But then his dog in the backseat moves a bit. I looked at the pooch, and the cop’s like

“I’m gonna send the dog around the vehicle in a minute here, you got anything illegal, drugs or weapons?”

“No sir.”

“Pipes or paraphernalia?”

“No sir, not that I know of?” I’m freakin’ out, for the first time in a long time, I’m lying to a cop about this sort of shit. He says,

“That’s not what I like to hear, that usually means you got something.”

What a fuckin’ prick. Of course the dog smells something, they always do, and after two more cops drive up they begin to search the entire truck. After looking at every stomp box and bag full of gear, clothes and boxes of CDs, they found nothing. They couldn’t even find that pipe. He pulled out a pillbox full of Aleve, and did a quick check in his mobile drug lab. Nothing. They didn’t find my three Valium that my ex-girlfriend gave me, and didn’t give a shit about the pocketknife in the front seat, and best of all couldn’t find the pipe. Fuckheads!

After we loaded all our gear back into the truck we went to Wall Drug, but it was closed. I wanted a drink at the saloon there, but we didn’t have any drinks on the whole trip, not even when we stopped into a bar in Bozeman, MT to watch the Detroit Pistons lose another game.



That night, we listened to David Cross’s Comedy Central Present’s. It was great, he did a bit about Jesus having an effeminate southern accent, which was particularly memorable. And we were on the comedy tip, so we heard a “best of” of Bill Hicks. He was great also. Comedy is about second on the list of what to hear while driving. Usually the last thing I wanna hear is more rock and roll, just because we hear a lot of it. The only problem with comedy is the crowd is usually too loud, poor recordings. I think the third thing I like to listen to in the truck while driving is classical, it’s easy to hear, usually recorded extremely well, and no distorted guitars.

Derek and I spent the night at the foot of the national monument, Devils Tower, in the Northeast edge of Wyoming. In the morning, we did the mile hike around it. After that we drove. We took a listen to this Television live album, from 1992, that we got when we played with Richard Lloyd a couple of months ago. For as fucked up and ridiculous he was that night, the ’92 recording was really good. He remains an amazing guitar player and he’s only gotten better. He took a nitrous hit out of a whipped-cream container, and offered Derek singing lessons! Ha! On the live album, there were songs not on either of their studio records that I’m excited to get into.



We tried to have a block of Neil Young, Derek really wanted to hear that. You know he’s all about the American Indians, and driving through Dakota and Wyoming yer right there. We drove through a lot of reservations and stopped at a lot of outposts. The Neil Young disc that he imported into the computer has some serious skips on it, so most of the material we couldn’t listen to. The album I wish I had was Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Fucking beautiful.



We don’t usually pop in the Beatles, not that we don’t like it, but you hear it wherever you go. I guess Derek was feeling inspired, and he played Abbey Road. It sounded great. But something happened to his jukebox and we didn’t hear the song “Her Majesty.”



The last thing I’ll talk about is our last day stretch into Seattle. I thought I’d be fun to do a Seattle mix. So we did a shuffled playlist of Nirvana, Built To Spill, and Jimi Hendrix. I gotta say, I agree with Steve Albini, I don’t like the way In Utero sounds either. I love the songs either way and the other recordings sounded great. He didn’t have Incesticide. I love that one. The Built To Spill album, Keep It Like A Secret is great sounding record too. I love the way his voice sounds, which sounds like that live, no effects. All the guitars and drums sound big and full, and his songs kick ass. Doug Marsch has a colorful way of expressing himself. Yet nothing can really compare to hearing any of Jimi Hendrix’s material. It wasn’t fair to Nirvana or Built To Spill! We heard some live shit from Monterrey Pop Festival, and Axis: Bold As Love. What if 6 was 9? (It was after 4 days of straight driving…!)

—as scribed by Chad Stocker of The High Strung