By The Landlord
“Driving is a Zen experience. It’s life on the road in a five by ten world …
A little distance can put things in perspective …
Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination …
The road is a great equalizer …
You don’t know someone until you know where they’re going …
Home is wherever you park your truck.” – Finn Murphy, The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
"Eastbound and down, loaded up and truckin’, we’re gonna do what they say can’t be done.” – Jerry Reed
“I've been on every interstate highway in the lower forty-eight states by now, and I never get tired of the view.” – Steve Earle
“The best truck drivers are patient, independent, determined, and hardworking. They love adventure and like thinking quickly.” - Joanna Dunham
“Summer is, ostensibly, the safest time to drive on the Dalton Highway, truckers would later tell me. After all, it is always light, and there is no ice, no snow, no darkness to hide the sharp curves or steep summits that wind between mountains. In Prudhoe Bay's summer, truckers tell me, you can see everything, protect yourself from everything. But more truckers die that time of year than any other, because when we talk about safety on the Dalton Highway, we are always talking about illusion.
We are talking about delusion. We are talking about what is and always is the most dangerous highway in America.” – Amy E. Butcher, Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America
Gas-guzzling, tarmac-eating, bulbous, road-hogging thunderers, or banter-bringing, charming, trundling, community chelonians? Perhaps we both love and loathe them.
Trucks of all sizes have been a huge part of human culture and industry since the early 20th century, taking a load from the railways and waterways in the transport of mainly goods and drivers across the vast frontiers and landscapes of reality and the imagination. Anywhere in the world, from the US to Canada, South America, Africa, UK, Europe, India, China or across vast sun-baked territories of Australia.
It's no wonder then, that such a mode of transport covers such a fertile ground for storytelling and song, and that as being a vehicle for temporary or a permanent form of nomadic life, it has a romantic association of freedom of ideas and lifestyle, is a perfect place to listen on the go, and can transport us infinitely through location and time.
So then, by trucks, or lorries as we call them more often in the UK, we mean not cars, nor even buses, which are both topics covered before, but motor vehicles that transport freight, either general or specific payload goods, for all sorts of uses, including commercial use to individual house moves. They could include tiny, cute, coffee and snack vans to vast articulated lorries carrying several tonnes across thousands of miles. Their journeys may vary, but there's a specific feel to the weight and momentum of a truck. It's a vehicle that moves things, but also plots and emotions.
Rock-it dumper truck
Trucks are therefore also a vehicle for all kinds of human behaviour, from haulage with hatred to carriage with kindness, bringing superficial to deep emotions, brief and continued encounters, boredom and solitude to company and inspiration. Trucks are life in momentum, fast and slow, filled with joy, despair and frustration and revelation.
It’s a culture full of it’s own lore and anonymous sayings. “The best part of being a trucker is knowing that you’re doing something that matters. You’re not just moving goods; you’re keeping America rolling.” Or "Truckers don’t make left turns; we make three rights.” Or "Truckers are the last of the cowboys, roaming the open road and living a life of adventure and independence.”Or “Old truckers never die they just downshift.”
It’s no coincidence then that there have been many feature films based around the subject, within the broader category of road movies. Here’s a selection and might also bring some musical inspiration.
They Drive By Night (1940), starring George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino, and Humphrey Bogart is a tale of two brothers struggling with debt, setting up their own business, with romance, hitchhikers, romance, rivalry and tragedy, and is filled with old-school banter and retrospective sexism, but also a feisty heroine. Dangerous curves ahead? In all sorts of ways it’s real pick-up:
Two desperate Frenchman, a Dutchman and an Italian find themselves stuck in the South American town of Las Piedras. It’s no joke, however, as this set in the shadow of a corrupt oil industry, and truck drivers are needed to transport barrels of highly inflammable nitroglycerin. Someone has to do it, for the money. This tense thriller, The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur) is 1953 thriller film directed and co-written by Henri-Georges Clouzot, recently restored. Careful with that cargo …
Over in Britain, Hell Drivers (1957), has a stellar cast (Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan, Peggy Cummins, Herbert Lom, William Hartnell, Sean Connery, Gordon Jackson, Sidney James, Jill Ireland, Alfie Bass, David McCallum) and is a breath-taking white-knuckle ride of fights and tight corners and short-cuts, a tale of rival drivers working for a haulage company competing who can carrying the most to win a gold cigarette case. What can possibly go wrong? Plenty. It’s another smokin’ noir movie with a different turn:
Then to another era, and California, and Steven Spielberg’s first, and rather cutting-edge first full-length feature, originally commissioned just for TV. Duel (1971), adapted from Richard Matheson's short story of the same name, is about a stressed travelling salesman (Dennis Weaver) being chased down a highway by a psychotic tanker truck driver who we never actually see. But why? It just keeps on coming. There’s no time to find out, just get out of the way. It’s almost as if the truck itself has a mind of it’s own. Quite a killer of a road movie:
Breaker breaker one nine! The 1970s seemed to be the golden age of the trucker feature, taking on all aspects of trucker life and culture, filled with humour and mischief, a mix of the naff and the nifty, the cool and the celebratory. It also popularised the language of CB radio slang, which may also feature in your song suggestions. Smokey and the Bandit, for example, which became an overblown franchise, starring Burt Reynolds, tells of a rivalry between a rebellious truck driver, the Bandit, and Smokey, short for Smokey Bear, an angry cop.
Is CB radio still used in the age of the mobile phone? Quite possibly, as across those vast swathes of land in the US or Australia or India where there’s no coverage. It’s a club tuning to a particular channel with its own language, often about avoiding police speed detection, or pointing out other hazards, people, types of vehicle, terrain or places. A blinkin winkin, for example, is a school bus. An angry kangaroo is for some reason truck with one (or both) of its headlights out. Guitar town is Nashville. Chocolate town is of course Hershey, Pennsylvania. And on the radio, an alligator station is a user who talks constantly and seldom listens, ie who will not shut up (an alligator - all mouth and no ears). There’s much more to tune in on this, including on the ultimate gathering of truckers on 1978’s Convoy, directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Kris Kristofferson with a rolling cast:
Convoys of truckers can enter different sides of the imagination. George Miller’s post-apocalyptic Mad Max series of films, originally an low-budget hit in 1979, develops exciting, dystopian scenes of gas-hungry gang trucks tearing across a desert landscape, set in Australia. But perhaps his greatest is 2015’s jaw-dropping Mad Max: Fury Road, arguably the most thrilling of all of his franchise, which was made without special effects and an astonishing convoy of specially created vehicles, stuntmen and insane characters, including Coma the Doof Warrior, the mad musician who plays heavy metal riffs from a flame-throwing guitar, while standing atop a massive truck of speakers.
Finally, in a calmer, much more considered, and downbeat, but rather moving setting, comes Chloé Zhao's Nomadland (2020). Based on many real-life situations, it follows the economic collapse of a company town in rural Nevada, in which Fern (Oscar-winner Frances McDormand) packs her van and sets off on the road exploring a life outside of conventional society as a modern-day nomad, joining many others in the same, and still very current plight, dealing with their difficult situation with huge melancholy, but also dignity.
Another trailer in a topic about trailers. Your songs of might also include RVs and campervans, of all sizes, especially when they are trucks that haul people’s entire possessions, and lives, but also livelihoods, such as fish’n’chip vans, burger vans, ice-cream vans, and other travelling shops on wheels. Mobile libraries, anyone? Why not.
Many songs chosen for other subjects, have come up in the past, but a convoy of many more are queuing up to be chosen. Of these, you might peer in the window, but drive by such examples as Phantom 309 by Red Sovine (thumbed up for the subject of zombies and the undead), Blondie’s The Hardest Part (picked up for songs about iron and steel), or Diesel Smoke’s Dangerous Curves parked interestingly in songs about curves and spheres. But as ever there are many other places to go. Everywhere.
What are we driving at? Taking the wheel this week, are the strong and dependable hands and steering skills of the that legend of the Song Bar road, Marco den Ouden. Place your number plates in the parking spaces below for deadline destination at 11pm UK time on Monday for playlists published next week. It’s time to get the hell into Dodge. But also rollin’ out, let’s hit the road…
Flame-throwing guitars in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
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