A new quarter is starting, and for those of us hailing from the
“hella” north half of the state, that can only mean one
thing: a seven hour car trip.
Fortunately, the sheer boredom can be alleviated by nothing more
than a robust CD collection and a passenger willing to DJ. Before
you know it, the formidable journey is just a few hours to catch up
on your listening, rock out with your buddy, and be, in the most
Kerouac-ian sense, on the road.
Well, that’s how I pictured it anyway. I set out for
Westwood on Saturday with visions of me and Randall
“Pink” Floyd going to score Aerosmith tickets with
Sweet Emotion blasting over the eight track. I saw Garth Algar and
myself belting out Bohemian Rhapsody with Phil about to spew in the
back. I imagined myself in a little Alfa Romeo rushing to stop the
wedding of the woman I love (you know how this one goes, right?)
And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.
That’s not what I got.
In retrospect, I should have seen it coming from the very start.
I left San Francisco and picked up my friend in Walnut Creek. It
was early, I had a headache, and I just wanted to chill out with
the latest Boards of Canada record, “Geogaddi,” for a
little while. For the first five minutes no one mentioned the music
and my hopes were high. But then it happened:
“Dude, what the hell is this?”
Ok, I’m not an unreasonable guy. I’ll concede that
abstract electronic music isn’t what most people want to
listen to on the road, and I willingly exchanged it for a record we
could agree on, Radiohead’s classic, “The
Bends.”
This was the high point of the trip. The tunes were great, the
road was clear, and we were singing along. But my happiness could
not last forever. I listened to the last song with trepidation and
then tentatively took out my CDs.
Radiohead had me in the mood to keep rocking and I had at least
a few options I could try. I suggested Built to Spill:
“Eh.” I suggested the Velvet Underground: “I
never really liked them much.” I suggested The Dismemberment
Plan, Pavement, X, Nirvana for Christ’s sake, anything!
Blank-faced stare.
At this point I was becoming frantic; I knew what was coming. I
tried a controlled retreat, bringing out some hip-hop, but it was
too late.
“Here, let’s put this on for a while,” he
said.
I knew it would be bad. I suspected it might be something along
the lines of Dispatch or Jack Johnson. But what went into the CD
player that fateful afternoon was worse than anything I could have
imagined. It was the The String Cheese Incident. A jam band; the
bane of any true rock fan’s existence.
I tried in vain to protest. Couldn’t it at least be the
Grateful Dead, the one really good jam band? But man did he want to
hear The String Cheese Incident, and he was the one handling the
switching. I could either pull over and force a change or do my
best to tolerate it for a while.
After about 40 minutes it seemed my fortunes might have turned.
My friend had fallen asleep. This was my chance. I reached for my
own CDs and found nothing! They were on the other side of the car.
He had locked me up in this horrible prison and then put the key
tantalizingly out of reach. There was nothing I could do, so I gave
a sigh and gave into my fate.
The moral of the story is if you want the road trip we’ve
all seen in the movies, you better make sure you’re with
someone who has the same musical tastes. As for me, I wanted
Kerouac, but all I got was wack.