The End of the Road Song
Chuck Berry wrote rock and roll’s first chapter. How does the story end?
Pete Townshend may have been the first to pronounce rock and roll dead — even as he willed it to survive, in its most urgent and primal state — in “Long Live Rock,” his vivid vignette of a classic Who concert.
Though the statement may have been designed to shock, such self-absorption wasn’t out of the ordinary. Rock and roll, after all, has always been its own favorite subject. But it is telling that one of the foremost songwriters of the genre, even during the decade that was arguably its creative high point, could sense that it was on the cusp of enormous change — and maybe even that its stars might soon find their best days behind them.
But Townshend was neither the first nor the only one to view rock and roll through an existential lens, as evidenced by the audio self-portraits of many of his contemporaries. And by looking back to one of the touchstones of its storied past — to the rise and fall of the road song — we can get a glimpse of not only how rock defined itself during its heyday, but also how its course toward an increasingly uncertain future was charted.
During a window of time before bands became brands, when rock and roll straddled the line between self-awareness and self-righteousness, the road song became a familiar formula and a staple among touring artists now largely relegated to the hinterlands of classic rock channels. Their arena-rock paeans to the touring life and the gritty road to the top — to both its pains and its pleasures — may seem self-indulgent, but they offered flashes of introspection in a songwriting climate that otherwise tended to emphasize rock and roll’s more decadent trinity mates: sex and drugs.
None of which is to say that these were tales of uncompromised virtue. Trading, as they did, in the loneliness of the touring life, temptations lurked around every corner. It’s a narrative as old as “The Odyssey”— the hero’s journey retold with modern-day minstrels in the starring role. And with that retelling began the earnest self-mythologizing of American rock and roll on the road.
Building on the themes of earlier, enduring hits — from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” to the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” — the road song truly came into its own in 1973 with the release of both Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band,” which topped the Billboard charts in September of that year, and Bob Seger’s often covered down-tempo lament, “Turn the Page.”
On the surface, the songs couldn’t be more different. With all the subtlety of its signature cowbell, the Grand Funk tune opens with a band out on the road for a quasi-Biblical forty days, but quickly establishes (“Booze and ladies, keep me right / As long as we can make it to the show tonight”) the tour’s real raison d’être: unbridled debauchery punctuated by concerts. Seger, however, offers a more plaintive and sober look (“Here I am / On the road again / There I am / Up on the stage / Here I go / Playin’ star again”) at the plight of the musician living for the fleeting moments in the spotlight in between long, monotonous hours rolling down empty stretches of highway. As it happens, the lyrics to both songs cite Omaha, Nebraska, whose location at the crosshairs of the U.S. Interstate System made it instantly familiar to the touring acts of the day yet effectively placed it in the middle of nowhere. For Grand Funk, the distance magnified the carefree liberation of living beyond the boundaries of societal conventions; for Seger, it only deepened the sense of alienation it fostered.
Taken together, the songs furthered the suggestion that being a rock star was, well, a job — even if that job was the stuff of fantasy for a record-buying public expected to sympathize with the performers who endured the tedium of tour buses, hotel rooms, and one-night stands for its entertainment. As a growing roster of popular songs would attest, the price of the adulation bestowed upon the artists was a life lived on the margins. By the mid-1970’s, songs ranging from AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)” to Boston’s “Rock and Roll Band” had all but codified the outsider’s hardscrabble path to success.
Before long, however, the formula began to lose whatever anti-establishment credibility it once may have had. Ostensibly a tribute to the roadies who set up and tear down the stage each night, Jackson Browne’s “The Load Out” reprised what had become the well-worn refrain of rolling on, show to show, through towns that all look the same — but with oddly specific lyrics that tempered appreciation for the road crew with the observation that their yeoman’s work yielded only minimum wage. Add in mentions of promoters and unions and it all was about as establishment as rock and roll gets.
Not surprisingly, some artists were more than willing to make musical hay of such hand-wringing by their peers who complained that the road was long and hard but neglected to mention that it could, eventually, lead to the big time. In the puckish “Life’s Been Good,” the pitch-perfect 1978 hit that reached #12 on the Billboard charts, Joe Walsh took some of the rarefied air out of rock stardom’s balloon: “I have a mansion, forget the price / Ain’t ever been there, they tell me it’s nice / I live in hotels, tear out the walls / I have accountants pay for it all.” In so doing, he shared rock’s open secret that, for all its self-styled individualism, success always would mean being part of the machine — so why not enjoy the ride?
For others less happy-go-lucky than Walsh, that question wasn’t rhetorical. As songwriting sensibilities — not to mention the direction of the music industry itself — continued to change with the turn of the decade, rising artists struggled to reconcile their fortunes and misfortunes and make sense of their unique circumstance as touring acts. For the Pretenders, in “Day After Day,” it meant fighting a war waged daily. For Rush, in “Limelight,” it meant taking part in artifice on a Shakespearean scale: “Cast in this unlikely role / Ill-equipped to act / With insufficient tact / One must put up barriers / To keep oneself intact.” Songs of isolation, it seemed, had given way to songs of insulation.
But by this time, the machinery — by any metaphor — already was transforming itself.
One unintended consequence of MTV’s meteoric rise and seismic impact in the early 80s was the virtual end of touring as rock and roll’s de facto corporate ladder. When Grand Funk and Bob Seger released their road songs, the circuit was the music industry’s proving ground for aspiring rock acts. Tour after tour, performers would strive to rise from clubs to theaters to arenas, and from opening acts to headliners, waiting and hoping to break through on the strength of radio airplay and positive word of mouth. In that regard, the system was as meritocratic as it was relatively orderly — the best live acts supporting the best records on the best tours eventually would be recognized and rewarded.
Of course, this only worked because the labels of the day still bought into the concept of artist development — of identifying and signing promising talents and giving them the time, space, and resources to grow into polished (read: profitable) artists. Once years of hard-won exposure on the road could be eclipsed by a few weeks of overexposure on the tube, the patience and attention span of the industry predictably became shorter. Concerts flourished — the newly minted superstars of the video age would go on to fill stadiums — but slogging along the road to the top no longer seemed a viable strategy for the would-be rock star. If that point already hadn’t been made clear, Dire Straits hammered it home in 1985 with “Money for Nothing,” their number-one single best remembered for its seminal animated video and reflexive lyrics: “Now that ain’t workin’ / That’s the way you do it / You play the guitar on the MTV / That ain’t workin’ / That’s the way you do it / Money for nothing and your chicks for free.”
Still, some artists tried to translate the pathos of the road song for the new medium, only to release videos — from Journey’s “Faithfully” to Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” — that managed to be as schmaltzy as they were self-aggrandizing. By 1986, with Bon Jovi’s Spaghetti Western-cum-tour video for “Wanted Dead or Alive,” it seemed that the earlier breed of road song had ridden off into the sunset for good. Once you deliver lines like “I’m a cowboy / On a steel horse I ride” and “I’ve seen a million faces / And I’ve rocked them all” without a hint of irony, where else is there to go?
Decades later, it’s tempting to look back at the road song as merely a musical relic of a bygone era. Born in vinyl and analog tape and fading with the advent of digital compact discs, those hits — and there were plenty of them — undeniably capture the spirit of rock at a certain moment in time.
In truth, the road song speaks volumes about the current state of music, if for no other reason than its sheer implausibility today. The rags-to-riches narrative of a song like Boston’s “Rock and Roll Band” doesn’t quite work amid the modern-day realities of the industry — for one thing, the contract the cigar-chomping, Cadillac-driving mogul offers the band almost certainly would be a rapacious 360 deal. And the rising heroes in any of that era’s songs now would likely find themselves hustling just to score a house concert or two to fill in the gaps between club dates.
It’s not that artists, at least those that “make it,” no longer sing about the trappings of their success — it’s that they’ve almost certainly taken a very different path to achieve it. The notion of a long but virtuous road to the top seems almost quaint in a digital age that has fundamentally changed the way music is recorded, produced, and distributed — much less how it is discovered, consumed, and shared. Whether it’s possible to produce a compelling rock song about the travails of going viral on YouTube, inking a licensing deal for a TV commercial or — heaven help us — appearing on American Idol remains to be seen.
But perhaps more than anything, the lonesomeness of those old songs reminds us, by comparison, of just how incredibly hyper-connected we are today — and begs the question of whether we’re better off for it. When earlier artists evoked the isolation of the road, it meant more than just alienation — they were singing about the constraints of space and time that resulted in distance both real and imagined: from the next stop on the tour, from loved ones back home, from tangible proof that each next show was amounting to something. To be on tour was to be unavailable and unreachable for extended periods of time — a kind of disappearing act in between appearances — something almost unthinkable in a wired culture that both offers and demands constant accessibility.
Today, even the perceived distance between artist and audience has all but disappeared, thanks to everything from the false sense of familiarity engendered by social media to the real-time coronation of talents on televised reality shows. And with it, so has the very notion of rock stardom itself, which always has been rooted in the kind of exclusivity that breeds both fantasy and indifference. Success, once measured by airplay, gate receipts and units sold, is now earnestly tallied in likes and shares, views and retweets. Where a band’s worst fate once was irrelevance, it is now invisibility — regardless of whether it has anything original or meaningful to say.
This much is certain: popular music and the industry that relies on it will continue to transform in ways we can’t foresee. Whether what remains of rock and roll can evolve alongside them is anyone’s guess, but one can only hope that some of its spirit will live on. And the key to its survival just might lie in not taking itself too seriously. Though he wrote these lines to “Life’s Been Good” nearly forty years ago, Joe Walsh seems to have had it all figured out the first time around: “It’s tough to handle / This fortune and fame / Everybody’s so different / I haven’t changed.”
