In 1975, when Route 24 was being cut through the green hills of suburban New Jersey, when, in a way, this country was poised at the top of the roller coaster between the last era and the current one, there were all kinds of ways to ignore what the new road really was-ways to see it as a handsome and successful engineering project, or, conversely, as an impolite intrusion on the woodsy-lane landscape.
It somehow linked the abiding earth to the sense that we live, nowadays, in a TV set whose channel is constantly being changed. What I was hearing seemed at once removed and intimate, visionary, funny, ecstatic, optimistic and pessimistic. Through the use of connotative rather than denotative language (the method of poetry), the song seemed to connect me with my context (the futuristic landscape) in an intensified way. You might get a frisson from the second side of Abbey Road, and a smidgen of it from “Third Stone from the Sun.” Here, however, the material seemed to be of a different order. Rock, which is rooted in sex, rarely triggers the feeling. What I felt was a kind of awe, almost like the transcendent feeling that great art-say, Mozart’s Forty-first-engenders. Water? Time? Permanence and change? Dislocation? Whatever it was, it wasn’t the usual stuff of rock lyrics. The song sounded as much like an American Indian rain dance or a Buddhist chant as it sounded like rock. The voices were not white voices trying to sound black the subject was not love or the singer himself or rock ’n’ roll itself the melodic structure was not yet another variant of the twelve-bar, three-chord blues. They had my attention-but what was I listening to? The context was rock ’n’ roll, yet this wasn’t rock ’n’ roll. Into the blue again after the money’s gone Letting the days go by water flowing underground Before I knew what was happening, several voices had joined in, singing in ecstatic chorus: His voice was set against a shimmering background of bells, punctuated by a rock backbeat. how did I get here?īut this wasn’t a radio preacher. What I heard instead was a man declaiming, like a radio preacher:Īnd you may find yourself living in a shotgun shackĪnd you may find yourself in another part of the worldĪnd you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobileĪnd you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wifeĪnd you may ask yourself Well. What I heard when I turned on the rock ’n’ roll station that afternoon was like nothing I had heard before-totally unlike what I guess I wanted and expected to hear: the rock ’n’ roll of the past, with its friendly or mock-menacing, infectious, always sexual, anthem-like, we’re-all-in-it-together lull. Now, that has an unfortunate sound to it, an evangelistic sound-as if I had heard the word of God out there on Route 24, as if, like those people who put bumper stickers that say, I FOUND IT! on their cars, I had been looking for something that was missing from my life, and suddenly here it was! On the car radio! I was driving along that stretch of road, at a point where it rises to a maximum elevation and then falls, giving a sudden vista of the gigantic suburban/industrial plain spreading toward the city, when I turned on the radio and my life was changed. In the summer of 1981, I was driving east on Route 24 near Short Hills, New Jersey, a stretch of new road that several years before had, at a stroke, transformed the leafy suburban terrain of my childhood into a futuristic landscape-that had, at a stroke, allowed for the rapid transit of many lanes of cars between the city, which lay strung across the horizon twenty miles distant, and the newly expanded, transfigured and futurized, mall. You can find every Esquire story ever published at Esquire Classic.
This article originally appeared in the January 1986 issue of Esquire.