The idea of a journey, setting off on the road, the excitement, the anticipation of discovery, leaving the stress and worries and memories behind is a construct we all can identify with. The romance of the story of America is inextricably linked with the move from east to west, the crossing of The Great Divide, leaving the East Coast angst behind to find a freer, more individualistic life. The California Zephyr, a long distance passenger train that runs from Chicago to San Francisco, is a symbol of this journey and has been the subject of many songs, the most famous perhaps being that released by Hank Williams in 1956. Travelling 2,438 miles, and taking approximately 52.5 hours, it cuts its way through some of the most beautiful scenery in North America allowing the rider to relax and reflect, and absorb the vastness and majesty of the country.
This song, written by Jay Farrar (Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo) and performed with Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service) forms part of the soundtrack to Curt Worden’s 2009 film One Fast Move Or I’m Gone – Kerouac’s Big Sur. The film chronicles the events surrounding the writing of Big Sur, Jack Kerouac’s 1962 book, providing a fascinating insight into Kerouac’s life at this time. It is also an invaluable historical record given that many of the key contributors such as Laurence Ferlinghetti, famously the founder of the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, and Carolyn Cassady, wife of Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s great buddy, are no longer with us. Utilising Kerouac’s words, Farrar’s compositional skills and Gibbard’s airy optimistic vocal the song soars with hope and anticipation. The singer is ebullient, off on a new adventure, as America, the land of promise and opportunity rolls by.
By 1961 Kerouac was desperate to escape his life in New York. His seminal work, On The Road, was published in 1957, and it was described by The New York Times as a testament to the beat generation, its influence compared to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Kerouac was dubbed “the avatar of the beat generation” and the resulting overnight fame led to an influx of people who wanted a part of him. People who wanted to hang out with him, have sex with him, fight with him. He was drowning in unwanted attention and in trying to cope, drowning in alcohol. After 3 years he realised that, in his own words, he needed to make “one fast move or I’m gone” or less poetically “I’ve got to escape or die”. Ferlinghetti had a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, a couple of hours south of San Francisco and he offered the use of it to Kerouac to help him to get away from it all.
This song is about the first part of the journey west. It opens with an upbeat lightly strummed acoustic guitar and Gibbards’s perfectly enunciated vocal describes the journey. “Up the Hudson Valley, across New York State/ To Chicago and then the Plains” paraphrases Kerouac’s opening chapter. You can imagine Kerouac sitting back as he watched the scenery “All so easy and dream like/Crashing the Salt Flat daybreak”, as he stayed in his train roomette with his coffee and sandwiches.
As the chorus starts a celestial organ adds to the drama, lifting the narrative as Gibbard sings “Now I’m transcontinental, 3000 miles from my home, I’m on the California Zephyr watching America roll by”. Farrar cleverly mixes place and time with the refrain, the rider both appearing to have arrived but also still on the train, adding to the ethereal feel of the song. When Kerouac reached San Francisco he immediately went on a bender. In his hungover state he is haunted by the bells playing a famous sad song. ‘I hear “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”/Sad fog winds out there to blow/Across the rooftops of eerie old hangover San Francisco”, before he finally sets off to find Ferlinghetti and his cabin refuge.
Kerouac’s Big Sur, a nervous breakdown of a book, is a harrowing paranoiac odyssey which took the author to the brink of destruction. He wrote it in real time, in ten days on a 60 foot, single spaced roll of teletype paper which adds to the feeling that you are there in that cabin on that dark journey. Yet despite the dark undertones, the song’s chorus forces this to be uplifting, optimistic. And (spoiler alert) even the book ends with a degree of positivity with “Something good will come out of all things yet”.
Farrar and Gibbard’s album was released in a package with a DVD of Worden’s film and is well worth tracking down. The musical contribution made by Farrar and Gibbard brings the story to life and adds to the vibrancy of Kerouac’s legacy. It’s such a fine track and a fine album it clearly doesn’t do any harm to the legacy of the two musicians either.
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