Various Artists – Rig Rock Deluxe: A Musical Salute to the American Truck Driver
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
— Robert Service, “The Men That Don’t Fit In” (ca. 1907)
After the loneliness passes — and it does, three or four days on — long drives resolve into a unique, intoxicating peace. The dao of the road: pavement without end, amen. It is soothing out there, exhilarating, solitary, no one to lie to but yourself, and there’s no running and hiding from any of that.
Now, mine are mostly an itchy-footed people, and we have crossed two continents in three centuries. Come cheek-to-jowl against the Pacific Ocean, we are still driven restless, can always be counted on for rides to the airport. Dad has even lined one basement hallway with antique maps of the world, just in case. Understand: Robert Service’s little red book, The Spell of the Yukon, poems written during the Alaska Gold Rush, was (along with a couple string ties) my share of grandpa’s estate, and all I needed.
And so when I say to you that the third and most ambitious Diesel Only compilation, Rig Rock Deluxe, has been road-tested, believe me. It’s been across West Texas, back and forth over the Mojave, into the high desert northeast of Los Angeles, even to the office once or twice. And it’s a good friend, this one.
That these miles were not crossed in the cab of a semi means only that I was not obliged to attend the truck driving/prison guard school back home on Pacific Highway South, though I passed it on the way to work for five years and felt its pull. Even so, I have spent some small time with a split-shift and was for a time able to back a 24-foot rental smack easy into a loading dock.
These modest credentials seem worth offering mostly because we now live amid the fashion of trailer-park chic, where young men wear used gas station jackets and drive vintage cars they’re obliged to pay others to keep running. It’s the difference between real life and a costume ball. Still, even the charade reveals how deep the current runs, for no matter the Internet (the CB of the ’90s), cable television, USA Today, no matter what, that primal, solitary, restive urge is inescapably a part of this culture of immigrants. (And, one suspects, of its native people.)
The road, see, is not about the mad thrill Kerouac found, not for most of us. For us (that “race of men”), it has a fragile, edgy peace, and there are inevitably family and friends and lawns to cut at the end. Which is why the mythology of the trucker is so central to the music of the American countryside, why the twin impulses of elation and isolation are so exquisitely joined in this subgenre of country music. Especially when you factor in the many unfortunate souls to whom this wanderlust makes no sense; we call them farmers, ex-wives, suits, and struggle intermittently to leap that cultural gap.
It isn’t the where of going, it’s the going, the motion.
Diesel Only, then, began its trip as a monthly series of singles back in 1990, just after the majors proclaimed the death of vinyl. Jeremy Tepper figured there were plenty of truckstop jukeboxes needing wax, and he knew a whole buncha bands along the Eastern seaboard who’d be willing and able to help him fill that need. Not least of which was his own World Famous Blue Jays.
The first two Diesel Only compilations revealed a steadily widening net of friends and introduced talents such as Go To Blazes, Courtney & Western, Gwil Owen, Killbilly, and Amy Allison & The Maudlins to a broader audience. Both compilations were released in association with other labels; Vol. 1 appeared on the ill-fated First Warning, and Vol. 2 showed up on Fruit of the Tune. (For a time, singles were released in affiliation with Bob Mould’s Singles Only Label.) Both are a blast and well worth tracking down (especially the Courtney & Western part), but, as is the nature of compilations, they’re a trifle uneven.
Rig Rock Deluxe is a more highly evolved animal. It is a brilliantly coherent suite (almost a grand ole operetta, if that weren’t so awful to contemplate) that neatly yokes together the restless old with the relentless new.
Well, that’s all true and everything, but what it really comes down to is a collection of first-rate songs. Every last one of ’em. It’s all here, the legends, the loves, the lore and the lure.
A list of participants will simplify things some, so, in order, welcome: Don Walser, Buck Owens & His Buckaroos, Red Simpson & Junior Brown, Marty Stuart, Kelly Willis (with Jay Farrar), Shaver, Son Volt, Del Reeves & Jim Lauderdale, Cheri Knight, Steve Earle, the Yayhoos (Dan Baird and Eric Ambel out front), Bill Kirchen & Too Much Fun, Kay Adams & BR5-49, Nick Lowe & the Impossible Birds, and the Bottle Rockets — plus a concluding singalong that includes Walser, Rosie Flores, Wayne Hancock, Toni Price, Kim Richey, Jon Langford, and Lou Whitney & the Skeletons.
That list cuts across some lines, though (unlike its predecessors) it probably won’t introduce new figures to habitues of this magazine. It’s taken some time for my generation to see Buck Owens as anything more than that guy with the red-white-and-blue guitar on “Hee-Haw”, but his presence here underscores the care with which this collection was assembled, and bestows an especial poignancy to “Will There Be Big Rigs In Heaven.” (Special kudos to Jim Shaw’s line, “If my old Kenworth don’t come through / A new St. Peterbilt will do,” a subtle, honest bit of wry humor in a touching song.)
Linking Red Simpson (62-year-old author of “I’m a Truck” and many others, and consequently grandfather of the genre) with Junior Brown for the story-song “Nitro Express” is a grand gesture of equal resonance.
Two of the strongest tracks may also be found elsewhere. Shaver’s “Muther Trucker” is a hidden extra track on his new Highway of Life. Yeah, well, buy both, if only to honor this verse: “I was looking for something to write on / When the divorce papers come / So I flipped ’em over on the backside / And wrote down this truck-driving song.” Son Volt’s cover of “Looking at the World Through a Windshield” also adorns the soundtrack to Feeling Minnesota (which, in passing, is a dreadful movie featuring Keanu Reeves and Courtney Love, so don’t bother). It’s no surprise by now that Jay Farrar likes the road, and this is a beautiful blue highway song.
Kelly Willis’ collaborations with Farrar continue to produce beautiful songs. Here it’s the Lowell George/Bill Payne tune “Truckstop Girl”, a cautionary tale of lonesome love. It’s also yet another reminder of what a gorgeous voice Willis commands. As, for that matter, does Cheri Knight, as evidenced on “Wagons of Clay”. Teamed with the classic “Mama Was a Rock (Daddy was a Rolling Stone)” offered up by Kay Adams & BR5-49, the tracks serve as a reminder that the road warrior is not the only lonely soul.
Even Marty Stuart, whose presence seems vaguely suspicious, turns in a stellar love story, “Miss Marie & The Bedford Blaze”.
One last favorite. Steve Earle does Townes Van Zandt right on “White Freight Liner Blues”. And while normally live cuts on this kind of set suggest an unhappy accommodation of artists’ schedules, in this case it fits right into the suite of songs. The crowd might as well be strangers killing time in a roadside lounge.
Enough.
It’s all good. All of it. Even the addition of Englishman Nick Lowe.
Better go put gas in the car.