Road Trip?

Question

Sure, why not? Who wouldn’t be up for one? Crazy as it sounds, I’ve always had more fun on all road trips than any vacation to exotic locales. Invariably, there’s always one song you heard on the radio that sort of crystallizes the experience in your mind forever. In other words, you hear this particular song and it takes you right back to that time and place. So, my question is what are the songs you connect to certain road trips from your past?

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult – Sex on Wheels – 1991 – Los Angeles – The perfect song to listen to while cruising down Sunset Blvd. Also, this was my first visit to the City of Angels.

Alice In Chains – Them Bones – 1992 – Kansas City – An unusual pairing for sure. I had some friends with ties to KU, plus it was Halloween weekend. Little did I realize what you could get away with inside a haunted house.

311 – Transistor – 1997 – Cleveland – I was there to catch The White Sox at the Jake. This was the shortest of the three trips for me but I must have heard this song five times in little more than a 24-hour period. The Flats never did recover from the damage done.

Prof - Going good for a Monday, my friend. Yourself?

Sookie - Wow, that sort of desolation would make me go stir crazy. That's when you REALLY want to get away from it all!

icouldbeagain - If you're climbing trees, you must be having a great time. Awesome story!

Mike - For some odd reason, I'm not surprised, lol.

Answer 1

Dave Matthews - Dodo. The CD had just come out when my husband & I were driving to Rehoboth Beach for a wedding. We listened the CD for the very first time on the way there. It was the end of September (and my birthday!) and it was an unseasonably warm weekend. Whenever I hear this song now, I have memories of parking at the beach, running into a tourist shop and purchasing bathing suits & towels at end of season prices (like 70% off), changing in the store's fitting room and then literally running full speed into the ocean and playing at the beach, followed up by lunch at this little beachfront pub with crab dip that would make you cry, it was so good. It was a very good birthday. :)

Kid Rock - Cowboy. It's a terrible song. I know it's a terrible song. But everytime I hear it, I think of the road trip my best friend and I took to Mardi Gras. We decided to go on an absolute whim (we rolled into town the Thursday of carnival weekend, and had decided two days prior to go), so we obviously couldn't get cheap airfare. So we drove, twenty hours, nonstop. We slept for a bit in the parking lot of a Waffle House, and basically spent a week in a beverage-induced haze. (The drive home, FWIW, sucked. A lot.). This song was popular, and every time I hear it, I think of that 20-hour drive and how slap-happy we were, and I laugh.

Blair - Have Fun, Go Mad. I think about the week my best friend and I spent at the beach in Hilton Head. We couldn't unpack for three days, because there was a hurricane bearing down on the coast, and we didn't know if we'd have to evacuate or not. The storm turned north, and we didn't even get a drop of rain. This song is on the "Sliding Doors" sound track, which my friend had purchased right before we left on this trip. For some reason, this song stuck, and became our unofficial "song" for our vacation. Now, when I hear it, I think about our horseback riding adventure, and our personal mission to try EVERY single beer on a local restaurant's "beers from around the world" menu...

Answer 2

There are a couple of albums that I attribute to trips in the car.

When the family moved back to the 1,000 Islands briefly (where I'm from), our house was literally in the woods and in the middle of nowhere. It was 15 - 20 minutes to the nearest gas station and grocery store, and 45 minutes - an hour away from the nearest department store or mall. Everything was a road trip then, and my soundtracks for it were The Breeders' "Last Splash" and 311's self-titled.

And the 3.5 years I spent in Cleveland, making trips back and forth to the Canton area several times a month, always had either the Foo Fighters' "The Colour and The Shape" or Everclear's "So Much for the Afterglow" playing.

Edit: All work and no play makes Sookie a dull chick.
All work and no play makes Sookie a dull chick.
All work and no play makes Sookie a dull chick.
All work and no play makes Sookie a dull chick.

Happy Monday, Prof! :)

Answer 3

Summer 1991 - Going from Philadelphia to Foxboro stadium in Massachusetts for a Grateful Dead concert with one of my college buddies, picking up another buddy in CT along the way. Huge traffic jam getting into the stadium. My car overheated about 2-3 miles from the stadium (sitting in the traffic jam). Fortunately, there was a gas station right there.

We hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck, and pretty soon we decided we'd do better by walking. Just as we get to where we can see the stadium, I realize that I've lost my wallet - and my ticket. I sure hope it's in my car (two miles back). I manage to catch a ride back to may car is a classic Grateful Dead VW bus, and it's not in my car. But someone turned it into the guy at the gas station desk, and it still has all of my money and my tickets in it! Whew!

But now I have to run to the stadium, or I'm going to miss the show, So I run the whole distance with another guy, who's also worried about missing the show (Traffic is still bumper-to-bumper), and I get into the stadium only missing the first two songs.

The second set gets closed out with "Goin' Down the Road, Feelin' Bad."

Perfect.

Hitched a ride back to the car after the show, missed all the traffic, & my car started right up (turned out to be a thermostat).

Thanks, Jerry! Those were the days . . .

Answer 4

The summer of 85' me and a few friends were staying at a motel on the main drag at Old Orchard Beach in Maine. We were sitting on the second floor balcony having a few brews watching the cars and girls go by.
The traffic moved very slowly and it seemed like every car that went by was blasting Money For Nothing by Dire Straits which was the big hit that summer. We must have heard it at least 100 times (no exaggeration) that weekend!
I still love that song because of the great memories it has for me.

Answer 5

Nothing too spectacular. It usually depends on the destination. If I'm going to Vegas, for example, I'll have Sinatra and Dino playing.

If it was a particularly long journey, then lately I've had Within A Mile Of Home by Flogging Molly playing as I reach my hometown. No place like home!

Answer 6

Concrete Blonde - The Bloodletting. Spring Break, New Orleans, March 1993. My best friend from college was at the height of her Anne Rice obsession, suggested New Orleans for spring break, and recruited two more friends to go with us. Before we'd even gotten out of Virginia, we were pulled over for speeding... got lost in Mississippi and almost ran out of gas... but managed to make it there safely... I'll never forget getting busted by the New Orleans cops for climbing a tree to snag leftover Mardi Gras beads! No jail time for us, just a stern warning - guess they were used to crazy college students.

In short, best damn road trip ever!

Answer 7

Almost every long journey of my childhood {mid 80's ~ 1993} had some or all of these cassettes playing :~

Fleetwood Mac ~ Rumours
Fleetwood Mac ~ Tango in the Night
Fleetwood Mac ~ Greatest Hits
Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac ~ Greatest Hits
The Beatles ~ White Album {LP 1}
The Beatles ~ Sgt. Pepper
The Beatles ~ Magical Mystery Tour

In case you can't tell, my dad chose the music!


I clearly remember in 1994, travelling through Wales in a minibus with family, hearing these :~

All That She Wants ~ Ace of Base {walkman}
Little Bird ~ Annie Lennox {walkman}
Careless Whisper ~ George Michael {my cassette on radio}
Top Gear ~ Various {album} {my cassette on radio}

What's scarey is that I can still see my uncle sitting in the driving seat, singing along to George ~ complete with hand & arm gestures! {we were parked at the time}.

Answer 8

Several years ago, I drove down with my brother to New Orleans so he could swap cars with this guy. Any way, New Orleans was a rainy, filthy, ghetto little hole...and this was before Katrina. I just remember us driving through that rainy weather listening to The Doors, and I always think of that trip when I hear "L.A. Woman."

In 2003, some friends and I drove down to Galveston Island (the closest beach to Houston) during the summer. I think of this trip when I hear "Wish You Were Here" by Incubus.

When I was very young, my family and I used to drive down to Louisiana to visit my grandparents for Thanksgiving. I'm reminded of those trips when I hear the songs that were played on the radio at the time..."Hold Me Now" by Thompson Twins and "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" by Tears For Fears.

Answer 9

Hows it goin Rckts?

The are two that I totally remember and actually will probably never forget. One of them happened twice and had the same effect with two different groups. There is a song by Pavement (suprise, suprise) called Box Elder that's about pickin up and leaving town and there is a particular line "It was the way that you smiled, it made me know at once that I had to get the f*ck out of this town" that happened to come on at the beginning of the car ride (not necessarily intentionally) and in both cases brought a lot of excitement to the car. It's a good, getting the trip rolling, blowin town and it's awesome kind of thing. Great tune.

The other one that was actuallly kind of a weird, very simple, but moving moment was when I was thinking of moving to Portland about 7 or so years ago. I went up on a scouting expedition on my own for about 4 days to check out neighborhoods in the suburbs of the city and have a look at Eugene in the process, but it was a weird time in my life (depression, looking for a major change, blah blah blah) and there was this point in the trip on the way up where I was driving up this mountain-y stretch of the 5 freeway in the cascades and there were so many trees and a really big lake and the beautiful mountains and what have you and Mother Nature's Son came up on the tape player. There was a weird sort of slowing down of everything and I was somehow amazed. I guess I didn't really notice too much with Birthday and Yer Blues on that particular round, but the rest of listening to disk 2 of the White Album in that round was amazing. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious douche-bag, there was something kind of spiritual about the whole experience of just being there, driving. That ended up being an incredibly lonely trip and I realized what it was that I would have been leaving behind if I had moved away at that point in time, but in that moment there was such a peace in being on my own in that place at that time with that song that I may not be able to articulate, but it was perfect.
Another thing I will never forget about that trip was driving for 18 hours straight (I had to take the long way because the 5 got blocked by snow) and getting home to one of my roommates telling my that George Harrison had just died and watching news coverage of that. Weird few days.

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Things are pretty good. I'm shaking off the weekend, but things are allright. Good and refreshed after a nice relaxing weekend.

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Sylvia reminded me of the kind of key song from one of the neatest road trips I've ever taken. All Nighter by Elastica. We, as a circle of friends had just gotten into that record and that was kind of a community favorite. Anyhoo, it was the Friday at the end of spring break for our senior year of high school and we were hanging out and realized that we had pretty much wasted the whole thing. My friend Jon (who unfotrunately was honest with his parents about the idea and couldn't go) proposed that we all hop in a car and roll out to Vegas (from Camarillo, CA about an hour north of L.A.). We were underage so we couldn't really do anything there, but we all told our parents that we were going to a No Doubt show that was happening in Santa Barbara that night and went to Vegas, grabbed a cheeseburger and came home (best Super Star with Cheese ever). About 7 of us piled into my old Jeep Cherokee. It was a classic, pointless 12 hour drive to go to Carls Jr. I think we listened to that self titled Elastica album 3 times in it's entirety over the course of it.

Hi Sookie, happy Monday. Yeah Last Splash!

Answer 10

The Offspring-Pretty Fly reminds me of a trip back in the 8th grade. It was a class trip and a friend's eaten lunch ended up in my lap on the bus. It's not a nice memory.