By GRAHAM REID
Highway I-10 heads south-east out of LA, across the spine and broad back of America. Texas is in the far distance.
I-10 is the southernmost interstate and along the way you buy jerky and ready-mix margaritas from gas stations to set on the dashboard, kicking-in the cruise control and smiling at a blissful blue sky where vapour trails run back to the City of Lost Angels. Set the radio to scan and the soundtrack changes from LA jazz-lite and the AM-rock of the Wallflowers to romantic Spanish-inflected Tex-Mex country-rock, balladeers of the disaffected and the occasional dark Southern realist.
Somewhere beyond the horizon lies the Gulf Coast and, if you are lucky, maybe even Florida and the warm shore of the Atlantic.
This is the road to places with magical names like Las Cruces, a chime in the romance of the highway. And highway songs have a romance of their own. Memories - real or imagined - of thunderheads and evening rain, things left behind, the promise of somewhere further down the road.
All this is encapsulated on The I-10 Chronicles (Virgin) ****, Bill Hearne taking you out through the palm-peppered canyons of steel'n'glass on LA Freeway ("if I can just get off without getting killed or caught"), and past Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz on Warren Zevon's Carmelita ("mariachi static on the radio and I'm all strung out on the outskirts of town"). By nightfall Willie Nelson is promising you're going where the weather suits your clothes (Everybody's Talkin').
The 1-10 Chronicles is one of those rare driving albums that make sense on whatever road you might be, especially when you'd rather be elsewhere: Joe Ely telling of St Valentine driving a red Continental and parking outside the video store, Texan Charlie Musselwhite and his Black Magic Woman, Meredith Marshall with Flaco Jimenez on accordion reminding you of Ry Cooder's broken-promise land Across the Borderline.
Real or imagined, The I-10 Chronicles is the road to travel.
If Wayne "The Train" Hancock had taken you on the road it would have been in for a decade after 1946 and into early rock'n'roll. He's a young man who knows Chuck Berry and 50s guitar swing.
His Wild Free and Reckless album (Ark) *** is stamped with a Route 66 sticker and in his imagination and reality he's playing the juke joints and piano bars, offering Flat Land Boogie and Bob Wills-style takes on Blue Suede Shoes. He's a fiddle-driven "interstate addict going back to Texas and the only gal I'd ever known."
Wayne's highway music is a good companion, but occasionally his stories get a little boring, so your attention shifts. The radio scans to ...
Slaid Cleaves and a couple of tracks from his Broke Down (Philo/Elite) ***. He's kinda melancholic. One Good Year, that's all he's asking to "take this losing hand and somehow win."
One man, his guitar, a small band and some observations of life and how it doesn't always work out. The radio scans and the highway opens up into classic music.
The radio guy back-announces the Flatlanders, a classic track from their reissued More A Legend Than A Band (Rounder/Elite) ***. Butch Hancock, Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, a rare combination of West Texas singer-songwriting talent with that Tex-Mex/dusty road edge. Legends in Texas and roots music each one of them. This was their sole album.
But next up it's Gilmore's exceptional new One Endless Night (Rounder/Elite) ****, where he takes that distinctive flatland voice to terrific songs by Hancock, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, Jesse Winchester and the late Townes Van Zandt. John Hiatt's Your Love is My Rest blows like a warm, top-down breeze across the night highway. You're thinking maybe this is his best yet.
Patsy Cline plays. The DJ says it's from a collection called True Love: A Standards Collection (MCA/Universal) ***. He also says the album's liner notes say Patsy was miscast as a country singer, that she was a pop singer. Huh. Just record company claptrap. And it's only okay, not that interesting. Then Patsy's doing Cole Porter's True Love and a couple of other standards draped in sweet strings.
Somehow it suits the mood as the headlights are aiming at the dawn coming up at the end of the road.
These are real or imagined stories and music from the American highways.
<i>Elsewhere:</i> Just drive, the man said
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