For Route 66 fans who like their music to sound like it was recorded before rock started to roll, the Mercury Lounge in Tulsa on Halloween Night promises a treat. That’s when Wayne “The Train” Hancock will get the juke joint jumpin’ as he begins a tour through the Midwest.
For those who haven’t heard him, Hancock plays a retro mix of classic country, jump blues and Western swing, and his singing sounds quite a bit like Hank Williams.
He’s also a fan of Route 66. Last I checked, he has a Route 66 shield affixed to his guitar, he regularly performs “Route 66” at gigs, and he calls our beloved highway “the church of the road.” I remember an interview with No Depression magazine in which he told about his van breaking down at night on Route 66 in Vega, Texas. He was fortunate enough to have a old, nice motel on one side of the road and a mechanic’s shop on the other. Hancock got a good night’s sleep, and his van was fixed by the next morning.
That experience might explain the lyrics to his best-known song, “Thunderstorms and Neon Signs.” Here is a Windows Media sample of the song. Here is a RealPlayer sample.
The night promises to be a fun for another reason. The Mercury Lounge lists it as a “Hot Rod Halloween,” and the bar has hosted other events for classic-car enthusiasts to show off their beauties. So it sounds like an evening of tailfins and hillbilly swing.
Vega has always struck me as the sort of place Wayne Hancock would love.
Somehow, I always seem to be driving into or out of a storm by the time I reach Vega on my trips west. I recall driving into a thunderstorm one night with “Thunderstorms and Neon Signs” on the stereo in the Hippy Wagon as we rolled into Vega. The neon sign was dark, but mixed with the lightning was the glow from the twin flashing backlit plastic boxes that advertise “Vega … Motel … Vega … Motel” over and over, softly displacing the darkness with a hypnotic rhythm.
Since then, it’s become something of a tradition to drive into Vega with that song playing … almost as much of a tradition as driving out of Tucumcari with “A Pirate Looks at Forty” on the stereo.
(Yes, I probably *am* the only person alive who associates Jimmy Buffett with New Mexico, but the first time I pulled away from the Blue Swallow before dawn, bound for home, with the swallows glowing in my rearview mirrors and the sun whispering sweet nothings into the darkness around Tucumcari Mountain, I had Buffett in the CD player, singing “Mother, mother ocean/I have heard you call.” That we were in the middle of the high desert, a thousand miles from any ocean, mattered not at all; for one strange, perfect moment, the whole scene fit.)
What’s on the soundtrack to your Route 66 memories?
Emily