Billy Connolly’s Route 66 Read online

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-12995-9

  Copyright © 2011 by Billy Connolly

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Copyright

  1 Get Your Kicks

  2 Winding from Chicago

  3 A Royal Route

  4 It Starts in Illinois, Let Me Tell You Boy

  5 Travel My Way, Take the Highway

  6 Go through St Louis; Joplin, Missouri

  7 You Haven’t Seen the Country ’til You’ve Seen the Country by Car

  8 Springfield, Illinois … Springfield, Missouri too

  9 Oklahoma City Looks Oh So Pretty

  10 You’ll See Amarillo …

  11 Albuquerque and Tucumcari, Make New Mexico Extraordinary

  12 Flagstaff, Arizona, Don’t Forget Winona

  13 You’ll Wanna Own a Piece of Arizona

  14 Get Hip to This Timely Tip, When You Make That California Trip

  Appendix

  Mileages from Chicago to Santa Monica

  1

  Get Your Kicks

  It was a moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I’d been travelling along Route 66 for a few days, and I couldn’t resist a quick detour to Arthur, a small community nearly two hundred miles south of Chicago. ‘Population 800’, it said on the sign at the edge of town. Beside it, another sign warned drivers that the roads might be busy with horse-drawn carriages. And with good reason: this was Amish country.

  I didn’t know what to expect. I’d always quite liked Amish folk; although, to be honest, I knew very little about them. It was just something about the look – the horse-drawn carriages, the hats, the plain, modest clothing, the way they carried themselves – that always led me to think they were really rather nice people.

  I parked my trike outside a simple house that backed on to a large workshop. Waiting inside was a furniture-maker with the best haircut I’d ever seen – like Rowan Atkinson’s pudding bowl in the first series of Blackadder. Beneath the mop of hair was Mervin, a man with a thick beard, no moustache and a slow, soft grin.

  Mervin makes the most outstandingly great furniture: the kind of stuff that will last for ever; the antiques of tomorrow. He showed me around his workshop, then we stood in his office while he answered every question I asked with total honesty. I could tell immediately that this delightful, decent man was being absolutely straight with me. He had nothing to hide. Men like Mervin have a ring of truth about them.

  ‘Why do you all grow beards and you don’t grow moustaches?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to grow a moustache when everybody just had a beard and no moustache,’ said Mervin. ‘We like to be the same and share and be equal.’

  How humane. In this age of individualism, what a delight to find a community of people who strive for equality and lead their lives according to whatever is best for everyone. We talked some more and Mervin explained the rules of the community, although the way he told it, those rules didn’t seem like restrictions but simple guidelines for a better, more harmonious way of living. With no sign of frustration about what he wasn’t allowed to do, Mervin totally accepted the boundaries of his life. Then he asked me if I wanted to go for a ride on his buggy.

  You know those black Amish buggies? I’d always fancied a ride on one of them, but first we had to get Mervin’s horse out of the stable and hitch it to the front of the wagon. Now, I’m a wee bit frightened of horses – not terrified, just a wee bit wary. So I lurked behind Mervin until he’d got the beast out of the stable, then I led it to the buggy and Mervin showed me how to hitch it up. We climbed into the buggy and off we went. After about two minutes Mervin said, ‘Here … ’ and handed me the reins. I was in charge. I was in seventh heaven. Riding along in an Amish buggy, with an Amish guy, waving to Amish people. It was a wonderful moment. It might sound ludicrously inconsequential – and I suppose it was – but it pleased me so, so much.

  Once we’d ridden in the buggy for a while, Mervin invited me and the whole film crew back to his farm for something to eat. And we’re not talking a bag of crisps here. An amazing meal was prepared by Mervin’s wife and mother, dressed in traditional long dresses, while a group of little girls, so beautiful in their bonnets, sang wee songs to themselves, completely oblivious to us.

  Not everything that I experienced with Mervin was quite so idyllic, though. While we were in the buggy, he told me about a family tragedy that was so distressing it took my breath away. I’ll not tell you any more about it until we come to that part of the story. All I’ll say now is that it broke my heart. Yet Mervin had a stoicism about him that had kept him sane in the face of a terrible event. If something similar had happened to me, it would have haunted me for the rest of my life, and it might have changed me for the worse. But Mervin had an acceptance that allowed him to remain a lovely, honest, happy man.

  Without any doubt, the time I spent with Mervin was one of the highlights of my life. I’ll remember that afternoon clip-clopping through Arthur, Illinois, for ever. There wasn’t much to it, but I think of my life as a series of moments and I’ve found that the great moments often don’t have too much to them. They’re not huge, complicated events; they’re just magical wee moments when somebody says ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re really good at what you do’ or simply ‘You’re a good person’. I had one that day with Mervin, the Amish furniture-maker.

  The peace and simplicity of Mervin’s little community stood in stark contrast to what I’d seen over the past few days along Route 66 – that mythical highway forever associated with rock’n’roll, classic Americana and the great open road. Most people, including me, would think of wisecracking waitresses and surly short-order cooks in classic fifties diners. Grease monkeys with dirty rags and tyre wrenches. Gas-pump jockeys and highway patrolmen. Oklahoma hillbillies in overalls and work boots. Stetson-wearing Texan ranch owners and cowboys at a rodeo. Idealistic hitch-hikers following in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac. Eccentric owners of Route 66-themed tourist haunts. Native Americans in the Navajo and Apache reservations of New Mexico and Arizona. Maybe even a few surfers, hippies or internet entrepreneurs in California.

  I’d already met a few of them, but when I’d set out from Chicago a few days earlier, my greatest hope had been to make a connection with someone just like Mervin. I’d thought back to similar trips I’d made in the past, like my tour of Britain and my journey across Australia. Every journey had involved visits to historic sites, explorations of beautiful landscapes, and planned meetings with locals and various dignitaries. The itinerary had always been tightly scheduled, as it has to be when shooting a television series. But in every case the best moments had resulted from an unexpected encounter with an interesting character – like the time ten years earlier when I’d made a television series called Billy Connolly’s World Tour of England, Ireland and Wales.

  I met dozens of fascinating people and visited scores of locations between Dublin and Plymouth, but the highlight came when I visited the grave of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, at the parish church of St Peter in Bournemouth. I suppose you could say I’m a bit freaky, because I’ve always been fond of graveyards. Many people think of them as morbid, sad places, but to me they’re monuments to great lives lived and they provide a connection to our ancestors and heritage. They’re full of stories ab
out people. And the story of Mary and her fantastically talented husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, is as good as they come. Which was why, one sunny day, I was standing beside her grave with a television camera and a furry microphone pointing at me.

  Just as I was telling the tragic story of how Percy Shelley drowned in Italy, a stooped figure appeared in the graveyard. Dressed in black, clutching a can of strong cider, and with a dirty green sleeping bag draped around his shoulders, he approached us with an admirable disdain for the conventions of television productions. Oblivious of the tramp’s approach, I continued to talk to the camera, relating the story of Shelley’s cremation on a beach. I’d just mentioned that Shelley’s friend Edward John Trelawny snatched the poet’s heart from the funeral pyre and passed it on to Mary, who then kept it in a velvet bag around her neck for thirty years, when the old fella stopped beside me and pointed at the grave.

  ‘Frankenstein, wasn’t it?’ he interrupted.

  For a moment I didn’t know what to say. Then I caught on. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Mary Shelley.’

  ‘Her husband was a poet, wasn’t he? Shelley … ’

  ‘Yeah, Percy Bysshe Shelley.’

  Climbing on to the grave, the wino sat cross-legged on top of it and swigged from his can.

  ‘Do you like Shelley?’ I asked. ‘Or have you just chosen to sit there?’

  ‘I studied him at school.’

  It was soon obvious that this was a bright guy who had fallen on hard times. We rabbited away about Shelley and Shakespeare – if you give people a chance, they shine – and then he told me he came from the Midlands.

  ‘The Black Country?’

  ‘Nearer Birmingham … You haven’t got a cigarette on you, do you?’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t smoke cigarettes.’

  I liked this man. He was very straightforward. So I offered to get him some. ‘What do you smoke?’

  ‘Just ten. Ten cigarettes,’ he said.

  So I walked off to a nearby shop and bought him a packet. When I got back we had a long chat. He was pleased with the fags and I was tickled to have made contact with such a lovely, open man. It was another of those wee unexpected moments that I’ll always remember.

  Something similar happened in 2009 when, during the making of Journey to the Edge of the World – my voyage through the North West Passage, deep within the Arctic Circle – I met Brian Pearson, the local undertaker, cinema owner and bed-and-breakfast proprietor. A former dishwasher, lord mayor and taxi driver, Brian was a complicated man who reminded me of plenty of people I’d known as a kid. He was well read, self-educated, but had a kind of grumpiness because he could see things turning to shit all around him. And his mood wasn’t helped by the fact that nobody tended to listen to him. Sat behind the wheel of his hearse, he drove me around the streets of his small town, relating stories about what really went on in his community. I spend a lot of time on my own – even when I’m with people I often feel like I’m alone because I think differently to most of them – so I’m always thrilled when I manage to connect with another human being. That afternoon, I felt a real connection with Brian, an interesting and interested man.

  So when I was preparing to spend six weeks travelling across the heartland of America, from Chicago to Santa Monica, I told myself that if I had one encounter that equalled the tramp at Mary Shelley’s graveside or Brian Pearson, then the trip would have been more than worthwhile. Less than a week into my journey, I’d met Mervin, and everything I’d hoped for had come true.

  My journey along Route 66 began long before the first wheel turned on tarmac beneath me. About a year after making Journey to the Edge of the World, various television companies approached me with a load of ideas about where I could go next. None of their suggestions appealed, but then I mentioned to one of the producers at Maverick Television that I had always wanted to travel along Route 66. They leapt at it – after all, Route 66 is the most famous road in the world. Everyone’s heard of it. My interest in it goes back to when I first heard Chuck Berry belting out one of the best rock’n’roll records of all time: ‘(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66’. Ever since, I’ve wanted to travel the length of Route 66 – just for my own enjoyment, without a film crew in tow, as a holiday. It’s the grooviest road in the world.

  Of course, many other roads have been made famous by songs. There’s the road to the Isles and the road back home. There’s Abbey Road and the Yellow Brick Road. And, as a Scotsman, I know all about taking the high road or the low road. But that song’s all about being dead. (I don’t mean to insult Scotland here, but it’s true. In ‘Loch Lomond’, a dying soldier is talking to one of his comrades. The ‘high road’, travelled by the healthy soldier, will be slower than the ‘low road’ that the dying man’s spirit will be able to take.) ‘Route 66’ is about being alive. It is rock’n’roll. From Nat King Cole and Chuck Berry to the Rolling Stones, Dr Feelgood, Depeche Mode and even Dean Martin, it’s a classic. And because of the song, Route 66 has become one of those magical places that you’ve always longed to see if you’ve got any interest at all in rock’n’roll music and being alive.

  None of the other songs urged people to hit the road simply for the pleasure of getting their kicks from watching the miles go by. With its exhortation to travel from Chicago through St Louis, Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman, Barstow and San Bernadino to Los Angeles, the song is an open invitation to anyone seeking adventure to find their thrills and spills on a California road trip. Who could resist? Not me, that’s for sure.

  But it’s more than just the song. Route 66 is special for many reasons. In America, all other routes, north–south and east–west, are pronounced ‘rowt’. It’s rowt this and rowt that. But thanks to the song, Route 66 has remained Root 66. And it’s steeped in a potent mix of histories – of America as a nation and of rock’n’roll as a cultural force. So it is perhaps not surprising that Route 66 appeals to everyone. Americans, Europeans, Australians, Japanese and Southeast Asians, you’ll meet them all along its 2,278 miles. It attracts car enthusiasts, motorcyclists, guitar players, people with long hair, silly people and dreamers. I hadn’t quite realised the extent of this popular appeal until a few days after it was announced that I was going to ride its full length. From then on, people started telling me that they’d always longed to do the same thing. ‘My wife and I have been saving up for five years to do Route 66,’ wrote one guy. ‘I hope you have a good trip,’ wrote another. ‘For me, it was the trip of a lifetime.’

  Like the Silk Road or the salt and spice roads through Africa, the Pan-American Highway or the Trans-African Highway, Route 66 is one of those wonderful trails that will always exist. It’s been called a road of dreamers and ramblers, drifters and writers. Well, I want to be part of that. I want to sit on my bike and ride Route 66. I want to go to Santa Fe and New Mexico. And I want to sing the song as I head down through the plains of Illinois and Missouri, the Oklahoma and Kansas prairies, the Texas Panhandle, the deserts and mountains of New Mexico, Arizona and California. I want to sing along with Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Nat King Cole and all the other guys who have recorded Bobby Troup’s fabulous song. And when I do it, I want to be singing at the top of my lungs as the miles pass beneath my wheels.

  More than anything, I want to reconnect with old small-town America. Like a lot of Britain, much of it has been smothered under a beige blanket of franchised coffee shops, fast-food palaces, faceless shopping malls and edge-of-town superstores with uninspiring, unimaginative corporate brand names above their doors. That’s not real America. It’s the creation of blue-suited marketing and advertising executives. Real America is to be found in all those small towns that have been bypassed by the freeways. That’s where I hope to find the fragments of thirties, forties and fifties Americana that I love. Funky neon signs enticing travellers to pull in at motels and diners. Or the giant oranges that used to lurk along the highways of California, selling ice-cold, freshly squeezed j
uice to thirsty motorists. At one time there was a chain of them across the state and they did a roaring trade. In the days before air-conditioned cars and express freeways, a single stand could easily go through six thousand oranges in a week. Now there’s just one left on Route 66 – and I want to see it before it’s too late.

  Representing freedom, migration and the empty loneliness of the American heartland, Route 66 is one of the essential icons of America – not just for Americans, but for anyone who, like me, is fascinated by the United States. Snaking across eight states, its concrete and asphalt was a ribbon that tied the nation together and enticed millions of Americans with a romantic ideal of adventure and an exodus to a better life.

  To some, it’s the ‘Mother Road’ immortalised by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath – an escape route for thousands of farmers and poverty-stricken families fleeing the barren dust bowl of Oklahoma and Kansas for the promised land of California during the Great Depression. To others – me included – just the mention of its name always evokes the birth of rock’n’roll and Chuck Berry urging us to ‘get our kicks’. To the beatniks and hipsters, it epitomises the great American open road eulogised by Jack Kerouac in On the Road. To the generation of baby-boom Americans that I know, it will always be associated with a 1960s television series, called Route 66, in which two young men travelled across America, seeking adventure and getting caught up in the struggles of the people they met. And, like my grandson, many of today’s youngsters know it from Cars, the Pixar animated film that was conceived as a way of making a documentary about the road and which features several businesses and residents along the route.

  When I thought about it, it struck me that in many ways, roads like Route 66 are as significant to American culture and social history as cathedrals and palaces are to European history. For a young nation founded on exploration and migration west, these great arteries of transportation became a major agent of social transformation. They did more than just move people; they changed America. Among all those highways, Route 66 was the everyman’s road that connected Middle America with southern California, a strip of hardtop that led to the birth of those icons of Americana I like so much: diners, motels and road food. Route 66’s 2,278 meandering miles inspired thousands of cross-country road trips. And what fun it must have been to travel its length. Taking its travellers from Chicago on Lake Michigan to Santa Monica on the Pacific Ocean (and vice versa), it traversed prairie, open plains, desert, mountains, valleys and countless rivers and creeks. What a trip.