#191) "Come Sail Away" by Styx - It was a bright afternoon in March 1989, and I had made the decision midway through the morning to skip school after lunch. Yeah, sure, I wasn't supposed to be cutting class (children of America...), but it was a beautiful spring day, the first in several weeks to hoist itself above 30 degrees. The high March sun was causing the crusted drifts of snow to dissolve into glistening wet stains on the newly exposed pavement, which if you looked really close you could tell were on the move, tiny rivulets busily working their way to Lake Superior.
Bright. Cloudless. Full of promise for the summer to come, the first summer that I would have my driver's license. There was no way I could spend the rest of the day inside; it was a real Ferris Bueller moment.
And so I lurked as inconspicuously as possible in a back hallway, holding my own against the swarm of students, waiting for the exact right moment to dip out through the big double doors without being stopped and asked for a pass by good ol' Mr. B. How I managed to have my parents' car on a school day I don't recall, it was our only family vehicle. But I saw my chance and sprinted across the parking lot, hastily keying into that 1988 Dodge Omni (nope, no Ferrari). I peeled out onto the street and went speeding out into the country like a bat out of hell.
It may as well have been a Ferrari for how I felt.
I'd only had my driver's license a month or two, but I'd already charted what I believed to be the perfect drive - a glorious 10-mile circle tour of the hills just west of town, that indeed would come to play a major role in my life over the next several years (but that's another blog post).
Near the end of the run was a pronounced rise in the land, from the top of which the whole of my world at the time could be seen in one splendorous eyeful - my hometown in the distance, splayed along the shoreline, tracing the edge of Lake Superior as it curved its way east toward Michigan. It was like a grand amphitheater where my childhood had been performed, and out of which I was sure, quite sure, I would eventually fly at breakneck speed toward untold glory.
Yes, that drive was a pretty big deal. It was a little road trip I could take at a moment's notice. I thought I knew what freedom was cruising along that trusty route. In fact, I was never more sure of anything than when I was driving those two-lane country roads at the very beginning of my adult life.
I must confess, sometimes I miss taking that drive, and being that age. It was a time of anticipation and expectation as pure, unbridled and uninterrupted as could be imagined, and what better anthem for such idealism than the distilled-down certainty that hope springs eternal found in "Come Sail Away"? Almost fairy-tale in its earnestness, not yet besmirched by jadedness or cynicism, realism or fatalism...all unavoidable by-product of spending too much time in the adult world.
"Come Sail Away" is another one of those songs that I have a very specific version of in mind. I'm not a fan of the studio version, from the 1977 album Equinox. It has to be the band's live version from 1984's Caught in the Act. Some songs benefit from the urgency of a live performance.
Some road trips do as well.
"I look to the sea, reflections in the waves spark my memories..."
#192) "Suite Madame Blue" by Styx - Not exactly a song about freedom on the road, instead, 1975's "Suite Madame Blue" is in the same camp as Mellencamp's "Pink Houses" or Springsteen's "Born in the USA", an indictment of America. To be sure, it doesn't pack quite the punch of those other songs, but for the time period in which it was released, it comes across accurately somber-sounding, emotionally deflated. Much like America in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era.
More of a lament than an indictment, really (which might be the reason for its lack of "punch"), "Suite Madame Blue" nevertheless has a few musically dramatic moments that I never get tired of hearing. It starts out slow, but builds in intensity, and at the end offers a fine opportunity to drum on the steering wheel and chant along as you drive. "America!...America!..." ;-)
"Once long ago, a word from your lips, and the world turned around..."
