There are some songs that are so good that the lyrics don't even matter, or rather a few lines that just don't jive. In this song we have the third line of the song: "...as I'm eating a sandwich in a small cafe, at a quarter to three" and you just want to smack yourself in the face and wonder what the hell they were thinking. If I was to write a line such as that and sing it to someone they would never stop laughing. But when you attached the names Clapton, Dylan and Robertson to the liner notes it suddenly becomes genius.
Poor start notwithstanding this song just works. It works on so many levels, the chill slide guitar, smooth melodic tempo and southern-flavored licks played low on the bottom pickup that snap coarsely contrasting with the vibe, the mandolin like start to the first solo; it all comes together giving one the sense that it was put together ad hoc with a dozen joints burning at four in the morning.
The first time I heard this song was in a forty dollar hotel room in Van Horn, Texas about three hours east of El Paso in the middle of nowhere while a non English speaking Mexican welded the tongue of a trailer for thirty dollars in the parking lot of the diner next door at midnight. It had broken during a drive from Florida to San Diego when I first became transfixed with the American Southwest. Walking out of my door on the first and only floor that stepped right out to the parking lot I saw the shadows of the mountains lingering in the background behind the few neon lights of the main strip on a Saturday night. The scene was Hopper-esque in the style of "Nighthawks" with hints of "American Graffiti" mixed in as the Mexican boys rolled up and down the thin strip looking for something that was never there and never would be.
That slide echoing through my head and out off of the mountains, the surrender of the August heat that would soon begin again in a few hours. The desolation and openness under a pitch black sky perforated by specks of white brilliance and the knowledge that there was not one person on the planet who knew where I was or where to find me, the juxtaposition of seeing my Range Rover with three surfboards on the roof in the middle of the desert; all of it coming together to be one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. To know what freedom truly was and just how sacred it could be when experienced fully.
Later on in that new day I would cross the Continental Divide in New Mexico and roll downhill into the Pacific where the mountains were green and flower ridden, sweet smells of eucalyptus and jasmine permeated the air flowing through my sunroof and all four open windows while Clapton and Bob whined through the speakers once more.
All of which has nothing to do with the meaning of this song. Save it for a time and place where you can make a memory to savor years later while sitting in traffic surrounded by canyons of concrete and steel.
