Texas is a land of wide open spaces, always flat, flat and then flatter still. One wonders whether any true-blue Texan can indeed subject themselves to life in an enclosed cubbyhole in corporate America, with its phony relationships, its faceless existence and its unreality. Perhaps that's what prompted this song.
But the more I listen to it, the deeper it strikes. It isn't merely about unreal life in corporate-land. It's a tired, telling plea to see through how, when one is well and truly caught in a rat race, utterly meaningless things wield unwonted power over us. It's a 'coming to oneself' of one caught in such a life.
Guy Clark's songwriting always has a force behind it that helps a song speak of things well beyond the mere lyric, and "L.A. Freeway" is probably the most demonstrative example I've ever heard. The weight of the music, even more than the lyric, seems to help us come to our senses about just how people caught up in the "busyness" of making a living can lose it so completely and still not know it. The road rage on the freeway is neither isolated nor incidental; it very really distills and percolates from the faceless, meaningless pursuits of corporate empire-building.
If I can just get off of this L.A. Freeway without getting killed or caught,
I'd be down the road in a cloud of smoke to some land I ain't bought
When one comes to one's senses, one just walks away from it all without looking back, and that's just what seems to be happening in "L.A. Freeway":
Pack up all your dishes
Make note of all good wishes
Say goodbye to the landlord for me
The son of a bitch has always bored me
Throw out them L.A. papers
and that moldy box of vanilla wafers
Adios to all this concrete
Got to get me some dirt-road back street
and again later:
And you put the pink card in the mailbox
Leave the key in the old front door lock
They will find it, likely as not
I'm sure there's somethin' we have forgot
Oh Susanna, don't you cry, babe
Love's a gift that's surely handmade
We've got something to believe in
Dontcha' think it's time we're leavin'
One longs for one's identity and hears the call of an old song one should have followed, instead of losing one's way in faceless corporate-land:
Here's to you old skinny Dennis
Only one I think I will miss
I can hear that old bass singing
Sweet and low like a gift you're bringin'
Play it for me just one more time now
Got to give it all we can now
I believe everything you're saying
Just keep on, keep on playing
It's a call to find one's calling, not just merely accept an imposed one. It strikes me as far deeper than merely wanting to "take a break" or "chill out" - these are superficial expressions. It's the song of a man who's had it up to here with the baloney and has come to a firm decision to walk away from meaninglessness into purpose.
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Guy Clark is generally classified, if at all he is, as a "country" singer-songwriter. Most often, his name is definitely not the first to turn up when people think of country "stars". His career is one that ignores show-biz utterly while still being in it. I'm pretty sure Guy neither knows nor thinks about what words like 'star', 'hit', 'charts' mean.
Oddly, he's found his calling - to observe, get inside lives, chronicle the inside with a home-grown back porch sincerity. His gravelly, rustic voice and scratchy guitar bring a certain solid, silent, tough conviction to his songs, which are mature, canny, knowing and almost always perfectly formed. When he sings in a concert, he always seems like he's trying more to get back into his songs and live them again, rather than merely perform them as memoirs of past (and forgotten) events. There seems to be no "second time" - it's always the first experience.
"L.A. Freeway", which appears on his first album Old No. 1 (1975), is the first of his songs I heard, which is very odd, because of all the songs I heard even later, it still remains the best song I've ever heard not just from him but from the entire output of the singer-songwriter genre. It is widely acknowledged, if unspoken, among country and country-rock singers, that Guy is a rare original, probably the best and most influential songwriter these genres might ever know.
The video I've posted is a live performance and it is the best I could get; the original studio recording is not on the tube. There are a couple of other live versions on the tube and I just chose the one that I liked best.
