Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [10]
Sorted with helmet and gloves, it was time to christen the trike. I’d been looking forward to this moment, but taking the beast out for its virgin ride was a nightmare. It had a different gear-box from mine back home, so I couldn’t find the gears instinctively. But once I’d studied a diagram and learned how to go through the gears, it became a joy; although, for some reason, I still needed to know Serbo-Croat yoga to get it into reverse. I liked to think the soul of the bike didn’t want to have a reverse gear. It just wasn’t right – bikes shouldn’t go backwards. So I thought the bike was fighting it all the way. But once I’d worked it out, I was as happy as a clam. And, as you know, clams are very happy things.
With the camera crew ahead of me in a car, we did a big tour around the outskirts of Chicago so that I could get used to the trike. It was fantastic to see the city looming up all around me, like in a science-fiction movie. Then I rode into town and it was just great. The trike ran like a cuckoo clock.
The only downside was the weather. It was a dodgy-looking day, with the weather neither one thing or the other. One of those greyish, yellowy, funky, funny days. Every time I phoned someone in Scotland, they told me they were in the middle of a searing heatwave and I seethed with envy. That morning, I’d seen a weather report from Britain. It was mid-April and seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit, and everyone was running around in their underwear. I love the British fervour for throwing off our clothes. And the first people to disrobe are always the ones with the grubbiest underwear, like the guys I knew in the shipyards who put on long johns in September and took them off in May. Meanwhile, we were freezing our balls off in Chicago.
As I rode through downtown Chicago, past the famous water tower, I tried out the communication link with the director, Mike. It worked like a dream, and it was great to show him that I could talk straight to the camera from the bike. It meant that I didn’t need to stop at a location before explaining it to viewers. I was dead against television that spoon-fed information to people. If I said, ‘There’s a water tower over there,’ as I drove past, I could then talk about it later, knowing that the viewers would remember it. I didn’t have to stop, lean against it, point and labour the point that I was talking about a water tower. We shot a piece about the city from the bike as we drove along with all the other traffic flying around us, before eventually arriving at the shiny black monolith that dominates the Chicago skyline.
For twenty-five years, the Sears Tower in Chicago was the tallest building in the world. But it was overtaken in 1998 by those cheeky upstarts in Malaysia with their twin skyscrapers, the Petronas Towers. So these days it was just the tallest building in America, but that was more than good enough for me when I visited it. Built as the headquarters of Sears Roebuck and Co., the tower used nine exterior frame tubes of different lengths, from 50 to 110 storeys, bundled together to provide strength and flexibility, avoiding the need for interior supports. It was said that the architect conceived this technologically innovative building when he watched someone shake cigarettes out of a packet.
Officially, the building was rechristened the Willis Tower in 2009,