Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [3]
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 juice 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