Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [82]
It was immediately obvious that Amarillo was in a much better state than many of the Texan towns I’d passed through earlier. It’s a rather beautiful place, with a lot of impressive buildings and successful-looking people in nice shiny cars, so I reckoned it was a good place to stop.
The next day, riding through the west side of town, as Route 66 headed back into the wilds, I pulled over to have a quick look at what some people call Route 66’s version of Stonehenge. Smack in the middle of miles of empty flatland, on a giant, windswept wheat farm, stands a line of ten Cadillacs that look like they have plunged from high in the sky into the earth. For reasons best known to the artist, each of the semi-submerged Caddies is arranged at a slant on an angle exactly the same as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It might sound bizarre, but I think it’s an outstanding piece of art.
The site belongs to a local wheat farmer, artist and philanthropist called Stanley Marsh 3 (that’s the way he writes it), who enlisted some mates who were part of an art collective called Ant Farm to build Cadillac Ranch. Stan created it in the 1970s to represent the American love of automobiles and freedom, and it has to be seen to be believed. I had seen it in many books and brochures, but when I saw the real thing with the sun shining on it, my heart missed a beat. I fell in love with it.
What’s really great about Cadillac Ranch is that Stan encourages people to graffiti on it, so it changes every day. Every now and then, Stan resprays the Cadillacs in plain paint to create a blank canvas, allowing the public to start again from scratch, drawing and writing whatever they like on it. I came prepared with a spray can of black gloss, but I was quite nervous. Having seen so many pictures of it, it felt odd to be walking towards it. The closer I got, the more I thought it was a cracking thing. It’s a fairly simple work of art – just a row of ten cars poking out of the ground – but it changes shape in really interesting ways, depending on how you look at it.
What really appeals to me about Cadillac Ranch is that it’s a big two-fingered salute to the kind of people I really don’t like – the beige-ists of the world, the kind of people who get all upset about artwork that they can’t buy, hang on their walls or give to their Auntie Jeanie for Christmas. When they see something like Cadillac Ranch, they don’t know what to do with it. It brings out things in them that they find disturbing. I like disturbing people like that. I grew old without growing up and I’m very proud of it. I don’t give a toss what anybody thinks.
I’m so full of admiration for Stan and his creation. It was one thing to have an idea like Cadillac Ranch, but quite another to go ahead and build it.
But then, as I got within striking distance of the line of lovely, multicoloured cars, their patches and streaks of paint gleaming in the sun, I spotted something that made my eyes stick out on stalks.
‘To make love to me, I know it will never be Billy Connolly,’ it said.
What?
I read it again: ‘To make love to me, I know it will never be Billy Connolly.’
How in the name of God had that ended up on the side of a Cadillac? I thought that Stan himself must have done it. Then, looking down the line of Caddies, I saw my name repeated again and again.
‘Billy + Amarillo.’
‘Billy C.’
‘Billy, see you Billy.’
‘Billy Dilly.’
‘BC.’
‘Welcome to the windy city, Billy C.’
It was freakish. I wanted to look at them sideways, see them from different angles, just to get my head around them. That entire fantastic artwork had been prepared specially for me. What a lucky chap I was. And, God, this guy was good.
Cadillac Ranch had turned out to be the last thing on Earth I had thought it would be: a shrine to me. Well … I