Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [83]
With my spray can of black paint, I added a few touches of my own. Just an exclamation mark on one set of initials and a few other bits and pieces. It was great fun, but I soon discovered that I wasn’t a very good graffiti artist. It’s not as easy as it looks. Ending up with dirty black fingers covered in paint, I didn’t make too good a job of it.
From Cadillac Ranch, I rode round to Ant Farm’s studio, where some of the artists were working on projects that Stan would later install in various parts of Amarillo. One of the wonderful things that they do is make road signs that are meaningless. They have slogans such as ‘I have known a slut’, with the idea being that people should just stumble upon them when they’re driving along or hanging out in a public place. They call this the Dynamite Museum – the ‘only museum in the world without walls’.
When I arrived, an artist called Drew showed me around and suggested I should paint one of their rogue signs.
‘What do you want to paint?’ he said.
‘I have no real idea,’ I said. ‘I had a thought last night and the one I came up with was, “She kissed me once but it melted”.’
‘For your sign? That is good.’ He smiled. ‘Are you going to draw a picture or are you just going to do words?’
‘I can’t really draw.’
‘I can’t either.’
‘You can’t?’
‘So what inspired you to do the Route 66?’
‘I think it was just rock’n’roll. It seems to mean more to Europeans than it does to Americans. It seems to have more sort of … magic.’
‘I think you’re right. I think it’s one of those things we just take for granted. To Europeans, it is what they associate America with – wide-open spaces and hitting the road. In America, it is our lifestyle, but we don’t really appreciate it.’
In the end, I painted a cartoon of my face. Beneath it, I wrote, ‘I have got biscuits’. It meant nothing at all, but then I started to worry that I’d done what I mentioned earlier – unwittingly absorbed another comic’s material. I was so concerned that I phoned my daughter, who works in a New York art gallery. I asked her if she’d once shown me some T-shirts, one of which might have said, ‘I have got donuts at home’. Maybe that had been floating around in the ether and I’d just adapted it a bit. But my daughter assured me that ‘I have got biscuits’ meant nothing to her. Then I met the woman in whose garden my road sign would be placed and she seemed delighted, so I was very pleased.
I think the rogue road signs are wonderful and ought to be expanded worldwide. My original idea had been to paint a sign that said, ‘Beware of Route 666’. I’m glad I didn’t do that – it’s kind of dark and strange. But I do wish I’d gone with ‘She kissed me once but it melted’. I don’t know what it means, but I like it.
As I said to Drew, I was nervous about drawing, although I am an artist. I’ll say that again: I am an artist. Once you admit that, you get good. I admitted it a long time ago, and I got good. I had noticed some rappers calling themselves artists – the kind of rappers who sold stuff on the street in New York, just regular guys. They would ask, ‘Would you like to buy my art?’ I thought that was a good stance to take. Gerry Rafferty tried to instil the same sort of thing into me when we were in the Humblebums – that what we did was art. Everyone else did junk, he used to say, but we did art. And I believed that attitude was true.
I also really believe Lenny Bruce’s theory that a comedian is a man who thinks funny things and says them, while an actor is a man who learns funny things and says them. They’re as funny as each other, but only one of them is a comedian. Going to bars and learning other people’s jokes then telling them in other bars does not make you a comedian – it makes you an actor … or a thief. It’s just being a rip-off artist. But if someone thinks funny things and is brave enough to say them on stage, then they have entered the world