A Look At My Road Trip Playlist

Ugh... Sorry I'm late, guys. Driving 450 miles and having a welcome home party right after will make that happen.

My version had less nudity, but probably a much better soundtrack.

Dire Straits, “Sultans of Swing” – There are guys who listen to Dire Straits and guys who don’t listen to Dire Straits, and I’m a guy who doesn’t listen to Dire Straits. However, my father is (clearly it’s not an inherited characteristic) and has been for some time, and “Sultans of Swing” has been a part of his road trip mix since the pre compact disc era, when if you wanted to listen to a song in the car you had to actually hire Dire Straits (or an equally good cover band) to come along and play it while you drove, and then give them cab fare to get home. Regardless, I heard so much of this song on family road trips growing up that I now can’t drive across state lines without listening to it.

Cheap Trick, “Surrender” – Is “Surrender” a great road trip song because its driving tempo just makes you feel like going somewhere, or because I and all fellow nerds associate it with Conan O’Brien sprinting from New York to Los Angeles to host The Tonight Show?

Guns N’ Roses, “November Rain” – In the summer of 1992, everyone who lost their virginity in or around a car did so while this song was playing.

Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir” – Kashmir might be a great road trip song because Robert Plant first got inspired to write the song while on a road trip through a flat, boring, seemingly endless stretch of highway – which, if you’re on a long drive anywhere in the United States, you’re bound to encounter eventually (up yours, Nebraska). Incidentally, for any of you who spend a lot of time driving to Northern California from Oregon, I recommend listening to Kashmir as you come out of the Siskiyous and approach Mt. Shasta in the distance, right after customs. I can’t really make a joke about that. Just do it. You’ll shit bricks.

Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon” – For all I know, this could be crappy road music, but it’s my favorite album so I’m inclined to recommend it. I had all of the songs in my road trip playlist in order when I drove down, but coming back I hit ‘Random’, which mixed them up in a way that, while jarring to a snotty Pink Floyd fan like myself, made for an interesting segue when the mellow, drugged out instrumental “Any Colour You Like” led right into “Hey Ya” by Outkast.

John Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane” – I really like John Mellencamp – not in the sense that I like his music, because I’m not a huge fan, but because he’s got basically my politics but the popularity and talent to be able to write successful songs about how much Reaganomics sucks. Also, in spite of his fame and fortune, he still lives in his home state of Indiana, which I respect, in a mansion with his supermodel wife, which I respect even more. Look, some people write fan letters, some people pray, and I occasionally listen to a song about poor white trash, even though I don’t like it that much.

B-52s, “Rock Lobster” – The B-52s are such a guilty pleasure for so many people that they’ve earned this reputation as a ‘party band’ – you play their music at parties, because then everybody has alcohol as an excuse to dance and sing along with all the completely ludicrous lyrics. Being in a car on the highway is the next best thing: As far as everybody else on the road knows, you’re belting the lyrics and doing the robot to “Candle in the Wind” or something more respectable than a song consisting almost entirely of double entendres about marine life.

Steely Dan, “My Old School” – This is yet another song that, thanks to hearing it on my parents’ road trip mix tapes every summer throughout the early 1990s, I now associate with being in a car full of bags and using rest stops that smelled like the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Rolling Stones, “Brown Sugar” – For the 1998 Super Bowl, Pepsi released a commercial where a CGI fly drinks some Pepsi and then is inspired to start dancing around with a matchstick, singing the chorus to “Brown Sugar” in an annoying falsetto voice while the original recording of the Stones backs him up. I was nine at the time and I thought the song was catchy, and for a few weeks I’d walk around humming or singing the snippet that I’d heard in the commercial. “Brown Sugar! What makes you taste so good? I say yeah, yeah, yeah, woo!” I figured that the Rolling Stones had loved pouring brown sugar on their oatmeal so much that they up and wrote a song about it – and hey, I could relate, because that shit was and is delicious.

Imagine my surprise when I first listened to the whole song, shortly before making my road trip mix. It turns out this song that I had been cheerily humming along to for a good chunk of fourth grade was actually about white plantation owners buying slave women at auction and pretty much raping them all night long.

This doesn’t explain why I listen to the song while I’m driving, but I hope it helps you understand why I don’t like Pepsi.

Truman Capps has never heard a song with content as filthy as ‘Brown Sugar’ – which is saying something, because he’s listened to, like, five rap songs.