Rock on the Road

"Get your motor runnin', head out on the highway, lookin' for adventure and whatever comes our way . . ."

It's a good line from a good rock anthem - Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild - and it probably encapsulates for many people the rebel-yell appeal of just turning the key in the ignition, putting the pedal to the metal and zooming outwards towards, well, whatever comes your way.

Agreed, it's difficult to do this on Irish roads for more than several hundred yards - there always seems to be a tractor in front of you, a long line of traffic behind you or crazy drivers alongside trying to impress by going over the speed limit.

Let's be honest. Irish roads aren't for Easy Rider types; living reasonably close to the new Dublin-Belfast M1, I know this. You might get a stretch of clear road at certain times of the day when you can safely edge the car past the speed limit, but by and large the closest you'll get to having a warm wind whip through your hair is when you have the heater up to full blast.

America is different because the roads are different. It's no surprise that most if not all the rock and pop songs we associate with a yearning for freedom from the shackles of conservatism emanate from the US.

We can blame songwriter Bobby Troupe for putting the concept on public display through his song, Route 66: from one coast of the US to the other, it splayed open the nature of musicians and their need to travel in order to play.

It also highlighted the myth of the road as a wondrous sequence of places by which to investigate the state of everything - the heart, the nation, the people.

It was a mixture of writer John Steinbeck, photographer Diane Arbus and artist Norman Rockwell set to a soundtrack of rough and ready guitars and a backbeat you couldn't lose. It was, to all intents and purposes, the documentation of emotional roadkill on the three-chord highway.

Cars have played such a major part in the mythology of rock music and the wide-open spaces that it could only have been a matter of time before the genre provided its very own bards.

At one point, it was Chuck Berry - the former General Motors assembly worker reworked the likes of Route 66 and made sure his own songs, such as Promised Land and My Mustang Ford, passed the road test.

Then there were The Beach Boys with tunes extolling the virtues of motoring, necking and drinking root beer in songs such as Little Deuce Coupe and Little Honda.

Come the end of the 1960s, we had Bob Dylan and the likes of Highway 51 Blues, Down The Highway, Motorpsycho Nitemare, On The Road Again and Highway 61 Revisited. With The Beach Boys coming across as too preppy and Dylan's often abstract lyrics not hitting a common enough nerve, it seemed as if the road and its associated trappings needed an Everyman. Enter Bruce Springsteen.

Unlike the regularly bitter Dylan, Springsteen was a romantic, and it was through rose-tinted songs such as Thunder Road, Born To Run, Racing In The Street, Drive All Night, Used Cars and Highway 29 that he defined the concept of teenage tearaways and plain people chasing their dreams on the open roads of America. If anyone made it crystal clear what all this on-the-road lark was about it was Springsteen: it was about breaking barriers without breaking hearts (although this, too, was inevitable); it was about documenting the trials of ordinary people using words and images everyone could understand.

The concept as Springsteen defined it has rarely been superseded or bettered. Songs by other artists intermittently filter through - Prince's Little Red Corvette, for example, although we're quite sure the title is a euphemism for the Purple One's little gear stick - but generally speaking the time has passed.

Thankfully, the inclination and the longing remains, which is why you still see cars zoom by your side mirrors all the way from Falcarragh to Inchydoney and why the coupé has become more a status symbol than a temperature gauge.

Born To Be Wild? Hardly, but it's always worth a try, isn't it.

Steppenwolf:

Chuck Berry:

Bruce Springsteen:

Bruce Springsteen:

Prince:

Bachman Turner Overdrive:

Talking Heads:

Bob Dylan:

Junior Walker and the Allstars:

Alice Cooper:

Born To Be Wild

Route 66

Born To Run

Racing In The Street

Little Red Corvette

Freewheelin'

Road To Nowhere

Highway 61 Revisited

Roadrunner

Under My Wheels