Riding the Road That Never Ends

 From my earliest days I have loved the idea of the endless journey – a journey taken not for the plain dumb act of reaching a destination – but because journeying is in the end  a way-to-be.  And often, at the heart of this dreaming were the wide free spaces of the United States. As a kid I would watch cowboy films as much for the exotic sights of the canyon. the towering cactus, the grand holy emptiness as for any weary plot line. I remember listening Paul Simon singing about looking for America with Kathy on a Greyhound Bus. Whilst I should have been reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen and Mill On The Floss by George Eliot for my A levels I was reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac! Not surprisingly my results were abysmal. (Woody Guthrie’s Bound For Glory still sits by my bed at home for when I get restless.) And on leaving college my first sensible act was to get a one way ticket to Atlanta , board a Greyhound Bus there for the three day ride to LA riding through the Chuck Berry song of Texas, New Mexico, Tuscon, Phoenix, San Bernadino, Pamona to Hollywood.   
​Riding the Road is my attempt to capture the spirit of this. (The Studebaker, the homemade dress and the blue-stemmed grass were visual gifts from a good friend) Scroll down to listen to the song
Cactus photo (c) Dinny Pocock 2016

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Riding on the Road
(c) Steve Bonham 2016
In a Studebaker 61, that’s smells of oil and dust
A beat up old convertible, whose soul is made of rust
Rides Jenny and her lover, laughing as they’re chasing trains
He’s got his foot down hard, Going like a hurricane
Headed down the lonesome way, the road that never ends,
Across the heart of America, That the spirit comprehends
Is in the river and the old state line, the prairie, and the plain
The highway of forgotten souls, who won’t come here again
Along the road that never ends,
The Road that never ends,
(riding on) the road that never ends.
 
From the stop a long way back, still lingers on his tongue,
The bitter taste of coffee, as he’s humming a Bob Dylan song
The country boy is picking out where the rebel soul begins
Thinking that if it all came down it would not be a sin
And behind the car the bluestem grass, is dancing in a haze
Bending to the rhythm of, the passing of the days
She remembers the man who told her once this moment’s all you’ve got
There’s not much use in longing for the things that you have not
Along the road, that never ends
 
In her homemade dress, cotton flowers in the wind
He says, babe you’re looking fine, and she’s turned to him and grinned
He can’t help noticing that on the curve of her sweet breast
And a drop of beer has trickled down to linger there at rest
He's thinking they should stop sometime, as the shadows run to gold
To make love under the shooting stars, before this land grows old
There’s so little that encircles her, like it’s from this place she’s drawn
It would be the sweetest thing to wake with her at dawn
Along the road that never ends,
The Road that never ends,
(riding on) the road that never ends.
 
Later under the tree of night, as the stars dance their pavanne
Running from the eastern light in the trail of a caravan
Somewhere in the lonely dark, a prairie dogs makes his move
Is he just a punk on fire with something left to prove?
Jimmy’s cursed, she sometimes feels, to keep looking for this grail
There’s dollars in his old blue jeans, a freedom kind of frail
As they flew across the universe like a bird that won’t be caught
She’s thinking he might be the rocket man but she’s the astronaut
Along the road that never ends,
The Road that never ends,
(riding on) the road that never ends
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 Riding The Road is available on I Tunes etc on the Steve Bonham and The Long Road album: The Murmuring of Thieves released March 2016



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