Repetune - The Songs of our Heads

Lindsey Buckingham - Holiday Road

Writing by Segal on Thursday, 4 of October , 2007 at 3:45 am

Listen to the first 30 seconds 

Great road songs create the illusion of motion and being hardwired to a culture that lives and dies by the automobile. For me, Steppenwolf recreates 1975. The Ronettes take it a decade further back. Holiday Road, a song written in 1983, achieves the distinction of placing me in suburban 1958.  Somehow, though I was born in 1978, I hear this tune and immediately phase shift into an otherness. My dented Hyundai becomes a resplendent Chevy, the six dollar sandals that I bought at Sav-On transmogrify into saddle shoes, and that parking ticket I got is now a bid to take Betty Jean to the sock hop, and maybe a canoodling session up at One Mile Creek later in the evening.

What makes this such a magical realization? Well, for starters, it’s Lindsey Buckingham, so undersupported by the public as an influential musical force, he makes Al Kooper look like John Lennon. Buckingham is solid record after record, never a misstep, never a false move, always bringing a new spin on an old idea, but operating in a time well past his prime window of acclaim with Fleetwood Mac. Here, he spins a few off-hand phrases (and I mean a few - there are maybe twenty words in the whole song), gets Beverly D’Angelo to sing backup, and channels Buddy Holly to deliver a choral harmony so sugar-coated, you’d need to brush after hearing it. Who cares that the image most popularly associated with this song is Clark Griswold driving that shitheap of a station wagon out of Chicago city limits? The song is strong enough on its own to evoke another image - blue sky, red sand, black top, no cops in sight.

In true repetune form, this is a song I listen to obsessively for a day or two, including it on the mix CD of the month, then put away for the other charms in my collection. However, on the occasion I have a day off from life and am heading in some random direction along an eight-lane autobahn, as soon as the needle hits 80, I’m singing to myself…

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Take a ride on a west coast kick

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Category: Lindsey Buckingham

What is a repetune?

It has happened to us all. For any reason, and sometimes for no reason at all, some obscure song we have heard but try to avoid manages to sneak itself into our head. It does nothing but repeat in our head over and over until one day, we realize it is gone. Then it only comes back again. These are those songs. These are repetunes.