The Road Song

A Story by capmango

Copyright © 2004 Glenn R. Wichman. I came up with this story some time in the 1980s, finally wrote it down in 2003.

The Road Song

Cynthia’s Eats, Tripoli, Missouri, Friday, March 23^rd 1984. 7:30 pm

The fingers of Michelle’s right hand danced over the keys, creating a driving new-wave beat that she was liking very, very much. The sound ricocheted off the coffee shop walls and back into her very soul. She smiled at the rest of the band as each of them caught on to the tune and joined in. She looked past the band, past the tables and chairs that had been pushed aside to make room for their instruments and amps, and past the marble countertop to see her mom smile in approval, bopping to the beat as she wiped down the counter.

Michelle’s band, Euromobile, practiced at Cynthia’s Eats, the old downtown coffee shop, because everyone agreed that it had the best acoustics in town, and also because no one would let them practice anywhere else. They were practicing now to be the band at Michelle’s own 18^th birthday party, which was still a couple weeks away.

Cynthia’s Eats did a decent business with the locals in Tripoli. The farmers came in for breakfast, and the businessmen came in for lunch. Nobody came in for dinner anymore, which was just as well, since Euromobile needed the space in the evenings.

Suddenly, Mom was alternately waving her hands in the air and making a “cut” signal with her thumb moving across her neck. The members of Euromobile stumbled unevenly towards silence as each member noticed Michelle’s mom’s signal. Once the band stopped, Michelle could hear that the phone was ringing. Her mom answered it. Michelle hoped the conversation would be quick, so she didn’t lose her groove.

“Cynthia’s Eats.”

…

“Huh? Yeah, this is Cynthia.”

…

”No. Cynthia Marks.”

…

“Yes, I used to be. That was my maiden name”

…

“Uh huh. Uh huh. What’s this about?”

Cynthia came around the counter and sat down on one of the red vinyl-covered stools. Michelle’s dad walked out from the kitchen, drying his hands on a dishrag, and began listening with some curiosity to the half-conversation.

“Oh, you’re kidding. Why? Oh, I see.”

…
”No I don’t think we’re interested. I don’t think anyone is interested anymore. I can’t believe you’re interested. No.”

…

“Huh? Yeah, Ted still lives here in Tripoli. He’s in the book, you can look him up.”

…

“Yeah, Mike still lives here too. He’s not interested. Trust me.”

….
”I saw him two seconds ago. Actually I’m looking at him now. No you can’t. He’s busy. He has to do the dishes”

Cynthia winked at Mike. He smiled but looked very puzzled.

“No. No, I don’t know. I haven’t seen or heard from him since 1965.”

Michelle was trying to signal her mom to wrap it up. She had a new tune swimming around in her head and she wanted to get it into the keyboard before it went stale on her. But Mom’s conversation wound down slowly with promises to think about something, and to call back if minds got changed. The moment Mom hung up the phone, Michelle’s fingers hit the keys. The music of Euromobile reverberated again through Cynthia’s Eats, almost obliterating this conversation between Michelle’s parents:

“So what the heck was that about?”

“Some lady calling from California -- a producer or something. That music channel is doing some kind of retrospective or something, on all the number one hits from 20 years ago.”

“All of them? Not just the ones people remember?”

“Yep. She wants to interview us. They’re going to do a segment on The Road Song.”

The Sugar Shoppe, Tripoli, Missouri, Saturday June 19^th 1965. 11:00 am

Close to a dozen loud happy teenagers pushed their way into the Sugar Shoppe, leaping onto vinyl covered stools, spinning around, leaning on the marble countertop, and ordering malts and sodas. At the center of the crowd were three of the four members of the local band The Grapes, still in a celebratory mood a week after their big debut. They were the band for the end-of-year dance, managing decent renditions of songs like Come Go With Me, Sheila, Sweet Little Sixteen, Sea Cruise, I Like It Like That, and Surf City. The group didn’t write any material of their own, and they had no ambitions in that direction.

The man behind the counter addressed the Grapes’ tambourine-player-and-harmony-specialist:

“Sweetie, this crowd’s too big for me to handle. I’m going to need you on this side of the counter.”

Cindy rolled her eyes but complied cheerfully enough with her father’s request. She rolled across the top of the counter, grabbing an order pad as she did, landed on her feet and immediately took orders for two strawberry sundaes. “Pop, have you seen Mick?” “Yeah, I saw him last night after Graduation. As I recall he spent the whole evening hanging onto your ear by his teeth. Didn’t you notice him?” “Geez Pop! I mean have you seen him today?” “No, but if you want I could close down the shop and go look for him.” Their banter was cut short as they each had to attend to customers.

The Sugar Shoppe sold candy, ice cream, sodas and burgers. The patrons were divided pretty evenly between the local youth, and the travelers headed down Route 66. The Sugar Shoppe was the last place to get food before you got to Oklahoma. A number of signs in Tripoli attested to this, somehow vaguely implying that no food or drink was available in Oklahoma. A sign painted in the Sugar Shoppe window attested further that here were to be found the very best malts on all of Route 66.

Cindy listened to each order, and repeated it back to each customer, followed by “by the way, have you seen Mick?” Finally, Michael, drummer for the Grapes, could take no more. “Geez, Cindy, give it a rest. Mick will get here when he gets here. Nobody’s seen him, alright?”

Mick and Michael both used to be called Mike, until they started hanging out together with Cindy’s gang. For a while they were called Mike1 and Mike2, but no one could ever keep straight which one was supposed to be Mike1. Somewhere along the line their names settled in to being Mick and Michael, and the name Mike dropped out of sight completely at Tripoli High.

The phone rang. Cindy’s Dad answered. Cindy listened with growing attention to half the conversation:

“Sugar Shoppe.”

…

“Hey Mick! Some girl’s been in here looking for you. When are you coming in?”

…

“What the hell? Where? Well, hang on a sec. Let me get Cindy.”

…

“Okay, you sure? Okay bye.”

The Sugar Shoppe got quiet as Cindy looked at Dad and everyone else looked at Cindy.

“Dad, where’s Mick?”

Dad’s answer came slow and quiet, like he just couldn’t understand what he was telling her. “He’s in Amarillo, Texas. Drove all night. He said he had to run. He said he’d call again when he got to Santa Something.”

Mike & Cynthia’s House, Tripoli, Missouri, March 23^rd 1984. 11:00 pm

Mike was talking: “I don’t get it " The Road Song won’t be 20 years old until sometime next year anyway.”

“She said they’re doing a lot of the segments in advance,” Cynthia answered, “The segment will air during the week the song hit #1. Apparently they happen to have a crew doing a segment in Kansas City right now. Since they’re already in the area, they want to come here tomorrow to talk to us all.”

“Well,” said Mike, “Maybe we should do it. It could be good for business " we’ll do the interviews at the restaurant, maybe find a way to work it into the interview. Maybe we can get some tourist traffic going again. We could start serving dinner again.”

“Honey, there hasn’t been a single tourist through Tripoli since they built the interstate. And we’re making ends meet serving the locals. We don’t need any more business.”

“Okay,” Mike answered, “we’re making ends meet, but we could be doing more than that. We could be saving money " sending the kids to college.”

Cynthia had to suppress a laugh. “The Kids” meant their children Michelle and Carl. Carl was five years old, and Cynthia couldn’t imagine him in college. And Michelle would only see college as a four-year delay in her plan to change the entire world with her music. But Cynthia said nothing out loud.

Of course, she thought, the segment would never air. Nobody remembered the Road Song; even the Oldies stations never played it. She couldn’t imagine that the segment producer had even heard the song. No, it was just her job to go through all of the #1 hits from 1965. So, the crew would come, do the interviews, realize that there was no story, and drop the whole thing.

Cynthia had been silent for a while, so finally Mike spoke again. “Of course, if we do the interviews, we’ll have to tell Michelle about the band.”

Cindy’s House, Tripoli, Missouri, June 19^th 1965. 11:00 pm

Cindy’s folks were asleep. Cindy’s dog was asleep, and so was her cat. Cindy was awake. She stared at the phone as if she thought it might run and hide if she took her eyes off it for even a moment. While she waited, she thought about Mick’s sudden disappearance.

Although Tripoli was right on the Mother Road, and travelers headed from Chicago to LA stopped at the Sugar Shoppe every day, Cindy had never been more than 50 miles away from home in her whole life. Neither had Ted or Michael or Mick, or any of the gang. Cindy didn’t look on those wanderers with either envy or pity. She never really gave them any thought at all. She never realized it, but Mick had been giving them a lot of thought.

Taking mercy on her, the phone finally decided to ring.

“Mick! Geez you finally called! Are you in Santa Something?”

“Santa Monica,” Mick answered, “and no, I’m not. I’m in a town called Williams. It’s in Arizona. I wasn’t gonna call till I made it all the way to the ocean.”

“Why did you leave? Are you mad at us? Are you mad at me?”

Mick laughed. “No, not at all. I don’t know. It was midnight. I couldn’t sleep. Here we’ve graduated from High School, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with my summer. I don’t know. I just go in my car, and started driving. I thought maybe I’d go to Tulsa. But then I got to Tulsa and I just kept driving.” Mick spoke each sentence a little faster than the one before. “I didn’t want you to worry, so I called the Sugar Shoppe just to let you know I was okay. But I didn’t want to talk to you until I was all the way at the beach.”

“Why?”
”I don’t know why. It just seemed important. I guess I was afraid you’d talk me into coming back home.”

“Okay,” Cindy was lost in thought for a minute. “So why are you calling me now?”

“Because,” Mick said, “I wrote a song.”

Tripoli High School Music Room, Saturday, March 24^th, 1984. 9:30 am.

One camera guy and one sound-and-lighting guy were setting up their equipment, as an attractive young woman spoke to Ted Sanders.

“Hi, I’m Darcy Lane. We spoke on the phone. Thanks for agreeing to the interview!” She went on to say reassuring things about easy questions and not to worry about mistakes or anything.

Ted Sanders was the music and woodshop teacher at Tripoli High. Darcy thought that the music room, with the big posters of Beethoven on the walls, and the lines of music stands and instrument boxes, would make a good backdrop for their interview. It didn’t take long before all was ready.

Darcy: “In 1965, you were the bass player for a rock group called The Grapes”

Ted: “Yup”

Darcy: “Tell me how the group came about”

Ted: “The band was Mick’s idea. The four of us " Mick, Cindy, Michael and me, had been hanging out together since sixth grade. Then, in tenth grade, that would be 1962, Mick learned to play guitar. He decided we should be a band. I played cello in the school orchestra, and Michael the kettle drum, so Mick decided we could play bass and drums in a rock band.”

Darcy: “And Cindy?”

Ted: “Well, Cindy was Mick’s girlfriend, and she sang and worked out all the harmonies, and she was also kinda the glue that held us together. We were all there because we were friends with Cindy.”

Darcy: “So you all got along? No rivalries, no jealousies?”

Ted: “No, we all got along. You know, Mick was the kinda guy everybody liked. Friendly, lots of energy. Everybody knew him, but nobody knew him well except for Cindy. Nobody else wanted to run the band, we were happy to let Mick do it.”

Darcy: “And the drummer? What was he like?”

Ted: “Michael was quiet. He was Mick’s opposite in a lot of ways. He didn’t have other friends besides us, but he stuck by us. He was honest, trustworthy, loyal, reverent.”

Darcy: “A real boy scout, huh?”

Ted: “Yeah, actually, he literally was. If you wanted to go have fun at the movies, you’d go with Mick. But if you ever really needed help, you’d go to Michael.”

Darcy: “How did you come to be called The Grapes?”

Ted: “Also Mick’s idea. I think most people assumed it was just one of those goofy ‘60s band names, but Mick named us after his favorite movie, the Grapes of Wrath.”

Darcy: “Did you ever expect The Grapes would have a number one hit?”

Ted: “I never expected The Grapes would even make a record. All we wanted to do was play at local dances and stuff. I think Mick had a lot of talent, but for the rest of us it was really just a hobby”

Darcy: “So Mick wrote The Road Song?”

Ted: “Yup”

Darcy: “When did you first hear the song?”

Ted: “That’s actually kind of interesting. Right after graduation, Mick just decided to drive all the way to California. I guess he didn’t plan it or anything, just got in his car and started driving. A couple days later, he calls each of us from the middle of nowhere, and tells us he wrote a song. As far as I know, he’d never written one before”

Darcy: “So he sang you the song over the phone?”

Ted: “It was strange. The Grapes played car songs, girl songs, dance songs. Probably the deepest song in our repertoire was “Surfer Girl”. Then I’m listening to him play me this song that sounds like it could have been written by Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan. I mean, at that time I’d never been away from Tripoli, but he played me this song and suddenly I understood what it was like to live your life on the road.”

Darcy: “And how is it that this song became a hit record?”

Ted: “Now that is a longer story”

The Sugar Shoppe, Tripoli Missouri, Monday June 21^st 1965, 3:00 pm

The phone in the malt shop rang. Cindy answered. Mick started talking. “Cindy, I’m on the ocean. I mean I’m over the ocean. I’m on the Santa Monica pier and it goes right out over the ocean, you can just drive out on it. Man, you’ve gotta see the ocean!” As far as Cindy was concerned, she had already seen the ocean. She’d seen Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, and all three Gidget movies. But Mick just kept talking. “You know how many places there are between Tripoli and here that claim to have the best malts on Route 66? Guess how many.” Apparently he actually expected her to make a guess.

“I don’t know. Five?”

“No, four. Well, I guess five including your place. So I guess you are right! I had malts at every one of them.”

“So which is really the best?” Cindy hoped Mick was smart enough to give her the answer she wanted.

“The Sugar Shoppe’s are the best, when you’re making them.” Yes, he was smart enough.

“When are you coming home?” She tried not to sound plaintive. She mostly succeeded. He had been talking so fast before that she had to strain to understand him, but now his answer came slowly.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll start back tonight. I promise I won’t wait more than another day.”

“Can you play me the song again?”

“No, I’ll run out of time. I don’t have enough change for the pay phone.”

“Does the song have a name yet?”

“No, not yet. Maybe you can think of one. Hey, I’m out of time. I’ll call you again soon.” He dropped the receiver right on her heart.

Mick’s next call to the Sugar Shoppe came less than two hours later. “Cindy! Man, I can’t believe this. Guess what. Guess who I just saw. I mean who I talked to -- I talked to him. Just guess.” Cindy could not fathom how she was supposed to guess. She didn’t know anyone who lived in California, and neither did Mick. “What are you talking about, Mick?”

“Dean Torrence!” he yelled.

“Who?”

“Dean Torrence, of Jan and Dean. You know, Surf City. Dead Man’s Curve. Little Old Lady from Pasadena?” This is what Mick said, but he pronounced as a single word: “Deantorrenceofjananddeanyouknowsurfcitydeadmanscurvelittleoldladyfrompasadena??” All Cindy really caught was the Dean at the beginning and the Dena at the end, but she figured if she just let him keep talking maybe she’d start to catch on.

“I was playing the song, you know, the road song, the one that needs a name. I was sitting on the pier just playing the song. And he just walks up, and sits down and listens to the whole song. And I’m thinking he’s thinking maybe I’m a bum and he’s supposed to give me a quarter or something, but then he just says he likes my song and he’s Dean Torrence and he wants to know if I’m interested in bringing my guitar to his place tonight because a bunch of musicians are going to be there and he just really liked the road song I guess.”

“Well, honey, um, that’s really wonderful.” She was trying to figure out how to respond while her mind was racing to try to catch up to his words. Slowly it dawned on her that he must have met someone famous, and that someone liked the song. Then finally she put it all together. Dean Torrence. Pasadena. And suddenly everyone in the Sugar Shoppe was staring at Cindy as she jumped up and down, yelling with excitement.

Cynthia’s Eats, Saturday, March 24^th, 1984. 10:30 am.

In the kitchen of their restaurant, in the lull between the breakfast crowd and the lunch crowd, Mike said to Cynthia, “So I talked to Ted. He said he agreed to the interview, so the team came down from KC this morning. They’re probably talking to him now. He said they’re still hoping we’ll talk to them tonight. What are you thinking?”

“Geez, I’m not sure. I had some wild dreams last night. I’m thinking about people and things I haven’t thought about in so long. But it’s not all bad. Maybe this is the right time.”

“So, does that mean yes?”

“Well, let’s talk to Michelle about it as soon as she gets in.” Michelle generally slept late on Saturday morning, but always came to the restaurant in time to help out with the lunch crowd. It wasn’t long before she walked through the door. “Hi Mom! Hi Dad! How was business this morning?”

“Great, fine. Hey, I have some interesting news. There’s a TV crew that wants to come by here tonight to interview your Dad and me.” Michelle could not figure that statement out. “Are they from a food show?” Her best, and only, guess was that this was somehow related to the restaurant. “No,” said Dad, “they’re from a music show”. There was silence for a bit.

“Okay…why would someone from a music show want to interview you?”

“Well,” said Mom, “we were in a band.”

“You,” repeated Michelle, “were in a band.”

“Yeah, we both were.” Silence. “When we were your age.” Silence. “Back in the ‘60s.” Silence. “A rock and roll band.” Silence. “We were called The Grapes.”

A whole bunch of thoughts were competing for attention within Michelle’s mind. Even though she was really trying to concentrate on some of the others, the one she kept coming back to was this: “’The Grapes’ is a dumb name for a band”. But finally, she decided that it was really cool that her parents had been in a band, even though they had completely neglected to mention this to her when she was putting her own band together.

“Okay, Mom. You were in band. That’s really very, very cool. But lots of people are in bands. Why do they want to interview you?”

“Well, it’s coming up on the 20^th anniversary of our record,” said Mom.

Suddenly Michelle was thrilled. “You made a record? Your band…made a record?”

Finally Dad chimed in: “A hit record. A number one record.”

Just as suddenly, Michelle was outraged. To be in a band, and not mention it, well, that was excusable. To not mention a record? Even that was forgivable. But for her to find out at age 18 (almost) that she is the child of parents who’d had a #1 hit record? The number of things she wanted to scream at them all at once was almost overwhelming. But she managed to scream each and every one of them.

Cynthia kept trying to respond with sentences that sounded very reasonable when they were in her brain, but sounded really lame when they came to her lips. It wasn’t as a big a deal as it sounded. It was a fluke, really. It was only number one for one lousy week, for heaven’s sake. Each lame response elicited another outburst from Michelle.

Then Michelle calmed down for a moment. She caught her breath. “So, do have contacts in the music industry? Do you know producers? Executives?”

Mom stood dumbfounded. Michelle looked to her dad. “Um. No. We don’t have any industry contacts. Not anymore.”

Michelle stormed out the back door of Cynthia’s Eats just as the first lunch customer wandered in the front door. Mike & Cynthia were going to have to handle the lunch crowd on their own. Cynthia said, “Well, that went better than I expected.”

“You know,” Mike said as they turned back to business, “soon we’re going to have to tell her the whole story.”

“I know,” said Cynthia in a quiet voice, “very soon.”

Tripoli Bus Station, Friday, June 25^th 1965. 6:58 pm.

Michael, Ted and Cindy were all at the station, waiting for the bus from Tulsa. No one had heard anything from Mick since he had called Cindy to tell her about meeting Dean Torrence, four days earlier. Until Friday morning: Mick called Michael. He told Michael to get the band together, and to meet him at the bus station. He said he had a surprise for them.

“Why is he coming in on the bus?” asked Cindy, “What happened to his car?” “I don’t know,” said Michael, “he wouldn’t tell me.” Cindy had decided that the very first thing she was going to do when Mick got off the bus was to demand a full explanation. She was wrong, though. The very first thing she did was grab him as tightly as she could and give him a long, long kiss.

“Come on, you two.” It was Michael. “Break it up, huh? We want to know what’s going on!”

“You guys would not believe what happened in California, man! I went to a party at Dean’s house, and like everybody was there. Jan Berry, Dennis and Carl Wilson, Al Hirt, Lou Adler, Johnny Postano” the other three nodded excitedly, just as if they had known who any of those people were. “We were all jamming, and I played my song and they just loved it. Johnny Postano has a record company. He told me if I recorded the song, he’d release it.” As Mick spoke, he went over to the luggage compartment on the bus, and pulled out his guitar case and a large, heavy, black suitcase.

“Geez, that’s great!” said Cindy, almost ready to forgive anything. “So did you record it?”

“No,” Mick answered, “I didn’t record it. We are going to record it.” He opened the black suitcase. Inside was a shiny new Ampex 2-track tape recorder, two microphones and four reel-to-reel tapes. “Look what I traded my car for!”

As it turned out, Mick hadn’t really traded away his car. But he had turned down Johnny Postano’s offer to use studio musicians and to record his road song in Hollywood. He said he had his own band back in Missouri, and he wanted them to record it. He may have implied that he had access to a first-rate recording studio in Missouri, but he certainly never said so explicitly. He got in his car, and drove east on highway 66 as far as Tulsa. It was there that he got into a conversation with the owner of a music store, where they agreed that the music store guy could drive Mick’s 409 convertible for a couple days, and Mick could use the brand new tape recorder.

“So,” said Ted, “We have a tape recorder. But we don’t have a studio. Where are we going to record this song?”

“Where do ya think?” asked Mick, “what room has the best acoustics in the whole Midwest?” Cindy answered for all of them: “The Sugar Shoppe!”

As soon as the Sugar Shoppe closed for the night, they brought their instruments and met there. They shoved some tables out of the way. Ted spent some time figuring out how to use the tape recorder, then some more time deciding where to set up the microphones. Then Mick taught them how to play his song. They started the tape going, and played through the song several times, trying different tempos and different harmonies. On one take, Mick suggested that they try the song with Cindy singing lead. Her airy soprano lent the song an even more mystical feel. It was that take that ended up being The Road Song. They finished off the tape with their rendition of Surf City, a present from Mick to Dean. The next morning, Mick brought the tape to the post office, and had it sent via airmail to Dean Torrence’s house, because that was the only address he remembered from California. Along with the tape, he included a note, and a photograph. It was a picture that Cindy’s father had taken months before as a promotional shot for the band. The four of them were standing around a Route 66 sign on Main Street in Tripoli. Across the street, in the background, you could see the Sugar Shoppe.

Cynthia’s Eats, March 24^th 1984. 2:45 pm.

The last of the lunch crowd gone now, Cynthia turned the “Open” sign around to say “Closed”, and locked the front door of the restaurant. It was funny, she thought, it had been years since she’d last laid eyes on the 45, but she knew exactly where to find it. Storage room, bottom shelf, a shoebox full of 45 rpm records. They used to live in a jukebox, back when Cynthia’s Eats was a teen hangout called the Sugar Shoppe. Some time in the ‘70s they’d all been carefully put back in their dust sleeves and retired to the darkness of the storage room. She pulled out the box, and flipped back to the very last record.

She brushed the dust off the dust sleeve. Dean Torrence himself had designed the package, Mick had once told her. There was a blue and red background. The foreground was shaped like a U.S. highway shield. The top of the shield said “THE GRAPES” in bold black letters on the white background. Below that, in the center of the shield, was the picture of her and the boys, that her father had taken so long ago. And below the shield, in rough-looking slanty white letters, “The Road Song”. She carefully pulled the 45 out of the sleeve. The label read “The Grapes " Surf City " Postano Records”. She flipped it over to the ‘A’ side. “The Grapes " The Road Song " Postano Records”. In the front of the shoe box she found some yellow plastic adapters, the kind that fit into the wide hole in the 45 rpm disk. She snapped one in and took the record out to the dining area, where she had a stereo.

She set it all up, and, for the first time since August of 1965, she listened to her voice wander through the melody of Mick’s song. She closed her eyes and lost herself in thoughts of her own, her first and only, road trip, all those years ago. In the middle of the first chorus, a voice broke into her reverie.

“Is that your song?” It was Michelle, in the doorway between the counter and the kitchen.

“That’s my song.” Cynthia was crying.

“I’ve never heard it on the radio,” said Michelle.

“No,” said her mom, “they never play it anymore.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Michelle, “can you start it over? I want to hear the whole thing.” They listened together to the whole song. When it was over, Michelle asked, “So, why didn’t you ever talk about this?”

“How about you make us some tea,” said her mom, “and I’ll tell you everything.”

For years now, Cynthia had felt that when it came time to tell Michelle this story she was going to do a really poor job of it. And she was right: Michelle went into the kitchen to heat up water for tea, and from the dining area Cynthia blurted out, “You know, if it hadn’t been for the Road Song, you’d have never been born.”

Across town at Tripoli High School, Ted Sanders was telling Darcy Lane about the events of June and July 1965:

“Mick took the tape recorder back to Tulsa and retrieved his car. It wasn’t but a week later that we started hearing the song on the radio. Everyone was surprised except Mick, Apparently he’d been talking to the folks in California on the phone, but he never told us. He wanted to surprise us, I guess.”

“It’s funny, nobody in town believed it was really us. They figured it was some other band, just happened to have the same name. It wasn’t til the next week, when the record showed up at the store, and we showed them our picture on the dust sleeve. Then we got to be celebrities for a bit. That was great.”

“Then suddenly, the record just caught on, all over the country. I still don’t know why. We were, I think #38 the first week, then #8, then #1. The week we hit number 1, the California guys called Mick and said they wanted The Grapes to do an album. In California. And that was when things started going wrong.”

The Sugar Shoppe, Wednesday, July 28th 1965, 6:30 pm.

The Road Song was playing on the jukebox. Again. The Grapes were seated around a table, figuring their next move. Mick was holding onto the table, not quite sitting in his seat: “This is opportunity knocking, guys. There is a studio just waiting for us in Hollywood. My car is packed. Grab your stuff, we can leave tonight.”

Ted said, “Mick, I’ve got four words for you: Foot. Ball.

Scholar. Ship. I’ve got a free ride at KU, provided I show up at training camp two weeks from today. I can’t throw that away.”

Mick said, “We have the number one song in the country. We are a guaranteed success. You don’t need a scholarship, you’ll be rolling in money.”

Before Ted could respond, Michael said, “I want to go. I really do. But I already agreed to be a camp counselor again this summer. That’s just a done deal, I can’t back out of that.”

Mick was ready to launch his counterargument, but Michael didn’t let him. “Look, Mick, I’m glad you want us with you. But face it, you don’t need us. There are better harmony singers in LA. There are better musicians in LA. What they want is you, the songwriter. You’ll be okay without us. Maybe I can come out and join you in the fall. Maybe I can go to school in California. You can save a spot for me behind the drums, but for now, just go to California by yourself, and make the album.”

Mick looked back and forth between Ted and Michael, then finally looked at Cindy. “I guess it’s just you and me, then.”

“I’m supposed to work in the Sugar Shoppe all summer,” Cindy protested.

Mick started singing to her “I love, love you darlin’, come and go with me, come west with me, baby cantcha see I need you darli-in, come go with me. Wo wo wo wo-oh”

“Come on, Cindy,” Mick continued, “you know you want to go to California. Lots of kids would love to work in the Sugar Shoppe. Someone will take your place.”

Cindy grinned. “I’ll talk to my Dad.”

Cindy talked to her Dad. Could she please not work for him this summer? Could she please, instead, move to Hollywood with her boyfriend and make rock and roll records?

Her Dad said, “A father would have to trust his daughter an awful lot to let her go off across the country with a boy that she wasn’t married to.”

“You can trust me, Dad”

“A father would have to know, that his daughter knew right from wrong. And that she wouldn’t do anything stupid that would ruin her life.”

“I know right from wrong, Dad.”

“A father would also have to trust this boy an awful lot, to let him take his daughter away across the country. That he’d be taking care of her, not taking advantage of her.”

“Do you trust Mick, Dad?”

“I trust Mick. I trust you. But listen, you call that Dean Torrence and find out a place you can live that’s all girls. And I’m gonna give you enough money so you can have your own separate hotel room every night on the way out there. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I trust you. Now go get Mick -- I want to talk to him too.”

And so it came to be that two days later, arrangements had all been made and everything was packed into the trunk of Mick’s beloved blue 1963 Chevy Impala SS 409 convertible. The whole gang, along with Cindy’s Dad, had come to see them off. Cindy was in the passenger seat, and Mick was about to get into the drivers seat, when Michael pulled him to the back of the car. “Listen, Mick, good luck. Have a great time.”

“Thanks. I’m sorry you’re not coming.”

“Me too. Listen, Mick, about Cindy.”

“Yeah?”

“I know she’s your girlfriend and all. But she belongs to all of us. You take good care of her.”

“Don’t worry, man.” Mick smiled and gave Michael a chuck on the arm.

The Road Trip

Mick and Cindy waved goodbye and took off down the highway. They passed through a small, empty corner of Kansas and on into Oklahoma. Cindy sat quietly in the passenger seat, watching the Oklahoma sameness roll past the window, while Mick spent the hours spinning their future history. They would go to Hollywood and make their album. They would get married. They’d get a house by the beach. They would buy matching his-and-hers Corvettes. Ted would transfer to UCLA, and move in next door to them. Michael would move west, too, and the Grapes would be a full band again. They would jam with the Beach Boys and the Beatles. They’d make a movie with Elvis. They would tour the whole United States and the whole world. It seems that Mick never got tired of telling the story, nor Cindy of hearing it. Each day he would retell it, and each day their future got just a little more grand.

Such was their time driving through the countryside. But when they drove through cities, they’d find a rock-and-roll station on the radio, and sing along. Cindy counted the number of times they heard The Road Song.

And each evening, they’d say a long goodnight, then go in their separate hotel rooms. Cindy would call her Dad, and Mick would try to write new songs for the album.

It was in Gallup, New Mexico, listening to a countdown show, that they got the news that the Road Song had fallen all the way down to #27. Mick was stunned. He stared at the radio. He said to Cindy, “do you even want to hear the rest of the show?” She gave the wrong answer: “actually, I’d like to hear it.”

They listened until they were out of range of the station, which happened about in the middle of the Petrified Forest, and about in the middle of the new number one song. They again found themselves in the countryside, but Mick didn’t spin their future. He didn’t say a thing. Cindy tried to say some comforting things.

“Hey, the number 27 song in the country is still pretty good. A month ago we never expected to even be on the radio.”

Mick said absolutely nothing. He stared straight ahead.

“We’re going to have a whole album full of #1 songs, you said so yourself.”

Mick said nothing.

“Hey, we got dethroned by the Beatles. There’s gotta be some honor in that, right?”

“The Beatles,” Mick said, “and twenty-five other bands.”

The two of them drove in silence for the rest of the day.

As darkness fell, they pulled into a motel parking lot in Williams, Arizona. Mick spoke, so quietly and slowly that he hardly even sounded like the same person. “This is the hotel I called you from. When I first sang you the song.” “Well,” said Cindy, “staying here is good luck, then.”

Cindy checked into her room, and sat down to call her Dad. She’d been happy to call every evening until now. But this time she hesitated. She didn’t feel like telling Dad the bad news, if he hadn’t heard, and she didn’t feel like talking about their reaction, if he had heard. Then she realized she hadn’t really said goodnight to Mick. She went out her door, onto the cement sidewalk, and knocked on the next door. “It’s unlocked.” She pushed the door open. There were no lights on in the room, but in the glare from a streetlight she could see Mick, sitting on his bed, his guitar lying a couple feet away from him. Tears were streaming down his face.

Cindy rushed to him and embraced him. “Honey, honey, it’s going to be fine. Please don’t worry. Remember, at least your song made it to number one!”

“It’s not that,” Mike sobbed. “I can’t write songs anymore. Not just since today. I’ve been trying all month to write another song. I just can’t do it.”

“Oh, babe,” said Cindy, “Sure you can. Show me what you’ve got so far.”

“Don’t you get it? I’ve got NOTHING. Nothing at all. Not a word, not a note. Johnny Postano is waiting for me to do an album, and I will have absolutely nothing to give to him.”

Cindy had only seen Mick this distraught once, three years ago, when his Dad died. She was desperate to cheer him up. “Honey, just relax. Calm down. You wrote a beautiful song. You’ll write more beautiful songs.”

“How do you know?” Mick was almost shouting. “How do you know? It’s not like there’s some guaranteed number of songs in a person. Some people don’t write any songs. Some people only write one song.”

She held him, she rocked him back and forth, she kissed his tears. She didn’t know what to say. For a while, Mick was quiet. Then he said, “I mean, it’s not like the song even came from me. The song didn’t come from me, it came from the Road. I just wrote it down.”

“See,” soothed Cindy, “you just need inspiration. The Road was your inspiration. When you’re inspired again, you’ll write another song.”

“Inspiration. Inspiration,” answered Mick. “I have to just wait for inspiration? Well, we’ve got like one more day until we get to Hollywood. What’s going to be my inspiration?” Cindy turned Mick’s head so he was looking right into her eyes.

“I will be your inspiration.”

The Williams Motel, Williams Arizona. Monday, August 2^nd 1965. 6:30 am.

Cindy awoke in Mick’s motel room. She fumbled for the light, and looked around. She was alone. Mick’s duffel bag was gone. In the center of the floor, lined up with the walls, lay his guitar, packed back in its case. Laid, too neatly, on top of the guitar case were the keys to his 409. She looked out the window and saw the bright blue car, still parked where it had been last night. She turned back towards the room, where she noticed that on the small desk, there was a hotel stationery pad and a pen. She saw something written on the pad. She ran across the room to look at it. It was, as near as she could tell, a few broken lines of song lyrics, all of them scratched out.

She went back to her room and packed up her stuff. Then she went back to Mick’s room and stared out the window at his car until checkout time. She thought about how she still had not called her dad, and how he’d be worrying by now. But she didn’t call.

She checked out at 11:00, and sat on the hood of the 409 until nightfall. Then she told the motel lady she’d be staying one more night. She should have felt hungry or tired, but she didn’t feel anything. She lay on her bed all night, but she didn’t sleep. Whenever she heard a noise, she’d go to the window and look out. She always saw the same thing: the blue impala in the glow of the streetlight.

As the sun rose on Tuesday, she dropped the motel keys in a slot in the locked glass door of the motel lobby, threw Mick’s guitar in the back of his car, got in, started her up, and pointed the nose of the 409 towards Tripoli, Missouri.

Metropolitan Studios, Hollywood, California. March 31^st 1984. 1:45 am.

Darcy Lane, for the umpteenth time, pushed the record button and spoke. “Swimming against the strong tide of the British invasion, there appeared a very unlikely, very American song. For one magical week, sandwiched between the reigns of ‘Ticket To Ride’ and ‘Help’, America’s number one hit was The Road Song.” She pressed stop. It still didn’t sound the way she wanted, but maybe this would have to do.

There was so much more story here than she had expected. She wanted to interview a dozen more people. She wanted to hire a detective. But, she couldn’t. Her assignment was just to create a three-minute video segment for a four-minute song. She had to figure out what to include, what to leave out. She stared at the three videotapes in front of her. Ted’s interview, and Michael’s, and Cynthia’s. And her thoughts drifted.

Even if they had made it to Hollywood, there would have been no album. As Cindy and Mick were driving across the country, Postano Records was going out of business. Because Mick had not yet gotten around to signing a contract, The Road Song fell into a sort of legal limbo. No one seemed to know anymore whom the song belonged to. Darcy didn’t know if that was why it fell so fast from #1, but it was apparently why no radio stations played it anymore.

From a pay phone in Flagstaff, Cindy had told her Dad that things hadn’t worked out like she hoped, please don’t ask questions and don’t let anyone else ask either. She came home, and after a “whirlwind romance,” she married Michael Marks, former drummer of the Grapes, on September 1^st, 1965. They took over the Sugar Shoppe when her Dad retired. During the natural food craze in the ‘70s, they renamed it Cynthia’s Eats.

Darcy thumbed through the photos she had taken of Mick’s blue Impala, sitting still unclaimed in Ted Sanders’ garage. Then she picked up the tape of Cynthia’s interview, and popped it into the machine. It was already queued up to a part right at the end. A part she’d watched a dozen times already tonight.

Cynthia sat in her restaurant, her husband on one side, her daughter on the other. “I got in his car and I just drove home. And that was the last any of us ever saw of Mick.” Darcy looked into the monitor, watching the tears trickle down Cynthia’s face. Cynthia caught her breath, and continued: “Hey, if you find out what happened to him, let me know, okay?”