The Serendipity of Good Road Trip Music
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- by Mark Stephens on Mon Apr 25, 2011 - Add comment
They don't know it, nor should they, but a few notes strummed and sung by Roger Clyne (right) and PH Naffah (left) fits into our road trips all because of one simple event.
In May of 2004, Brooke and I had been married for a year and the notion of me being a father was still, you know, alarming. We spent the weekend of our first anniversary down in Sonora, Mexico kayaking on the Sea of Cortés near the little drinking village of San Carlos. The day she and I left, I met my friend Brian at a seedy dive in Tempe right on our way out of town, sipped a chilled Patron, and he cornered me again about some band he liked. This time he came armed with a freshly purchased copy of ¡Americano! by Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers and he made me promise that we'd give it a whirl. I lied and said okay because I was so focused on getting to Mexico and putting a paddle in the water.
That night Brooke and I drove the Jeep to Patagonia, Arizona, followed a snaking Forest Service road into the scrubby mountains, found a clearing with a colossal mesquite tree, set up a primitive camp, cooked a forgettable dinner, and popped open a few memorable bottles of Dos Equis Amber. We rose early in the morning the next day, and didn't even make coffee. Instead we packed things up and drove to the border, but stopped just outside of Nogales for huevos rancheros in a little roadside café with saltillo tile on the floor and orange trim. We crossed into Mexico and handled all the usual details like exchanging dollars for pesos, which you feel like should take just a minute but turns into an hour and a half and you don't know why. Mexico, man. You can't beat the clock here.
We negotiated our way through the streets of Nogales that, despite any form of recognizable design, just seem to work because the rules of engagement on the road here are social rather than legal. Dodge a mega-nippley dog here, clobber an unmarked speed bump there, accept a few honks of the horn in your general direction . . . do it a few times and you get used to driving in Mexico.
My nerves loosened up somewhere just south of Nogales, once we were settle into the mayhem. That's when Brooke said, "We should put in that CD Brian gave us."
The volume knob had spun around all the way to the right and we didn't know it; probably thanks to those dozen or so speed bumps we nailed at 40 mph. The opening track on ¡Americano! begins with a machine gun of snare drum cracks: Da-da-da-da-da, da-da-da! I jumped so hard and fast that I jerked the steering wheel in all directions but straight, figured we were taking gunfire, then the blood left my face. Brooke grabbed the volume knob, cranked it down, and looked at me like, "Get us there alive, will ya?"
I looked at her, shook my head, declared Brian a no-good bastard, and then we laughed. I didn't have the energy to hit eject and toss the disk out the window, much as I envisioned great satisfaction from doing so. I just let the song go. Then the next one. And the next one. Brooke eventually said, "I kind of like this." And I bit my lip.
Something happened that weekend. We kayaked our brains out, snorkeled around a small island for hours, ate tasty tacos, swam in the sea, and if the Jeep was running so was the CD Brian gave us. Because I didn't do anything about it, the music of Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers earned its place as the soundtrack of not just any ol' road trip, but of our first wedding anniversary.
No, I didn't fall in love with the music that weekend. It took a while for me to come around. Nowadays when Brooke suggests we give ¡Americano! a few spins, I don't exactly object. Instead, I do my best to hide a smile from her. But I think she's on to me.
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