We all have
certain pieces of music which we connect with certain places.
When I hear
Roadhouse Blues played by the Doors, I am seeing streets in suburban
London passing by swiftly, semi-detached redbrick houses in the sunshine and
lots of black people in the streets. I am feeling the swerve of the car as we
go through a roundabout, and I am being cooled on a hot summer’s day by the air
drawn in through the open sliding doors of a Comer van.
The year
is 1970. I was seventeen. Together with a friend I was hitchhiking in northern
Europe. We had made it to London, and it was when we were leaving London that
we had the chance of getting a lift with a tradesman.
We had a
small cassette recorder with us and in London we had just bought this new Doors record, Morrison Hotel. The driver noticed our recorder and asked for some
music. We listened to it for the first time.
“Turn it up”, the driver said. “More”, he added. And with the volume at maximum we drove
through the suburbs of London. The first
track was Roadhouse Blues. I think we
listened to the whole record twice, before we were dropped near a motorway from
where we could look for a lift to the coast and a ferry to the Continent.
To this
day, this song brings pictures of driving through London suburbs in hot summer
sunshine to my mind.
