Road to Publication, S2 E9

On the road again (and again and again)

It’s gonna be a late one, boys.

This week I’m a road dog, helping one of the bands I hang with do the devil’s drive from Denver to Seattle via Boise, which means we spent yesterday driving through all of Wyoming and a good chunk of Utah. Which is actually a whole lot of nothing but buttes along the I-80 corridor. We don’t have time to take the scenic route, but fortunately I can find a little fun scenery even out in the middle of nowhere.

A lot of the Hot Wax road trips were like this. A 19-hour haul through four states is exactly when you want to spin all two and half hours of Use Your Illusion I and II, then make a pit stop at a gas station which looks like it hasn’t seen fresh octane for fifty years. It’s strange to be out here driving around since November 2024; Dumptruck America is a different beast, where you look over your shoulder or keep your eyes down and don’t stop at sports bars with too many Confederate flag license plates in the lot. It’s even stranger to think ahead to September, when I’ll be on a tour of my own to support a book all about all the things I used to love about rambling around this country which feel, suddenly, dangerous or endangered or both.