Author: C3PO. The first Summer Tour happened in August 1994. I was deep in the throes of a voluntary "Jobless" lifestyle and had plenty of free time. Vygis was working pizza delivery, essentially jobless also. This was the year that he decided that he had to drive to see his friend Jenny Babicke and her sister Kris who had moved to Arizona, and was scheming on a way to make it happen. Part of my goals at the time of my life involved travelling frequently to see my relatives around the country, so he proposed that we join forces and do a trip together. We were fairly compatible travellers as had been demonstrated on several previous trips, could both fix a variety of possible mechanical problems with cars, and could split the driving in his stick-shift 85 Honda to minimize our travel time. For some reason, we only had a week and a half for the whole trip, so overnight shift driving was a fairly crucial aspect of the plan. Ever ambitious to improve our chances of pulling the trip off, we put out notice that we had room for a third person if anybody wanted to join us, and to my surprise my friend Lisa was interested in travelling with us. The resulting trip was epic, transformative, and would become an annual tradition whenever possible.
Arizona mix tape, 1994
I kept notes of the trip, but unfortunately they're currently packed away somewhere and so I probably won't be able to get my hands on a lot of the details for many months more. It was the age of film cameras and as was the habit of the time we didn't take a whole lot of photos of that first trip, selecting our shots judiciously because of the cost of film and development. Actually, I've recently found my old photo albums, and of the few photos I took on the trip most were were terrible. However, I have the story of the trip in another form which has kept a lot of the impressions and memories fresh in my mind. Within a year of our return, I put together a mix tape of some of the music the three of us had listened to while driving. I gave a copy to Lisa and a copy to Vygis, and here is a picture of one of those copies. All three of us had brought treasured selections from our massive cassette libraries for the drive, which we played on Vygis' tape deck for the five thousand mile round trip. Much of the music we brought had meaning for the person who brought it, as well as meaning for the trip itself and finally meaning that arose from having been played on the trip. After we came back, I arranged some songs from each of us in an order that itself told the story of the trip, and having converted it to MP3 I continue to listen to it to this day. Here is the story of the first Summer Tour as told through this mix tape. (Note that audio links in the story below don't work in Internet Explorer because Wikia is sort of optimized for Firefox):
Side 1, Track 1, Thomas Dolby, I Love You Goodbye:
At the time that we left for Arizona, the album that I pretty much had on continuous repeat at home was Astronauts And Heretics, which my sister had kindly dubbed off a copy of for me. I managed to sneak in more than a couple plays of this tape during my turns at the wheel during the trip, although I know that the others were tired of it after the second time. Astronauts and Heretics is full of Dolby's "whistful" material which is my favorite but this song also reflects his British obsession with American crime that seems to seep into all of his albums. The song takes place in the southern states, which the first leg of our trip punched through as we aimed for a stop in Dallas to visit my Uncle and his family there. The scenery through Kentucky and Tenessee never fails to be anything other than awe-inspring and breathtaking. All three of us were wide awake and enjoying the view through the car windows at this phase of the journey.
On the way to Dallas I'm pretty sure that we swung through Jackson, Mississippi to visit my sister who we'd helped move six months ago, although for some reason we didn't take any photos to commemorate the occasion so I'm not sure. Things were still going good for her in her new home at that time. We continued on to Dallas, Texas and arrived at my Uncle's house in the afternoon, staying with him, my Aunt, and my cousin for dinner. Here is a picture of all of us posing with my Uncle and his family.
Side 1, Track 2, Tangerine Dream, The Dream Is Always The Same:
I'm not gonna lie, I'm a fan of Tangerine Dream. In the 1980's they hit it big, did some great albums and movie soundtracks, even got some TV soundtrack deals. I listened to the "Risky Business" and "Richochet" albums while reading the Lord Of The Rings trilogy one summer. I brought my Tangerine Dream tapes on this trip and they make great driving music. The tracks from them that I put on the mix tape are the most atmospherically evocative of the open fields, sunrises, and countryside of the United States that we drove through.
Side 1, Track 3, Kip Adota, Life In The Slaw Lane:
Side 1, Track 4, Kip Adota, UHaul Airlines:
These are a couple of my favorite goofy songs from the Kip Adota tape that I brought and played on the trip. Life In The Slaw Lane was one of the ones that Kip made it big with in the 80's, so I think that even Vygis recognized it when I played it as we drove. He even mentioned that he thought that the UHaul Airlines song was funny. UHaul Airlines has some meaning for me because I used to fly on People Express, the airline that broke the old mold of point-to-point airline routes that was in use up until the 1980's. People Express emulated the FedEx hub-and-spoke model, and at the time a lot of people scoffed at this budget system but now it's the only way that Airlines operate. People Express had the lowest fares of anybody, so college kids like me could afford to fly it and it got me around the country at an early age. Anybody who flew it affectionately referred to it by the more socialist-sounding name "People's Express".
As we left Dallas, night was falling, and soon we were driving in the dark. To get from Dallas to the western edge of Texas is about a 12 hour drive. Struggling to keep going on this seemingly endless leg of the journey was the first real driving challenge we faced. Despite switching drivers every few hours or so, it was agony. Lit up refineries lined the road for pretty much the entire stretch, and in the darkness we drove through some of the most horrific smells any of us have ever encountered before or since. At the time we attributed that to the refineries, but in retrospect it had to be slaughterhouses although since we couldn't see more than a few feet from the road we'll never know. This was also the first time but not the last on this trip that Vygis and I encountered one of the unexpected side effects of driving in shifts all night. If you weren't driving, it was a fairly natural plan to move to the back seat to make a semi-comfortable bed among the duffel bags and get some sleep. However, in a moving car this would inevitably result in having a dream that you were driving; the realization that the bumps and turns you were feeling didn't match the dream gave your unconscious self the impression that the car was careening out of of control and you'd wake up screaming. The next few songs on the tape are about this memorable part of the journey.
Side 1, Track 5, Ken Nordine, Honky Tonk/Stars:
Vygis and I had an awful amount of music in common; due to the sheer size of our collections we also had plenty that had nothing to do with each other but over the years a lot had been shared. Plenty of people dropped tapes on each of us too, and those would sometimes become part of our common lexicon. I'm not sure who gave Vygis the tape that had an episode of Ken Nordine's "Stare With Your Ears" that had somehow been recorded off of the radio. It might have been Joe Wall, VYgis' source for weird stuff like Jah Woble, or Ken Stone, our mutual source for prog rock and early synth music like Vangellis. Our friend Andy Looney was into Ken Nordine, but as I recall Andy first heard of him later than when we'd gotten this tape. Anyhow, it was Ken Nordine at his best; with just his voice, a multitrack recorder, and some instrumentals and he wove sounds and words into stories that stimulated the imagination, stories that mysteriously blended one into the other in ways that didn't make sense but made sense, stories that described the hidden poetry of the world. It was huge to both of us, when listening to it each of us felt a sense of secret magic, and the fact that we both knew about it was one of the strong bonds between us. As our penchant at the time (Vygis had gotten the tape while we were both in high school) was for memorizing lines from things that we loved we could often quote the stories in the tape for minutes on end, this exerpt in particular. By the time we went to Arizona, I had my own well-worn copy of this program. At the end of the program that had been captured off of the radio were instructions on how to order a copy, so I did that. You called an 800 number and ordered program number 33. The tape that arrived from Snail Records also included a copy of program 32 which is also mind-bogglingly great as well. I played this Word Jazz tape on the trip as a gift to my friend, and as we were out West the aural imagery of the honky tonk and the clear twinkling of stars on a pitch black desert night was particularly appropriate.
Side 1, Track 6, The Plugz, Reel Ten:
The soundtrack to the movie "Repo Man" is just one of those things that either Vygis or I had on us at all times. Of course it was played on the trip. Repo Man is one of those cult classic movies that were part of our nerd culture, and had extra points with Vygis for its punk elements. And this instrumental is pretty much a perfect musical representation of driving at night through Texas.
Side 1, Track 7, Excerpt from the movie "1984", The "From A Dead Man" monologue:
This bit of spoken dialog was from a tape given to me by our mutual friend Andy Looney. A lot of my tape collection consisted of tapes from Andy. He had spent a lot of time in high school putting together mix tapes for his own amusements of excerpts from his favorite TV shows, movies, and music all artistically blended. Then at some point he got bitten by some kind of audiophile bug and decided to reduce his tape collection to only things on high quality tapes, and gave all the rest to me to sort through and keep what I wanted. A lot of these mixes are pure genius, and Vygis was quite familiar with my tendency to play them on trips. Of those tapes, this section of one of them pretty much sums up how bleak the experience of driving the length of Texas in the middle of the night became after many hours.
Side 1, Track 8, Simple Minds, Shake Off The Ghosts:
This song is probably pretty special to anybody who hears it; a beautiful instrumental filled with magic and inspiration, the type of song you only played at night. I didn't have the album, just this one song that somebody had given me. So I played it on the trip at a moment that I felt like it would pep me up, and Vygis was PISSED when it began playing! It turns out that his relationship with this song was far more treasured than even my own; he had apparently kept from hearing it for years so that the last time he had heard it could remain special. After his dismay wore off, he told me that he would have to write down the exact date and time had heard it again on some kind of list that he kept.
Finally, as dawn broke, we passed into New Mexico and began driving through the beautiful western desert. It turns out that Vygis and I had both brought music specifically to play while driving in the desert; the next few songs are the music that we played as we approached Tuscon and while later driving around Arizona.
Side 1, Track 9, Fields Of The Nephilim, Dead But Dreaming:
At the time of the trip, Vygis had been turned on to Fields Of The Nephilim, and had been listening to them for some time. Their music, often described as "Goth Country," epitomized the West for him and he had special tracks picked out to listen to once we reached our destination. Out of the Fields Of Nephilim songs that he kept rolling during a lot of his driving shifts, this is one that I remember particularly well, the opening track to Elizium.
I think that it was somewhere in New Mexico that The Jenny Flowers blew out the window. Among the sacred items that Vygis had prepared for our trip was a little plastic tub that had a spray of colorful handmade crepe paper and pipe cleaner flowers in a foam base. These flowers had apparently been given to Vygis by either Jenny or Kris Babicke many years ago, and a key part of Vygis' plan to visit Jenny was to show up on her doorstep holding these flowers. They travelled across the country in a place of honor, perched on the center of the dashboard so that they could observe the countryside that we drove through. During the day in the desert, as the interior of the car got warm, somebody rolled down a window in the car. These paper-light flowers got sucked right out the window and blew down the side of the highway! In a panic we stopped and Vygis lept out of the car. Lisa and I prayed that he wouldn't get hit, and fortunately the flowers blew onto the edge of the road and Vygis was able to retrieve them. Rolling down the window after that was largely forbidden.
Side 1, Track 10, Steve Reich, The Desert Music Part 1: Side 1, Track 11, Steve Reich, The Desert Music Part 3: I had also picked out desert music for the drive and, being more into weird instrumentals than Vygis was, this was mine. I find Steve Reich's music, often criticised for being too mechanical or repetitive, to be some of the most organic and beautiful I have ever encountered. These two track to me really evoke images of the baking sand and otherworldly plants and animals of the west. The other thing about this particular track that makes it special to me is that out of the murky chorus in the first part can be heard the words "My friend.." over and over at the beginning before moving on to some other chanting which can't be distinguished. At the time we were driving, I intentionally played this because it felt significant to mark that Vygis and I were on this epic trip together. I'm sure that he didn't notice, it was something that I did for myself. Now that the years have gone by however, the meaning of this track is all that much more precious to me.
Side 1, Track 12: Excerpt from the movie "Dark Star", Benson Arizona: Vygis was totally on board with making sure that this song got played right as we were passing through Benson. How many chances do you get to pull off a trick like that? This was also from one of Andy Looney's mix tapes, and was from another nerd movie that Vygis and I were as familiar with as Andy, part of the common Explorer Post language that we all shared. At the end of the exerpt, it ends up being mixed with snippets of music from the movie Koyannisqatsi, a bit of of the Jon and Vangelis album, and a "Big Bopper" version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers," just an example of Andy's signature mixing style that was carried by us on across the country as we drove.
Side 1, Track 13, Tangerine Dream, Love On A Real Train: I let the last few minutes of this side of the mix tape play out with some more Tangerine Dream music about driving across America. Here is a link to the full version, however.
Side 2 Track 1: Thomas Dolby, Silk Pyjamas: Another song from Astronauts and Heretics. During the trip the three of us of course shared in confessional, sleep-deprived conversations. Mostly with Lisa as the new person in the group, we learned about her life and family. For example, at one point she told me about her Uncle who plays guitar, including a song about sheer pajamas; I remember her telling me about this song and attempting adorably to sing it. Since by the time I made this mix tape it was functioning also as a romantic gift to the girl I eventually started dating, this song is a reference to that conversation and a lovely memory that we shared of the trip. It's a musical description of her mysterious and passionate spirit. It's also an opportunity for another Thomas Dolby song and a great way to open Side 2.
Here's another funny story of us getting to know Lisa better on this trip. The imagined advantages of having another passenger along had turned out to be negligible when it was realized that Lisa had never before driven stick shift (nobody had thought to mention to her that the car was not an automatic while we were planning the trip). She promised to give driving a try but Vygis wasn't interested in risking the wear and tear to the clutch that a student driver would put his car through, so Lisa's job was mostly to keep us awake by talking to us. At some point after a long stretch of driving, we pulled into a rest stop to switch drivers and just take a break. Lisa was still pretty fresh at this point at the start of the trip. I think that Vygis had been driving prior to this stop, and I shifted over into the driver's seat. Lisa, peppy, decided that her plan for staying awake on the next leg of the drive was to get some exercise while we were stopped. She got out of the car and began doing cartwheels in the grass next to the car, in the dark. Vygis, hunched over in his trench coat in the passenger seat, sipping a Snapple, watched her in amazement, and croaked to me, "What the hell is she doing?" Lisa also tended to eat a lot healthier than either of us, and her "107-grain bread" was a frequent source of humor between me and Vygis when she wasn't in earshot.
Side 2 Track 2, Depeche Mode, Route 66: Lisa was a huge Depeche Mode fan, something that no doubt redeemed her presence on the trip to Vygis. She'd brought a few albums which I grudgingly sprinkled into my own mix when it was my turn to drive (nobody got to make any suggestions about what was playing while Vygis was driving). Driving through New Mexico, we occasionally found ourselves on stretches of Route 66 that paralleled the highway, and I think we even stopped at a cool museum dedicated to the highway. It may seem quaint, but history was taught when Vygis and I were in school and he and I as kids had both soaked up the mythos of the of the West from the 1800's to the 1960's. Route 66 is part of that history and we were stunned to find remnants of it still around. This song was played on the trip because it was Depeche Mode, but we soon realized that it could have been one of the anthems of our journey.
Side 2 Track 4, The Smiths, Ask: From a continuity perspective, this track is out of order, it should have been track 3 for this side, but I guess it just sounds better where it is and I've gotten used to it there. Vygis was never into the Smiths, that was me. He kindly gritted his teeth through the sections of our journey where I played my Smiths tapes. However the reason I included this song was because of my sister's voice. This particular song was from a radio show that she did while at Boston University and she had taped the whole show for me. She was the one who got me into the Smiths of course, but Vygis was also very fond of her. They have a long history as friends; she was in Explorer Post 1275 along with us, they went "stag" together to one of Cora's proms, Vygis and I composed some sound effects for one of her radio shows at BU, the two of us even drove up to visit her there once in a trip that was itself pretty glorious. This song is in the mix because I played the tape on the trip, but I was also tweaking Vygis by including this track. Vygis didn't particularly like The Smiths, but this track had Cora's voice so I knew it could not help but remind him of her; when her voice had come through the speakers as we drove her presence in our lives was so strong that it was almost like she was on the trip with us.
When we got to Arizona, Lisa and I rented a car and we split up with Vygis so that we could all perform our mutually exclusive missions in the state. He went to see Jenny, and aside from that I have very little idea what he did for the majority of that week. No doubt he hung out like he had just dropped in from down the road, recreating the experience from when Jenny had in fact lived closer. Lisa and I visited my Grandfather and my Uncle in Tuscon, camped in Madera Canyon, drove around looking for touristy stuff like Montezuma's Castle and a ghost town that we ended up never actually finding, spent a day in beautiful Sedona, and hung out in Tuscon. The next few songs are included on the tape at this point as memories of that part of the trip.
Side 2 Track 3, Guy Carawan, Sparkles and Shines: This is from a tape given to me by Ruth Connely of folk songs that we listened to a lot on the trip. This particular song is in memory of the ghost town that we drove around the mountains outside of Phoenix looking for but never found.
Side 2 Track 5, Small Band, Poodle (A Poem): Side 2 Track 6, Small Band, Take Me Out: Side 2 Track 7, Small Band, What's Goin' On: The night that Lisa and I decided to go into Tuscon and magically encountered a street festival, one of the street performers that we chanced upon was a 7-year old boy and his older brother busking punk rock songs on a corner. The brother had an electric guitar, the boy played a school violin that had been keyed with colored spots on the neck to help find certain notes. They were immensely cool and I bought their tape which Lisa and I have listened to ever since. These are acutally the best three tracks on their tape, but they're pretty good and I thought that Vygis might like their raw, innocent energy. Sadly, Lisa and I failed to impress Vygis with this band. I have never found out what became of the kids; "Small Band" produces absolutely useless Google hits and I've lost the cover of the original tape which had the names of the kids on it.
Side 2 Track 8, Depeche Mode, Stripped: Another one of Lisa's songs from the trip. You'd think that driving around the country with a pretty girl who was into Depeche Mode might have given me ideas, but I stupidly kept our relationship platonic until after we returned from the trip and she stuck around anyways. I eventually got the message and we started going out. This song is also representative of Lisa's spirit.
Eventually, Lisa and I returned the rental car and rejoined Vygis for one tourist side-trip which we all agreed must be done, which was to visit the Grand Canyon. We drove north past Flagstaff, and stayed overnight in the National Forest by the South Rim of the canyon. The rules for the National Forest at the time were that you could just go in and camp anywhere as long as you were a certain distance off the road. No fees, some rules about fires but that was it. This amazed Vygis, it was hard to conceive of such lawless freedom from the perspective of our wimpy suburban lives. It was like the whole wilderness was his own. We probably failed to meet the distance off the road rules when we spotted an abandoned campsite that somebody had previously made in a field and simply drove up to it. We built our fire in the pit that the previous person had left their ashes in and pitched two tents.
The next morning we went to the South Rim. After going to the Vistor's Center, we joined the crowds of visitors trooping up and down the rim trail. The views were incredible, the Grand Canyon is simply one of those things that you have to see in person to appreciate the vastness of. There were western squirrels hopping adorably around and Vygis disobeyed all manner of warning signs and left the trail to climb on an outcropping resulting in a fairly impressive photo and fortunately no loss of life. We took a lunch to the South Kaibab trail and began to hike into the canyon, again surrounded by many other people. The views continued to be incredible, and after a couple of hours we ate underneath a large boulder before returning to the rim. We said goodbye to the Canyon and began the long drive home.
Side 2 Track 9, Tangerine Dream, Lana: Our drive back to Maryland was along a more northerly route, through the breadbaskets of Kansas and Missouri. This Tangerine Dream driving song is here to evoke the long, boring fields of grain we passed through. There weren't a lot of side trips at this poiht in our journey, just driving. We switched drivers and kept going, occasionally waking up in the back seat screaming. Somewhere in the middle of the country, none of us could stay awake to drive, and I just parked the car next to an abandoned gas station off the road and we all slept as if clubbed unconscious in our seats until the sun rose.
Side 2 Track 10, Offspring, Bad Habit: Vygis was into Offspring at the time of this trip, I think that this was something he and Ari shared in particular. He kept "Smash" going for a lot of his driving on this trip, particularly on the drive home when we were all pushing it and trying to stay awake while at the wheel.
Side 2 Track 11, Thomas Dolby, Close But No Cigar: To end the tape are some songs that describe the bittersweet victory of returning home. The drive back was a bit numb, we had simply underestimated the toll of driving non-stop and mostly we just willed the scenery to flash by, keeping a death grip on the steering wheel and counting the miles left in each state. This song is about feeling like being at the end of a life, where an attempt to rekindle a romance falls flat and the artist is simply left pondering potential that somehow slipped away. This is pretty much how I feel most of the time as well. In addition to being a stunning work by Thomas Dolby from a tape that I played half a dozen times on the trip, this track is my confession of myself.
Side 2 Track 12, Fields Of The Nephilim, Wail of Sumer/And There Will Your Heart Be Also: As we headed east, Vygis described to me why he was playing this song, how it evoked for him the feelings of sadness for the end of a trip. Many of the tracks on Elizium are blended together like these two are and to Vygis the moment when "Wail of Sumer" switched to "And There Will Your Heart Be Also" reminded him of the moment when an airliner's wheels touch down on the runway after a long flight, and passengers' trip is over. After that moment, you're in a non-travelling phase, finding your luggage, returning to your once-familar car and driving back to your once-familiar home, until the feelings of familiarity return and the feelings of the trip begin to fade.
Vygis anticipated that switchover with our own trip. But instead of that happening, we did everything that we could to keep those feelings from fading. Lisa and I would accompany Vygis on two more Summer Tours, and then after a long break one more. He kept going on years when we did not, never failing to return to his western haunts, taking other friends on the magic journey. He discovered new places out there, made new friends and refound some old ones. Lisa and I eventually got married, and when we got our own house we tiled a bathroom for it in tiles that we'd bought on our trips out west, filling in the rest with a southwest-color-themed tile. And we had many other adventures with Vygis.
When we were cleaning out his house after he died so unexpectedly in 2013, I found the copy of the tape that I had made for him in one of his "time capsule" boxes. It didn't look like he had played it much, although given that if he heard certain songs on the tape he'd have to update some special list somewhere I guess it's understandable. On an impulse I sent it westward to Kris and Jenny Babike, the inspirations for the trip as well as every other summer tour that Vygis took in subsequent years, and who still live in Arizona to this day.