Well I rode that ribbon highway
I saw above me the endless skyway
I saw below me the golden valley
This land was made for you and me
I’ve roamed and rambled and followed my footsteps Through the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me a voice was calling
This land was made for you and me
This land is your land
This land is my land
From California
To the New York island
From the redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
Well the sun came shining and I was strolling
Through wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
And a voice was sounding
As the fog was lifting
Saying this land was made for you and me
This land is your land
This land is my land
From California
To the New York island
From the redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
How’s that for a Christmas present?
Well now, isn’t that just perfect. It’s even better than the glorious original, one of the finest pure American, and by this I mean no influence from European or ethnic cultures, songs ever written.
I heard this song the other day in the coffee shop and of course, I knew the song, but who was the singer? Well it had to be Springsteen of course. I just never knew he covered this.
I’ve listened to a lot of Springsteen and of course, he’s one of the all-time greats. But he really puts it all in on this one. The glorious beauty of his spare voice and the resonating perfection of his pure soul just ring right through this whole shoddy world for a few minutes and spark everything up with epiphany before the song fades and it all turns dark again.
But at least we can have that four minutes. Four minutes of perfection…before we die. It’s almost enough to make the whole sorry journey worth it after all.
That voice of pure soul and heart sounds familiar. Of course. It’s Willie. Willie Nelson at his best sounds just about like this. And who are they both channeling? Can’t be other than Johnny Cash, right?
There’s that perfect harmonica at the end. Well that’s straight up Bob Dylan. Who can also sing and feel much like this, at his best that is. 1960’s Robert Zimmerman, I’m looking at you.
For the record, I also think that country music is “pure American music.” I had always hated it, but one day I was racing up Highway 395 blown out of my mind with a head full of LSD, and I finally realized that true greatness of country music, and even Frank Sinatra for that matter. I also realized that country music was as I noted above “pure American music.”
Not long afterwards, country music and Sinatra bored me again. Revelations on acid often fade when held up the sterile empirical light of the non-frying mind. Whatever I heard in them on acid just wasn’t coming through on the normie quotidian wavelength.
By the way, I drove fine on that trip. Get yourself a nice two lane highway in the middle of nowhere, fill your head with high-powered LSD, and get ready to fly. Acid never distorted the road for me. As long as you have a straight and narrow road ahead, you should be just fine. It’s city traffic that I worry about, though once we were flying on LSD driving through the slums of Mexico along the California border. I’ll have to tell you that story sometime.
