12 Days To Dudes: "Indiana"

My father worked for the 3M Company from 1977 until his retirement in 2003. He was a salesman, starting out in copy machines before moving into facsimile machines in the 80’s and then graduating to medical products in the 90’s. He traveled 2-3 nights a week for most of my childhood. During the summers, he would take my mother and I along on business trips, especially the ones featuring a hotel with a nice pool and cable television. Occasionally, he would pull me out of school and just the two of us would set off in search of commerce in some struggling Alabama city: Huntsville, Montgomery, Anniston, Florence.

I loved these trips. I loved the wide-open landscape of Interstate Highways, the anonymity of being in a different city, nights spent in hotels, maid service, the strange salty textures of restaurant food and unscheduled stops at Dairy Queens. It was the sex appeal of business travel, that particular sensation of having a far-off destination and a job that needed doing upon arrival. My father and I were joining up with a wider partnership of ambition, claiming our place in the silent fraternity that ran the world, dreaming beyond our house in a quiet suburb of a second-tier Southern city.

In 2002, after the major label tour support money went away with my major label record deal, I began hitting the road by myself for the first time. The tour managers, side musicians, 15-passenger vans and long nights of after-show fraternal debauchery were suddenly replaced with economy rental cars, meals taken alone in anonymous restaurants, weird conversations with truck stop cashiers and an empty hotel room at the end of every night.

This change in circumstance brought its own particular sense of glamor, one hopelessly connected to my appetite for nostalgia. Whether I wanted to admit or not, it all bore a near perfect resemblance to my father’s career. I found that the best way to approach solo touring was to think of my tiny audiences in each city as clients, the venues as businesses and the world as my sales territory. Fortified by a certain measure of talent, suburban work ethic and gallons of alcohol, I was on the road, exploring the elusive romance of my father’s absence.

All sons are curious about the secret lives of their fathers. Most dads try to put on a brave face for their families, exposing the frustration of their unfulfilled ambitions in only the most fleeting moments: a quick bout of aggressive driving, some seemingly random cursing over a building project gone awry. As boys grow into men, the general plot of everything thickens, and even the most eloquent fathers are often incapable of verbally communicating to their sons exactly what the fucking point is, why you keep chasing something down, something shapeless and migratory, that need for purpose that is hard-wired into the male DNA. I don’t envy fathers trying to explain this to their sons, all the while knowing that, at some point, they will just have to go out into the world and figure it out for themselves.

I always thought of “Indiana” as a pretty straightforward whining session that played out over one particularly boring stretch of the American highway. But on a subconscious level, beneath the hangover and bloat and mild depression of another day spent driving to another solo job, it is simply a version of that eternal question that boils in the male gut: “Why, Dad, why?”