Wheels

The song “Wheels” by the Flying Burrito Brothers on their 1968 album "Gilded Palace Of Sin" LP has been haunting me for some time now. It is one of the more recent encounters with music that caused me to initially began thinking about music as a means of questioning our politics in the present as I attempted to provisionally explore in the previous post. They are in fact directly related in many ways, the byrds overlapped with the flying burrito brothers and later wholly incorporated this song’s composers Hillman and Parsons as significant contributing members over their multiple configurations. In the prior post I outlined the structure of contradiction in a byrds song at once an expansive liberating space that is repeatedly interrupted, constrained forcibly and tamed by a countrified slide guitar ridden chorus. Here we find another, nearly opposite use of precisely the same instrument to insert expansive dimensions into a typical song structure.

It opens with what can only be described as bare, bar room temperament: a brittle tremolo guitar, dry tinny snare, and a rubbery cardboard sounding bass lead us into a “honky-tonk” piano-lined room where two harmonizing voices sing, one close, one slightly distant, with a slippery slide guitar adorning the corners of the first verse.
“We've all got wheels to take ourselves away/ We've got the telephones to say what we can't say/We all got higher and higher every day/Come on wheels take this boy away”

The democratic imagination of a collective “we” narrated here is defined by means of transportation, telephones, and stuff that makes you higher and higher. These are the foundations of the postwar image of freedom: vehicular escape, mediated communication, and infinite self-administered pleasure. A ceaseless rite of passage never completed that forever postpones “our” transmission from boyhood is wrapped in the cloak of the timeless honky-tonk of a long lost folk authenticity. But the chorus disrupts this repetition of deferral and displaced subjectivity inhered in the confines of a mediated honky-tonk with the linear expanse of the road. Although distant, the end of the road is always present in the linear expanse of lines of flight afforded by the wheels that will take this boy away, like the angels of death themselves. “We're not afraid to ride/We're not afraid to die/ So come on wheels take me home today/So come on wheels take this boy away”
The fearlessness of the choruses’ collective we suggests a subject full of certainty in the face of limitless uncertainty, it is a subject differentiated from the verses’ subject by a decisive recognition of the profound limitations of their own eternal escape. The piercing of the song space by two resonating notes of a distorted slide guitar’s open strings sustaining a lone note embodies this decisive state of both limitation and freedom, a state produced by the collective we’s confrontation with its death as it permeates the very conditions of their freedom. That is, in the resonating sustain of the two notes born in the wake of the linked verbs to ride and to die we encounter a world at once infinite and finite, a contrary form of possibility and constraint which calls into being a “we” whose wheels are the sole means of their becoming, their angel of hope and death all rolled into one. Between their ride and their death, punctuated by the resounding drones of fuzz distortion “we” must decisively submit to their wheels having abandoned all fears as well as the fraught distractions of a ceaseless escape that has reached its limits; the wheels embody both discrete worlds of verse and chorus, and are thus the transport between these realms. This chorus repeats instrumentally and the interaction between these contours of possibility and constraint between two worlds plays out in the exchanges of the instruments leading ultimately to a return of the honky-tonk world played by the conventional country slide guitar and insistent piano.

From there, the second verse ambiguously attempts to align these separate worlds with a single subject who faces their death with a joined fatalism with faith to plead their wheels to transform him at last into the deferred manhood: “Now when I feel my time is almost up/And destiny is in my right hand/I'll turn to him who made my faith so strong/Come on wheels make this boy a man” This turn to the spiritual through the material produces a deep contradiction between the liberating and confining functions of the wheels which differently embody each world of verse and chorus. At the same time, in both realms, they increasingly become the only means of salvation for both collective and singular subjects. The chorus returns as the mediation of the timeless individual versus community opposition and that resigned, decisive collective subject, which now includes all individuals capable of inserting themselves into the “I” of the second verse. “We're not afraid to ride/We're not afraid to die come on wheels take me home today/ come on wheels take this boy away/come on wheels take this boy away.”

I could go on with these contrary forms of mechanical escape and liberation tangled up in the image of wheels but want to instead come to the point of my encounter with this song. While not the first “road song” by any means, this song about wheels contains many of the contradictions from which the present was born and in particular, identifies a very concrete set of political limitations active in the present.

The interstate highway network legislated into being under pressure of the auto-makers in 1956 would have by 1968 been largely completed. (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System for a brief overview of this network)
The wheels of this song in fact seem to represent the profound shift in the spatial-temporal dimension of the American landscape and the contradictions the highway system brought into being. Most importantly these lyrical wheels belong to a new we of a political subject linked through a interstate road system and a landscape increasingly oriented towards this new scale of exchange. The degree to which we can trace the material foundations of the so-called party of “strength” and its martial logic through this particular form of wheels is the degree to which we can locate our own possibilities and limitations in opposing them in concrete ways. That is, quite literally by encountering the contrary form of wheels brought into being at the same time as a new spatial-temporal scale inscribed upon the landscape throughout the 1960’s, we can uncover the conflicted origins of a present all the more submitted to the wheels which this song hailed as our angels of salvation and death. This is not a question of a new language, nor of a new set of values but identifying within these materials present everywhere a space of leverage that can offer us a better understanding of the present. If we can locate the places and times when and where the “politics” of the present have come into being, those who oppose the right need not merely find better counter-slogans, but can perhaps begin to displace their practices of inequality with practices that undo those inequalities. I am using very general terms here again to emphasize the need to think both beyond and through the politics given to us by a deeply mediated world (a world of politics indistinct from the politics of news channel hair stylists and make-up technicians). Our own strong valuations of “equality” will never being able to engage the practices of inequality until their material foundations are confronted with opportunities for all to take part in their undoing.

Song link in comments