*who also pointed out that Miller was the voice of Allan-a-Dale in the Disney animated Robin Hood, a movie with which I was mildly obsessed as a nipper.

I love “King of the Road.” It’s not my favorite Roger Miller recording, but it’s one of his best compositions, and it definitely feels natural that this be his biggest hit. Like many, many texts about hobos, it appeals to people who in real life have little actual fondness for the unhoused. It’s certainly a dated trope - Miller’s proud rambler somewhere along the way turned into Oasis’s caricature (”sniffin’ in a tissue, sellin’ the Big Issue”) and society’s elephant in the room. I wonder if part of “King of the Road”’s success can be traced to its ambiguity - if you’re convinced the hobo is a noble wandering philosopher (we’re a few short years from Easy Rider), the material is certainly there to support it - but you could also probably dig on this if you were inclined to think of him as a seedy, unwanted tramp: he’s breaking and entering while puffing on a gross discarded cigar, and you can take the lyric as Miller making fun of this stereotypical creep who is telling himself he’s got it made. Obviously the slant is towards the former reading and you’d be hard-pressed to miss it, but I think it’s at least sort of open-ended.

(Compare to the more direct statement - in a very different context - from Dylan: “…where people carried signs around saying ‘Ban the Bums’ / I jumped right in line, said I hope that I’m not late / When I realized I hadn’t eaten for five days straight.”)

A girl I once dated could never get her head around “Don’t pay no union dues.” “Why does he say that?” Well, because he’s the sort of grinning fellow who sees a bright side in the fact that he’s unemployed. “What’s so bad about paying union dues?” etc.

Of course, the Stones, being more thoughtful than Miller, portray such “freedom” as very problematic.

But even if there were no thematic connection between Stones and Miller, they’re connecting by sharing the same pop chart at the same time (and are automatically connected on this blog when “King of the Road” 7, “The Last Time” 6 come in near succession). Furthermore, back in the day, once the Stones hit, a “you’re-either-with-’em-or against-’em” vibe was created. You can’t understand 1965 if you don’t understand this. Mick Jagger was one of the most hated men in the world. And therefore everything on the charts was somewhat defined as either being similar to the Stones or dissimilar. You didn’t have a choice. And, obviously, as Mark Sinker points out upthread, traces of this vibe remain 40 years later, hence Popular gets testy once the Stones show up.

I have no trouble sympathizing with Mardello’s and D. Mod’s antipathy, though I don’t share it. Did spend a few hours last week trying to find what services there are in Denver for homeless teens. Not a lot (presumably fear of lawsuits is a big deterrent from helping the young and disenfranchised).

Fingersnappin’ and walkin’ bass = hipster signifier (but one that’s already out-of-date)

Text that no one but Don has noted: “every lock that ain’t locked when no one’s around.”

If I’ve got this right, understanding why a number one hits that magic button is exactly why Tom is doing this site, and I applaud him for it. All I’m saying is let’s not invest the songwriters and musicians and producers themselves with too much intellectual engagement. Most of them run on instinct, and music (popular or otherwise) is all the better for it. Look what happened when rock musicians started thinking too much about what they were doing: Jon Lord gave us ‘Deep Purple and the London Philharmonic’ (or whatever it was called), and Pete Townsend gave us ‘Tommy’.

Of course I’m crackers too, so the above may just be a load of old hooey of the sort you might find in a Chinese fortune cookie…

That’s not what he said.

Doctor Mod

Here’s my sixpennyworth. King of the Road was a hit because it’s a damnably singable tune with a well-crafted, memorable lyric. Anyone who thinks Roger Miller was thinking about subtexts on the nature of the American Dream is just plain crackers.

Ditto some of the comments about the Stones. Give us a break, guys.

This song is about many things but the Rolling Stones is not one of them; neither are the Proclaimers nor amphetamines. What is about is the grimy glamo(u)r of living on one’s own terms, ready to drop everything in a heartbeat and move on, the mobility that guarantees freedom from all commitment and therefore heartbreak, even if that means that you are a useless bum.

No one ever heard this song and said “Hey I wanna be like that guy,” but if you have never met any one of these completely untethered off-the-grid individuals then I can understand why you think this is hokum. I don’t know why so many of these guys are named Fred, but many of them are, and they all have lived in Wyoming at some point. They don’t have to smoke old stogies anymore, but sometimes they probably do just to do it. It’s kind of like hono(u)ring fallen homiez by pouring out a 40.

This freak, for one, never bought into the Dylan myth either–which is not to say that I can’t appreciate Dylan on some level–and, indeed, hasn’t been much impressed with the “American frontier” mythos in more recent figures such as Springsteen and Mellencamp. Rather, I see all these figures (with the exception of Dylan, who has a keen sense of irony) as the mourners of an American dream that is rapidly becoming more and more untenable. Being American, white, straight, and male might not be the passport to an absolute freedom that answers to no one that it was, in previous decades, imagined to be. Even so, to our own perdition, there are still those who try ferociously to cling to this notion.

What does this have to do with “King of the Road”? It is both a throwback and a harbinger of things to come in this vein.

You say you’d have liked it better by the Kingston Trio. I’d have been able to like it by Fairport Convention or the Strawbs, artists who would have put it in a rather different context and who weren’t invested in this particular myth.

Doctor Mod

Tom’s right about words, guitar, and singing playing at odds with one another, and though Jagger may sound upbeat and as if he holds the cards, his words say otherwise, divide Jagger the lyricist from Jagger the singer. Girl holds power by saying no, and put “The Last Time” with “Heart Of Stone” and you’re planting the seeds for Iggy going “Come and be my enemy so I can love you too,” and Axl saying “Turn around bitch I got a use for you.” But where does that get you? I don’t know… [into the fade out, the best and longest fadeout to that point in music history, and he really doesn't know].

Staples Singers are to “The Last Time” as Ptolemy is to Copernicus.

It’s somewhat closer with, say, Valentinos’ “It’s All Over Now” vs. the Stones’, but the Valentinos going “Hurt my nose open, that’s no lie, tables turn now it’s her turn to cry” still feels, in that version, like standard man-woman stuff, while the Stones going “Hurt my eyes open, that’s no lie, tables turn now it’s her turn to cry” is done with threat, arrogance, a social tough-guy-ness like Brando in The Wild One. It’s meant to hurt our eyes open, about a world that is wrong, and is the precursor to “God save the queen/The fascist regime/Made you a moron…” etc. and there is no future in England’s dreaming. Her turn to cry.

Of course, now that the songs are golden oldies, a lot of this is lost; we’re used to that guitar line, and there’s no way it’s a razor anymore. You want a razor, you make one yourself.

It seems to me that the political context has been completely overlooked here. This recording represents something of a backlash against all the other trends of the moment, particularly what many Americans, at least, would see as the infiltration of “furners” (trans., foreigners) into a traditionally American popular music culture. Thus we have this bit of hokey Americana, a nostalgic pseudo-pastoral apotheosis of American freedom that, in reality, never was–at least not in this glorified manner. Growing up in the US, I saw this as what I was “supposed” to like as opposed to what I did like, a reimposition of the standards of the previous decade.

In 2005, I still thoroughly dislike this song–perhaps even more than in 1965–because I know exactly who wants to blind us with counterfeit nostalgia for a “lost” America and reimpose those falsehoods and repressions NOW.

It’s not so much that I can’t stand the song itself (”hate” is too strong a word), but rather the idea of it.

Would this song be a hit in 2005? I can imagine a performance of it in the White House, even in the age of “compassionate conservatism” that would call any self-styled king of the road a “homeless person” and therefore a problem.

Doctor Mod

So, where does “King of the Road” fit? Well, it’s gentle enough to appeal to adults for whom the Beatles are “What’s that?” and the Stones are the devil’s spawn, but is devoid of show music and old pop (Perry Como, et al.) signifiers, is folky and hobo enough to play to the bohos, is slick enough to play to the sophisticates, but has enough subtle country inflections to appeal to the farmers. Which is to say that despite the hate evidenced on this thread (which has more to do with 2005 than with 1965, I think), “King of the Road” didn’t play as anyone’s other - except maybe the guy who thinks everything turned to shit after Debussy - hence didn’t raise sociological barriers to enjoyment.