Why "Slow Ride" is my own private "Niagara Falls"/"Susquehanna Hat Company"

Grooving to the “Ride” in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, 1993

The com­ments thread on my post con­cern­ing my “The Tree of Life” review for MSN Movies has taken an intriguing turn, now con­cern­ing itself with the ways vari­ous dir­ect­ors incor­por­ate pre­vi­ously recor­ded music into their films. Malick and Woody Allen are cited, of course, as is Richard Linklater, who Kent Jones calls “the most under­es­tim­ated American film­maker.” Looking back on the dir­ect­or’s 1993 Dazed and Confused, Kent affec­tion­ately cites the film’s clos­ing song, Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” call­ing it with­in the film’s con­text “an ode to freedom.”

If only I could hear it that way. Instead, whenev­er I get a taste of the chug­ging slide-guitar riff that fuels the song, it’s like ashes in my mouth. It’s not an ode to free­dom; it’s a remind­er of my youth being taken away. 

Back in the early ’70s, my uncle Jack, the head of the house­hold known as “the Brooklyn Kennys,” had this really delight­ful spread on remote Long Island, a con­ver­ted farm com­plete with a barn. The occa­sion­al horse resided therein, but the barn was mostly not­able for the swim­ming pool Jack had installed next to it. Summers of my early teens were spent there, in utter bliss. Jack’s young­est boy, my cous­in Justin, and Britt E., a cous­in from Santa Monica (his dad had foun­ded the Oar House, the hangout for the motor­cycle gang in Corman’s The Wild Angels, and, get this, was an early real-estate busi­ness part­ner of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s) and I were all the same age, more or less, and we would camp out at that house for a month or so each sum­mer, get­ting in to more and more “trouble” each year. Down the road lived one Kristin [sp.?] Gifford, reputedly a niece of Frank’s, who was very cute and sweet and whom Justin had an enorm­ous crush on. Britt would osten­ta­tiously make as if to moon her whenev­er she was swim­ming under­wa­ter, which made poor Justin very nervous and agit­ated. We were all like 12 at the time. Our only adult super­vi­sion most of the time was our our aged grand­moth­er and a couple of her equally eld­erly friends’ they’d get up at the crack of dawn, put their toot­sies in the pool for ten minutes, and then dis­ap­pear until din­ner, where we duti­fully showed up and peppered the old­sters with ques­tions as to what Herbert Hoover was really like. When coun­try life got a bit too quiet, we’d hop on the LIRR into the city and hang a bit at Uncle Jack’s brown­stone in the Heights, and go into Manhattan and get into Central Park Wollman Rink rock con­certs for free by brib­ing a secur­ity guard at the peri­met­er gate with a single can of Schaefer beer from the six pack we had some­how pro­cured before mak­ing our way there. We saw Poco and the Charlie Daniels Band, as I recall. Why, I don’t know. Then, once we’d annoyed our older cous­ins suf­fi­ciently with our pizza and beer and loud rock music, we’d go back to the farm house, and the pool, and give Justin shit about get­ting nowhere with Kristin, and make dan­deli­on wine, and maybe get a little read­ing done. It was heaven.

And then it was gone. Around the time I was 13 going on 14, Jack announced that he had sold the spread. Rather bemused, he related that he had sold it to, of all con­glom­er­ates, a rock and roll group. Scottish, he believed. “Have you heard of Foghat?” Jack asked. I had. “Undistinguished blues-rockers from the ashes of Savoy Brown,” I did not say. I’d heard some of their stuff on WNEW FM. Whatever. “Normally I don’t think too highly of the rock people,” Jack said, “but I have to say these fel­lows were com­plete gen­tle­men.” Like I cared.

And years later I read in MOJO magazine, I think it was, about Foghat’s move from Great Britain to Long Island, and the ter­rif­ic con­ver­ted farm they com­mun­ally bought, and how they con­ver­ted the barn into a stu­dio, which was bril­liant, really, you see, because there was a swim­ming pool right next to it, so if you ran out of inspir­a­tion or just needed refresh­ing you could just nip out and have a little dip. The res­ult­ant atmo­sphere was so relax­ing that it res­ul­ted in a new cre­at­ive high for the band, res­ult­ing in the 1975 album Fool For The City, which also yiel­ded the group’s sole hit single. 

Yup. It was “Slow Ride.” Fuckers. Slowly I turn…