American Road Magazine Autumn 2022 Back Issue

This issue of American Road offers you our own road concert in hopes to find you humming through the miles. Our melody begins with a musical look at the landscape of America through thirteen tuneful locations.
“Rock Around the Road Again” follows the same format as our original “Rock Around the Road” feature of autumn 2018. It visits a dozen spots that played a part in the history of popular music: from the Montreal hotel room in which John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their 1969 “Bed-In for Peace” to that disappearing California bridge from which the Monkees leapt in making their 1968 surreal feature film Head.
Few songs have found such an enduring place in popular culture as Don McLean’s 1971 single “American Pie.” The eight-and-a-half-minute opus recounts the turmoil of the 1960s through the death
of Buddy Holly. We talk with McLean in an exclusive interview as the song turns fifty-one and hits the road for an anniversary tour in “Don McLean: American Pie Meets American Road.”

Years ago, I asked our magazine staff to select those road songs they believed to be the best in the canon. You’ll find our final consensus in “American Road’s American Tunes”—which scores everything
from Willie Nelson’s seminal highway anthem “On the Road Again” to Bruce Springsteen’s ode to big, blushing automobiles in “Pink Cadillac.” Give us a listen, then let us know if your ears agree.
The rest of this issue follows the music wherever it leads. We visit Louis Armstrong’s old apartment in Queens, New York, and get stuck in Lodi again with Creedence Clearwater Revival. We drop into
Paisley Park outside Minneapolis, Minnesota—former home to the late Purple One, Prince. For an encore, we shake, rattle, and roll over to Tennessee, to see how Dolly Parton has recreated a street straight out of the 1950s at Dollywood theme park.

Enjoy our selections and feel free to play your own mood music as you read.