BLUE HIGHWAY influence map

Because a couple asked about it.

Click to get it at full size.

It’s not really in order. Deal.

 

THE ROAD WARRIOR/MAD MAX

Immediate and visceral impact on fourteen or fifteen year old me. Semi-alien desert vistas, V-8s being operated with no sense of safety or human restraint, punks on motorbikes and evil cops in leather and everything good in the world hinges on a sole burnout case and his big black interceptor. I can’t even begin to relate the kind of psychic damage that movie wrought on my teenage brain. The film conveyed speed in a way that I’d never seen before and maybe never will again. Some stuff works best on you when you haven’t crafted a defense for it, when you don’t even know what’s coming.

 

CAR WARS

A mix of game and compulsive “what if” future history projection. This game from Steve Jackson Games was all about electric cars in a post-oil future America that was part ROLLERBALL and part DEATH RACE, all of it grounded in a pretty detailed future history with its own continuity and most importantly, a real sense of place. Like all game systems and worlds, eventually it figures out what it is and becomes less exciting for it, but those early days of trying to figure out how to squeeze in just one more space’s worth of weapons or another ten points of armor before the chassis bottomed out were pretty special.

 

NEUROMANCER

Not so much for the content, but the way it was presented. That prose sang like nothing else I’d read at age nineteen or twenty. Yeah, I came to it late. But you have to remember, I was reading more comics than novels at that time. Gibson’s prose set the standard for me, making that world live and breathe even if it was only a millimeter thin.

 

Cowboy Junkies

The jukebox at Roy’s has THE TRINITY SESSIONS on it, I know that much for sure. And like everybody else, I was introduced to them by way of their cover of “Sweet Jane” which of all people, my dad brought home with him one day. Their mix of country and gospel and rock and probably the barest recording I’d heard at the time was something pretty amazing. And though they’re Canadian, a lot of the hurt and the emotion in those songs in particular had a place all the way in the California desert.

 

Tom Waits

The Frank’s trilogy especially, that being SWORDFISHTROMBONES, RAIN DOGS, and FRANK’S WILD YEARS were albums that I spent a lot of time listening to from 1987 on, when a friend of mine pressed FRANK’S into my hands and said “You need to hear this” and was he ever right. Waits’ imagined/remembered past blended with all kinds of off-kilter instrumentation and unique lyrical approach really unscrewed my head and put it back differently. You don’t have to scratch real hard to see me try and capture some of that in the language of BLUE HIGHWAY.

 

The Cure

Well yeah, I named a place “Fascination Street”. Really, that’s the Balboa Pier and peninsula in Orange County, but turned into something a lot more seductive and dangerous. Only the danger is all play. So yeah, DISINTEGRATION was an album that got a lot of play when the earliest draft of BLUE HIGHWAY was being hammered out. But geez, that bassline on “Fascination Street”, that drive and the sort of desperate howl that Smith puts into the vocals, that’s the sort of thing I was shooting for and never really was satisfied in hitting.

 

MIAMI VICE/THIEF

Michael Mann hangs heavy on all this. My dad sat me down and had me watch THIEF with him on cable and I bet I wasn’t fifteen yet. The whole thing was dreamlike, but so grounded in the little details that it couldn’t possibly be, right? Clean shots, simple, nothing hugely fancy because the whole thing was being shot like Mann wasn’t a household name. If I’m trying to really copy anything with my visuals, it’s this, the uncomplicated and often austere beauty that Mann and his crew found in urban environments.

 

Rice, CA. – http://www.airfields-freeman.com/CA/A...

In 1986, I went with a bunch of my friends to Rice, California, out in the Mojave. Yes, it’s on Highway 62, you can see it just south of Blythe and not too far west of the Arizona border. There’s a lot that’s been left out there, whether by mistake or by design. Some if it is the bones of history, like the Iron Mountain Proving Grounds that were set up to simulate North African desert conditions for WWII. And some of it is just the scrabbled-out airstrips that were left behind and now get used by drugrunners or college kids out for kicks. Not that I’d ever know anyone who’d just drag old furniture out there to set it on fire and watch it burn. No siree.

 

Riverside http://www.hercampus.com/school/uc-ri...

I was born in Riverside, just like that Beat Farmers song. It’s another place, particularly back then, where the recent past dragged out for several decades. In a lot of ways, now that I look at it from today, it held onto the fifties and sixties. Not so long ago, there were still orange orchards and mid-century bungalows, as opposed to Xeroxed tract houses. Last time I was there, to see an uncle off to the great beyond, there had been a lot of modernization (which usually means big tracts and cheap construction) but the old parts still hung around. Though it was unsettling to drive past a former orange grove and seeing all the trees ripped out, root structures like a flock of twisted Lovecraftian sea creatures left to dry in the sun.

 

Life in Orange County http://blog.hoddick.com/2011/07/05/so...

Orange County is a pretty weird place. Where once was bean fields (and still a stubborn family growing tomatoes near Main and Sunflower, in the shadow of the Costa Mesa Performing Arts Center), now stand monuments to industry and finance. That gleaming new airport, John Wayne International? Yeah, I remember when it was a single terminal building that was basically a couple of double-wides put together and you had to walk out on the tarmac to get to your plane. Originally bucolic, if not pastoral, Orange County was ever the playground of the well-heeled. Go to Costa Mesa and just a few blocks from Norm’s (which typifies déclassé dining), you get a Lamborghini dealership. North County isn’t South County and never the twain shall meet. And yet, I call that place home, when you dig down to the deepest part of my sun-bleached California soul. Not that it feels like home much anymore, though.

 

Raymond Chandler

When I’d started writing BLUE HIGHWAY, there was no noir revival. About the closest thing to that was the Black Lizard Library of Willeford and Thompson and the like. Chandler was still on the literary scrapheap, though pieces of him had been bubbling up and around the margins for some time. My dad handed me a copy of THE BIG SLEEP and I never looked back. The way he used language was nothing short of astonishing to me. The way he bridged both “high” and “low” culture (dig the scare quotes, something I’d picked up since my film and postmodernism classes where I realized that the border between the two was basically imaginary) and showed the corruption running in and out of the haves and have-nots, as revealed by Marlowe tracking the threads of crime? Yeah, big influence. Perhaps inescapably big.

 

THE END OF HISTORY AND THE LAST MAN

By Francis Fukayama, which is an expanded version of his 1989 paper “The End of History” in which he, apparently with a straight face, argued that the triumph of Western Liberal Democracy was going to become the final form of human government. This tract was going around the office where I worked not long after I finished my college studies and I could only look at and laugh. Sure, the wall had just come down and Russia was on its way to imploding (it hadn’t yet) so hey, maybe this guy was right. And people ate it up. Meanwhile I thought about the carcasses of whales beached on the shore and busily being eaten and nibbled on by a thousand crabs and seagulls and other decomposers, with only scraps of flesh attached to bleaching bones.

 

THE GLASS HAMMER/DR. ADDER

Before there was a thing called ‘cyberpunk,’ K.W. Jeter, a friend of Philip K. Dick (who was then a resident of Orange County – connecting the dots yet?) DR. ADDER hit all the cyberpunk buttons long before that was a word on anyone’s tongue. I remember reading the illustrated (with art by Matt Howarth) copy of DR. ADDER that my mom had gotten and…wow. Mind. Expanded. Also punker than fuck. THE GLASS HAMMER, which I ended up reading just after BLUE HIGHWAY was finished (but it was on my radar before then) was much more a Gnostic romp through authority and reality television and cars with guns trying to outrun remote-controlled-drones in a near-collapse Los Angeles, written in the early 80s. Ahead of its time is an understatement.

 

BLADE RUNNER

And who wasn’t? Not that BLUE HIGHWAY is a direct lift, but the idea of the world being cobbled together by the scraps discarded by the wealthy, glommed onto the old structures to keep them limping along, that’s a big part of what I tried to being into my own work. Note that Scott didn’t go into great detail showing how it was all done, either. He just presented the world and let you put it together in your head.

 

Mom’s photography

One of the things my mom used to do was a lot of 35mm photography, and she had prints of her work made and put up in the house. Cheaper than buying “real” art. And what she took pictures of is long gone now, mostly the rolling hills around South County that used to be green a couple months a year and gold the rest of the time. Sometimes beaches, sometimes macro photography of various knickknacks and things around the house. So I come by it honestly. But that attention to detail never went away.

 

Dad’s reporting for the LA TIMES

My dad covered border issues since the early seventies, long before it became a hot-button issue for just about anyone. But he was also threatened by a west coast mobster for the stories he wrote (a threat which his attorney most explicitly relayed was the heat of the moment and surely his client didn’t mean anything like that.) He pointed out to me a lot of what other people overlooked, and that’s how the world really works.

 

STREETS OF FIRE

Probably an unusual one, right? Gotta admit, though, that it’s approach as movie-as-music-video was a compelling one. So was its setting of somewhere maybe in the fifties and maybe not. It’s heavily romanticized, and the gauze on its lens shows, but is also part of what makes it so much fun. Of course, I tend more to the romanticized seventies instead of the fifties as a rule, but whatever works.

 

The Walkabouts

One of the Sub Pop bands that never got a break like they should have. The Walkabouts were neither retro nor futuristic, neither punk nor country but somewhere in between. They wrote scrappy songs about outsiders and beauty and put it all to a beat, making things distinctly American, which is weird since they’ve had their greatest success overseas. Start with SEE BEAUTIFUL RATTLESNAKE GARDENS, but even their most recent work like ACETELYNE and TRAVELS IN THE DUSTLANDS still pack a real bite.

 

Stan Ridgway/Wall of Voodoo/Drywall

Ridgway’s THE BIG HEAT could pretty easily be an unofficial soundtrack to BLUE HIGHWAY, or parts of it. There’s a lot more to Wall of Voodoo than “Mexican Radio” would have you believe (but then that’s often true with most one-hit wonders). It’s part science fiction, almost a Burroghsian take on border life but also part realist, particularly true on DARK CONTINENT, their first album. Ridgway (who was the leader of WoV until he left in 1985) always had a fondness for the weird, the strange flyers stapled to telephone poles and the stories crammed into the back of the newspapers, and that sort of weirdness was something that I always found attractive and tried to bring back with me. Oh, and the album recorded under the name DRYWALL? It’s his love letter to Los Angeles (recorded with longtime collaborator Pietra Wexstun and Ivan Knight), and it has to be heard to be believed.

 

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

I’ve already talked at great length about this movie, which is probably near the top of the list for me, if not the occupier of slots 1-5. Lean and mean, explains as little as it has to and stops there. Plissken isn’t a role model, and in a lot of ways became the role model for amoral bad good guys, but there’s a lot more to him than that. Immaculate design and aesthetic born of the seventies, projected onto an imaginary future. The blueprint for the kind of thing that I wanted to do.

 

Muscle cars in general and vehicular lawlessness

I’m old enough to remember that 1973 cars were the cars that people used to drive around. That muscle cars used to rule the highway and weren’t just relegated to showrooms or movie screens as they are now. But that’s at the far edges of my memory. Mostly I remember K cars and the new econoboxes that came around the eighties. Still, though, those uncivilized dinosaurs still lurk out there, ready to roar past you and leave you in the dust at one hundred and ten per.

 

70s SF dystopias

The world wasn’t ever going to end. But it was going to get a lot worse. But we were still going to be around. The design in those always stuck with me, too. Mostly because it was cobbled together out of whatever was laying around and within reach at the time. Sometimes you got really inspired re-utilization of real-world locations (think DEATH RACE 2000 and the later PLANET OF THE APES movies.) And this got me looking at places and thinking about how they could be repurposed in ways perhaps not intended. But still fun. Mostly, however, I clung to the idea of beating the apocalypse, since I’d lived in an age which had done just that, given the end of the Cold War.

 

Nascent Internet, pre-Gopher

You have to understand, it was not always as it is now. There were times that it was innocent, or at least unknowing.