The Padkos Playlist: Free-falling into blue hotels on the long drive to redemption

Road songs need drive and rhythm, balanced with a thoughtful, melancholy air, a refrain to occupy your mind while your eyes are fixed to the narrowing strip of tar disappearing into the far hills. Road food – padkos – needs crunch and tang, a refreshing fillip to counter the ennui of the endlessly rolling tyres; a fix, a shot, a booster; an elixir to shock the tired mind into life again, like a splash of iced water to the face.

The song takes you, its lyrics borrow you, leaving your hands on the wheel but your mind far away in a foreign land where a lonely and regretful man in a red 1964 Chevrolet Corvair reversible with the top down is feeling the warm wind in his hair but ache in his heart. He’s 24 hours from Tulsa but a world away from the woman he forsook in a moment of rash madness. He hadn’t noticed the siren in the teal 1938 Chevrolet Master Deluxe coupé who had passed him going in the other direction, the lovesick woman who has driven all night on a long straight road to get to her lover, to escape the cruel and sticky city behind her; the same city where his spurned wife is now reading his letter; dearest darling, I had to write to say that I won’t be home any more… But he’s 24 hours from Tulsa and now he’s turning around, he can’t go back, because something happened while he was driving home.

He sings to her in dreams like Roy Orbison does. In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk to you; in dreams you’re mine all of the time… only in dreams. In the gloaming of duskfall, he passes a melancholy lineman on a ladder high up on a transmission tower, climbing stealthily like a lizard who’s scented bird’s-nest prey. He hears her singing in the wire, through the whine. He reminds himself that the lyric isn’t wine; though he long thought it was.

In the gloom he sees a faint, shifting glow; a touch of blue like a shiftless vagabond hiding from his deviance in the night. He pulls off and heads towards it as a strange mist clears to reveal a blue hotel on a lonely highway, where a man waits wistfully each lonely night for the lover who doesn’t come. He should find solace there, or escape, or if nothing else another lonely man who made a stupid mistake and will never recover from it; and drown their sorrows together like men do wherever there’s a lonesome bar on a long and empty road with a light saying No Vacancies. With creepy houses where Norman Bateses sit thoughtfully before rocking chairs, and strangers mutter and gossip behind their hands.

With a jolt, that jolt of adrenaline that bounces you in your driver’s seat when the reverie breaks and the spell is broken, you’re back on your long Karoo road again, the one that Willie wrote about, not the Beatles’ long and winding one; this is the highway of the ponytailed dreamer going places that he’s never seen; with his band of gypsies, down the highway he goes. And you’re hungry now, what’s in that plastic bakkie... and your eyes are like a cinematographer panning the long black stripe ahead for the sign with the little tree pointing to the next picnic spot. Tyres crunching, spitting stones, five steps and there’s relief next to that acacia, eyes taking in squashed Coke cans and crumpled KFC boxes, the scurrying beetle and something scraping in the ignored garbage bin, your head shaking at the numbing thoughtlessness of the litter lout. Don’t touch that dull green concrete table, rather sit in the car and brush away the crumbs before you ignite the engine again. It’s like she’s in your ear.

She made you ham and mustard sandwiches this morning and filled your flask with hot black coffee. Opening the bakkie, you smile when you see that she’s put a neatly folded blue-checked paper napkin in it and a sprig of parsley; those little touches that bring a smile even when she’s not beside you reminding you to slow-down-there’s-no-rush. There’s a peach too; she knows you love peaches.

While you’re passing another sign to Rietfontein on the endless road to nowhere, an open-top ’66 Ford Thunderbird hares past at the speed of the wild wind, two women in it laughing with their heads thrown back, flashes of a chiffon head scarf and tousled red hair, and a mood of strangeness all around as if there’s something going on, as if they’re being chased, and mystery and dread hang in the air as the car disappears into the fateful distance and heads off the road towards the final credits.

There’s ka-chook-ka-chook somewhere far east and as the rumble increases you see that long train running, and the pistons keep on turning, and the wheels go round and round, and you watch it disappear. But it’s not the Illinois Central or the Southern Central Freight, it’s the Shosholoza Meyl, purple and yellow in its lack of urgency; “best take your own food”, your wife warned that time you took the third-class Meyl to Matjiesfontein and the carriage was like a shebeen with passengers drinking and swaying all around you while the conductor handed out free miniature papsakkies of brandy and Coke, and you hiding behind your To Kill a Mockingbird paperback trying to be invisible. Watse boek is dit, one aunty asked you.

The grinding of a truck pulling into the picnic spot in your rearview mirror brings you back. The coffee’s gone down sweetly, the mind soothed, the eyes sharper. That purr of the ignition always pleases you, the way it breathes life afresh into the car, the mechanical resuscitation, the metal hulk sliding back onto the road and reaching its speed again; not too fast, love, whispered in your ear. Without love, where would you be now; she’s there even when she’s not. You wipe your mouth again on the blue-check napkin, focus on the great truck that you could swear was following you, the man’s arm out of the window, but you never see his face. Is this Psycho or Rear Window? He’s been there all day, now you see him, now you don’t, and suddenly he’s there again; he overtakes you yet is mysteriously behind you again, and again, and again. You plug your phone in to charge, put your mind back in gear.

Lucy Jordan is playing on the radio and you’re behind her on the Champs-Élysées, how sad she looks, how defeated and deflated; but it can’t be her, she never drove through Paris with the warm wind in her hair. You wishful-think her to the French capital, as if you could conjure her, materialise her like a Houdini or a David Copperfield, the magician, not the book. You try to banish the mind’s-eye picture of her letting the phone keep ringing while she sits there softly singing. At the age of thirty-seven, she realised…

You force a cheery image into your mind, and here’s Lil Nas X and Billy Ray taking their ’hoss to the Old Town Road, they’re gonna ride till they can’t no more. God you love that song. You put the CD in. Got the horses in the back, horse tack is attached, and the smile you smile at Nas with his cowboy hat from Gucci, Wrangler on my booty, and at how the kid bought Billy Ray a Maserati sports with the proceeds. And at how Billboard removed Nas’ original solo version from the charts because they didn’t think an African-American cowboy crooner could fly, and how Billy Ray Cyrus read the kid’s tweet after his song was dumped and was moved by the song and how their subsequent joint version of it blew every other Country song right off the charts. And Lil Nas X’s ain’t nobody tell me nothin’... Now that is a road song, that is a road story. Song of the decade, right there. Eat dirt, Billboard.

Find links to all 20 songs in my Padkos Playlist and a few movie clips at the end of the column. In the meantime, if you don't know this song you really should...