What with all this he-said-she-said stuff swirling around, maybe it will come as a relief to read something about not much more than the joy of charging down a highway in a convertible with the radio playing loud. After a church service, no less.
My hair got all mussed up, but nobody minded.
It’s a little late, but this will also be my own personal offering to the Queen of Soul. I was in Philadelphia, not Detroit; riding in a black Camaro; not a pink Cadillac; listening to the Beatles, not to Motown. But still, there she was, in the back seat (if there had been a back seat) reminding me of how she’d come to my rescue in the past and plans to reign on within my psyche still.
Much has been made of how, as a young woman, Aretha made the move from gospel music to mainstream R & B and then started racking up the hits. There was song after song about love every which way – “Dr. Feelgood” and “Ain’t No Way” gave us the range of highs and lows possible. And then there were those sock-it-to-you one-word titles: “Think,” “Respect” and yes, especially relevant nowadays, “Integrity.” She didn’t leave church so much as carry the range of emotions she must have expressed in that original setting with her into a new arena. She made a kind of beautiful — and OK, profitable—bridge.
Thanks to my four older brothers and an active turntable in our living room, I grew up absorbing through all my pores how she sang— along with Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations and the Marvelettes, just to name a few. Musically, anyway, I like to think I was well- educated.
But it was her “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” album that had the greatest impact on me. For Aretha, it was apparently a kind of a comeback moment; the seventies had been a long dry spell for her. I, on the other hand, was in a deep trough. Having made a series of decisions that landed me exactly nowhere, I felt down and out, with a life in shambles. Some family members up in northern Vermont took me in for a while, and there, on a cold January day in 1986, I watched the explosion of the Challenger in the clear blue sky.
One evening, though, my sister-in-law Amy wisely suggested some dance therapy. We moved back some furniture and put on something with a pounding beat– “Freeway of Love.” Now that’s a song that will shake you right out of your blues, at least for a few minutes. Here’s the second verse:
Oh we got some places to see
I brought all the maps with me
So jump right in, it ain’t no sin
Take a ride in my machine.
I won’t say that the dancing alone launched a new and better chapter, but it sure nudged me in the right direction—towards accepting myself as I was, letting go of whatever mistakes (if they in fact were mistakes) I had made, and looking forward rather than back.
Clarence Clemons plays the sax on this track, and if you’ve never heard it, please be my guest in enjoying this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip_pjb5_fgAYou might assume that a song with “freeway” in the title would be set in Los Angeles, but think again: this is a tribute to the Motor City.
So it was, 32 and a half years later, riding in that fast car next to my husband on a sunny September afternoon—our anniversary – I felt certain that we “still got some places to see.” How though, I wonder, did all those maps of everywhere get inside everybody’s phones?