Song of The Day - Day 220

Today's song is...


Road Movie To Berlin


I used to be totally indifferent to this song and now it's one of my favorites. It was one that had to grow on me over time. I think seeing it live about a dozen times helped too. Ultimately, it was the charm of the quiet, mellow song that is just a little bit sad and then suddenly turns into a bombastic musical explosion that won me over. I can not listen to this song without banging my head along to the beat in the bridge. And then it slides back into the quiet, beautiful melody at the end. When played live, at the end of a front-to-back Flood show, there is something haunting and bittersweet about ending the set on the lyric "So sneak out this glass of bourbon and we'll go." I have a recording from the Flood show I saw in Chicago, where a lone fan in the audience cries "Don't go!" as the music fades out.

Like so many songs, my head is filled with memories of this played live. Going back and listening to a few recordings of shows I was at, I am reminded how incredibly beautiful it is to be in a room of people all singing along with this song. From Chicago, where Flans, as he usually does, rather forcefully inserts the missing verse, so that the audience singing along wont skip ahead, to the LPR show where there is no need for that at all, because the entire audience slides into the missing verse effortlessly. I can vividly recall Danny, relaxing with a beer on the horn riser in Chicago waiting for the bridge to hop up and play again. And more humorously, in Richmond, taking advantage of the short break the first verses allowed to use one of the amps to scratch his back, earning the most comical "what the hell are you doing?" from Dan Miller on the opposite side of the stage.

But my favorite memory is always Marty and his tambourine assistant. In Albany, just before the song starts Marty is gesturing to one of the techs to come over. They mistake his meaning initially but eventually one of them comes over behind the drum riser to see what he wants. Marty instructs him to crouch down behind the riser and hold his drum sticks, which the guy does. The song starts with Marty on the tambourine. But in the beat of silence before the bridge he reaches his hand with the tambourine in it back, the tech takes it and slaps the sticks in his hand and he swings his arm back around to come crashing in on the bridge. Then he repeats the process in reverse for the final verse. It is the funniest thing to watch and yet, of course it makes the transition, which would otherwise be awkward and likely result in something being dropped and missing beats, smooth as butter. And forever after if you looked behind the drum riser during this song, you would find someone, usually Victor, crouched behind Marty holding a tambourine up in the air. It's one of those things you wouldn't know to look for unless you had seen it half a dozen times already, and it never, ever failed to make me smile.