Beautiful Song of Despair

I’ve loved the song “Truck Stop Girl” since I first heard it 50 years ago. 

I’m hyperlinking to the Byrds’ version, which is the one I’m familiar with, though I learned some years ago that the song was composed and performed first by Little Feat.  

I love the way the song hits my ears: the melody, the piano; the carefully placed guitar parts; the sympathetic drumming; the perfect, understated vocal by the late great Clarence White. 

But more than that, even as a kid, I recognized that the song lyrics relate a crisp little parable about how convincing and unreliable despair can be. Like, when you think your world has come to an end and you’ve got nothing to live for, you can do some really stupid shit.

To say the least, you lose perspective.

Simple story: Young truck driver, nice kid, falls in love with a truck stop waitress, she dumps him with no warning, he drives off in a rage of anguish, crashes his truck and dies. 

Here, I’ll paste the words:

Tailights flickerin’ as he pulled up to the truck stop
The same old crowd was hangin’ out again tonight
He said, “Fill up my tank while I go check my load
It feels like it’s shifting all around”

He was the kind of man, do all he could
Above all he had integrity
But he was so young and on a ten city run
In love with a truck stop girl

As he went inside, he was merrily greeted
By the girl with whom he was in love
She held out a glass and said, “Have another
This is the last time we can meet”

With her hair piled up high and a look in her eye
That would turn any good man’s blood to wine
All his eyes could see, well, all his eyes could see
Was the stare from all those around him

He ran out to the lot, and climbed into his rig
And drove off without tightening down
It was a terrible thing to see what remained
Of the rig that poor Danny was in

And he was so young and on a ten city run
In love with a truck stop girl
But he was so young and on a ten city run
In love with a truck stop girl”

God I love that song. I found myself singing it out loud on a couple of my recent late-night park walks. It’s such a fine reminder of how little I can really see at any given moment, and how easy it is to lose a sense of proportion.

By the way, I feel Clarence White was something of a vocal genius. His rendition of “Bugler” with the Byrds is among my favorite songs of my life. I saw the Byrds perform this song in concert in 1972. (Yup.) It moved me so much. I couldn’t understand all of the words, but I “got” that it was a song about a deep friendship, and that one of the friends died by being run over by a car. 

What I didn’t get until at least ten years later, when I heard “Bugler” performed live by a different artist, was that the friend who died in the song was a dog. Which didn’t diminish its profundity one bit.