Burma Shave [View all]

I grew up in the age of Kerouacian "On the Road" fantasy, romance of the road, which, to my regret, I embraced. In the 1970's and 1980's, I drove my car across the US multiple times, Long Island to California and sometimes back again.

The song, a poetic, rendering, about that CULTure is Tom Waits "Burma Shave: "

"Some nights my heart pounds like thunder, don't know why it don't explode..."

Burma Shave refers to an advertising campaign by a company that put little riddles on a series of signs on the side of major highways in the 1950s and 1960s:

Burma Shave



Waits sings of it as a destination, in this case the destination being death.

I am barely old enough to remember seeing some of these signs, albeit when I was too young to shave.

A list of some of the road side jingles is here:

Burma Shave Roadside Jingles.

Regrettably, the car CULTure has been an unprecedented environmental disaster, just this side of a Mesozoic asteroid hitting the Earth, so there's that.

It's odd the things that come to mind at random.