2-4-6-8 Motorway by The Tom Robinson Band

http://tomrobinson.com/welcome/

     Welcome back to Tuesday Request Day at Off The Charts.  Today I am extremely pleased to present the Tom Robinson Band and their 1978 song 2-4-6-8 Motorway. The request came to me locally by someone who asked for this song profile during the same conversation where he came out about his sexual orientation.  Since my wife and I were the first of many on a long list of people that he still needed to speak with he asked that I keep his name and personal story out of the blog.
       
       
        Being a young, openly gay man in urban England in the 1970's meant Tom Robinson confronted societies antipathy daily.  The songs he wrote were frank observations of how it felt to not only be an outcast from society, but also an object of the body politics' open derision.  The song (Sing if You're) Glad to be Gay points out that society pigeon holes people into roles that we may not necessarily fit into.  However it goes beyond that by quite graphically describing how homosexuals back then, were misunderstood, stereotyped, and sometimes the objects of terrible crimes driven by hatred.  The recent killing of an openly gay black man running for public office in Clarksdale, Mississippi is a stark reminder that we still live in a society that in many ways is perilously close to the world Tom Robinson described in his music.

Tom Robinson circa 1978

       I heard the song 2-4-6-8 Motorway a couple times during the winter of 1978 and thought it was a really cool rock and roll song.  Beyond the awesome tune and catchy chorus I didn't really know anything about the song.  I never heard the name of the band who wrote and preformed it announced on the radio.  At the time of it's release I was to young to drive and when you're the passenger in someone else's car on the way to high school you aren't in charge of the radio. Beyond the chorus, Robinson's accent and the loud scratchy guitar I couldn't understand 90% of the lyrics so I didn't even know what the song was about.  I just knew it sounded good and, for me, that's usually enough.  Still, without the song title, the name of the band, or really knowing any of the words I never forgot the song.
       About 20 years later Al Gore invented something called the interweb and I searched for the song with no luck.  It remained elusive to me until a website called youtube.com showed up on my computer screen in 2005.  I put 2,4,6,8 in the search engine and finally found out that the song was performed by the Tom Robinson Band.  Armed with that knowledge I did a bit of research and learned that Robinson himself is kind of a legendary figure in homosexual politics.  My wife thought this was very funny. I mean for more than 20 years I'd been describing this completely awesome song I heard when I was a teenager and it turned out to be an internationally recognized gay anthem.

Your life, your love, the road you are on

       Outside of a couple of oblique references the lyrics of the song Motorway are not explicitly gay.  In fact the main point of the song is that if you are in love and committed to the relationship then the road you're on will lead you where it chooses to lead.  It metaphorically describes the couple in the song to a double white line running down the middle of the road.  We might not know where the road is leading or when it will end but we do know if we've chosen the right road.  If society doesn't like the road you've chosen then it is their problem not yours. 

TR still asking
provocative questions

       Considering the sundered politics currently driving America 2-4-6-8 Motorway is a poignant reminder that despite the intervening 36 years years since it's release we still have much to do.  Our laws may have changed, in some places, to reflect a more open and equal society but many of us still have a tightly defined sense of right and wrong.  Frequently this sensibility is changed by personal circumstances but generally speaking we are caught up in a web of societal pressures to think, feel, and behave in very specific ways.  Robinson wants us to know that if you are not harming others there is nothing wrong with charting your own course because, as TRB points out, "No-one knows if a roadway's leading nowhere. Gonna keep on driving home on the road I'm on "