Driving South

Driving south 'round midnight
Man, I must have been insane
Driving south 'round midnight
In a howling hurricane
I stopped for an old man hitcher
At a lonely old crossroads
He said: "I'm going nowhere"
"I'm only here to see if I can steal your soul"

"I'm not trying to make you
I don't wanna touch your skin
I know all there is to know
About you and all your sins"

"Well you ain't too young or pretty
And you sure as hell can't sing
Anytime you wanna sell your soul
I've got a toll-free number you can ring"

(Yeah, that's what I thought he said anyway ooooooooh)

"I'm not trying to make you
I don't wanna touch your skin
I know all there is to know
About you and all your sins"

"Well you ain't too young or pretty
And you sure as hell can't sing
Anytime you wanna sell your soul
I've got a toll-free number you can ring"

"0-8-0-0 treble-six oh yeah
0-8-0-0 treble-six oh yeah"

I stopped for an old man hitcher
At a lonely old crossroads
He said: "I'm going nowhere"
"I'm only here to see if I can steal your soul"

(Good Golly)

Lyrics by:
Squire

Music by:
Squire

Written:
1993

Personnel:
John Squire (guitar)
Ian Brown (vocals)
Gary Mounfield (bass)
Alan Wren (drums, backing vocals)

Producer:
Simon Dawson & Paul Schroeder

Engineer:
Simon Dawson & Paul Schroeder

Available on:
Second Coming (5.09)
Crimson Tonight Live EP: Daybreak (8:38) / Breaking Into Heaven (7:03) / Driving South (4:50) / Tightrope (4:39) (September 1995, Geffen, catalogue number of Japanese release: MVCG-13029)

First live performance:
Oslo Rockefeller Music Hall (19 April 1995)

Details:
Viewed by some as a pale imitation of Love Spreads, Driving South has the same 12-bar format and heavy guitar sound as the album's final track. It can be criticized lyrically for being cliched. The song is not entirely without merit, however - the guitar and funky bass (unfortunately too low in the mix) being its stronger aspects.

In this interview, John reveals the inspiration for the Driving South riff. He is correct in suggesting that the riff is "quite 'Pagey'" as it is merely a rewrite of 'Moby Dick' from Led Zeppelin II. Driving South is also a musical spin-off of Hendrix's 'Driving South'. For those that have the Hendrix BBC sessions, check out the ending to the second of the three takes of Driving South. Squire's ending is almost a carbon copy of this.

"The high points on Second Coming, for me, are the lyrical content of Your Star Will Shine and the riff to Driving South. I can play it properly now. Quite 'Pagey' ? Yeah. Doesn't detract from the riff, though."
(The Guitar Magazine Interview with John Squire, June 1997)

The noise at the end is a mobile phone dialing 0890 666 according to Simon Dawson, a slight variation of the number Ian sings in the song itself - 0800 666 (666 is of course the number of the beast and the author is "driving south 'round midnight, the hour of the undead). The subject matter of the song is strongly suggestive of Robert Johnson and the Crossroads, with Johnson, according to myth, selling his soul to the Devil for the best tunes. In actual fact, the blues singer who publicly made this claim was Robert's less-well-known contemporary and friend Tommy Johnson, not related to Robert.

"If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little 'fore 12 that night so you know you'll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself...A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he'll tune it. And then he'll play a piece and hand it back to you. That's the way I learned to play anything I want."
(Evans, David. Tommy Johnson London: Studio Vista, 1971).

It was possibly a writer named Robert Palmer who was responsible for transferring Tommy Johnson's crossroads story to Robert Johnson, probably because Robert Johnson was the much better known of the two. Unfortunately, Palmer and the other European-American writers who propagated his fictional story were unfamiliar with the teacher at the crossroads and they conflated Tommy Johnson's "big black man" with Goethe's Mephistopheles in 'Faust' and then painted false, 'spooky' images of those who received the gift of learning. Consequently, Robert Johnson was cast in the role of a tormented and tortured soul, doomed to suffer the wrath of God. Needless to say, Palmer's take on the black man at the crossroads does not accord with oral histories collected in the South in the 1930s, the time in which Robert and Tommy Johnson were friends. The "old man's" (i.e., Satan's) words, "I'm going nowhere, I'm only here to see if I can steal your soul" in Driving South represent Satan's role in the Bible; he is "going nowhere" because he lost the battle and is trapped in hell for all eternity. His only consequent vow is to tempt humans away from God. The following stanza, "I'm not trying to make you, I don't wanna touch your skin", states that Satan cannot force anyone to do anything, but is rather a tempter in a world of free will. John's "Well you ain't too young or pretty and you sure as hell can't sing" lyric, seen by some as a jibe at Ian, is a rewrite of a line from Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well' - "I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin".

In 1995 John Squire created an artistic work, a toy car crash pile-up entitled 'Driving South', (wood glue, sand, toy cars and bitumen on plywood, 24" x 24"), which featured in the Australian / Japanese tour guide released that year.

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