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:

"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)

On The Stone Roses' debut LP, Squire's masterful guitar laced the album as freely as the paint that splattered the sleeve. On parts of Second Coming, Squire's guitar has an almost vice-like grip on Ian's vocals, nowhere more so than on this track. The noise at the end of the song is a mobile phone dialing 0890 666, 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 around midnight. Thematically the song is inspired by the myth of Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, 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 (unrelated to Robert). 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.' Consequently, Robert Johnson was cast in the role of a tormented and tortured soul, doomed to suffer the wrath of God.

   

 

Top left: Jimmy Page.
Top middle: John Squire at the Feile festival, August 1995.
Top right: The guitar workout on Love Is The Law pays homage to Jimmy Page. From the mid 90's onwards, Squire would often lean back with his Les Paul a la Jimmy Page, when performing live.
Bottom row: Squire in full-on Jimmy Page mode at Queen's University, Belfast, 7th December 1997.

Geffen's ownership of Chess Records led to The Stone Roses receiving a multitude of blues work from the Chicago label's back catalogue. The Stone Roses circa Second Coming were morphing into 'The John Squire Experience', and live reviews furthered this perception; Squire was hailed as the last great guitar hero, whilst Ian's vocal limitations led one critic to compare his delivery to "a man shouting into a bucket." At Glasgow Green in 1990, The Stone Roses were a tight unit, both socially and musically. "When we were on stage that day," Mani recalled, "we all looked at each other, and then just went up another level." When, in May 1995, at Atlanta Midtown Music Festival, Mani slammed down his bass halfway through I Am The Resurrection and stormed off stage, band members hardly batted an eyelid, such was the lack of communication on that tour. Nothing outside The Egg, as Mani referred to their four-way protective force, could harm them in their prime, but severe cracks appeared during the second LP. Driving South, musically is a pale Led Zeppelin / Hendrix imitation (a mixture of 'Moby Dick', from Led Zeppelin II, and 'Driving South' by The Jimi Hendrix Experience), and lyrically, is cliched. Speaking to The Guitar Magazine in June 1997, Squire was very open about the song's debt to Jimmy Page: "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." "Well you ain't too young or pretty and you sure as hell can't sing" is a rewrite of a lyric from Fleetwood Mac's 'Oh Well', "I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin."

 

Left: The Jimi Hendrix Experience BBC Sessions. Listen to the ending to the second of the three takes of Driving South, of which Squire's ending is almost a carbon copy.
Right: Robert Johnson. One John Squire lyric which Ian flatly refused to sing on Second Coming was the Robert Johnson inspired line, "I got this dead shrimp baby", relating to male impotency.

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