From Shamrock, TX to Tucumcari, NM: High Plains Drifter

After yesterday's deluge, the Lone Star State's weather is behaving itself again as I trudge out of Shamrock to make the briefest of runs across the Texas Panhandle into New Mexico.

Route 66 exists in places alongside I-40, but so close it may as well be its hard shoulder. And after last night's torrential rains, common sense - plus a little namby-pamby tourist wobbliness - takes charge and I forgo America's Highway for...er...one of America's highways.

Texas is, after California and probably even before California, the state I would wager most non-Americans think of when they think of the United States. It's the state generations of Western fans grew up with, even though most cowboy movies were filmed on backlots around Los Angeles, or up in Lone Pine in the Sierra Nevada mountains (where I will be soon). That, though, is Hollywood's story: the film industry expanded in California because it had an agreeable climate and access to countryside that could be anywhere in the West.

Texas, on the other hand, prospered through, mainly, cows. They're everywhere, so it's understandable that people still think of Texas as cowboy country. It has the most farms in the US, and produces more livestock, in particular cattle, than anywhere else in the nation. Which is why most restaurants in the state will be serving variations of cooked dead cow.

Long before the cows, of course, were the dinosaurs, who roamed freely across the southern plains of before eventually turning into the more recent boon to the Texan economy, oil. It's at this point I must declare a tiny, but personal revelation: after many years visiting and driving through the US, I have never before noticed the Sinclair Oil company, which operates filling stations in 22 states in the American heartland between the Mississippi River and California. The reason I mention this now, is that driving on Route 66 has brought me in to close proximity to Sinclair's logo - a brontosaurus.

At first thought, this seemed to me a little like McDonalds replacing its golden arches with the outline of a cow, or KFC removing Colonel Sanders' visage and putting an actual chicken in its place. But, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I have now learned that Sinclair's logo is in fact educational and is, perhaps, the only example of a corporate logo having such value.

It evidently dates back to the Chicago World's Fair of 1933 where Sinclair sponsored a two-tonne animatronic brontosaurus that explained the role dinosaurs played in the formation of petroleum. This led to Sinclair selling toy brontosaurs (and, later, giant inflatable dinosaurs) at its filling stations as promotional gimmicks. The dino proved so popular that Sinclair eventually made it part of its logo, becoming yet another familiar visual fixture along highways like Route 66.

Oil, though, has added considerably to the Texan economy, and the state does possess roughly a third of the entire US oil reserve. This does lead to the misconception, perpetuated by Supertramp, that everyone's a millionaire here.

I would beg to differ, but with the vehicle of choice in Texas being, apparently, a sizeable V8 pickup truck, fuel is either dirt cheap or there's money abroad to pay for it. In Texas, pickups are utilitarian vehicles. In Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia they carry AK-47-toting thugs or large machine guns mounted on the back. Without wishing to make any correlation, a lot of such vehicles in Texas do carry gun racks. Even the police drive pickups.

Guns remain a Texan sub-culture: contrary to popular disbelief, people don't walk around with holstered 9mm pistols at their hips, and there are tight(ish) laws governing the ownership and concealment of guns.

Nevertheless, it is somewhat ironic that on the front door of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas - from the sixth floor of which Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy - there is a sign saying "No Smoking, No Firearms, No Photography". In that order.

Trying to encapsulate Texas in this tin shack of a blog is never going to do a state this vast any justice, especially as Route 66 just cuts a straight line across the top of the Panhandle. But it's worth noting that it is the state more people are moving to than anywhere else in the country.

Recent figures from the US Census Bureau showed that five of the 10 fastest-growing cities over the last couple of years were in Texas, with Houston the country's second fastest after New York. Employment has been the main factor swelling the Texan population, with the still booming oil and gas industry, as well as military-related industries drawing people in to reasonably well paid jobs. And once there, people find a relatively low cost of living - including no personal state income taxes.

Culturally, Texas is cooler than some might expect it to be. Austin is one of America's hippest cities, and another one of the state's fastest growing towns, with a thriving, college-fuelled music scene and the annual SXSW festival to its credit.

In fact, the state's contribution to popular music is wider than you might think - ZZ Top (whose Texan blues-boogie has been accompanying on my ride west), Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, T-Bone Walker, Albert Collins, Lightnin' Hopkins, Lead Belly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Scott Joplin, Kenny Rogers, Willie Nelson, Don Williams, George Strait, Jim Reeves, Waylon Jennings, T-Bone Burnett, Edgar Winter, Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Miller and Janis Joplin are or were all Texas-born.

Texas does have, however, one questionable mark hanging over it: earlier this year the state - which has the highest rate of legal executions in the US (more than 500 since 1982) - announced that it was running out of the drug pentobarbital used in lethal injections. With 11 inmates put to death so far this year, and a further five to come, supplies have become scarce due to drug companies objecting to their products being used for capital punishment. Despite the shortage, the state said it was "confident" that it would be able to continue with the deaths, despite the shortage. Now there's a thought.

But, back to the road. Less than an hour's drive from Shamrock along I-40/Route 66 is Amarillo. Let's, first, get the business of that song out of the way: Neil Sedaka's cheesy hit - made even bigger by British crooner Tony Christie - put the city on the map for no other reason than "Amarillo" was the only place name Sedaka could find to rhyme with "pillow". Thus, Sweet Marie could have been waiting anywhere else.

It's unlikely, too, that Marie would have chosen Amarillo in any case. It's a bustling, functional town, providing the economic hub of the Panhandle, and work, such as at the 15-year-old Bell Helicopter factory, which produces aircraft for the US military on a site adjacent to Amarillo's "international" airport. Frankly, though, there isn't much to keep anyone in Amarillo, beyond hotels and shopping.

© Simon Poulter 2013

On the western edges, however, is a bizarre photo opportunity - the Cadillac Ranch. In 1974 local millionaire philanthropist Stanley Marsh III commissioned a collective of artists to create a piece of art by burying 10 Cadillacs nose down in the mud as a symbolic representation of the marque's evolution.

Like most artistic obscurities, it's hard to truly understand the concept, though there is something decidedly Storm Thorgerson about the entire scene. It has, though, become a minor landmark on Route 66, with visitors encouraged to apply their own spray paint signature to the vertical car corpses. Unfortunately, this also leaves the area around the exhibit littered with discarded spray cans.

© Simon Poulter 2013

While still in Texas I reach the exact midpoint of the entire journey at the small community of Adrian. With 1,139 miles to Santa Monica, or 1,139 miles the other direction to Chicago, it's a significant landmark on the trip, deep in the heart of farmland and, it would appear, the world's largest collection of wind turbines.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Adrian is another must-do photo opportunity, and its Midpoint Cafe is a delightfully kitsch throwback to the era of cars with fins, and before the fast food chains and franchises took over.

Food at the Midpoint Cafe is excellent, the coffee beats Starbucks into a crocked hat, the decor is authentically tasteful, and it has free WiFi and a gift shop. All in all, a stop you shouldn't miss.

There has been no shortage of the perfectly acceptable kitsch and nostalgic along the road since leaving Chicago. Some attractions have been accidental - run-down empty shells of businesses that, during the road's heyday, would have thrived.

Where, however, the attractions are still going strong is because they've been invested in. Which brings me to my resting place for the night, just 40 miles over the New Mexico border in Tucumcari.

In an area first populated 10,000 years ago, with dinosaurs abundant millions of years beforehand, Tucumcari has had a long history, particularly during the tribal era when the area was the hunting domain of the Apache, Comanche and other tribes (nearby Tucumcari Mountain is one of those classic flat-top desert erections directors of Western movies would have Indian warriors looking out from before attacking a wagon train...).

The town started to grow at the beginning of the 20th century when the Chicago, Rock Island and Union Pacific Railroad turned Tucumcari into a major town. Route 66 brought even more business Tucumcari's way. Today, however, it's the nostalgia for 66 which turns the town's commercial axles.

© Simon Poulter 2013

66 itself runs through the town, still lined with vintage-looking motels replete with traditional flashing neon signs. Don't be put off by this: at the charming Blue Swallow Motel, owners Kevin and Nancy put the extra effort into making this a very special stopover indeed, and well worth avoiding the chain motels further back up the road as you come off the interstate.

From the stunning sign out front, to the charming and perfectly maintained period detail in each of its 12 rooms, to the provision of free bottles of water and even an individual garage to park your car next to your room, the Blue Swallow Motel is a treat and a simple, but absolute highlight of the trip so far.

And there's history to it. Opened in 1941 - a brave move then as wartime rationing was limiting cross-country travel - it was taken over in the 1950s by Lillian Redman, bought for her by fiancé Floyd as an engagement gift. Lillian had lived in Tucumcari since 1923, and originally moved to New Mexico with her family in 1915 in a covered wagon. The story goes that Lillian walked alongside the wagon. As a tribute, Room 6 of the hotel is now the Lillian Redman Suite, complete with open bathtub and a cute writing desk - where this post is being written - which contains a model of a covered wagon that has been turned into a desk lamp.

Unlike the other anonymous hotels I've stayed in, this is the first stop along the way where other guests gather in front of their doors to compare notes of their own road trips along Route 66. Some are doing it for the nostalgia, others for the more relaxed pace. Others, like me, just to say they've done it.

Tomorrow:  A Saucer Full Of Secrets

Art For Art's Sake - a tribute to Storm Thorgerson: 1944-2013

If you were to ask me to make a list of the greatest albums of all time, I could start now and probably never finish. Magazines and radio stations regularly try to give it a go, but rarely come up with a top 10, top 100 or even top 100 that will truly cover things adequately.

You might, however, stand a chance of coming up with a decent list of the greatest albums based on their cover art.

From Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to London Calling, album covers were an integral part of the record buying experience in the pre-CD era.

With the 2013 Record Store Day taking place throughout the world tomorrow, you won't have to go far to hear old heads - like me - ruing the disappearance of gatefold sleeves, of liner notes and lyrics, and the whole tactility of buying music in a physical format.

As a schoolboy, album art meant as much to me as the music contained within. Dull geography lessons on Upper Volta would pass more meaningfully while recreating band logos in biro on the cover of an exercise book. Entire band back catalogues could be filed and discussed according to their sleeve art, while no adolescent male could resist a sneaky peak at Roxy Music's Country Life while perusing the record racks on a Saturday afternoon.

Some covers - and more pertinently, their designers - became synonymous with the impact of the album's musical content. Barney Bubbles was the creative force behind Stiff Records during the New Wave, while further back, Roger Dean's elaborate fantasyscapes will be forever associated with Yes.

But, perhaps, the most inventive and iconic cover art designer of them all was Storm Thorgerson, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 69.

He is mostly associated with Pink Floyd, but together with Hipgnosis, the design collective he co-founded in 1968, Thorgerson was responsible for designing covers for 10CC, Muse, Led Zeppelin, Audioslave, The Cranberries, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, Ian Dury, Steve Miller and Genesis.

Growing up in Cambridge, Thorgerson was a childhood friend of eventual Floyd members Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour. "We first met in our early teens," Gilmour wrote yesterday on his website. "We would gather at Sheep's Green, a spot by the river in Cambridge and Storm would always be there holding forth, making the most noise, bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. Nothing has ever really changed. He has been a constant force in my life, both at work and in private, a shoulder to cry on and a great friend."

In 1968 Thorgerson and fellow Cambridge designer Aubrey Powell were asked by the Floyd to design the cover for A Saucer Full Of Secrets. It was to seal Thorgerson's association with the band forever: "The artworks that [Storm] created for Pink Floyd from 1968 to the present day have been an inseparable part of our work," Gilmour added in his online tribute.

In 1973 the band released Dark Side Of The Moon, for which Thorgerson came up with a cover design as iconic as the record itself. It's origins were pretty functional: the band's Rick Wright had suggested Thorgerson produce something simple and straightforward. The outcome is something so straightforward and simple that it has adorned T-shirts and posters for the last 40 years

"No amount of cajoling would get them to consider any other contender, nor endure further explanation of the prism, or how exactly it might look," Thorgerson has explained. "'That's it', they said in unison, we got to get back to real work, and returned forthwith to the [Abbey Road] studio upstairs."

"The refracting glass prism referred to Floyd light shows - consummate use of light in the concert setting. Its outline is triangular and triangles are symbols of ambition, and are redolent of pyramids, both cosmic and mad in equal measure, all these ideas touching on themes in the lyrics. The joining of the spectrum extending round the back cover and across the gatefold inside was seamless like the seguing tracks on the album, whilst the opening heartbeat was represented by a repeating blip in one of the colours."

Throughout Thorgerson's work, artistic influences can be easily identified, from Picasso to Magritte, but also plenty of humour. With the Floyd's Animals, Thorgerson created another icon, with a pig famously flying over Battersea Power Station.

The shot has now passed into lore thanks to the inflatable pig used for the photograph slipping its mooring and drifting off into the incoming flight path for Heathrow Airport.

As the 1970s unfolded, and conceptual cover art became increasingly intertwined with musical narrative, Hipgnosis expanded their client roster to include other bands, and notably those on the artier side of rock, like Genesis and 10CC.


The studio also picked up Black Sabbath's Technical Ecstasy, the cover of which was once described eloquently by Ozzy Osbourne as "two robots screwing on an escalator"

More often than not covers were conceptual interpretations rather than literal representations, eschewing the pop notion that albums should be adverts for the bands, featuring the members themselves.

Through Thorgerson's work with Pink Floyd, however, notable design cues emerged that would appear in his work for other acts. Anonymity played a major part. Even with albums like Floyd's Wish You Were Here, ...And Then There Were Three by Genesis, and jazz-rockers Brand-X's Moroccan Roll (my favourite album title ever), which feature photography of people, they are never in close-up. Faces are never clear and in several cases feature figures with their backs to the camera.

Distance is always significant, something Thorgerson's work shared with Floyd's Roger Waters, who became increasingly obsessed with absence and separation, culminating in the entire narrative of The Wall. Thorgerson returned to Water's feelings with the cover for Is There Anybody Out There?, the box set of the live Wall show, which simply features the four face masks worn by the fake Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason at the beginning of the ambitious show.

One dominant cue throughout Thorgerson's projects has been the prominence of flat, green grassy fields in the lower half of the cover, blue sky in the upper half, and a prominent object or objects in the immediate foreground.

Perhaps inspired by Grantchester Meadows in Cambridge (immortalised by Floyd on Ummagumma), Thorgerson returned to this device again and again, on everything from Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and The Division Bell through to Biffy Clyro's single God & Satan and Synrise by obscure Belgian electro band Goose. Along with the setting, Thorgerson's photography would often have an unreal reality about it - rich greens in the grass, bold blues in the skyscapes, and an unnerving clarity of objects in the fore.

"I listen to the music, read the lyrics, speak to the musicians as much as possible," Thorgerson has explained. "I see myself as a kind of translator, translating an audio event – the music – into a visual event – the cover. I like to explore ambiguity and contradiction, to be upsetting but gently so. I use real elements in unreal ways."

As albums have become reduced to bitstreams, and music consumption shifts from having the patience to listen to two or even four sides of vinyl to downloaded singles or Spotify mixes, Thorgerson's artistry is, sadly, diminishing. 

There are still, thankfully, champions of the art of record design, who regard the packaging and presentation of their music as more than just a marketing exercise, and who look to today's multiple formats as an opportunity for renewed design creativity. 

But with Storm Thorgerson's passing, we should mourn the death of an era when the album cover meant more than just the thing that stops your record from getting scratched.