Get your kicks on Colin Godbout’s Route 66: a Musical Quest for the American Dream. It is a musical road trip along a historic highway that is also a symbol of the westward quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The iconic road no longer exists, but what about the dream it symbolizes? Godbout’s musical quest for an answer winds through six states of mind: the restlessness of Robert Johnson’s sweet home Chicago, the optimism of Pat Metheny’s Missouri sky, the desperation of Bruce Springsteen’s Oklahoma highway, the serenity of Ottmar Liebert’s Santa Fe foothills, the surrealism of [music group] America’s Arizona desert, and the frenzy of The Doors’ L.A., city of night. The end of the quest rides on a storm of songs by The Doors that break on through to the other side of the ‘Mother Road’ at the Santa Monica pier, gateway to the Pacific, where groups like Ventures, Deltones, and Surfaris declared independence from oil as a means of materializing dreams and were reborn as soul surfers.
Get your kicks on Route 66; it winds from Chicago to L.A.
Oh baby don’t you want to go to the land of California, to my Sweet Home Chicago?
The preacher likes the cold; he hopes I’m going to stay California Dreamin’ on such a winter’s day.
A little piece of you, the little peace in me, will fly for This is not America.
I’ve been hitting that 66 way down the road, I’ve been having some Hard Travelin’ lord.
The highway is alive tonight and I’m sitting in the campfire light searching for The Ghost of Tom Joad.
All my dreams pass before my eyes a curiosity; all they are is Dust in the Wind.
I’ve been through the desert on A Horse with No Name…there ‘ain’t no one for to give you no pain.
Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose…for Me and Bobby McGhee.
We’re living it up at the Hotel California; anytime of year you can find it here.
Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown – Riders on the Storm.
Ride the highway west for the west is the best, but the future’s uncertain and the end is always near –
Of our elaborate scheme, the end; of the American dream, The End.
You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day…Break on Through to the other side.
If everybody had a notion across the U.S.A., then everybody’d be searching like California;
You’d see them riding their Harleys, hanging ten all day, hitching on the highway, searching U.S.A.
You’d catch them seaching for Eden, and Xanadu, the New Jerusalem, lost Atlantis too,
All over Valhalla, or by a narrow way, everybody’s gone searching, S[earch]in’ U.S.A.
Victoria: /A\ Vancouver Island
Tickets: $9 Tickets & Info: Victoria Fringe Festival
Thu, Aug. 26 – Sun, Aug. 29; Tue, Aug. 31 – Sun, Sept. 5: 8:45-9:45 pm. Read a 5 star review.
“Godbout leads listeners to another world with his music. Audiences have only to sit back and relax alongside him, as he does all the driving with his guitar. Godbout’s fingers make the guitar sparkle with emotion. He mixes jazz, country, surf, and blues with a unique flair that not many can do, or even much less imitate.” Nexus Newspaper
Winnipeg: Ragpickers Annex
Tickets: $7 Tickets & Info: Winnipeg Fringe Fest Advanced Tickets: (204) 942-6537
Wed, July 14, 9:15 pm; Thu, July 15, 10:45 pm; Fri, July 16, 5:15 pm; Sat, July 17, 7 pm; Sun, July 18, 8:45 pm;
Mon, July 19, 10:30 pm; Tue, July 20, 5:15 pm; Wed, July 21, 7 pm; Thu, July 22, 10:30 pm; Fri, July 23, 8:45 pm;
Sat, July 24, 5:15 pm; Sun, July 25, 8:45 pm. Read a review.
“A pleasing hour spent with virtuoso Colin Godbout on a musical tour across the U.S. heartland.” Winnipeg Free Press
“Godbout is a stellar guitarist…and the show is a pleasant, laid-back musical journey.” Uptown Magazine
Toronto: Free Times Cafe
Tickets: $10 Tickets & Info: Toronto Fringe Festival
Wed, June 30 – Sun, July 4; Tue, July 6 – Sun, July 11: 7-8 pm. Read about it on page 52 of Metro.
Click below to view opening and closing medleys of Route 66 Revisited.
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Colin describes the genesis of Route 66: a Musical Quest for the American Dream:
About five years ago I was performing music of Pat Metheny and Ottmar Liebert at gigs and thought it would be interesting to stage a multimedia performance of this music with video projected images of the Missouri and New Mexican landscape which inspired it. That idea lay dormant until the autumn of 2009 when the relative success of my 2009 summer tour of TransCanada ’69 led me to brainstorm other possible musical travelogues. When I noticed that Route 66 passed through Missouri and New Mexico I realized I had a larger framework for my initial idea. I debuted Route 66 Revisited as a house concert in the winter of 2009 and toured across Canada with it the following summer.
Route 66 Quotes:
In The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck calls Route 66 “the mother road, the road of flight.” Journalist Charles Kurault commented: “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System it’s now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything”.
“Starting around the Reagan era [1980-92] we crossed into new territory in terms of what capitalism is about. The result is a culture that values things that aren’t valuable and ignores things that are valuable. It’s a culture that seems to be celebrating the kind of achievements that take very little in terms of wisdom and insight, depth, development and nuance. The whole idea of expression has changed into something that’s much less sophisticated than it was in prior times. Fear of creativity has become the norm.” Pat Metheny
“As Hunt says, [the American dream] includes American’s vision of themselves as bringing freedom and the American way of life to the world, being atop a racial hierarchy (although this is no longer expressed overtly), and keeping political revolution at bay.” (Morris Berman, Dark Ages America, 110; commenting on Michael Hunt’s Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy)
Colin defines his relation to theatre as a modern rhapsode:
I trace my roots as a performer to the ancient rhapsode. This Greek term means song stitcher, and shares with the theatrical genres comedy and tragedy the second syllable ode, Greek for song (so the title of Neitzsche’s “rhapsodic” book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, is apropos). When stitching songs together to tell a story “the rhapsode was not only the forerunner of the actor, but he was himself an actor” (The Theatre of the Greeks). As a modern rhapsode, I stitch songs in the tradition of the those actors whose odes gave birth to theatre.