It is great to be on the open road. We are rediscovering America each in our own way. Me as the expat after living eighteen years abroad, Egon as the first-time visitor who has been consuming American music and movies and culture all his life.

The best part of the trip is the soundtrack. Egon has set up a mobile record factory, with a professional-quality CD burner, a laptop with 38,000 songs on the hard drive, and encyclopedic knowledge of the entire inventory. He is setting up playlists for different legs of the trip, and can compose a whole playlist and burn a CD in ten or fifteen minutes, with music by musicians from the region or lyrics suitable for the landscape or the last diner or just the mood (the Auteurs: “The South will rise again”). The CDs mean that we can play the music through the battle cruiser’s integrated sound system and access it through its six-CD player. Now we’re headed into the deep south and so there is lots of country. I have always firmly believed that I hate country so Egon is tailoring his playlists for a country skeptic: Gene Clark, Townes van Zandt, Uncle Tupelo, and many more. He’s also been playing cowpunk (Jason & the Scorchers, Nine Pound Hammer, Supersuckers) and other music with a southern or country theme (Hank Williams III, “I thought I was her daddy but she had five more”). I’m being converted, surely enough – if this is country, I don’t actually hate country (it seems that some country purists might protest that this isn’t really country, but who cares, they’re not here).

This trip through the south is helping Egon understand some of his own voluminous musical knowledge. For instance, I pointed out the Jayne Mansfield bumpers, or Mansfield bars, on the eighteen-wheeled rigs on the highway, the horizontal bars suspended down behind the rear wheels. I explained that they are so-called because Jayne Mansfield died when en route from Biloxi to New Orleans, her car slammed into the back of a truck, and the hood of the car went right under the truck so that the high-riding carriage of the truck sheared off the top of the car from the base of the windshield, effectively decapitating the adults in the front seat (her kids in the back seat survived). Since then, the lowered bumper on the back of a truck is meant to meet the bumper of a car, avoiding that kind of accident. Egon immediately exclaimed that that made sense of a Cramps song where Lux Interior croons, “Bend over, I’ll drive – that’s how Jayne Mansfield died” – and connects it to the title of the album, “Look Mom, No Head.”

In fact, I think the music is helping me understand the south better, at the same time. One thing you notice right away entering Virginia from DC is a kind of fatalism and sense of tragedy (or victim culture) which manifests itself among other places in an obsession with the Civil War. Richmond has a “Monument Avenue” with grand Roman-style monuments to Civil War heroes, with columns and equestrian statues and whatnot. There are stirring inscriptions about how the noblest thing is dying for a cause that you believe in. There is a proud statue of Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue. Jackson led the South to a great victory at Chancellorsville in the war, only to be accidentally shot by his own troops. It all fits with the themes of lost causes and sorrow and tragedy and defiance that run through a lot of country music.

We drove down the whole Avenue listening to the Memphis band the Reigning Sound, stopping here and there to photograph the grand 100-year old statues. At the very end of the avenue, there is a late attempt to balance all of this defiant posturing with a statue of Arthur Ashe, a black tennis champion (unveiled in 1996). He seems wildly out of place in the line of proud and constant Confederate generals and statesmen; he appears to be playing keep-away with a flock of children. His statue was Egon’s hands-down favorite.

In a dilapidated neighborhood of Richmond we met a fan of Norwegian metal (death metal is Norway’s third greatest export, not in kroner but in terms of cultural significance) who directed us to a great place for lunch, the Alamo BBQ, basically an adobe kitchen with some picnic tables under a tarpaulin. Egon points out with delight that they are playing Townes van Zandt. I notice that they have a whole line of vegetarian options, mostly based on portobello mushrooms, but we go for beef sandwiches and they are excellent. There was a flyer on the wall advertising a Dead Milkmen concert coming up in Richmond. But by then we would be long gone.