Listening to and choosing bus songs has been a lot like riding them – an epic journey of terrains, sights, sounds and smells. I've experienced lengthy uncertainty, frustrating delay and white-knuckle ride excitement. I've moved through the gears of every imaginable mood swing. I've felt tension and tedium, seen tragedy and romance, enjoyed surprises and humour, and endured heartbreak and regret. People arrive and depart, nominations are left behind, there have been some wrong turns and a few breakdowns – punctured by the occasional zedded song from the past. But above all this theme has been a vehicle for fantastic narratives – there really is something about a bus and the space around it that makes for a great story. The route I am about to take you on could easily have gone several ways. But now it's time to step aboard on this one.
It's a dirty, dusty road, and tres hombres have been waiting at the stop for so long, they've grown enormous beards. Yeah, that's right. In the perverse tradition of RR, we're going to start with the letter Z. Let's crank that old funky, bluesy, rusty-sounding engine, open the doors and on step ZZ Top with Waitin' for the Bus. It's packed full of passengers but it's a welcome sight for the working man: "Have mercy, been waitin' for the bus all day. I got my brown paper bag and my take-home pay." OK, buddy, let's roll.
Now it's time to settle in for the ride. And on a Greyhound leaving the city, who better to get some momentum with lots of colourful detail than Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard with "Roll Bus Roll … take me off. A rolled up sweatshirt makes the window soft." Getting comfortable? OK now we're flying along – or are we? For long journeys some people might prefer to take a plane and would advise You're Crazy for Taking the Bus, but not Jonathan Richman who gives us many a cheerful reason why this is the right way to go.
Are we due our first stop yet? It's a question worth asking, but we can still keep going and enjoy the sights and sounds of 70s Manhattan, toss the bus driver some change, and along with the Boss, just ask Does this Bus Stop at 82nd Street? This rarely performed Springsteen number is packed with observations of all kinds of odd people – "wizard imps and sweat sock pimps, interstellar mongrel nymphs" - and has an unusual chorus-free momentum that winds through the city streets. Nice trip.
I've so far resisted my usual temptation to meander down the tangential alleyways of alternative routes – but talking of tripping, although I was tempted to hit the road with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead (and see my alternative route later in comments), instead I've only money in this ticket selection for the Who and Magic Bus. It may be about a guy boarding the bus to his girlfriend's house a mile away, but that's just one of several routes to stimulation. And it's got a sticktastic middle-eight too.
Another trip entirely now. Tourism is big on buses, such as Bobby Cole's wonderful Bus 22 to Bethlehem and Lou Reed's satirical Busload of Faith, and I felt compelled to run and jump on with the crew of Sixto Rodriguez for a mesmerising melody on Heikki's Suburbia Bus Tour. But I felt it was time to hear a women's voice – so decided to take a trip with Oh Susanna's Greyhound Bus.
Time to take a quick stop now, and funk it up a bit. As I look out the window there's a fabulous Fatback Band doing the bus-stop, but as a theme they are more pre-occupied with those dance moves than travelling anywhere, so the funk ticket goes to Frankie Smith's Double Dutch Bus which skips along and most certainly influenced the likes of Snoop Dogg and Missy Elliott. Shizzle, baby!
But bus-stops aren't always fun places. There's many a song that just waits for the bus and some never alight at all. There's the menacing Eels' Bus Stop Boxer for example, and many a sad song hangs out at bus stations. Time for a different turn here, then, to the tragic lives of homeless kids who live in the bus station and turn to prostitution in the Decemberists' On the Bus Mall, full of fine, double-edged lines such as "we sleep in on Sundays" and "our shoes were our showboats".
Buses throw up plenty of melancholy – the glimpse of a longed-for lover, such as Chuck Berry's Nadine, or dark edge of In the Hidden Places by The Mountain Goats. Buses may be full of people, but they are also conduits of loneliness. So here I parked this very regular part of the bus experienced in the sad but uncommonly beautiful Twenty Seven Strangers by Villagers. Look out the window and wonder.
So now we're back at a stop, it's raining, but it's time to change our mood and go somewhere with joy in our hearts. Let's chat up a girl using an umbrella and ride along on the glorious tune by the Hollies with their Bus Stop.
Where next? While many queued up for America by Simon and Garfunkel, as it was zedded a suitable replacement service was required. So the very same songwriter drove up with diversion on his evocative story about a Mexican coming across the border. He so nearly found the Promised Land by Johnny Allen, but that didn't quite arrive. But on Trailways Bus, Paul Simon's narrative is tinged with black humour, tension, hope and tragedy of a long journey.
Perhaps the immigrant might have had more fun in England, where another great songwriter took an amusing take on more local buses. That might have been Fred Wedlock's green Bristol Buses, but he was no match for the bumpy lanes and laughs, and lifestock on Jake Thackray's Country Bus, "clumsy and cumbersome, rumbustious".
And so, at the end of the journey, where do we want to end up? So many other destinations, too many to mention, so let's take a ride on a national institution. It's a bit of a nostalgic fantasy, so let's hope, on the Divine Comedy's National Express, we will reach a heavenly place.
Thank you once again for all your nominations. I'd also like to make special mention of my friend and colleague Robert White for putting this topic in my direction, as well as another culmination of comments this week of fantastic bus song puns and then anecdotes about unusual travel experiences. What a community. It's been a very rich journey, and one, we hope, that will just continue ever onwards.
We would like you, dear readers, to get in the driver's seat regularly as gurus, so please be in touch and let us know your preferences and availability.
Waitin' for the Bus by ZZ Top
Roll Bus Roll by Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard
You're Crazy for Taking the Bus by Jonathan Richman
Does this Bus Stop at 82nd Street? by Bruce Springsteen
Magic Bus by the Who
Greyhound Bus by Oh Susanna
Double Dutch Bus by Frankie Smith
On the Bus Mall by the Decemberists
Twenty Seven Strangers by Villagers
Bus Stop by the Hollies
Trailways Bus by Paul Simon
Country Bus by Jake Thackray
National Express by Divine Comedy
