Dave Grohl

With all due respect to country singer-songwriter Roger Miller, Mike Watt is the true “king of the road.” In “What Drives Us,” the punk-rock vet talks about the lengths to which he’s gone to make a living as a musician — a pursuit that’s required him to get in a van and motor from one town to another, never sure of how many people might show at a concert or what he might encounter along the way. His balance from a 2019 trek, one of more than 100 tours the bassist has endured: 45 gigs, 45 days, 13,380 miles. The Minutemen cofounder sat behind the wheel for the entire trip.

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”  Credit Jack Kerouac for instilling the wanderlust when I read “On the Road” in high school circa 1980, though my mother would have said “blame,” given that it spurred an atypically irresponsible urge to abandon home, job and all commitments to climb in the van. Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” helped, too — “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” — but I was never that irresponsible. Psychotropics weren’t necessary for what Kerouac called “the restless search for kicks” and Thompson deemed “a savage journey to the heart of the American dream.”

Being part of a touring band can be exhilarating, a nonstop string of gigs in a new town every night. But at the start, the material rewards are often slight: Long hours far from home for barely enough dough to pay for gas to make it to the next club, while coping with broken drive shafts, lousy food and surly club owners. Yet generation after generation, this is how bands often begin their journey, inevitably leading to a bounty of vivid memories and hard-won experiences that can’t be acquired any other way. Here are a few songs that put us in the driver’s seat of the tour van.