The Blues Road: We Start in Seattle

Me, Jacqui, Liz and Martin.

Some cool girls!

Among the many US travel/road books that I have read, two stand out. Firstly the mad crazy brilliant “On the road” by Jack Kerouac (which I have read many times and am reading again as we travel), and the more measured thoughtful “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck. This was written during the later part of his life and reflects on the America he knew and wrote about decades earlier. Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California and knew the West Coast well.

In 1960 he travelled around the USA with his giant poodle, Charley and drove into Seattle, then a small but growing successful city. This was long before the Microsoft revolution and the growth of Boeing and many other household names. It is difficult to think that in Steinbeck’s youth, this was just a small fishing port.

John Steinbeck

He wrote:

"I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage -- a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land. This Seattle had no relation to the one I remembered. The traffic rushed with murderous intensity. On the outskirts of this place I once knew well I could not find my way. Along what had been country lanes rich with berries, high wire fences and mile-long factories stretched, and the yellow smoke of progress hung over all, fighting the sea winds' efforts to drive them off. "

Pike Market

A fishy tale at Pike Market

He goes on to describe the port area and its cobbled streets, which have now been turned into trendy bourgeois districts such as Pike Place.

"The old port with narrow streets and cobbled surfaces, smoke-grimed, goes into a period of desolation inhabited at night by the vague ruins of men, the lotus eaters who struggle daily toward unconsciousness by way of raw alcohol. Nearly every city I know has such a dying mother of violence and despair where at night the brightness of the street lamps is sucked away and policemen walk in pairs. And then one day perhaps the city returns and rips out the sore and builds a monument to the past."

Steinbeck went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962 and died in 1968

The wharfs have been transformed but they don’t seem to have the vibrancy and charm that similar areas of San Francisco have achieved. One climbs up from the water’s edge to the Pike Market, which has become one of Seattle’s major tourist attractions. The old market now buzzes with restaurants, grumpy tea shirt sellers and the ubiquitous Seattle coffee house. Seattle is the world capital of coffee.

Pike Place entertainment

This city was responsible for the invasion of coffee chains into nearly every city in the world. And it all started in the Pike Market. Two teachers and a writer started a store on Western Avenue, which was swiftly relocated to Pike Place. Starbucks is the world’s biggest coffee chain with19,972 stores in 60 countries, including 12,937 in the United States and 790 in Great Britain. Seattle literally has a coffee house on every corner and I am told that over 80% of Americans live within 20 minutes driving time of a Starbucks. Not bad for the small store that we visited today.

The original Starbucks at Pike Place

Despite the success of the Aerospace industry, computers and coffee, Seattle will be remembered also for its contribution to popular music. Younger music buffs will champion Nirvana and the birth of Grunge but to my generation, the city stands out as the birthplace of Johnny Allen Hendrix

The Seattle Music Experience

Jimi Hendrix was born in Seattle on November 27, 1942. To many he was one of the greatest electric guitarists of all time. I still remember that first time that he appeared on Top of the Pops, playing Purple Haze as one of the defining moments of my musical upbringing. We simply had never seen or heard anything like him before!

After a hesitant start to his career he was spotted in 1966 by Keith Richard’s girlfriend playing in a club in New York. He was persuaded by Chas Chandler (former bassist for the Animals) to move to London. Following a series of auditions, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell joined him to form the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Jimi's colourful jumpsuit

Hendrix’s famous white Stratocaster

Hendrix’s famous white Stratocaster on which he played his rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in the early morning of August 18^th 1969 is on display in a disappointingly small Jimi Hendrix museum (part of the Seattle Music Experience Project). He bought the guitar in 1968 and played it at many concerts including the 1969 Newport Festival and his final concert at The Isle of Fehmarn (Germany) on September 6^th 1970. Twelve days later he died of a fatal overdose. Other memorabilia include a series of his guitars (whole and smashed), some of his clothes, personal effects, writings and an excellent timeline wall with a musical history played through headphones.

My mental image of the man is a larger than life character, filling the space that he inhabited. The museum has one of his colorful jump suits that he often performed in. What a surprise to see how small and diminutive he really was.

It was great to visit one of my favorite cities again One of the most relaxed and comfortable places in the world to live. Tomorrow we leave on the ferry across Puget Sound and our journey begins for real.

P.S. I forgot another great travel book: Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory”