Nostalgia Up to Speed on Route 66

On the surface . . . well . . . there isn’t much surface left on the old road. To rip off an Oakland-ish phrase, there’s not much there there, out there on Route 66.

It’s mostly big, concrete, cloned interstates hard by the dusted-off and bypassed small towns of the former 2,400-mile highway.

But somehow, John Steinbeck’s “mother road” endures as a sort of Pop-culture icon. We’re going to hear and see a lot about the highway that ran from Chicago’s lakefront to Santa Monica’s beachfront, the road that represented westering 20th-Century style, cheap gasoline, roadside diners and motor courts. Mobile Americana.

If you like your nostalgia gritty, you’ll find it on Route 66. More traffic is headed there in this, the road’s 66th year, than it’s seen since it unceremoniously lost its number seven years ago. And there will be more show-business traffic connected to it than Bobby Troup ever thought of when he wrote “Route 66” and Nat King Cole recorded it in the ‘40s.

Look what Michael Eugene Fairman and his company of Burbank-based actors have in mind: They’re planning to travel what’s left of the road from West to East this spring with their strongly improvisational play, “Town Meeting.”

And then there’s the country swing band Asleep at the Wheel. It’s taking two weeks in May for concert dates in at least 10 cities, going the classically East to West way, ending at Santa Monica Civic, hoping with the band’s sponsors, the Coors beer folks, that something can be done about preserving 66 as a national monument. In March, Arista will release the group’s new version of “Route 66.”

There is a certain irony in that, a beer company celebrating road travel . . . with a group called Asleep at the Wheel.

And on Friday, Columbia TV will be talking pilot to one television network--a revised version of the ‘60s series “Route 66,” possibly as a fall 1992 series.

The Route 66 associations in each of the eight states that the abandoned highway touched are planning motorcades, commemorations, concerts and other programs this year for the road traveled by Steinbeck’s family Joad and the Beat generation’s Jack Kerouac/Neal Cassady, that inspired a pop classic song and some 30 recordings, several books, a 1960-64 television series, a gasoline logo and countless documentaries. And performance artist Celeste Miller will offer her talking dance, “Visions of Route 66,” May 26 at Santa Monica’s Highways club.

Why all these latter-day cultural swings through Americana? Part of it is the work of Oxnard writer Tom Snyder, who has helped the various 66 associations to organize preservation movements for rural area travel and to get some federal action to keep what’s left of 66 properly honored. The author of “The Route 66 Travelers Guide and Roadside Companion” also got the Coors advertising agency to sponsor the Asleep at the Wheel tour.

That’s the kind of sponsorship action that Fairman craves. He had no road plans for his 5-year-old environmental theater group in Burbank, The Actors Company, during his play’s four-month run last year. The play “Town Meeting” is just that, a traditional small-town forum in the northern Sierra town of Eaglewood.

After one night’s presentation, Fairman was approached by Pacific Palisades businessman Lee Greenwood, an advocate and organizer of what he calls rural tourism, getting people on to the back roads of the country. Aware of the Route 66 anniversary, he talked to Fairman about taking the play--itself an exercise in frill-free democracy--on the road to its real counterpart small towns. He put up some money, inspired Fairman and company enough that they’ve organized a grass-roots-like effort to line up other sponsors and venues along 66.

“Town Meeting” returns to the Burbank Little Theater in March. The road show is planned to begin Memorial Day weekend in Santa Monica. Fairman plans to contract with theaters between Santa Monica and Chicago. Since the show is self-contained it can be put onstage in 105- or 5,000-seat houses without scenery. Or in town squares.

Curious that an old road should engender such activity. Fairman admits that few of the company knew much about the interstate other than its existence as a song and an old black-and-white TV series. He found that when he first organized “Town Meeting” he had to “politicize” the actors, taking a month to get them to brush up on news and history.

“Most of us are just old enough to remember Nixon. But once we did our homework we couldn’t stop each other from talking politics and government. We couldn’t shut up. After all, the idea of ‘Town Meeting’ is to spread the word of democracy.”

The sweeping, peaceful, democratic changes that have sprung up throughout the world provided the inspiration for Fairman to write and direct the play. “People were changing their governments peacefully through talk and mediation. That’s how the United States started, through town meetings in New England and through talk and discussion.”

You hear a lot of similar, basic, off-road democratic thought when it comes to the various Route 66 projects now.

Writer Snyder: “These groups are saying don’t forget our heartland, don’t destroy it. We have to connect with all of our people. There has been a remarkable groundswell of interest in doing just that.”

Businessman Greenwood: “You have to keep reliving the past to see how such influences as that old road had on getting people to California.”

In a time when our only connections with town meetings are through a Ted Koppel or a Peter Jennings or a Larry King via distant satellite technologies, it seems strangely refreshing that a young bunch of actors and a much-traveled group of country singers would still care about towns with such sweet names as Joplin . . . Winona . . . Kingman, Ariz.

Route 66 -- The Tour Stops Here

Tour stops for Asleep at the Wheel:

May 2, Chicago

May 3, St. Louis

May 7, Joplin

May 8, Tulsa

May 9, Oklahoma City

May 10, Amarillo

May 14, Albuquerque

May 15, Flagstaff

May 16, San Bernardino

May 17, Santa Monica

Burbank little Theatre’s “Town Meeting” will be staged in Chicago, St. Louis, Albuquerque, Gallup, McLean, Tex., and McLean, Ill., among other cities.