Half a dozen miles west of the Denver International Airport, there’s a cluster of hotels that rise, seemingly, out of nowhere, stripped of all context. Here is the western edge of the Great Plains: no-man’s land, punctuated by a Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant and a single gas station. It’s another eighteen miles to the city, though Aurora is closer. Boxy and beige, each hotel is indistinguishable from the next, but for the logos—cheerful and cheerless—that adorn their facades. What makes these structures eerier than average is their simultaneous proximity and indifference to the wilderness around them, a mosaic of Western plant life: buffalo-grass, cottonwoods, blue grama, Arizona fescue, sumac, sagebrush, a litany of shrubs.
A few days ago, I arrived, exhausted, at one of these hotels—the Tru by Hilton—having flown in from Los Angeles earlier that morning. The days prior had brought together all the joy and misery of what we in the music business call “road dog” touring. On this run, it was me and my backpack, a suitcase, pedal board, guitar, and the odd cardboard carton of LPs. Long days, short nights. After forty-eight hours of relative quiet at Stanford University, which co-commissioned and presented Magnificent Bird, I left my hotel in Palo Alto at 7am to pick up a rental car at the San Jose Airport, returned to pack up my things, and then began the six-and-a-half hour drive down to Los Angeles, where I would play that night.
Anyone who’s done the trek from the Bay Area to Southern California knows the adage that I-5 offers an unspeakably dull (though efficient) drive, punctuated by the intermittent stench of cattle, or Cow-schwitz, as it’s sometimes known. From the time you merge around Gilroy—home of the Gilroy Garlic Festival—until a few miles north of the Grapevine, the freeway offers a master class in monotony: no change in elevation, no turns, only the occasional truck stop or rest area. But perhaps owing to the two-year moratorium on touring (thanks, pandemic!), this all too familiar pilgrimage became novel. I found myself moved by the rolling, pastel hills of Central California, the hand-painted signs for pistachios and cherries, the bales of hay piled up under cerulean skies.
Nevertheless, the drive was a slog. I parked on a seedy stretch of Santa Monica Blvd in East Hollywood just in time to load in for my show and scarf some Thai food before watching a rapturous set by Aaron Embry, who opened for me. And my God, Aaron is among the most masterful, gutsplittingly funny, heartrendingly sad songwriters and performers with whom I’ve had the honor to share a stage. After the gig, I signed records for about half an hour, then headed to my folks’ house, where I slept for four hours before dropping off my rental car at LAX and flying to Denver. Which brings me back to the Tru by Hilton.
Wherefore the airport hotel? Tru by Hilton is the latest advance in an ongoing scientific effort by the hospitality industry to perfect the anodyne rooming house, to deprive their properties of any semblance of character. The most notable features of this campaign are its bold colors, pleasant geometry, the appearance of luxury, but all devoid of any organic intention or impulse. Each design flourish seems to have been grown in a lab in isolation, without regard for any tradition of aesthetics, without any connection to the surrounding physical environment.
How, in a setting like the outskirts of Denver, would such a connection to the environment manifest? I don’t know. That the airport, which opened in 1995 after years of delay and project creep, is twenty-three miles from the city, is its own small tragedy, the lure and promise of future sprawl trumping practical considerations in the present. But that’s another tin of sardines. The point, here, I guess, is that the airport, too, has been stripped of context, dropped arbitrarily into the Plains.1
In many ways, these hotels are just another portent of the death of regionalism. This is an old anxiety, dating back in this country to the 1930s, when the Federal Writers Project, an arm of the WPA, sought to combat the homogenization of culture through its American Guide Series, a set of travel guides whose creation put unemployed writers to work during the Great Depression.2 Beyond that, the FWP undertook other visionary projects, among them, a vast array of oral histories, intended to archive and preserve regional culture at the individual, communal, and state level. (I highly recommend tracking down a copy of your state guide; nearly all of them remain in print, and they are beyond fascinating.)
Much of the anxiety surrounding cultural homogeneity in the 1930s was connected to the radio, which brought mass culture to a national audience. New technologies have, in the last century, changed the ways in which art and culture are disseminated, but the general phenomenon of a nationalized culture seems similar. To me, it’s the monotony of the physical environment, the fact that if you were blindfolded and dropped into any number of American suburbs, you’d have little to help you tell one from another, that is the real signal shift of the last several decades. And that, of course, is in large part a function of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of corporations whose franchises have become ubiquitous in our cities, suburbs, and exurbs.
Is it possible that the flattening of culture, architecture, and commerce, into a sterile, agglomeration of sameness—in addition to a panoply of political & historical factors—makes it more difficult for us to embrace and celebrate difference? Does not a society, in which all traces of quirk and character have been studiously rubbed away—from its strip malls, its hotels, its coffeehouses and sandwich shops and car dealerships—become a cold room, a laboratory for suspicion, activated by difference in human likeness? And does not this cold room become a theater in which fear and grievance are expressed mercilessly, callously, violently?
It is tempting, in moments like this, to give in to despair, cynicism, contempt, and resignation. But I am still dreaming of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s beloved community. Each of us has the power and privilege to walk through life energized and oriented by an ethic of love, by which I mean an ethic in which our mandate and responsibility is to see ourselves in each other, to insist on loving even, and especially, those whom it may be tempting to dismiss as unworthy of our care and consideration.
And while there may not be much we can do about airport hotels, we can be intentional when it comes to the ways in which we allocate our time, money, and other resources within our communities as a means of amplifying and celebrating that which makes our neighborhoods, towns, and cities, our own. Investing in trust and communal fabric at the local level is, at least, a start.
I begin a run in the Midwest this evening at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis in support of my new album, Magnificent Bird. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you along the way. And for reasons that are too obvious and heartbreaking to name, I feel compelled to share this video from December 2017.
Perhaps the unmistakable strangeness and isolation of the airport’s setting have something to do with the preponderance of conspiracy theories that have cropped up in the last two dozen years.
The American Guide Series provided much of the source material for my 2013 song cycle, Gabriel’s Guide to the 48 States.
The heartbreaking reasons remain, but there is something achingly beautiful about a bunch of people crammed together making music. How casually we once did such things!
Dear Gabriel Kahane,
Reminds me of my friend Patty's song, as regards your tour and hers many years ago,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvvqAqx5vC0
Also, reminds me of my travels for work recently - something I never imagined doing - but managed to be asked to participate in gatherings, trainings, conversations, about sexual health, HIV prevention, etc, in states and cities where it's hard for the public health people to deliver services. So, I was grateful to be invited. But, first, it involved flying - a terrible experience isn't it really? Aside: just rewatched the 1974 Murder on the Orient Express. This conversation reminds me of Wendy Hiller's character and the annoyances she experienced on the train. Good god/ess - I'd love to be on the train. Anyway, then arriving at the hotel as you experienced - the room smells suspect upon entering because the so-called air system is on either way too cold in summer or way too warm in winter, and not a single window can be opened to let in any air - which if you could do so would be from the exhaust from the nearby freeway... Then the horror of the bed with fabrics - can we call them fabrics? - the layers of the bed sheets and coverings made with who-knows-what polyesters and such - and the horrible pillows. Well, shouldn't go on any longer. Just wanted to let you know that I empathized... Wishing you well in your tour, RWB
Is there any way you could get a tour bus with JEREMY KAHANE on the side? Or get a dog, like Steinbeck's travels with Charlie? Can't wait to meet you in the same city!