The Lost Art of Walking

5. As I Tripped Out One Morning

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? It’s a good question, and who better to ask it than Bob Dylan, who devoted a whole episode of his radio show to the topic of walking. I was asked it myself while in Manhattan, walking on 135th Street in Harlem. I had walked all the way uptown from 24th Street, along Madison Avenue. I was following a songline, investigating the way in which certain songs can act as self-guided walking tours.

Bruce Chatwin, one of the great ‘sacramental walkers’ (his term), describes the ‘songlines’ in his book of the same name. They are part of the belief system of the Australian Aboriginals, who of necessity were walkers since they never invented the wheel or domesticated a rideable animal. They believed the world was sung into being by ancient spirits — consequently, if you knew enough songs you would know the whole world. Chatwin writes:

‘A song…was both map and direction finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.

I wanted to see if something similar might work in New York City.

I had a song in my head: ‘Walking Down Madison’, words by Kirsty MacColl, music by Johnny Marr. It’s one of those catalog songs (‘Streets of London’ is probably the most famous example of the genre) that describes the horrors of the big city; in the MacColl song it’s homelessness, poverty, knife attacks, and hypothermia. She rhymes Madison with gun, fun, bums, nuns, and ‘philosophizing some’, which neatly lays out the territory she’s dealing with.

Whether people who live in large cities actually need any reminding of the horrors of the urban environment is debatable, but MacColl’s song is better than many. It says that a single street, or avenue in this case, can connect high and low, rich and poor, the hopeful and the hopeless. The distance, physical and metaphoric, between the penthouse and the basement is ‘not that far’, with sharks in the penthouse and rats in the basement. It isn’t a subtle song.

I sang the song to myself as a sound track for 110 blocks or so of the avenue, from Madison Square Park, where it starts, up to where it becomes the on-ramp of the Madison Avenue Bridge. True, I was walking up rather than down, which was not precisely what the song describes, but it seemed more interesting to walk from an area I knew to one that I didn’t. By the time I got to the end, through Spanish Harlem, then East Harlem, I’d be in extremely unfamiliar territory.

The song is political in its way, and since Madison Avenue is the home of the New York advertising industry, political targets are comfortably at hand, but advertising isn’t mentioned in the song; perhaps that would have been too easy. I, for one, didn’t know there was any such thing as the Madison Avenue Advertising Walk of Fame. It runs along Madison from 42nd to 50th streets. There’s a plaque set right there in the sidewalk to prove it that reads, all in capitals — and the dots are theirs, not mine —:

IN RECOGNITION OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF ADVERTISING TO POP CULTURE AND ITS MOST ENDURING AND BELOVED ICONS AND SLOGANS…THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ADVERTISING AGENCIES DEDICATES THE MADISON AVENUE ADVERTISING WALK OF FAME AS A PERMANENT TRIBUTE TO THE MOST CREATIVE OF ALL INDUSTRIES…ADVERTISING.

Evidence of this creativity was available right there. Famous advertising icons and slogans, beloved no doubt, had been printed on banners that were hanging from the lampposts: the Aflac duck, Juan Valdez, ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste’, ‘Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t’.

It was no surprise that the home of American advertising was pretty swank, but around about 60th Street things became even swanker, with shops selling designer clothes and high-end luxury goods, elegant restaurants, a store with a chrome ejector seat in the window, a chauffeur-driven pork-colored Rolls-Royce waiting at the curb. But it wasn’t so swank that a few blocks later it couldn’t accommodate a young black man standing on the corner saying repeatedly to passersby, ‘Help me out, please’, and then to himself, ‘Let it go’.

Then at about 100th Street things changed with a bang. There were medical buildings, some project tower blocks, more people walking, street traders, crowds on the sidewalk, and it became a good deal less white. In a schoolyard at 104th Street a lone white teenager was sitting on a wall by the chain-link fence trying not to look nervous, and failing. He wasn’t within a hundred yards of any other kid in the schoolyard, none of whom shared his skin color. If this were a movie you knew he’d integrate and ingratiate himself in some novel manner — as it was it looked like he was just sitting there praying for his school days to be over.

At 117th Street a group of forlorn but surprisingly good-natured people was blocking the sidewalk, including one man on crutches, one woman in a wheelchair, and a black kid who was saying loudly to nobody in particular and certainly not to me, ‘Gimme a bottle of Cleeko, eighty dollars, I’m ready to go’. I don’t think he seriously thought anybody was going to give him anything.

When I got to 120th Street and Marcus Garvey Park, still called Mount Morris Park on the map I had with me, I was reminded of another song, Joe Souths ‘Walk a Mile in My Shoes’. The fact is, walking a single mile in anybody’s shoes really isn’t very hard. You could walk that distance in shoes that really didn’t fit you at all. Walking a mile, even several miles, in the boots I was wearing that day was fine. They were pain-free and really quite comfortable for about four and a half miles, but then they started to feel really uncomfortable, and after about five miles they became absolutely excruciating.

Suddenly I felt a terrible twinge and wrench in my right pinkie toe, as though all the skin had been abruptly ripped from the toe in one sharp slice. I limped into the park, found a bench, took off my boot and sock, and saw that, yes, all the skin had indeed been abruptly ripped from the toe in one sharp slice. It hurt and it didn’t look pretty.

I thought about ending my walk, and hobbling to the 125th Street subway station. I’d already walked over a hundred blocks; there’d be no great shame in retiring injured. But I looked around the park at all the people who were sitting there killing time. Most looked as though they had a lot of troubles, and although I didn’t presume to guess what those troubles were, I thought they were probably a whole lot worse than a toe with the skin stripped off. I sat for a while but then I put my boot back on and decided that — like Felix in a different song — I would keep on walking.

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Given people’s capacity to write songs about anything at all, it’s hardly surprising that there are any number of songs about walking. The earliest form I know is the chanson d’aventure, devised by the Provencal troubadours in the twelfth century. Traditionally these songs often begin with the line ‘As I walked out one morning’, and they go on to describe a troubling or surprising meeting or some unusual sight encountered while out walking. Compare and contrast with Bob Dylan when he goes out ‘to smell the air around Tom Paine’ in the song ‘Tom Paine’ on John Wesley Harding.

There’s evidently something contradictory here. The moment you use those opening words, the listener knows something surprising is about to happen, which means that it’s not really so surprising after all, which is an issue at the very heart of the idea of ‘going for a walk’. We may not want our walks to be ‘adventures’ in the most extreme sense — we can do without pirates, gunplay, caverns measureless to man — but we do hope to see something new on our walks, even in the most familiar surroundings.

‘Walking out’ in the troubadours’ sense sounds like an everyday activity, something close to home, not necessarily part of some great thousand-mile journey, and the implication is that adventures and wonders are to be found wherever we are, if not in our own backyard, then within walking distance of it.

The trope ‘as I walked out one morning’ is thrillingly close to the traditional blues opening line ‘I woke up this morning’. And if you’re trying to write a simple blues lyric it’s very tempting to rhyme blues with shoes, and before you know it, you’re writing a song about walking.

Robert Johnson didn’t resist the temptation and wrote ‘Walkin’ Blues’. Johnson’s words aren’t easy to understand at the best of times, and attempts to nail them down in lyric sheets and songbooks don’t make things much clearer. In a book of sheet music called Robert Johnson at the Crossroads: The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions, the words are presented thus:

I woke-up this morning — feelin’ ‘round for my shoes

Know ‘bout ‘at I got these old walkin’ blues.

Which isn’t exactly what I hear when I listen to the song, and is any case inscrutable, but it seems he has the walking blues because his ‘little Bernice’ has gone. She’s walked out on him, and rather than stay at home moping, he’s hitting the road again on foot. Alternate interpretations are no doubt possible. A whole bunch of fellow blues walkers, including Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, and the Grateful Dead, have followed in Johnson’s footsteps and done cover versions.

Johnson’s plan to hit the road might not solve all his problems. In another of his songs, ‘Stop Breaking Down’, he says that every time he walks down the street some pretty mama starts ‘breaking down’ with him, and he wishes she’d stop.

Johnson, like most blues players, frequently uses the rhythm known as the ‘blues shuffle’, the very basic ‘dum da dum da, dum da dum da’ pattern at the heart of the classic twelve-bar blues. It’s always struck me as a misnomer. The blues shuffle sounds more sprightly and purposeful than I expect a shuffle to be, especially if it’s combined with a ‘walking bass’ line.

The walking bass isn’t confined to the blues — it’s in all kinds of pop and jazz music. Since one note is played for every beat of a 4/4 bar it’s certainly a rhythm you can walk to, as opposed to, say, the ¾ time of the waltz that makes you want to dance, or Stravinsky’s polyrhythms that make you want to celebrate the rite of spring. Karlheinz Stockhausen claimed to hear the march of the jackboot in any recognizable time signature.

Walking bass has something in common with ‘stride piano’, the style of jazz playing where the player’s left hand ‘strides’ up and down the piano, alternating bass lines and chords. Some of these lines may ‘walk’ regularly at the pace of a basic beat, but this being jazz, there’ll be arpeggios, syncopation, and the introduction of mixed time signatures. You might be able to walk to this but you’d look darned odd.

One of the greatest stride pianists is Fats Domino, a man who’s written at least three songs with the word walking in the title. The best known of them, called simply ‘I’m Walking’, was, according to legend, written after his car broke down and a fan saw him making his way on foot to the nearest garage and yelled, ‘Look, it’s Fats Domino walking’. Fats went home and turned his misfortune into a song. I so want this story to be true.

In song, as in life, there are a lot of people who’d much rather be riding than walking. And you might think that country-and-western music, with its fondness for pickup trucks and eighteen-wheelers, would find walking a particular humiliation, but it appears not. Here walking is often synonymous with honesty and plain dealing, whether it’s Faron Young’s ‘Walk Tall’, Keith Urban’s ‘Walkin’ the Country’, or Johnny Cash’s ‘I Walk the Line’.

Rodney Crowell sings a song called ‘I Walk the Line (Revisited)’, which is about the joys of hearing Johnny Cash sing ‘I Walk the Line’ on the radio, but it’s a car radio and Crowell is driving in his ‘49 Ford, an irony the song seems not to notice. But it wouldn’t be country music at all if there wasn’t some mawkish sentiment attached to walking, as in Wayne Newton’s ‘Daddy Don’t Walk So Fast’, which is what the kid says as his daddy abandons him and walks away.

Some people reckon that Patsy Cline’s ‘Walkin’ After Midnight’, written by Alan Block and Don Hecht, is a great song of female independence and empowerment, but it strikes me as deeply problematic. On the surface it appears to be about a female protagonist who has, we don’t know how, lost her lover, and so she wanders the streets after midnight looking for him. Why she chooses this method and this time of night is left for the listener to guess, but earlier, more prudish sensibilities than ours couldn’t imagine what any woman would be doing in the streets after midnight unless she’d become a hooker, a streetwalker. Another possibility might be that having been abandoned, she’d simply lost her wits, à la Ophelia, and is walking around in a daze, looking for love in all the wrong places, but this doesn’t seem even remotely empowered.

When men sing ‘Walkin After Midnight’, as they often do, the streetwalker possibility seems much more likely. The guy searches the night for his lost love, trying to save her from a life of vice. Of course you could conceivably reverse the sexes on this scenario, too: the woman’s searching the streets because she thinks the guy’s become a hustler, but this is probably trying too hard.

Sexual role reversal plays a part in another great walking song, ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’’. As sung by Nancy Sinatra this does indeed sound like a song of empowerment. She’s walking over the guy and striding on to freedom. When you hear the original male version, as sung by the song’s composer, Lee Hazelwood, it becomes a particularly nasty piece of vindictive masculine domination. Hazelwood, it always seemed, was perfectly happy with that interpretation. His other compositions included ‘Rebel Walk’ and ‘The Walker’ for Duane Eddy, and ‘’She Don’t Walk on Water’ for himself and Anna Hanski.

You might think that walking is in itself too tame a subject for the full-on, balls-out, hard-rock song, and writers of rock songs seem to agree. Not wishing to appear pedestrian, they envisage fancy or extreme walking that takes place in unusual or downright impossible circumstances: on the moon (the Police), on thin ice (Elvis Costello and Yoko Ono), through walls (Steve Hackett), on locusts (John Cale), on broken glass (Annie Lennox), on sunshine (Katrina and the Waves), and, in a particularly obscure favorite of mine, through syrup (Ned’s Atomic Dustbin).

The most rock-and-roll walking song, or at least the rock-ingest song with the word walking in its title and lyrics, is surely Aerosmith’s ‘Walk This Way’. Supposedly it was inspired by the movie Young Frankenstein, in which Marty Feldman, as Igor, invites visitors to the castle to ‘walk this way’, which they do by copying his shambling, hump-backed gait. In the context of the movie it’s very funny, the silliness of the pun only adding to the comic mayhem. By the time of the Aerosmith song the pun has pretty much disappeared. It becomes a song about being sexually initiated at the hands of a cheerleader, and the lyrics don’t require a very close reading, but the gist of it is that the girl is telling the guy to follow her round to the back of the bleachers, not to imitate her cheerleader moves. Either way, it doesn’t sound like a very long or challenging walk.

The fact that Run-DMC did a fantastic hit version of ‘Walk This Way’ is enough to make us realize that rappers can be walkers, too, though not very far or very fast, that would scuff up their immaculate sneakers, but whenever you have a lot of pimps you’re likely to have a lot of people doing Tom Wolfe’s ‘pimp roll’. There’s Snoop Dogg ‘walking down the street, smoking, smoking, sipping on gin and juice’, Cypress Hill’s ‘Stoned Is the Way of the Walk’, Lil Wayne’s ‘Walk It Off’, Xzibit’s ‘Get Your Walk On’.

The walk Xzibit is referring to here is the Crip Walk, originally part of gang culture. Back in the day Crips would make heel-and-toe or V-shaped movements with their feet to spell out letters and words on the ground, often after they’d committed a crime. One word they tended to spell out was Blood, the name of their gang rivals, and then they’d ‘erase’ the word by scrubbing their feet all over it. This does sound wonderfully baroque. It’s not a walk that would get you from A to B, but it was certainly a walk that could get you into a lot of trouble if you did it in front of the wrong people: Crips believed it was for Crips only. But eventually it became mainstream. Ice-T Crip-walked on TV, and since then all and sundry have been at it. You can find tutorial videos on YouTube, a lot of dance moves have been added, and it’s now often known as Clown Walking. It’s also been said that it looks like hopscotch on crack.

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References to walking are more at home in the apparently safer territory of the show tune and the standard. Walking here tends to be an innocent activity from an earlier, gentler, less sexualized age. And so we have songs like ‘Walkin’ My Baby Back Home’, ‘Winter Wonderland’, or ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’.

The oddest walking-related show tune I know is Irving Berlin’s ‘My Walking Stick’ of 1938, written for the movie Alexander’s Ragtime Band, which is about how very attached the protagonist is to his walking stick. I say ‘he’ because it’s quite evidently a man’s song even though in the movie it’s sung by Ethel Merman, who performs it as a male impersonator. The lyrics say you can take his hat, his tie, his spats, and he can get by just fine, but take away his walking stick (which for the sake of a rhyme sometimes becomes a cane) and he’ll go insane. If he’s down lovers’ lane and he’s caught, then without it he’s nought. It was a different age.

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In October 1938 the Times of London ran a headline that read ‘While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances — to The Lambeth Walk’. It was referring to a song of that name, part of the hit stage show Me and My Girl, book and lyrics by Douglas Furber and L. Arthur Rose and music by Noel Gay.

To be fair, the Lambeth Walk is as much a dance as it is a way of walking, a jaunty strut that involves linked arms and raised knees, and occasionally shouting ‘Oi!’ Traditionally it’s been done by lovable, heart-of-gold, salt-of-the-earth Londoners. The song says ‘any time you’re Lambeth way, any evening, any day, you’ll find them all doing the Lambeth Walk’, though this information is inevitably out-of-date.

The song rapidly became a hit and a political cause. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth went to see the show and loved it, and the song was even popular with some people in Germany, so popular that Noel Gay was asked to sign a document declaring that he had no Jewish blood in him. He declined. In 1939 this led to the Lambeth Walk being denounced by the Nazi Party as ‘Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping’, though to a rational person it looks like none of these things. In due course, in 1941, a short English newsreel propaganda film appeared that went by various names including Lambeth Walk — Nazi Style. It filched footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and edited it so that Hitler and his troops appeared to be doing their own ridiculous, militaristic version of the Lambeth Walk. The film’s provenance is mysterious, and it’s most convincingly credited to Charles A. Ridley, though that’s a name that’s otherwise disappeared from film history. It’s said that Goebbels was so infuriated when he saw the film that he ran out of the room literally kicking and screaming.

Lambeth Walk is the name of a street as well as a song, and I went there, following another songline. According to the lyric, everything there is free and easy, and it’s a place where you can do as you darn well pleasey. The song asks:

Why don’t you make your way there,

Go there, stay there?

I could think of several reasons. No doubt lovable, heart-of-gold, salt-of-the-earth Londoners still live in the area, but none of them was in evidence on the day I went walking there. In fact there were few people on the street at all.

Lambeth Walk was not thriving, and it seemed to be in trouble. A place by the name of Denby Court was a block of so-called sheltered housing. This is where the English authorities place the old, troubled, disabled, and generally vulnerable. The people in Denby Court weren’t just sheltered, they were incarcerated, behind walls, bars, and metal fences, protected by metal spikes and closed-circuit TV cameras. No doubt it was a good thing that the inhabitants were protected, but to need so much protection suggested that they were permanently under siege, living in constant terror. What monsters walked this street?

On the day I was there, there didn’t seem to be much to fear, unless you count the kid on a bike who did an aggressive wheelie a couple of feet in front of me, as if to say…well, I’m not sure what — that a kid on a bike owns these mean streets, that I was obviously a stranger there and I’d better watch myself, that I must be a sucker to be walking rather than riding a bike — who knows, but he was definitely saying something.

Perhaps he thought I had no reason to be there, and in a way he was right. There was nothing to see or do or buy. The Lambeth Walk Carpet Shop was boarded up, as was Lambeth Walk Seafoods, its sign smashed to pieces. Something called CORAS, the Colombian Refugee Association, seemed still to be in business, even though it was closed and there was a serious-looking metal blind rolled down over the front. Joy’s Mini Market’s (sic) was open for business, and a black woman, possibly Joy, was sitting on a box outside. I wasn’t going to do anything so crass as ask her about the dance, but I did try to make eye contact, and she was having none of it.

In fact Lambeth Walk has some history of economic failure. In the nineteenth century there were two wells in Lambeth Walk, one called Nearer, one called Farther, trying to sell water for its medicinal properties. The wells hadn’t lasted long and now there was no sign they’d ever been there. Finally I came to a bleak little courtyard where the owners of a couple of market stalls were just closing up for the day — one had been selling household products in industrial-sized packs, the other selling toys. And painted on the wall above them, high enough to deter all but the most determined taggers, was a faded mural showing a jolly man and woman with knees raised and arms linked doing, there was no doubt about it, the Lambeth Walk.

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It might have been tempting, on these songline walks of mine, to wear a personal stereo and have the relevant song playing as I walked. For several reasons, I didn’t. One was simply the issue of irritation: to have the same song playing over and over again might have driven a person insane. More crucially, as I walked I didn’t want to be insulated from the sounds of the environment. The things you hear when you walk are every bit as important as the things you see, or for that matter touch, taste, and smell. There’s also the safety issue. I wanted to be able to hear the approaching car, the ominous footsteps, the cries of ‘White man!’ Perhaps I was being old-fashioned.

There’s at least one generation, probably several, who can’t imagine what it’s like not to have music that’s portable and always available, via the Walkman and its various higher-tech developments through to the iPod, known in some quarters as the ‘isolation Pod’.

The name Walkman is one of those not quite English words belonging to some global tongue, devised by the people at Sony, who first marketed the personal stereo in 1979 in Japan. Toshiba had a rival product called the Walky. Walkman strikes me as a very unsexy word, and you’d think Sony might have called it the Runman or the Jogman, but the early versions were so sensitive that if you ran or jogged, or even walked too speedily, the playing mechanism faltered.

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I can not only remember a time before the personal stereo, I can remember the first one I ever saw. It was in London, and it was 1979, before the Walkman went on sale in England. I was working in a bookshop, behind the counter with a couple of other assistants who were big music fans, and a young Japanese man came into the store wearing a Walkman. It was as strange as seeing somebody with a jetpack on his shoulders. We had a halting conversation in which we tried to ask him what the Walkman was like. We couldn’t believe that the sound quality could be very good, and the Japanese boy very definitely wasn’t going to offer his earpieces for us to sample. We didn’t blame him. We didn’t expect it any more than we’d have expected him to offer us the use of his jetpack.

At least one of us said it would never catch on. Although it was easy enough to see the advantages of being able to take your music with you anywhere, the notion that life required a personalized, prerecorded sound track was a new and an unexplored one. We had no idea of the extent to which the personal stereo would subsequently be used to provide background music as a form of editing, something filmic, a way of combining sound and vision, manipulating what you see and hear, to make yourself believe you’re living in a movie.

Absurd and unlikely juxtapositions are par for the course. They’re expected and welcomed. By now we know that any sound and any image can be put together to create some sort of meaning. If you’re walking, wandering lonely as a cloud, you might think that one of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies would do the job, but if your iPod randomly selects some Napalm Death, then that will create its own oblique and ironic resonances, too. These may be random, but they will not be meaningless. This is something we’ve all learned from watching so many movies.

Erik Satie, incidentally, as well as being a composer, pianist, Rosicrucian, and master ironist, was also a fine, determined, obsessive walker. Every day he left his home in the suburb of Arcueil and walked to his studio in the center of Paris, then at night he walked back again. It was a substantial journey, six miles in each direction, and some of it was potentially dangerous: Satie carried a hammer for protection.

Guillaume Apollinaire tells us that Satie did a lot of composing on his nocturnal homeward walks. He would create music in his head, then stop from time to time under a convenient street-lamp and write it down in a notebook. His productivity was greatly reduced during World War One when so many Parisian streetlamps were turned off. It’s easy enough to believe that you hear the regular, repeated rhythm of the human footfall in much of Satie’s work. He also said, ‘Before I compose a piece, I walk around it several times, accompanied by myself’.

Satie’s music, alas, has become something of a cliché of the less inventive movie sound track: an instant source of knee-jerk melancholy. Imdb.com would lead you to believe that he’s one of Hollywood’s most in-demand composers. His work has appeared in movies and TV shows as diverse as The X-Files, Chocolat, The Man Who Fell to Earth, My Dinner with Andre, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Benny Hill Show.

There is one cinematic moment, however, where Satie’s music is forever welded to an image of walking, and that is in the Hal Ashby/Jerzy Kosinski movie Being There. It’s the last scene, when the hero, Chance the gardener, played by Peter Sellers, walks on water, across a lake, to the accompaniment of a version of Satie’s Gnossiennes. The movie credits say ‘Rearranged by Johnny Man-del’, though surely ‘arranged’ would have been enough.

The scene was a spur-of-the moment invention. The script they were shooting from ended with Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine simply meeting each other while walking in the woods. Compared with seeing the hero walk on water, this was obviously tame stuff. Ashby found walking on water was a surprisingly easy movie effect to pull off. He got the technical details from Robert Downey Sr., who’d done something similar in his movie Greaser’s Palace.

All you need is a certain kind of mobile platform that can be found at airports — you sink it below the surface of the water so that it can’t be seen, and then any actor can take a short straight walk along it and appear to be doing some miraculous aquatic pedestrianism. In Being There the narrowness of the track also allowed Sellers to poke an umbrella into the water just a few inches away from his feet and have it sink deep below the surface, giving the impression there was no platform at all.

Another of Sellers’s great walking scenes is one in which he scarcely walks at all, as Dr. Strangelove, who having been in a wheelchair throughout, suddenly leaps up, stoked by the prospect of nuclear attack, and yells, ‘Mein Führer, I can walk!’

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Sellers insisted he was an actor who had no ‘true self’. He disappeared into his roles and became invisible. There is, therefore, no such thing as a ‘Peter Sellers walk’. Certain other actors are far more inclined to have a trademark stride. A few who immediately spring to mind are Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, Pee-wee Herman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Wayne. All of these might be construed as comical: by the time a walking style has become recognizable it has also become absurd. It also seems to be a particularly male trait. The only genuinely distinctive ‘female walk’ I can think of is Marilyn Monroe’s stylized wiggle. Sometimes this is attributed to her weak ankles, but that sounds like an explanation for something that needs no explaining.

I’m one of those people who finds Charlie Chaplin largely unwatchable these days, and his walk is certainly part of what I can’t bear, its cuteness, its faux humility, its feverish attempt at ingratiation. If this sounds like too contemporary an opinion, Wyndham Lewis felt much the same about Chaplin back in 1928. His novel The Cbildermass is set in the afterlife, a world overseen by a character known as The Bailiff, who sometimes appears in the form of Chaplin. Characters in the afterlife are then forced to perform routines from Chaplin movies — it isn’t hell exactly, but it’s near enough. For Lewis this represents all that’s wrong with popular culture — it’s become no more than repetition and imitation at the expense of authenticity.

Certainly Chaplin is anything but inimitable. It’s said he based his on-screen walk on that of a real tramp, a man rejoicing in the name of Rummy Binks, who drank in a pub belonging to Chaplin’s uncle. There’s also a story, maybe an urban myth, that Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest, and lost. One version has him saying to a reporter that he was tempted to give the contestants lessons in the Chaplin walk, ‘out of pity as well as in the desire to see the thing done correctly’.

Chaplin’s high regard for his own trademark walk was confirmed — indeed, turned into a publicity stunt — in the 1920^s, when he had his feet insured for $150,000. Is there any recorded case of anybody ever collecting on these Hollywood body-part insurance policies?

By the time of his movie Limelight, in 1952, Chaplin had transferred some of his concerns about walking onto another character. Chaplin plays Calvero, a fading comedian, and Claire Bloom plays Terry, a ballerina suffering from hysterical paralysis. There’s nothing physically wrong with her, but she can’t walk. It comes as no surprise to anybody when, late in the movie, she finds her feet again and yells, ‘Calvero! I’m walking! I’m walking!’ One must have a heart of stone to watch this scene without laughing.

The main thing that makes Limelight endurable is the brief presence of Buster Keaton. Now there’s a man who knew how to walk across the screen (as well as fall, tumble, slide, leap, swing, etc.). In Limelight he plays another fading comedian, and one who gets far, far less screen time than Chaplin. The two of them perform a creaky musical routine, with Keaton on piano, Chaplin on violin. The act is filmed very straight, very deadpan. There’s a long period at the start of the scene (two minutes or so out of a total of seven) where Keaton fumbles with his sheet music while Chaplin shows off a series of ‘funny walks’ based on the idea of having one leg shorter than the other. These are skillfully done as far as they go, but they point up a fundamental difference between the two comedians. Keaton could be funny when he walked, but he didn’t do funny walks.

For Keaton, like any good actor, the walk was not a trademark but a part of characterization. In Sherlock Jr., for instance, he plays a would-be detective following a suspect by walking about a foot behind him, their strides interlocking. Typically Keaton’s gait is a combination of the stoic, the hesitant, the noble. He walks on, not in expectation of joy or success, certainly not in expectation of being loved like Chaplin’s ‘Little Fellow’, and yet for all the abuse and misfortune that gets heaped on him, Keaton’s walk remains brave and optimistic.

According to legend, Keaton, while a child actor, was performing onstage and was required to walk down a flight of stairs, but he tripped and fell all the way to the bottom, then immediately got up, walked across the stage, and carried on as though it had never happened. Harry Houdini was supposedly in the audience and is credited as having said something along the lines of ‘Ain’t he the little buster’, but surely this is apocryphal.

It appears that Keaton may also have got something from the cartoon character Felix the Cat. According to Mark Newgarden, an illustrator and animator, who got it straight from the mouth of Otto Messmer, Felix’s creator, there was a time in the 1920^s when Keaton paid the producer of the Felix cartoons (Pat Sullivan) so that he could use an approximation of Felix’s walk: a backward-and-forward pace, head down, arms clenched behind the back. Newgarden, as do I, finds it amazing that Keaton thought he needed to make such a payment. What court would ever have found Keaton guilty of stealing a walk from a cartoon character? Still, these were Keaton’s golden years — perhaps he had enough money that he thought it was a good investment to spend a little then and head off legal trouble later.

Like Felix, Keaton kept on walking, through TV specials, commercials, industrial training films, and even, in 1965, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. That was the year before his death, and also the year he starred in The Railrodder, in which he’s seen jumping into the River Thames in London, then seconds later emerging out of the water on the Canadian coast, having walked across, or along the floor of, the Atlantic Ocean.

It was also the year that he appeared in Samuel Beckett’s Film. Keaton wasn’t the first choice for the movie, and he seems to have had some trouble figuring out what he was doing in the part; even so, the casting now seems inevitable. Imagine the horror of Chaplin mawkishly puttering his way through the part. When we first see Keaton in the movie he’s scuttling along beside a vast, tall, mythically featureless brick wall. He’s moving quickly, hurriedly, with a frantic daintiness, trying hard, according to Beckett, not to be ‘perceived’. He’s definitely walking, there’s no doubt about that, but if he were moving even the slightest bit faster it would definitely be running.

Samuel Beckett, interviewed by Kevin Brownlow, said, ‘The heat was terrible — while I was staggering in the humidity Keaton was galloping up and down and doing whatever was asked of him. He had great endurance, he was very tough and, yes, reliable’.

♦

Moviemakers may in general be happier depicting the rapid motion of actors: dancing, running, diving, swinging from jungle creepers, jumping off buildings, but there’s no shortage of great movie walking.

Errol Flynn is Jim Corbett in Gentleman Jim, walking through the packed streets of New York City and using his fancy footwork to avoid bumping into passersby.

Fred Astaire walks down the Champs-Elysees in Funny Face, and because Astaire is Astaire even his walking looks like dancing.

The characters in Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie repeatedly find themselves transported from their bourgeois homes to a country road, where they walk along briskly, though without ahy obvious purpose, dressed for a dinner party rather than a country walk.

Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects limps along when he’s playing the crippled, nerdy Verbal Kint, but then when he’s free and clear, not a suspect anymore, he walks along the street and his limp disappears and he strides out as his true self, the cosmically evil Keyser Soze.

There’s Michael Douglas as the crazed, disgruntled defense engineer in Falling Down. You know the guy’s insane because he abandons his car and walks all the way across Los Angeles for his daughter’s birthday. The most satisfying scene is when he crosses a golf course, and the mere presence of a pedestrian encroaching on their precious turf is enough to give one of the members a heart attack.

Cary Grant’s last screen appearance is in the movie Walk, Don’t Run, set at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Because of the accommodation shortage he has to share an apartment with Samantha Eggar and a guy who’s an Olympic athlete. The guy’s too embarrassed to say what event he’s competing in, but given the title of the movie this really isn’t hard to work out. Racewalking as a source of social embarrassment — now there’s a topic not much explored in cinema. There is, however, a Harry Langdon movie called Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926), in which the hero enters a cross-country walking race in order to pay his father’s mortgage. Then he falls for the sponsor’s daughter and starts walking in earnest, determined to win the race and the girl. The girl is played by Joan Crawford.

Naturally, in any movie, choices will have been made about what sound track should go with any walking scene. Even those movies that were originally ‘silent’ will be shown with a musical accompaniment of greater or lesser appropriateness. However, there are certain movies where music and walking fuse together in a magically cinematic way.

Admittedly, some of these fusions may take place in the brain as much as in the movie itself. I often think of Dustin Hoffman’s walk as Ratzo Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy (a real limp — he put a stone in his shoe so that he wouldn’t have to ‘act’), and I hear the song ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’, even though I know that’s the music that plays when he’s on the bus.

And of course I think of John Travolta, as Tony Manero, strutting his way through Saturday Night Fever while the Bee Gees sing, ‘You can tell by the way I use my walk I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk’. But the scene I remember best is from the ludicrous sequel, Staying Alive, where the conversation goes, ‘You know what I wanna do?’ ‘What?’ ‘Strut’. And Travolta goes striding off across the Brooklyn Bridge, or is it the Verrazano-Narrows?

All this, I know, is just scratching the celluloid. However, when I began writing this book there was no doubt in my mind about what I thought was the perfect coming together of music, walking, and film: the opening scene from Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas. The camera, up in a helicopter, makes a long swoop across the pale, jagged Texas desert, and finally rises over a long, sharp, horizontal ridge to reveal Harry Dean Stanton, playing the part of Travis, in a suit, tie, and baseball cap, walking along, floppy and swift-moving, in the middle of the harshest of landscapes, not on any recognizable track, coming from nowhere, going nowhere.

The accompanying music has a perfection about it. The scene, in fact the whole movie, is unimaginable without Ry Cooder’s slide guitar-driven score, based on Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’, which in turn was based on a nineteenth-century hymn. It’s ‘mood music’ all right, but it’s hard to define the mood. It’s deeply ambiguous desert music, with a floating, swaying, self-renewing sadness. You wouldn’t necessarily think of it as music to accompany walking, though it does have a forward movement, a restlessness, a rise and fall, tension and release, as it struggles with and then descends into melancholy. It’s a cinematic moment that could make you fall in love with a director, an actor, a musician, a cinematographer, a desert. It’s a perfect start to a movie, a huge visual statement that asks an even bigger question. It’s a moment so strong and enigmatic that the rest of the film sometimes seems to exist simply in order to explain and justify that image.

The scene had long been etched firmly in my mind, and there was another scene, or at least a shot, that I remembered. Still quite early in the movie, Travis is trying to escape from the brother who has come to rescue him, and he begins to walk along an endless, dead-straight railroad track into an empty, pale blue, featureless desert landscape.

I decided I’d better see the movie again. These two scenes were there, largely as I remembered them, but there were a couple of other walking scenes that I’d forgotten about. One has Stanton walking across a freeway bridge, where he encounters a madman screaming at the traffic below. He gives the screaming man a sympathetic pat on the back as he walks on.

The other scene shows Travis trying to make amends to the son he abandoned four years earlier — the boy is now eight. He asks his brother’s maid how he should walk in order to look like a ‘rich father’. She tells him he must walk with his head up, his body stiff, and with dignity. We can see that Travis isn’t quite able to pull this off, but he and the maid are happy enough with the effect.

He then meets his son after school and they walk home together, but instead of sharing the same sidewalk, they walk along on opposite sides of the street, doing little comic walking routines for each other’s amusement. It’s a scene of enormous warmth and charm. It’s hard to think of Harry Dean Stanton as a purveyor of funny walks, and that’s precisely why these walks work so well, because they belong to the character rather than the actor.

But that’s pretty much it for walking in the movie. Sure, people walk across rooms and across parking lots, but there are no more genuine walking scenes. Paris, Texas turns into what it was threatening to be all along: a road movie.

Travis buys a 1959 Ford Ranchero, and father and son drive off in search of Mom, played by Nastassja Kinski. They find her, mother and son reunite, and Travis, knowing that he’s the problem rather than the solution, drives off with an ambiguous smile on his face. It has become a Sam Shepard story of love, loss, alienation, and manly men driving alone in pickup trucks, which is to say it has become rather unsurprising.

Within the scheme of the film Travis has redeemed himself. He’s become part of something. In the beginning he was a lost, crazy man walking alone through the Texas desert. In the end he’s a sane man, integrated, driving along highways in his incredibly cool twenty-five-year-old classic Ranchero.

There is a moral here that I’m not very comfortable with. Naturally, one has sympathy for Travis. We don’t want him to be a lonely, miserable outsider, and yet I can’t see why a man driving along in a Ranchero is necessarily any better off than a man walking alone in the desert. It would have been crass for the end of the movie to have him returning to the desert on foot, yet the vision of the smiling man driving his pickup into the American night feels like too easy a resolution.

There was also something about one of those earlier scenes that worried me. In the beginning Travis walks in straight lines, without regard for topography or established paths. He doesn’t walk down any actual roads. When his brother sees him walking along the railroad tracks he stops him, peers into the distance, in the direction Travis is heading, and says, ‘What’s out there? There’s nothing out there’. It rings hollow, because there is something out there and maybe it’s something that can be better found on foot than in a pickup truck.

So what’s the answer to the question: How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? In an episode of The Simpsons called ‘When Grandma Simpson Returns’, Homer first says it’s eight, and then when he’s told the question is rhetorical he corrects himself and says it’s seven. Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says it’s forty-two. But the answer surely has to be none. A man’s still a man even if he walks down no roads at all. It’s just that he’s likely to be more interesting company if he’s walked and sung his way down a few more than that, and if he doesn’t rely too much on his pickup truck.

♦

Meanwhile, back on Madison Avenue, I walked from Marcus Garvey Park to 135th Street, where the on-ramp for the Madison Avenue Bridge starts. I then started heading west toward the subway station. For most of the time I’d been in East Harlem I hadn’t been the only white man on the street. There had been one or two others along the way. But now as I walked along 135th Street, I was certainly the only one, and apparently a rarity, rare enough for someone to shout out in my direction for the benefit of the guys he was with, ‘White man! White man!’ I wished he hadn’t, for all sorts of reasons. He wasn’t, I’m pretty sure, saying, ‘Hail fellow well met’. He was saying it more in the tone of someone who’d seen some exotic or threatened species, the way you might have called out, ‘Look, a spotted owl!’ though no doubt there was some disconnect between what he said and what he meant. In fact, I don’t really know what he meant, and I certainly didn’t know how to respond. ‘Why yes, you’re right. I am a white man, aren’t I?’ In any event I pretended not to hear.

I had some of that feeling of being in a movie, though not an especially original one. You know the kind: where the white guy strolls into the wrong part of town and terrible things happen to him. I was also reminded of a couplet from Kirsty MacColl’s song:

When you get to the corner don’t look at those freaks

Keep your head down low and stay quick on your feet, oh yeah.

I don’t know that the guy yelling at me was a freak, but I did keep my head down and continued walking at a brisk New York pace all the way to the subway entrance. And as I walked I was reminded of one last song, Lou Reed’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’, which asks another question: ‘Hey, white boy what you doin’ uptown?’ Walking a songline is not the answer anybody would expect or, I’m sure, accept.