Word: blacktops
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wizard of Oz played backward. British journalist Tony Parker gets caught up in a brainstorm with his editor and is blown from batty Albion into the middle of humdrum Kansas. There, in Dorothy's native land, he finds not a winding yellow brick road but a grid of blacktop highways crossing one another at predictable right angles. Instead of tin men and cowardly lions, there is a pride of stolid citizens unashamed of their placid routines and quick with the thank-yous and have-a-nice-days. Wicked witches? Nope, but there is a local drunk who tells dirty jokes...
...large parking lot behind Quincy House on DeWolfe St., where developer H.J. Davis plans to build condominiums, has residues of lead, arsenic and petroleum under the blacktop, and St. Paul's Parish, which agreed to sell Davis the land, must pay to clean...
...striking Panhandle rasp. "What I'm doing is country and rock, and I don't think they are mutually exclusive terms." It is no easy matter to convince everyone, though. Guitar Town, his seminal 1986 MCA album, was full of great tunes -- Springsteen on a two-lane blacktop -- and should have settled all conflicts of style. But, he reports, "I'm at war with the record company on the West Coast about using steel guitar and mandolin, and I'm at war with Nashville over drums being too loud. But I think everyone is starting to become more comfortable with...
...fast lane of a Los Angeles freeway, a Randy Travis song on the car radio can put you, all at once, onto a stretch of two-lane blacktop. A tune like On the Other Hand or What'll You Do About Me can turn a city singles bar into a state-route sugar shack. If there is a new spirit in country, just about the friendliest place to get acquainted with it is on the tracks of Travis' fine new album, Always & Forever...
...Already under construction, the 31-mile highway will connect Interstates 74 and 55, cutting 40 miles off the trip from Peoria to St. Louis. Backed by House Minority Leader Robert Michel, who represents the area, the stretch would provide an alternative to Route 121, two lanes of inadequate winding blacktop on which highballing truckers terrify motorists. Total price tag: $135 million, of which the highway bill provides $17 million...