Alt-Rock Dept. is author Niko Stratis’ essay series about working at a grocery store in the mid-Nineties and the radio songs that filled every aisle and stockroom.
I believe everyone has a favorite donut, though there are some who will never admit it. I’m certain there are those who believe they are beyond such things, and there are others who are undecided, and in the middle remain us. There are even those who believe that your favorite donut says something about you, an answer that reflects your taste and your desires and place in the world. Your favorite donut says everything about you, only it says nothing at all.
This is a shared truth across mediums, and when I pivot to talking about music I want you to know this is a tether—that this theory transcends what borders remain between cultural divides. It’s the same with music as it is with donuts, it’s just that the answer becomes bigger. Where a favorite donut is a singular idea, songs are a broader truth. Favorites demand context, genre, and place.
So then if we’re sharing truths, I’ll tell you that “The Way” by Fastball is one of my favorite songs, though I know this is a stone tossed in a lake. The ripples from its impact are buoyant and they are boisterous just as quickly as they push back on the centre of their creation. There are certainly enough people with shared sentiment that the song became a hit, just as there are ardent haters, and those who have never heard the song at all. Where once it was a ubiquitous part of any interaction with daytime radio, it has retreated from mainstream context. “The Way” became a historical artifact around which we can gather our stories and shared history and remember all lost and fading days.
In 1998, when the song hit the radio, I was working in the bakery department at the Food Fair. I had turned sixteen, which meant I could borrow the family car—a used 1995 Mazda Protege—to drive to work on weekends. There are few things more freeing to a life trapped in a small town than a driver’s license and car keys on the hook by the door. When my tires hit the road and mingled with the early morning traffic, it was as if I had become a drop of blood rushing with so many others to the heart of the world, each of us certain we would get where we needed if we trusted the journey ahead.
The Story Behind the Song
I know there is a story that tells the tale within “The Way,” only I didn’t know it at the time. I heard it first on the floor of the grocery store, as I’m sure so many of us did, and for a while it was simply there. Another song in another stream of songs that played throughout and behind us over the span of a day. As if prepared for its position as a stop on the dial, “The Way” opens with a dial searching for a signal. We hear snapshots of dialogue, and a brief second of Jewel’s “Foolish Game” before the song comes into focus. Tony Scalzo, Fastball lead singer, opens the story with a hint of rhythm in his voice—“they made up their minds, and they started packing”—before the song opens itself to a melody. A guitar with a swept strumming pattern played in shuffling time, a rhythm I’m sure is owed to the influence of the Tejano sound of the band’s Texan origins.
The story then is of an older couple, Lela and Raymond Howard from Texas—one with Alzheimer’s and another recovering from brain surgery—who had packed and piled into their car and left home to drive to a festival they would never arrive at: their bodies found in the car in a ravine days later, a great distance away from where they had ever intended to be. Scalzo had employed a trick that worked for the Beatles, open a newspaper and look for a story that can become a song. When he read about the Howards, they had not yet been located. They were still off somewhere, exploring together maybe, or lost and searching together, and so he wrote optimistically around their imagined odyssey.
On weekends in the bakery department, my task was to prepare the donuts we sold on impulse shelves. We didn’t bake anything, rather I went to the Tim Hortons down the street, grabbed the racks of donuts we had a standing pre-order for, and drove them back over to our store. My days started with this nothing task, one that only asked that I had a car, and I had the desire to be in it going anywhere at all.
A Lasting Legacy
I think if you are trying to paint a portrait of what a grocery store in the mid-Nineties looked like, and if you were trying to give it the air and ambience it demands to be made fully real, you would be required to have a speaker playing “The Way” somewhere in the tableau. It’s foundational in that way, as if a song was a keystone, as if the automatic doors sliding open to grant entry were a grand archway to another world. The stories we tell from within are unlike any that we share from anywhere else, which is not to say they’re perfect, just that they are real and ever changing.
I love “The Way” for how its story has changed for me over time. Once, the song was just a pleasant melody played in perfect sequence between alt-rock and R&B songs on the radio. Then it became a fond memory, and then it slowly evolved into something more: a beautiful and idealized look at how we choose to live, even and especially if we believe we might be making our last and final choices. The vision of the road as offering freedom, and choosing life even as it runs from death. A song that reminds me of the past, lets me remember its soft and kinder days, and helps as I recall where I began building a life surrounded by chosen truths.
Listen to Fastball’s Daytrotter Session here and watch their most recent Paste Session below.
