Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks – "Traffic Jam" (1971)

Traffic jam – I'm in a hurry

Why we're going so slow, I'll never know

Traffic jams are a way of life for those of us who live on the East Coast.

The I-95 corridor between Washington and Boston is 500 miles of potential road rage – you never know exactly where a traffic jam will bring your progress to a halt, but you know it will happen sooner or later.

I-95 traffic jam

During my recent Cape Cod vacation, I had occasion to drive from the Cape to central Maine.  ("I had occasion to" – ?  Who the hell do I think I am, Ford Madox Ford?  Evelyn Waugh?)

I barely got over the Sagamore Bridge before running into stop-and-go traffic on the highway to Boston.  The congestion continued off and on all the way through Beantown, finally easing once I was well north of the city.

So there I was, minding my own business, driving north on Route 1 through the nondescript blue-collar suburb of Saugus, and suddenly I see this enormous sign looming over the highway:

All that remains of the Hilltop Steak House

The Hilltop Steak House, which opened for business in 1961, closed for good in 2013.  The building was demolished recently to make way for a new development, but the 68-foot-high sign is going to be preserved.  

According to the New York Times, the Hilltop was the busiest restaurant in the United States 25 years ago.  It served 2.4 million customers a year and grossed $27 million.

In a typical week, the Hilltop served 3500 pounds of butter, 8000 pounds of fish, 14,500 pounds of salad, 17,500 pounds of baked potatoes, and 20,500 pounds of beef.

Frank Giuffrida founded the Hilltop in 1961

Click here to read a long magazine story about the Hilltop Steak House by a man whose father bought it from its original owner.

Not far away from the Hilltop was Weylu's, a 1500-seat Chinese restaurant that featured hand-painted Chinese vases, marble lions, and an indoor waterfall.  Chinese immigrants Rick and Wilma Chang spent $13 million to build it in 1989, but their bank foreclosed on it ten years later.  

New owners reopened the restaurant on three separate occasions since then, but all three of those owners eventually went belly up.  Today the building sits empty on a hilltop that looms over Route 1. 

The entrance to Weylu's

Saugus is also home to the Prince Pizzeria, which seats 700 and also houses Giggles Comedy Club. 

Prince's "Leaning Tower of Pizza" is another Route 1 landmark:

"The Leaning Tower of Pizza"

Freeport, Maine – my ultimate destination – turned out to be a match for Saugus when it came to roadside weirdness.

Freeport is the home of legendary retailer L. L. Bean, which started selling its distinctive "Maine Hunting Shoe" – also known as the "Bean Boot" – in 1912.  A large "Bean Boot" stands outside the main entrance to Bean's flagship store in Freeport:

Big-ass Bean Boot

When I was in Freeport, the L. L. Bean Bootmobile just happened to be parked in front of the Bean store.

The Bean "Bootmobile" in Chicago

Just south of Freeport is a 30-foot-high Indian statue known locally as the "Freeport Big Indian."  It was constructed in Pennsylvania from fiberglass and plywood in 1969, and driven to Maine on a flatbed trailer.

The "Freeport Big Indian"

I can only imagine the rubbernecking that must have resulted as that flatbed truck travelled up the New Jersey Turnpike and I-95.  Talk about your traffic jams!

In 1965, Dan Hicks became the drummer of the Charlatans, a legendary "San Francisco Sound" group.  A couple of years later, he switched from drums to guitar, and then left the band to form Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks.  

"Traffic Jam" was released in 1971 on the Where's the Money album, which has been one of my favorites since I was a college student.

Here's how Hicks later described his music:

It starts out with kind of a folk music sound, and we add a jazz beat and solos and singing.  We have the two girls that sing, and jazz violin, and all that, so it's kind of light in nature, it's not loud. . . .  Most of the songs are, I wouldn't say funny, but kinda maybe a little humorous.  We all like jazz, so we like to play in a jazzy way, with a swing sound you know, so I call it "folk swing."  

Here's "Traffic Jam":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Moose -- "Little Bird (Are You Happy In Your Cage?)" (1992)

Then maybe I'd have something more

Something more than getting older

In the spring (wrote Alfred Lord Tennyson) a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love.

In the fall, however, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of moose -- at least that seems to be true of young men (and not-so-young men) who live in Maine.

DIFW logo

Earlier this year, my daughter Caroline moved to Maine to take a job in the state Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (or "DIFW," for short).

To say that my daughter is not exactly an outdoorswoman would be an understatement.  She's athletic and fit, but she'd never been fishing and never been hunting -- never even held a gun -- before taking that job.

Her talents are more in the artistic direction, as this photo of one of her creations demonstrates:

One of Caroline's first assignments was to work on the annual Maine moose-hunting permit lottery.  

Since 1980, the DIFW has awarded permits to hunt moose through a lottery.  This year, there were 3725 hunting permits up for grabs.  But there were 54,338 applicants for those permits.  (The DIFW estimates the Maine moose population at about 76,000 animals.)

The DIFW lottery is extremely complex.  In the first place, residents don't compete against nonresidents -- it's almost like there are two separate lotteries -- and residents have a much better chance of winning.  (No more than 10% of permits are allowed to go to nonresidents, while almost 30% of applicants are from out of state.)

Your best chance of winning is if you are willing to accept any available permit.  But if you have your heart set on a bull moose instead of a cow, or you want to hunt in a particular geographic area, your odds of succeeding are longer.

The good news is that the more years you've entered without winning, the better shot you have.  That's because you get "preference points" for each unsuccessful entry.  A first-time entrant from Maine has about a 1.5% chance of winning.  But a Mainer who's been trying since 1998 without bagging a permit has a 33.9% chance of winning.

The moose permit lottery is a big, big deal in Maine.  The drawing is held live each June -- it's the culmination of a weekend-long "Moose Lottery Festival," which features a fishing contest, turkey shoot, bowling and archery competitions, sailing regatta, art show, baked-bean supper, and the finals of the "World Invitational Moose Calling Contest."

Waiting for the moose lottery drawing to begin

Hundreds attend the drawing live, while others sit at their computers and eagerly wait for the winners' names to be posted online.  (My daughter said that when there was a brief delay in posting the winners' name to the DIFW website, they were flooded with e-mails from anxious entrants.)

All I know about moose is that they are enormous -- the bison is the only North American animal that is larger than the moose, which can weigh well over a thousand pounds and stand six or seven feet tall at the shoulder --  and that if you hit one in your car, you are in a world of hurt.  

Not only do moose weigh a lot, but have very long legs.  If a typical passenger car hits a moose, it will likely break the moose's legs and cause its body to fall on to the hood and crash into the windshield.  If you're sitting in the front seat when you hit a moose, you can pretty much kiss your you-know-what goodbye.

Aftermath of moose-automobile collision

Some people think that you're better off speeding up if you see that your car is about to collide with a moose.  The guys on the MythBusters TV show tested that theory by constructing a six-foot-tall, 620-pound rubber moose and running a car into it while speeding up, slowing down, or maintaining a constant speed.  It turns out that slowing down is the best strategy.

I kept running into moose -- not literally -- when I was in Maine last weekend to visit Caroline and to attend a very special wedding.  (Click here to read about that wedding.)

Here's a big-ass moose head that hangs on the wall of the Broad Arrow Tavern in Freeport, Maine, the town where Caroline lives:

Freeport is best known as the headquarters of that legendary seller of clothing and outdoor equipment, L. L. Bean.  The first product sold by L. L. Bean, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, was the legendary "Maine Hunting Shoe," or "Bean Boot."  Today, the company has an enormous mail-order operation, 115 retail stores (including ten in Japan), and annual sales of about $1.5 billion.

Here's a store display of a 1940s-vintage Bean boot, plus a small axe, a compass, and various other woodsy items:

Here's the biggest Bean boot in the world:

The main L. L. Bean store in Freeport -- which is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year -- also has a big-ass stuffed moose head:

There are plenty of other stuffed animals on display at the Bean store:

For my money, the most amazing taxidermy item in the Bean store is a display titled "The Final Charge."

In May 2006, a resident of New Sweden, Maine, found the remains of two bull moose on her property.  The moose had died after their antlers had become locked while they battled during the previous fall's rut.  (Cherchez la femme!)  She donated the antlers to the DIFW.

DIFW asked L. L. Bean to help pay for a taxidermist to reconstruct the two moose, using their antlers -- which have remained locked ever since that fateful encounter -- as the basis for the tableau.

"The Final Charge"

"The Final Charge" was unveiled in September 2009.  It is usually encased within a specially-built viewing diorama at Bean's flagship store, but can be taken on the road in a custom-built trailer.  Caroline tells me that the DIFW gets many requests to bring "The Final Charge" to events all over Maine.

Perhaps the fearsome collision that caused the antlers to lock also killed the two moose instantly.  But I fear that it didn't, and that those two magnificent bull moose suffered terribly before eventually starving or succumbing to predators because they were unable to defend themselves.  

It's like something out of an ancient myth.  Imagine two magnificent warriors, each determined to have a fair maiden for his own.  They engage in hand-to-hand combat and eventually die in one another's grasp, unable (or unwilling) to call off the battle.  

Moose was an indie rock band who formed in London in 1990, taking its name from guitarist K. J. "Moose" McKillop's nickname.  (The UK doesn't even have moose.)  They were the first so-called "shoegaze" band.  

"Shoegaze" was an alternative rock subgenre characterized by droning, distorted guitars that peaked in the early 1990s.  The name was supposedly applied to Moose by a reviewer who saw them play a concert at which their lead singer taped the song lyrics to the floor and looked down at them as he sang.  (Another theory is that shoegaze guitarists often used several different effects pedals and had to look down at them in order to operate them correctly.)  The term was then applied to other bands playing the same style of music.

Over the next decade, Moose released four studio albums and several singles and EPs, none of which sold very well despite generally favorable reviews.  Like so many cult bands who never found a larger audience, Moose eventually gave up.  

Here's "Little Bird (Are You Happy In Your Cage?)," the first single from Moose's 1992 album, XYZ.  It's not really a classic shoegaze song -- it's more melodic . . . more of a pop song.

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: