Today, his cartoonish figure is perched among the building’s pinnacles and turrets, above the casino. About sixty years later, his body was inadvertently exhumed during construction. Whiskey Pete’s, which opened in 1977 as Primm’s first casino, is named after him. Primm is named after casino developer Ernest Primm (it was renamed this in 1996 after being called State Line for years), but spiritually, it belongs to Pete MacIntyre, a gas station owner who made whiskey in a cave during prohibition. The casino is open, but the hotel is closed. Whiskey Pete’s is a castle in the brown desert foothills. Because of this, I can easily imagine a life for myself here: everything I own in a room by the highway, every day meeting people I’ll never see again.
LONG ROAD SONGS FULL
I know what it’s like to be a fixed object in a place full of visitors, to be asked, “Where do you commute from?" when you are already home. To sell someone food for the road, to watch them drive away. I worked at resorts in the national parks, and now I live in Las Vegas. I’ve lived most of my life in tourist destinations, staying put while other people move on, and more and more I find myself chasing the pleasure of anonymity. Primm is a place you pass through and forget - that is, if you even noticed it in the first place. Primm is where the little Google Maps voice says Welcome to California. Primm contains three gas stations, three casino resorts (one is open, one is half-open, and one is closed), a golf course, a lottery store, a few fast-food restaurants, and a dying outlet mall. Check-in isn’t until 3, but I arrive early. I’ve been getting the We look forward to greeting you emails and imagining myself 40 minutes outside of Las Vegas, three and a half hours from Los Angeles.
I booked a room at Primm Valley Resort and Casino a week in advance. I want to be in Primm because I want to vanish, too. It appears from the highway, and then it vanishes. It is an in-between place: too close to be a stopping point on the drive to Los Angeles, too far to be its own destination. Primm is on the border of California and Nevada, but it doesn’t seem to exist in either. I am here because I have passed by it many times and I want to know what it feels like to stop and stay. Everyone will assume I’m trapped in Primm because of the flooded roadway.īut I am here on purpose. A month after that, the song was finished.In a few hours, it will rain so hard that the 15 will close. Went through a couple versions, tweaking verses, but the core idea remained the same. Then I let it stew while I moved onto other projects.Ībout a month and half later I started hammering the song into place. I slipped off my work gloves and ducked into my office, sweat dripping onto the page, and jotted down a song. It struck me as funny rather than depressing.Īnwyay, that was it, just a phrase, until I was mowing the lawn a month later and the idea for a song swept over me. Sort of maudlin, with a bit of surprise: the long lonely road leading not to victory, but failure. It summed up the feeling you get when you’re working hard towards a goal but nothing comes of it. Click here to Follow me on Bandcamp Behind the Songīack in March, I wrote down the phrase “The long, lonely road to rejection” in my songwriting notebook.
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