Episode 24: Thanksgiving Sucks, and So Does the Planes, Trains and Automobiles Soundtrack

I love the holidays, and I have nothing against green bean casserole and mashed potatoes, but I hate Thanksgiving.

That doesn’t make me a Scrooge – we started listening to Christmas music the day after Halloween this year – nor could you accurately describe me as an ungrateful bastard, though the latter might get us in the ballpark. All in all, I’ve had a pretty charmed life, and every day I express my gratitude to the cosmos in my own silent way, but when we get to the end of Thanksgiving day, I’m just glad it’s over. That isn’t to say I’ve never enjoyed the holiday; I have bits and pieces of scrapbook-worthy memories from my childhood, and Thanksgiving 2002 was a deep, affirming, emotional sweeping-of-the-feet with my now-wife Erica, but all in all, as a one-day repository for warm and fuzzy moments with kith and kin, Thanksgiving has been a bit of a turkey.

And let’s face it, Thanksgiving is a holiday that never should have been a holiday, at least not the whitewashed and condensed national holiday version. Expressing gratitude is super, but as a holiday marking the warm and fuzzy American moment when a small band of colonists diffused a clash of cultures by breaking bread with the natives, Thanksgiving is a historical sham. History, especially when politics and/or Christianity is involved, is typically twisted and perverted into something that bypasses the grim realities in favor of the Hallmark pleasantries, and that’s why in first grade we all made pilgrim hats and headdresses out of construction paper instead of learning about King Philip’s War. Yet not unlike Christmas, which for billions of earthlings has nothing to do with Jesus or the pagan god Odin, Thanksgiving has come to represent whatever the hell people want it to represent, and for most people, it represents family and togetherness, and at the end of the day, who can hate on that? To call the celebration of Thanksgiving “complicated,” both as a nation of people and a private citizen, is the understatement of the year.

It took me years to realize how much I dislike this stuffiest of holidays – it’s possible there’s a cumulative effect at play here – and I was just as surprised as anyone a few years back when I blurted out, “I hate Thanksgiving.” It was mid-November and I was at Spacebar talking to my friend and fellow DJ Mr. Juggernaut about what we do (and don’t do) during the holidays, and suddenly I heard myself verbally torching Thanksgiving, and Juggernaut’s steady nods of agreement only fueled my fire. I can’t pinpoint a single source of my animus toward the holiday, but the cornucopia of grievances is bountiful. Growing up, particularly as an adolescent, I was usually jolted awake on Thanksgiving morning by the jet-airliner din of the vacuum cleaner and/or oven fan, and slogging down the stairs from my bedroom to greet the day, I’d be engulfed by chemtrails of stress that would not fully dissipate until the last of the relatives had motored away down 14th Street toward Route 8 south. When said relatives would arrive for the day, I’d be forced out of my pajamas and whatever solitary comfort I had carved out for myself, whether hiding in my room under a pair of headphones or in the basement TV room with John Madden and Pat Summerall. Seeing friends was out of the question; you couldn’t go anywhere before or after dinner, because the traditional afternoon suppertime and Tarantino-esque length of the meal made it damn near impossible to do anything before the turkey was carved or after the last bite of chemical pumpkin had touched down in your uncle’s colon. That’s if you got to stay home; the roadblocks to well-being were only magnified if you had to put on a pair of irregular slacks and ride an hour down the freeway to see what holiday stress felt like in Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

As an adult, my perspective on Thanksgiving has only worsened. A day off is even more of a premium than it was as a teenager, and even if you aren’t hosting, you’re on the hook to contribute, even if it’s only the obligation of your presence for the mid-afternoon gut bomb. Which, again, means your day is shot and you’re probably taking off your pajamas and putting on your social face sooner that you’d like, and as someone who often feels like he’s just standing there getting in the way of everyone in the kitchen of humanity, Thanksgiving is more work than it’s worth, a rare Thursday off that ends up being far more taxing than going to work. It’s telling that one of my favorite Thanksgivings was spent alone. Erica and Magnolia were in Florida visiting my in-laws and my brother’s family took a year off from hosting, so I slept in, went for a three-hour hike in the Boise foothills, ordered takeout Indian food and treated myself to a $17 bottle of red wine. There was a two-hour nap in there somewhere, too. All of which was as awesome as it sounds.

The saving grace of Thanksgiving, the warm quilt of redemption, is my annual viewing of John Hughes’ Planes, Trains and Automobiles. I feel personally defeated — that I’m off to a bad start with the holidays — if I don’t fit it in before Thanksgiving, but sometimes I don’t get there until sometime over the holiday weekend. I’ve watched this film every year since it was released to VHS following its 1987 theatrical debut, and every time I watch it I pick up new details and laugh out loud at the same scenes I’ve been laughing at for more than three decades. The performances by Steve Martin and John Candy are among my favorites by both actors, and it’s mind-blowing to think that I’m now older than both of them were when they made this movie.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles will never make one of those all-time-films lists, but it’s fair to call it a holiday classic, and as a movie buff with somewhat unrefined tastes, it checks a lot of boxes for me: There’s some slapstick, some physical comedy, some low-brow humor; it’s a road movie and a buddy flick, albeit a twisted one, and, in the end, it has heart. As a kid, beyond the yuck factor, it did manage to fill me with that gooey holiday feeling despite the alarm clock vacuums and stress chemtrails, and when Neal finally makes it home to the Chicago suburbs, the warmth I feel watching the movie reminds me of the warmth I felt growing up in a mostly-functional Midwestern family and the warmth I feel now in my own household. Which, as I recently discovered, is in stark contrast to the movie’s effect on Erica and Magnolia. Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a comedy of errors, and Erica and Magnolia both admitted to me that they get stressed out watching the dogpile of calamities unfold. So starting this year, I started watching it alone. And I was alone listening to the soundtrack at a ridiculously high volume one Saturday afternoon in November 2020 when Erica returned home and walked inside the house. She was blasted by “I’ll Show You Something Special,” a paint-by-numbers glam-metal track by hair band also-rans Balaam and the Angel, and she scowled at me and asked, with tangible and justifiable skepticism, “What are you listening to?” In the film, “I’ll Show You Something Special” is a perfect sonic accompaniment to Neal and Del’s ride through the dark Wichita night in Doobby’s Taxiola, but removed from the context of the movie, the soundtrack, as a standalone listening experience, makes absolutely no sense, and like Thanksgiving, it kind of sucks.

So why do I even have it in my collection then? When we lived in Boise, every Saturday before Thanksgiving I would DJ a set at Spacebar that was heavy on hip-hop and funk with themes of gratitude, but I never had a bona fide Thanksgiving cut to throw into the mix until a used copy of the Planes, Trains and Automobiles soundtrack appeared at The Record Exchange for $5.99 (minus my employee discount). The opening cut is that goofy-ass “I Can Take Anything” – aka the “Love Theme From Planes, Trains and Automobiles” – which chops up a bunch of dialogue from the movie, including Neal’s signature line, “You’re messing with the wrong guy!,” and lays it atop a bed of jazz-inflected electro; it’s something like a discount version of Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” that kind of slaps once you get past the absurdity of its existence. From that point on I included the track in every pre-Thanksgiving Spacebar set, more for my own amusement than anything else, but also because it oddly fits within the context of the music I spin there.

Watching the movie, each song on the soundtrack serves a purpose, meticulously edited for the specific needs of each scene; I can’t hear Ray Charles’ rendition of “Mess Around,” which sadly is not on the album, without seeing a chain-smoking Del play air piano on the dash from the driver’s seat. Hughes, of course, was a master of these musical moments, especially in his teen classics Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. Those are soundtracks you can listen to and love on their own even if you’ve never seen the movies, and in some ways, Hughes applied the same template to Planes, Trains and Automobiles, only in this case the music mirrors the emotions of a story constructed around middle-age adults. His love of dream-pop and ’80s synthesizer cheese remains, with tracks by Book of Love, the Dream Academy and Silicon Teens used as recurring motifs throughout the film, but then there’s that Emmylou Harris cover of “Back in Baby’s Arms” and two Steve Earle tracks, which of course make a hell of a lot more sense as backdrops for scenes in low-budget off-brand motels and greasy-spoon Midwestern diners than say, A Flock of Seagulls.

Mercifully, the soundtrack has not been reissued since its original 1987 release, and it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever see a Record Store Day exclusive pressed on brown gravy colored vinyl, because taken on its own – even with the producers doing everything in their power to provide some continuity with the sequencing – the album is something like a disjointed mixtape from hell. Which is an apt description of the push-and-pull of emotions I feel around Thanksgiving and how I parcel my time with people who aren’t my wife and kid. I love my extended family, deeply and dearly, but I prefer to hang out with them when it’s not a big holiday, which is why we had a pre-holiday brunch with my parents before Erica and Magnolia flew to Florida and I headed back to Boise for a work trip over Thanksgiving weekend. We hold on to these idealized notions of what the holidays should be and place an exorbitant amount of weight on them at the expense of our sanity and the other 360-odd days on the calendar, and where I’ve discovered true joy in togetherness is through rewriting the script or removing myself from the story entirely, finding meaning in the seemingly meaningless days instead of trying (and failing) to fill my cup once or twice a year amid colossal and unrealistic expectations. Working holiday retail means your life ramps up as most of the world winds down, and the beauty of this arrangement is giving Thanksgiving the end-around, starting new traditions and, in the end, finding those warm and fuzzy moments to be far less forced and far more prevalent. And this year, more than any other in the past 12 at The Record Exchange, I’m most grateful for that.

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