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It's sad how many nights of my life have been spent in hotels and motels. Last year, my former go-to hotel chain sent me a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones and a note thanking me for spending my 1000th night with them. I don't want to think about what 1000 nights amounts to in dollars. Over the years, the quality of my road accommodations has improved considerably. For the first 10 years of road life, hotels barely factored into the equation. I stayed at motels. Cheap motels. Those old-school motels ran the gamut. Some were charming, clean mom-and-pop businesses where the pride of ownership was evident. Others were shabby dives. Some of them rent by the hour. My nostalgia for old motels kicked into high gear a couple of years back when a buyer in Northern Minnesota put me up in a classic 1950s-era motel. It was still run by the original owners' family, frozen in time, and perfectly maintained. All of the familiar elements were there: a neon roadside sign with a “Free HBO” placard hanging beneath it, a brass security chain, typewritten rules and rates affixed to the inside of the door, vintage touch-tone phone (sadly, not rotary dial), wall-mounted stainless steel Kleenex dispenser, framed nature prints, ancient Mr. Coffee machine, glass drinking glasses wrapped in tissue paper, thin, scratchy towels, and polyester floral print curtains that wouldn’t close completely. And most importantly, a "sanitized for your protection" paper band across the toilet lid. The only things missing were a glass ashtray and branded motel matches next to the phone. A lot of memories came flooding back, most of them fond, some depressing, but all memorable. Aside from being the cheapest options, we stayed at mom-and-pop motels because they didn’t require a credit card (it would be years before I, or anyone in the band, was financially solvent enough to have one). We would scribble a fake name, address, and phone number on a guest register card, then fork over $25 cash. No deposit. We were young and dumb, and often not great guests. I'm not proud of that. We were loud, smoked heavily, drank until 4AM, took ashtrays and towels, and stayed way past checkout time. We never trashed rooms in the stereotypical rock-and-roll sense, but we certainly didn't leave them neat and orderly. To find a motel back in the old days, before the World Wide Web was a thing, you had to stop at a payphone and rifle through the yellow pages or simply drive until you came across one. Many nights, we passed one motel after another, the neon "no vacancy" sign lit, until we finally gave up and pulled into a parking lot to catch a couple of hours of sleep in the van. We would often ring a motel office doorbell or bang on the door at 4AM until a light went on somewhere inside. Eventually, a rumpled, half-asleep owner or manager would stumble out to check us in. We never had a reservation, but there were rarely any questions or signs of annoyance. That was just how it worked. I remember more than a few times when the desk clerk would ask how many guests were in my party, and I would answer “two”, even though they could clearly see five more people sitting in our rusty van parked right in front of the window. I fear that these sorts of posts are clear signs that I am nearing the “shaking my fist at the neighborhood kids for hitting their baseball into my lawn” stage of my life. The motel photos below were taken by me over the years.
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