WALCOTT, IA.---I don't know why I'm excited about trucks all of a sudden.
Tis' the season to get riggy.

I've always liked the sweaty sensory overload of a big truck stop; a place where you could pick up Merle Haggard CDs (and 8-tracks), Louis L'Amour paperbacks and a case of the cooties. You could throw on Brut from a cologne dispenser in the bathroom and buy a matching green gallon of Mountain Dew.

Earlier this month I visited the Iowa 80 Trucking Museum, about 11 miles west of the Quad Cities and adjacent to the World's Largest (and cleanest) Truck Stop.

The truck stop covers nearly 200 acres with parking for 800 semis. The truck stop includes a 300-seat restaurant, 80-seat movie theater and 24 private showers. As much as I love truck stops, I have never taken a shower in a truck stop.

The museum has more than 100 trucks of all shapes and sizes in this museum. I spent two hours there........

The deep grooves of Chicago's Record Row will never go away.
Like waves from Lake Michigan, American roots music roared out of South Michigan Avenue from the late 1950s through the 1970s.

Popular music would be changed forever.

Nick Lowe is best associated with pure pop for now people.

But his most stunning composition is arguably "The Beast In Me," popularized as a desperate ballad on Johnny Cash's 1994 "American Recordings" record for Lost Highway. Producer Rick Rubin exorcised the burning quest for redemption of "The Beast In Me" from Cash's profound soul.

Between 1979 and 1990 Lowe was married to Cash's daughter Carlene Carter (the daughter of June Carter Cash and country singer Carl Smith) so he had in inside take on the Man in Black......