[SF Chronicle]: Zach Bryan just bought Jack Kerouac’s original ‘On the Road’ scroll for $12.1 million By Aidin Vaziri, March 14, 2026

https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/zach-bryan-kerouac-scroll-22077310.php

#jackKerouac #zachBryan #onTheRoad

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8 March through 14 March 2026

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Zach Bryan Buys Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ Scroll for $12.1 Million

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/zach-bryan-jack-kerouac-on-the-road-scroll-auction-1235530285/

Just wrote this elsewhere about a Zach Bryan song, Heavy Eyes. I was searching for discussion of this song and all I saw was watered-down slop like "it's about the exuberance of youth and the zany hijinks we all get up to with our high school friends..."

NO. It's about #masculinity, #youth, forgotten #rural cultures, and absolutely about death. It kicks ass, makes me want to drive faster and... line dance, maybe? But it's about #death.

I'll change my mind (maybe) if Zach himself tells me (fat chance I'd ever meet him), but here's what I wrote.

No idea if it's literal or about an actual person, but I am relatively sure it's about a kid (or more than one) who died far too young from doing stupid kid stuff that cowboy kids in the plains do. They're walking staggered, vision blurred; who's going to drive them home? Well, they are. The boys back home live for things like Dead Man's Curve. I think this is an homage and maybe eulogy for one of the boys who lived for Dead Man's Curve and who was walking staggered, vision blurred. He got behind the wheel and died. Maybe he took some of his friends with him.

The climax of the song is when the person Zach is singing about says "I can't take this soul with me / If I go I'm going quickly."

Heavy eyes can be sleepy. They can be serious and cynical. They can be drunk. They can also be dead. I think that boy (whether real or imagined) died and this is a song celebrating his short life and his violent death. It's a song about youth forgotten in farm and ranch towns, especially the boys and men, compelled to do daredevil shit, laugh in the face of death, etc. If you roll those dice enough times, the odds go way up that you'll lose. I think that boy lost.

Once I got this idea of what the song means, it made more sense: the jagged, unhinged pace, the slightly chaotic guitar, the drums that never pause in their frenetic drive, even in the few seconds literally singing about dying, the celebratory tone that is always a split second away from being a wail of grief.

I love this song and am in awe of Bryan for writing it and performing it like he does. It sounds like every cowboy kid I knew growing up in Montana, Arizona, and Utah. It sounds like the kids who died in drunken car crashes back then--at least a few when I was in middle school and high school, doing the only things they could, in these towns with no teenage entertainment beyond "doing stupid shit", to show their fearlessness and lust for life. It sounds like the tone of the school when those deaths were announced on the PA system: somber (because death), but also constantly recognizing that the adults just didn't get it.

I wasn't one of those kids. Most of those kids were fucking assholes. They were often bullies. A few of them were the best kids, though. And all of them were at risk, every day, of being killed by the culture their parents and grandparents refused to ever even look at carefully.

https://youtu.be/gteDFiG4gCA

#music #country #ZachBryan #death #youth #adolescence #alcohol #youGotItWrong #FuckingListen