Stuck Between Stations/The Hold Steady

The Hold Steady's 2006 album Boys and Girls in America takes its name from the opening lyrics of a song on the record called Stuck Between Stations:

There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together

The lyrics, in turn, allude to an incident in Jack Kerouac's classic 1957 novel On the Road.  Following an unsatisfying sexual encounter with a waitress, the book's narrator, Sal Paradise (a thinly fictionalized version of Kerouac himself), muses:

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk.  Not courting talk--real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment precious.

The line Boys and girls in America is also repeated on another track from the album, First Night.

["Stuck Between Stations" features a second literary reference, unrelated to On the Road, which we'll cover in our next post.]


On the Road (Kindle Edition)