ON THE ROAD WITH MATT

This past week, I’ve been listening to film actor Matt Dillon narrate Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and it’s as close to a free holiday back in time as you can get. I truly feel like I’ve been traveling with Kerouac and his companions through 1940s and 1950s America, and now the experience has blended into my 2025 reality here in the Cotswolds.

Actually, there's a kind of Bohemian affinity between Kerouac's iconic book and my local town — a place where you could just as easily find yourself strung out in a park on heroin as you could end up reciting poetry to some frantic free jazz in front of a solemn-looking audience of faux hippies.

And I have often suspected that Dillon has one of the best voices in film, but I’d never considered how he'd hold up as a narrator of prose. But man, it works — and now I’m obsessed with imagining how his voice would sound reading other American classics.

I’m also thinking that if there’s a beatnik heaven I could help curate, it would include a dimly lit bar where Charlie Parker dazzles with his swooping saxophone solos and Matt Dillon stands in the corner reading the entire Kerouac collection aloud, sipping a mezcal margarita after each chapter. And while we’re at it, let’s have him read Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency—and why not throw in some William S. Burroughs (since they shared the screen in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy) and maybe even a bit of Hunter S. Thompson.

There’s just something about Dillon’s soothing drawl — like a kind of vocal opium — that carries you far away from the stress and angst of the present, into a beach dream where you can almost hear the crackling of a campfire and the distant sound of surf in the background, just as you might if you were spending the night in a hidden cove in Big Sur.

And I haven't even started on how amazing his voice would be for voiceovers in classic movies like Sunset Boulevard, Taxi Driver, and Goodfellas, replacing the likes of William Holden, Robert De Niro, and Ray Liotta.

"You don't yell at a sleepwalker - he may fall and break his neck. That's it: she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career." - Sunset

"Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." - Taxi

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster" -Goodfellas

Maybe I've overdone it with this latest Audible acquisition, but I'm beginning to hear Dillon's voice everywhere — even the barista who just called out my coffee.

"Yeah, I ordered a black iced Americano. So what?!"

Damn. Now I'm doing it too.