Proto punked

It’s not garage, not really, despite referencing hitchhiking ‘earlier’ than CCR’s “Sweet Hitchhiker” and starting off simply (perhaps too simply as this just sounds like a rip on real garage bands) the next two verses are too dense and elliptical, despite the word count and the use of terms like ‘the hop’ simply rhymed with ‘shop’ and ‘stop’.

You can use all this and still have a song that doesn’t sound right. The term ‘proto-punk’ is useful here as the critic will look at whether There’s a Hitch imagining that it was written in the mid sixties, would have played more of an influence on other seventies genres than punk. If it was taken up at all.

I think it structurally fails for all of its tripping tropes both because it doesn’t meet the brief – whatever wonky wordplay some teenager of the time may have jotted down – nor stand up generally. When you start off with such a base mission statement it’s not wise to drift off in reverie, even if, on decoding the phrase or clause, the reader or listener discovers that you never really went off track. It’s the change in register that throws the song out.
I don’t know where it fits, quite honestly. Too twee for the braggart at the start of the song, too indecipherable for hotblooded teens in automobiles.

Much easier to write and not try to second guess your audience

Things are Back to Normal

I can vouch for the couch in which I slouch
Steady the course where's there's nary a stoush
Wear what I like or just despite
 wandering out and tripping the light

I can sneak a snack or openly spoon
the cornucopia the balanced boon
Read all day all I need to say
forget the regrets so far away

Stay indoors endeared to none
who find each other just for fun
where nations amass
at stations of the crass

A hint of the garage

The thing about garage rock is that it wasn’t named that until a decade later so adolescents wanting to get together and bash out songs could do so without worrying about genre. Some retrospective assessment has it that these teens cranked out simple ‘she done me wrong’ lyrics but I think we can adhere to the broader directive to keep the song simple and easy to sing.

Our roots rock merely had to be authentic so I told the story of my father leaving the farmhouse he’d lived in for twenty-five years. In the process, the blues is evident in both the mournful tone and, well you can’t get more blues than have to leave my happy home                                                                                                                                     The folk feel is evident in the plain speaking, in the unvarnished setting and the gathering of family.                                                                                                                   Country? It’s a rural setting and populated with machinery, with rust and dust.

Roots rock can still facilitate that line in the chorus which is both long and a bit of a tongue twister. It’s also confronting for the narrator to make declarations about their ‘frail familiar frame’ whether they have one or not. So it’s not as though it’s not challenging for a fellow with a semi-acoustic but does fit the classification. This is where, when we move over to the garage, we’d need to either break up the line or dispense with it altogether.

There’s a Hitch

I saw you on the side of the road
I said do you want a ride
You nodded and you climbed inside
You smiled as you climbed inside
CHORUS: Oh there's a hitch there's a hitch
          There's always a hitch
f
I was the driving force
arriving in due course
at the hop at the shop at the stop
keep this from the cops
(C)
I clutch this close to me
Brake for the sake of repartee
The gear to appear carefree

My reverse and my rearview 
I can't get enough of you 
How mad the mode a lad with his load
(C)