Today we turn away from the Giants of Truckin’ and check in on the seedier side of that endless black ribbon. Rod Hart wasn’t into truckin’ as a career, he was more of a “Weird Al” Yankovic of the Nashville set, recording such thighslappers as “Chicken of the County” (a wild take on Kenny Rogers’s “Coward of the County“) and most famously today’s song, “C.B. Savage”.

I don’t know if “savage” was a 1970s term for “homosexual”, but ol’ Rod certainly watched his share of Charles Nelson Reilly appearances on Match Game to prepare for this song. There’s a lot of CB lingo in this song, but the basic plot is that two men are sharing a big rig truck across the country, when they’re both outrageously freaked out by a flamboyantly gay man coming onto them with radio-friendly CB-centric euphemisms. People in 1977 apparently really loved this sort of thing.

Listening to “C.B. Savage” today raises many questions. Why are two guys sharing a single truck and radio? And how do we handle their response to this “savage”?

They keep hesitating, nearly reaching out to this liberated gay gearjammer, but pull back at the last moment. Were they restraining violent urges to gay-bash? Did each man long to embrace the openly fabulous lifestyle of this rake of the open road? Isn’t a “bird-fed cat” a very happy — some might say GAY — type of cat? Could the fowl filling this trucker’s mouth be, if you will, a cock? The world was unprepared for a Brokeback Mountain-style exploration of these themes in 1977, so a twist ending was tacked on. Things were tough all over under Jimmy Carter.

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