June 5th: Obama receives Nomination. Lincoln sez: TWO THUMBS UP
November 4th: Obama wins Election! Lincoln raises but one thumb!
January 20, 2009: Lincoln’s hands are down! Look out, President Obama!
Perhaps Lincoln’s thought balloon of “godspeed” is not a blessing, but a warning that our new President should run, for a giant marble statue is about to give him chase! Don’t laugh, it’s happened in cartoons before!
Be careful!
The Food I Love to Hate
Taken from Stories Galore! by C.R. Eckert. Topeka: American Binderies, 1987 edition. 1/1.
1. Lobster
2. Grapes
3. Onions
4. Ham
5. Frog Legs
6. Lima Beans
7. Green Beans
8. Spinich
9. Apple Sauce
10. Pineapple
11. Lamb
12. Shushi
13. Fish
14. Pear
15. Oysters
16. Cherries
17. Oatmeal (sorry, Gonzo)
18. Liver Oil
19. Prune Juice
20. Cantalope
21. Caviar
22. Hot Peppers (drawn with flames surrounding words)
23. Cailflower
Truckin’ Music embodies all the great conflicts of literature, and Man vs. Machine is no exception. While truckers harness the diesel to do their job, Ol’ Smokey wields technology to hamper them as well.
The dreaded Radar was first used against truckers by the late Officer Leonard Baldy of Chicago, who also pioneered the use of puttin’ Bears in the Air. This particular innovation cost Baldy his life in 1960, though it’s clear his memory lives on in the hearts and minds of Chicagoans.
Luckily for Coleman Wilson, not all technology is fatal, sometimes it just puts you to walkin’. There isn’t a lot of biographical details around for Ol’ Coleman, save that he recorded a trio of truckin’ singles for King Records back when the dreaded Radar was young:
1960 – “Radar Blues pt. 1″ b/w “Radar Blues pt. 2″
1961 – “Passing Zone Blues” b/w “Flat Footed Mama”
1962 – “A Green Truck Driver’s First Experience (with Radar)” b/w “Hot Rod Baby”
Obviously, this new device worried the mind of Coleman. His songs aren’t without humor, but they’re not good-time dance numbers; they share that high lonesome airiness with Lonnie Irving’s haunting compositions. “Radar Blues” isn’t even identified as a “song” on the label of the single: it’s called a “Monologue with Guitar”.
Coleman’s brief discography is highly preoccupied with Radar and trucking. Perhaps it’s a pen name for some other musician, or perhaps the perils of Modern Trucking troubled him to an early grave. I prefer to think that the widespread use of CB radio, a phenomenon that began in the 1960s, helped him to overcome his fear of them beartraps, and he lived a long happy life, no longer haunted by the Radar Blues.
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I like to fancy myself a writer. I don’t know what kind of writer, but I write things with some degree of regularity, I think about the writerly craft, I help children and adults improve their writing and I get irrationally angry when professional organizations let the phrase “could care less” into their publications.
All of this bluster and bravado is impotent in the face of this:
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One more song and I promise to drop the “truckin’ music = crack rap” thing. But I can’t get either of these songs out of my head.
But come on!
In 1968, the Harden Trio have a minor hit with “Sneakin’ Things Across the Border”.
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In 2001, Philly’s Most Wanted have a minor hit with “Cross the Border“.
Two styles, one message! Now I just need to find someone familiar with narcocorridos and I can work out my Universal Field Theory of smuggling music. There’s probably some nerdcore song about Han Solo, too.
From tenuous sardine links between “truckin’ music” and “gangsta rap” yesterday, we move onto an explicit link: drug smuggling! No, “pinball” wasn’t drug slang, but you bet your ass “white lightning” is!
Truckin’ pop culture is rife with liquor smuggling, from The Dukes of Hazzard to Smokey & the Bandit, aka the best advertising Coors ever got. I know that sneakin’ beer and moonshine across state lines seems quaint and friendly compared to the crack trade, but witness this old chart, taken from a copy of The Baffler I happened to be reading this week:
With weekend novelties out of the way, let’s get down to business. This week’s theme is Perils of Truckin’. Now, I know that modern day truckers — the kind you see on Trick My Truck have a pretty sweet life, haulin’ load across this country in a rig full of bluetooth accesories, iPods, in-dash DVD players and Web 2.0 mobisodes. It’s like hanging out at your computer all day, but you get paid for it, and get to see this great nation!
But it wasn’t always this way. Back when most truckin’ songs were penned, these world-shrinking portable technologies didn’t exist. The U.S. Postal Service and payphones were your only contacts with the folks back home, and your audio options were severely limited. Today most of us are accustomed to the complete agency a portable music player offers us, but even a cassette tape player wasn’t mass-produced until the middle 1960s, and a trucker on the long haul had, at best, radio reception at the whim of their itinerary.
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It’s a shopworn cliche of my generation: middle class white people will insist they like “all types of music – except for country and rap!” It’s an absurd claim: you can easily conjure a dozen musical styles that most of these people would hate, or at the very least that they’d never heard of. How many of these people do you think listen to a lot of free jazz, gabber, symphonic black metal, zydecko, baroque, gamelan? More to the point, there’s bound to be some country and rap songs these people would enjoy. There’s one category of music I think most people would be justified in dismissing though: country-rap hybrids.
Sure, Alabama 3 uses elements from both, but what have we got besides that? Kid Rock? Some novelty records who take cues from Rappin’ Rodney and Joe Piscopo, believing that rap is simply nursery rhymes over a Casiotone drumbeat? Well, in the 1990s someone decided to take that “winning formula” and apply it to truckin’ music: “Buck Truck, the Rappin’ Trucker”.
TMM is a celebration of truckin’ music, not a mockery. But you take the bad with the good, and when college pal “Matthew Barney Gumble” discovered ol’ Buck a few years ago, he made sure the staff IOPI was made aware of him. We can no more disown Buck Truck than we can C.W. McCall or our church’s reverend or anyone else. So without further comment, here is “Sleazy Weasel”. It’s not very good. We’ll make it up to you tomorrow with one of the best trucker songs ever, a genuine old style tearjerker. Meanwhile, “enjoy”.
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Yesterday’s subject wasn’t the best-known novelty trucker of the 1970s: that title belongs to one Chatsworth Warrington McCall and his 1976 hit “Convoy”!
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Okay, I made up the Chatsworth bit, “C.W.” doesn’t stand for anything, it was just a name for an character concocted by adman William “Bill” Fries for an Old Home Bread campaign. Like the Muppets before him and Ernest P. Worrell after, C.W. made the move from advertising to entertainment people theoretically pay for! And you all laughed at Cavemen! Or didn’t laugh at it, I guess. Or watch it.
Anyway, “Convoy” is a well-known song, and I have subjected many rooms to karaoke renditions of it. It’s shrugged off as a goofy country novelty song, but listen to it: really listen. It’s basically a song about taking arms against government agents and committing acts of “terrorism” against an unjust state.
Perhaps uncomfortable with such politically charged material, McCall dialed it back for the sequel, “Around the World with the Rubber Duck”. It picks up where “Convoy” left off, with the Convoy engaged in a high speed showdown with the fuzz at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. The crew’s only choice was to somehow convert their diesel demons into amphibious crafts, and truck all over this globe of ours. This allows Fries to perform a number of borderline offensive ethnic accents, but even he seems aware of the absurdity. Listen to the backing vocals to the second verse:
Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! This is dumb! Dumb! Dumb!
That’s okay, partner! “C.W. McCall” has a lot of other truckin’ songs out there, and even some non-truck songs like “Columbine”, a 1970s ode to a sleepy mountain hamlet that takes on a new meaning today. But none of those tunes have the staying power of “Convoy”. Rubber Duckie, you truly are The One!
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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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