[jdeegan]

Early love songs like my merry Oldsmobile? Later tributes like "My Little Deuce Coupe". And a hundred others. I sorta like "Mercury Blues". What's your choice?

[Hanoi5]

Queen's: "I'm in love withmy car"

[mike777]

jdeegan, on 2013-March-23, 19:39, said:

Early love songs like my merry Oldsmobile? Later tributes like "My Little Deuce Coupe". And a hundred others. I sorta like "Mercury Blues". What's your choice?

tough to beat your choice: I think I agree with you.

here are some options:

. Hot Rod Lincoln - Commander Cody/Charlie Ryan/Johnny Bond/Bill Kirchen
2. Rocket 88 - Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats
3. Little Deuce Coupe - Beach Boys
4. G.T.O. - Ronny and the Daytonas
5. Hey Little Cobra - Rip Chords
6. 409 - Beach Boys
7. One Piece At A Time - Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three
8. Low Rider - War
9. Beep Beep - Playmates
10. Pink Cadillac - Bruce Springsteen
11. Maybellene - Chuck Berry
12. Little Red Corvette - Prince
13. Shut Down - Beach Boys
14. Mustang Sally - Wilson Pickett/Sir Mack Rice
15. Fun Fun Fun - Beach Boys
16. The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena) - Jan & Dean
17. Dead Man's Curve - Jan & Dean
18. Racing In The Street - Bruce Springsteen
19. Mercury Blues - K.C. Douglas/Alan Jackson

[kenberg]

I was glad to see Maybelline, a story of love gone wrong. As I was motivatin over the hill, I saw Maybelline in a Coupe de Ville... Nothin outruns my V8 Ford. Chuck Berry was great.

A car song, but not at all a love song, that I almost recall was Transfusion, ca. 1955: Outa my way, I don't drive with my horn, Transfusion.

From Bob Seger:
Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy
Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy
Workin' on mysteries without any clues
Workin' on our night moves

And perhaps it's a stretch for this thread, but in The Wild One, Brando takes Mary Murphy off on his motorcycle with a jazz piece playing in the background. Seems like it was called The Lonely Way, but whatever it was I really liked it.

My friends all drive Porsche's, I must make amends
Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

[Winstonm]

Now all of the sudden she started to knockin'
And down in a dips she started to rockin'
I looked in the mirror, a red light was blinkin'
The cops was after my Hot Rod Lincoln

They arrested me and they put me in jail
And called my pappy to throw my bail
He said "Son, you're gonna to drive me to drinkin'
If you don't stop drivin' that Hot Rod Lincoln"

[jdeegan]

kenberg, on 2013-March-24, 07:03, said:

I was glad to see Maybelline, a story of love gone wrong. As I was motivatin over the hill, I saw Maybelline in a Coupe de Ville... Nothin outruns my V8 Ford. Chuck Berry was great.

I once had a transformational experience driving across Louisiana. I finished a ZZ Top tape and put in an old Chuck Berry tape. It was astounding how much better Chuck Berry's drummer was than his counterpart on ZZ Top.

[Phil]

Ol' 55 (Eagles / Tom Waits).

[onoway]

A fun reminder of songs not thought about in a long time. May I suggest One Piece At A Time by Johnny Cash.

I don't know if there was ever much of a song specifically about it but one of the most famous cars from back then was the '69 Dodge Charger called General Lee from Dukes of Hazzard TV series. Apparently it sold on EBay in January this year for $9.9 million.

[jdeegan]

I love ZZ Top. Their lead singer and I both passed Math 100 at dear old Rice Institute. It was very hard. I hate to disrespect their drummer, but no matter how good you are, there is likely somebody even better. Even Jake admitted there was a better actuary (not bridge player) in Dallas.

[jdeegan]

kenberg, on 2013-March-24, 07:03, said:

My friends all drive Porsche's, I must make amends
Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.

For the record:
"Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."
"My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends."
"Worked hard all my life, no help from my friends."
"Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."

Oft times greatness is brief.

[jdeegan]

Hanoi5, on 2013-March-23, 20:18, said:

Queen's: "I'm in love with my car"

Queen was in many ways THE BEST EVER. IMHO. this one of their lesser songs. No passion, no longing, no love for the machine. Sad, but nobody cares about the automobile anymore except people who make them or work on them.

[billw55]

Johnny Cash, "One piece at a time"
Rush, "Red barchetta"

[kenberg]

jdeegan, on 2013-March-24, 20:18, said:

For the record:
"Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."
"My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends."
"Worked hard all my life, no help from my friends."
"Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz."

Oft times greatness is brief.

Right, I just did it as I recalled it. And even got a stray apostrophe in with the mix. Shades of another thread.

I was in grad school working on a thesis when some of the very best came out. My wife is somewhat younger than I am and grew up in San Francisco so I defer to her on all matters of music from that era. . She had never been to the City Lights bookstore though, until a few years back when we were visiting. She is quite a reader and she loved the place. Of course it's pretty respectable now with a placard designating it as a historical landmark.

The world was once young.Maybe it still is. We can hope.

[jdeegan]

One car song that I like because I have a Celtic ear, and minor key tunes appeal to me: the 1930's version of Wreck on the Highway. The best renditions imo. are by Roy Acuff and the Louvin Brothers. In the 1930's auto safety was a huge problem because the cars were getting faster and most people didn't know how to drive very well.

[blackshoe]

Most people still don't know how to drive very well.

[PassedOut]

I well remember in high school driving downtown in my dad's car because mine was (as was often the case) in the shop. Two girls flagged me over and asked if I'd give them a ride.

"Aren't you the same girls who told me to shove off when I offered you a ride last week?"

One girl pokes her head into the window and looks me straight in the eyes. "Yes, but you weren't driving this car."

I dated her for two years...

[ggwhiz]

blackshoe, on 2013-March-28, 21:03, said:

Most people still don't know how to drive very well.

An early Trivial Pursuit question had the answer that in 19?? the only 2 licensed cars in Illinois were involved in a head on collision.

Colin James - Chicks N Cars and a Third World War. Not the best but belongs in the mix.

[y66]

Nothin' will outrun my V8 Ford?



Rachel Kushner, author of "The Flamethrowers," with her 1964 Ford Galaxie 500, currently not running, in an alleyway near her home in Los Angeles. Photo by Ann Summa for The New York Times.

Excerpt from story by Maria Russo:

Quote

LOS ANGELES — On a recent morning the novelist Rachel Kushner stood in the parking garage of the Petersen Automotive Museum, where the Green Monster, a lean, turbo-jet-powered vehicle used to set land speed records, was displayed in a roped-off corner. In her new, rapturously reviewed novel, “The Flamethrowers,” set in the 1970s, the narrator finds herself driving just such a vehicle on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where those records are set.

How outlandish is it to put a ’70s female character in a speed machine designed to go 500 miles an hour? “I based that scene on something that actually happened in 1965,” Ms. Kushner said. She went on to describe how the racer Craig Breedlove talked his wife, Lee, into taking a vehicle out on the salt flats to make the terrain unavailable to one of his competitors, who was hoping to ride that day. “Lee Breedlove went 308.506 miles per hour,” she said. “That made her the fastest woman in the world.”

It’s the same speed and the same record achieved by Ms. Kushner’s narrator, Reno. But Reno’s fascination with speed is part of an even more treacherous project: moving to New York City to become an artist at a time when the downtown scene is both male-dominated and plugged into a revolutionary impulse, with protest shading into violence.

Painting is dead, Minimalism is on the decline, and artists are ransacking their own bodies and lives for ideas and gestures that might make an impact. At 23, Reno, trying to capture “the experience of speed” by photographing her motorcycle’s tracks on the salt flats, becomes the girlfriend of an older Italian Minimalist, the scion of a tire and motorcycle company called Moto Valera. With him, she can attend chic events like a dinner party where she realizes that despite her hostess’s “feminist claims and enlightened look,” women are expected to help in the kitchen.

“Reno is a persuasive and moving narrator because Ms. Kushner allows her the vulnerability and fuzzy-mindedness of youth while rarely allowing her to think or say a commonplace thing,” Dwight Garner wrote in The Times, adding that the novelist’s prose “puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.”

Ms. Kushner, 44, has the relaxed intensity of a ballet dancer — an Eastside Los Angeles thrift-shop-clad Suzanne Farrell, if Ms. Farrell could handle the clutch on a Moto Guzzi. Over lunch at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, across the street from the Petersen, she reflected on the situation of women in the art world of the 1970s.