All Flash, No Drag
Everyone knows “Little Deuce Coupe.” Everyone knows “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” Those records are fine. But the hot rod song as a form had a longer and stranger life than the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean would suggest — it kept turning up in British Invasion records, bubblegum sessions, proto-punk singles, and Philadelphia basements well into the ’80s. Ten tracks that took the theme somewhere nobody expected.
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01
The Who — “Bucket T”
The Who covering a Jan & Dean hot rod song is not the most obvious move for a band that was about to make Tommy, but in 1966 it made complete sense. Pete Townshend and the rest had grown up on American records — every British band of the period had — and the hot rod genre was as much a part of the pop landscape as anything else. “Bucket T” appeared on the Ready Steady Who! EP with Keith Moon on lead vocals, which is its own argument for why the track works. Moon treats the material with total commitment, no winking, no distance — he sings about his T-bucket with the same ferocity he applied to everything else. The production is heavier than the Jan & Dean original and the guitars have an edge the California version never had. It’s a British Invasion band doing a California car song and it sounds like neither, which is exactly the right outcome.
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02
The Archies — “Ride, Ride, Ride”
By 1968 the hot rod song was supposed to be dead — psychedelia had happened, the Sunset Strip was melting, nobody was writing about posi-traction anymore. The Archies did not get this memo. “Ride, Ride, Ride” arrived that year out of the Kasenetz-Katz factory orbit, a bubblegum hot rod song with lyrics that name-check four-eleven rears and mag wheels with the kind of specificity that suggests someone in the room actually knew what they were talking about. The Archies were a cartoon band — literally a cartoon band, the house group from the Saturday morning TV show — which makes the horsepower knowledge even more confusing and more charming. The candy apple honker with a cocoa brown vinyl top goes into the hot rod canon alongside anything Roger Christian ever wrote, and it got there through a children’s animation property. 1968 was a strange year.
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03
Annette — “Custom City”
Annette Funicello spent most of her early career doing beach movies and teen pop for Walt Disney, which is not a background that screams hot rod credibility. And yet “Custom City,” from the Muscle Beach Party soundtrack, is a genuinely good hot rod song — uptempo, specific, sung with real enthusiasm by someone who sounds like she actually wants to go to Custom City rather than just completing a recording obligation. The whole Muscle Beach Party album is like this: Annette singing car songs, surf songs, and drag race songs with the same commitment she brought to everything else. The Disney machine could manufacture sincerity when it needed to, and on “Custom City” it did. The track is two minutes long and doesn’t waste a second of them.
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04
The Surfaris — “Boss Barracuda”
The Surfaris are remembered almost exclusively for “Wipe Out,” which is fair in the sense that “Wipe Out” is one of the ten most recognizable instrumental tracks ever recorded, and unfair in the sense that the band had an entire catalog that almost nobody has heard. “Boss Barracuda” is the case for the rest of it — a hot rod boast song about a ’64 Plymouth Barracuda that runs through every competing car (Corvettes, Mustangs, Thunderbirds) and dismisses them all. The Barracuda was brand new when this record came out, which means someone was paying close enough attention to write a song about it before the ink on the model year was dry. The guitars are clean, the tempo is exactly right, and the whole thing has the easy confidence of a band that knew the genre cold.
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05
The Barracudas — “I Want My Woody Back”
Twenty years after the California surf and hot rod explosion, a London band named themselves after a Plymouth and made an album called Hang 11 (Mutant Surf Punks). The Barracudas were formed in 1978 out of genuine affection for the music rather than nostalgia — guitarist Jeremy Gluck and the rest had grown up on American records the same way the Who had, and by 1985 they were making the kind of surf-punk hybrid that nobody in California was bothering with anymore. “I Want My Woody Back” is exactly what it sounds like: a punk-tempo lament for a lost station wagon, played by people who understood both halves of the genre equation. The fact that it was recorded in London in 1985 by a band fronted by a Canadian is the entire point. The hot rod dream traveled, and it landed weird, and that’s what made it last.
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06
Rip Chords — “Three Window Coupe”
The Rip Chords were not really a band. They were a production vehicle for Terry Melcher and Bruce Johnston — future Beach Boy and future Beach Boy producer — who used the name to release hot rod and surf records on Columbia while the actual members rotated in and out. “Three Window Coupe” was written by Jan Berry and Roger Christian, which means it came from the same desk that produced most of what the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean were doing at the time. The track peaked at number 28, which makes it a genuine hit by most definitions, but nobody puts it on a Top 10 car song list because the Rip Chords are not a name that registers the way the Beach Boys do. That’s the right reason to play it. Johnston sings it like it matters, which it does.
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07
Gary Usher — “The Beetle”
Gary Usher co-wrote “In My Room” and “409” with Brian Wilson, produced the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday and the Mamas & the Papas’ first album, and spent the early ’60s writing hot rod songs for anyone who would record them. He also wrote and recorded “The Beetle” in 1964 — a song about a Volkswagen. The VW Beetle was the anti-hot rod, the car driven by people who had specifically opted out of the muscle car arms race, and Usher wrote it a song with the same energy and specificity he brought to everything else in the genre. It’s funny and it’s fast and it’s completely absurd, and it says something real about the hot rod genre that one of its key architects couldn’t resist turning it inside out. The car doesn’t win any races. It doesn’t matter.
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08
Stray Cats — “Hot Rod Gang”
Brian Setzer grew up on Long Island listening to records that were twenty years old and decided that was the correct thing to do. By the time the Stray Cats hit with “Rock This Town” in 1981, rockabilly was having its third or fourth revival, but “Hot Rod Gang” from Rant N’ Rave goes somewhere the radio hits didn’t: it’s a straight hot rod song in the ’49 Merc and flathead tradition, played by people who understood that the genre had always been adjacent to rockabilly anyway. The ’31 Ford channeled too low. The four-barrel carburetor with a dual exhaust. Setzer had done the reading. The track has a looseness that the more polished Stray Cats records sometimes traded away for sheen, and it’s better for it.
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09
Hasil Adkins — “Get Outta My Car”
Hasil Adkins recorded in a shack in Boone County, West Virginia, playing all the instruments himself, singing in a voice that sounded like he’d never heard another human record but had strong opinions anyway. “Get Outta My Car” is a hot rod song in the way that Adkins did everything — the form is recognizable but the execution is from somewhere else entirely, some parallel universe where rock & roll developed in isolation from commercial pressure and radio formatting. Norton Records compiled his recordings for the wider world starting in the ’80s and he became a cult figure among people who cared about where the edges of the music were. “Get Outta My Car” is one-take primitive and it sounds like nothing else on this list, which is the point. The hot rod song had a longer reach than anyone planned.
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10
Dead Milkmen — “Bitchin’ Camaro”
The Dead Milkmen understood that the hot rod song was a genre built on aspirational absurdity and they took that to its logical conclusion. “Bitchin’ Camaro” opens with a spoken word exchange about how the narrator got the car (his parents drove off a cliff; he didn’t get a funeral as a result; he got a Camaro instead) and escalates from there. It is a joke and it is also a perfect hot rod song, because it identifies exactly what the genre was doing all along — creating a mythology of speed and freedom and chrome that had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the dream. Philadelphia, 1985. The car was already twenty years out of date. That was the whole point. Running over mailboxes. Doing doughnuts in parking lots. Bitchin’ Camaro. There is a direct line from “409” to this, and it is not as crooked as it looks.
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