So we crashed the gate doing ninety-eight
I says “Let them truckers roll, 10-4.”
C.W. McCall
Thanks to my friend Kyle for contributing to Music Week 2011. I found Kyle’s blog last year and loved it from the first post. It’s really cool to see a dude who busts the stereotype of what a biker is and what a dad is.
Kyle is an all around bad ass and I look up to him as a writer and as a person. When I decided to have people help me out with Music Week, there was no doubt he was going to be asked. So sit back and enjoy ChopperPapa’s contribution to Music Week 2011.
There are musicians and there are music snobs, I’m neither. I’m not that guy who’s able to find obscure references in songs to drug use or debate why Van Halen was a much better band with David Lee Roth instead of Sammy Hagar. What I am is a guy who hears a song, likes it, and will play it 784 times in a row. Music is the only legal substance I know of that can put me in a good mood any time, every time.
I’m a child of the 70’s and 80’s, a time when YouTube would have been mistaken for a woman’s garment and a time when musicians still had to pay their dues before making it big. Because of this I’ve maintained a freaky love affair with the music of my generation, even before it was cool and radio stations began broadcasting “Friday Night 80’s”.
My own blog’s RetroRewind features songs I grew up with and the more forgotten the song is the better the chance I’ll talk about it. I like to find a track where the first response is
“I haven’t heard that in years!”
I write most of my posts on the music of the 70’s because it’s a decade time forgot, but I’ll also pepper in 80’s for good measure. Ninety percent of all music post ’92 is garbage.
It took me a few days to come up with a totally obscure, off-the-wall, haven’t-heard-that-in-a-million years song for my blogging bro J.R. I narrowed it down to a handful most of which had vague references to sex, which I felt was important, but I decided to go in a different direction.
If you’ve ever taken an interstate road trip then you can claim this song as your own. Written in ’75 by Bill Fries (a/k/a C.W. McCall) it’s the only song ever written where names such as “Rubber Duck”, “Pig Pen”, and “Sod Buster” are perfectly justified.
The song recounts this trio of groovy named truckers leaving out of L.A. (shaky-town) on a cross-country trip to the East Coast. As the group makes their way through the Midwest they pick up more of their kind and by the time they reach Chi-town they are 1000 strong. Effectively the song is the melodic finger to all the headaches truckers face, mostly smokeys and bears (law enforcement) and those random weigh stations you see along interstates.
Surprisingly this pseudo rap song reached #1 in ’76 on the US charts for both the country and pop and the Canadians loved it just as much. Another distinction is that the song is recognized as one of the worst in history.
And for more obscure 70’s deliciousness, treat this as your invitation Papa’s RetroRewind.
Papa
Kyle (aka ChopperPapa) is naive enough to believe he has something important to say. He’s been a parent in the modern family since 2004, co-parenting his enchanting daughter (9) and rambunctious son (7) with the skill of a British nanny. With an itching to be a Hell’s Angel he’s far too metro sexual to actually get in; leaving him to direct his custom chopper towards the nearest martini lounge, but only if they serve buffalo wings and have hookahs. With a fondness for cold beer, loud engines, and fresh bed linens it’s clear he has an identity crisis. By day he’s a banker which keeps the lights on and the child support paid, in his remaining 46 minutes he blogs, sleeps, works out, courts his Queen, and performs Academy worthy parenting feats. Blogging since late ’10, he’s amassed a loyal following of distant relatives and mental patients.
I’m smiling so BIG!
I love Convoy!!!! This song reminds me of playing with the CB radio in my grandfather’s camper. Or riding on the back of my grandfather’s Harley. It’s the song that makes me think of my Papa!!
Love it. Thanks for the grin on my face. 🙂
Awesome terrible song, but you could have also mentioned the fact that it generated an equally bad movie starring Kris Kristofferson 😉
Hmmm, speaking of bad songs, Mr. Kristofferson, while a great song-writer and guitar player extraordinaire, has possibly the worst singing voice of anyone I’ve had the misfortune of hearing.
Haha! I have never heard this, probably because it is before my time, but I hang out with an average of 5 truckers on any given weekend, and I am thinking that this song would be a big hit with all of them.
Keep on rockin’ J.R. and Papa. Love both your blogs!
i HAVEN’T heard that song in forever! i have fond memories of listening to that song with my dad in the mid-80s at the local townie bar. Sure, i was only 10 but it was small town wisconsin, what else do you do with your kids that you only see a few times a year?! thanks for sharing 🙂
Thanks for letting me participate, dude. There’s some justification on why this song is one of the worst of all time. But still…if I didn’t know better I’d think he was actually a trucker.