Musical Cars

There’s no end of songs about cars. To give you some idea of the numbers we’re talking about, there are over a thousand recordings with “Cadillac” in the title alone. Back in 2006 Bob Dylan dedicated an episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour to songs about automobiles. This week New Zealand Gerald would like to narrow the field a little – or rather restrict the parking – for songs with “car” in the title.

Let’s get the total write-offs out of the way first. Van “Diesel” Morrison wrote and deformed “Who Drove the Red Sports Car?” in 1967. I find it very hard to believe that anyone takes Morrison’s post-Them albums of shapeless “jazz-inspired” tootling and caterwauling seriously. How can he not be prenant le pipi?

I once met an ex-roadie of Morrison’s in the Bomb & Duck pub in Belfast who told me that the working title of Astral Weeks was, right up until the eleventh hour, Gastral Leaks. In return for this gem I insisted on buying him as many Guinnesses as he had fingers: 4½. Thus began one of the best breakfast drinking sessions I’ve ever had. But back to Morrison: he has the dubious distinction of being the first person to get a degree in cultural studies, majoring in popular music.

One man who has unquestionably taken more piss than a hospital bedpan is Captain Beefheart. One of the briefer pseudo-hallucinations on his 1969 album Trout Mask Replica is called “Dali’s Car”. Promising title, wouldn’t you say? It certainly sounds more appetizing than its stablemates “Hair Pie” and “Bills Corpse”. But the track is a brief, disappointingly well-structured instrumental that gives the impression that the most notorious surrealist the world has ever seen drove a Prius. “Dali’s Car” is proof that the drugs don’t always work.

Another crime against car songs is Big Star’s “Back of a Car” (1974). Only Big Star could title a song thus and then spend 2:46 whining about a love that cannot be voiced because the car radio is too loud and because the singer doesn’t know what to say to his would-be lover anyway. The song offers a kind of musicholia (is that a word? it is now) that would have been deemed naff even in the 1930s. Back then the narrators of songs like “In the Middle of a Kiss” got a lot further than Big Star’s tongue-tied hopeless romantic.

The narrator of The Divine Comedy’s “Your Daddy’s Car” is more experienced than that of “Back of a Car”, but no less nauseating. Frontman Neil Hannon thinks he’s a wit, but most of his songs reveal him to be only half right. I say “most” because he did pen one of the funniest original songs for a TV show ever: “My Lovely Horse”, which featured in the Eurovision Song Contest episode of Father Ted and contains the following immortal couplet: “I want to shower you with sugar lumps and ride you over fences / Polish your hooves every single day and bring you to the horse dentist.”

The instrumentation of the 1999 version of “Your Daddy’s Car” is typically, deliberately, “inventive”: acoustic guitar, pizzicato violin, and cello. Hannon sings as if he’s imitating Suede’s Brett Anderson. Indeed the song sounds like a drugless, flirty-but-not-dirty cleansing of Suede’s “Daddy’s Speeding”, which is sadly off-limits for this post.

Enough of the lemons already; time for the sweet runners.

When she was writing “Fast Car” (1988), did Tracy Chapman have any idea how career-defining it would be? The song is a masterpiece. If “Fast Car” were the only song that Chapman ever wrote and recorded, her place among the greatest singer-songwriters of the 20th century would have been assured – it is that extraordinary. It is also the saddest song I know.

Chapman’s delivery of “Fast Car” is one of the 7 wonders of popular music. Her voice – deep yet fragile, stoic yet vulnerable – is sincerity itself. The song contains one of the most authentic character portraits ever penned. Chapman’s performance dresses you in robes that feel borrowed at first but that somehow fit you perfectly by the end of song. Bruce Springsteen provides similar tailoring services on 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad. But Springsteen would be the first to pay his respects to Chapman: “Fast Car” drives many miles further down Highway Authenticity than “Born to Run”.

Beth Orton’s “Stolen Car” (1999) is another extraordinary song, for very different reasons. The lyrics are wordy and syntactically complex, with subjects and objects oscillating wildly. They describe the unexpected return of a prodigal son of a bitch, who is keen to break and enter the narrator’s life once more without feeling. Listening to Orton’s vocal is an unnerving experience; her conviction is as inescapable as your confusion about who’s doing what to whom.

The song opens dawn-breakingly but the light’s advance is challenged by an angular, wheedling electric guitar that lurks darkly in the shadows of the verses and reveals more of itself in the bridges and choruses. The song’s core, which is distinguished both lyrically and musically from its surroundings, is the following quatrain:

One drink too many and a joke gone too far,

I see your face drive like a stolen car.

Gets harder to hide when you’re hitching a ride,

Harder to hide what you really saw.

“I see your face drive like a stolen car” is an exceptionally fine image. This is the only time “stolen car” appears in the song, and what a unique way to use it!

The lobotomizing riff of Gary Numan’s “Cars” (1979) made it one of the most iconic synthpop/New Wave singles. Inspired by an incident of road rage, the song is narrated by the original paranoid android. Despite the silliness of the lyrics, and the fact that Numan is shamelessly ripping off Kraftwerk, the world would be a decidedly lesser place without “Cars” – the myriad allusions to it in popular culture are pudding-proof of this.

Brooklyn band They Might Be Giants released their first, self-titled, album in 1986. It boasts an absurdly generous 19 tracks, all of which appear in 1001 Songs You Must Hear before You Buy Another Top 40 Album. The most deliberately arcane track is entitled “Boat of Car” and is 75 seconds long. The complete lyric is:

Daddy’ll sing bass
Daddy’ll sing bass
Daddy’ll sing bass
Daddy’ll sing bass

I took my boat for a car
I took that car for a ride
I was trying to get somewhere
But now I’m following the traces of your fingernails
That run along the windshield on the boat of car

Daddy’ll sing bass

Traces of your fingernails that run along the windshield
On the boat of car
On the boat of car
On the boat of car
On the boat of car

For reasons clear only to the song’s composers, “Daddy’ll sing bass” is sampled from the 1969 Johnny Cash song “Daddy Sang Bass”, which was written by Carl Perkins. As for the rest, let’s just say that Dali would have been far more willing to share a bottle of absinthe with They Might Be Giants than with Captain Beefheart.

 *****

Other “car” titled songs of a certain regard include:

“Used Cars” by Bruce Springsteen: appears on his superb Nebraska (1982) and is flawed only by the unnatural grammatical inversion of “Now, mister, the day the lottery I win”.

“Drive My Car” (1965) by The Beatles. A mostly McCartney composition that flirts (which is all McCartney ever does) with a blues euphemism for sex.

“Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” (1988) by Billy Ocean. Co-written by Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who also co-produced Heartbreak City (1984) by . . . The Cars.