Popular Music and Automobiles

Mark Duffett, Beate Peter, Mark Duffett, Beate Peter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501352317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Particularly since the 1950s, cars and popular music have been constantly associated. As complementary goods and intertwined technologies, their relationship has become part of a widely shared experience-one that connects individuals and society, private worlds and public spheres. Popular Music and Automobiles aims to unpack that relationship in more detail. It explores the ways in which cars and car journeys have shaped society, as well as how we have shaped them. Including both broad synergies and specific case studies, Popular Music and Automobiles explores how attention to an ongoing relationship can reveal insights about the assertion and negotiation of identity. Using methods of enquiry that are as diverse as the topics they tackle, its contributors closely consider specific genders, genres, places and texts.

1

Rock ‘n’ roll: Cars, convergence, and culture

Tim Wall and Nick Webber

In traditional narratives of American cultural history, the period from 1955 to 1965 is represented as one of ‘newness.’ Depictions of this period, in both academic and popular form, draw attention to phenomena seen to result from post-war social, economic, and cultural change: the so-called rise of the teenager, the creation of rock ‘n’ roll, the advent of the transistor radio, and the central importance of the car. In association, ideas of technology, mobility, and teen culture are combined to give us the presentations of the period in films such as American Graffiti (Lucas, 1973), in which we see teenagers in custom cars—so-called hot rods—cruising around town, with music pouring from the radio. This ‘rock ‘n’ roll moment,’ captured for California, 1962, by American Graffiti, is one of display and consumption, and of music and culture.

None of these practices and technologies were genuinely new. The association of car customization and teenagers had a longer history, the radio and the car had been linked from at least the 1920s, and, musically, cars had been the subject of songs since the nineteenth century. Indeed, when we examine the practices and technologies more closely, the continuities appear more important than the idea that this was a period of time in which a major disruption in culture occurred. In what follows, therefore, we will explore the relationship between cars, radio, and music in the decade between 1955 and 1965 in the United States. We will present these objects, and the cultural practices which connect them, as the end result of a gradual convergence of mobility and entertainment in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. We will suggest that the particular importance accorded to this moment of rock ‘n’ roll results not from ‘newness’ but from the way in which the visual and auditory ‘image’ of these disparate activities of cars, radios, and music form a coherent set of meanings over the decade after 1955. Most importantly, we will explore how new culture was made out of the elements of US commercial culture, and the way that the commercial culture took them back into mass production in the early 1960s.

As we have already indicated, there is a rich variety of representations of this era within later media texts and popular culture. There are, in addition, several very useful academic and popular historical investigations of the precursors to the cultural practices on which we focus here. Intriguingly, though, there are attempts to understand how they come together in what anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) termed ‘bricolage’—the reuse of materials and practices for the solution of new cultural dilemmas. In this chapter, then, we use some of the eulogizing scenes woven throughout American Graffiti to stimulate our investigation, and explore existing scholarship on the history of the individual strands of this culture in order to draw together the sophisticated ways in which cars, radio, and mobile music converged to create a meaningful culture.

Cars

George Lucas’s American Graffiti opens, to the soundtrack of Bill Hayley’s “Rock around the Clock,” with the arrival of three of the central characters at Mel’s Drive-In restaurant by different modes of transport. The cool of the ’58 Impala is evident, set against the utility of the motor scooter and Citroen CV. Cars, therefore, feature centrally in the narrative of the film, not as modes of functional transport, but as symbols of youth, mobility, and competition. The car is presented as the means through which the other aspects of youth culture are articulated: music, relationships, coming of age. This connection of cars to youth culture, however, is much older than the 1950s or 1960s. In fact, even as early as the late 1920s, cars had become the technological innovation most identified with young people in films, songs, and novels (Ides, 2009, p. 110), and US manufacturers were advertising cars “that might appeal to younger drivers” from the mid-1930s (Best, 2006, p. 11).

Following the introduction of the Model T Ford in 1908, the ownership and widespread use of cars by the young resulted, primarily, from the massive increase in automobile production and decrease in price. Adjusted for inflation, between 1909 and 1925, the price of a new Model T fell in real terms by 82 per cent (Ides, 2009, p. 122), creating both the broad distribution of new cars and a burgeoning market in used cars. It was this latter market that was the principal source of youth car ownership, and by the mid-1930s, in Los Angeles at least, middle-class high school students were driving to school (Ides, 2009, p. 102 and 123). Ford’s mass production model also incorporated consistent and widely available car parts, and these factors were vital to the increasingly popular practice of car modification: or hot rodding, as it came to be known.

Southern California, and particularly Los Angeles, was central to the development of hot rodding practices (Luckso, 2008, pp. 65–66 and 69), in part due to the increasingly distributed nature of the urban environment of Los Angeles both driving and being driven by huge growth in car usage. While the population of Los Angeles roughly doubled between 1919 and 1920, car registration in the area more than quintupled (Shackleford, 2004, pp. 31–32). By the end of the 1920s, the practice of altering a production car for speed was well established throughout the United States. In Southern California, competitive racing took place along dry lakebeds, a practice which rapidly grew in perceived legitimacy and formal organization. Car clubs, first appearing in the area in the 1920s, were initially focused on adult hobbyists, but these became more youth focused during the 1930s, and in many cases were amalgamated into sanctioned racing and timing associations (Ides 2009, pp. 102, 123–24; Moorhouse, 1986, p. 84). Although the lakes were commandeered by the military during the Second World War, lakebed racing resumed after the war, with the timing associations continuing to lend the practice an air of credibility and, increasingly, respectability. However, there is more to this picture.

The ‘hot rod’ problem

American Graffiti, significantly, does not show us a hot rod involved in a lakebed race; rather, the race presented in the film takes place on a road. The trend of increasing access to cars continued throughout the 1930s, as production volumes grew, but increasing in parallel to the ownership of cars were some car-related problems familiar from our contemporary experience: those of high-speed road driving in general and, as we see in the film, street racing. While mark ing a departure from the intentions of many of those who might have considered themselves ‘genuine’ hot rodders, by the 1960s street racing was not only a well-established phenomenon but something seen as a serious problem, strongly associated with youthful delinquency. As early as 1913, records show that 115 juveniles were arrested in LA in one year for joyriding (Moorhouse, 1991, p. 29), and it is clear that speeding was an issue throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s, teen drivers—“wild-eyed kids in hopped-up jalopies”—were seen as a major social problem across the United States, and a new term, ‘teenicide,’ was coined to describe the perceived proclivity of teens to die in car accidents (Moorhouse, 1991, pp. 29, 31, 35). Many street races took place at night, after sanctioned club meetings, leading one Los Angeles police captain to refer to them as “suicide clubs of midnight owls” (Ides, 2009, pp. 135–36).

In actual fact, there were few accidents (although figures from California for 1949 suggest the vehicle accident rate was well above average among people under eighteen), but the discourse of delinquency remained strong, meaning that accidents which did occur were sensationalized (Moorhouse, 1991, pp. 29, 35; Ides, 2009, p. 136). In some cases, any and every car driven by a teenager was labelled as a hot rod (Ides, 2009, p. 138). Ben Shackleford (2004, p. 37) draws our attention to an indicative November 1949 article in Life magazine, which decries “The ‘Hot-Rod’ Problem” with the subheading “Teen-agers organize to experiment with mechanized suicide.” By the late 1940s, ‘hot rod’ was used to refer to “a highly visible, relatively affluent, teenage lifestyle which seemed to turn on drive-ins, noise, jalopies held together with chewing gum and dangerous driving on public highways” (Moorhouse, 1991, p. 33). These negative associations created consternation among self-proclaimed genuine hot rodders, the (by this point often older) devotees of lakebed racing, and motivated them to try and coax street racers back to the relative safety of sanctioned speed events. In addition, a threat of state legislation that would affect all hot rodding and racing activity in California drove a vigorous attempt to present lakebed races as a sober, respectable, and self-regulating sport, distinctly at odds with the practices vilified by the press (Moorhouse, 1991, pp. 32–41).

Fashion

Approaching 1955, then, there was already a well-established association between cars, high-speed driving, and teenagers. So what was actually happening between 1955 and 1965, in the rock ‘n’ roll moment? In terms of cars, we can start to understand this period through the meaning of the term ‘hot rod.’ If the practices here were not new, the terminology certainly appears to have been. ‘Hot rod’ was not an expression in use among lakebed racers of the 1930s, and in 1945 Life magazine—which used the term confidently only four years later—felt the need to provide a definition for its readers (Moorhouse, 1986, pp. 83, 86–87). Although it appears to have been employed at first as a belittling contraction of ‘hot roadster’ (Luckso, 2008, pp. 10, 66–67), by the end of the 1940s ‘hot rod’ was in wide circulation. Significantly, in 1948, self-identifying usage appeared in the form of Hot Rod magazine, launched in January of that year by a group of lake racing enthusiasts (Moorhouse, 1986, p. 84). This magazine was aimed at the ‘genuine’ hot rodders to whom we have already alluded; those who defined themselves in terms of the hard work and innovative engineering they performed on their cars. The first issue dismissed as ‘shot rodders’ those who did not espouse this ethic and instead settled simply for the appearance of speed, and the magazine explicitly rejected the construction of hot rodding that had become a media commonplace (Moorhouse, 1986, p. 89). Street racers were labelled as ‘squirrels.’ Journalists were also castigated when they “presented this ‘screwball few’ to the mass audience as if they were true hot rodders” (p. 89). The editor of the second issue suggested that ‘hot rod’ was among “the most misused of words” (Moorhouse, 1991, pp. 40–41). Importantly, such struggles for definition reflected a divide that became increasingly significant into the 1950s: between speed and style, between being fast and looking fast.

Street racing survived the years of the Second World War through impromptu drag meets and improvised solutions to fuel restrictions (Moorhouse, 1991, pp. 31–32). In the following years, the cars became more varied in their mechanics, creating a diversity which changed the nature of hot rodding practices. Ford’s shift to interchangeable parts in the early part of the 1930s, along with the large stock of old cars available and the decreasing cost of cars, had made hot rodding a hobby accessible to a broad range of middle and working-class youth (Ides, 2009, p. 124). Fords of the 1930s, prominent among them the “Little Deuce Coupe” of Beach Boys fame (see the next chapter in this volume), were particularly prized as a basis for hot rod work. In American Graffiti, a yellow hot rod version is driven by John Milner, the character in the film who represents eternal youth and who the main characters are reluctantly leaving behind. However, the diverse mechanics of the 1950s meant that in reality, parts were harder to get, and cars of the 1930s were by that point two decades old and becoming costly to purchase and to modify (Ides, 2009, p. 117). So, much as the low-cost cars of the 1930s had democratized what had initially been a middle-class pursuit into something that cut right across society, by the 1950s ‘genuine’ hot rodding was once again becoming an activity in which only (upper) middle classes could afford to indulge. If, before the 1920s, speed had belonged to the wealthy, the increasing ownership of fast cars by the working classes thereafter contested that privilege. And by the 1950s, ‘fast cars’ did not have to mean modified cars: it could happily mean new cars.

Perhaps the most significant change apparent in the 1950s is the engagement of mass culture and mass production with hot rod culture. For a start, Detroit manufacturers started to draw on the expertise within the hot rodding community, offer scholarships to the winners of organized r aces on the Utah salt flats (Shackleford, 2004, pp. 39–40), and use ‘horsepower tricks’ to offer production cars with more powerful engines, capable of higher speeds (Luckso, 2008, p. 106). Appropriating the cachet of the process itself, they also began to sell ‘customized’ models of new cars (Shackleford, 2004, p. 43). In 1955, at the start of our rock ‘n’ roll moment, the Dodge D-500 was launched and controversially described in Hot Rod magazine as a “production line hot rod” (Moorhouse, 1986, p. 91). In the years that followed, ‘muscle cars’ like the Chrysler C-300 and the AMC Rebel became very popular. There were also notable responses to the adornment practices of hot rodders by mainstream auto manufacturers. Most visibly they adopted the contrivance of adding chrome parts to their production cars. Even those who could not afford, or did not want, a road racing car, could reproduce the symbols of speed and rebellion in their showroom purchases. Driven by a determination to differentiate themselves, the hot rodders (and then the more youthful shot rodders) removed the chrome (Shackleford, 2004, p. 50). In the next production generation, car manufacturers followed suit, at which point hot rodders added it once again in an ongoing cycle of “cultural participation and creativity within mass consumerism” (Ides, 2009, p. 145, paraphrasing Balsley 1950/2011). Interestingly, both the black ’55 Chevy and the yellow ’32 Deuce Coupe that duelled in American Graffiti’s road race had the same amount of chrome on their wheels, though the Chevy kept its chromed bumpers.

Between 1955 and 1965, the car was consolidated not only in its long-term role as an aspect of youth culture, then, but as an item of fashion. In the aftermath of the Second World War, cars were increasingly seen as short lived, to be replaced readily by the new. Car modifiers led the fashion and car companies followed it, but the majority of people consumed the products produced en masse by the Detroit factories; thus, the car was appropriated and re-appropriated in turn.

Radio

If the story of the cars in our imagined rock ‘n’ roll moment is not as simple as we might imagine, the same holds true for the radios which they carried. In American Graffiti, the radio appears as a major signifier and narrative device, almost as immediately in the film as the cars. After the main characters are introduced, Lucas blurs non-diegetic and diegetic music, as the rock ‘n’ roll title soundtrack morphs into the sound of music on the car radios, and then on to announcements by radio DJ Wolfman Jack. At almost every moment when a car is key to a scene, music (and radio music in particular) is there as well. In the film, the mobility of people and music, therefore, appears central to both the iconography and story.

Following the perfection of the transistor itself at the end of the previous decade, the first transistor radios appeared in the mid-1950s (Braun and Macdonald, 1978, p. 17; Partner, 1999, pp. 193–98). Perhaps as a consequence, there is a tendency to assume that it was the development of the transistor that allowed radios to become portable, making radio listening a mobile phenomenon that was exploited in turn by a new youth culture. Certainly, transistors used less power, were more rugged and smaller than the valves/vacuum tubes that preceded them, and were easier to mass produce (Tilton, 1971, pp. 16–17; Partner, 1999, pp. 203–5)—qualities that contributed to a greater culture of mobility. Although they were not always the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Rock ‘n’ roll: Cars, convergence, and culture
• 2 “She’s my little Deuce Coupe”: Freudian transformation in the car songs of the Beach Boys
• 3 Music is the vehicle: Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” Top Gear, and the driving anthem
• 4 The passenger? Gender, cars, mobility, and dance music
• 5 Rave journeys: Intimacy, liminality, and the changing notion of home
• 6 Driving on the A470: Cars and roads in Welsh-language popular music
• 7 “Ich will Spaß, ich geb Gas”: German pop between fun and subversion
• 8 Las chivas: Fiesta in motion
• 9 Listening to music in cars while black: Popular music, automobility, and the murder of Jordan Davis
• 10 Crash! Music press coverage of performers in automobile accidents
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright