Tales from the Roadhead Chronicles!

El Mikey!

Classic cars, nostalgia and sex appeal all combine in a headon collision of pop culture fueled by a V-8 powered heavy metal machismo internal machine. The car show, the swap meet, the cruises up and down main drags on hot summer nights, and the rock n' roll, yes, the rock n' roll, the backbeat of youth. The classic car culture of America is stronger than ever but why? It's not just the chrome is it? The massive engine under the hood? What makes this car culture so damned exciting? The cars were works of automotive art, no doubt about it. Caddy fins that rose like atomic mushroom clouds made of chrome high into the sky and protruding Dagmars on the grills that pushed forward like a push up a bra.


It holds a lingering attraction today for the teen angst car culture that sprang up around all that Motor City metal. The passion pit drive in theater with monsters from space on the silver screen and Tina from down the street in the backseat. It was Wolfman Jack on the radio and every city in America had one version of him or another. The carhop, sexual siren of fast food, clamping the tray on the window while she took hold of our hearts at the same time. The drive-ins, the carhops and hot, sweaty summer nights crusiing on Woodward Avenue in Detroit or any avenue in any town U.S.A.

Good times and rock n' roll, radio cranked up and the engine purring. Those beautiful engines. The maestro's of muscle in Detroit created monster machines that made us shudder as they shook the streets.Rubber burning, tires squealing, hearts racing at 10,000 rpms as we kicked asphalt with a full tank of gas until we were running on empty. Screw the Cold War and Vietnam, we were young and immortal in our internal combustion world, until James Dean reminded us in 1955 on a lonely stretch of California highway that immortality has a price, but one we were willing to pay. Live fast, die young. .


Godzilla and The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, Dean and Brando. All took their place on the stage to create the concerto of pop culture. Music poured with the intensity of hot oil from every radio, the beat blending harmoniously with the backseat fury that was let loose in the 45 rpm rythym of the night. The gas gauge would soon drop, heading for "E", and "empty" would be Groucho's secret word as our gas would run low, and time would run out.

The days of teen dreams would soon move down the food chain of memory and become nothing more than just that, a backseat full of fading memories

Classic car shows fire up all summer long as a reminder our youth, and the age of the auto as art form that has not been forgotten. In fact, classic car enthusiasm has baby boomed into a multi-billion dollar hobby industry with garage and street mechanics retro fitting everything that will run and those machines that have seen better days, but they know deep in their crankshaft that better days are ahead for them as they roar to life once again and join the rest of the resurrected relics at some classic car show, somewhere, sometime in the summer.

As the song goes..."Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end..."

Mike Marino
Contributing Columnist
Author of The Roadhead Chronicles Book

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