The Go-Go Years, 1959-1973

And everybody’s saying there’s no body meanerThan the little old lady from Pasadena

She drives real fast and she drives real hardShe’s the terror of Colorado Boulevard

The Rise of the Counterculture

• Hippies – the term first appears during the Fall of 1966

• Visionaries

• Freaks

• Midnight Hippies

• Plastic Hippies

Tom Wolfe

• The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1962)

• The Electric Kool-Aid Test (1968)

Ken Kesey and the Majic Bus

Tom Wolfe – The Electric Kool-Aid Test (1968)

• Kesey gave the word and the Pranksters set upon it one afternoon. They started painting it and wiring it for sound and cutting a hole in the roof and fixing up the top of the bus so you could sit up there in the open air and play music, even a set of drums and electric guitars and electric bass and so forth, or just ride. Sandy went to work on the wiring and rigged up a system with which they could broadcast from inside the bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it would blast outside over powerful speakers on top of the bus. There were also microphones outside that would pick up sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the bus. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road. . . . There was going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn’t tune in on and rap off of.

John Muir – How to Keep your Volkswagen Alive

While the levels of logic of the human entity are many and varied, your car operates on

one simple level and it’s up to you to understand its trip. Talk to the car, then shut up and listen. Feel with your car; use all of

your receptive senses and when you find out what it needs, seek the operation out and

perform it with love. The type of love your car contains differs from you by timescale, logic level and conceptual anomalies but it is “life”

nonetheless. Its karma depends on your desire to make and keep it – ALIVE!

Cadillac – The Ultimate Symbol of the Establishment

• Leadership under Nick Dreystadt – 1930s to late 1940s

• Efficient Production Facilities and Sleek Design

• High Compression Engine, power Accessories

• Hardtops

McManus, John & Adams Advertising Agency – copy on the Cadillac:

• Let’s say it was thirty-one years ago, on a beautiful morning in June. A boy stood by a rack of papers on a busy street and heard the friendly horn of a Cadillac. “Keep the change,” the driver grunted, as he took his paper and rolled out into traffic. “There,” thought the boy, as he clutched his coin, “is the car for me.”

• And since this is America, where dreams make sense in the heart of the boy, he is now an industrialist. He has fought – without interruption – for a place in the world he wants his family to occupy. Few would deny him some taste of the fruits of his labor. No compromise this time! The papers are all in order . . . and the car of his dreams is waiting for him. It’s his!

• It’s Junetime – and the top is down – and he’s going halfway up the hill, to a spot where a lane strays into the wildwood and he can glimpse the top of a fieldstone chimney above the trees. The family rushes out with the final voice of confirmation. “Hi there neighbor, isn’t it a lovely day?”

• There’s the first trip to the office with a waiting delegation to admire his choice. He’ll get those quick glances of approval that tell him the dream he dreamed for so many years is still in the heart of others.

• Let him arrive at the door of a distinguished hotel or a famous restaurant . . . and he has the courtesy that goes with respect. “Here is a man,” the Cadillac says – almost as plainly as the words are written here—“who has earned the right to sit at the wheel.

Harry Crews – Car – 1971:When you can assume that your audience holds the same

beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the

hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures."

—Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer & His Country"

From Harry Crews -- Car

• Filled with terror and joy, he tried to wake up. But he was not asleep. His eyes were filled with cars. They raced and competed in every muscle and fiber. Dune buggies raced over the California sands of his feet; sturdy jeeps with four wheel drive and snow tires climbed the Montana mountains of his hips; golden convertibles, sleek and topless, purred through the Arizona sun of his left arm; angry taxis, dirty and functional and knowledgeable, fought for survival in the New York City of his head.

• And his heart. God, his heart! He felt it separate and distinct in his chest. Isolated and pumping, he knew its outermost limits. And every car that raced and roared in his vision of himself finally ended in his heart. An endless traffic of Saabs and Fords and Plymouths and Volkswagens and modified buggies of every sort and Toyotas and cars from all over the world lined up and entered his pounding heart.

• He watched, amazed and stupefied, as he filled up with cars tighter and tighter until finally he was bumper to bumper from head to toe. His skin stretched. His veins and arteries blared with the honking of horns, jammed with a traffic jam that would never be over because it had no place to go. Cars, cars everywhere and no place to drive.

• But at the last moment, when he was gasping and choking with cars, truly terrified that they would keep multiplying until the seams of his skin split and spilled his life, a solution – dreamlike and appropriate – came to him in his vision. He was a car. A superbly equipped car. He would escape because he was the thing that threatened himself, and he would not commit suicide.

• If he needed more air he’d turn on the air-conditioner. If he needed more strength, he’d burn a higher octane gasoline. If he needed more confidence, he’d get another hundred horses under the hood. If the light of the world bothered him, he’d tint his windshield. And his immortality lay in numberless junkyards, . . .

Sammy Johns – Chevy Van --1975

\I gave a girl a ride in my wagon\She rolled in and took control\She was tired and her mind was a-draggin'\I said get softly (?) back, dream of rock and roll\\Refrain:\\Like a picture she was layin' there\Moonlight dancin' off her hair\She woke up and took me by the hand\She's gonna love me in my Chevy van\And that's all right with me\\Her young face was like that of an angel\Her long legs were tanned and brown\Better keep your eyes on the road, son\Better slow this vehicle down\\Refrain\\I put her out in a town that was so small\You could throw rocks (a rock?) from end to end\A dirt-road Main Street, she walked off in bare feet\It's a shame I won't be passin' through again\