“Listen. Get this:
Nobody with a good car needs to worry about nothin’, you understand?”
1. We Are The Bridge
Labeling and generalizing about generations can be a tricky business; I must bear that in mind as I expound upon this: those of us who are of the age to be labeled “Generation X,” those of us born between roughly 1965 and 1980, are in a unique position in the world.
Unique, yes…but perhaps there is a parallel. Think back to 100 years earlier. Imagine if you will someone born between, roughly, 1865-1880. Think about what such a person would have experienced in their “formative years” as they were growing up and becoming an adult. Coming into the world following the American Civil War, someone born in 1865 would have been raised without light bulbs, flushable toilets, or telephones: by the time they were 50, they would be driving around in a car and calling their friends to round them up to go watch airplanes take off from a nearby airfield before heading to a ballroom to go dancing to records. We often think of the Civil War as ancient history, but less than a lifetime later, people were being machine gunned and air-bombed in the next war.
So it goes with my generation: those of us raised on Hanna Barbera, Pop-Tarts and Thunderjets came of age in a world where we had to make phone calls and physically go to places to gather knowledge and learn things; now all our interactions are through a screen. We are the generation that created that, who made it happen, who watched it happen; we are the bridge between the analog world and the digital world: we remember what the real world was like, lived half our lives in it, but will spend our final years behind the screens.
“Listen. Get this:
Nobody with a good car needs to be justified!”
2. Weekends Are For Rabbit Holes
Sometimes on a Sunday evening after long hours in a rabbit hole, its amusing to look back and try to piece together the string of events that led you down there. This, of course, can become a rabbit hole of its own if you spend too much time wondering how that happened or what it all means! I’ll try to walk carefully around that slippery slope by recalling that on Thursday last, I did a post about my delight in turning my friend Jason into a Hot Wheels collector. When I pieced together a series of short videos clips showing the parking lots of 1:64 die-cast cars he’s built in the last few months, I chose to score that video with a couple of bars of a song I remembered from my pre-digital youth, a single from 1985 called “Every Day Is Halloween” by Ministry. I can’t say why this particular song occurred to me to score this video: thematically, it doesn’t make sense. “Why” might not be important: I just liked the song, and used a few opening notes from it for that video and I didn’t think much more of it. The Universe, it seems, had a few more thoughts on the matter…
On Friday while I was at work, Jason sent me a text message to say he was busy packing and getting ready to move; this is a chore that all of us must surely dread, and it gets harder and harder as we get older. He sent me a screen shot of a song that had come up at random from his huge collection of digital music files and said “Just the stuff to get me motivated!” The song he was referring to was “Jesus Built My Hotrod.”
Rabbit Hole Drop on 3…2…1!
“And I tell you why! And I tell you why!
I come a long way since I believed in anything. And I come half-way around the world!”
3. Jesus Built My Hotrod!
In November of 1991, I was 20 years old; after a wasted “gap year” I was in my 1st year of college, angry and aimless and with no idea of where I was going or what I wanted to do with my life. Sounds very “Gen-X,” doesn’t it? These were my “punkiest years,” and I was heavily involved in music, collecting records, and had a large number of friends that I roamed around the wastelands of southern California strip malls with, record hunting, going to punk shows and concerts, and drowning our angst in booze. These were our last “pre-digital days;” the last days when cars from the 1960’s were still on the road as daily drivers, when jobs were still plentiful, when things were still affordable and there was still a possibility of a middle-class future. And in November of 1991, Ministry released the first single of what would be their 5th studio album; that single was “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” which became an unexpected hit, but in order for it to be played on the radio, it had to be edited, because-unlike so many songs in that era-the “long version” (clocking in @ 8:15) was the original version, not an “extended mix:” a shortened version was made for FM radio, which on record sleeves was brilliantly titled as exactly what it was: the “Short, Pusillanimous, So-They-Can-Fit-More-Commercials-On-The-Radio Edit.” The original long version-the real mix-was titled the “Redline/Whiteline Version.”
It is this version that opens up with a series of clips of dialog that have been lodged deep inside my brain for 33 years: clips of what sound like a crazy backwoods Southern preacher leading his flock to worship at a dealership filled with muscle cars! I never knew where those clips of dialog had come from, but they were so compelling that they made the song for me: listening to the short mix without them seemed pointless.
“Where you come from is gone. Where you thought you were going to, weren’t never there. And where you are ain’t no good unless you can get away from it!”
When the single was released on vinyl, cassette, and CD, the cover art featured a Chrysler Corporation press photo of a 440 big block with a Six-Pac on an engine stand (frequently misidentified even to this day as a “Hemi”). As a car-mad post-teen, was there anything about this song, this single, or this band, not to like???
4. Someone Drowned In My Pool
Sitting at my desk at work last Friday, that text message from Jason set me off on a mission: I hadn’t heard the song in decades, but I could remember every note of it, and now finding out where those lines of dialog came from was a mouse-click away! So I did…
Rabbit Hole Drop on 3…2…
Those compelling lines of dialog are all taken from various scenes in a 1979 movie called Wise Blood. Directed by the late great multi-oscar winner John Huston, it is an adaptation of the famous novel of the same title by Georgia-born writer Flannery O’Connor. I am aware of who she is by name, yet somehow I have never taken the time to read any of her stuff…strange, since another of my favorite and most “literary” bands-Shriekback-recorded a song titled after one of her best-known short stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”
Also interesting is that the name “Wiseblood” (spelled as one word) was used as one of the almost countless side project names for another musician I greatly admire and who was in heavy rotation on my turntable in the early 90s, J.G. Thirlwell, who is best known for releasing albums under variations of the name Foetus, but used the name Wiseblood to put out several singles and eventually an album when he was working with members of the band Swans; Wiseblood’s 1987 album Dirtdish – which lives up to its name in more ways than one – is another fever-dream of gearhead mania, particularly the tracks “Stumbo” and “Motorslug.” On top of all this, the book was admired by Nick Cave, who read it in his younger years when he was still with The Birthday Party, and is said to have influenced his own first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel. How could so many things that mean so much to me be so connected, and yet me remain so ignorant of it all??? It’s time to fix this!
So there I was with the answer, finally, after 33 years: this was the source of those opening lines of dialog from this song that I listened too with such head-banging enthusiasm back in those heady beer-swilling days! All this from scoring a 30 second video of toy cars recorded at a friend’s apartment and a casual follow-up mention in a text message! All of this made possible by our digital world; by our life behind the screens!
“There’s only one thing left for me to do, mama; I’ve gotta Ding a ding dang my dang a-long ling long!”
5. “Southern Gothic” At Home
Reading reviews of Wise Blood didn’t make it sound like “easy viewing.” Heavy with doom and filled with symbolism, it was claimed to be a worthwhile adaption but also described as a movie that was “all subtext with no text.” Siskel and Ebert reviewed it as a well-made film that “failed to connect.” Even so, at midnight on Saturday night I found the whole movie available on YouTube for free, so I sat down to watch it.
This was the one of the early starring roles for actor Brad Dourif, whose incredible performance makes this film. Overall, the reviews I read were spot on: more subtext than text. Siskel and Ebert hit the mark. Despite excellent performances, the intensity and the drama of the subject matter left me feeling like there was a lot there, but something fundamental was missing. And when you find that, there’s only one real solution: YOU HAVE TO READ THE BOOK!
So, back to the screen to find a downloadable version of an audiobook of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, originally published in 1952. I’ve got it on my iPod right now, and know what I’ll be listening too on my daily commutes to work over the next week! It makes me wonder if Alain Jourgensen or Chris Connolly or any of the other members of Ministry ever did the same, since they clearly loved the movie in their own heady beer-swilling days! We may never know, but I think its high-time this fan of American literature read something by an author long-regarded as a towering figure of the “Southern Gothic” genre and this weekend journey through the rabbit holes has led me straight to that.
“There’s no use trying to talk. No human sound could stand up to this. Loud enough to knock you down!”
6. CONCLUSION: What does any of this have to do with Thunderjets?
It’s the connection to cars: the mobility, the escape, the movement, the music! Flannery O’Connor got it. Her literary creation Hazel Motes got it. Al Jourgensen and Ministry definitely got it! And you get it, too, or you wouldn’t be here reading this! And the connection for your humble blogger? I’m a writer, a gearhead, and an American: Jesus built my car. It’s a love affair, Mainly Jesus and my hot rod!
“These are sensations as hard to forget as they are to ignore!”
EPILOGUE: I Almost Forgot to Mention…
There is one more line of dialog from “Jesus Built My Hotrod” that didn’t come from Wise Blood, but rather from a film I did know when I first heard the song, because its unmistakable! Let’s play a little game, dear readers: if you listen to full version of the song I embedded above, at almost exactly the 5 minute mark, who is it that says:
“Let’s Hit The F***n’ Road!”
And what movie is that from??? 😀
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