CHAPTER 9

VAN

Ironically, all groups are tied to an automotive destiny. And the automobile is, of course, the primary culprit in the destruction of the world via global warming, suburban sprawl, and oil wars. This underlines the paradox of the group, who purport to embody some accelerated utopian artistic ideal, but are alchemized into Teamsters for most of their lifetime.

Unlike Teamsters, however, the group has no union benefits or representation against their boss class. In fact, the labor model for independent groups is a primitive, fractured cross between the minstrels of the Dark Ages and an Avon lady. Perhaps groups should look into unionizing as Teamsters, hauling freight from show to show.

Hank Williams named his touring truck “Bucephalus” after Alexander the Great’s warhorse. The implication that he was an imperial conquistador on a heroic mission is inherent in the conceit of the groups as well, both before and since.

The vehicle a group drives—like the shoes they wear or their make of guitar—is a signal which audiences absorb, whether consciously or not. The craze amongst garage groups of the 1960s was to drive a hearse or an ambulance painted with the logo or insignia of the aggregate. Parked ostentatiously in front of the record hop, this was a signal to the showgoer that the group’s claims to wildness, carelessness, and stylized outrageousness were legitimate. The fashion for such unreliable vehicles quickly faded, however, and was replaced with an institutionalized fetish for “cargo” vans—the more workmanlike and “no frills,” the better.

During this phase, the Ford Econoline and the Dodge Ram were regarded as “real” and rugged, while a minivan or station wagon was an embarrassment—effeminate, suburban, and square. This has changed, to some extent, with the downsizing of groups into electro, folk, or two-person acts. At the time of this writing, the rented minivan is a signal of a hep, digitally sophisticated, “What-me-worry?” sensibility. Its comfortable seats with drink holders eschew the stress-inducing roar of the cargo van engine. Like the English groups of the mid-’60s, who would lip-synch carelessly on the television, unhindered by plugs and amplifiers, the modern “indie” group desires to infer its wealth, privilege, and ease of existence. Owning a van seems like a dirty, proletarian hassle.

Once successful, the group is expected to hire a driver and a tour bus. This is an expensive look to maintain but nonetheless a requirement at a certain level, like the private jet for the successful corporation.

The more popular groups discuss their drivers and the smell of the broken toilet on the bus in the manner that their junior peers discuss clubs and promoters. The tour bus parked at the side of a club or theater is a prime accessory, as are the tractor-trailers used by the next higher echelon of entertainer. Once a certain stature is reached, none of these accoutrements are visible at all, and the star appears to be sans “fuzz”—free of responsibility, like a nomad chieftain or astral deity.

The van, being the group’s vessel from city to city, contains its clothes, gear, and personnel. The van is as indispensable to a group as its instruments are. The mechanization of the group, via these rugged oil and electric appliances, rehabilitates the mawkishness of their expression for audiences. During the Industrial Revolution—and accelerating into the nuclear and space ages—machines became not just tools for use by humans, but also came to be considered indispensable as conduits for communication.

 

 

As early as the eighteenth century, machines were displacing the specialist, the craftsperson, and the farmworker. The farmer was replaced with a thresher, the tailor with a sewing machine, the once mighty cavalryman was cut down from his steed with a machine gun, and the theatrical play was abandoned for the motion picture. Every other kind of worker from every other trade stepped aside to be one-upped by a noisy, belching, perfectly efficient, human-chewing machine.

As society was completely mechanized, humanity’s natural state was seen to be weak, embarrassing, flawed, and in need of industrial improvement. Humans couldn’t go very fast, for example—their hearts were weak. They were inefficient. Their skin wasn’t metal, and it couldn’t take a cool paint job. Eventually, not only “craft” but also communication and expression were considered insufficient if they weren’t mediated through mechanization.

The telephone and the microphone were invented because people felt more comfortable with a machine as a liaison and a go-between, something to give their voices the electric warble of the mechanized age and liberate them from using the same natural acoustics as the woodland critter and the caveman. There was a general shame regarding the human condition. The handwriting of a human was felt to be lame, so the typewriter was invented to abolish it. Photographs took over from paintings and memory. People wouldn’t play music directly to each other with a piano or a guitar anymore, but only through a machine called a radio or a record player. If music had to be performed live, it only felt legitimate if transmitted through an enormous PA or “sound system.”

The electrical instruments and amplifiers a rock ’n’ roll group plays are really part of this same tradition of assuming a factorized identity, a way of inserting mechanized components into the musical combo so as to rehabilitate its pathetic, tawdry humanity.

Smoking was another attempt to industrialize the person. With the magical factories heroically churning out smoke as they improved society more and more, many people felt a need to either contribute or somehow conform. The cigarette, once lit up, linked mankind to their factories. When belching industrial towers were imported to the third world, the stink of smoke was no longer seen to be sexy to first-worlders and smoking became essentially verboten, low-class, and degenerate. It’s hard to find a place where one is still allowed to smoke in the “West.”

When cigarettes were deemed déclassé, they were almost immediately replaced with mobile cellular telephones. The cell phone is a postindustrial version of the same thing. When a person uses a cell phone, it is an attempt to close the gap between them and their new gods, the computers. The smoke of the factory chimneys is replaced with the radiated satellites of the digital society. And when one is not using one’s mobile computer phone—which is rarely—the important thing is to have a cup of coffee in a to-go cup, which serves as a fuel tank—another assimilationist move by humanity, designed to ingratiate themselves to their machine masters. It sends a message to one’s automobile: “Look! Me too!”

When the car was invented, it was really an attempt to mechanize the human, to create a cyborg. The car, for the original automobile theorists, wasn’t supposed to be something one got into and got out of, but instead an extension of one’s body and, eventually, either through science or evolution, a permanent attachment. At the height of the automobile era (the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s), the car was presented as a sex partner for both men and women. Its sensual shape and ample trunk space, its purring engine and obedient reliability, made it a perfect conjugal companion. People would be attached physically, psychically, sexually to their car/self and there would be no more need for bad marriages and procreation. Just a new lease every year or so for the new model. It was a brave utopian dream to free the citizenry from their feeble legs, inefficient carriages, and stifling home lives.

When the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, or “Interstate,” was introduced by President Eisenhower in 1956 under the pretense of being a military defense system, it brought a completely detached experience for the driver, who no longer had to contend with traffic, stoplights, crossroads, people, or even things at the side of the road. The oil, automobile, and tire concerns, which had lobbied for its construction, were ecstatic that their inventions finally had a place where they were free to roam to their heart’s content—places where they could be the machines they were meant to be. As one roared along the Interstate’s extrawide lanes with impunity, it gave rise to a new mode of solipsistic, ultraindividualistic thinking.

Because the Interstate was financed under the pretense of being a defense system for moving troops and landing aircraft, it was required to be shorn of roadside shrubbery and buildings. Thus the view from the road looks mind-numbingly similar no matter what state or region one is in. This increases the Interstate user’s view of him or herself as singular and superimportant.

When the Internet, also financed as a military tool, came about a few decades later, it was just an extension of this “Inter-state of Mind,” with its disregard for humanity or engagement with circumstances on the ground. And today, with the Internet and digital technology paradigmatic, the Interstate seems incredibly archaic. One wonders, as one drives along it, “Why can’t I text myself to my destination?”

With the motorcycle gangs and the truckers, the auto industry’s brave dream of the Man-Machine almost came to fruition. Fueled by white pills and diner grease, identifying themselves by their wheels, and indispensable to mechanized society, the trucker seemed poised to introduce an absolute melding of flesh and steel. In the 1950s, trucker songs and mythology were abundant. (Coleman Wilson’s “Passing Zone Blues,” Swanee Caldwell’s “Six Days on the Road,” Jimmy Logsdon’s “Gear Jammer.”) But the truckers’ mundane off-highway habits and proletarian demeanor made them less a model for emulation than another itinerant freak show, feared by the middle classes. While the motorcycle clubs seemed momentarily utopian to a post-war society despising bourgeois tedium and struck with wanderlust, they soon degenerated into mafioso cliques of ruffians, rogues, and racists.

The groups, though, more than any other subculture, still embody the cyborg vision of old Detroit. Wired for sound when away from their vehicles, and tied inextricably to electrified instrument-machines, they rely on the van, roads, tires, and oil as much as any other profession does. But unlike the Teamsters, cabbies, and MC clubs they share the road with, the groups are imbued with the nobility inherent to the “artist” class, who struggle to maintain their vision against almost impossible odds. Of all the creatures that ply the highway, the group is what the Big Three’s grand dreamers would have been most pleased with.