Heller RatRod

I love cars. Muscle cars, rally cars, open wheel cars, stock cars, supercars, hot rods. Anything made with the dream of speed in mind. I love the way they fit together, like a giant puzzle. I love the science behind them, the physics and chemistry. I love the mythology they engender, the romance of the road. This probably comes from watching my dad work on an ever changing stable of old cars, in his case mostly just trying to keep the family beater running. But he had eclectic taste in old cars, preferring VW beetles (so easy to work on) and 50's era Chevy and GMC trucks. I have a picture in my office of me at 8 sitting in the bed of one of those trucks while he works on it. When I was 8 he was 27 years old. My own daughter is 9 and i'm 42. It was a different world back then, and I sometimes wonder what she'd be like if she could have watched me work on my own line of nearly dead, 300 dollar cars back when I was 27. Would she be taking apart every appliance in the house to see how it worked, the way I did? I don't know. It's fun to think about. Anyway thanks to her it will be another ten or so years before I can afford another project car. I'll have to be content with singing about them until then.

Musically, I wanted to take the standard form and see how I could bend it to my imagination, which is pretty much what I do with all of my music, and probably due to the fact that I love hot rodding so much, taking that old thing and frankensteining it into a craig thing, a tempie thing. I think the best hot rod song writer of my generation is Springsteen. Setzer and other 50's buffs no doubt do the best job mechanically, but they don't make the genre their own like Springsteen, they don't create new myths, they work with the old ones. That's fine, but I love how the Springsteen hot rod tunes could not have been written in any age but his. So i wanted to do that, you know, make the old new and mine and 2011. If you listen closely some of the percussion is my million piece socket set and my craftsman toolbox. Two things that should be in every hot rod song.

Oh also - I apologize to the Mopar gods for slamming dodge in the chorus. I still love you, I will always love you, i can hear a hemi from ten miles away and it fills my heart with joy whenever i hear it. But it fit the song. Sorry.

AND last but not least, the rad illustration is a bob dorsey original, the dude has skills.

I was born
in a machine shop
outside of rockingham
when they chopped my top
my daddy said
this boy's a real badass
then he took me to the spray shed
and gave me my first tat

cause i'm a heller ratrod
i'm a heller ratrod
'32 ford body and a
chevy small block
bring your plymouth
son bring your dodge
i'll smoke them both
cause i'm a heller ratrod

i shut em down
in primer gray
with junk yard parts
bondo and tape
and i shout em down
in glossy black
with top shelf chrome
yeah, i set em back

cause i'm a heller ratrod...

hide your daughters
hide your sons
hide your mamas
i whistle and they run
hide your grandma
your grandpa too
hide your paychecks
your cigarettes and booze cause

i'm a heller ratrod...

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Uploaded: Oct 19, 2011 - 06:24:40 AM
Last Updated: Oct 19, 2011 - 06:24:40 AM Last Played: May 10, 2013 - 07:39:27 AM

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