"Desperate Rock'n'Roll" Vol. 18

...Ronnie got a job at a service station and poured every spare cent into getting the car customized at Barris'. His car was right there while we were talking, a fact I was very aware of, because he never looked at me. He never took his eyes off that car. It's what is called semi-custom. Nithing has been done to it to give it a really sculptural quality, but a lot of streamlining details have been added. The main thing you notice is the color - Tangerine Flake. This paint - one of Barris' Kandy Kolor concoetions - makes the car look like it has been encrusted with chips of some kind semipreciousossified tangerine, all coated with a half-inch of clear lacquer. There used to be very scholarly and abstruse studies of color and color symbolism around the turn of the century, and theorists concluded that preferences for certain colors were closely associated with rebelliousness, and these are the same colors many of the kids go for - purple, carnal yellow, various violets and lavenders and fuchsias and many other of these Kandy Kolors...
... After he got his car fixed up, Ronnie made a triumphal progress back home. He won the trophy in his class at the national hot-rod and custom-car show in Indianapolis, and he came tooling into Lafayette, Indiana, and down the main street in his tangerine-flake 1960 Chevrolet. It was like Ezra Pound going back to Hamilton, New York, with his Bollington plaque and saying, Here I am, Hamilton, New York. The way Ronnie and Barris tell it, the homecoming was a big success - all the kids thought Ronny was all right, after all, and he made a big hit at home. I can't believe the part about home. I mean, I can't really believe Ronnie made a hit with a tangerine-flake Chevrolet. But I like to conjecture about his parents. I don't know anything about them, really. All I know is, I would have had a hell of a lump in my throat if I had seen Ronny coming up to the front door in his tangerine-flake car, bursting so flush and vertical with triumph that no one would ever think of him as a child of the red sulk - Ronny, all the way back from California with his grail... (excerpt from "the candy kolored tangerine flake streamline baby" by Tom Wolfe to be continued...)
traxfromwax:
1. Tag Along - Tommy Todd 2. Let's Go Wild - Alvie Self 3. My Baby Loves To Rock - Del Reeves 4. Beating On The Bars - Travelin' Texans 5. Baby's Boss - Johnny Scoggins 6. Do The Hully Gully - King Coleman 7. Trouble - Hedley And Lee 8. Early Next Mornin' - Gary Von Ilg 9. Won't You Be My Baby - Jerry Banes 10. Bye-Bye - Duals 11. Hurricane Baby - Curley Money 12. Rockin' In The Coconut Top - King Ivory Lee 13. Ford And A Shaker - James Gallagher 14. The Cheater - Bobby De Soto 15. I've Got A Bead On You Baby - 5 Williamson Bros 16. TV Commercial - Johnny Parker
ripped from vinyl in glorious monoloudarama!