Songs about Car Crashes

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That lovely instrumental piece is by a 70s Oregon group called the Muddy Bottom Boys, whose album on Grassroots records is likely a rarity, if not particularly valuable.  I find it very strange that privately pressed bluegrass and string band records from that time – A golden age for traditional music – are given so little attention by record collectors.  “Slaughter on the Highway“ is the title track from this fine album and also the start of today’s playlist of classic car crash songs.

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“Long Black Limousine“ was first recorded by Wynn Stewart in 1958.  As with most types of death songs (Murder, suicide, etc) country music really leads the pack.  Still, it was Elvis 1969 blue-eyed soul version of the song that became most memorable.*

*Yeah, Elvis’ eyes were brown.

Here’s a great quartet of car crash gems, all pre-Beatles pop.  There are so many great things about the Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack“ that the motorcycle crash itself – Complete with sound effects – isn’t even the song’s highlight.  “Dead Man’s Curve“ by Jan & Dean, on the other hand, really hits it’s stride with “the last thing I remember Doc…“ (When does a good story ever start with that line?).  A couple years later, Jan Berry actually did crash a race car and nearly kill himself, although it was a couple miles from Dead Man’s Curve, which you might be surprised to learn is a real stretch of Sunset Boulevard.

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The other two tracks are Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel“ and “Last Kiss“ by J. Frankie Wilson and the Cavaliers.  After scoring the biggest hit of his career with Last Kiss, J. Frankie Wilson was nearly killed when his manager, Sonley Roush fell asleep at the wheel on an Ohio highway.

And here is one last classic pop song about a car crash, Richie Valens’ 1960 #1 hit “Tell Laura I Love Her“.  His recording was actually a cover of Ray Peterson’s version.  That record was deemed by Decca Records in England to be so distasteful that 20,000 copies of it were destroyed rather than be issued.  In addition to the Richie Valens record, the song was also covered by J. Frankie Wilson on the same record as his own smash crash hit, “Last Kiss“.

But the most interesting thing about “Tell Laura I Love Her“ is that in the original version lyricist Jeff Barry had Tommy compete in a rodeo, not a drag race.  There, he was bucked and injured and just as in the finished song used his dying breath to say, “Tell Laura I love her … my love for her will never die“.  Would it have been a hit?  Would Richie Valens have covered it?  And, most interesting of all, would I be creating a rodeo accident playlist instead?  We can only speculate.

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I had to dig a box of tapes out of our basement to include this next song, which I remember from a 7“ single that I guess I don’t own anymore.  Fortunately, I made a tape of it that I found in the basement.  And here it is, a song by the Bay Area punk/rockabilly group the Gr’ups.  These guys (And gal) were an awesoe group whose best tracks seemed to be exploring the idea of punk rock fairy tales.  “Roadkill“, on the other hand, is a car crash song:

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On ay 12th, 1956 actor Montgomery Clift smashed his car into a telephone pole in Hollywood.  His injuries along with his subsequent drug and alcohol problems and bad publicity, tanked his career.  Marilyn Monroe worked with the struggling actor near the end and remarked he was “the only person I know who is in worse shape than me.“

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“The Right Profile“, a song on the Clash’s 1979 masterpiece London Calling, is about Clift’s accident and his post-accident career, often called “the longest suicide in Hollywood history“.  Strummer and Jones are pretty cold to the actor who had to be shot from just the right profile to hide his scars.

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Percys Song was a Times They Are A-Changin‘-era Dylan track that went unissued until it appeared on the middle-80s Biograph box set.  Dylan credits folksinger – for the melody, but the songs underspoken narrative is certainly his own work.

This next song is less subtle.  The Drunken Driver is from the 1997 disc Bluegrass Rules! by mandolin player Ricky Skaggs, and its based on an earlier song by Ferlin Husky which is even more tragic and violent.

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Sonley Rousch did not survive the accident in which J. Frankie Wilson was injured.  ore than half of all single-vehicle accidents are fatigue-related, in fact.  I looked and looked, but there just wasn’t a relevant song by Asleep at the Wheel.  There is, however, one by the Barenaked Ladies called “Tonight is the Night I Fell Asleep at the Wheel“ – It’s on their album Maroon.  Here it is…

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One thing I found remarkable is that out of all the Bruce Springsteen songs about cars (Fairly at least 75%), I could only find three about car accidents.  The most depressing of those is this outtake from his 1982 folk album, Nebraska.  The lyrics from this unissued track were reused in another unissued song that appeared on the Tracks compilation of outtakes, called “Rockaway the Days“.  Each ends with the protagonist wrapping his car around a telephone pole (Perhaps inspired by Montgomery Clift).  Here is the original outtake, called “Losin’ Kind“, followed by the one from Tracks.

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Roy Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway“ was a Grand Ole Opry favorite, based on “I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray“ by the Dixon Brothers.  Like a lot of great country songs its simple and morbid.  Bruce Springsteen revived it at the end of his 1980 double album The River.  Springsteen’s song is ore of a character study of the witness to the crash and an admonishment of the victims.  Having once been the person who got a call in the middle of the night that a loved one had died in a car crash, I feel like those last two verses of Springsteen’s song are among the finest things he ever wrote, closing out four sides of honest, working class struggles and anxieties.

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