"Convoy". What the Hell?

Cafe Society
1

I’m showing off my age here, but for some unknown reason, this damn C.W. McCall song Convoy is stuck in my head. I think it’s the antibiotics that I’m on.

Some of you may remember this ‘70’s song that began the inexplicable trucker craze that spawned some of the worst pop culture dreck that everyone now uses as evidence that the Seventies sucked big time. Okay, the CB/Trucker craze was intensely stupid, but consider the source. This freakin’ song!

I mean, it’s a story song, but the story it tells makes no sense at all. A bunch of truckers join up to break traffic laws and ram toll gates? How in the hell would that work? Even without all the surveillance cameras that law enforcement has now as opposed to back then, the minute these truckers stopped at their destinations to unload, they would all be surrounded and arrested. And fired. And blacklisted from the industry.

Why would traffic laws even be an issue with these truckers? Most companies have reasonable delivery schedules, even cross-country. Oh sure, you get the occasional sleep starved driver running down Tracy Morgan, but that’s the exception, surely? And I don’t see how a convoy would’ve helped in that case anyway.

Okay, I know, it’s just a story. But it’s such a damn dumb story, and at the time it was a huge cultural phenomenon. Movies, TV shows, music, Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed, Clint Eastwood and that damn orangutan that later morphed into BJ and the Bear. And that was the top of the line dreck. The low class drivel it spawned showed up on MST3K in Riding with Death.

I was there, and I still don’t know what the hell happened. The country’s never suddenly embraced anything like stevadoring or construction work with such gusto as it did the trucking industry in the mid-seventies. I can’t explain it.

It couldn’t just have been the CB lingo, could it? I mean, diner talk has been around for decades (Adam and Eve on a Raft) and the country never went nuts over that.

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It was about freedom, good buddy!

3

When we were kids my brother got caught up in Big Rig fever. He had truck posters on his wall, collected Trucking magazines, made truck model kits, he even travelled for a week with a cousin of ours who was a truck driver. He loved Convoy (especially the song), and the second Smokey and the Bandit, and the TV shows Movin’ On, and BJ and the Bear.

Then it all came to a screeching halt, and its brief pop cultural impact vanished like it had never existed. Funny how that happens.

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Y’all will love this video I found, I think.

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It was the CB lingo, and the availability of CBs to normal people, allowing them to peek into a subculture. Also, ‘Convoy’ was honky proto-rap.

Or sunspots. Either one.

Thank you for bringing up this topic. I’m going to mention it to my kids in case any old fart starts to talk about the good old days. They can just say:

“Pigpen this here’s the Rubber Duck
We just aint gonna pay no toll
So we crashed the gate doin’ ninety-eight
I says Let them truckers roll, ten-four”

Which should pretty much demolish any argument regarding cultural superiority of the good old days.

6

Oh, I think I can top that that, Bo. Um, maybe ‘top’ isn’t the right term for the winner in a race to the bottom, but you get the idea.

Ohio folks of a certain age may remember this, and wonder why we watched it.

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I was another one of those kids who were “Convoy” crazy (I was about 9 or 10 when it came out, and I collected everything I could get my hands on related to C. W. McCall, trucks, and CB radios). I was a weird kid–even weirder since I was a girl. It was mostly a boy thing, but I was a major tomboy. I remember we took a cross-country trip in our motorhome in the summer of '76 and I spent many an hour counting and identifying big rigs.

The impetus for the whole phenomenon was the 55-mph speed limit, which I believe was signed into law by Richard Nixon. The truckers were strongly opposed to it because it cut into their livelihoods, and “Convoy” grew out of that. That’s why it mentions “double nickels” and how undesirable it is. The truckers were seen as lovable outlaws, kind of like pirates or bikers. It all just kinda snowballed from there. I even remember buying CB-radio- and trucker-related books from my grade-school book clubs (things like “CB Logbook of the White Knight,” and “CB Lingo”).

And yeah, it did disappear about as quickly as it came.

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As someone who worked as a DJ on a country music station in this era, I’ll have to disagree with your penultimate sentence.

I would argue that the CB/Trucker craze, far from being “intensely stupid,” had certain things to recommend it.

  1. For truckers, it brought a chance to have human contact during grueling, long hours spent in the cab. Prior to this, it was country music (on 8-tracks and, um, radio!). All well and good, but I would think talking with other human beings was a better antidote to loneliness.

  2. And far from a simple antidote to loneliness, there were practical applications. Yes, CB was used to circumvent speeding laws, but it also could be useful to alerting truckers to accidents or construction that caused traffic to back up on the interstate, allowing them to seek alternate routes rather than sitting for minutes/hours cooling their heels.

  3. CB allowed not only contact with fellow drivers, but also with ordinary folks at home. No doubt the quality of that contact varied, but I suspect a lot of lonely people in homes across the nation also benefited from that human contact with folks they otherwise would not have talked to. Doubtless some bad came out of that, but also some good.

  4. I make no claims as to the worthiness of the song “Convoy.” It’s a novelty song. Like all such songs, some are more clever than others. Most, by definition, posit a situation that’s, well, over the top. All have in common that by the time you’ve heard the song a few times, you’re unlikely to want to hear it much again, as you’ve already got the joke.

  5. As with #3, “Convoy” gave folks a glimpse into a culture and its accompanying lingo that they otherwise would have known little about. Some embraced that culture, because people will always want to belong in some way.

  6. Of course to others, that culture seemed quite foreign and mock worthy. Rest assured that said culture’s denizens were/are just as busy mocking the culture that you thought/think was/is so cool and cutting-edge.

  7. At some future time (or perhaps right now), I will easily be able to cherry pick songs from your very most favorite era of music that will prove beyond a doubt that it “sucked big time.”

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I loved that there were enough convoy trucker movies made that our local independent TV station was able to have a themed-movie week of them when I was a kid (Channel 12 in Portland). Was not as good as the James Garner theme weeks (my annual getting to watch Support Your Local Gunfighter and Support Your Local Sheriff) or the week of showing all the Planet of the Apes movies.

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The song was an improvement over Red Sovine’s works.

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Not all of it went away.
My Dad was a traveling salesman, & kept a CB in his car/van, starting in the 70s, & going on until just around 2007.

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We had a CB in our car for our summer vacation drives through the US when I was a kid (late 60’s and all through the 70’s)

Dad was Arizona snake rancher in honour of the worthless piece of property he bought and Mom was the Ditch Witch in honour of, well lets just say she earned it.

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People using the latest technology to share news, opinions, joke, etc. under pseudonyms? What kind of bullshit is that?

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Damn, now you got it stuck in my head too!

The song has always kinda struck me as odd… can’t really explain how, but just… odd.

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I must take objection to the OP’s lamenting of trucker culture, especially his lumping in the road trip classic Smokey and the Bandit, which, from a dog lovers point of view, is one of the greatest cultural achievements of our time, into the mix.

Any film that has a basset hound in a named role should never be called “trash”. :smiley:

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Truckers and other blue collar drivers were the cowboys of the 70’s: riding the range, ropin’ strays, living life on the edge… Star Wars (Han Solo), Taxi Driver, Alien (truck drivers in space), Close Encounters, Mad Max, Smokey and the Bandit…

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That’s why I love the seventies. It was a completely “what the hell?” time. Anything was possible!

I loved the Smokey and the Bandit movies too, me and my brother both wanted to be truckers when we grew up. When we were riding in the back seat of the car, and saw a semi-truck, we would always do the arm motion to get the trucker to blow his horn. And they always did…big thrill! :smiley: Mom and Grandma didn’t care for this game much.

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I see it as a dying gasp of the Old West conceit. Guys being guys and bending the law. The lingo helped a lot. And the idea that slovenly unkempt fat guys could wield the power of a big killer machine and frighten little old ladies in Pintos and such, just added to the mystique. Safer than being a biker, at least.

Besides, everybody got to be someplace.

Twickster, my hat’s off to you for some spot-on irony!

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+1 million

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Oh my God! Thanks for posting that. I don’t know if I just needed a laugh, but I was literally crying from laughing so hard at that video. I remember loving that song as a kid; but this really pointed out how kitschy it was.

Where I grew up (NW Oklahoma) CB Fever hit big time. I already grew up in a small farm town; and a lot of the farmers already used CBs but it went into overdrive. There was a kid a couple of grades below me that even had one mounted on his bicycle (I’m talking 12 or 13 years old).

Maybe someone’s Google-Fu is stronger than mine; but C.W. McCall was on Johnny Carson on May 21, 1975 (obviously I was able to find the date, just not the video). I remember there was a jeep on stage, and ‘sang’ Convoy with one foot on the Jeep step in a manly fashion. I wish I could find the video.

However i DID find this video from Convoy: The Movie starring Kris Kristofferson as the Rubber Duck, and an always hot Ali McGraw.