As I was riding yesterday, I thought of the old jingles they used to sing on motorcycle commercials when I was a kid. I started wondering what the lyrics were. I’ve found Yamaha’s:
I seem to remember part of it as:
The site where I found the lyrics describes the first quote as a poem in a brochure printed in 1974. Maybe they modified it for the commercian jingle?
Can anyone clear that up, and does anyone know the words to the jingles for:
Honda: “Get yourself a Honda / Built like a watch that was meant to last a hundred years…”
Kawasaki: “Kawasaki lets the good times roll / Kawasaki lets the good times roll…”
Suzuki: “Forget your troubles / Get on [a] Suzuki / We’re looking for a better way…”
Johnny LA
The song is called “Silver Bird” and was released 1970 by **Mark Lindsay ** (formerly of Paul Revere and the Raiders). Mark Lindsay was an avid motorcycle rider, so the association of the song and the bike was a natural.
Oh and the orginal song is NOT about a motorcycle.
It’s funny, when I saw the thread title, I thought “Hey, I’ll post something really obscure”. - yet that was the first jingle listed !!!
I’m a life-long Yamaha rider, so that’s probably why it’s the one I thought of first.
But your trivia is certainly obscure! I always thought they just made it up for the advert. (I did know that Kawasaki and Suzuki were using old popular songs.)
To broaden the thread a little bit: Newer motorcycle commercials seem dull to me. When I was a kid, watching the commercials I mentioned, it was all about fun. The message was it’s fun to ride a motorcycle. The jingles were happy tunes, and the images were of happy people riding through pretty country. “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.” (That one is a little “before my time”, but I’ve seen it somewhere.) Nowadays it’s all about speed or toughness, and interest rates.
I guess it’s not surprising. “Back in the day” we had Standards and Dirt Bikes. Some of the standards were modified into off-road bikes, and some were more suited to riding fast on the freeway. But they were still Standard-class. In the 1980s bikes started to be more specialised. We got Sportbikes. Cruisers became more popular. The 1970s Honda Gold Wing 1000 evolved from a Standard “muscle bike” into a bloated Tourer. The UJM (“Universal Japanese Motorcycle”) became less desireable to people who were looking for bikes to fulfill specific missions such as racing, touring, cruising, etc.
Not that that’s a bad thing! I love my R-1. But by making “niche” bikes, I think they can no longer focus simply on fun. They have to tout the racing heritage of the sport bikes, the off-road prowess of the dirt bikes, the “coolness” of the cruisers… They just can’t show people out enjoying a nice ride any more.
I’d love to see motorcycle commercials that focus on fun. I think they should also emphasize economy, in these days of ever-increasing fuel prices. IMO a Standard bike is a good overall machine. It’s comfortable, it gets good mileage, and it’s fun to just put around country lanes. I don’t know what kind of jingle they’d use (Roman P by Psychic TV comes to mind, but it’s already been used in a VW commercial), but I can see images of people just enjoying the open air. Or they can show people having fun on two wheels and insert a gentle reminder that the bike gets 40-50 mpg.
But I’d love to just see a motorcycle with people having fun, and a catchy tune.
(As I type this, the Choice Hotels commercial with Johnny Cash singing “I’ve been everywhere, man…” is playing. )
In the 60’s the jingle for Honda was “You meet the nicest people on a Honda”. We spent summers in Plymouth, MA and it was not uncommon to see someone dressed up as a Pilgrim (guides at the rock or the Mayflower) riding a Honda motor-scooter. We’d always sing at the top of our lungs “You meet the nicest Pilgrims on a Honda”. Cracked me up every time.
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