In ’94 I drove a ’63 Rambler. In ’95, a mid-seventies Dodge Adventurer. In ’96, I leased a new Toyota Tacoma. The valencia ivory Rambler was found for sale around the corner from the 1906 pre-fab inhabited briefly in SF. The shack had a rose bush in front about the same age as the building. The car had a three-on-the-tree & drove like a tractor. It was sold to a bartender-acquaintance in advance of an out-of-state move — part of a futile Spring cleaning that got messy for awhile. Even the bush was uprooted. The white & turquoise two-tone Adventurer was purchased cheap from a farm near the next hovel further north. It had a homespun feel with stereo speakers hung upside down behind the bench seat, three different tire sizes & bad spark plugs. I could watch the gas tank drain in real time as I’d drive the two miles back & forth to my beer-slinging job in-town from the reservation bay cabin I was renting. The green-pearl Tacoma was picked up at a dealership somewhere in Calif when I wasn’t really specifically living anywhere. It was on special: $187/mo-2/yr lease. It came brand new with some sporty decal on the side — a typical nineties swath-of-happiness design which I had the dealership remove. I also had them install a black fiberglass bed lid that locked in back with what looked like a child’s small key. When driving through vast, flat windy places like Iowa or Saskatchewan, the lid would bow in the middle, lifted from strong crosswinds. I had to get moving straps to belt it down, hooked to the rear wheel hub. Over time, the straps rubbed the paint off leaving beautiful erosion marks that hastened the body’s surrender to rust.
The Rambler is memorialized in the artwork of my debut album, Bloomed. It’s eternally parked there, with its unbelievably-mere 45,000 miles at the time, like a forever-young photo of a lost childhood friend. The only scar was a small patch of rooftop rust near the back where rain had dripped in the same place from a Noe Valley garage for the decades that the original owner left the car nearly unused.
The Adventurer is sequestered to an undocumented memory of its fumy, passively-misfiring growl. Its odometer was at a standstill, like mine seemed to be, then. I bartered the truck for the services of a sound person I was borrowing from a headliner I hooked up with for a few tours. It ended up chugging around somewhere in the dairy belt by the sound person. I figured the deal worked out to about the same as what I paid the farmer for it. The Tacoma's lease expired at its terms with a few hundred more miles than contractually allowed. After weighing the mileage penalty vs its worth, I just got a bank loan to ride it out. Soon, at nearly 300,000 miles, another dealership advised an engine rebuild. The Toyota & I both scoffed &, instead, replaced the fiberglass lid for a windowless shell & kept going.
Finally, in 2013, with a terminal catalytic converter & windshield #5-ish unable to grip onto the rusting body, it was traded in due to an impassable state inspection.
Though the Tacoma wasn’t realistically worth anything, an Upstate NY dealership took a few grand off a used minivan trade-in, fixed it up & put it on display there, presented as a taxidermic specimen of extreme vitality.
Love that Rambler pic! 💥👍🏼 Cool hearing the backstory. I also have a storied history with cars, from ‘72 Chevy Impala to a ‘92 Chevy Lumina. ☺️
met jon langford after a show at the Old Town School of Folk Music and we talked about how you and him recorded your music at Sally Timms apt in Chicago.