Posted on 06/19/2021 6:01:34 PM PDT by mylife
It’s pretty definitively summer now, and if the coming of summer doesn’t fill you at least with some residual, school’s-out-tinged joy, then I suppose all I have to offer you is pity. Summer should also mean something else to anyone with a pulse: the 1989 B-52 song “Love Shack.” That song famously references a gigantic Chrysler, and I think it’s time we accurately determined which Chrysler the B-52s are singing about.
I got me a Chrysler, it seats about twenty...
...
Hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale
And it’s about to set sail
I got me a car, it seats about twenty, so come on
And bring your jukebox money
So, we know three things about the car that Fred wants to drive you down to the Love Shack in: it’s a Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, and seats “about 20.”
(Excerpt) Read more at jalopnik.com ...
Bite marks on the
Pencil leads to
An Assault by Jon.
Ouch!
We had a 73 New Yorker. Didn’t seat 20, but would seat 10 I bet.
Seems like a ‘68 Newport from what I can see.
It isn’t supposed to be called a Chrysler Imperial, just Imperial, in the same way you wouldn’t say a Ford Lincoln.
The car in the video is a 1967 Chrysler Newport convertible.
It very well may be the B-52‘s Chrysler is in this Chrysler graveyard.
I submitted the pictures. If you love Chryslers, you will really hate to see what happened to these once beautiful cars.
it was till the wheel fell off and it hit a toll booth at 2 am on a feb night..
Almost any Chrysler from 1925 to 1960 would fit the bill...
tin roof... rusted.
John Lennon compared Yoko’s “singing” to Cindy and Kate’s vocals in this song, as if the world was finally catching up to Yoko’s great vocal stylings. I guess he didn’t notice that unlike Yoko, Cindy and Kate’s quirky vocals stayed in tune and on key.
I never understood what that meant. But about a year ago I stumbled across an article explaining it. I still don’t understand the connection, but oh well.
It’s easy for people who haven’t been in one to appreciate how big some cars were in the 30s, 40s and 50s. If you watch old TCM movies you’ll see that it was standard practice for the driver to park his car, slide across the front seat and exit on the passenger side.
People getting into the back of a four door kind of walked hunched over to the back seat. Your knees in the back came no where near touching the back of the front seat. In one old Chrysler or Dodge I rode in, I could stick my feet out and not touch the front seat.
Ha, ha. The slant six matched with the torqueflite was invincible. If I had had half a brain, I would have sold the Lincoln and the Avanti and kept the LeBaron. I would have saved a pile of money and frustration. But I wouldn't as many funny car stories, like when the Lincoln's steering wheel came off when My wife was driving it.
This guy did manage to get paid writing a story about nothing, however, and I'm just replying to it indirectly, for free.
https://www.mlive.com/music/2018/06/the_b-52s_talk_michigan_love_s.html
Here is the meaning behind the "TIIIIIIIN ROOOOOOF! RUSTED!" line from the song, if anyone was interested.
Yeah my friend’s first car in HS was a Chrylsler Newport. I used to remark that the hood itself was as big as Rhode Island.
My parents had a 1964 Chrysler New Yorker, and that thing was huge.
White, with red leather interior (Coulda been Naugahyde...) and rows of buttons on the dashboard instead of a column selector. Push a button to go in reverse!
I recall it had a large engine, 400+ cubic inches too, and my mother used all of it. She drove with a depleted uranium foot, and if we were acting up, she would floor it and speed up until we were crying for her to slow down, and she only agreed to do that if we would behave! That would be child abuse today, but back then, well...not so much.
In that Big Chrysler, only my mom and dad were in the front seat...usually. there would be three or four in the back seat. two in the rear facing sear out the back window, and one in between the back seat and the rear seat.
On those long, cross country drives we took in May of 1967, the rear facing seat for two was highly coveted.
The space for one of us between the seats was uncomfortable but some of us (including me) liked it because it was all yours.
The back seat was The Pit. It was the worst, especially in the middle, because my two physically bigger older brothers had to ride there, and they always had the window seats. There was no arguing there. So I was in the middle if I drew that seat. There was a lot of fighting and arguing, and my brothers would give me “frogs” alternating from side to side. A “frog” was inflicted by a sharp rap on an exposed forearm muscle with a sharp pointed knuckle. The muscle spasms and goes into a hard knot, and it hurts. I never liked riding there.
And nobody wanted to ride up front with Mom and Dad. It was hard to see out, and you didn’t sit there unless you were hurt or in trouble.
Anyway, we took that Big Chrysler from Fairfax, VA to San Franciso, where our family of eight was heading to my Dad’s new duty station in Yokosuka, Japan.
They loaded that car on a ship and it met us in Japan, and we also took it to Subic Bay later on where it stayed forever. I wonder if it ended up somewhere completely covered with ash from Mount Pinatubo.
The people who dig up that car 500 years from now will have no idea. They won’t know anything about that 1964 Chrysler New Yorker station wagon, and how it took a 20th Century Cold War family on a 30 day cross country journey on our way to Japan.
Along the way, we went to Mammoth Caves, took Route 66, went to places like the Petrified Forest and ended up on Cable Cars in San Francisco for our flight the next day.
I broke my foot the night before we left, playing dodgeball in a twilight backyard where I put my foot in a hole. My parents their friends, our friends, Navy people, and a bunch of Nuns and Priests from a local parochial school where we went. They thought it was a sprain, and I couldn’t walk on it, so they put me to bed early. I lay there, but my foot was killing me and I was all by myself in there, everyone else was still partying. At some point, one of my parent’s friends coming upstairs to use the bathroom walked by and heard me crying in the room. My mom came up, looked at my swollen foot, and on the night of the going away party, hustled off to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where they casted my broken foot. It was broken where I couldn’t walk on it, so I had to be pushed around in a wheelchair. They did check it when were were staying at the base camping ground at Fort Leavenworth, and determined it had healed enough in three weeks that they could remove the cast!
In that Big Chrysler, we were on our way up to Expo 67, and we got lost on back roads at night in the pouring rain where my dad got stuck in the mud trying to turn the car around on a narrow dirt road with the rear wheels hanging in the air over a short muddy hill. We slept in the back with the car hanging out like that, all six of us under blankets while my parents celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary.
In that Big Chrysler, the brakes failed on it coming down Pat’s Peak!
What a trip. We had a large ten person canvas tent, sleeping bags and air mattresses, a camp stove...all strapped to the top with my wheelchair tied on top of it all like a cherry!
Those archeologists or construction people will have no idea of where that rusty frame of a car had went.
How I loved that Big Chrysler!
If it were a Pontiac....
The Bonneville (known as the Parisienne in Canada until 1981), and its platform partner, the Grand Ville, are some of the largest Pontiacs ever built; in station wagon body styles they reached just over 230 inches
At 231.3 in in length the 1974-76 Grand Safaris are the longest Pontiacs ever.
BUT the Chrysler big as a whale might have been....
Chrysler prided itself on offering the largest car possible, with many ads and promotional material claiming its vehicles were a few inches longer and wider for each new model year. It never got any bigger than the 1973 Imperial LeBaron, though, with a length of 235.3 inches.
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I think it was in a Dave Barry humor book I read where he said old people want to signal their intention to turn early enough so may leave a blinker on for an hour of driving.
And he said old ladies sometimes had cars so big and wide they could be used as a landing field to land a light plane in an emergency.
I got me a car, it seats about twenty, so come on
And bring your jukebox money
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It rhymes. Early 70s Chryslers were big. Chrysler Imperial was one. Plymouth Fury was another.
That’s all
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