1969 Dodge Polara
Posted on 08/17/2018 5:55:21 PM PDT by SamAdams76
The summer of 1979 was a very hot and steamy summer in New England. I can almost still smell the fried food from the clam shacks as we cruised up and down the beaches in our Pontiacs, our Dodges and if we were lucky enough to have one, our Chevy Camaros. Always with the windows rolled down and the top down too if we had a convertible.
Car radios blaring, of course. A lot of us had the local FM rock stations dialed in on our five presets. Or we had our tape players, either cassette or 8-track, but the cassette format was gaining traction. Compact discs were still a few years away.
There were a lot of popular songs from that summer of 1979, with the big one being that "My Sharona" song by The Knack. Rock music was making a big comeback and pushing disco off to the side. That was also the summer that some Chicago radio DJ had a disco record burning event at Comiskey Park between games at a doubleheader and caused a riot which forced the White Sox to forfeit the second game. I believe that is still the last time a complete game was forfeited in the Major Leagues. (There was a forfeit in 1995 but that occurred in the 7th inning of that game.)
A lot of great summer songs from that summer but there is one song in particular, a classic example of a "one-hit wonder" that just defined the summer of 1979. And that would be "Driver's Seat" by an obscure British band called Sniff 'n' the Tears. For a period of about 8 weeks that summer, this song was blaring out of just about every car radio in America.
This song is a perfect time capsule from 1979. A sizable hit at the time that everybody knew but by the time the leaves started turning and kids went back to school, it disappeared from radio playlists and Sniff 'n' the Tears were never heard from again. Which was a shame because you would think that a band that could put out a song that catchy and that good would stick around for a while and put together a string of hits.
For me, this song brings back memories of Hampton Beach in NH, where we used to hang out on hot summer nights and walk up and down the "boardwalk" where we would order up fried clam plates for about $5.95 (very expensive for those times) and then as it got dark, we'd drag a cooler of iced beer and a boombox down to the water line (we were just 16 or 17, going into our senior year at high school) and hang out until either the beer ran out or until some cops came snooping around (which never failed to spook us and send us on our way).
I was 26 at the time, and a huge rock fan, but I don't remember this song at all.
Maybe it didn't get much airplay on the west coast.
I believe the Van Halen debut album came out in 1979. My buddy Mark and I used to cruise Gratiot Avenue in the greater Detroit area for hour and miles in his 1976 Firebird Formula listening in awe to Eddie Van Halen’s groundbreaking sonic assault on the old, conventional music of the day.
So she had the aptly-named Screaming Chicken on the hood of her Trans Am?
Worst band name in history.
Alright...I looked it up on YouTube, and yeah, I remember the song.
It wasn’t a ‘turn it up to eleven’ type of song back then - what with Van Halen and so many other American pop/rock/funk groups tearing it up. This song was sort of filler music for me.
I was actually going to post that version here but I didn’t want to irk the women Freepers!
Correction: The Van Halen debut album came out in 1978.
I had a beautiful 1969 Dodge polara with a 383 two barrel / two door cream colored with a black vinyl roof...would stay down the Cape then...if all you left behind were footprints no one said Boo...try it now.
I’ve read many a issue of Muscle Car Review
Mom had an ‘85 Firebird with v6 auto and t-tops
I was driving around New England in the summer of 79. Never heard this song.
That backup singer with the sunglasses was cool...until he had to readjust them at 2:14.
Meridian, Mississippi, summer before my senior year. Hitting on girls at the Carrousel Skate Center......driving up and down 8th street between the Sonic and College Park Mall....buying Champale and hoping I didn’t get carded.......good times.
A prog-rock station in Ft. Collins CO I listened to all the time back then played it, because it was a cool song, even though they very seldom played anything from the Hot 100.
It got airplay into the late eighties in the central prairie states.
1969 Dodge Polara
One of my all-time favorite songs.
Spent a few years in Beantown in my youth; I still have fond memories of taking the “T” out to Revere Beach; but what I remember even more was going out to Wonderland: I’d never even heard of dog tracks before, let alone seen one. The other thing we got a kick out of was climbing some rocky promontory near Nahant, just off Route 1 if I recall correctly.
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