CHEVY VAN
By Tommy
Tomlinson
From “Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas” | 2008
Lots of people will tell you they have always had great taste in music. They will say they latched onto Springsteen in first grade, that they played Dylan for kids at the pool, that they spent their first chunk of allowance money on “Kind of Blue.”
These people are liars.
Kids listen to junk. It is the same impulse that makes them crave cotton candy. When our taste buds are young all we want is a sweet rush that melts on the tongue and puts one thought in our mind: Again.
Which brings me to a song called “Chevy Van” by a Charlotte boy named Sammy Johns.
In the summer of 1975, to my 11-year-old mind, there were two great American record labels: K-Tel and Ronco. They crammed 20 hits onto a single LP and sold it for $4.98. A slab of vinyl can’t hold as much as a CD, so every song had something edited out: the third verse, or the keyboard solo, or the long fade at the end. In almost every case this made the song better.
I’m imagining some guy at the Ronco splicing machine thinking, The Beatles got in and out in two minutes and 15 seconds, I’ll be damned if Paul Anka gets more than that.
Because of the sweet glorious Internet I am now looking at the track listing for a record I bought the summer when I was 11. If I am remembering right, it is the second LP I ever bought. It is a fine K-Tel production titled “Music Express.”
“Chevy Van” is track 9, side 1. The record leads off with “Love Will Keep Us Together,” the Captain and Tennille’s megahit – the best-selling record of the entire year – and because this is a personal essay, and you should be honest in personal essays, I will now tell you that back then I belonged to the Captain and Tennille Fan Club. Actually, it could have been a lifetime membership, so I might still be in. We members got a special 8x10 photo of the Captain and Tennille with their bulldogs.
If you tell anyone this I will track you down and kill you.
We will get to “Chevy Van,” I promise, but first let me list the other tracks on “Music Express” by category.
SONGS I STILL LIKE ENOUGH TO HAVE ON MY IPOD 32 YEARS LATER: “Get Down Tonight,” KC and the Sunshine Band
SONGS THAT STILL SORT OF HOLD UP: “I’m Not In Love,” 10cc; “Jackie Blue,” Ozark Mountain Daredevils; “The Rockford Files,” Mike Post; “Long Train Runnin’,” The Doobie Brothers
SONGS I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T LIKE BUT STILL DO: “Cat’s In the Cradle,” Harry Chapin; “Swearin’ To God,” Frankie Valli
SONGS I USED TO LIKE, BUT IT TURNS OUT I WAS WRONG: “Love Will Keep Us Together”; “Philadelphia Freedom,” Elton John; “Mandy,” Barry Manilow; “Poetry Man,” Phoebe Snow; “Sky High,” Jigsaw; “My Eyes Adored You,” Frankie Valli (again!)
SONGS I DON’T REMEMBER ANYMORE: “Brazil,” Ritchie Family; “Dynomite,” Tony Camillo’s Bazuka; “Black Superman,” Johnny Wakelin and the Kinshasa Band
SONGS THAT, EVEN AT AGE 11, SUCKED: “Run Joey Run,” David Geddes; “Rocky,” Austin Roberts; “Get Dancin’,” Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes
If you are around my age, and you are realizing that this is a fair sampling of the music you loved when you were 11, part of you might be wishing that when you were 10 you had fallen down a well.
But as Woody Allen said in a totally different and really creepy context, the heart wants what it wants. Which brings us back to “Chevy Van.”
On YouTube there’s a sad little video of “Chevy Van.” Video is not even the right word; the only image is a still photo of a Sammy Johns album cover. He is dressed in the full ‘70s singer-songwriter uniform – longish hair, matching beard and mustache, wide-collared shirt open two or three buttons down. The opening act for Dan Fogelberg.
But the song doesn’t sound right. It’s a remake he did somewhere along the way.
Poke around a little more and you find another video, a shirtless guy in a Hamm’s Beer cap goofing around on a farm. It’s your basic YouTube special, made for 99 cents and some weed, but the background music is the original “Chevy Van.”
It starts to play and in my brain a drawer opens and the words and music come tumbling out.
I gave a girl
A ride in my waaaaagon…
There’s not much to it: a couple of layered guitars, some nice harmonies, a keyboard of some kind tugging at the chorus. But it all flows together, as shallow and pretty as a trout stream, and Sammy reaches for the high notes, as if he knew when he wrote it, this one’s got a chance.
She was tired, ‘cause her mind was a-draggin’
I said get some sleep and dream of rock ‘n’ roll…
I should stop right here and admit the best thing about this song, back when I was 11: Sammy got some. Right there in his Chevy Van. My dad drove a Chevy van back then, mostly to haul around his tools, but I could (and did) imagine giving a girl a ride and shortly thereafter – two minutes and 48 seconds later, if the song was any indication – getting some of my own. Although I wasn’t sure how to get some, or how much I needed to be getting, or exactly what “some” was.
When I was 11 there was a lot I didn’t know. One of the things I didn’t know was how hard it is to write something that is simple and pure and sticks with people 35 years down the road.
‘Cause like a picture she was laying there
Moonlight dancing off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
We made love in my Chevy van
And that’s all right with me.
“Chevy Van” sold more than a million copies and made it to no. 5 on the pop charts. It was the only time Sammy Johns made the Top 40.
Twenty years later I was a music writer in Charlotte and Sammy Johns was trying to make a comeback. He came by the newspaper for an interview. He had written a few hits for country singers – Waylon Jennings, Conway Twitty – but wanted another shot on his own. He knew he had a better chance living in Nashville. But he decided he liked it better in Shelby. That was the last I heard of him.
As far as I know he’s still knocking around, and he may well be writing his giant comeback hit at this very moment. But chances are that his gift to the world at large is one song, a shade under three minutes long, that they played on the radio three decades ago.
I’ve been listening to “Chevy Van” over and over as I’ve been writing this, 10 or 12 times in a row, and I keep expecting to get sick of it, the way most of us get sick of the music we used to love before we became mature and smart and cool, the way grown men and women lose the taste for cotton candy.
But instead I keep pressing play, keep clicking and listening and writing, and somewhere in all this I turned 11 years old again, and “Chevy Van” is playing on my K-Tel album on my Sears Roebuck stereo, and spun sugar melts so good on my tongue, and that’s all right with me.
Reprinted with permission of “Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas”