I was riding in Dave's van this past weekend, and it really made me miss my old van. Vans, actually.
The first one, my first car ever, I got about a week and a half after I got my driver's license. It was a 1980 Ford 150 with a V-6, every body panel a different shade of brown or primer grey. Bought it with cash on the spot, and the couple I bought it from was obviously a little quicker than me, because once I got it home, it wouldn't start again. Bad alternator. It took a lot of hours of standing outside in a freezing Michigan winter with a blow torch and a cheap socket set to get that old, rusted alternator out, but once the electricity was flowing again that van was a thing of beauty. Jim, my sometimes friend who was sometimes a mechanic in his garage helped me duct tape the hoses in the engine together, then gave me a 50/50 shot of making it through a week long winter tour. It leaked gas, and took about ten minutes of revving the engine before you could get going, but we made it to Chicago, St Louis, Canton, wherever the hell else we were going and back home again in style. Of course, two days after we got home, the engine locked up. Oh well. I needed the scrap guy's 80 bucks more than the van anyway.
Moved up in the world when I got the second van, a 1986 Econoline. You know, the one with the two tone gray and red racing stripe down the middle. Seven hundred bucks, and worth every penny. We jacked a bench seat in the middle with four half-inch bolts, and for some ungodly reason spent too much time installing a flimsy wire cage on the back that didn't stop a guitar and two hundred bucks from getting stolen in the time it took us to eat a falafel sandwich in New York. Oh well. This one had a leaky gas tank, too, and for added excitement we kept the tail pipe from hitting the ground with a couple of wire hangers and some duct tape. Our tourmates were convinced that the van would explode, with the sparks from the exhaust pipe sparking the hole in the gas tank, and that we were seriously, strangely insane. We slept in that van for almost a month, and even played a show half inside it, on the loading dock of some community center in East Providence. Or was it West Providence? When we got back from tour, I worked another week at the flower shop, collected my paycheck, loaded up three bikes, all of my records and books, and drove the van to Chicago. Slept in it for a few days, rode around the city, completely forgot where I parked it for forty-eight hours, moved in someplace, moved down the street, then drove away a month later, to West Virginia and New York and San Francisco and back, this time in a different car, which is a whole other story altogether. By the time I got back, the van was gone, never to be seen again. Stolen by the city, but hopefully sold at auction to a good, loving home.
The Coup - Cars and Shoes
Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Kanye West f. GLC and Paul Wall - Drive Slow
Minutemen - D's Car Jam / Anxious Mo-Fo
