Back in the early 1960s, my friends and I were captives by Hot Rod Hits. My favorites were by The Beach Boys, but plenty of other groups filled the radio airwaves with songs about fast cars. If you watch any of the car TV commercials from the late 1950s and 1960s, you’ll see lovely models slouched against the hoods of big cars with fins. The message was clear: buy a hot car, get a hot girl.
Big Hot Rod Hits a plethora of car songs, many obscure. Even The Beach Boy songs are tunes you probably haven’t heard before…or haven’t heard in decades! Have you heard Robert Mitchum’s “The Ballad of Thunder Road”? Or Hot Rod Dog’s “Repossession Blues”?
Shut Down: The Best of the Hot Rod Hits includes some of the songs on Big Hot Rod Hits and more recognizable hits like Jan & Dean’s “The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena) and The Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe.”
Do you remember these Hot Rod Hits? Did you have a Hot Rod? GRADE: B (for both)
TRACK LIST:
| A1 | The Beach Boys– | Custom Machine | 1:40 |
| A2 | Dick Dale– | Ho-Dad Machine | 2:02 |
| A3 | Dick Dale– | Night Rider | 1:45 |
| A4 | Super Stocks*– | Hot Rod City | 2:05 |
| A5 | The Beach Boys– | No-Go Showboat | 1:52 |
| B1 | Dick Dale– | The Scavenger | 1:45 |
| B2 | The Beach Boys– | Our Car Club | 2:15 |
| B3 | The Cheers– | Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots | 2:10 |
| B4 | Jimmy Dolan*– | Hot Rod Race | 2:08 |
| B5 | Hot Rod Rog*– | Little Street Machine | 1:40 |
| B6 | The Beach Boys– | Cherry, Cherry Coupe | 1:50 |
| C1 | The Beach Boys– | Shut Down | 1:59 |
| C2 | Super Stocks*– | Wide Track | 2:00 |
| C3 | Robert Mitchum– | The Ballad Of Thunder Road | 2:28 |
| C4 | Super Stocks*– | Cheater Slicks | 1:55 |
| C5 | Shutdown Douglas– | Twin Cut Outs | 2:18 |
| C6 | The Beach Boys– | 409 | 1:58 |
| D1 | Super Stocks*– | Street Machine | 1:55 |
| D2 | Shutdown Douglas– | Flash Falcon | 2:15 |
| D3 | Hot Rod Dog– | Repossession Blues | |
| D4 | The Beach Boys– | Car Crazy Cutie | 2:40 |
| D5 | Super Stocks*– | 426 Superstock | 2:00 |
| D6 | The Beach Boys– | A Young Man Is Gone | 2:15 |
TRACK LIST:
| 1 | The Beach Boys– | Shut Down | 1:53 |
| 2 | Jan & Dean– | Drag City | 2:21 |
| 3 | The Duals– | Stick Shift | 2:32 |
| 4 | The Beach Boys– | 409 | 2:01 |
| 5 | The Gants– | Road Runner | 2:20 |
| 6 | Jan & Dean– | Dead Man’s Curve | 2:47 |
| 7 | Bert Convy– | Chicken | 1:59 |
| 8 | Robert Mitchum– | The Ballad Of Thunder Road | 2:32 |
| 9 | Jimmy Dolan*– | Hot Rod Race | 2:11 |
| 10 | The Cheers– | Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots | 2:13 |
| 11 | The Beach Boys– | Little Deuce Coupe | 1:41 |
| 12 | Jan & Dean– | The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena) | 2:23 |
When I saw that SHUT DOWN was on the Capital label, I wondered if it was the original compilation from the Sixties. It isn’t, though it not surprisingly has some overlap.
Side one
No. Title Performing artist(s) Length
1. “Shut Down” The Beach Boys 1:59
2. “Chicken” The Cheers 1:55
3. “Wide Track” The Super Stocks 2:00
4. “Brontosaurus Stomp” The Piltdown Men 2:28
5. “Four on the Floor” The Super Stocks 2:00
6. “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” The Cheers 2:10
Side two
No. Title Performing artist(s) Length
1. “409” The Beach Boys 1:58
2. “Street Machine” The Super Stocks 1:55
3. “The Ballad of Thunder Road” Robert Mitchum 2:28
4. “Hot Rod Race” Jimmy Dolan 2:10
5. “Car Trouble” The Eligibles 2:00
6. “Cheater Slicks” The Super Stocks 1:55
Jeff, thanks for the comparison!
Bert Convy sings “Chicken”?? I think he was actually a member of the Cheers, so I guess it makes sense. To me, he’ll be forever the host of “Tattletales” in a mid-1970s tv-scape that never changes.
As for the rest, well, I know some of the more popular songs & artists, but things like the Robert Mitchum are brand new to me—and likely to stay that way, lol.
Deb, Bert Convy shows up in surprising places in the Sixties and Seventies.
“Thunder Road,” a classic–movie and song both, although Mitchum;s backwoods bootlegger makes an odd fit with the Beach Boys’ and Jan and Dean’s surfer dudes.. I’m not familiar with most of the tracks, especially those on the first comp, but both CDs look like fun listening. “Dead Man’s Curve” became a pretty good TV-movie biopic about Jan and Dean, with Richard Hatch and Bruce Davison, back in the pre-cable, pre-streaming days when the networks invested heavily in TV-movies.
Fred, these CDs bring back a lot of memories. I haven’t heard most of these songs in 60 years!
My brother loved THUNDER ROAD and mentioned the song several times. So, I knew that and “409” and “Shut Down” and “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots” (from doo wop radio) from the first album.
From the second, add “Little Deuce Coupe” and the three Jan & Dean songs.
“Well, the last thing I remember, Doc, I started to swerve…”. Of course, Jan Berry had his own Dead Man’s Curve moment a couple of years later.
No, I never had a hot rod, but there is a guy with a vintage ’60s muscle car on the next block that Jackie has spoken to about it a couple of times. It’s in gorgeous condition.
Jeff, every kid in the Sixties and Seventies wanted a Muscle Car!
A lot of my friends were heavily into cars but not me, so these songs (those few that I remember) meant little to me except as something to hum along with. Although not a hot rod song, “Leader of the Pack” should be given credit as the very worst of that ilk. And don’t get me started on dead teenager songs as a genre!
Jerry, you need to get LAST KISS: Songs of Teen Tragedy.
Besides Leader of the Pack, it has Last Kiss, Teen Angel, Tell Laura I Love Her, Endless Sleep, Patches (she drowns herself), Ebony Eyes and a few more, highlighted for me by the sick classic I Want My Baby Back by Jimmy Cross. That one starts as a Last Kiss/Leader of the Pack parody (“There was my baby, and there was my baby, and way over there was my baby”) and ends up in the cemetery.
Jeff, let’s pretend I got and we’ll never speak of it again.
“I Want My Baby Back” involves a young man so obsessed with his late girlfriend that he disinters her corpse, and the last chorus is sung as if he’s joined her remains in her coffin…clearly meant as a parody, but, as the Seeds might note, pushin’ too hard.
Todd, very creepy indeed!
Jerry, I once asked my father if I could buy a car. He looked at me and smiled, “Sure, if you have the money.” That ended that dream of an 18-year-old.
Not a hot rod fan – my first car in the 1960s was a little FIAT 500, 15 Horsepowers and a max speed of 65 mph – if you pushed the pedal to the metal long enough.
Th song I re,ber best and have watched on youtube often:
Leader of the Pack
Wolf, “Leader of the Pack” was a big hit in the 1960s and occasionally finds itself played on local Oldies radio stations here.
I saw the Shangri-Las in 1965! I never saw The Detergents, who did Leader of the Laundromat! No, never had a hot rod!
Bob, maybe you could buy a hot rod with your casino winnings!
My parents, as I’ve probably mentioned here, were auto-racing enthusiasts for most of their lives…they had cars that could be raced up through my infancy (mid-’60s) and my father had an Avenger body and partial (Porsche) chassis that we towed from New England state to state in the ’70s, with the diminishing hope of completing it and racing some more…he eventually sold it to another enthusiast as we got ready to move to Hawaii in’79. I’ve never owned nor desired a muscle car, though did most of my earliest driving in an early ’70s Toyota Celica, from when they were low-powered sports cars one could soup up (it was an oil-burning–a quart added at every gas-up–junker that my father had used for commuting to Honolulu proper from Kailua), and it became my default car while my folks used the Audi they’d bought in New Hampshire and brought over…I did race a Porsche momentarily, and win, once on the Pali Highway, with the Audi).
Todd, my parents favored practical, reliable cars. My cousin worked at an auto shop and owned a number of hot rods over the years. But, other than admiring the racy lines of his vehicles, I had none of his skills at souping them up.
The Fiberfab Avenger body (which was well-suited to a Porsche or VW chassis, apparently): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiberfab_Avenger_GT