Book Review

Bruce Springsteen's love is bigger than a Honda, the Reverend Horton Heat has a fucked-up Ford, The Beach Boys' Little Deuce Coupe purrs like a kitten and Queen's Roger Taylor has a feel for his automobile. Maybe it's the lure of the road, maybe it's the rhythm of a well-tuned engine, or maybe it's just man's primal desire for speed. Whatever the reason, rock 'n' roll's love affair with the automobile dates back to its emergence as a music form, yet, strangely, it's remained undocumented until two months ago when Rockin' Down the Highway: The Cars and People that Made Rock Roll, by Paul Grushkin, hit bookshelves.

To say Grushkin's research was exhaustive is an understatement. The rock historian and archivist spent a solid year just researching rock songs connected to cars; he stopped at 4,000. By the time the muscular coffee table book was ready to be assembled, he and the project's art director found themselves sifting through roughly 30,000 relevant pieces of photography, memorabilia and artifacts.

The result is a bad-ass compilation of rock and kustom kulture ephemera, authoritatively discussed and beautifully presented. The book begins with a foreword by old-school punk-rocker and gearhead Mike Ness, which doesn't whet the appetite nearly as well as Tom Morello's (Audioslave) Dodge Demon memoirs found on the last page. Rather mercifully, the book is not arranged chronologically. Grushkin's instinct to favor a thematic approach over an encyclopedic one was wise; for a hefty coffee table book with more than 1,000 images, Rockin' Down the Highway is an easy read.

From the dawn of lowbrow art to the auto industry's liberal use of rock music in advertising, Grushkin left no stone unturned. From the malt shop to thug life, Jerry Lee Lewis to James Hetfield, Cadillac to the Snoop DeVille, Grushkin offers us a thorough understanding of the cozy relationship that's always existed between two of popular culture's most powerful engines.

-Michel Cicero

Rockin' Down the Highway: The Cars and People that Made Rock Roll
by Paul Grushkin
Voyageur Press