They are some of the most evocative song lyrics ever penned: "I got a '69 Chevy with a 396 Fuelie/heads and a Hurst on the floor/She's waiting tonight down in the parking lot/ outside the 7-11 store/Me and my partner Sonny built her straight out of scratch/and he rides with me from town to town/We only run for the money, got no strings attached/ We shut 'em up and then we shut 'em down."
Bruce Springsteen's Racing in the Street (1978) is a masterfully crafted paean to an America where Cadillacs and Chevrolets cruised highways and freeways. There's an indivisible link between those great big hulking automobiles and Springsteen's lyrics, which was parodied in the Prefab Sprout song Cars and Girls: "Brucie dreams life's a highway . . . but some things hurt much more than cars and girls".
It's hard to imagine how Racing in the Street could be written now: "I've got a hybrid electric car solely powered by a rechargeable battery . . . Me and my partner Sonny car-share from town to towns so as to minimise the impact on the environment" doesn't really cut it.
Escalating petrol prices in the US, not to mention the pressure to be ecologically correct, have spelt an end for rock music's long and passionate love affair with the automobile. Delve into the great American songbook and you will find numerous references to autos. Some veer on the fetishistic. Rock would be much poorer without the car's central position in many of the great musical narrative dramas.
The recent turmoil over petrol prices Stateside has even led to a new form of protest song, or a "gas-roots protest" if you prefer. A band called Planetary Blues have written a song about the price rises.
Sample lyric: "Price gouge'n, so we're shout'n/What's jack'n up the cost of fuel?/I can't afford it/I'm bangin' on my dashboard./I can't believe they think I'm a fool." Band singer Jan Weinberg was charged with criminal trespass and disorderly conduct after performing the song through megaphone on top of a petrol station last week.
Don't expect this type of protest song to grow. It may be okay to sing in protest about famine, Tibet, global emissions etc, but fighting for your right to be able to put petrol in your car is, if not exactly verboten, then frowned upon.
Which is a shame, because it means an end to lyrics such as "I met her on the strip three years ago in a Camero with this dude from LA/I blew that Camero off my back, and drove that little girl away" (from Racing in the Street Again).
Maybe Springsteen is too busy leading the choruses of "Yes, We Can" on the Obama campaign to comment on the rising price of petrol and its potential knock-on effect for rock music. But for someone who has written about cars and driving in 43 per cent of his songs, you'd think he would address the issue.
Diehard Springsteen fans will have noticed a tendency in his later output to substitute "walking" for "driving". Does this mark a change of ideology?
In fact, some enterprising blogger has gone to great trouble to chart how the rises in the price of petrol over the years have affected the number of songs Springsteen has written about cars. See his results on http://blog.masslive.com/local buzz/2008/04/Bruce-
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I must say I was sceptical too, so I undertook some research of my own. On www.brucespringsteen. net, you can search his lyrics for certain terms and the years in which they appear. The word "driving" appeared six times in the 1970s, 14 times in the 1980s, 11 times in the 1990s and just twice so far in this century. A search for "highway" shows a similar decline: five usages in the 1970s, 15 in the 1980s, nine in the 1990s, and a mere seven in the noughties. Try it with "gas", "Chevy" etc and you'll see for yourself. Bruce has got the lead out.
Meanwhile, for perhaps the last time: "Tonight tonight the highway's bright/Out of our way mister you best keep/'Cause summer's here and the time is right/For goin' racin' in the street"
bboyd@irish-times.ie
Springsteen plays the RDS, Dublin tonight and Sunday
