After my previous post, when we listened to “All Day and All of the Night” in honor of the Spring Equinox, I just wasn’t in the mood to stop listening to the Kinks. That plus the fact that where I live we got another unwelcome dump of late season snow, made me yearn for warm weather, driving with the window rolled down and the volume turned up. Thoughts of those two things brought back memories of a road trip from my younger days. Back in the summer of 1970, my girlfriend and I put Detroit in our rear-view mirror and headed out for Cape Cod in her little V-dub Beetle. We decided to take the scenic route, and kept as much as possible to the “back roads,” alternating between free campgrounds and cheap motels (for the shower) along the way. As we drove we kept passing and being passed by a car full of really cute guys with Ontario plates heading for the same destination, and they became our unofficial “road buddies.” Sometimes we’d lose sight of each other, one car would make a pit stop and the other go on ahead, but we always seemed to catch up. And as we traveled, we would use hand signals to communicate to each other the dial numbers of any radio station that was playing a particularly good song. Thus we always had the best music on our trip. The ones that still stand out in my memory today were Neil Diamond's "Cracklin’ Rosie," "All Right Now" by Free, and "Lola." Especially "Lola." It wasn’t only that hard-driving guitar, but also the suggestive subject matter, which was all rather startling at the time. Why, it even was banned in some places! Don’t forget this was only 1970. And Provincetown was a budget-friendly hippie mecca, not the trendy gay – “not that here’s anything wrong with that” – tourist destination it is these days.
Nowadays, we can go online and discover 1) that Lola was written as the result of a couple of (purely observational as far as we know) encounters that a member of the Kinks' entourage had with some doubtless lovely but nevertheless shady (as in five o’clock shadow) ladies... and 2) that the Kinks had to change the original lyrics from “Coca-Cola” to “cherry cola” for legal reasons. It’s always about sex and money, isn’t it? Anyway, Lola is one of everybody’s fave Kinks songs, I’m sure…so if your computer happens to be beside a window, open it all the way, turn your speakers up and have yourself a mini-road trip in your mind.
El-Lo-El-Lay - Lola! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMsnqQHOwFg
What can I say, the Davies brothers always knock it out of the park!
And yes, the photo really is Cape Cod.
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