Monday 10 December 2012

I am into C.B.

One of the blue-collar heroes of the Seventies is the truck driver. This doesn't last into the Eighties from which point on the view that they are basically illiterate and reactionary serial-killers-in- waiting prevails.


Seventie's truckers are standing up for the working man, the little guy, against the corrupt unions and the police and government. The doomed existential heroes of Two Lane Blacktop or the rather naff Vanishing Point (unsurprisingly a key reference point for terminally naff British retro-rockers Primal Scream) are given a different, more down home iteration in films like White Line Fever, Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy, the great image perhaps being the moment when a kamikaze Jan Michael Vincent drives his truck through the Glass house company billboard.



 Perhaps truckers are partly heroes in the 70s and demons in the Eighties and onwards due to their power and the success of their strikes and protests, most notably during the 1979 oil crisis.

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