WHERE WERE YOU IN ’73?

a screaming Chev V8 engine pulling 6000 or 7000rpm. The side-valve Ford V8s and 272s around town were cool enough and sounded nice, but they didn’t leap out and grab me by the throat and stir my soul. The first guys in Wanganui to build really fast cars — such as Fred Mann and Mike Maddon — hadn’t quite arrived on the scene in the early to mid ’ 70s, so the only exposure I had to seriously tough hot rods and street machines was limited to the silent and two-dimensional pages of hot rod magazines. As a school kid, I couldn’t always afford to buy but I was able to buy the odd used American magazine cheaply from a local second-hand book store. So when, one day in 1973 or 1974, I went to the movies as an impressionable 13- or 14- year- old kid, already with a love of hot rods and American cars, and watched it was like an awakening. Suddenly, right then and right there, I was confronted by the most awesome, exciting, and utterly mesmerizing images and sounds that I’d ever experienced in my relatively short life. In 108 fleetingly brief minutes, automotive cool, power, speed, and badass had all come to life. All of those images that I’d seen in magazines had suddenly become real, and I could attach a sound — albeit imagined — to them. It was all so vivid — and so spectacularly exciting. More than any other single event, that movie set my path in life. There’s no doubt that tens of thousands of people the world over — hundreds of thousands, perhaps — were turned on to hot rodding, V8 engines, and Americana by The sound of that two-door ’55 Chev bellowing across the intersection as Bob Falfa ran the red light … wow! The sight and sound of that couple of seconds stirred something deep within my soul. It’s interesting to listen to the sounds of that big block 454 Chev–powered ’ 55 Chev and Milner’s 327- powered ’ 32 all these years later — the engine noises are perfect; the quality and the realism and the timing are spot on; and they still give me a bit of a shiver today. The two- door post ’ 55 was genuinely a badass machine; it’s the same car that was used in — released two years prior to — and it was a genuine 11- second street and strip warrior. So, quite probably like you, I’ve watched that movie more times than I can count or remember. There’s no other movie from which I could recite line after line like I can from I think I still fantasize, 40 years later, about the notion of a pretty blonde girl jumping enthusiastically into my car and saying, “Peel out! I love it when guys peel out!” Anyway, I’m getting all nostalgic, and that wasn’t my intention. I really wanted to tell you that the next time you watch watch it on a modern DVD — and take the time to view all the extra stuff about the making of the movie, and so on; it’s truly fascinating. It shows interviews with Harrison Ford, Paul Le Mat, Richard Dreyfuss, and Ron Howard, among others, and all recount anecdotes that are both insightful and hilarious, and all of which made me want to watch the movie all over again. I’ll tell you about some of it next month — it really is amazing stuff.