Eddie and Tommy

I caught a TV spot the other night for a cell phone featuring Eric Clapton (the same day I'd come across a news nugget that said there were 4.6 billion, with a B, cell phones on a planet with almost seven billion people in it). I went for at least the first fifty years of my life without having one, wasted some time getting confused with cordless phones until now I'm the proud owner of a device that is so much smarter than I'll ever be, it's a privilege and an honor to be holster-worthy.

Eric, whom I first heard when he was in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers (he'd left the Yardbirds because they were getting 'too commercial') over four decades ago (yeah, I know, he really is old!), survived Cream ("Clapton is God), heavy duty pharmaceutical abuse, being Derek of Derek and the Dominoes, the guy who broke up Beatle George's marriage (but the two remained best buds, see 'L'Angelo Misterioso' on the Goodbye elpee from Cream) to, these days and, for the last decade or so, a very comfortable pair of shoes, broken in and weather worn with no surprises. Just step into 'em and be comfortable.

The ad uses "Rock and Roll Heart" a really nice song, especially if you forget any of his readings of Robert Johnson's Crossroads and the lyrics 'I get off on a '57 Chevy' caught my ear because back in the day, growing up in Surrey, I imagine the order of the day was more often a Vauxhall or a Cortina.

Thinking about Cortina brought me, with a jolt, to Tommy R, with whom I went to grammar school and then later re-acquainted with (?) at Rutgers. Tommy and his parents and older sister had moved from New Brunswick to even deeper into Franklin Township than where we lived (they bought a house in the Levitt development (I'm surprised it didn't rate a mention in the article, it was a HUGE sprawling mass of houses)).

In the early seventies as our addiction to petroleum made us vulnerable to offshore oil boycott pressure, which we solved (of course) by spending the next thirty plus years growing even more dependent on foreign oil and Detroit took a stab at building 'small' (= flimsy) cars while VW Beetles gave way to Japanese-made cars, there were Vega, Opel, Pinto, Cricket, Simca and Cortina.

Most of those weren't actually American made (though the Vega, which made the Corvair look bullet proof and the Pinto, which most shudder when recalling were home-grown) but were European products of US car companies, reconfigured for us and all of which got twenty miles to the gallon, which made them economy cars, as long as you didn't mind the look of bewilderment when a mechanic opened the hood to try to repair them (and they needed lots of repairs) after they broke down.

Tom had a Cortina, sort of ox-blood red, but with the steering wheel on the left side of the car, rather than like the British on the right. You couldn't slam the door like you did on the family station wagon, or the car might fall over. It had four doors and a backseat and both of those were more for ornamentation than anything else since you couldn't open the rear doors wide enough to get in and there was no leg room to sit back there anyway.

I remember, I think, it had a six volt car battery under the passenger's front seat, which made finding a tape deck/car radio (had to have the eight track player!) quite a challenge otherwise you had to listen to AM radio, which was the soundtrack of our growing up years. And afterwards? Well, Eric, not all of us get to hang with Buddy. A lot of us ended up 'Kickin' asbestos in the factory/Punchin' out Chryslers in the factory/Breathin' that plastic in the factory/Makin' polyvinyl chloride in the factory.'
-bill kenny