Before recently, I had never actually heard of a song from the 70s called "Chevy Van"... I discovered this song in a Facebook group called Everything 70s. Man, the folks who were born in the 60s had all the fun!
Apparently, it was released by Sammy Johns in 1973...
This song is about a guy who picks up a hitchhiking chick and gets laid in his Chevy Van. Remember, this was when people didn't care about sexually transmitted infections. It sounds like the woman was a bit loose and he was game. And she clearly didn't think he meant to rape her, either. To be sure, he was a gentleman. A horny gentleman for sure, but a gentleman nonetheless.
Would this song be a hit today? I don't think so. It's a song from a bygone era. Since I was alive when it was a hit, I feel pretty ancient. But I guess the lady wanted to thank her benefactor properly by giving him a hummer in his van.
The things I think about on Monday mornings... Now I'm going to have "Chevy Van" stuck in my head all day.
I actually know this song. My dad had it on a pirated CD.It had meaning to my mom. A first-grade teacher and a high-school counselor, who still lived in that home long after they retired, lived down the road from them when they lived in the rural San Joaquin Valley. The couple had two grown children, both of whom were intelligent but had some issues in their personal lives. The daughter was an rN who functioned well professionally but had trouble with relationships and had a great deal ofdifficulty raising her four sons without their father, my mom says no one around ever knew what happened too the boys; father. If he had died, people would have heard about it, so it was sort of assumed that he had either run for the hills or was incarcerated. The boys were such a handfull that any other man she married wouldn't stick around for long. i don't know if she his the boys until she got the men to say 'I Do," or if they married her with full disclosure and still took off at the first available opportunity. It wasn't as though she would have been able to do anything to get them to behave decently even for a short introductory period, even through major bribery; they were THAT bad the they were bona fide juvenile delinquents who broke into people's houses and stole, among other petty to not-so-petty crimes. The last I heard, they were all living at least semi-productive lives. at the very least, not one of them had records as adults. that half of the family was the very least of the situation, though.
ReplyDeletethe retired couple also had a son. he was, I think, a bachelor who maybe at the age of forty married a woman with two young daughters. he and the woman soon had a son and daughter together.
he was supposedly highly intelligent but always marginally employed. The jobs he had didn't seem suited for his intelligence level, yet for all his supposed intelligence, he had no formal education beyond a high school diploma to show for it. My mom said that come to think of it, the only actual evidence of his intelligence was by word of mouth via his parents, who spoke in glowing terms of his genius-level ability. In school, he was the perennial underachiever. He may very well have been smart, though. Ue was the same age as my Aunt Maureen. she remembers him mostly sitting in the back of the classroom making sketches of nude females during high school classes and doing just enough to pass most of his classes. In today's world, someone probably would have been concerned enough at least to refer him for some sort of services, though his parents might have refused them.
Cats never seemed to live long when he was around. Often they'd be left with slit throats or whatever on their owners' doorsteps. no one knew for certain that he was the perpetrator, but it always seemed to happen when he was around.
Ugh... That is creepy!
DeleteOne time he made it down to my mom's family's home when she was three, and she was the only one outside. He lured her inside a treehouse and undressed her. It was summer, and she was just wearing a sunsuit and underwear, so it wasn't an involved process.She realized something was wrong with the scenario and jumped from the treehouse to the ground to get away, breaking her fibula just above her ankle in the process. She screamed loudly and crawled away as fast as she could. She was loud enough that her mother and what siblings were home came running out of the house. He tried to get away, but one of my uncles caught up to him and beat the hell out of him.
ReplyDeleteIt was in the days when such things didn't happen much, or at least that anyone knew about, and you really didn't usually want to call the authorities. This was probably 1969. The neighbor boy's parents would have heard eventually, but he was so stupid that he went home and told his parents that my uncle beat him up because, he, the pervert, beat my uncle at chess and my uncle was jealous. The pervert's father quickly drove to my mom's family's home to confront my uncle. My grandma wouldn't unlock the screen door but gave him the reader's digest condensed version of what had happened and said that it could be discussed more fully when my grandpa got hoe that evening.
My grandpa went to their house that evening. My mom doesn't know exactly what was said, but supposedly my grandpa told the family the pervert was not welcome on the family property and that he strongly urged th4e parents to seek some sort of counseling for him. The perv's father said something like, "I AM a counselor." My grandpa told him that what he was doing obviously wasn't working. The parents tried to suggest that my mom and the oerv were just in the treehouse together and my mom had decided on her own to undress. My grandfather told them they had to know just how ridiculous that sounded, and asked what in the world the sixteen-year-old boy was doing in our treehouse in the first place.
My grandfather did call the sheriff's department. they took a report, but said that because my mom was so young, she wouldn't have been a reliable witness and there was probably nothing that could be done. (My mom is and always was very smart, and could have told her story and stuck to it quite well. Her siblings say the story she tells now is the very same story she told when she was lying on the ground nude with a broken fibula.
my grandpa called the superintendent of the high school as well just to alert him, although if the perv's penchant was for three-year-olds, chances were that the high school girls were probably safe. My dad told him that if the perv so much as touched either of my two aunts who were in high school, he would sue, beat the hell out of the guy, and God knows what else.
Two nights later, several tires on two the vehicles at my grandparents' home were slashed. There was no proof it was the perv, though he had an unexplained dog bit the next day when my grandma called the sheriff and suggested that it might have been he who did it. The dogs went a bit nuts at one point during the night. My grandpa was flying that night, so my grandma just turned on the light and didn't go out. That was the last my family really had to do with him. They moved to Nebraska. I think my grandpa was stationed at Offutt not long after that, i believe.
My grandparents eventually moved back to the same area many years later. After my grandma died of cancer, my grandpa continued to live there until he died.
By then, the perv had moved on. He would occasionally visit with his new family.
Once when my parents were newly married, they were in the general area visiting my aunt Victoria and her husband, and they decided to make the drive maybe twenty miles away so my mom could show my dad the two homes in the area in which she had lived when she was growing up. As they passed the perv's parents' home, a Chevy van was parked in front of the home. "He's there!" my mom exclaimed. his trademark vehicle was a Chevy van. He'd always driven one since high school, periodically upgrading for newer and nicer models. My dad slowed the car to read the trite bumper sticker on the back, which read "If this van's a rockin', don't bother knockin.' " A man emerged from the house and approached the van. "That's him!" my mom exclaimed to my dad. My dad had heard all about the perv who undressed my mom and caused her to break her leg. My dad slowed to a stop and stared at the man, who would have been forty-something probably. I don't know if the guy recognized my mom or not, but he flipped my parents off, then put something into the van and returned to the house, on his way bak flipping them off with both middle fingers. My dad reciprocated, then drove off.
ReplyDeleteNot much later, my Aunt Vitoria called to tell my mom that my Uncle Ralph's brother, who was and is an amateur photographer, had been asked by the sheriff's department to develop a roll of film. (IT's a rural law enforcement office with few resources, and probably had even fewer then. At the time, they would call on citizens for such tasks. What my uncle's brother found when he developed the film was the perv's two step-daughters, aged maybe ten and twelve, nude and posed in a variety of sex acts with each other.
My aunt didn't know about any of this until formal charges were filed, as her brother-in-law was required to maintain confidentiality until the story broke. The guy was charged with molesting both of his stepdaughters as well as producing and distributing child pornography. I believe he's still locked up in a federal pen because it's a federal charge when child porn is distributed electronically.
After charges had been filed but before the case went to trial, my Aunt Victoria received a call from a woman identifying herself as a representative of the district attorney's office. The woman asked about the incident involving my mom so many years earlier. My Aunt Victoria would only have been about five years old at the time, but she had a reasonably clear memory of what had happened. She started to tell what she knew, then stopped. She told the woman, "I have no idea who you are (this was before everyone routinely had caller ID) and i'm not comfortable giving any more information over the phone. The sheriff's office and the district attorney both know how to find me, and are free to show up in person to ask any questions they would like to ask." The woman then hug up. My aunt believes it was the perv's wife, wo was filing her own civil suit against the perv and his family, although they didn't own enough property for anyone to get very rich by suing them. All she would probably gotten out of the suit would have been the Chevy van. She probably did get the Chevy van.
Whenever the song comes on, my mom and dad sing along loudly to it and, now that we're not little anymore, wildly gesture with their middle fingers.
My mother was very lucky to have escaped with ust a broken fibula. she surely would have been molested had she not jumped when she did, and she might even have suffered the same fate as the neighborhood (it wasn't exactly a neighborhood because it was so spread out but they called it one) cats.
That's my convoluted Chevy van story.
I was 13 years old when this song hit the airwaves. I was a bit young to understand it but my 15 year old brother did! Thanks for the memories!
ReplyDeleteI was thirteen also, I really hated this song back then. I got it, though I was naive at that age. I was raised by a very strict Asian mom and was clueless. I think I must have been kinda uptight about that stuff then, yeah... That changed. Anyhow, it is catchy as hell with that weird funky groove in the chorus. I heard it recently, listening to a 70's playlist on prime music, I liked it more and listened to it a few times. You are just too funny!
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