I Drive a Volkswagen (1973)

Genre: Novelty, Accordion

Some families living near the Motor City bought new cars annually as a status symbol and to support the local economy. Not so my parents. They bought new cars and maintained them well, but drove them until they fell apart. There was always an American-made station wagon in our driveway to accommodate our growing family (which may account for my preference for hatchbacks). Since my Dad drove to work from the suburbs to the city, he needed something more economical for the commute. For that he always bought small and foreign, first a dwarfish, light blue Fiat, and when that proved unreliable—a Volkswagen beetle. Despite its entangled history with Nazi Germany, the VW was a cheap, dependable, pretty-good-gas-mileage vehicle for the common “Volk,” with some interesting design innovations, like an air-cooled engine in the back that set it apart from American cars of the time.

The first VW “bug” the family had was red; the second one light blue. When I got my driver’s license and my first summer job as a a busboy at a local restaurant, I wanted my own vehicle, so naturally I chose a used, navy blue VW bug (for $250). It was a funky mess, with rusted-out holes on the floor under the passenger seats in back, but it was all mine and I loved it. Since a lot of the other kids at my high school were partial to sportier cars with souped up engines, it was a way for me to flaunt my teenage identity and still be just like my Dad with whom I had a very good relationship (despite all the grief I gave him growing up).

I took Auto Mechanics in high school as an elective, so I could do routine maintenance on my own. It was a time when engines were simple enough that anyone could  learn the difference between a distributor and a carburetor. Nowadays I can’t even begin to identify what’s under the hood of a car.

When my blue bug became too old and unreliable, my folks handed down their old red one to me, and I had lots of fun (and some not-so-fun) adventures with that one during my teenage years.

The gap-year before I was ready to start college, the red VW was no longer functioning well enough to get me to and from classes, so I decided to devote the summer to rebuilding the engine. John Muir had just published the book How To Keep Your VW Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot (1969). I bought a bunch of new tools and methodically moved through his humorous collection of diagrams and directions. The only thing I couldn’t manage myself was the engine block, so I sent that out to a local shop to have the work done there. It was a proud moment when I got it back, re-assembled the entire housing, and hoisted it in the rear engine compartment. It ran like a charm again.

Unfortunately, this story does not have a happy ending. Two weeks before I was scheduled to start classes at Western Michigan University, I was driving down one of the main thoroughfares in Kalamazoo when a truck, driven by a guy who wasn’t paying attention (and was hauling a load of bricks in the bed!), rear-ended me. The crash sent me, my girlfriend, and dog skidding into a girl on a motorcycle in front of us who was trying to make a left turn onto a side street. Thankfully none of us were injured, but the red VW bug I had inherited from my parents was deemed a total loss. (You may remember that the VW engine was situated in the back of the car.) All my summer’s work was in vain.

Later in life, I owned a VW Passat, but that accident was the beginning of my lifelong gravitation towards Asian vehicles with their own design innovations (catalytic converters, better gas mileage) that set them apart from American cars: first Hondas, then Toyotas, now Hyundai.

I wrote “I Drive a Volkswagen” aka “The Volkswagen Song” in 1973 to amuse friends at parties with novelty tunes I wrote specifically for my accordion, Chuck Noble. It starts with a musical quote from the German folk song about unrequited love (“Du, du liegst mir im Herzen”: “You are in my heart”) and zooms downhill from there.

Other influences are obvious and dated: growing up in Southwest Michigan with a bunch of teenage boys with souped-up engines; Ralph Nader’s 1965 critique of the Chevy Corvair in Unsafe at Any Speed. (The Corvair was Chevrolet’s answer to VW; it also featured a rear-mounted, air-cooled engine.) For the record, I don’t think VW ever used Holley carburetors in their vehicles. That must have bled in from my days in Auto Mechanics class. Solex (the manufacturer VW used) doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.

This song scrapes the bottom of the barrel of tunes I wrote when I was kid, so I thought it would be a great one to experiment with using artificial intelligence (speaking of incomprehensible machines under the hood).

I had an old cassette tape of me singing the song, accompanying myself on the accordion. I uploaded that recording and ran my lyrics through Suno.com with instructions to create versions in polka style (even though the song is in 3/4 time and therefore a waltz, not a polka.) I asked AI to include accordion, brass, and rhythm section. What you hear here (pun intended) is exactly what AI spit out (in 25 seconds).

The melody and chords are almost exactly the same as I wrote them, but obviously the voice is not mine and the instrumentation is new. (“O brave new world”!) I added the bleeps to censor out some of my juvenile indiscretions. Otherwise, I’m releasing this version with only slight modifications—just as the bots interpreted it. I hope you’ll find it amusing. Listens better with lederhosen on!

Perfect timing for an homage—it was right around this time of year (50+ years ago!) that my beloved red VW bug was totaled.