Like any other type of culture, pop music will go through fads that burn bright and then fade away, leaving those of us who missed them shaking our collective heads in wonder. Surf music was huge until it wasn’t. Swing music had a brief revival in the mid-90s for reasons that no one has adequately explained. Pop R&B became infatuated with 12/8 time in the early 2010s. Perhaps the most perplexing of all was the series of hit songs about teenagers dying in car crashes in the early 1960s.
Tragic love ballads have been a staple of popular music for time immemorial, but this sub-sub-genre featured lots of stories about kids dying as a result of vehicular failure. In addition to car crash songs, there were plane crash songs (“Ebony Eyes” by the Everly Brothers), train wreck songs (early Lieber/Stoller hit “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”), and even one shark attack song (“The Water Was Red” by Johnny Cymbal). But car crash tragedies were the most common theme. Some songs were major hits that are still played today, like The Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack” and J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers’ “Last Kiss”. These sorts of songs were everywhere for about five years until the fad petered out.
The question at the root of all of this is simple – why? What was so captivating about songs of teenage love doomed to end with tragic violence? There must have been something in the zeitgeist. The timing is relevant, as car culture, an expanded interstate network, the emergence of teen media, and the high-profile deaths of several celebrities in vehicular accidents were all swirling in the American consciousness. This type of song could only have had maximum impact and appeal at this specific time.
One song became a hit and spawned a legion of imitators. Ray Peterson’s 1959 hit “Tell Laura I Love Her” was the first true car crash song to have a cultural impact. Others quickly followed in its wake. This fad and the surf music scene, happening simultaneously, began to peter out around the time the British musicians started invading, and the culture shifted away. It carried on sporadically, with Meat Loaf’s epic “Bat Out of Hell” being its last gasp until Pearl Jam had a hit with a cover of “Last Kiss” in 1999. The phenomenon of car crash songs remains a strange footnote in the history of American pop music, slightly grotesque and eerie. You had to have been there.
PHOTO: Rico Loeb from Pulsnitz, Germany, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
