I know next to nothing about the Jensen Interceptor that fictitiously inspired this ersatz UK actioner, starring BBC Top Gear's 3 game presenters. But I do know it was styled by Italians and "looked the business" as the Brits liked to say. That it drove like a couch is beside the point.
What are summer nights for but whiling away the moments, hoping it never ends but knowing that inevitably it will. As endless as they may seem, no matter how much you fill them up with fun or adventure or romance or memories, there are only a finite number of them. One day, one night, it won't be summer any more and you'll have to wait for next year. Nevertheless, I'll bet they were each perfect summer moments strung together one after another.
That's how I feel about the next two songs on my Summer 2010 soundtrack. They're strung together back to back, perhaps the best one-two pairing on any record from my youth. Okay, maybe that's hyperbole. I'm sure I'm missing many others, but this one is about as perfect as they come: cuts 2 and 3 from side two of Cheap Trick's earth-shattering Live at Budokan. And when you hear Mr. Bun E. Carlos knock out that punchy double-time beat to "I Want You to Want Me", you know that in six minutes' time and with the last crashing power chords by Rick Nielsen and Tom Petersson on "Surrender", pure pop perfection will, alas, be over like summer moments.
August. Even when you live in the land of the Endless Summer, summer is gonna end. Bookended by Memorial Day and Labor Day, for my family it is a glorious stretch of beach outings, barbecues, unscheduled days off, camp outs, and various larks. This season, so far, we had four days at a fabulous beach house on the quiet windward side of the island, a camping trip complete with huge illegal bonfire and meteorite-like marshmallows, numerous evenings at the King Kamehameha Club, lots of surfing, and goodness knows what else.
To do all of that, you've got to have your kit together, ready to bring it, just like the Long Range Desert Group brung it to the Afrika Corps. Swiftly. Confidently. Effectively. Definitively. The Rat Patrol was already on re-run rotation when I discovered it as an eight year old. I have never been more enamored of a television show I rarely saw. This was back in the early '70s, when regularly scheduled programming hardly was. Some afternoons I would turn on the TV, tune the rabbit ears and there it would happen to be. The Rat Patrol. Sgt. Troy, prissy Sgt. Moffitt, Hitch, and Tully, cresting dunes at high speed in the greatest TV vehicles ever broadcast, a pair of G.I. jeeps mounted with .50 cal. belt-fed machine guns, all trained at the halftracks and "panzers" of Capt. Dietrich, the honorable Prussian.
All that pre-teen adrenaline certainly contributed to my choice of family summer vehicle: the crew cab with surf racks, in desert tan. Capable of transporting all the equipment you need to whatever outdoor destination you've chosen for your tribe of family, friends, and law partners.
I got mine mere months after my son was born. Turned in the two door pick-up after my wife rightfully cut my head off for trying to stuff my son's baby-seat into the rear "Xtra Cab". Sideways. I've never looked back (well maybe a little. That old truck would've taken me to hell and back). This crew cab has since dutifully carried my family through five summers, and I fully expect my son to drive it a dozen years from now. I dubbed it "Warthog", because to me it is reminiscent of the indefatigable Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft, basically a flying rat patrol jeep.
So with roughly two weeks left in August, I've still got hunting coming up, and then beach cabins for the Labor Day weekend. And I still haven't had to mount the fifty cals in the back.
Someday, this summer's gonna end. And when it does, hopefully it ends like an episode of Rat Patrol.
Bottom pic: The Crew Cab, laden wih surfboard, pole tent, folding tent, 3 coolers of food and alcohol, Weber grill, beach toys, water guns, barbecue gear, dry goods, 40 lbs. charcoal, and son sitting safely in the backseat.
I got mine mere months after my son was born. Turned in the two door pick-up after my wife rightfully cut my head off for trying to stuff my son's baby-seat into the rear "Xtra Cab". Sideways. I've never looked back (well maybe a little. That old truck would've taken me to hell and back). This crew cab has since dutifully carried my family through five summers, and I fully expect my son to drive it a dozen years from now. I dubbed it "Warthog", because to me it is reminiscent of the indefatigable Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft, basically a flying rat patrol jeep.
