Performance Art

Pop culture crazes used to last a lot longer than they do now, which is one reason that the CB radio wave occupied a couple of years during the last part of the 1970s. Among the interesting things it produced was the spoken-word hit "Convoy" by Bill Fries, under the name C.W. McCall.

The internet being the internet, there's at least one page dedicated to the story of a massive group of trucks tearing through the nation's highways, undaunted and unstopped by law enforcement. It has performance clips of McCall doing "Convoy" live -- after a fashion -- and it mostly involves him telling the story of the aforementioned convoy, led by the Rubber Duck and Pig Pen. McCall switches between a CB mike and a regular one as he narrates the events of "the dark of the moon on the 6th of June" and re-creates the Rubber Duck's dialogue from that night.

There's an oddball connection between "Convoy" and another spoken-word novelty song, 1982's "Valley Girl." Both contain the phrase "fer sure fer sure," although "Convoy" uses the double construction only once and "Valley Girl" repeats it every time the song comes to a chorus.

Both also spawned movies, although Valley Girl didn't involve songwriter Frank Zappa at all, and Convoy is something Kris Kristofferson and Ali McGraw might want left off their respective filmographies.