PROJECT:OBJECTIONABLE (12)

By: Joshua Glenn
November 10, 2021

One in a series of 25 first-person narratives of offense, outrage, innocent transgression or principled affront, in attire, display, speech or spectacle.

K-TEL TRUCKER TAPE

I was barely cognizant, as a child in the ’70s, of Country music. Besides the occasional crossover hit from, say, Kenny Rogers, Boston radio stations rarely played the stuff. Ringo’s cover of “Act Naturally,” Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay” — this sort of fare is what passed for Country in my family. In July of 1980, though, while fueling up at a truck stop en route to the Alleghenies, my father for some perverse reason purchased 20 Great Truck Drivin’ Songs, a cassette produced by K-Tel.

For the rest of the summer, he and I got a kick out of these novelty songs. “Give Me 40 Acres (To Turn This Rig Around)” was fun because it made unflattering reference to our hometown; so did “Big Wheel from Boston.” The tape conjured up a way of life utterly exotic to this 12-year-old. “Six Days on the Road” celebrated the drug-enabled melding of man and machine: “I got me ten forward gears and a George Overdrive / I’m taking little white pills and my eyes are opened wide.” “Convoy” was a libertarian fantasy of truck drivers protesting government regulations. And Hank Snow’s rapid-fire recital of exotic place-names — “Tampa, Panama, Mattawa, La Paloma / Bangor, Baltimore, Salvador, Amarillo / Tocopilla, Barranquilla, and Padilla” — transformed “I’ve Been Everywhere” into an incantatory spell of the open road.

It was in a sentimental mood, then, that one day in 1986 I would rescue the neglected tape from a box of junk before hoofing it for the inbound train. In those days, my friends and I toted our sticker-covered boomboxes around with us, blasting Minor Threat, Minutemen, Bad Brains, The Smiths, Run DMC, Mantronix, Schoolly D. I boarded the Orange Line train, that day, at my local station — Green Street, on the now-demolished elevated line — and took a seat. I slipped 20 Great Truck Drivin’ Songs into the deck and pressed PLAY. Instantly, I regretted doing so.

Playing Country on one’s boombox while riding the Orange Line, I recognized too late, was a provocation. My neighborhood was, in those days, majority-minority, or nearly so; my fellow train passengers certainly were. So I might as well have been waving a Confederate battle flag around. I should have hit STOP. Yet as we rolled through Egleston, Dudley, and Northampton stations, and the train car filled up, I let the tape keep rolling. To do otherwise, according to the streetwise algorithm that in those days guided my every public action, would have been to show weakness, fear.

This incident remains one of the most inflammatory, offensive things I’ve done… and I wasn’t even trying. I still feel like an asshole about it.

MOVIE OBJECTS: INTRODUCTION | Ramona Lyons on EYE OF THE SERPENT (CONAN THE BARBARIAN) | Faythe Levine on BEDKNOB (BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS) | Gerald Peary on CUP OF COFFEE (THE BIG HEAT) | Christopher Orr on TOM’S HAT (MILLER’S CROSSING) | Lynn Peril on TRANSISTOR RADIO (DR. STRANGELOVE) | & 20 MORE.

PROJECT:OBJECTIONABLE (12)

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