Song Of The Day 8/10/2015: Lindelltronics – “Convoy”

Quarterly Covers Report – Well, you know, different cultures have different ways of interpreting the more micrographic touchstones of American pop culture – even the chartreuse microbus. C.W. McCall made “Convoy” one of the more acceptable trendy cash-ins of the ’70s, dovetailing the CB radio craze with a novelty song that wasn’t all that bad, even if it was essentially recorded with musicians who would ultimately become Mannheim Steamroller. That’s another topic. Also another topic: the fact that we had a CB radio craze at one point in America. CB radio brought all the excitement, intrigue and derring-do of ham radio and stuck it on truck dashboards. CB had its own patois, its adorable code for things like highway patrolmen, adverse weather conditions, livestock and loose women that had everyone atwitter. In addition to “Convoy” the song there was Convoy the movie which, again, was reportedly pretty good. CB radio was a uniquely American mini-industry that was, like everything else, throttled by motherboards, punk rock and Giorgio Moroder.

So how Finnish group Lindelltronics got their mitts on copies of “Convoy” and decided to turn it into a ’90s big-beat crossover hit is sort of a mystery to me. I can’t say I’m really offended by it, but I’m not in a flyover state. Fortunately there’s a video in which you can see a guy who looks uncannily like XTC’s Andy Partridge regale a whole Finnish equivalent of a barroom with tales of how he bust the will of those Finnish hogs, picking up a hitchhiker who accidentally discovers his rubber duckie in the back seat. This was from an album called Hello Finland which is completely inaccessible to me. But it contains a track called “Truck Drivin’ Serial Killer,” which indicates that they took the semi semi-concept all the way.

Hyvä heille! That's Finnish for "I use Google Translate and I'm confident it's 100% accurate all of the time!"



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