Perhaps it’s just me, but I believe a degree of humility and selflessness is required to achieve something truly great. Call it a belief in the bigger picture versus the pride of sticking one’s name on every bloody thing you make. Henry Ford, I’m looking at you. You too, Soichiro Honda. Ditto Enzo Ferrari. And Ferrucio Lamborghini. Also that Pagani chap.
Ok, there are a few gems here, but there’s also Ratan Tata and let us never forget the infamous John DeLorean. I admit it’s less of an issue in the world of motorcars but if you drive something like an Audi or Volvo or hundreds more, you get the sense that a team of brilliant people collaborated, made sacrifices, negotiated to make - at least in the days of its inception - a truly considered product, and that’s a good thing.
But I can’t help drawing parallels between the ‘moving metal’ industry to another interest of mine, rock and roll.
David Grohl is typically the first who comes to mind in this regard. A man that went into a sound room and recorded an entire album, first by laying down the drum beats, then overlaying the guitar riffs, before returning to record the vocals, before chopping the lot together to create a record called Foo Fighters. By himself.
As things of lore usually are, it was awesome. So he realised he needed a name for his one man band. He didn’t call it the David Grohl band, as he well could have. Again he whipped out a pen and wrote down ‘Foo Fighters’, a term copped by fighter pilots to describe Unidentified Flying Objects spotted during World War II – obviously.
So old Dave went about employing other (sometimes inferior) musicians to take up the physical spots in the band and went on tour. The rest is modern rock history. Later on, when questioned about his name choice for the band, Grohl commented only that, “If I knew we were going to be so f**king famous I would have come up with a better name.” Fair enough, but I’m sure The David Grohl Band never entered his mind space.
A lesson many other musicians could have learnt from, for example Mr David Matthews. I mean, how massive must your ego be… wait no, rather, how low on self-esteem do you have to be Stefan Lessard, co-founder and bassist of said ego-trip? What about Richie Sambora, lead guitarist for Bon Jovi. That’s Jon Bon Jovi’s band, you know? Nobody needs to be introduced to Slash, who plays an identical roll at Guns ‘N Roses, I’m just saying. Or how about David Lee Roth, a frontman so humble he named his band Van Halen, the surname of his lead guitarist, Eddie.
There’s doing something for the greater good versus taking one for the team. Jon, David (Mathews) and the others egomaniacs like yourselves, you may have scored all the best chicks but I’m going to tell you with certainty that the rest of your band is plotting your demise, which I think is fair since you’re most likely responsible for their current drug addictions.
Which brings me rather neatly to one of the greatest bands… in the world. And simultaneously one of the worst car manufacturers to have ever churned out a metal box on wheels. That they culminated in one of the most iconic car-meet-rocker scenes in cinema history, well that’s just luck.
I refer to Wayne’s World, the Bohemian Rhapsody skit specifically – a scene I am reminded of each time I glance at my three sons in the rear-view mirror. Here amidst a festival of head-banging and lip-syncing, Queen, which despite Mr Freddie Mercury’s exuberant lifestyle and wardrobe choices could not be argued to share its name with its frontman, provided the soundtrack for one of the most memorable motoring moments on celluloid.
The car in question was an AMC Pacer. That’s AMC as in American Motor Cars – you couldn’t come up with a more generic nomenclature if a committee paid you to. The car itself was wholly unappealing, a hopeless mess that combined cute and ugly with, ‘oh no, our clay model has melted overnight – build it anyway.’ But, like one of those yellow minion things in Despicable Me, it was personified with so much charisma and charm that it defined my first enthusiastic years with motor cars. It probably led to my purchase of a Mini Cooper as my first car.
It occurs to me now that if my beloved MINI's creator had suffered the same egotism of Mr Jon Bon Jovi, my first car might have been called a Sir Alec Cooper (now why does that sound familiar?) but as it turns it was at one point built by a little British motor company, called BMC. Gettit?
