Junkyard Find: East Bay Gig-Rig Malaise El Camino
When a truck or truckish vehicle gets close to the end of its usable lifespan, the last owner— if this vehicle happens to be in an urban area full of scroungy underemployed dudes with a 15:1 effects-pedal/guitar ratio— will often be a Band You Never Heard Of. When I was an affiliate of such a band in early-80s Oakland, we had a GMC Value Van with Chevy 396 power. The fate of such vehicles is always the same: a year or two of abuse, spilled beer on the carpets, and tire theft while parked in alleys behind dive bars… and then the head gasket blows or a control arm breaks and the tow-truck takes it for its final ride.
I see a lot of these discarded gig-rigs in the junkyards of the San Francisco Bay Area. I think it’s good to see that a truck’s last miles were spent holding up honorably under such abuse, like a sick old horse that still hauled tons of scrap iron up the hill before collapsing dead in a mud puddle. Lots of stickers, the stink of sweat and stale beer, and a general sense of time-capsuleness. Some museum should buy these up and exhibit them; imagine how cool it would be to see a collection of beat-to-hell gig-rigs from, say, early-80s Austin or mid-60s Los Angeles.
The Artfag Mafia and Stork Club stickers definitely mark this as an East Bay band’s amp hauler. I grew up in the East Bay and have seen many a gig at the feet-stick-to-the-floor Stork Club; this El Camino (or maybe it’s a GMC Sprint; damn if I can tell the difference on one with no emblems) would look right at home parked on Telegraph with a bunch of dudes in Fang T-shirts unloading a cheap drum kit out of the camper shell.
There’s even the remnants of some sort of homemade psychedelic-light-show device in the back, no doubt passed from band to band until finally being sacrificed to the Junkyard Gods.
Look, an East Bay Rats sticker. The stories this cartruck could tell!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Shame it's long since been chipped and melted, as it's calling to me, telling me I need a new daily driver...
dammit, im waitin for the backstory... this should be good, as usual :)