R2 Joins the Fleet

Volvo V70

One night a few months ago we were out to dinner with another couple and afterward walked them to their car.  They own half a dozen cars, at least 2 of which are what they call “appliance vehicles:” a minivan and a wagon.  The rest are collector cars, antiques.  (Well, one is a Studebaker pickup, so that kind of straddles the line.)  But on that particular evening they’d brought the wagon, a Volvo V70.  After they drove off Frieda said: “We should get a car like that.”  We had 3 cars already, but they were all 2-seaters and the newest one was 30 years old, so it didn’t seem a bad idea to add a vehicle to our fleet that could be used to pick someone up at the airport and still have room for their luggage; something we could fit another couple in, along with our collie; something that, if we folded the seats down, would haul a few 8’ 2x4s or the 8’ long fluorescent tubes that illumine our garage; in short, a practical vehicle, a vehicle that didn’t have to be coddled but could just be used.   

So, I started looking.  Frieda didn’t want to spend a lot of money.  Our friends’ wagon was a ’98 (you see a lot of older Volvos on the road, they’re pretty sturdy), worth maybe $3500, so that’s what I started looking for.  But I found that vintage tended to have a lot of mileage.  And, as you might infer from all our cars being 2-seaters, we both, unlike most Americans, prefer small cars, and the V70 seemed just a bit too big for us.  Being a sports car guy, I gravitated toward a sport wagon.  I liked the looks of the Audis, but they were pricy and online I found a lot of complaints about them not being reliable and being in the shop all the time getting expensive repairs.  The styling of the VWs was ho-hum and they also had a lot of complaints online.  Not as many as the Audis but enough, given that they weren’t as pretty.  The Subarus got good reviews, except for an apparent propensity to blow head gaskets.  Frieda liked the Forester because the high roofline in the rear meant our collie could stand up without bumping his head but I thought they were homely.  I preferred the styling of the Outback, but we didn’t need AWD and I was therefore reluctant to pay for it.  To me it was just something else to go wrong, a needless complexity.  Then I spotted the Mazda Protege5 which looked small and sporty.  Mazda only made it for 2 years, 2002 and 2003.  When I looked it up online I found nothing but raves.  Almost no one seemed to have anything bad to say about it.



Mazda Protege5



I saw one in the Auto Trader and called.  The guy said he couldn’t meet me that day, but I could drive by and look at it.  Cosmetically it looked fine, but it had 150K miles on it.  He was asking $4200.  The next day when I called him back he said it was sold.  It took a while before I saw another one within a reasonable distance.  It had 96K and they were asking $6500.  Frieda said that was too much.  I thought about it for a couple of days and then called the guy anyway.  He said it was sold.  I began to realize that a) these cars didn’t come up for sale that often and, b) when they did, you had to jump on it because they usually sold within 48 hours.  I told Frieda that, if she really wanted a car like this, we were going to have to pay at least $6K to get something decent, something with less than 100K miles.  After getting her grudging agreement, I started checking Craig’s List on a daily basis, looking for the lowest mileage Protege5 I could find, but weeks went by and the only ones that came up were farther away than I wanted to go, and most of them had over 100K miles.



Volvo P1800



I was beginning to feel frustrated when Frieda said she’d seen something on a used car lot nearby that might work for us.  I found photos of the car online.  It was the smaller Volvo wagon, the V40, with 77K miles; a nice looking car, not as sporty as the Mazda, but clean and smooth, almost elegant.  According to Wikipedia it won an Italian award for “Most Beautiful Estate in the World.”  (“Estate” is the European term for a wagon.)  It was also the first car to be awarded a 4 star safety rating by EuroNCAP.  I had long admired and aspired to own a Volvo P1800, last produced in 1973, the car that holds the Guinness world record for most miles driven at close to 3 million but, in a concession to practicality, I thought, perhaps I’ll have to make do with this one.  The reviews online weren’t as good as the Japanese cars but were better than the German ones.  The lot offering it just happened to be the same one where our friends had bought their Volvo wagon a few years back, so I knew it was reputable. 

I took the car for a test drive and there was nothing to complain about.  It was tight and smooth.  Not gobs of power, but adequate.  With leather, power everything, ac, a sun roof, it had all the modern comforts and conveniences our vintage sports cars lacked, including a defogger that actually worked.  It was boring to drive, of course, but that was the point.  It insulated you from everything, including the driving experience.  It was a quiet cocoon in which you floated down the highway.  Only one thing bothered me.  Every so often an odd twittering and chirping emanated from the dash, as if a family of electronic birds had nested there.  The salesman pled ignorance and I was reluctant to buy the car without knowing. 

Volvo V40

So I took it to a Volvo specialist and, after giving it a clean bill of health in every other respect, he told me the sounds were being produced by an aftermarket stealth radar detector.  Apparently this had been installed at considerable expense as there were tiny holes drilled into the sides of the instrument binnacle with red LEDs that flickered in concert with the chirping.  Back at the lot I told the salesman I liked the car, except for the aviary in the dash.  Could he quash it?  Alas, no, he said.  It would have to go to a specialist.  He offered an extra discount instead.  The sticker on the windshield said $7950.  I paid $6250. 

That afternoon we took it to Pet Pals and just happened to park next to a Protege5.  Looking at the 2 cars side-by-side Frieda said: “The Mazda is too small.  The V40 is just the right size for us.”

The twittering can still be annoying at times, barraging you in an overbearing way with too many indecipherable messages, but the other day I was cruising along when it went into a chirping paroxysm and when I looked around, sure enough, there was a CHP ahead parked on the other side of the road, so maybe it’s not all bad.  Frieda says she has come to find it endearing, like R2D2 is in the cockpit trying to communicate with her.  Consequently she’s dubbed the car “R2.” 

Top 40

Adele

Top 40 radio was invented in my home town, Omaha, Nebraska.  Previously the standard rule was that radio stations never played the same song more than once a day.  In 1949 Todd Storz, the grandson of Omaha brewing legend Gottlieb Storz, convinced his father to buy him a radio station, KOWH.  Then, one day in the early 50s, Todd and his buddy Bill Stewart, the station’s program director, were across the street in a diner waiting for Bill’s waitress girlfriend to get off work when they noticed that, even though the restaurant staff listened to the same handful of tunes on the jukebox all day, played by different customers, after the customers cleared out, when they were free to play any song they wanted, they played the very same songs.   Todd asked the staff to identify the most popular tunes and the next day the station started playing them in heavy rotation.  Ratings went through the roof. 

By the end of the 50s top 40 was the most popular radio format in the nation.  But toward the end of the 60s FM radio came in.  Rock was becoming increasingly pretentious and the single was diminishing in popularity.  With the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s,” the album became the dominant format and remained so throughout the 70s.  In the 80s and 90s popular music began to fragment into subgenres, each with its own following.  Top 40 never completely went away, but it could no longer claim to be the ubiquitous soundtrack of American life. 



The Black Keys



But since the advent of iTunes, the single has staged a comeback and, with it, top 40.  Now there’s no need to buy an album.  You can download the singles you like and put them together in your own album.  The best selling singles chart on iTunes lines up closely with YouTube’s most popular videos and the Billboard Hot 100.  In a turnaround, top 40 now dominates FM radio, once the bastion of album rock.  If you think of punk as an early revolt against the pretention of album rock, you could say we’ve come full circle now back to something resembling the mindless bubble-gum pop and innocent emotion of the 50s, albeit with dirty words and more sophisticated production.  I can keep up with what’s new simply by sampling the iTunes top 200. 

So here’s the playlist I recently downloaded:

1)  “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye – An Australian transplant from Belgium.  I’m not crazy about xylophone, but top 40 is about infectiousness and this lodges itself in your head. 

2)  “Paradise” by Coldplay – A little too lush for its own good, but sticky.

3)  “Someone Like You” by Adele – She owned the year and this was my favorite.

4)  “Lonely Boy” by the Black Keys – These guys just keep growing on me.

5)  “Moves Like Jagger” by Maroon 5 – Initially felt this wasn’t up to the standards they set in “Songs About Jane” (and maybe it isn’t) but it won me over nevertheless. 

6)  “Tonight is the Night” by Outasight – Callow, but good for the gym. 

7)  “Levels” by Avicii – Swedish technopop, but the video is amusing.  Also, like the Gotye song, it reminds me of Venice, where we heard them everywhere.  It appears that, this time around, top 40 has gone international. 

8)  “Drive By” by Train – Very catchy and infectious, perhaps even more addictive than “Hey Soul Sister,” their top 40 hit from last year.  Frieda loves it.

9)  “Not Over You” by Gavin DeGraw – His best since “I Don’t Want to Be.”

10)  “It Will Rain” by Bruno Mars – Frieda loves Bruno, that’s all there is to it. 



Broken Bells



11)  “The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells – Here the list veers a bit away from top 40.  Broken Bells is a side project of James Mercer (of the Shins) with Danger Mouse and, even though they’re a couple years old, I like the 2 songs on this list better than anything on the new Shins album.

12)  “Hidden Hand, Hidden Fist” by STS9 – An instrumental band from Santa Cruz, too jazzy to be top 40 but with some hooks nonetheless.

13)  “On the Corner” by the Twilight Singers – A project of Greg Dulli (formerly of Afghan Whigs) too dark to be top 40, but this much saccharine pop on one list needs a little leavening.  Nice wah-wah guitar solo.

14)  “Tighten Up” by the Black Keys – Yeah, and my next list will have yet another song from these guys, so there.

15)  “The High Road” by Broken Bells – Maybe the better of the 2 Broken Bells songs; at least, the more accessible. 

16)  “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele – Frieda’s favorite.

17)  “We Used to Wait” by Arcade Fire – Every list needs a touch of pretension.

18)  “Missed the Boat” by Modest Mouse – Almost an oldie, already, but Frieda loves Modest Mouse, and we didn’t have this one.