Defend the Indefensible: Sammy Hagar "I Can't Drive 55"

"Your Love is Driving Me Crazy" is worse that "I Can't Drive...", though.

Heavy.

This fucking made my day!

The first Montrose album, the one that contains Bad Motor Scooter, is great. It should be noted that it's actually Hagar's girlfriend that rides the titular scooter. She also can't drive 55 but that's cuz the scooter only goes to thirty.

Yet one of them is by Don "Eagles" Felder, which is about as heavy as a Jackson Browne outtake.

montrose does kick ass, tho.

Also he drives with "one foot on the brake, one on the gas," meaning that his brakelights are on the entire way to Los Angeles, pissing off everyone who has to drive behind him. Which also means he's a badass.

he should have followed it up with a single about jaywalking called "I Won't Stand in Line for the Crosswalk Sign"

Stencil - I think you may be right about that I-10 thing. I'd always assumed it was used in the "stop on a dime" sense, ie. from 55mph to zero.

That first Montrose album is 10,000 times better than anything featuring Mr. Hagar has a right to be. Search!

Anyone still drive a car with 55 on the speedometer all red and highlighted? You don't see those anymore.

It is fucking MAGNIFICENT, albeit EXPENSIVE.

Like driving above the speed limit and getting a ticket?

"the reference is to doing the legal speed limit which was 55
mph at the time. it was supposed to be a joke on sammy hagar ("can't
drive 55").

on bass, watt"

(ie not the I-10 thing.)

this is the worst fucking song

with the best fucking video

I just learned a song called "Shag", which includes beach music references in the lyrics to back up the entendre.

*Hagar* has a song called...

When "I Can't Drive 55" came out I was 15 years old, a freshman in High School and living in suburbia. Like almost everyone's freshman year, this was a transition period for me: A few years earlier, I was an OCD kid diligently writing down the American Top 40 with Casey Kasem on the radio and when I heard the likes of "The Stroke" and "Back In Black," I discovered that I much preferred loud guitar-oriented fare to much of the pop pablum that made up the bulk of the charts at the time (see my user name for reference).

A few years later, I would be immersing myself into "stoner" culture in my High School, turning my nascent love for heavier music into a burgeoning personality and the (sometimes painful) elimination of social retardation with new peer groups.

(I say groups, plural, because unlike many at that time, I felt an equal kinship with the metal kids who loved the classics and were just starting to get into Metallica, Mercyful Fate and the like as I did with the punk rock kids who loved the classics and were into the DC Hardcore. Being in the suburbs of the nation's capital assisted this. Dave Grohl is almost exactly my age and only a few miles from me, he was using the same stimulus I was. Only he became rich and famous because he had talent, whereas all I have are posts like this one to show for it.)

So this was an awkward time when I was sponging up anything with guitar in it, but I lacked the financial resources due to my age and sheltered early-teen existence, and there was no internet or even college radio stations for me to expose me to more underground things.

As such, the gateway drug between AC/DC and Slayer was a gateway period between middle school and freshman year was the pop metal that Circus and Hit Parader covered and who got a small degree of play on the commercial rock stations at the time (a short but crucial few years before so-called glam rock really took off.)

"Pyromania" was the soundtrack to the 8th grade for me. It was one of the first cassettes I owned and seemingly every song on it found it's way onto the radio. I also heard Judas Priest and Accept and Black Sabbath (well, "Paranoid") on the radio and bought tapes from them; newer stuff I heard included Twisted Sister and "Cum On Feel The Noize. I respected my elders (Cooper, Zeppelin) though I didn't know much about 'em historically.

It was at this juncture where "I Can't Drive 55" came into my life, right about the same time as 1984 which would become the soundtrack for the 9th grade for me. It was a perfect song for me when I was 15, thinking I was already well into a journey (I listened to Journey too, come to think of it!) that I really had only just began, at a time when I had not yet fell into any clique, making me feel like a foreigner (I listened to Foreigner too!) in the classroom halls (yeah, Rush too) that alienated me. It was actually worse at this point because a few years later, I would find like-minded peers who would accept me, but now I just felt like a geek with no older brother to assist my voyage to High School.

I not only couldn't drive 55, I couldn't drive at all, what with being just 15 (Due to a ton of things, mostly my dad's sudden unemployment shortly before all of this, I didn't really drive until I was way older than anyone else around me at the time). And as an expat New Yorker teen in suburban Northern Virginia, I had trouble relating to Sammy Hagar's distinctly California vibe.

But I didn't have a problem with that riff! And embarrassing as it might be to admit it now, at the time Hagar's anti-authoritarianism was a thrill for a sheltered kid who still had to look out for his younger siblings, and come to think of it, also a gateway of sorts since it would be a few years before "Fuck The Police" and a slew of anti-police punk and hardcore songs would solidify my distrust of law enforcement.

It's not just a time-and-place track either. A few ears later, when I was still young but now driving, that song could come on the radio and still cause me to go just a little bit faster, with it's rush of urgency and of course the lyrics basically extolling the virtues of doing that exact thing. I pictured that no jury of my peers would ever convict me for not driving 55 since all I had to do is play that song in court ("If you like the riff, you must acquit!") and get off scott free.

(Please note this did not work. I got tickets and apparently explaining that I was incapable of driving 55 was insufficient to get out of them. They also didn't ever have a jury for traffic court, or if they did, I didn't know I could do anything other than pay the fine.)

So I'll rep for this song. It was one of a few important songs that helped transition me from an awkward pre-teen to an unabashed music fan whose love for loud music defined his personality, employment and very existence. I'm happy being me and this song helped get me here. So thanks, Sammy Hagar! Your Van Halen records were not as good as the ones with David Lee Roth and even the words Cabo Wabo make me want to vomit, but this song was important to making me what I am today, for better or worse.

Sammy Hagar does have quite a few car related tunes. One of the stranger ones I have come across is one called "Crusin' and Boozin" which is pretty much a PRO drunk driving song. Tune is very 1977 and comes from the self titled aka 'Red' lp.

There are a couple of other interesting things on the LP too. The tune "Rock and Roll Weekend" has the dead on the same riff as Joy Division's "Interzone". Sammy also cover's Patty Smith's "Free Money".

Only one motor scooter song, though, as far as I know. It's not bad.

"Trans-Am (Highway Wonderland)" ftw w/the line about his license plate reading 'I8-Z28S'.

The tune "Rock and Roll Weekend" has the dead on the same riff as Joy Division's "Interzone".

Also the same riff from here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbKCWBTgTR8

Sammy also cover's Patty Smith's "Free Money".

I read his autobiography a few years back (for some reason)... I recall he wrote something like, “Patti’s not really my kind of gal; but that’s ok, I’m probably not really her kind of guy.”

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61TR0AizEjL._SX401_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Hagar's like the Jimmy Buffet of hard rock at this point