Mom's Corner: A Car Full of Rock & Roll Clowns

While its predecessors go as far back as the Stout Scarab from 1936, the DKW Schnellaster from 1949 through 1962, and the VW bus, which began production in 1950—mini-vans as we know them were invented in 1984, the year that Toyota issued its Van, Plymouth issued the Voyager, and Dodge released its Caravan. I was in ninth grade that year, the age my middle son is now. 

It didn’t take us teenagers long to realize that the term “mini-van” was just a euphemism for “lame thing mom drives.” I remember telling friends, as a teenager, that I hoped they’d just shoot me if I ever ended up driving one of those things. 

We do a lot of things as parents that our teenaged selves would freak out about, I guess. For me, this not only extends to driving the mini-van in the first place, but to the activities that take place inside of the car. 

In 1983, Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” was a seriously kick-ass album. Only the burnouts in the back of the school bus in their jean jackets advertised that they were listening to Def Leppard, but in truth, we all were. It was not music for the faint of heart. Certainly, it was heavier than WHAM. 

Last week, when the family was cruising down the Parkway (in our mini-van), the iPod shuffled itself onto Def Leppard’s single from “Pyromania,” “Photograph,” which has apparently been re-visited recently by Chris Daughtry and Carlos Santana. The only thing that surprised me more than the fact that somebody re-made “Photograph” was the chorus of children’s voices in the back of the car, singing along as though it were a Kidz Bop album. 

Then, they got into a disagreement about the lyrics. The 7-year-old insisted it was “OH! Nothin’ on my head but this rock and roll crown.” The 14-year-old believed it was “OH! Nothin’ to be said to this rock and roll crowd.” The 16-year-old was sure it had to do with a clown, but she didn’t think so, because “clowns are evil.” (She was the closest, because the lyric actually is “OH! Look what you’ve done to this rock and roll clown.”)

“You look vaguely horrified,” noted my husband. He was right, of course. I was completely baffled by the surreality of that moment. First, there we were in a mini-van with our three kids (which, to my 14-year-old self sounded like a fate worse than death). Second, said children were joyfully singing along to a re-make of Def Leppard’s “Photograph” as though it were the perfect car sing-along song and not one of the most bad-ass rock songs of 1983. Never mind the misheard lyrics. 

My husband and I met on the school bus in tenth grade when we were both 15. So, when I answered him by explaining my realization that our 15-year-old selves would be kicking our ancient butts right about now, he was forced to agree. 

About the car…we always thought we’d have flying cars by now. So, absent any kind of cool Marty McFly ride, it was more a decision of fitting our entire family in the vehicle without strapping anyone to the roof. 

The music question is more complicated. Our teenagers think we and our music are lame, but to us, stuff that was cool to us has now been taken and made lame. I wonder what stuff of theirs will be recycled to their great horror when they’re on the opposite side of 40. Maybe they’ll at least get the flying cars.