THE GENERAL LEE:
Backwoods Hotpants & Horsepower!
By: Mike Marino
Lights, camera's, action! Quiet on the set! The casting couch and the Golden Age of Film. It was the heady Hollywood heydays. Glitz and glamour were personified by Gable and Garbo, and it was the same era of over consumption and arrogance that inspired the Gloria Swanson/William Holden film treatment of the great washed up stars of the Hollywood Hills..."Sunset Boulevard". It was Hollywierd at it's gluttonous best. Premiers, autograph's, paparazzi by the busloads...and the cars, oh man, those cars. These were the V-8 and V-12 chariots of the gods that had descended from the heavens to walk among us mere mortals. Cadillac. Stutz. Duesenberg.
Ragtops purring, humming, wind in the hair, racing without a care down the Malibu coast, full moon on the water, waves silver tipped, racing shoreward to engage in oceanic intercourse with California's golden beaches. Gay laughter and witty reparte punctuated the night with scarves flying and whipping in the West Coast breeze...flags of the Republic of Celebrity. Gasoline was being consumed in gargantuan quantities as filmland flaunted itself to the delight of a hungry public. In time the Golden Age would pass, the patena would fade from the movies and the stars themselves, and in the coming of age, piston pubescent era of the 1950's - 1970's roadhead, the cars would become the main attraction.
Take two moonshining pretty boys, add some backwoods mayhem with a slurred southern drawl...a kissin' cousin-type sister in painted on hotpants from the planet Salivation, and you have the makin's of a recipe for success with "The Dukes of Hazzard."
John Schneider and Tom Wopat perfected the roles of the deep fried southern troublemakers who gave heaping plateful's of grief to Boss Hogg and Sheriff Roscoe Coltrane. Car chases, car crashes, car near misses. It was a piston pumping inbreed festival of stars and bars, as well as cars. The women were awed by the sinewy brothers of the backwoods. One blonde, (only his hairdressed knew for sure), and the other the obligatory brunette, dark, swarthy and deep. In other words, The Anti-Blonde!
Now we need something else. Something the guys can relate to. Soon the seas of sexuality parted with divine inspiration and from the fog emerged everyones backwoods dream...Daisy Duke, the Queen of Cleavage and Heaven in Hotpants! The sexual thunder that emerged from her rocked our world, as we waited patiently in line to get a direct hit by her lightning. If other sex symbols of the day were mere thunderstorms, then, Daisy Duke qualified as a full fledged hurricane!
Although women dreamed of going to the moon with Luke or Bo, and the guys wanted to search for a needle in Daisy Dukes haystack, the real star of the show was an automotive phallic symbol named "The General Lee". Named after the spirited leader of the Confederate Army, the car symbolized the muscle of an era gone by, and when The Dukes debuted in 1979 it was already considered late Sixties and early Seventies nostalgia.
The venerable V-8 Dodge Charger was chosen for a reason. Power. Power...and more power. Mucho, macho, machisomo muscle. The Charger won 22 of 54 major NASCAR races in 1969, so why not take the king of the track and make it the king of the backwoods. Give it a distinctive blaze orange paint job, add a Confederate flag on the roof, have the horn blast out the opening notes of "Dixie" and you have one deep south southern-fried mo-sheen.
The Charger itself, was a thinly disguised street racing screamer that rocked and roared as the engine came to life with the power of the beast from 20,000 fathoms. Raw power and energy unleashed, and the timing couldn't have been better. The country was full of hollow-eyed asphalt junkies, and a gallon of gas fix was just pennies on the dollar and it all got jammed into the gasoline vein of the Charger.
The era of muscle flexing Motor City Mo'sheens began in 1964 when John Delorean put his team to the task of creating more machismo per quarter mile than had ever been seen before. The GM team he put together for the Pontiac division jammed a big block V-8 under the hood of the modest Tempest and the GTO was the result. The Mother of Muscle had broken her water, and the Muscle Era was born.
The Charger, was introduced in 1965 at the auto show as a "concept car" although it was actually the final product that would be unleashed in 1966. The engine was a street version 425 hemi, and it had four bucket seats with a sleek console that ran from front to back. The standard engine was a 230 hp 318 V-8 with an optional 265 hp 361, 325 hp 383, and 425 hp Hemi. Transmissions were the three-on-the-tree, four-on-the-floor, and three-speed automatic. V-8 options only were available in 1966 and 1967, but in 1968 a V-6 option was introduced. The Charger was now poised to lead the "Dodge Rebellion" as it was the rubber burning wild child of the muscle era and would remain until the end of the line, at least for awhile, in 1978.
According to various sources, The "Dukes" production company had something like 300 plus "General Lee's" and only two dozen remain as at least one Charger per episode got wrecked in the stunt work. Only '68 and '69 models were used during the course of the show from 1979 to 1985. The first General Lee ever built, was salvaged out of a Georgia junkyard in August 2001 and has since been fully restored to its on screen appearance. It was officially unveiled to the public November 11, 2006 with John Schneider behind the wheel.
There is no doubt about it, the Charger was king of the streets. In fact it was so popular it was featured in the movies "Bullitt" and "Vanishing Point". Soon there would be change on the Charger horizon and the muscle era itself would surrender at the environmental equivalent of Appomatox in the gas rationing Seventies amidst a sea of federal regulation, but, thanks to The Dukes of Hazzard, "The General Lee" keeps whistlin' Dixie!
Classic Cars, Rock n' Roll, Elvis, Drivein Movies & Route 66! Kerouac, The Beats, Haight Ashbury, Easy Rider & Vietnam!
The Roadhead Chronicles goes from the Cold War Fifties Pop Culture of classic cars and rock n' roll to the spaced out Spare Change Sixties of Vietnam and Hells Angels. Not the usual look at the era, instead It's written by someone who lived it and spent a life of being on the road from his beach bum days in Honolulu to the glitz and dangers of the Sunset Strip in LA, and his purple hazed and double dazed days in North Beach and the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. The Roadhead Chronicles also looks at the history of Route 66, Roadside Neon Culture and old diners and dives!
Mike Marino writes in an offbeat and irreverant style with a beat and a cadence that is all his own. His writing style has been compared to John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck and Terry Southern and one reviewer likened him to Frederick Lewis Allen on acid! Readers and critics call the book "wickedly wonderful", "delightfully weird" and "automotively sexy."!!
