Songs About Camaros

The shelf is short. A handful of bands put the word in a title, and the records they made came out across 25 years and two continents. Each one is a small window on what the Camaro meant to the people listening when it was released, which is why it is worth setting them side by side. They sit in the same family as the Camaro in movies, though music tends to get to the car from a stranger angle.

Why the Camaro keeps turning up in song titles

Start with the sound of the word. Three syllables, the stress landing in the middle, an open vowel at the end that a singer can hold as long as the breath lasts. It rhymes with very little, which is a problem for a lyricist and a gift for a title. You just say it, and the listener already has a picture.

That picture matters more than the sound. By the middle of the 1980s the Camaro was everywhere: in driveways, in classified ads, on the back row of the used lot. It was the car a teenager could actually buy, or at least the car the teenager's older cousin had. A song that names it does not need to explain anything. The word carries a whole wardrobe with it, a haircut, a particular kind of Friday night.

The 1980s: punk and college radio find the car

The song from that dorm room is "Bitchin' Camaro" by the Dead Milkmen, a band formed in Philadelphia in 1983. It appeared on their album Big Lizard in My Backyard, released on Restless Records in 1985, as track 11, with a running time of 3:01. The writing is credited to the band as a whole. The rambling introduction that opens the track was improvised, which explains why it feels less like a performance than like overhearing friends who forgot the tape was running.

It became a cult hit on college radio, and that is the right scale for it. Its audience came through college radio, not the pop charts. It traveled the way college radio songs did, from one station's playlist to a friend's mixtape and back again. For a lot of listeners, it was the first time the car in the school lot showed up on a record they actually owned.

Two years later the Ramones put the car on a record of their own. "Go Lil' Camaro Go" is track 5 on Halfway to Sanity, released by Sire on 15 September 1987. It lasts exactly two minutes, which is about as Ramones as a running time gets. Dee Dee Ramone wrote it, and Debbie Harry of Blondie sings backing vocals. It is not on the band's later albums Mondo Bizarro or ¡Adios Amigos!, so anyone hunting for it should start and stop with Halfway to Sanity.

Put the two records next to each other and you hear a generation working something out. The car was not glamorous to these bands. It was ordinary, and the ordinariness was the point.

Songs about Camaros after 2000

The next wave came from a different place and arrived more quietly. In 2003 the Belgian band Triggerfinger (one word) released a single called "Camaro." It later turned up as track 10, at 4:02, on the band's debut album Triggerfinger, released on Green L.F.ant on 26 January 2004. A Belgian rock band naming a song after a Chevrolet tells you how far the car's image had traveled. On a European record, the Camaro is less a neighbor's car than a picture of America seen from a long way off.

Weezer's connection is a story about a song that sat in a drawer. "Yellow Camaro" was written by the band's guitarist, Brian Bell. Weezer recorded its own take in 2002, but that recording did not reach the public until it appeared as a Japan-only bonus track, 1:54 long, on Death to False Metal, released by Geffen on 2 November 2010. Eight years is a long time for a car song to wait in a garage. By then Bell had already taken the song to his own band, Space Twins, who put it out in 2003 as track 4 on their debut album, The End of Imagining.

Then there is Kings of Leon. Their song "Camaro" is track 12 on Because of the Times, released by RCA on 2 April 2007 in the United Kingdom and a day later, 3 April, in the United States. It runs 3:09 and is credited to the band. By 2007 the classic Camaro had become something closer to an heirloom than a used car, and the last fourth-generation car had left the Sainte-Thérèse plant in Quebec in August 2002. A song with that one word for a title, landing then, reads almost like a postcard from a road that was already behind everyone.

What the songs say about the car

Line the five records up and a pattern shows. Not one of them came out of an advertising agency or a factory jingle session. They are rock records made by bands, released on ordinary albums, credited to the people who played them. The Camaro lends them a title and a picture, a social marker, a piece of scenery that tells you what kind of person is standing in front of it.

"The Camaro never needed a love song. It needed a song that admitted everybody knew someone who drove one, and that the someone was usually a little bit ridiculous and completely sure of himself."

Nora Beckett

That is a different kind of fame from the one the car earned on the track or in the showroom. It is the fame of being common enough to joke about and loved enough that the joke never quite turns mean. The bands that wrote about it were mostly working in rock and its rougher branches: punk, college rock, alternative, and a Belgian band a long way from Detroit. The car fit that music because it had always been a little unpolished, a working person's sports car that did not mind being laughed at.

It also says something about timing. The 1980s songs arrived while third-generation cars filled the streets and earlier ones were cheap enough to be anybody's first car. The 2000s songs arrived as the original run was ending and the car was sliding into memory. In both cases, the songwriters were catching the Camaro at a moment when it was part of the furniture of everyday life, either because it was everywhere or because it had just gone missing.

Listening to them now

Every track on this list lives on a named album, so finding them is mostly a matter of knowing where to look. "Yellow Camaro" takes a little patience, because the Weezer recording reached listeners only as a Japanese bonus track.

Owners have their own way of using them. A song with the car's name in the title is the obvious choice for the moment a restored car rolls off a trailer at a show, or for the drive home after the first registration in years. That ritual is part of what the Camaro clubs have kept alive: the car as something shared, played loud and talked over. The songs fit that setting better than any spec sheet ever could.

And the shelf may not be finished. Every few years, a band somewhere finds that the word still sounds right at the top of a track listing. The car stopped rolling off the original line in 2002. The song keeps getting written.

Sources and notes

• Big Lizard in My Backyard, the Dead Milkmen album (Wikipedia)
• Chevy Hardcore on the Dead Milkmen and "Bitchin' Camaro"
• Halfway to Sanity, the 1987 Ramones album (Wikipedia)
• The End of Imagining, the Space Twins album with "Yellow Camaro" (Wikipedia)
• Top Gear Philippines on Chevrolet's 100-song centennial list