Memories - Front Man - Classic Muscle Car

I'm 37. So, if you assign any credibility to my earliest years as a car guy, that means I've got 25 years to call upon for pontification about my firsthand experience of how good things used to be. It's a right that I find myself exercising ever more frequently, especially as I focus on the erosion of the good old days that, more so than ever, don't seem so long ago. That's odd, since I've spent most of my life feeling that I was born too late; I should have raced the dry lakes as a young teen in the late '30s, then served in the Pacific and come home to participate in the boundless opportunities of the early speed and off-roading industries. Today I'd be one of those old guys who never needed a cell phone and never heard of a Blackberry. Instead, I was born in the Summer of Love, was weaned on disco, and came of age in glam-metal Hollywood. It was an era that's recalled fondly by virtually no one who won't attend this summer's Mtley Cre reunion tour. Too Fast For Love was released 23 years ago. It makes me want to reach for the Rogaine, which I could actually use.

Perhaps it's a predictable manifestation of pending middle-agedness, but I find myself looking back more fondly at stuff that went down during my lifetime. Today it seems less cheesy and more nostalgic that I spent my 20s at parties and clubs with the likes of Nikki Sixx, Steven Pearcy, Jani Lane, Kevin Dubrow, Carlos Cavazo, and even Axl Rose. At a distance of maybe 17 years, it's fun to tell of David Lee Roth mashing my then-girlfriend during a night at the Hollywood Gardens. I guess it was payback: A couple years earlier the "Hot For Teacher" video was shot at my high school during summer break, and we snuck in and snapped a compromising photo of Roth with some chick, then ran for our lives. It'd be a better story if the photo had come out.

The music may have dictated our hair length, but my friends and I were car guys to the bone. I walk the same junkyards today that I did then and remember when they were piled with musclecars, or at least V-8 parts donors. Mopar A-Bodies were not taken seriously back then, and we pulled more than a couple 340s from the yard. I'm personally responsible for the extinction of at least three 340 Dusters, since you could buy them all day long for $800 a whack, and I cringe as I recall the mint '68 Dart Swinger 340 that my friends and I illegally derbied on the horse trails of Griffith Park before parting it out. It was green, and green was worthless. We drove Chevelles as throwaway cars since we didn't like Chevys that much. Though Hemis were already out of our price range, you could still find cheap Six-Pak cars once in a while, and guys street raced them mercilessly. All the good street race spots are now overdeveloped. All the speed shops are out of business, and the junkyards are thick with indistinguishable econo-blobs. Around 1987 I sold a '71 V-code Road Runner for $3,800. Last time I heard, the same went for 10 times that, and I'm sure it's atrophied from a lack of burnouts.