To celebrate the fact that Easter 2008 was possibly the best weekend of Oversteer’s life, we present the article written after driving an elderly Cadillac down to Wellington to rock out for the long weekend at ROCK2WGTN!
Although the article seems rather complimentary to the Cadillac, that was largely due to the fact that the head gasket blew and we felt slightly guilty about it. It was, after all, a second hand car the guy was trying to sell. The car was shit. So if you bought a black 1998 Cadillac Seville STS… sorry about that…
It’s 1am and my eyes feel like they have been crudely painted onto my face and then roughly scrubbed off again. I could swear we have been driving for days, and yet we are only mere hours into our trip. The problem was all due to that marvel of modern technology, the mobile phone. Or rather, the leaving behind of one…
Hunter S. Thompson started of his epic road-trip story Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the line “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold”. This not-so-epic road-trip story, however, should unfortunately began with “We were somewhere around Bombay on the edge of the motorway, when Carl remembered he had left his mobile phone behind…”
We were heading from Auckland to Wellington for the ROCK2WGTN series of concerts featuring some of the biggest names in that wonderful subset of rock and roll called Heavy Metal. The line up of bands appearing at ROCK2WGTN read like the scrawlings that covered my pencil case in school, with some of the true heavyweights of rock shattering the air around the Cake Tin in Wellington with their sonic thunderings. Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, KISS, Whitesnake, Poison and relative new-comers, Finnish band Lordi, would all be playing, along with a range of up-and-coming New Zealand bands, all complimented by the promise of special effects supplied by Peter Jackson’s Academy Award-winning WETA Workshop. What true rock fan could resist?
But what car would be the most appropriate to take on a road-trip to an epic rock concert? We were in search of the ultimate Rock Star weekend, so we needed the ultimate Rock Star car. Lamborghinis and Ferraris are all fine and well, but they are not the sort of vehicle in which you pile a bunch of lads and hit the capital for three nights of raising hell and Rock Star attitude, and besides, there’s nowhere to fit the beer. No, it had to be big and it had to have a V8. A Rolls Royce or Bentley? No, far too English Rock Star — Keith Moon may well have driven his Roller into the pool, but these were American Rock Stars (Ozzy excepted, but he doesn’t strike me as a Rolls Royce kinda guy…) In the end, there could really be only one choice…
In 1953 a band called Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats released a song called Rocket 88 about the Oldsmobile 88. It was considered to be the first true rock and roll song, and while not a huge hit, the song set the scene for a long, enduring love affair between rock and roll and the automobile.
“Rocket 88” was based on an older song by Jimmy Liggins called Cadillac Boogie which is vastly appropriate, because Cadillac went on to become the ultimate American Rock Star car, as the concept of the Rock Star evolved along with the music itself — the first thing Elvis Presley did after he made enough money off his first single was to go out and buy a second hand Cadillac. Many more followed as his success grew, and many thousands of songs have been written about Cadillacs since, so what better car to make the trip down to Wellington in than a Cadillac?
But there was the problem — General Motors are bringing Cadillac to New Zealand, but probably not until later this year (or not at all, as it would turn out…), when the new CTS rears its head down under. So why not try one they prepared earlier? Why not indeed, and thanks to the Bunce Motor Company, we could. Sales manager Rod Bunce had been keen to provide us one of the hulking Chevrolet trucks that the company imports and coverts to right-hand drive, but due to the fact that they sell every one they can convert almost straight away (and they churn out pretty much one a week!) none were available.
So Rod suggested the Cadillac they had sitting on the yard. It was a 1998 Seville STS — sleek, black and on chrome alloy wheels — and while it was not the huge be-finned monster of Elvis’ day, it was more than Rock Star enough for our purposes — huge, voluminous arm chair-like leather seats, electric everything and a boot big enough to hold three or four bodies — we would be cruising to Wellington in style. The “we” in this situation being myself, my cousin Carl and his mate Dave.
Style we may have had, but organisation was another thing all together, hence the need to turn around for the mobile phone. While leaving a phone behind may not be such a disaster in itself, the fact that it was the only place Carl had the phone number of his mate, who’s place we were to be staying at, was. Damn… Rock Stars have minions to take care of this kind of trivial detail, don’t they?
After that false start was taken care of, we were on our way again. The plan was to get as far as Otorohanga the first night, then get to Wellington the following day and have a weekend of debauchery and rock and roll.
Our soundtrack for the journey was to be a slightly odd mix of heavy metal, rap, punk, rock, pirate sea shanties (true…) and a CD of Bob Marley songs sung in Maori — the delicate strains of Turbonegro’s All My Friends Are Dead accompanied our eventual departure from Auckland as the Caddy pounded along the motorway in a great, long-legged lope that big American cars do so well. The 4.6-litre V8 has a proper old-school rumble to it and the four-speed automatic transmission slurs effortlessly from one gear to the next. Cruising was to be the order of the weekend’s driving, and the Caddy is the ultimate cruiser.
That is just as well, as not only is the Seville an ultimate American cruiser, it is also the ultimate only-in-America automotive oddity — a front drive V8. Yep, that’s right under the hood is a transverse V8 driving the front wheels. That doesn’t make for the ultimate in handling…
The Scandinavian death-punk of Turbonegro had given way to 80’s heavy metal by the time we reached Huntly, and surprisingly the Cadillac’s fuel gauge had hardly moved off full. Rod had told me that the Seville was easy on the dead dinosaur juice when cruising on the open road, and he wasn’t wrong. The engine sits just under 2000rpm at 100km/h, and thanks to some pretty advanced technology for its day the Cadillac’s average fuel consumption was soon sitting down around 10.5L/100km.
The Northstar L37 V8 was a pretty clever piece of kit when it was launched by GM in 1992. A derivation of the Lotus-designed Chev LT5 all-aluminium DOHC V8 used in the Corvette ZR-1, the L37 was essentially GM’s high-tech solution to the problem created by the disastrous V8-6-4 engine that featured an early version of cylinder deactivation technology to save fuel a decade earlier. To say that it did not work very well would be a vast understatement, and the V8-6-4 was very hastily replaced by an OHV V8, which had left Cadillac on the back foot when compared to its European competitors. The Northstar V8 was a response to that.
One notable feature, heavily promoted by GM at the time, was the “fail-safe” cooling mode, which allowed the engine to continue running for a limited time without any coolant at all. It alternated banks of cylinders “air cooling” the inside of the cylinders, to maintain cool temperatures, allowing the car to be driven with no coolant for about 161km (100 miles) with no damage.
Every good road-trip needs a good, comprehensive soundtrack, and that we had, but a single “Theme Music For The Trip” CD that gets thrashed endlessly is essential, and it is somewhere between Huntly and Otorohanga that we discover ours — the soundtrack CD to the kiwi movie The Devil Dared Me To featuring music by kiwi bands the D4, Head Like a Hole, Darcy Clay and the greatest NZ band ever — Deja Voodoo. Booze-fuelled, sweary chaos fills the air inside the Cadillac as we rumble along a dark, almost deserted State Highway 3 into Otorohanga. Perfect.
The next day dawns with the kind of sunny optimism that only a fine, slightly cool morning over the King Country can manage. We are not so sunny, but then none of us are “morning” people anyway.
Bleary eyes are rubbed, and other various morning rituals are taken care of, and we pile back into the Caddy and hit the road again. To pass the time Carl starts reading the Cadillac’s handbook and discovers that the extremely comprehensive information system in the dash is called DIC (Driver Information Console). “Dick”, as we prefer to call him, is our constant companion, chiming in politely whenever a door is opened, etc. He would become less pleasant later in the weekend, when he would become the bearer of some unsettling news, however that was to come…
After waiting for a suitably civilised hour to start drinking (10am) Carl and Dave crack open their first beers for the day. Very rock and roll. I, meanwhile, have to make do with Red Bull and coffee, not quite as rock and roll, but it’ll keep me going until I can fully unleash my inner Rock Star on the unsuspecting population of Wellington.
Driving along the roads of the lower King Country, skirting around the edge of Taranaki and down into the Manawatu towards our final destination, people notice the Cadillac — from the occasional quizzical stare at this big, sleek, black gangster car rumbling menacingly past them right through to full-on stares with mouthed obscenities (mainly from young males).
Deja Voodoo had by now given way to the Bob Marley in Maori CD, which strangely enough made for excellent “cruising in a Cadillac on a sunny day” music as we headed towards Taumarunui. After a brief stop at Taumarunui for essential supplies — Panadol, Berocca and more Red Bull — we push on directly to Bulls before the call of nature becomes far too strong for Dave and Carl to ignore any longer and we have to stop at the McDonalds there, both for bladder relief AND sustenance. Eighties metal in the form of Motley Crue has taken over the stereo by this stage, and we trundle through Bulls with the Caddy’s Bose stereo thumping out Girls, Girls, Girls.
We roll into Wellington at about 6pm. The Cadillac turns as many heads here as it does everywhere else. Perhaps more so — there are Rock Stars in town, after all. Funnily enough, while it has no trouble turning heads, turning itself is not one of the Caddy’s strong points, as it has a turning circle roughly the same as a small battleship, and as we find out, Wellington has lots of one way, dead end and/or narrow streets…
After one particularly painful 8-or-9 point turn as traffic slowly built up waiting for us to get the hell out of the way, I mutter dark obscenities about not wanting to own a Cadillac in Wellington, only to find the first parked car I look at as I do so is an identical Seville, but in grey. The owner must either: a) have an intimate knowledge of what streets NOT to go down in Wellington: b) be a very brave/stupid/arrogant man, or: c) only visiting too…
After hauling our “stuff” — calling it luggage would be far too generous — out of the huge boot and up about 400 flights of stairs (again, don’t Rock Stars have minions?) to get to where we are staying, we go in earnest search of a beer. Or so we thought — it was Good Friday, nothing was open. The bars would be opening at midnight, however, and on hearing this, I feel a knot of discontent settling in my stomach — a night out that begins at midnight, never bodes particularly well for the next morning. And it didn’t, but it was a very Rock and Roll night…
The morning of the first concert dawns, and we miss it entirely. The morning that is — breakfast is at a waterfront cafe at 1.30 in the afternoon, and we slowly gather up the energy for the night to come. Lordi, Alice Cooper and KISS would play tonight, Poison, Whitesnake and Ozzy Osbourne would be the next night, and we were sure it would be spectacular.
And sure enough, it was.
I had managed to blag a media pass and after doing the ultimate Rock Star thing — ie: dump my mates and head off to where they can’t go — I had the best experience of my life over the next two nights: KISS, Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne were about the greatest things on the planet when I was growing up: my bedroom walls were plastered with posters of them, and their music was constantly screaming from my stereo (sorry mum…), and even after the posters had been replaced with ones of scantily clad women and fast cars, their music has always stayed with me — and here I was leaning up against the front of the stage with thousands of screaming fans behind me, taking photos of my childhood idols. Forget this motoring journalism thing — I want to be a rock photographer now…
The concerts were incredible, and after the final night, with our ears still ringing from Ozzy Osbourne’s crushingly loud show, we hit the town and partied like Rock Stars long into the obscene hours of the morning.
The trip home is, as it always is after things like this, a slow comedown. A dull realisation that, after our most rock and roll of weekends, reality is about take over again. As the digital odometer in the Caddy’s dash slowly ticks over the kilometres, the crushing ordinary-ness of everyday life gets closer.
Perhaps as a final reminder that we are most certainly NOT Rock Stars, our friendly little in-dash friend, Dick, chimes up to tell us that we should check the coolant level. By the time we get to the nearest service station, at Taihape, the Caddy’s temperature is soaring.
We leave the car in the shade and head into the pub for a cold beer on a hot day. No one feels much like talking, and Carl and I have a half-hearted race on the Virtua Racing game flashing in one corner before giving up and leaning on the sticky bar leaner instead.
I give up on the last few mouthfuls of beer after I see tobacco floating in it and wander outside to see if the Caddy has cooled down enough to check the water. It has, but there is no water to check. We fill it up at the service station and head off again, Dick seems happy and stays quiet until we reach National Park where the temperature starts creeping up again, and soon enough Dick tells us to check the coolant level again. Same result this time, and we ponder our best course of action.
It is decided, after some deliberation, that the best idea is to buy a 20-litre petrol container, fill it with water and push on gently. It is, after all, largely downhill from National Park to Te Kuiti, and after that, if worst comes to worst, we can stay in Otorohanga again.
As it turns out Dick only chimes up once more, just out of Te Kuiti, and then the Caddy behaves almost perfectly all the way back up to Auckland, with the temperature only creeping up a bit after the Bombay hills, but no more warnings from Dick. Who knows why? Maybe it was just the Caddy’s way of bringing us back down to earth again after one of the best weekends we could ever have hoped to have.
So was the Cadillac a true Rock Star car? Well, put it this way, like some of the bands, the Cadillac may well be considered past it’s prime, but as the old guys (Poison are all in their mid-forties, Whitesnake and KISS their mid-fifties, Ozzy Osbourne is 60 next year and Alice Cooper turned 60 earlier this year) on stage proved age is certainly no barrier to putting on one hell of a show. And like the old guys, the Caddy put on one hell of a performance.
It’s only rock and roll, but I like it…
