Got My Chips Cashed In

It seems like I'm always on Route 81, back and forth between our house in PA and my 99-year-old mother's place in VA. One thing it would be hard not to notice: the increase in truck traffic. Or two things: the truck traffic, and the vast warehouses that have sprung up all along 81, but especially in southern Pennsylvania. It's like they built a hundred Pentagons.

You might end up boxed in by boxes, with a truck to your left, one ahead of you and one behind. And you definitely might have to deal with a major accident closing the whole road for hours. These are particularly frequent in the stretch around Carlisle, PA, and hundreds of trucks are often detoured through the town.

But if you're sitting in Carlisle eating lunch, it's getting hard to tell whether a detour is in progress; there are always, now, a number of 18-wheelers on the streets, and it's getting ridiculous around Hanover ("the snack food capital of America," home of Snyder's and Utz). It's strange, sharing the road in a large town or small city with tractor-trailers. It takes them forever to accelerate when the light turns green; they can barely make the right turns. Sometimes they get jammed under the bridge.

This here is the golden era of trucking. But it's not, yet, the golden era of trucking music, which came in the 1970s. There were trucking movies in the '70s as well (especially the Smokey and the Bandit franchise), and the two went together. The truck driver was mythologized as the modern-day cowboy, CB radio lingo ("10-4" or "Breaker 1-9") entered the vernacular. People had careers in trucking. Some, such as Red Sovine (he of the CB tear-jerker "Teddy Bear") also had careers about trucking. In the words of the great country singer Josh Turner: "We turned that big rig around on a dime. Ain't seen nothing like that since Red Sovine."

The most famous trucking song is C.W. McCall's "Convoy." It seems a bit obsolete, as it now looks like a convoy stretches from Miami to Boston all day, every day. It’d be hard to distinguish a convoy from the normal flow of thousands of consecutive trucks. There was even a movie based on that song, starring the late Kris Kristofferson and featuring the greatest poster in cinematic history, as well as Ernest Borgnine.

You'll be surprised and perhaps disappointed to hear this, but so far this is all digression. The 2020s, not the 1970s, should be the golden era of the trucking song. There has seemed to be little sign of that until recently, with the dramatic advent of the band known as the Franklin County Trucking Company.

As if to confirm my prepossessions, the Franklin County Trucking Company (or 'fco-tco' as they seem to call themselves) have 18 million followers on TikTok. Just kidding! I don't even know what TikTok is. But they should have 18 million followers wherever they may be. Instead, they have 53 views on YouTube.

Because they’re a steaming rock band; fco-tco is to today's music what that poster is to cinema: simply its greatest expression, its very essence. Plus it's pretty funny. Wait, does Ali McGraw have an Afro?

The Death-Defying Adventures of the Franklin County Trucking Company is the band's fourth album, all in the same spirit. But somehow I missed the first three. This one consists of 12 great original trucking songs, played sort of Supersuckers' style, featuring Eddie Spaghetti in some capacity. It's driving rock ‘n’ roll, beautifully and loosely played, referring to everyone from ZZ Top to the Ramones.

I'd say Death-Defying Adventures is a concept album, but really this is a concept band. That can be a good idea. It gives them a specific subject-matter to explore, one that most Americans are right in the middle of on a given Tuesday morning commute, but which we might not fully understand. Playing fco-tco in my car (where else?), I start thinking about what's going on in those cabs, in those heads, as the dudes convey white blood cells through the circulatory system of America. The anthem now might have a lyric about supply chains rather than convoys.

Anyway, what a delightful album. Punky southern rockers like "Shotgun Ghost" or "Raise Hell, Praise Dale!" rock and roll a little better than anything I've heard in some time. "Me and Mr. Pibb" is a great sobriety song, a great breakup song, and a great trucking song, played in a more bluegrassy mode.

I gave up smoking
I gave up drinking
I gave up most drugs and pornography
But all you gave up was on me....
Now it's just me and Mr. Pibb on the highway tonight
No powder, no pills for the ride
I'm as lonesome and sober as I've ever been
'Cause I can't drink you out of my mind.

Red Sovine wishes he was still alive to cover that one. Or at least the more serious trucking songs on the record, such as "What a Trucker Does" or "Work Hard, Be Humble" which features the sage advice of an old trucker to a young one. A lot of the record is pure rock 'n’ roll, but there are myriad references to the country tradition, as there must and ought to be in songs about trucking. The would-be classic song "Ain't No Duke in Paducah" refers to "I've Been Everywhere" and "We're Not the Jet Set".

The Death-Defying Adventures of The Franklin County Trucking Company brings trucking songs back to the trucked-up world we live in now, and it brings real guitar rock back to a notably annoyed and annoying America. We owe essential workers like the Franklin County Trucking Company a great debt.

—Podcast episode of Crisper Roots featuring review of Franklin County Trucking Company