Road & Track February/March 2023

When queen sang “I’m in Love with My Car” on their sublime 1975 album, A Night at the Opera, the line “got a feel for my automobile” worked because it rhymed, not because Freddie Mercury, Brian May, and drummer Roger Taylor (who sang this song) were gearheads. But history brims with rock stars who really did love cars, who sang about them, collected them, even died driving them. Popular music, especially after World War II, has been mortally linked with cars. For the average teenager, the car radio became as important as the car itself. I had suitcases of mix-tapes and dubbed cassettes, then books of CDs that dates and buddies flipped through as I carved the side roads in southern Maine. I knew which station was getting the Led out…

Joe Levy Levy, an editor-at-large at Billboard, hosts the podcast Setting the Standard: Stories from the Great American Songbook. For this issue, he writes about the life of Miles Davis and how the trumpeter’s philosophy of perpetual forward motion found expression in his music and his passion for Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and all types of speed in “Running the Voodoo Down” (page 038). John Flansburgh Flansburgh is co-founder of the platinum-selling band They Might Be Giants. Like many musicians, he loves listening to music in cars. In “Road Noise” (page 056), he tests various automotive audio systems. He has earned two Grammys, and They Might Be Giants is nominated again this year for the package design of their album (and book) titled Book. He is on the road across the U.S. through the summer…

HACKLES ARE THE FINE HAIRS at the back of your neck, evolutionary leftovers that can still rise like those of a protohuman ancestor hearing a wolf howl in darkness. Fight or flight, adrenaline pumping, senses heightened—a click of the column-mounted paddle shifter and a foot stabbing at the throttle. Hackles raised, choose combat. A prehistoric hominid raises a burning branch; eons later, a spark ignites fuel 75 times every second. The idea is the same: fire as a weapon. Screaming to its 9000-rpm redline in six-tenths of a second, the Lexus LFA’s 4.8-liter V-10 is a blur of magnesium and titanium, its complex engineering beyond common under-standing. But the sound it makes—that sound is everything. The wolf pack howls, but it howls at the driver’s instruction. So let them run. The digital…

1966 SHOULD HAVE BEEN great for the Beatles. Just before the new year, they released Rubber Soul, a stunning creative leap, and they followed it up with the even more dazzling Revolver in August. It was a one-two punch that rocked the pop world. Across town, Mick Jagger furiously cribbed Paul McCartney songs. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, whose sublime Pet Sounds came out between the two Beatles LPs, engaged in creative mortal combat with McCartney and had a mental breakdown. An entire generation of rockers was taken to school. But for the Beatles, ’66 was a nightmare. Days after the release of Revolver, they embarked on a world tour so disastrous, the Philippine army chased them, Japanese crowds nearly trampled them to death, and evangelical Americans burned Beatles memorabilia after…

THE GUITAR PLAYER wrenches the column shifter, and the van rolls drowsily out of suburbia. The singer farts and yells, “Window!” The bass player groans. A Fritos bag rustles. Black Flag rages on a boombox. The pedal drops. The engine wheezes. The highway opens up. Another punk-rock concert tour is underway. The dream of a musician’s life on the road may reflect in the stainless façade of a luxury tour bus, but more often, the reality plays out between the steel panels of a humble trade van. For decades, ladder-on-frame vans have carried payloads of impoverished punk, heavy-metal, indie, and other acts, like ramshackle, heat-seeking missiles homing in on a shadowy audience desperate to be found. Aging tour vans supported young outfits that flamed out after a few gigs and those that launched…

WATCHES ARE GENERALLY polite little objects, quiet except for the movement’s whispering tick tick tick. Some watches, however, are not content to remain hushed. This H. Moser & Cie. belongs to a class of watches called minute repeaters, which, in addition to visual indicators like hour and minute hands, can signal time audibly via tiny chimes. At the press of a button on the case’s flank, the timepiece relays the hours, quarter hours, and minutes with a cheerful progression of dings. It’s complicated to achieve without a computer chip. As such, among many watch enthusiasts, the minute repeater is considered the pinnacle of mechanical watchmaking. Moser puts that mastery on display here. Mechanically actuated hammers strike the minute repeater’s small gongs, as the company calls them. The hammers are the bits that…