“It’s kind of a temptress, this truck,” observed k. d. lang. “A very nice looking vehicle, inside and out. Something to tear up Saturday night with. ” The vehicle in question was a new Chevy pickup with a monster engine, and lang had been using it mostly to tool genteelly around her hometown of Vancouver, B. C. And to move a couch, for which it had come in handy. At one point she and her friends had thought that the truck might inspire them to feats of precision in the great Canadian sport of throwing beer bottles at road signs, but they couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for the attempt, since everybody seemed to have given up drinking. “I don’t partake anymore,” sighed the twenty-eight-year-old lang.

Nevertheless, the hunky new Chevy had made an impression. “It goes like stink, no question,” she reported. “It makes you want to squeal it every light, which I’ve been doing consistently. If you buy this truck to make you feel like a greaser, it works. Definitely.” That may not be quite what G.M. has in mind. Recently the company bought a double-page spread in the trendy Sharper Image catalogue, noting that the 454 SS had been anointed one of Sharper Image’s “official vehicles.” It’s hard not to think that the truck, which is being produced in a “limited edition” of 10,000, is most valuable for its looks and ability to draw people into showrooms. Pickups are a big deal in this country. The Ford F-Series pickup was the number-one best-selling vehicle in America last year, and the generic Chevy pickup came in second.

Lang with her dog, Jillian, in the Chevrolet 454 SS on the waterfront in Vancouver, B.C.

Lang has had a certain amount of experience with big vehicles, having put in a stint as the driver of a five-ton grain truck before she became a legendary “progressive country” singer, and having spent her adolescence in a small town on the Alberta prairie, where “bush parties” are part of growing up. Bush parties involve a lot of nighttime drinking around a bonfire somewhere out of town, frequently from the back of a half-ton pickup. “This Chevy would be an asset at a bush party because you could slide open the back window and blast the stereo,” she noted.

The last few months have not afforded lang much time for drives into the country of any sort. She has been pretty much steadily on the road since last spring and won’t be able to sit still until the end of March, when the final leg of her current tour — from Boulder to Buffalo — ends. Then she goes “back into the writing mode and then into the studio. ” A new record, her fourth in the U.S., is planned for next year. When lang and her band, the Reclines, are on tour they get around in a specially outfitted bus. “Long drives, over six hours, really tire me out,” she explained, “but the buses make things simpler. You can leave stuff inside them. It becomes a constant in your life, something stable and familiar.” Back home in Vancouver she drives a new Jeep Cherokee, “to get my chores done. You can fit a lot of instruments in it.” But her main car, “my dream vehicle,” is a whalelike robin’s-egg-blue 1963 Mercury Meteor with a back window that slides down. She also has a Honda Shadow motorcycle, purely for recreation, one assumes.

The 454 SS we lent to lang in Vancouver gave mixed signals, and seemed slightly unconvincing as a serious truck. “To me, a half-ton is something that you work with,” lang explained. “And I don’t think this Chevy is practical. For one thing, you can only fit two people in it, since it’s loaded with bucket seats. And that means that if the back is full of bales of hay or something you’re kind of limited. The bucket seats would be bugaboo at the drive-in too — although the beer holders would be an asset.” Lang was convinced that, “given the type of vehicle this is,” the cutouts in the fat center console would most definitely be used for beer.

The 454 SS has the feel of sixties muscle cars like the Pontiac GTO and the Dodge Charger RlT. It’s so quick off the line that you have to be exceptionally gentle with the accelerator or else smash into the car in front of you when the light turns green. The tires scream gleefully with a minimum of provocation as the pickup hurtles past BMWs and Saabs while chasing Corvettes around town. (Over seventy on the highway, however, it kind of peters out — and consumes more gas than a Rolls-Royce Corniche II.) General Motors is clearly trying to recapture a sensibility that might now be considered borderline redneck, although “I don’t think I’d put it in those cut-and-dried terms,” lang said cautiously. “First of all, the way it’s set up — the tires and rims they have on it would never make it on the farm. They are strictly city and highway tires. You would never go on a gravel road or out in the field with tires like that. It just wouldn’t get you anywhere.” The wheels are shod with rubber more suited to a passenger car, which means the ride is neither too harsh nor too noisy. “The transmission is fine,” lang allowed, “though I have a thing against automatics in the first place. If you’re going to buy something with so much horsepower, what’s the use of having an automatic that doesn’t have as much capability as a standard?”

But the Chevy was by no means completely hopeless-seeming as a functional vehicle. “The tailgate opens and closes easily, which is a good sign,” lang pointed out. We speculated about the quality and toughness of the bumpers. “You have to be careful about this,” she explained, “especially if you want to pull a trailer with livestock or horses. This vehicle doesn’t come with a trailer hitch, but you could have one custom-put-on.” A hitch might ruin the lines of this very slick machine, however, which comes with chrome sport wheels as standard equipment. And with a tacky plush interior. The burgundy-colored seats, like the doors, were upholstered in a kind of rat-fur velour. Little threads poking out suggested longevity problems. These seats, by the way, couldn’t be put upright enough for an alert driving position.

The glossy paint on our 454 SS (the truck comes in only one color, black) was so thin and cosmetic that it seemed to run off the cargo bed like cheap mascara. Expensive protective rubberized cargo-bed liners like those advertised in car magazines were very much called for here. “It needs one,” lang agreed. “But why don’t they put the doggoned thing in standard’?” One wonders. Lang had her own personal peeves, too. “I find that the dashboard is a little too fancy,” she reported. “I would prefer a simpler one. The lights were very easy to find and operate, though, and electric door locking is always a nice feature. ” There were no power-operated side-view mirrors on this $18,000 machine, however, and the instrument panel was standard General Motors issue, electronic and brightly lit, though skeletal. It was missing a tachometer, which is a grievous omission given that this is one of the fastest American-made vehicles, a sports car in truck’s clothing. But then, the engine was sufficiently noisy that you would know if you were revving it too hard.

“The tape deck is too doggoned far over,” lang remarked, frustrated. “You could have an accident just trying to slip in your Hank Williams Jr. cassette. The thing has good brakes, though. They felt very good on all four wheels. It’s the steering I didn’t feel comfortable with. It’s too jerky.” The power steering is overassisted, so one doesn’t have a feeling of control over the beast.

The truck has a sliding glass window behind the seats, with a view of the cargo bay. Poorly sealed, it hisses slightly in your ear on the highway, unless the noise is obliterated by the sound of the stereo — or a citizens-band radio. “Yeah, a C.B. would be real,” lang replied to that idea. “But it would probably be a cellular phone now. This truck will tempt rich construction men, the upper echelon of the blue-collar crowd.” I took it that that left her out. “I wouldn’t buy this car unless I was really rich and bored. I would prefer a ’73 GMC pickup. I just like them,” she said. “I like clearance lights, the yellow lights on the top of the cab; there’s five of them. And I like the two-tone paint jobs that the GMCs had. They had purple ones, pink ones, lime-green ones. Put a dog box in the back, you know, one of those toolboxes, and little chrome rails along the top of it. To me the heyday of the halftons was the early seventies,” she said nostalgically.

k. d.Iang’s first big album was Shadowland, a haunting homage to Patsy Cline, and I asked her what sort of car her idol drove. “She had a pink Cadillac,” lang said, “and Minnie Pearl has a yellow one, an ’86, I think.” Pearl is another kind of country-music figure, with a giddy persona that lang seemed to borrow from for her stage act at one phase in her career. But now she is settled into a more comfortable androgynous style, something that must seem pretty far-out in Nashville. “In terms of my talent, the basic, raw talent, I think they respect me,” she said, “but I think it’s the packaging they can’t handle. Nashville is sort of like going to the moon. It’s a culture shock no matter where you’re from.” I wondered if her image might be bolstered in Tennessee if she showed up in the Chevy 454 SS. “Oh, it would be perfect in Nashville,” she said, grinning. “Perfect for all those people who dream about being a cowboy.”  MG

published April 1990