Bloodrock - D.O.A. (1971)

Despite the breakthrough made in 1968 by the release of two singles that ran over 7 minutes in duration, "Hey Jude" by The Beatles' and '"MacArthur's Park" by Richard Harris, the practice of truncating songs of similar duration for release as singles continued unabated for well over a decade. At one time only those who purchased the album the track was on knew the difference, but as FM radio stations attracted an increasingly larger and more sophisticated listening audience, what had been done to shorten album songs for sale as 45 singles and for play on AM radio stations became glaringly obvious. Some of the editing jobs done on songs were so badly done that it is little wonder they charted at all, with many listeners greeting the hack jobs either with gales of laughter or exclamations of contempt. This, in part, contributed to the eventual death of AM radio.

One of the most notorious examples of a truly fabulous album track getting so badly mangled by editing that it was rendered all but unlistenable when heard on AM radio by FM listeners was this classic rock song from 1971. Indeed, if editing this 8 minutes, 30 seconds length vocal and instrumental experience down to a laughable 4:32 wasn't a ridiculous enough idea, the song was banned by many AM stations and high schools in the United States besides. Still, it managed to peak at #36 on both Cash Box and Billboard on March 6, 1971. Although the inspiration for the song was lead guitarist Lee Pickens witnessing a deadly private plane crash involving one of his friends (after just getting off the same plane at a little airport a few minutes earlier), it became a cautionary rock anthem about the dangers of reckless driving and the potential consequences. For good measure, not only is the narrator (lead vocal) about to die, but his girlfriend, also injured in the car crash, is already dead. However, because of the style of the song, teetering on the verge of Black Sabbath type heavy metal with a lot of weirdness in the keyboard playing, the song had a double-edge sword appeal about it, making it seem to glorify death. It is thus an excellent example of "shock rock" ... the kind that would eventually be associated, not only with Black Sabbath, but with bands like Alice Cooper and the much later advent of darkwave in the 80's. The song, in other words, can function in much the same way as a horror film.

For me this song was timed almost exactly with an event that occurred in the spring of that same year: 1971. I was in my senior year at high school and a popular former student from our school who had graduated a year earlier in 1970, was involved in a horrendous car accident that got a lot of local media attention. He was speeding so fast his car went airborne, sheared through part of a tree, and crashed into the side of a house between the first and second floor. Both he and his girlfriend were killed. About a week after the wreck was dragged off, my friends and I (and most of the school) went down to have a look at it. Gazing with puzzled expressions at the crushed, almost compacted twisted metal it was hard to believe that two human beings had actually been inside of it. "D.O.A." was making the rounds on both FM and AM radio at the time, and it was hard to listen to without associating it with this very real event. Of course we all still liked listening to it because it was such a cool song. But, like I said, it wasn't all that cool to hear on AM.

The idea for a song about driving and death was not anything new as it had been done many times in the past in "teenage tragedy" hits. 1964 alone saw two of them sail to the Top 10: "Dead Man's Curve" by Jan & Dean and "Last Kiss" by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers, a commercially successful cover of the song written and recorded by Wayne Cochran in 1961. Another fabulous cover of "Last Kiss" would be recorded by grunge band Pearl Jam in 1999. Both these songs were not without real tragedies associated with the bands: Jan Berry, of Jan & Dean, would later have a near-fatal accident in 1966 when he crashed his car into a parked truck, and Sonley Roush, the record producer of Wilson's version of "Last Kiss," was killed in an auto crash touring with the band, leaving Wilson seriously injured (although Wilson would go back on tour with the song a week later with cracked ribs and a broken ankle).

I do not enter into the creation of this music video of "D.O.A." lightly. Less than 10 years ago I was a witness to a high speed head-on collision at a "T intersection" between two vehicles. You could say I practically had a front row seat, close enough that if it had happened a few seconds later, I might have been involved. What I saw seemed surreal and utterly impossible to describe; I saw two machines do in a few split seconds what seemed to be against the very laws of natural physics. Imagine what violating those laws can do to a human body.

This is "D.O.A." by Bloodrock, from the excellent LP, Bloodrock 2.