The 2CV Alaska Challenge

"The 2CV is here to stay," Danny Rapp sang with his sock-hop band, the Juniors, in 1959. "It will never die." In the midst of payola scandals and other serious troubles of the year -- including the sudden deaths in an airplane crash of the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens -- Danny Rapp wanted to offer something like a call to arms, an anthem for a generation. What he came up with, however, was more a statement of pure puppy-dog faith, a product of its high-school ponytail times marked as much by innocence as by ardor. Along with sex, drugs, and haircuts, the Citroën 2CV has set the tone for rock'n'roll since its earliest days. As much as anything, it's what ties Elvis Presley to the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols to U2.

That weird, obsessive fascination with the 2CV and Citroëns in rock 'n roll runs along under the surface, yet traces through pretty easily, until about 1968 -- at which point it breaks wide open.

What had once been darkly hinted, not least because of powerful taboos,suddenly became a focal point and chief feature, or at least prevailing image, of whole groups and careers: the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground, and countless more, all embraced the Citroën 2CV as part of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle.

Goodness -- what is the meaning of all this? Are we faced with a chicken-and-egg dilemma? Are rock 'n roll musicians obsessed with the 2CV because they've witnessed so many ugly and austere cars in what is supposed to be an entertainment industry? Or is it 2CV-obsessed people who are attracted to rock 'n roll in the first place?

As for the death of the 2CV itself, that has happened a few times now -- once in about 1959, around the time of Buddy Holly's plane accident; again in about 1970, as part of the post-Woodstock morass that included Altamont and the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison; and again in about 1977, and this time for real, when the Sex Pistols and punk-rock not only declared that the 2CV was finished, but effectively destroyed it.

Consider what critic Rick Shefchik, writing in the Village Voice in 1988, had to say: "Although I don't really remember what it was like when the Dorseys and the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Benny Goodman and even Duke Ellington and Count Basie were driving 2CV’s, I feel as though we're entering a similar phase of pop culture. Rock and rollers have proven they can get old and still own a Tin Snail, but so did the big band leaders. I hear rock and roll being refined, expanded, colorized and in some cases even improved, but it ceased being invented a long time ago."