(Pictured: if you see this van a-rockin’, you know what not to do.)

I got this post ready to go on One-Hit Wonder Day last September then ended up not running it for some reason. So here it is today. 

If we had some kind of tournament for the most quintessentially 70s songs—those that most effectively capture the essence of the times, in the way they sound and the things they say—wouldn’t Sammy Johns’ lone big hit, “Chevy Van,” have to be in the semifinals?

The song is sung by a guy driving one of those vans, and if you remember the 70s, you know the kind I mean: elaborately painted on the outside and big enough to live in on the inside, or at least big enough to sleep in, or not sleep in, when necessary.

I gave a girl a ride in my wagon
She crawled in and took control
She was tired cuz her mind was a-draggin’
I said “get some sleep and dream of rock and roll”

What a perfectly 70s line: “get some sleep and dream of rock and roll.” It’s quite lovely, actually—dream of something utterly out of this world and time, something simple and unthreatening, purely pleasurable and fun. It’s obvious he’s not suggesting she dream of Black Sabbath or Emerson Lake and Palmer, but rather of something that rocks easy, like “Chevy Van” itself.

There is no doubt that Sammy is checking her out, the moonlight on her hair, her angel’s face, her long and tanned legs. Because this is the 1970s, however, she’s not entirely down with being objectified: “Better keep your eyes on the road, son / Better slow this vehicle down.” Yet at the same time, she really does need a lift to the next town, and she’s willing to use what she’s got to get what she wants: “She’s gonna love me in my Chevy van and that’s all right with me.”

And because this is the 70s, we turn discreetly away from the scene and listen to a gentle wah-wah against a wall of acoustic guitars before Sammy fast-forwards to the end of the story.

I put her out in a town that was so small
You could roll a rock from end to end
A dirt road main street, she walked off in bare feet
It’s a shame I won’t be passing through again 

Then Sammy sings the refrain one last time, slightly altered, in which we learn that what was going to happen has just happened: “We made love in my Chevy van / And that’s all right with me.”

An easy-rockin’ song of the road about a casual sexual encounter in the back of a van with a beautiful, nameless, barefoot hitchhiker? It doesn’t get more 70s than that.

“Chevy Van” bubbled under the Billboard Hot 100 during the week of January 25, 1975, and hit the big chart the next week. It peaked at #5 in Billboard and Cash Box during the week of May 3 but plunged swiftly off both charts, gone by June. Its chart run roughly coincides with the time when I was involved with my first serious girlfriend. We could imagine what Sammy and the stranger were doing in there, but what it had to do with us—how we might contrive to get to that point—wasn’t entirely clear. I had no van—no driver’s license yet—and certainly no line as smooth as “get some sleep and dream of rock and roll.”

Sammy Johns had charted one Hot 100 single before “Chevy Van” and would chart one more afterward. In their wake, he lived a rock star’s life—broke and in rehab by the end of the 70s. By the 80s, he was back writing songs, however, many of which were country hits, including the #1 single “Common Man,” recorded by John Conlee in 1983. The refrain of “Common Man” includes the lines “I’m a common man / Drive a common van.”

“I’ve had it since the 70s,” the Common Man might also say. “You shoulda seen it then.”

(This post was rebooted from one appearing shortly after Sammy Johns died, on January 4, 2013.)