How the Arab oil embargo created Convoy, a Billboard No. 1 hit for CW McCall

The US response to the 1970s oil embargo was to reduce vehicle speeds, giving birth to the CB radio fad and an unlikely hit song.

CW McCall pictured in 1978. Picture: Getty Images

CW McCall (Bill Fries) Singer-songwriter. Born Audubon, Iowa, November 15, 1928; died Ouray, Colorado, April 1, aged 93.

-

It’s pretty obvious what the songs Disco Duck, They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Monster Mash, Dead Skunk, Gangnam Style and so many others have in common.

Unless you are a gimmick act, such as Weird Al Yankovic, it is hard to follow up a gimmick hit. Johnny Farnham famously came back from the nauseous 1968 novelty Sadie (The Cleaning Lady), but was fortunate to have a couple of cracker hits written for him by the brilliant Hans Poulsen.

CW McCall hit the top of the Billboard chart for a single week in January 1976 with the curiosity called Convoy. He had a treacly baritone and half spoke the lyrics over a melody written by Chip Davis, a then unknown but clever composer who would found the inventive modern-classical fusion outfit Mannheim Steamroller.

Convoy was the hit created by the Arab oil crisis of 1973 when, to punish those nations that supported Israel during October’s Yom Kippur War, OPEC countries applied an embargo on oil exports to much of the West.

The US had passed peak domestic oil production in 1970 and soon after was importing substantial volumes. In short order, after drastic OPEC production cuts, the oil price quadrupled sparking a worldwide recession. In the US petrol was rationed, and for a while not sold on Sundays. US president Richard Nixon was advised that most vehicles were most efficient when running at a top speed of 55 miles per hour (about 89km/h) and in January 1974 he signed off on a controversial law applying this limit, designed to reduce national petrol consumption by 2.2 per cent.

Most Americans chose not to comply with the restricted speed limits and so the states started to increase fines for speeding, and introducing and quickly increasing jail terms for the offence, further outraging motorists. Citizens band radio had been about for 15 years but suddenly took off, particularly among truck drivers as they tried to alert each other to outlets that had petrol, while also warning of police speed traps.

Around this an idiom emerged that was designed to serve the in-crowd while befuddling eavesdropping cops. “The truckers were forming things called convoys and they were talking to each other on CB radios,” McCall told Rolling Stone magazine years later. “They had a wonderful jargon. Chip and I bought ourselves a CB radio and went out to hear them talk.”

The song Convoy tells the story of an ever-lengthening motorcade of defiance as it crosses the country: “With a thousand screamin’ trucks/An’ eleven long-haired Friends a’ Jesus/In a chartreuse micra-bus”.

It is a sophisticated piece of country-pop music and the military-style drumming is played by Bill Berg, who just a year before had played on Bob Dylan’s acclaimed Blood on the Tracks album.

The song topped charts around the world, doing so in Australia five days before it became the US bestseller. Two years later came a daft film based on the song, but with a hefty budget that paid the acting fees of Kris Kristofferson, Ernest Borgnine and Ali MacGraw. It was directed by the legendary Sam Peckinpah whose credits already included Straw Dogs, The Getaway and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. But Convoy out-grossed them all.

McCall had been born Billie Dale Fries and as a child was attracted to country music, played guitar and joined a band, but he chose to study commercial art and became a set designer for his local television company.

He wound up in advertising and while working on an account for Iowa’s Metz Baking Company wrote and performed a song for a TV campaign to be sung by a truck-driving delivery character called CW (for country and western) McCall.

The Convoy mould was precisely cast and the ad-turned-single sold a healthy 30,000 copies.

He never regretted his one-hit status. It was parodied, copied and localised throughout the world for decades – once by Star Trek’s William Shatner.

It was widely reported that he approved its use by the Canadian truck drivers on this year’s so-called Freedom Convoy that started off protesting against the need to be vaccinated to enter the US, but he did not and knew little of it as he lay dying in a hospice. Unaware of his health, an American FM radio station called him on February 19.

“They’re using our song, eh? Yeah, well, that’s great. Except that the lyrics don’t quite fit talking about Tulsa Town and Chicago and LA,” he told the team of try-hards. “What do the truckers want anyway?”

He was asked if he had been vaccinated. “Yeah, I have been for a long time.”