Chicago Story: Reclaiming a Stolen Volvo, and Discovering a Masterpiece Album

"Good music is beyond category."

                                                                                                   Duke Ellington

It was springtime in 1973. Sometime in the previous fall I'd decided to share a big Old Town apartment on Burling Street with high school friends Bob and Ruby Houdek and their little daughter Sasha. It was a different kind of time than now.  I'd just worked hard in a Presidential election campaign and my candidate had lost, so maybe it wasn't so different.  No, cancel that. It was different.  We'd have a party and Ruby would make her amazing moussaka and we'd have drinks and music, and sometime after midnight a bunch of new people would show up, a replacement party really, and Bob would assume I knew them, Ruby would assume one of the two Bobs knew them, and in reality none of us knew them.  Sometimes little Sasha would toddle into the front room to try on hats in front of a full-length mirror.  It was new living in the city, and having a small child around...

Ruby worked in a landmark plant store called Green Inc. near Lincoln Park; it's still there. Bob, on the road to being a cartographer (people used maps then) worked there too. I commuted 11 miles north to a drafting job, often riding my bike along the Lake Shore bike path. One day Bob's trusty old Volvo PV 544 disappeared.  It was just gone.  Sometime in late spring or early summer, the record store next to Green was the victim of a heist.  Just about everything at Ears Records was gone.  Bob walked over to talk with Tom, the manager.  Tom picked up some records from the floor and gave them to Bob, telling him that this might make it a total loss.  Because we were all music critics at heart, we had different takes on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  Bob and Ruby preferred the spacey mysticism of the early Floyd, so it wasn't the hit with them that it was with the public.  Bob thought maybe Pink Floyd was turning into a bunch of English essayists like the Moody Blues. We were floored by a record called Solid Air, though.  English / Scottish songwriter and guitarist John Martyn was completely new to us, and he'd crossed a line from acoustic folk into uncharted territory, with brooding, boozy vocals over a yearning sax on the title song, shimmering vibes and a kind of syncopated lounge rhythm behind the piano on "I Don't Want to Know", and a jangly, stuttering use of something called an echoplex on "I'd Rather Be the Devil."  We were hypnotized, and listened to the thing over and over.  In an apartment that already had plenty of candidates for a session on the turntable, Solid Air came to define the space, and our season in it.  We were still getting used to the city, and the curves that it threw at us. One day Bob was walking in the neighborhood and he found his stolen, pale blue Volvo.  It was a little scruffy, but intact; I guess you can't expect thieves to wash the car they've stolen.  Bob still had the key in his pocket, so he just got into the thing a drove it back home. With another amateur photographer, I took photos of industrial zones at night.  The alley wall behind me was sprayed with Gangster Love; this was almost 3 decades before the phrase appeared in a song.  We didn't think much of it at the time.  I thought of the Mob when I thought of gangsters, and knew there were more of those guys in plush suburbs like River Forest than in our Old Town neighborhood...

It was sometime in the late summer when something changed. I was sitting on a front porch in the neighborhood with other friends, Toni and Geoph and Susan. We were talking about moving out a bit from the city, maybe to Evanston, where Toni had a job at Northwestern. We were sitting on the steps eating ice cream when a loud bang came from the corner store to the east.  Somehow we knew it wasn't a car backfiring, but we went running anyway, down to the corner to see what was going on.  Maybe we were thinking we could help; this was before anyone thought much about drive-by shootings, and long before mass shootings became a recurring theme in American life.  We got to the corner and there was a guy on the ground with a hole in his head. Another guy was standing in the doorway with a gun; maybe this was the store owner.  The police came, but I don't recall any of us being interviewed.  In the fall I moved north to Evanston, and when we divided up the record collection from Burling Street I hung onto that copy of Solid Air.  I returned to it again and again; it was as if carefully wrought sound could somehow be a source of light...

Photo & Image Credits

Top: Island Records, front cover photo by John Webster

2nd:  Historic Chicago ("Looking North on Dearborn, 1973")

Bottom:  Photo by Bob Jecmen, from a birthday card by Reiko Fujii

Forgotten Sometimes-Classics: Renault in the USA

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Renault released its rear-engined, water-cooled Dauphine in 1956 and brought it to the US the following year.  By 1959, when the "Le Car Hot" ad campaign began, they were marketing the 89.4" wheelbase, 845cc 4-door as an alternative to VW's Beetle (94 inches, 1,200 cc, 2 doors). And for a brief moment, the promise of the New French Revolution ad campaign seemed to be coming true.  While nearly 120,000 new VW vehicles were registered in the US that year, Renault sold around 102,000 Dauphines.  But that was the stylishly rounded little car's best year here.  It turned out that the Dauphine was not well-adapted to life on the Interstate, and that Renault dealers were not as ready to provide parts and service as VW dealers, whose cars seemed to need less of both.

By 1962, when Renault produced the R8 with a 956cc inline four and radiator still at the rear, the lines had become more rectilinear to provide more interior and trunk space on the same wheelbase as the Dauphine, and its 4-wheel disc brakes were new to this class of sedan.  By 1964, they'd released a Gordini version named after their engineer, ex-race car maker Amédée Gordini*, with engines ranging from 1.1 to 1.3 liters, and producing up to 95 hp, twice that of the original R8.  Rally success gave the Gordini a certain cachet, and this California example survives in fine condition.  

Jean Rédelé's independent Alpine firm first produced his fiberglass-bodied A110 berlinette, based on the R8 driverain in a variety of engine sizes, with steel backbone chassis like the previous A108, starting in 1963.  The little 2-seater had a long and illustrious rally career, winning the World Rally Championship in 1973. The author captured the example below after the Tour de France Auto in 1974.  The car was never imported into the US, however...

The A110 became enough of a collector's trophy, though, that when Renault decided to produce a mid-engined GT car in 2016, then named it after the rear-engined A110 from the Sixties and Seventies. The new car is in the foreground below. 

Other detours and adventures occupied the years between 1977, when the original A110 finally ended production, and 2016.  In 1971 Alpine released the A310, still rear-engined but with the radiator in front, with styling by Trevor Fiore and six covered headlights marching across the sleek fiberglass nose, a clear reference to Alpine Renauilt's success in international rallying.  The A310 below was also photographed after the '74 Tour de France.  

While rear-engined Renaults were beginning to have rally success, Renault engineers were launching production cars with front-wheel drive. First was the R4, a competitor for Citroen's 2CV, in 1962.  By '65, though, they'd released the R16, a serious effort to redefine the mainstream sedan.  It featured a longitudinally-mounted aluminum inline 4 (from 1,470 to 1,647 cc) driving the front wheels, a hatchback configuration with folding rear seats, those 4 disc brakes, and a practical orientation not unlike the pitch Volvo used to attract US customers.  An unusual feature was torsion bar rear suspension design with non-aligned rear axles, which resulted in different wheelbases on each side of the car (104.3" right, 107.1" left).  The R16 was less successful in the US than in Canada, where it was popular enough to justify a Quebec assembly plant.

Renault's R5 was introduced in 1972 with similar front-drive and rear suspension, and by '75 was competing with the VW Rabbit / Golf and Honda Civic for US customers.  It was marketed in the US as Le Car, harking back to that late Fifties advertising campaign. 

The R5 / Le Car dramatized the divergent views of the engineers who saw front-wheel drive as a universal format, and those who wanted to promote Renault and Alpine Renault as rally winners.  In 1980, the rally crew got a mid-engined Turbo based on the R5 as a rally weapon.  The mid-mounted, turbocharged inline 4 of 1.4 or 1.5 liters sent power to the rear wheels through a 5-speed gearbox, and took the place of the rear seat in a body adapted from the front-drive R5.

Bodywork is credited to Marc Deschamps and Marcello Gandini of Bertone, along with the futuristic interior.   Sales greatly exceeded what was required for a "homologation special" over 5 years of production, with nearly five thousand cars sold.  A few "grey market" cars made it to the US...

Likewise, some V6 versions of Alpine's A310 came to the US through specialists willing and able to certify the cars.  These all had flared wheel wells and rally spoiler kits to go with the 2.7 liter PRV engine and 5-speed gearbox that might have made the lighweight GT an interesting alternative to Porsche's 911, had Renault taken an interest in selling it here.  The example below is from 1984, when production ended...

By then, however, Renault had taken a different route into the US market, focused on front-drive compact versions of the Renault 9 and 11, redesigned for the US market in a $90 million program with American Motors that gave Renault a 46% share in AMC. The resulting Alliance sedans and convertibles, and Encore hatchbacks, were sold in the 1983-'87 model years, but discontinued when Chrysler bought out Renault's share in AMC.  Still, the cars represented Renault's biggest sales success in the US market, with over 623,000 specimens sold.  American Motors was renamed Jeep-Eagle and merged into Chrysler in 1990...

From the '89 to '92 model years, AMC built and sold the Eagle Premier in the US.  A mid-size car by US standards, it was related to the Giugiaro-designed front-drive senior Renaults, and available with 2.5 liter inline four or Peugeot-Renault-Volvo 3.0 liter V6.  Pre-production prototypes had Renault badges, but these were replaced with Eagle badges.  The Bricklin lurking behind our example is a reminder of the difficulties of launching a new make of car, and the Jeep signs above it suggest that AMC's path to success may have been easier if it had invested as much effort into renewing the Jeep brand, in the face of growing demand for SUVs.  After all, it had earlier produced AWD versions of its Hornet, and Audi was having some success with its Quattro line.  When Chrysler bought out Renault's stake in AMC, it was because Chrysler management saw Jeep as the prize.  But that is a story for another day...

*Footnote:  We took a closer look at the Alpine Renault A310 and its A110 predecessor in "Forgotten Classic: Alpine Renault A310", posted here on January 9, 2021, and profiled Amédée Gordini's racing cars in "The Etceterini Files Part 6—Gordini: French Connection, Chicago Subplot", from March 27, 2016.

Errata:  When we posted this piece we noted that the Alpine A110 was based on the Renault R8 chassis.  Wrong; as we noted in our "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 4" (posted here Dec. 27, 2023), the Alpines (including the predecessor A108 and the Brazilian Interlagos) had a steel backbone chassis. Think of something like a Lotus Elan, but turned around so the engine is at the wrong end...

Photo Credits:
Top, plus 5th, 7th and 8th from top:  Groupe Renault S.A.

2nd & 3rs:  Gogo Heinrich
4th, 6th, 9th & 10th::  the author

11th::  bringatrailer.com

12th & bottom::  Wikimedia