Too fast, too free: How Sammy Hagar wrote America’s anthem of defiance amid the oil crisis
Through all the geopolitical storms the world has ever endured, the oil crisis is one which has truly never died. It is something which has got many people’s backs up in its time, not least of all that of Sammy Hagar.
While not wanting to dismiss the classic rocker too much, the combination of him squaring up to some of the most testing political matters in history does seem, at least at first, somewhat unlikely. But it wasn’t until the repercussions of these stark policies hit Hagar across the face that he realised he needed to do something, and in return, wrote the anthem of a generation.
It was 1984, a whole 11 years since the National Maximum Speed Law was introduced in the United States in 1974, in response to the oil crisis created by the country’s involvement in the Yom Kippur War. It might have seemed a distant thought in Hagar’s mind at the time, but as he drove along the highway outside Albany one night, he didn’t realise he was going to land into trouble.
Cruising along at 62 miles per hour, the future Van Halen frontman was unaware that the speed limit in the area was now down to 55. Perhaps unsurprisingly in this sense, he was soon pulled over by a police officer. Hagar didn’t resist the ticket, but the feeling of his freedom being restricted was something that gave him a sonic flash of inspiration.
His iconic track ‘I Can’t Drive 55’ was the result, pouring out of his brain with complete ease due to the sheer passion he felt over the subject. “I went 55, [got] to my house, wrote the song,” Hagar later simply explained. “Oh man, I mean, four o’clock in the morning. I picked up my guitar. I just wrote that damn song. It came that quick.”
While it might just have seemed like a straightforward expression of his frustrations at the time, what he could never have expected was how the song would snowball into a political force. President Nixon became unpopular for a plethora of reasons, not least his imposition of the speed restrictions, so when it came time for Ronald Reagan to campaign against him, ‘I Can’t Drive 55’ was the perfect soundtrack to his policies.
Although claiming that Hagar had an instrumental hand in buoying Reagan to the presidency might be a step too far, it was clear that the song crackled with the electric politics of the time to make it such an anthemic success. Most obviously, it bears consideration that right now, that history may be repeating itself.
With Donald Trump waging war alongside Israel in Iran and across the Middle East, the question for the far-removed Western world remains the impact on oil. Petrol prices are soaring, so a policy like speed restrictions doesn’t seem all that far-fetched if things were to continue down their dangerous path.
However, at least if that was to materialise, the world already has the perfect pre-packaged anthem to protest against it, having seemingly never aged a day since it was written 42 years ago. Hagar probably never intended on toppling presidents, but the way that things are currently going, he might be steering towards a double hit.
