Mexican Hot Rod

You are parked in the middle of a Reno brewery with a cold one in your hand and a band that has no intention of behaving, and that is exactly where “Mexican Hot Rod” lives. Track two on The Saddle Tramps’ 2004 album Nashville Swinger, it comes right after the openers have already announced themselves with “Intro / The Bulge in Satan’s Pants,” which tells you the house rules before a single hot-rod lyric is sung. Written and arranged by John Von Nolde, Johnny Fingers, and Scott Roller, the song runs a little over four minutes and feels twice that fast. This is not Nashville in the Music Row sense. This is Nevada cowpunk with the windows down, a rockabilly heartbeat, and a Tex-Mex wink painted across the hood.

The cut was caught live at the Great Basin Brewing Co., the room that supplied the first thirteen tracks on the Split Seven Records CD, catalog S7CD126. David Irish engineered and mixed it, with Chris Davis assisting on the live tracks, and Kyle Homme mastered the whole thing at World Class Audio. The band and Irish produced. Stan Byers handled the artwork. Tracks fourteen through sixteen were studio jobs cut and mixed in Milano, but “Mexican Hot Rod” is the brewery version, crowd heat still in the tape, banter waiting in the wings. On the 2023 twentieth-anniversary double vinyl, limited to 250 numbered copies on translucent purple and neon orange, the song sits in the same early spot on side A, now with a gatefold, a sticker, a poster, and handwritten lyric inserts that had been in boxes for two decades. A bonus side pulls in a 2010 bootleg from El Lokal in Zurich, proof the Reno racket traveled.

What the song is selling is a picture anybody who has ever idled next to a custom on a western highway already knows. A reviewer who lived with the album for years put it plain: an old El Camino, curtains in the windows, hundred-spoke rims, a driver leaned way back with a couple of friends in the bed. The Tramps take that postcard and run it through surf chords, a country two-step that refuses to stay polite, and the kind of mariachi daydream a German critic heard all over Nashville Swinger. Johnny Fingers, already a Reno guitar name from the Boston Wranglers, the Swiveltones, and Gunshot Licker, supplies the twang that makes the chassis move. Mike Young hammers the drums. Big John Von Nolde holds down bass and half the mouth, Scotty Roller the rhythm guitar and the other half. It is a chase tune, a brag tune, and a cartoon painted on a real fender.

The Saddle Tramps came out of Sparks, a few miles from the Reno neon, and they branded themselves the Ambassadors of Bad Taste before anybody else could do it for them. Scotty Roller has said he and Big John got together in the early spring of 1998, writing songs and cracking wise. By 1999 they were a comedy duo at places like the Improv and Bully’s, shortening the originals and stuffing the gaps with standup. The first titles out of the gate included “After a Sixer,” “Waitin’ on a Waitress,” and a country punchline so blunt it cannot be printed on a bumper sticker. They needed a drummer. El Viagro held the stool into about 2001. Mike “Powder” Young eventually locked it down. A friend tied to Royal Crown Revue floated the idea of an Ellie Mae Clampett type on stage, and Suzy Switchblade, the gun-slinging go-go dancer, called. From then on the show had a fifth gear that did not plug into an amp.

They called the music corn-fed bolt music and filthy cowpunk, a shotgun marriage of honky-tonk and potty talk. The first long player, Whiskey Dick, came out of a practice room and a lot of beer. Relentless West Coast gigging, and a good word from Speedbuggy and Hellbound Hayride, landed them at L.A.’s Split Seven, with Cargo handling wider distribution. Nashville Swinger was the label’s live document, release party set for the Reno Hilton Garage. They shared stages with Royal Crown Revue, Social Distortion, and Brian Setzer. They set liquor-sale records at home, played the Derby in Hollywood, the Continental Club in Austin, the Tractor Tavern in Seattle, the Bahia in San Diego, and the Tropicana in Las Vegas. They did Entertainment Tonight’s anniversary party, the Blessing of the Cars, the National Tattoo Convention more than once, and Dennis Hof’s birthday at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, where Ron Jeremy made the introduction and members of Digital Underground were in the neighborhood. Early road days were less glamorous: John’s Ford mini-truck with a shell on the bed, the two of them sleeping in back, a U-Haul trailer on the hitch.

Roller later called the whole career a fourth-grade fart joke that ran for twenty-five years and somehow got bigger. That is the right size for “Mexican Hot Rod.” It is not a statement record. It is a grin with a backbeat, filed under country rock and rock and roll on the Discogs entry and under the same roof as “How Can I Say I Love You (With a Shotgun in My Mouth?),” “Cotton Pony Express,” “White Trash Chicks on Speed,” and a cover of the Vandals’ “Susanville.” After Split Seven they cut Don’t Laugh It’s Prayed For: Songs of Sacrilege and Salvation on their own Von Roller label, plus a tiny Christmas disc and a later-years hits roundup. They ground out van tours for about fifteen years, hopped to Europe, and parked the band in 2015 still friends. Reunion nights have popped up since, including a Cargo Concert Hall blowout in Reno, and the anniversary vinyl gave the old brewery tapes a second life.

If you want the rest of the story, the merch, and that numbered double LP while copies last, the band keeps the lights on at thesaddletramps.com. Scotty still posts the odd poster and proof over on Facebook, and the official pictures live at Instagram. Listener tallies and the old bio sit with the fan pile at Last.fm. And the station that just spun the hot rod for you, commercial-free and deep-cut stubborn, is THE ZOO, still flying the KZEW flag for anybody who likes a record with dirt on the chrome. “Mexican Hot Rod” does not ask permission. It just drops the clutch.