Hot Rod Rumble features a lot of the sound described in its title -- indeed, half the songs here open or close with the sound effect. This is a genre collection from Buffalo Bop: 30 songs (plus one sound-effects track, "A Ride in a Corvette") dating from the late 1950s into the early 1960s, built around fast cars, the girls who like them, and the guys who like the girls who like them. Some of the material is uneven, semi-professional work by bands and singers that never made it, and it's rather telling that most of the best cuts here are instrumentals, plus a handful of recognizable ringers like
Sleepy LaBeef.
The Esquires' instrumental "Flashin' Red," released on the Durco label, pretty well blows every one of the cuts preceding it (and most of what follows) off the chart -- a loud, searing, heavy, fast-paced musical recreation of a drag race that's hard to beat.
The Sandells' "Scrambler" came closer to brushing with greatness and the charts than more of the others here; they recorded for World Pacific, an actual near-major label (now owned by Capitol/EMI), with top West Coast studio facilities and a budget to access them -- with the Esquires, they're the highlight of this collection. Bob Cass' "Corvette Baby" is noteworthy just for its "auto-eroticism," describing a woman in delightful and admiring mechanical terms. It gets beat for humor, however, by
Gene Savage's "Big Machine," which describes the singer's efforts to make an M-60 tank into a hot rod.
Johnny Fortune is another of the handful of national-class professionals represented; his "Dragster" outclasses most of the competition with its instrumental prowess, sound effects and audio recreation of the title subject -- it seems a good deal shorter than its two-and-a-half minute running time.
Sleepy LaBeef's raunchy cover of
Bo Diddley's "Ride on Josephine" is one of those other numbers that blows aside the surrounding cuts.