I’m going to get this out of the way: Although I love 1960s cars and I love 1960s music, I don’t like 1960s car songs; however, there’s one famous car song that fascinates me because of how cryptic it is, and that’s “Shut Down” by the Beach Boys. Most online scribes poo-pooh the possibility that a 327/360 Split Window ‘Vette could run with a Super Stock Dodge, but it’s not as implausible as it sounds.
To the musicologists among us, it will come as no surprise that none of the Beach Boys really knew much about cars or surfing, although Dennis Wilson’s character “The Mechanic” in 1971’s Two-Lane Blacktop wouldn’t shut up about the carburetor jets in the ’55 Chevy street racer he shared with James Taylor’s “The Driver.” Regardless, cars were hot when “Shut Down” was released on March 4, 1963, as the B-Side of the more successful “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” and the Beach Boys did know music. If you haven’t listened to 1966’s Pet Sounds, you should probably make that your dinner music this evening. “Shut Down,” which didn’t have much in common with anything from Pet Sounds, peaked at number 23 on Billboard’s “Hot 100.”
The premise of the song is a race between a Super Stock Dodge with a 413 and a fuel-injected ’63 Corvette Sting-Ray. The songwriters were the massively talented Brian Wilson and lyricist Roger Christian.
Here’s the first stanza (courtesy of AZ Lyrics):
Tach it up, tach it up
Buddy gonna shut you down
It happened on the strip where the road is wide
(Oooo rev it up now)
Two cool shorts standin’ side by side
(Oooo rev it up now)
Yeah, my fuel injected Stingray and a four-thirteen
(Oooo rev it up now)
Revvin’ up our engines and it sounds real mean
(Oooo rev it up now)
The confusion begins immediately: “It happened on the strip where the road is wide.” Most people interpret the song as a play-by-play account of a street race on the “strip,” although the word “strip” indicates that it could be a fully sanctioned drag race. It’s a little less spooky and sinister that way, a little less “Dead Man’s Curve” and a little more “Hey, Little Cobra,” but it doesn’t matter much. “Two cool shorts” is simply 1960s slang for two cool cars. The rest of the lyrics are fairly self-explanatory.
The second stanza continues as thus:
Declinin’ numbers at an even rate
(Oooo movin’ out now)
At the count of one we both accelerate
(Oooo movin’ out now)
My Stingray is light the slicks are startin’ to spin
(Oooo movin’ out now)
But the four-thirteen’s really diggin’ in
(Oooo movin’ out now)
Gotta be cool now power shift here we go
OK, “declinin’ numbers at an even rate” suggests a street race; although a flagman was still in use at NHRA events until the 1963 Nationals, he didn’t count the drivers down. Nevertheless, in this case, somebody is clearly counting down the two racers, perhaps even one of the drivers themselves. We find out that the Sting Ray has slicks but is searching for traction, while the 413 Dodge has hooked up. If nothing else, this indicates that the Dodge is going to win, because the Corvette’s lighter weight and (ostensibly) less powerful engine mean that its advantage lies in the hole shot. Still, the driver doesn’t panic; he power shifts the Borg-Warner T-10 (maybe not a good idea—they weren’t all that strong) and carries on.
The third stanza:
Superstock Dodge is windin’ out in low
But my fuel injected Stingray’s really startin’ to go
To get the traction I’m ridin’ the clutch
My pressure plate’s burnin’ that machine’s too much
The Dodge most likely got the hole shot because the hot setup was the TorqueFlite. Stick cars got a Borg-Warner T-85 three-speed and were not as competitive, but the automatic cars tended to clean house in their respective classes because Chrysler was the only manufacturer to offer a truly high-performance automatic in 1962. The lyrics indicate that the Corvette’s driver is slipping the clutch to gain traction, and anyone with mechanical sympathy is cringing right now.
The final lyrics end the song with only the implication that the Sting Ray’s driver caught up to the mighty 413:
Pedal’s to the floor hear the dual quads drink
(Oooo pump it up now)
And now the four-thirteen’s lead is startin’ to shrink
(Oooo pump it up now)
He’s hot with ram induction but it’s understood
(Oooo pump it up now)
I got a fuel injected engine sittin’ under my hood
(Oooo pump it up now)Shut it off, shut it off buddy now I shut you down
Shut it off, shut it off buddy now I shut you down
Shut it off, shut it off buddy now I shut you down
Shut it off, shut it off buddy now I shut you down
Shut it off, shut it off buddy now I shut you down
The 413’s dual quads are drinking, and the driver’s “hot with ram induction,” but the ‘Vette is somehow overcoming its flubbed launch to reel in the Dodge. In terms of actual street races, this is unlikely unless the 413 suffers from a mechanical failure; regardless of the Corvette’s “fuel-injected engine,” it gives up almost 100 cubic inches to the Dodge, and it just didn’t have the real-world power to catch a Super Stocker that got off the line cleanly. Score one for the internet scholars and put a fork in the Corvette.
However, did the Corvette stand a chance given an equal start? This is where I think many people get “Shut Down” wrong, by assuming that the ‘Vette didn’t stand a chance in the first place. Journalist Roger Huntington was one of the sharpest guys in the magazine scene back in the 1960s, and he published a book titled American Supercar: Development of the Detroit High-Performance Car in 1983. In doing so, he discussed his testing methodology and assigned net horsepower ratings to muscle cars using the most “non-doctored” road tests he could find (he tried to use Car Life tests because he felt they were the most accurate, although those tests weren’t always available).
A 1961 Dodge with a 413 could only turn a 15.1-second quarter-mile at 92 miles per hour, which meant that the net horsepower rating of 270 fell over 100 short of the car’s 385-horsepower rating from the factory.
But the song wasn’t talking about a ’61 model, but rather a Super Stocker, which must have been a ’62 model (the ’63 used a 426 wedge). Here, Huntington tested a Ramcharger 413, which benefited from uncapped headers and seven-inch wide slicks, a definite advantage, as was the 4.56:1 rear axle ratio. In other words, it was set up for the strip and was producing an honest 400+ net horsepower.
The Ramcharger 413 had no exhaust crossover for carb heat, a 13.5:1 compression ratio, a huge camshaft, bigger valves than a standard big-block, and dual valve springs that precluded using valve seals. The Super Stock 413s were known to use as much “as a quart [of oil] every 50-100 miles…[but] the engine was safe to 6500 rpm—but for sustained bursts not longer than 15 seconds.”
Therefore, you’d think that a Corvette wouldn’t stand a chance against a car that probably looked like this most unlikely (based on its outlandish looks) street sweeper.
Unfortunately, Mr. Huntington doesn’t discuss a Corvette set up for racing. All he can offer is a Car Life road test of a similar 1965 Fuelie ‘Vette, which had 15 more horsepower than a ’63. The 99 mile-per-hour trap speed (about average for fuel-injected Corvette road tests in general) is miles away from the Ramcharger’s 109.76, but the Corvette would have been hamstrung with street tires and a full exhaust system, which certainly bled off a minimum of 30-40 horsepower. Plus, the Corvette would have been tested as it came off the truck, not tuned to the nines as a factory race car would be.
NHRA records show that a well set-up 413 with an automatic was indeed a strip terror at the time. In late 1962 at the NHRA Nationals, Al Eckstrand won the Super Stock/SA (automatic) eliminator with a 12.72-second pass at over 113 miles per hour, a good showing for that season, and quicker than the stick-shift eliminator Dave Strickler’s Chevy 409.
By the Winternationals the next year, however, Bill Bagshaw’s Corvette ran a 12.40 at 113.20 miles per hour to win the A/Sports class. Bill Hanyon’s Super Stock/Automatic winning ’62 Plymouth (which was mechanically identical to a Dodge) ran a 12.30 at 115.38. You could flip a coin between the two cars on the strip given those times.
How do we know that Bagshaw’s car was a ’63 fuel-injected Split Window? Hot Rod Magazine published a retrospective of Bill Bagshaw on their website in 2014, and they said:
Bagshaw purchased a new split-window coupe with the fuel-injected 327 that would become his most serious effort to date. The engine was blueprinted and finessed, and after flogging, the 1963 claimed the A/Sports record (12.17/116.73) and won class at the 1963 Winternationals.
Unfortunately, we must come to the conclusion that we’re treading no new ground in our basic analysis of the song “Shut Down”; the outcome was pure fictional literature. No matter how fuel injected the protagonist’s 327 was, he was shutting down exactly nobody that day, especially if he cooked his clutch. Almost certainly, he saw nothing but the Dodge’s weird taillights disappearing into the night (most likely, if it was indeed a street race).
But since the Corvette was also wearing slicks, we have to assume that it was also set up to mean business; after all, the top dogs in street racing rarely wasted their time with the small fries. It was too dangerous to be running any Joe Average who came along, so on another day, a well-tuned and blueprinted Sting Ray would have more than a fighting chance against the 413. Although “Shut Down, Part II” was an instrumental, I like to think that the Corvette’s driver came home with more than a fish tale and a clutch job ahead of him.
Related CC Reading
Car Show Classic: 1963 Corvette Sting Ray – A Sting Ray With A Saginaw? (by me)
Automotive History: 1963 Corvette Sting Ray – A Ravishing New Lust Object Appears Out Of The Depths Of The Ocean (by Paul N.)
This Dodge looks like a miscarriage from a radioactively contaminated area.
The Corvette’s biggest disadvantage in drag racing vs. the Dodge was the IRS and 4 speed. The 12.40 ET listed above for a Corvette was in the A/SP class which permitted serious modifications including things like a solid rear axle.
Those Max Wedge Mopars with the Torqueflite cleaned house. The LIttle Old Lady from Pasadena didn’t drive a Corvette either.
Strickler’s Chevys came from Ammon R. Smith Chevrolet, which was a block from my boyhood home. I would often stop by there to look at the cars in their tiny showroom and the adjacent parking lot. Lots of SS cars, I remember lots of SS 396’s and SS 454’s. Last of the breed was a 1974 Laguna S-3 with a 454, but by that time the real muscle cars were dead.
Wish I had held onto all those dealer showroom brochures.
Strickler and Grumpy Jenkins made quite a team in the early 60’s.
This was great fun to read–wonderful of you to parse the lyrics and tell the real-world data tale. I never bought any Beach Boys records, and this one didn’t get much radio airplay, so I never memorized the lyrics as I did with “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” and so on.
Speaking as a musician, there was some really out-of-tune harmony singing on those early records–but that didn’t dim their popularity at all. Was that really 63 years ago? That’s like parsing 1900’s “Bird in a Gilded Cage” in 1963…time flies!
CAR QUESTION: Is the using of a quart of oil every 50-100 miles a “loose clearances” thing?
Thank you, George. The implication in Huntington’s book was that the lack of valve seals led to the high oil consumption. Even so, 50-100 miles a quart is a lot.
Never with the crowd, I looove the looks of the ’62 Dodge, the coolest most rad design ever on a ’60s car. My Grampa A. had a ’62 Dodge 440 (model not engine) with a 361 and boy would it go as well as handle better than any “full” size US car. Fell in love with it at the age of 12 and would love one. now but the “max-wedge” crowd has driven up prices to a huge degree, even for 4 door 318 cars.
A ’62 Dodge Dart 440 was my first car, a hand me down from my Dad. Unfortunately, it was a 4 door hardtop, and only had the 318 Poly; nevertheless, I still did the street light to street light drags with it (and won some!) 🙂
I think the 4 doors look great, especially with those wheels and tires.
Given they all basically share the same roofline the 4 door really gives up nothing to the 2 door, and given the already polarizing nature of the 62s I almost like the 4 door even more for being extra rebellious from the norm. Love the color and wheels
A little late to the party here, but I too love the ‘62 Dodge!
It’s a cool looking car in its quirkiness.
Excellent Aaron! Great fun ! 100% !
Now ….. What about that other drag race between a 6-tail-light Sting Ray and an XK-E ?
The Jag won that one , but it took a tragic turn along “Dead Man’s Curve.”
Jan & Dean:
I’m with you, Randedson. GM cars back then were pretty although the C2 had a hint of menace about it. The Dodge featured here is flat out cool. The sculpted sides over the rear wheel wells look like they were twisted into shape by the 413.
A couple years ago a blue ’62 Dodge pulled up next to me in traffic. It was wonderful to see.
Allpar has a collection of stories detailing some Ramchargers’ exploits. Good reads.
The only songs sung by GM boys on the strip back then when facing Mopar were the blues 😉
Thanks, Dan!
Sadly, Jan Berry wrecked his Corvette near “Dead Man’s Curve” in 1966, but he ran into a parked truck instead of missing the curve.
The cover art of that single is primitively cool, isn’t it?
The lyrics of “Shut Down” fail to mention that the Super Stock Dodge in question was driven by “The Little Old Lady (from Pasadena)”, which was also written in part by Roger Christian, and originally recorded by Jan and Dean (although the Beach Boys recorded it as well).
“The little old lady from Pasadena
has a pretty little flower bed of white gardenias
But parked in a rickety old garage
is a brand new, shiny red Super Stock Dodge.”
“She drives real fast and she drives real hard
She’s the terror of Colorado Boulevard”
So, you see, Brian Wilson didn’t want to admit that he’d been “Shut Down” by a “Little Old Lady”, so he made up a story in which he wins the race.
[this comment written firmly tongue-in-cheek]
Roger Christian wrote the lyrics to Shutdown, I think you inferred that but others might not know. Brian Wilson didn’t write any lyrics to my knowledge and he wasn’t into cars either.
Roger Christian supplied lyrics to most of the Beach Boys’ car songs, although Gary Usher also wrote a few. Christian was a race car driver before he got into music and radio, and the lyrics to “Shut Down” or “Little Deuce Coupe” are clearly not the work of an automotive novice.
Brian did write some lyrics – the words on their two 1965 albums (The Beach Boys Today! and Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) were mostly his work, with minor contributions from Mike Love.
While those Max Wedge, Super Stock Dodges were drag-strip terrors, trying to drive one of the highest horsepower versions on the street would have been a nightmare. That would have been the biggest difference between one of them and a fuelie Sting Ray. TBH, a race between a solid axle C2 would have been more appropriate, especially since the Super Stock Mopars showed up for 1962. Of course, ‘Sting Ray’ was more lyrical.
Nevertheless, it’s been written that the downsized (but butt-ugly), lighter weight, big engine 1962 Mopars were DeLorean’s inspiration to create the 1964 GTO, and we all know the impact of that one on the sixties’ musclecar era. All those car songs (some of which sure sound like they were created with marketing in mind) certainly didn’t hurt sales, either.
> To the musicologists among us, it will come as no surprise that none of the Beach Boys really knew much about cars or surfing
Dennis Wilson did surf, though I don’t know how good he was at it. Bruce Johnston, who joined the band in time to sing on “California Girls” in 1965 also surfed.
“Shut Down, Vol.2 was an oddity of an album made quickly to capitalize on the unexpected popularity of the Shut Down album, which Capitol Records had put out recently. It featured car songs from several acts, including the Beach Boys. The band wasn’t given the time to write and record a whole album of good stuff, so timeless classics sit side by side with utter dreck. The best songs on that album though, like “Don’t Worry Baby” and “The Warmth of the Sun”, are sublime.
While it’s true, it’s worth noting that Brian Wilson and Bruce Johnston were up all night with Terry Melcher’s 1960 Chevy getting the 348’s exhaust revving and overrun for the intro of ‘409’ just right, and it shows when compared with similar attempts by other artists at using engine sounds in recordings.
The point is, Wilson might not have known much about anything else, but he definitely knew music.
I can alleviate your immediate confusion. “The Strip” is the Sunset Strip. It’s a street race, and that was very much a thing at the time of “Shut Down”. “Where the road is wide” puts it west of Doheny Boulevard. It’s a two-mile stretch from there to just past Whittier Blvd. where Sunset curves to the right.
That’s “Dead Man’s Curve.” As in the Jan & Dean song.
“The Strip” is the Sunset Strip.”
Came to say this. I just assumed it was common knowledge. And I’m from CT, almost can’t get any further from the Strip. [Sunset Strip, that is.] 😉
Nice .
When I began my Civil Service career in the Spring of 1984 we were just beginning to salvage out a fleet of Dodge D500 3 yard dump trucks, every one had a 413 V8 and they were beasts .
Some had manual boxes others Allison slush boxes with retarder pedals to prevent crashes when descending hills loaded with Asphalt .
IIRC we got maybe $150 each for those well worn but good running trucks .
Who could possibly afford to feed one now ? .
-Nate
I’ve never been much of a Beach Boys fan but I do enjoy this track. The most questionable lyric is pedaling the CLUTCH to get traction but that’s about right for Corvette owners in my experiences at the “strip”.
I really love the headline pic, talk about beauty and the beast! Part of what always bugged me about the beach boys is they always had the “coolest” stuff, be it the universally loved Stingray C2, or the Deuce coupe, or the Honda Cub. For me when when I listen to this song I’m rooting for the ugly 413 Dodge, not the preppy surfer boy in daddy’s Vette
When I was 15 my 17 yr old brother had a 62 polara 500 hardtop, 361 push button torqueflite… They were and are so ugly they’re cool.. He traded it in on a 63 s22 comet convertible with a 170 and 2sp merc o matic.. Said he wanted a drop top. The dodge would do a great one wheel burnout, we tested it..!! The comet was given to me when he entered the marines, my first car. Here’s a pic of the similar 500
While my first choice would be a big Pontiac, I’d still take the awkwardly downsized Dodge over a Ford from that time period.
The,500
No way Beach Boys. Real life the Dodge always won. The fuel injection was garbage back then. Can’t remember which one but a muscle car magazine also proved it in an article in the 80s or 90s. Tried Google but like always the AI answer that popped up was totally useless
Fuel injection wasn’t garbage when a mechanic understood it. Most mechanics were only fluent in carburators. A properly tuned fuel injected engine was far more efficient than a carbureted one. How many modern cars have carburators?
Put just one curve in and see how the Dodge fares.