GRAND OLE AVANTI

Dwight Yoakam, country-music heartthrob, drives some classic Americana

Cars

MARK GINSBURG

These days I'm driving a 1987 El Camino Chevy pickup, the first new car I ever owned. I drove a 1970 for about ten years; I drove it to death. Drove it, drove it, drove it. It was all bashed up. A guy hit me one time and I used the insurance money to finish my first EP," reminisced country-rock singer-songwriter Dwight Yoakam three gold albums later. "I also have a '64 Cadillac Coupe DeVille which I restored; it's a Hudmobile. But when I rebuilt the house I never thought to measure the garage. The car sticks out about a foot, so I've got it stored." He sighed. "Then Buck Owens gave me a '59 Coupe DeVille which he had the top cut off of as a parade car. It's red. Buck just bought a Buick station wagon, and I bought a Jaguar, for pragmatic reasons." Yoakam bought a fouryear-old XJ6 for his house in the Hollywood Hills, "because when I go to the airport to pick somebody up, like if my mother comes to visit, I need a car that I can put four people in and not look like an old man driving around. I might consider getting rid of my Jaguar for this Avanti, though," he said, striding over to the crimson test car we had lent him. "I can only fit two people in the pickup."

"Dwight's really into the Jetsons," Yoakam's manager commented as his client settled into the sixties futuristic fiberglass convertible. After familiarizing himself with the controls, Yoakam fired up the engine, lit a smile, and disappeared up the hill. When we rendezvoused in an oil field off La Cienega several days later, the bloom was still on the rose. "It's real comfortable inside," he declared, his long skinny legs unimpeded by the steering wheel. "I drive kind of close up on the wheel like this because I feel more in control. And I always adjust the seat back to its maximum upright position—I drove for a living for several years. Drove a cab over bobtail trucks and airfreight vans. The Avanti is kinda like a hot-rod RollsRoyce to me. I've driven a Rolls before and the coachwork on it reminds me of this, the handstitched leather and so on."

Like a Rolls-Royce or Aston Martin, the Avanti is a hand-built car, only it's even more exclusive than its British counterparts. The Avanti Automotive Corporation produced just 150 cars last year; this year it hopes to sell 350. Its current owner, J. J. Cafaro, a multimillionaire shopping-mall developer and optimist, has sworn never to build more than one thousand Avantis annually. His wife, Janet, who is the company's C.E.O., touches up the original Avanti shape. An awkward task, considering the car was designed by Raymond Loewy, one of the twentieth century's greatest industrial designers.

"I've never been in a car that more people stopped and looked at," Yoakam remarked, "not car buffs but everyday pedestrians—kids, old people, and even folks who remembered the original Avanti. Fiftyand sixty-year-old men were stopping me and going, 'God, that's an Avanti?' Thinking that it was a restored 1964 original. They didn't know that the car was still being made." The Avanti was introduced by Studebaker in the sixties and except for a brief hiatus in 1986 has been continuously in production. After Studebaker's demise the car was made by a company formed by rich Avanti enthusiasts. Cafaro, the most recent owner, took over the financially fraught business last year. He claims that the bulk of the problems he inherited have been resolved, and he has been orchestrating an advertising campaign for the coupe, convertible, and new four-door sedan to reassure prospective customers.

"The first night, I was reminded of getting into a brand-new 1969 Pontiac GTO," Yoakam offered. "Because the Avanti's an American V-8, you know, 305 cubic inches on a Chevy Caprice chassis, which feels like it has a police suspension—a real beefedup package." Cafaro confirmed that he buys up regular Chevy Caprices (the staple of New York City's taxicab fleet), stiffens their suspensions, alters their gear ratios, and substitutes custom bodies and interiors to produce a $53,000 Avanti convertible. That it all hangs together is kind of a miracle. "I drove on the freeway from an on-ramp to an off-ramp and glanced down figuring I was at 65 m.p.h., and I was 20 miles faster than that. Everybody who was in the car with me was amazed at how, on acceleration, when you kick down to the passing gear, the car just spread itself out and attached itself to the road. The tires really lit up, and they're real good tires, Goodrich tires. The Avanti's nice and sturdy," Yoakam confirmed.

I asked him if the handsome wooden steering wheel obscuring the fuel gauge bothered him. "With a twenty-fivegallon tank and a V-8, who gives a shit?" he replied emphatically. "I can see the 'E' and that's what matters. And I think there's something to be said aesthetically for the cluster approach." There's an analog gauge with a chrome bezel for everything an engine might do in the Avanti, and it's all grouped in front of the driver and lit with a red glow the color of cheap wine. "Everything else besides the radio is General Motors as far as I could tell," Yoakam noted. "The keys are G.M., so I assume the ignition and so forth are G.M. It sure sounds like it when startin' up. Which I think is great because it's one of the best American power plants and drivetrains. Ford being my second choice on that, and for trucks, the reverse." The airconditioning unit in our car performed poorly, but Cafaro says cars currently in production have a more sophisticated G.M. model.

The Avanti controls were set into wood with a curlicue pattern. I asked Dwight, who was bom in rural Kentucky, how the panels got that way. "It's burl wood, which is taken from the roots of the stump down in the ground. It looks curly because that's where the wood burls through the root system, the big feeder roots that connect right into the trunk," he said. "This is elm, so it's not so dark that it looks toxic. This is a tasteful application: you've got it right on the console, and just on the instrument area of the dash, the rest being padded leather, which contrasts very well." Even the latches for the convertible top are covered with handstitched leather. The Avanti is laborintensive.

"The sound system's the one thing that's lacking, mostly in terms of speaker configuration. The Sony tuner and tape deck are adequate, but Japanese speakers are terrible," Yoakam complained. "I'd change immediately to JBL speakers all the way through the car." The convertible Avanti is a little noisy, and Yoakam felt that a secondary amp might be in order. He didn't miss a Dolby noise-reduction system, which is normally standard in a luxury-car radio. "I don't like Dolby," he maintained. "I'm a musician; I wanna hear all the hiss and tingle and zingle that I can hear. And I want all the treble and dirt that I can find, 'cause that makes music real. I don't know that I'm sold on a CD player in a car, either. I'm not sure the lasers are developed to the point where you hit a bump and it won't bounce." Which is important here because the stiff Avanti suspension gives a fairly hard ride around town, and tends to bring out audible, but not threatening, creaks and quivers in the body and chassis.

The Avanti is known in the industry as a "boutique car," a kind of fashion statement for rich people. But it's really more than that. "The Avanti is a piece of the future that was never realized," the songwriter said, philosophically. "It's a piece of post-World War II American art. And because it wasn't successful on a grand scale of production, it has retained its American artistic charm. The name is European, but the style is purely futuristic American. It's like the guy who developed that chrome toaster, dig it. I'll bet he built this." Raymond Loewy also designed the Lucky Strike logo and gave the streamlined "American" look of the forties and fifties to refrigerators, railroad locomotives, and Coke bottles.

I asked Yoakam if the Avanti would go over in the South, if it could be driven unselfconsciously through some holler. "Oh, absolutely!" he replied. "This was Studebaker's answer to the Corvette and Thunderbird. And all you gotta do is hear that engine; nobody's gonna question it. It doesn't sound European, it sounds American, like an eightcylinder car with a hot exhaust. Real throaty. It's very much an outgrowth of the generation that gave the world rock 'n' roll." If the Cafaros exercise restraint in deviating from the original Avanti design (already much of the chrome is gone, and rocker panels have sprung up under the doors, etc.), the Avanti, like rock 'n' roll, will be here to stay. "I'm definitely interested in having one," said Yoakam as he reluctantly parted with the red convertible. "Frost blue, saddle interior, white top, and American leather. Made in Youngstown, Ohio, with a Chevy engine—by God!"

MANUFACTURER'S

SPECIFICATIONS

1989 Avanti Sport Convertible

• Vehicle type: front-engine, rear-wheel-drive, four-passenger two-door convertible.

• List price: $47,982 (price as tested: $53,539).

• Options: wire wheels,

sports suspension, power seats, leather interior, keyless remote entry.

• Engine type: 5.0-liter fuel-injected V-8.

• Transmission: four-speed automatic overdrive with lockup torque converter.

« Acceleration 0-60 m.p.h.:

8 seconds.

• Top speed: 130 m.p.h.

• E.P.A. fuel economy:

17 m.p.g., city; 23 m.p.g., highway.