Do Look Back

In the years 1965-66, Bob Dylan recorded 3 albums which embody one of the most astonishing streaks of sustained creative brilliance of all time.  Bringing it all Back Home , Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde showcased thirty four tracks, not a single one less than first rate, and, astonishingly, nine are genuinely classifiable as ‘masterpieces.’  Talking about what he was striving to achieve, Dylan said: The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on the Blonde on Blonde album.  It’s that thin, wild mercury sound.  It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.  It brings to me, in a visual aesthetic analogy, the sharp – yet harmoniously integrated – angular forms that are the automobile bodies created in 1970-73 by Marcello Gandini in a mid-‘60s Dylan-like purple patch.  Limbering up in 1967-69 with sharp-lined ‘concept’ cars such as the Lamborghini Marzal and the Alfa Romeo Carabo, Gandini’s razor-like shapes appear...

It’s always seemed to me that the VW Type 14 Karmann Ghia is one of the most frustrating concepts in automotive history.   Here we have a machine with looks I’d consider to be completely emblematic of a ‘sports car’ of the era, but performance little better than the blue ‘invalid carriages’ that always seemed to be smokily in the way back then.   Whose idea was it to sign off something which looks so purposeful, lithe and cheeky, but which was unable – in early production - to unleash more than 34 bhp from its flat four engine? Karmann Ghia brochure, circa 1959 Happily, there were some people down in Brazil who took a similarly dim view of such dim performance.  Paulo de Aguiar Goulart ran a VW dealership named with the acronym DACON, in Sao Paulo.  Seven years after the model’s introduction, DACON became able to display the Karmann Ghia in its showroom, local production having been commenced in a new factory at nearby São Bernardo do Campo.  Goulart was also ...