Jerry Was a Race Car Driver
by Primus
- 122
- BPM
- C# minor
- Key
- 12A
- Camelot
- 57
- Danceability
- 2
- Acousticness
Jerry, the ill-fated race car driver of "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver", collides with a telephone pole while driving intoxicated. That is why the title says "was". The other character is Captain Pearce, a retired fireman. Primus released the song in 1991 as a promotional single from their second studio album, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, and it was the first Primus song released as a single. It also features a sample of Bill Moseley as Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, chuckling and saying "Dog will hunt!"
The song received heavy airplay on rock radio and peaked at number 23 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart that year. The video became an MTV favorite. It cut between the band playing an out-of-control gig at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma, California, nachos spilled by a collision with Larry LaLonde on a skateboard, and racecar footage, some of it filmed at the Petaluma Speedway.
The band ended the video with a claymation segment that included creatures from the album cover. In it, Les Claypool's Rainbow Bass appears without its upper horn, because the video was filmed before Carl Thompson rebuilt the bass with its signature scroll horn.
Jerry Was a Race Car Driver runs at 122 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.97 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 492 ms. It is in C# minor, Camelot 12A, which shares its notes with E major and mixes cleanly with F# minor and Ab minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.