Our Cars: Triumph GT6

‘Is there gas in the car? Yes, there’s gas in the car. I think the people down the hall know who you are.’

That famous Steely Dan lyric from Kid Charlemagne has been stuck in my ear for the last two weeks and not just because Mrs English and I recently attended a hugely enjoyable evening at The Wharf in Tavistock to see tribute band, Simply Dan.

Kid Charlemagne is of course Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s 1976 tribute to the life of Owsley Stanley, Grateful Dead sound engineer, polymath, psychedelic legend and manufacturer and supplier of, by all accounts, highly pure supplies of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to impressionable young Californians in the 1960s. LSD was still legal to make and sell when Stanley started synthesising it, but by 1967 it most definitely wasn’t and in allegedly his second major bust, the legend goes that Stanley ran out of petrol and was arrested by the cops – hence that line; ‘is there gas in the car…’