cars news 10: Celebrity Drive: Brit Turner, Blackberry Smoke Drummer

Quick Stats: Brit Turner, drummer, Blackberry Smoke
Daily Driver: 1968 Chevy Camaro SS (Brit’s rating: 8 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: See below
Favorite road trip: Georgia to Florida
Car he learned to drive in: 1969 Buick Skylark wagon
First car bought: 1972 VW Beetle

Southern rock band Blackberry Smoke’s Brit Turner is on the road 250 days a year for gigs, but his dream is to one day be able to enjoy cars. For now, the American car enthusiast focuses on his five cars and makes sure they are running when he comes back from touring. That includes his 1968 Camaro SS with a 396 big-block engine.

“It’s a great running car, and with every old hot rod that I get, I learn something new,” Turner says. “With this car, I didn’t know Super Sport was just a trim package; I thought that always meant there was a big-block motor in the car. It just so happened that people that ordered that trim package also used to, 99 percent of the time, order a big-block motor, the bigger motor, either 454 or 396 [cubic inches]. So when I was running the VIN on it, I discovered it was ordered with a six-cylinder. … That completely confused me and I looked it up and sure enough, the guy told me that I talked to about it, ‘Man, if you can find the original six-cylinder motor that went in that, it’s so rare that somebody ordered one with a six-cylinder, it’d be worth $110,000.’ So that’s what I’m going to do when I retire, just try to search for that motor somewhere.”

Turner helped form the band about 15 years ago, and despite Blackberry Smoke’s success, he’s never bought a typical splurge car. “As far as making money now, it’s just doing more fun things to your car. My goal is to tour less so I can go on all these Goodguys car show runs … and all these rallies that go on that I’m always watching on the Internet while we’re touring.”

He bought the Camaro 10 years ago, and his wife, who is also a car enthusiast, was a big supporter of the purchase. “We’ve always agreed on that, which is kind of bad sometimes. If I say, ‘Oh man, we’ve got get this!’ there’s nobody to be, ‘We don’t really have a place to put that one.’ She’s always like, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to get it!'” he says.

At the time he got the Camaro, he had four other Chevy hot rods and was looking for a big-block muscle car. “I looked around and I found this, and my wife was pregnant, I said, ‘Man, I’m going to get this to celebrate you being pregnant.’ She was like, ‘All right! That sounds awesome!'” he says, laughing. “So, we got it and she was driving it around the day she gave birth.”

Turner rates his Camaro an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10. “I love it, as a big-block motor, and drive it as much as I can. You say, ‘What’s your daily driver?’ but we tour 250 dates a year,” he says, with a laugh.

1959 Chevrolet Biscayne

Rating: 9

Turner also has a 1959 Chevrolet Biscayne with an inline-six. “It’s a lowrider. It’s nice; it’s got weed leaf interior embroidered in it,” he says. “My wife bought it stock from this guy that wanted $2,050 for it, and he wouldn’t go down to $2,000. She bought it, and that’s what she drove when we met.”

They then restored it, including redoing the paint and bodywork. “We put 100-spoke Dayton rims on it and lowered it a little bit,” he says. “It’s a fun car. It’s a four-door, so you don’t have to lean forward to get your buddies in. It’s a Biscayne, so it’s the same body style as the Impala, but it doesn’t have all the chrome on it, which I love. I think it’s so cool-looking.”

It doesn’t have a stereo, but Turner enjoys just listening to the sound of the car. “I hear music a lot, and sometimes I just like to hear the car and think. That’s like my alone time, is in cars.” he says, with a laugh.

1964 Chevrolet C10 pickup truck

Rating: 6

Another ride that does not have a stereo is his short-bed Chevrolet pickup truck. “Once you get a truck, you always have to have a truck,” Turner says, laughing. “If you ever have to put your truck in the shop, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, when’s my truck going to get back? I’ve got to use this for something.'”

Turner says he has no plans to paint the Chevy. “It’s patinaed. If I do paint it, I’m going to do just the roof, like a candy Mexican blanket,” he says. “I love it because I can run errands in it, and my daughter loves it. She’s 9, and she loves to ride in the truck, so we just tool around in that sometimes. She likes to sit in the back of it and read books.”

1962 Chevrolet Corvette

Rating: 11

Turner’s dad bought this Corvette new back in 1962, so the convertible has a much more emotional connection. He gives it an 11 on a scale of 10.

“It’s all original and he gave it to me and my brother before he passed away. When we were growing up, he’d barely let us get in it. We thought he was going to be buried in it. He told me one day, ‘When I went to buy that car, I was going to choose between the ’62 Volvo and the ’62 Corvette.’ I said, ‘Man, you made the right decision.'”

The Corvette had been stolen three times, but his dad always got it back. “The only thing that’s not original on it is the Wonderbar stereo radio that we never even replaced. I haven’t found one that’s a ’62.”

Growing up around his dad’s beloved Corvette had a big impact on Turner’s taste in cars. “That car has serious design; it’s just a beautiful, beautiful car. And the motor, the 327 that’s in it, that’s one of the best motors made. I identify fun memories with that,” he says.

Turner’s love for American cars is consciously reflected in his car purchases. “I feel there’s so much pride that went into those cars, and so much beautiful design. The lines, every detail top to bottom, inside and out of these cars were beautiful,” he says.

Those were the cars he grew up seeing around him. “All the older kids in my neighborhood, they all had muscle cars and they raced them on the street. I grew up in Smyrna, Georgia; it’s like 12 miles north of Atlanta and it was the first police station to have Mustang 5.0’s. On the back of them they all had pinstripes, ‘You can’t outrun us,'” he says, laughing. “That’s the neighborhood that we grew up in. There were a lot of people street racing cars and being crazy.”

Turner not only enjoys vintage muscle cars, he also likes the reissued ones as well.

“I get excited when they reissue something. At first when they did the Charger, I didn’t know it was going to be a four-door and that was kind of weird, but then they did the Challenger, I thought that was cool. Then the Camaro, I thought that was cool, but it’s almost like they gave up underneath the back bumper,” he says, with a laugh. “It’s like this hole there, and I’m like, ‘Man, they wouldn’t have done that back then, the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, or even the ’40s.'”

The cars that most stand out for Turner are the ones made in the 1960s and 1970s. “When people get in them, you can pull up beside a Maserati and somebody’s going to come over to your car and be like, ‘I love this; my grandfather had one.’ I’ve never driven a Maserati, but I know that when I get in my Camaro it’s just fun to drive.”

Turner’s “newest” car is a 2004 Cadillac SRX. Although he does get behind the wheel, Turner’s wife mostly drives the Cadillac around their home near Atlanta. “And I love Cadillacs. I know why people buy Cadillacs and keep buying them historically. I had a ’98 DeVille, and it was the smoothest riding car ever, and I thought, ‘This is why people just go on and on about Cadillacs, very comfortable, very smooth ride, you want to drive long distance in it.'”

He got the SRX because it had OnStar. “I wanted something for my family to drive that was safe and it’s a safe car, but if you get any of my muscle cars, it’s pretty safe too,” he says.

While the Cadillac isn’t the kind of car that he can fix himself, Turner does enjoy working on his cars. “With older cars, they’re just easier to work on. If you have time to do it, you can do it if you got the tools. But a new Cadillac, you’ve got to have a system that can read the computer.”

Car he learned to drive in

Growing up in Atlanta, Turner learned to drive in the family car, a 1969 Buick Skylark wagon, which he says had “a 400 big-block motor in it. That was a fast station wagon. It definitely looked like the family truckster type thing.”

The brown and gold station wagon was what the family took on trips to Mexico Beach, Florida. “It’s like 30 miles from Panama City Beach, where my parents didn’t want to take us because that’s where all the crazy teenagers were and we weren’t teenagers yet,” Turner says, with a laugh.

Turner’s mom and dad taught him how to drive. “We lived on a dead-end street. There wasn’t any traffic, so they were always like, ‘Back it in, back it out, drive up the street.’ But even in the Corvette, my dad would let me shift, let me steer, sit in his lap. Things that people would call Child Services on you now probably,” he says, laughing.

First car bought

But his dad wouldn’t let him work the clutch on the Corvette, so Turner bought his own car to properly learn on— a used manual 1972 Volkswagen Beetle. “I remember stopping on a hill, and somebody pulled up right behind me, stopping at a train track, and a train was going by,” he says. “The whole time the train was going by, I was like, ‘I’m going to smash into the front of this car because I’m not that good with the clutch yet.’ Of course I just peeled out and about flew up over the railroad tracks when it was time for me to go, but luckily I didn’t have a car accident.”

As a teen, Turner saved up enough money from jobs, including one scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, to buy that first car. Turns out the Volkswagen was the perfect first car. “It was one of those things that if I messed the clutch up, it was something that we could actually repair, or I could afford to have repaired,” he says.

Back then, Turner was always fixing up his VW. “I remember you wanted to always being doing something to your car. So we’d take the trim off it and paint it flat back and then paint the rims flat black, cut the springs on it, so it’d lower it a little bit,” he says. “Then you finally save up enough money to buy a stereo for it and then that gets stolen, and you just ride around with a hole in your dashboard for a while.”

The little Volkswagen was also what Turner used to get to gigs playing in basement parties. “Being a drummer, I just learned how to stuff a pretty big drum set into a Volkswagen Bug, and it always took a long time to get it out, but at least I could travel in my own car to a gig.”

Favorite road trip

Turner’s favorite road trips are all the family trips to Florida in the Skylark. “They’re memorable. Like I remember my mom asking my dad, ‘Oh, pull over. I want some of that Spanish moss that’s hanging from the trees.’ When you start to get down to Florida, you see that, and it looks so cool. My mom’s like, ‘I want some of that for my pots and plants at home.’ So my dad pulls over, and he jerks some of that out and puts it in the back and an hour later we’re all getting bitten by red bugs. That was probably the most memorable trip ever,” he says, laughing. “It’s like something from ‘Vacation.'”

A collaboration with Grateful Dead legend

Blackberry Smoke was recently in Europe for a month and went on the road with ZZ Top last year. The band is recording a new album and always touring. The band members will be back on the road next month.

“The more you do it, the better you get at it,” Turner says of life on the road. “I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a lot of work because it’s not digging ditches. Being away from your wife and kid, it’s pretty brutal at times, but at the same time, we get to play music. … We get to play music for a living and people want to see us, in a different country, thousands of miles away, that’s incredible, and that’s what it’s about.”

The band is particularly excited about a DVD to be released in the spring, a collaboration with Grateful Dead legend Bob Weir, also a former Celeb Drive.

Blackberry Smoke was invited to jam with Weir in his studio in Marin County, California. “He’s such a rock star … but he can’t park well so he’s always got a ticket on his dash, and hippies come up and grab his ticket and pay it for him. It’s hilarious. It’s funny because we were walking around one day in Marin, and somebody’s like, ‘See that car that’s all parked [screwed] up?’ He’s like, ‘That’s Bob Weir’s car.’ I said, ‘That’s a nice car; it’s a Tesla!’ He said, ‘Yeah he’s not concerned with parking properly; it’s just not in him,'” Turner says, laughing.

How the band came to meet Weir involved a bit of serendipity. Blackberry Smoke was touring with the Zac Brown Band, and Carhartt was a sponsor.

“We were playing a show in Detroit and met a guy that was friends with Bob Weir. This guy saw us playing, was like, ‘I like your music.’ He worked for Carhartt and on the way out of our bus, he said, ‘Oh man, that’s a great picture of Jerry Garcia. I’ve never seen that before.’ We were like, ‘Our friend took that when he was 14 years old.'”

The man suggested the band go and jam with Weir. “We’re like, ‘Sure, of course, we’d love to!’ And never thought anything about it. The guy called the next day and said, ‘Tell me when you’re in California next.’ We’re like, ‘We’ll be there in two days!'”

The band jammed for seven hours straight with Weir at his studio. “That definitely tested us because we’re used to playing with each other for years, and we have people come sit in, but it’s really on our terms. This is on his terms, and so he’s more like, ‘Hey, let’s keep it real low, let’s keep it real slow, and let’s just go through this stuff.’ And it’s just like—wow. Magical,” Turner says.

Brit Turner with Blackberry Smoke show 02

Brit Turner with Blackberry Smoke concert

The entire experience was special for the band, and it was filmed. “This studio he has is called TRI Studios. It is one of the most elite setups you’ve ever experienced. … It’s just amazing,” he says.

Making the DVD ready for fans has been a bit on hippie time. Last summer, the Grateful Dead was busy playing 50th anniversary shows in Chicago.

The DVD will include some Dead songs, The Band songs, and old country songs. “It’s certainly special,” Turner says. “It was so comfortable; I can’t even explain it. Obviously, we’re going into it like ‘This guy is in the Grateful Dead!’ One of my odd jobs I had, I was a runner for a promoter here in town. They did all the Grateful Dead shows from the beginning in this area, and I met Jerry [Garcia]. I was 18, 20 years old. It blew my mind because I wasn’t a huge fan. … But I was blown away watching five shows in a row, going ‘Wow, this is the most special I’ve ever seen regarding a band and people watching them.'”

Jamming with a rock legend exceeded the band’s expectations. Weir “made it very comfortable. And there was no pressure, because he was like, ‘Look, we’re going to do this, and this is going to be fun. And if not, we’ll go drink some wine and have some food. And if it is, we’ll also go drink some wine and have some food,'” Turner says.

For more information on tour dates and the new DVD, please visit blackberrysmoke.com.