Here’s another soft rock song that reminds me of long summer holidays that seemed to go on for ever: the first hit by the strangely named – and even more strangely coiffured – Lobo.

It’s one of those strangely elegiac songs, an existential ode to freedom and the open road, and the endless appeal of an open-top car on an American highway. It came out in the same summer of ’71 as Vanishing Point, which evokes the same mood on film.

So who or what were Lobo? That’s a question I never asked myself when this forgotten soft-rock classic got to No.4, sung by a fellow with Lenny Beige hair. I say “hair” but it’s more like Steve Furst‘s stage syrup.

It seems that Lobo (the Spanish for “wolf”) was the nom-de-musique of the already exotically named Kent LaVoie from Tallahassie, Florida. He joined his first band, The Rumors, in 1961 when he was only 17.

Their line-up also included a 16-year-old future legend in Gram Parsons and 15-year-old Jon Corneal, who later joined Parsons in The Invisible Submarine Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers – he’s widely regarded as the first ever country-rock drummer – as well as James Stafford, who would go on to have a hit of his own with Spiders And Snakes a few years later.

And if you think Lobo was a shit name, then check out the other band names LaVoie went through: The Sugar Beats, US Male, The Uglies and Me & The Other Guys. The man specialised in shit band names. Despite that, he had a follow-up hit, I’d Love You To Want Me, three years after this.

A move to Nashville in the early Eighties failed to revive his career but, bizarrely, a late-Eighties compilation caught the imagination of an Asian audience and he became a star in the Far East, recording his first new album in a decade in Taiwan and signing to a label in Singapore.