Coming from a musical family, Fries devised the character of C. W. McCall for a popular television advertising campaign for Old Home Bread, in which McCall was a truck driver (played by Jim Finlayson) who delivered the bread to the Old Home Café and flirted with its waitress Mavis, with Fries supplying the talk-singing vocals. The commercial's song was extended into a single-length version that was so successful in the markets where the bread was sold that Fries assumed the McCall persona and wrote more song lyrics, while his coworker Chip Davis, who wrote jingles for the same advertising agency (and later founded Mannheim Steamroller), wrote the music.
McCall would record six albums from 1975 to 1979, collecting sixty-two songs (and recording two more that were never released on albums), before largely retiring from the music business, though he would later release one album of re-recorded songs with one new song, four compilation albums and a collaborative album with Mannheim Steamroller.
After he retired from touring as McCall, Fries and his family moved to Ouray, Colorado, where Fries served two terms as mayor. He lived in Ouray with his wife until his death from cancer in 2022, at the age of 93.
The 1978 film Convoy was based on his most famous song, featuring a trucker who went by the C.B. handle "Rubber Duck".
McCall's regular albums (originally on MGM Records, then moving to sister label Polydor Records) consist of:
- Wolf Creek Pass (1975)Songs
- Black Bear Road (1975)Songs
- Wilderness (1976)Songs
- Rubber Duck (1976)Songs
- Roses for Mama (1977)Songs
- C. W. McCall & Co. (1979)Songs
McCall's other albums consist of:
- C. W. McCall's Greatest Hits (1978; contains twelve songs from his first five albums)
- Four Wheel Cowboy (1989; contents re-released on the later The Best of C. W. McCall)
- The Real McCall: An American Storyteller (1990; first of two albums of re-recorded songs; also including one new song, "Comin' Back for More")
- The Legendary C. W. McCall (1991; all songs also contained on C. W. McCall's Greatest Hits and The Best of C. W. McCall)
- The Best of C. W. McCall (1997; contains all eight songs from Four Wheel Cowboy and three more)
- American Spirit (2003; collaboration with Mannheim Steamroller, including re-recorded versions of "Convoy" and "Wolf Creek Pass")
McCall's works contain examples of:
- An Aesop: "Roses for Mama" ultimately leads the singer to learn that he shouldn't take his mother for granted after meeting a young boy who's bought five roses to put on his mother's grave.
- The Alleged Car: The 1957 Chevy pickup truck from "Classified". As the song goes:Well, I kicked the tires and I got in the seat and sat on a petrified apple core and found a bunch of field mice livin' in the glove compartment. He says, "Her shaft is bent and her rear end leaks, you can fix her quick with an oily rag. Use a nail as a starter; I lost the key. Don't pay no mind to that whirrin' sound. She use a little oil, but outside a' that, she's cherry."
- And to top it off, the singer's friend later comments of it that "I've seen better stuff in a junkyard".
- Angry Guard Dog: "Classified" has the singer going out to a place owned by a man named Bob, who has a German Shepard named Frank. Frank's immediate reaction to the singer's arrival is to come out, grab onto his leg... and later when the singer's trying to leave in his "new" truck, the dog attacks him again and has to be beaten off with a crowbar. And even then he still won't leave the guy alone, even while he's trying to fix a sudden flat!
- Artistic License – Geography: Apparently used, but actually averted, in "Four Wheel Cowboy", which has McCall driving south from Denver to Santa Fe, supposedly going straight. Some of the places named are rather out of order, implying that he must have backtracked for some reason. Especially notable when he's "Rattlin' down off a' Raton Pass", with the next spot being "Glorieta Hill like a sheet a' glass". Glorieta Hill is about 160 miles from Raton Pass, so he wouldn't be going anywhere near it if he's trying to go as straight as possible. However, northern New Mexico is so mountainous that Interstate 25, the fastest route between Denver and Santa Fe, takes a very indirect route through that region. Once I-25 south reaches Raton Pass at the Colorado–New Mexico border, it turns to the southwest toward Glorieta Pass, after which it takes a sharp turn to the northwest to reach Santa Fe.
- Black Comedy Cannibalism: "Comin' Back for More (Al's Café)" is very loosely based on the case of Alferd Packer, the only person ever to be prosecuted for cannibalism in the US. note
- Canine Companion: "Old Home Filler Up an' Keep on a-Truckin' Cafe" has McCall's character accompanied by a dog named Sloan in his truck. The song "Sloan" in turn explains how they first met.
- Car Meets House: The last verse of "Wolf Creek Pass" ends when the flatbed truck that McCall's character is a passenger in, and which the driver has lost control of, crashes into the side of a feed store.
- Casual Danger Dialogue: Though it may be an artifact of the nature of the song, "Wolf Creek Pass" has this bit in a near deadpan:And I said Earl I'm not the type to complain, but the time has come for me to explain that if you don't apply some brake real soon they're gonna have to pick us up with a stick an' a spoon
- Country Rap: In most of his songs, he doesn't sing so much as orate the lyrics, giving him the flow of a rapper without a typical rap-style beat, instead going for typical country banjos and guitars. He gets a little close to singing in "The Silverton", but he's also wobbling in pitch quite a bit, so it's hard to tell.
- Cover Version: A couple of McCall's songs are covers, including "The Battle of New Orleans" (originally sung by Johnny Horton), "City of New Orleans" (originally sung by Steve Goodman) and "Hobo's Lullaby" (originally sung by Goebel Reeves). Inverted with "Roses for Mama" — McCall is the original singer, but Red Sovine later did a cover version.
- Denser and Wackier: "Round the World With The Rubber Duck" is a far, far less serious song than "Convoy", its predecessor. The song kicks off with Rubber Duck's convoy crossing the Atlantic Ocean with nothing but their faith in Jesus (except for about 110 trucks who sink, whom Rubber Duck claims "just didn't have no faith"), and the rest of the song has the trucks traveling across the entirety of Eurasia and crossing the Pacific through Japan and Australia, encountering National Stereotypes of the countries they encounter all the way. There's a legitimate argument to be made that it's actually a Stealth Parody of "Convoy" and by extension novelty CB trucker songs.
- Dissonant Serenity: "Wolf Creek Pass" has its narrator describing a harrowing trip down a mountain grade in a semi truck in a humorously nonchalant monotone.
- Drives Like Crazy:
- "Wolf Creek Pass" is a story about a trip through the place of the same name in Colorado, in which two truckers lose control of their truck while driving through "37 miles of hell". As the song goes on, they gain an enormous amount of speed, lose a lot of their cargo (which consists of crates of chickens), and eventually crash into a store in Pagosa Springs. Inspired by the very real hazards that Wolf Creek Pass presents, as the drive is significantly steep on either side (with a 6.8% maximum grade), making it a dangerous undertaking for truckers, especially during winter.
"I looked on out the window and I started counting phone poles going by at the rate of four to the seventh power.
Well I put two and two together, added twelve, and carried five, and come up with twenty-two thousand telephone poles an hour."- The driver and his cop pursuer in "Four Wheel Drive", who both proceed to tear across a valley, at high speeds, just because the latter is in Hot Pursuit of the former for speeding. Not only does the driver drift through a cornfield so hard that he apparently starts cooking the corn, but he also manages to ford the Nishnabotna River and rejoin the highway by crashing through the guardrail.
We was screamin' through the valley where the Nishnabotna flows/through the mud and crud and cornfields where the mary-jew-wana grows/'cross the railroad tracks of Persia, up the hills and down the dale/got a CJ-5 with four wheel drive, Smokey on my tail - Driving Song: "Convoy", which is all about a pack of truckers driving east across the U.S. (and in "Round the World with the Rubber Duck", they end up continuing on and circumnavigating the globe).
- A Good, Old-Fashioned Paint Watching: Referenced in "Audubon" — apparently, there are only two things to do in the titular town, and one of them is to go downtown and watch haircuts.
- Green Aesop: "There Won't Be No Country Music (There Won't Be No Rock 'N' Roll)" warns about the environment's bleak-looking future and the effects of over-commercialization.
- Hard Truckin': Portrayed as both good and bad. "Convoy" has trucking as awesome, despite the complaints the characters make about various issues with their time on the road. "Long Lonesome Road", on the other hand, suggests that it's hard on a man, but the singer and his truck will keep on going and make it through anything they have to deal with.
- Have a Gay Old Time: There are few songs that he made in which he uses "Tranny" as rural slang for a car or truck's transmission, when today the word is almost exclusively known as a transphobic slur.
- Hippie Van:
- In the song "Convoy", the convoy includes "eleven long-haired Friends of Jesus in a chartreuse micro-bus".
- "Crispy Critters" has a busload of hippies and dogs descending on a small country town.
- Hollywood CB:
- McCall featured in a set of regional commercials for Old Home Bread during the 70s as a truck driver of the same name who regularly stops at the Old Home Fill Er Up and Keep on Truckin Cafe, where he makes sure to have some Old Home Bread with his meal and flirt with Mavis the waitress. These commercials would tell stories about McCall and Mavis, and since he was a trucker, and this was the citizens-band radio boom, the stories would often involve McCall's CB radio. McCall would later have a top 40 radio hit with the song "Convoy", which tells a similar story, though without the bread commercial. And that would later be turned into a film.
- It's also featured in the song "Convoy"
and the film it spawned.
- Hot Pursuit: Played for laughs in "Four Wheel Drive", in which a lone driver going 67 miles per hour catches the attention of a cop, who proceeds to chase him through a valley where the Nishnabotna River flows. The cop's car ends up "mired in fourteen feet of mud", so he calls ahead... and twenty-five more cops come to back him up, finally catching the driver.
- I'm a Humanitarian: McCall did a song about the legendary cannibal killer Al Packer, titled 'Comin' Back For More (Al's Cafe)'.
- Last-Second Word Swap: One of the final lyrics of the song "Convoy" is this:So keep your thumbs off your glass and the bears off your... tail.
- Magic Brakes: "Wolf Creek Pass" describes this happening to a flatbed carrying a full load of chickens on the downhill side of the eponymous pass. The description makes it sound as if the lines blew out at that moment, explaining how they didn't notice before. Well, that, and Earl apparently Drives Like Crazy.Well Earl rared back, cocked his leg, stepped down as hard as he could on the brake, the pedal went clear to the floor, and stayed right there on the floor, he says it sorta like stepping on a plum.
- Messy Pig: In "Convoy", Rubber Duck repeatedly complains about the odor of Pig Pen's truckload of hogs, insisting that the other trucker keep well behind him to minimize exposure. By the end of the song, Pig Pen's all the way back in Nebraska, while the rest of the convoy is in New Jersey.
- Nitro Express: Referenced in "Convoy". The convoy's unofficial leader, Rubber Duck, asks a chartreuse minibus driven by 'eleven long-haired friends of Jesus' (that is, Hippies) to put their bus in behind a 'suicide jockey'. "Yeah, he's hauling dynamite, and he needs all the help he can get!" Considering that the convoy is, by then, doing 98 MpH and crashing through roadblocks and the like, his worries are understandable — under those conditions, even dynamite (which was specifically designed to be a more stable alternative to nitro) can't be considered particularly safe.
- Parenthetical Swearing: "Convoy", featured in the 1978 movie of the same name, apparently uses "trucking" as a lyrical euphemism for the F-bomb:Come on and join our convoy, ain't nothin' gonna get in our way,
We're gonna roll this truckin' convoy across the U.S.A., convoy... - Road Block: The song "Convoy" involves a group of truckers, annoyed with issues ranging from wage theft to petty harassment over the speed limit, banding together in a massive titular convoy and blasting through several of these on a cross-country run.
- Sequel Song: McCall followed up his 1975 novelty trucker anthem "Convoy" with the comparatively obscure "Round the World with the Rubber Duck" the next year. The song picks up directly after its predecessor as Rubber Duck's convoy finds itself surrounded by "bears" (police) on the Atlantic coast, but takes a sharp turn into Denser and Wackier territory when, with the help of the "friends of Jesus" and their micro-bus, the convoy literally drives across the ocean and tours Eurasia, starting with England and continuing on through Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Each country gets its own (self-consciously corny) Brief Accent Imitation.
- Significant Monogram: Fries gave his character McCall the initials "C. W." for "Country and Western", after the musical genre he used for the commercials, and which he would go on to perform in.
- Similar Item Confusion: Non-lethal example in "Aurora Borealis" — McCall recalls how he and some friends were camping next to the Green River in Wyoming, and one of the guys from New York chuckles when he points out what he thinks is smog, "clear out here in the sticks". One of the others has to tell him that's not smog — it's the Milky Way, which he'd never seen before.
- Spoken Word: More than a few of McCall's songs are actually recitations set to music, including "Audubon", "Classified", Roses for Mama" and "Aurora Borealis".
- Stock Scream: "Black Bear Road" uses Disney's Goofy Holler when the U-Drive Jeep Car rolls over the rock and over the cliff.
- Tempting Fate: In "Four Wheel Drive", the narrator says repeatedly that "Well, the chase was on, but I had the edge / With a rig that’ll never fail". The song ends with him saying his "CJ-5 with a four-wheel drive" is "Settin’ out back a’ the jail".
- Time Skip: "Jackson Hole" describes the people who worked in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in different eras, and jumps forward to new eras with every verse, starting in 1836, jumping a hundred years forward to 1936 and then forty years forward to 1976.
- Title-Only Chorus: "Old Home Filler Up an' Keep on a-Truckin' Cafe". (Though there's a couple of recited lines by McCall in between the title.)
- Top Ten Jingle: C.W. McCall's entire career was based on this trope. The C.W. McCall character was originally a truck driver in commercials for Old Home Bread in the early 1970s whose adventures were told through a talk-singing Country Rap supplied by Fries, then an advertising executive who helped devise the campaign. The commercials, and a song based on them, was so successful in the markets where the bread was sold that Fries assumed the C.W. McCall persona publicly (despite
looking nothing like the actor who played McCall in the commercials) and parlayed it into a real-life musical career. - Train Song: McCall recorded two original songs about trains — "The Silverton", about the Durango and Silverton Railroad, and ''Gallopin' Goose", about #5 in a series of seven railcars operated by the Rio Grande Southern Railroad from the 1930s to early 1950s. He also did a cover of Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans", describing a train ride from Chicago to New Orleans on the "City of New Orleans", an overnight Amtrak passenger train operated by the Illinois Central Railroad.
- Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: The protagonist in the song "Classified" reacts with incredulity that a dog — a German Shepherd at that, who'd reacted to his arrival in the animal's yard by running out and grabbing onto his leg — is named Frank.
- Wintry Auroral Sky: McCall's song "Aurora Borealis" mentions a time he and his friends saw the Northern Lights once, while camped in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana.
