Welcome back to Cars and Guitars, Street Muscle’s monthly series where we pair iconic cars with a hit song from yesteryear. Our goal? A perfect time capsule, where music and machine meld together for the ultimate cruising soundtrack. So buckle up, shift into reverse, and floor it back a thousand years to when Blue Oval muscle cars and blue-eyed soul music ruled the land.

In this 15th installment, we pair Mercury’s high-performance 1966 Cyclone GT with “Time Won’t Let Me” by The Outsiders, a rock group hailing from Cleveland, Ohio. Their blockbuster hit debuted in early 1966 and wafted from car windows all summer long. The Mercury Cyclone GT was brand new that year, and its AM radio was the perfect secondary transmitter for The Outsider’s big hit.

Heady Days Of Sixties America

America was in full, post-war bloom in the mid-sixties. Lyndon Baines Johnson sat in the Oval Office. The US Department of Transportation debuted, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter One circled the moon, and Ronald Reagan ascended to California’s governorship, foreshadowing his presidency fourteen years later.

Pop culture was on a streak in 1966 as well. TV series “Batman” and “Star Trek” debuted, and mini-skirts and Twiggy were all the rage. Rock, Soul, and R&B ruled the charts with artists like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Monkees, Motown, and of course, The Outsiders. Detroit was in the middle of an all-out horsepower war, and from its factories, it produced hundreds of thousands of muscle cars that are now coveted around the world.

The Outsiders Hit The Big Time

“Time Won’t Let Me” was recorded in September 1965 and became a massive hit the following year, reaching #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. It became the 42nd biggest American hit of 1966 and enjoyed similar success in Canada. Let’s take a listen to this infectious R&B ditty, with its swirling organ, percolating horn section, throbbing backbeat, and soulful vocals.

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Unlike most American bands who rode the coattails of the British Invasion during this period, The Outsiders had been a working band since the late ’50s, originally known as the Starfires. Guitarist and saxophonist Tom King led the group, which focused on soul and rhythm & blues. By 1965, the lineup included King, Al Austin on lead guitar, Mert Madsen on bass, and Jim Fox on drums.

Later that year, Fox went to college, and Ronnie Harkai took over. Around the same time, Sonny Geraci joined as lead vocalist, and The Outsiders as we know them were born. The Outsiders were considered a “one-hit wonder” band, even though two of their subsequent songs made the Top 40, “Girl In Love” and “Respectable.” By 1970 it was all over and the hit producing lineup dissolved.

Golden Era of Ford’s Mercury Division

Meanwhile, over in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford’s Mercury Division busted out a brand new Comet series in the fall of 1965. The top-of-the-line model was the new Cyclone GT. All Comets and the Cyclones shared their chassis, basic body shell, and new engine options with its corporate intermediate sibling, the Ford Fairlane. Mercury built 13,812 Cyclone GT hardtops in 1966.

The 390 Y code was the 390 cubic-inch engine with a two-barrel carburetor producing 265 horsepower. The 390 H code had a four-barrel carburetor and cranked out 275 horsepower. The $452 GT package packed a powerful punch with an S code 390-335 horsepower V-8, dual exhaust, engine dress-up chrome, fiberglass hood with dummy scoops, handling package, front disc brakes, and GT livery. A three-speed manual tranny came standard, with a four-speed or automatic available as options. In 1966, a Cyclone GT paced the Indianapolis 500, yet no clones were ever offered to the public.

Life Imitates Art

It has been said that pop culture mirrors the tenor of the times and both The Outsiders and Mercury’s Cyclone prove this as they morphed over the years. Even though President Kennedy had been assassinated three years earlier, America still wasn’t all that different from what it was in the 1950s. 1966 was the last year of pop culture before the Summer of Love hit the following year and then all hell broke loose. From the Vietnam War to the civil rights movement, to Bobby Kennedy’s, and Martin Luther King’s assassinations. Almost overnight, everything changed.

A great example of this cultural evolution is The Outsider’s lead singer Sonny Geraci. He was a fresh-faced kid in the video of “Time Won’t Let Me” from 1966. Dig Geraci’s Beatlesque mop top, mod sport jacket, and period-perfect dance moves. The entire band looks pretty squeaky clean, and most are wearing ties.

Six years later, after he split from The Outsiders, Geraci founded the band Climax. They had a huge hit with “Precious and Few” which reached #3 on the charts in early 1972, eclipsing “Time Won’t Let Me” which peaked at #5. I’ve included the video of “Precious and Few” from 1972 below. It’s hard to believe it’s the same singer, but Sonny Geraci voices both songs. Gone are the floppy haircuts, suits, and shuffle dancing replaced with shoulder-length hair, mid-drift tops, fringy sleeves, and the most outrageous bellbottoms on record. Even the TV tech morphed, from black and white to full color in the 1972 clip.

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The 1966 Cyclone was the last of the rectilinear styling era of Ford, and mid-sixties Sonny Geraci would look right at home behind the wheel. This design language had big greenhouses, flat beltlines, and comparatively trim sizes. By 1972, the Comet line had morphed into the bigger, wilder Montego with curved sheet metal, dramatically upswept beltlines, and a neoclassic grille, not to mention the beginning of horsepower strangling emission controls. Essentially, the 1972 Montego donned the automotive equivalent of Sonny Geraci’s fringy rock and roll blouse and bellbottoms.

Only six years separate these mid-size Mercs and singer Sonny Geraci…

Epilogue

Both the Mercury Cyclone GT and The Outsider’s “Time Won’t Let Me” debuted almost 60 years ago. The people and factories that built those groovy old Mercurys are dead and gone, as well as the music industry of post-war America. Mercury was euthanized in 2010, and few people outside the classic car hobby remember how cool the division was and how much money it made for Ford.

Sonny Geraci

Sadly, the founding members of The Outsiders are long gone as well. Guitarist and emcee Tom King died at a nursing home in Ohio on April 23, 2011, at the age of 68. He had been battling congestive heart failure. Vocalist Sonny Geraci died at 70 years old from complications of a brain aneurysm in 2017.

Spring always follows winter and The Outsiders live forever every time the opening salvo of “Time Won’t Let Me” kicks into overdrive. Even if you don’t own a classic Mercury, the heady days of mid-’60s America live again when you queue up The Outsiders. So turn it up, find that perfect stretch of tarmac, hit the loud pedal, and let Sonny Geraci ride shotgun from heaven above, crooning his blue-eyed soul symphony.