Dave told this story when he was promoting that Bluegrass covers album. He refers to his blue Opal Cadet as, "Panama."

DLR : "You heard me talking about my Opal Cadet 1969 Station wagon in Dance the Night Away. The nickname for that blue 1969 Opal cadet station wagon was, "Panama" cuz that was the farthest South that you could possibly go and still have a really corrupt good time. That car now, what I did is I had a friend of mine torch off the front engine lid, and at my house in Pasadena, California we have it bolted to the wall in the front hallway. You have the front engine compartment in the grill and the two front halves of wheels like that, and we mounted the windshield right up on the top of it okay? Like it came crashing through the wall of the hallway.

And then what we did, is we went to a place called Ellis Mercantile which is where you rent all of the movie props that they make in Hollywood and all of these environments. There's a section that's very famous at Ellis Mercantile where all of the Cowboys and Indians stuff is. So there's a whole stack of stuffed deer at Ellis Mercantile. And I bought one, and we sawed it neatly in half and took just the butt, the tail and the back legs and positioned it like it was coming through the windshield of my Opal Cadet station wagon, and hit it and ran through the wall of my house like that. And we painted the hooves blue, "Blue Suede Hooves." And underneath we have a little plaque that says, "My first deer, courtesy of Panama." ~

Panama.jpgPANAMA2.jpg

(DLR – Crazy From the Heat)
I bought a little Opel Kadett station wagon for eleven hundred dollars; you could fit one PA speaker in the back compartment and one PA speaker on top. All of the gear, the brains of it, you know the controls, in the passenger side.

I would come home from gigs, and getting the PA speaker out of the back of the car was easy; getting it off the top of the car, read: Six-foot-two, and I’m only six feet, in my stocking feet. So I’d pull it off the edge, and start to fulcrum it, it would start to get off balance, and I’d get the base of it onto my chest, get it positioned and then start lowering it, using my legs, bending my knees. You didn’t want it to roll onto your side and break something-that meant money spent. I would routinely spend a half an hour in the bull-frog position, with a three hundred pound speaker sitting on my chest, trying to figure out, “Okay, where do I go from here?”

John 5 Also refers to the car as the, "Panama Car" in an interview with Eddie Trunk.

ET: Give me your favorite story working with Roth if you can share a classic Roth story

J5: We were doing a photo shoot, and you know I loved Van Halen back in the day, and he would do these photo shoots and he would have the little people around and the two girl bodyguards and all this wacky stuff. This was just at his house, the Panama car was there and we were just doing all these crazy things and it was just incredible because that's how I visualized Dave when I was a kid growing up and when I got my chance to do a photo shoot with him that's exactly what it was. It was just like going to the Wizard of Oz and it was just the exact same as what you had in your head.