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Years ago I was driving home from an early gig in my old pickup truck about 5 PM.  My friend (the bass player) and I had loaded up all our equipment and were heading south on the 101, back to LA.  We got to a long uphill and since I was going slow (about 50 mph) I moved over into the far right lane.  Cars were whizzing by us.

All of a sudden I noticed a car had slowed down and was going at my speed right alongside us.  Someone in that car was yelling something at me.  I said to my friend, “What the heck is he yelling about?”  I thought maybe he was mad that I was going so slow or just making fun of my old truck.  I keep driving, hoping they would stop yelling and drive on.

They continued yelling and after a few minutes I rolled down my window to give them a piece of my mind.  I heard them say, “YOU’RE TRUCK’S ON FIRE, YOU’RE TRUCK’S ON FIRE!”

I looked in my rear view mirror and sure enough there was a huge cloud of smoke coming from the back of my truck!  I let out some sort of yell and told my friend, “MY TRUCK’S ON FIRE, MY TRUCK’S ON FIRE!”   All I could think about was my equipment burning up.

I quickly pulled over off the freeway to the side and stopped.  We got out ran around to the back and discovered that the moving van blanket we had lined the bed of my truck with, and put all our heavy gear on, was on fire.  It is kinda weird that those blankets can smoke a lot but burn really slow and with virtually no flames.  We were frantic at first but gradually tried to think what would be the best way to handle this.  We didn’t want to take all our gear out of the truck.  Fortunately, my friend had a pocket knife which he pulled out and started cutting away the burning section.  It took a while, but he managed to do it and then we buried the burning section in the dirt.

We laughed all the way home and still laugh when I see him and one of us says, “YOU’RE TRUCK’S ON FIRE, YOU’RE TRUCK’S ON FIRE!”