Ice Cream Truck Music: Revealed

To the city’s ice cream vendors, Los Angeles is zoned into the child-luring strains of “It’s a Small World,” “Yankee Doodle” and “Turkey in the Straw.” Why must they play those songs again and again? A visit to one of the Highland Park yards where trucks juice up their freezers overnight reveals a tale of Pavlov gone amok.

For 10 years, Umberto Valdez has driven around blasting Brahms’ “Lullaby,” and only Brahms’ “Lullaby,” because that’s the song the truck was equipped with when he inherited it from his father. Valdez would like to play something more modern, but he also inherited his father’s customers, who have been conditioned to run into the street at the sound of the German composer. “If I changed the music,” Valdez asks, “then how would they know it is me who is coming?”

As for the wheezy quality of the music, which sounds more like a dirge than a lullaby, Valdez explains that most music boxes built into the old-time trucks are broken, and the company that made and repaired them went out of business. Since many of the drivers don’t have access to record stores selling corny Americana, they’ve come to rely on vendors selling tapes of old-time music made the old-fashioned way: holding tape recorders to the speakers of established trucks.

Competition between ice cream vendors is fierce. To hear Valdez tell it, nary a week goes by without rivals secretly trailing him by car, recording his music out the window, then coming back the next day in their own Brahms-playing trucks to hit his stops 15 minutes before he does. But “poachers never last,” Valdez says. At the end of the day, customers are more loyal to drivers than to music. If that’s true, then why don’t the drivers go for something a bit less Germanic, like techno? Or salsa? Or jazz? Two men loading Bomb Pops into their truck chortle at the idea. “Then they’d think we were catering trucks,” shouts one. “Ice cream trucks must play ice cream music,” his friend agrees. “That is how the world works.”