He Doesn’t Want to Drive the Zamboni

Courtesy of Gear Daddies

If you’ve ever been to a hockey game—and probably even if you haven’t—you’ve heard the Zamboni song. “(I Wanna Drive The) Zamboni” by Minnesota rock band Gear Daddies has been featured in three Disney movies, in late-night TV show sketches, and in a beloved Mastercard commercial. It has even been a clue on “Jeopardy!”

Funny thing is, when frontman Martin Zellar (pictured above, second from right) wrote the song—which turned 35 in October—he never intended to record it. He dashed it off as an inside joke for his Gear Daddies bandmates, but when their Polygram A&R rep heard it at a private party, he insisted they include it on their next album. Zellar resisted, so “(I Wanna Drive The) Zamboni” landed as a hidden track on 1990’s “Billy’s Live Bait.”

It didn’t take the public long to discover—and embrace—the anthem that gives voice to a universal desire among anyone who has watched the eponymous machine work its resurfacing magic in mesmerizing loops: “I wanna drive the Zamboni!”

There was, in fact, a Smokey at the local arena in Austin, Minnesota, where Zellar grew up—a guy with a cigarette forever dangling between his lips who drove the Zamboni. Zellar himself never has. He has had plenty of offers since the song became an arena sensation, including one to lip-synch it while driving at the NHL All-Star Game. “My wife, God bless her, said, ‘You’re not doing that,’ because she knew the toll it would take on me,” Zellar says.

Courtesy of the Minnesota Wild

Zellar is content to watch the Zamboni, rather than drive it. Same way he would rather watch hockey than play it, which he did as a goalie until high school. He jokes that’s how his fascination with the machine began. “I was enamored with watching the Zamboni because I was sitting on the bench so much,” he says. “There’s something Zen-like watching it go from strip to strip, smoothing the scuffed-up ice.”

He admits to a love-hate relationship with the song. He’s grateful for the financial boon it has brought, which helped him buy a house in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he and his wife, Carolyn, now live. He references his good fortune in the song “We Ran Wild” from his 2023 solo album “Head West”—“Who would have thought that cow would give milk this long?” Its success is rooted in its uniqueness. “If you write a love song, you’re in competition with tens of thousands of spectacular love songs,” he says, “but I have the market cornered on Zamboni songs.”

The track has also brought Zellar a measure of international fame. One day in Mexico on the shuttle to the airport, he met a couple of Canadian travelers who asked him what he did. He told them vaguely he was a writer. They drilled down. What kind of writing? A songwriter? Have you written anything we’d know? He reluctantly told them he had written the Zamboni song (which had gotten lots of airtime during “Hockey Night in Canada” broadcasts). “No!” they exclaimed, surprised. “I might as well have told them I’d written ‘Let It Be,’” he says.

One of the travelers called his brother in Canada and said, “You’ll never guess who I’m sitting next to.”

At the same time, Zellar wants to be known for more than writing that one song. He has written hundreds of others, including love songs. Though he has performed the Zamboni song live often, he prefers to stick with his trademark songs, like “Wear your Crown,” “East
Side Boys,” and “Wore Me Down,” among many others. “It’s so unrepresentative of what I’ve done with my career and the type of songwriter I am,” he says. “But I know damn well what’s going to be in the first sentence of my obituary.”