i saw a deadhead sticker on a cadillac

Nothing about this record is warm. The drums are a machine, the guitar is all treble and slapback, the synthesizer hangs over the top like glare coming off a windshield — and somehow it is the most convincing song anyone made in the 1980s about a summer being over. Don Henley wrote the words. The music arrived already finished, on a home demo Mike Campbell had built around a LinnDrum he had only just bought.

Campbell offered it to his own band first. Tom Petty and Jimmy Iovine listened, and Iovine’s verdict was “Eh, it sounds like jazz.” Campbell, by his own account completely deflated, went home, decided Iovine had a point about the chorus chord, changed it, and let Iovine send him over to Henley instead. Henley listened with his eyes shut and said only, “Okay, maybe I can do something with that,” then phoned back later claiming he had just written the best song of his life to Campbell’s music. When they cut it properly the key had moved, so Campbell had to relearn parts he had improvised once and never expected to play again; the solo that runs out the end was invented on the spot. Petty heard the finished thing on the radio during the Southern Accents sessions and said he wished he’d had the presence of mind not to let it get away.

The line everybody keeps came from a stretch of the San Diego Freeway. A Cadillac Seville went past Henley with a Grateful Dead sticker on the bumper — the car he described to NME as the status symbol of the right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie, wearing the badge of the counterculture it had comfortably outlived. He got one sentence out of it: Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. No commentary attached, none needed. Play it in a car, in September, with the window down.