Case Study #15: The Case in Which Curves Ahead Means Look at What’s Going On in Our Heads

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The road to inspiration is a hairpin curve we take on two wheels, our eyes still locked on the middle distance of our original trajectory as suddenly something slams into us so hard it lands in the seat beside us, intact and comfortably familiar, like an only-now visible navigator who’s been directing our trip the entire time. This happened with me recently, when I was driving and listening to the Tom Petty classic “Free Falling.” At first, I latched onto an aspect of how the song has always affected me. That line of thought twisted, though, until I was struck by the fact that this 1989 hit is part of another phenomenon so broad it’s like a map unfolded and flew up into my face.

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My go-to question for most everything in life seems to be “What’s unfamiliar about the familiar?” And “Free Falling,” I realized, could very well have been a formative element to this approach of mine, because a key part of my pleasure in hearing it over and over on the radio as a 14 year-old was gnawing on the bone of the references I didn’t get but felt like I should. Sure, I was hypnotized by the way the guitar chord pattern seemed to create a stretching kind of symmetry, like a playground swing’s back-and-forth arc that leads you to believe you can touch the sky; and I was caught up in the masterfully concise yet opaque character sketches, and the bittersweet storyline of the lyrics – but just as much, I was intrigued by Petty’s references to places in Southern California: Reseda, Ventura Boulevard, and Mulholland Drive. I took it for granted these were real locations, yet my inability to invoke any associations in my imagination to go with them (having only visited Disneyland once, as a younger child, and my uncle’s house in Sherman Oaks another time) imbued these terms with magical power, like stones I would roll around inside my mouth every time I heard the song in an effort to release myself from a mysterious spell.

Underlying this diligent listening effort was an unconscious undercurrent of self-chastisement: Thanks to the coalescing trends of mass pop culture, by the end of the 80s, Los Angeles was a place we were all supposed to know very well. As a student so avid to excel in school that I always chose a desk in the front of the class, this lacuna in my knowledge of what my favorite teacher – the radio – was imparting irked me, and caused me to hold the magnifying glass of my ears even closer to each successive mystery reference to the southern half of my home state. This impulse went back, though, too: deep into the dark thicket of 80s musical homework that piled up half-done in my brain.

Thus, similar to the places Tom Petty would cite, I’d already been haunted for four years by the titular restaurant referenced by Don Henley in his 1985 hit “Sunset Grill.” As it turned out, this was in fact a real hamburger joint on Sunset Boulevard[1] – but even when I was 10 and couldn’t confirm that, I could tell, just by the sound of the song. At six seconds in, on top of suave Bryan Ferry-type percussion, loud, slow synth notes come blaring out at us like car horns battling on a Los Angeles freeway. (This intro has curdled echoes of “Jump,” the 1983 single by Pasadena, California’s most famous rock band, Van Halen). That makes me think of a key line from “Free Falling”: “There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.” And then back to a verse in “Sunset Grill” that stands out like a sore thumb amongst all the descriptions of the riffraff around that restaurant:

Don’t worry, girl
I’m gonna stick by you
And someday soon
We’re gonna get in that car
And get outta here

That section of the song is what gives it its truest LA pedigree, though, more so than if Henley had packed in 100 more references to real places down there. This is because Los Angeles represents driving culture in America, and in the 80s an inordinate number of pop songs put the narrator in the front seat of a car – and often the person they cared about as well.

This was my second epiphany spurred by thinking about “Free Falling”: the musicology of my youth included the lesson that the role of the automobile in our lives is an apt metaphor for a kind of love so bittersweet it’s cast in the dusty golden glow we associate with the smoggy City of Stars.

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“City of Stars” is the name of a duet sung by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in the 2016 film La La Land, which literally begins with a jubilant song-and-dance number set in a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway. It would be hard to find a more on-the-nose example to back up a thesis than that – except that that film isn’t from the era I’m focused on. To tie all the elements together properly, I could cite, say, 1985’s “Freeway of Love” by Aretha Franklin, her highest-charting single in 12 years.[2] Or Billy Ocean’s 1988 chart topper “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car.[3] But that’s still not precise enough, because while those examples corroborate what I’m saying about the prevalence of automobiles and love overlapping as topics in pop songs back then, they’re too peppy to line up with the final element I mentioned: a kind of bittersweet love experience conveyed in musical tones that I, at least, associate with the look and feel of Los Angeles.

A step closer to what I mean would be Cindi Lauper’s 1989 hit “I Drove All Night,” but not so much because it conveys a more wistful tone, as much as because of oblique clues I latched onto when reading about its backstory. Songwriters Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly originally penned it as a Roy Orbison homage, and in fact they did get their childhood idol to record it in 1987 – the year before he died – but he didn’t have a recording contract at the time, so they then took it to Lauper. (And later Orbison’s version got added to his posthumous 1992 album King of Hearts).[4] It was the look of the singer originally meant to croon that tune that I want to loop back to my main point: specifically, the way Orbison always wore dark shades. Contrary to early on myths that he was blind or that he did it to deal with stage fright, the explanation for this signature look is quite mundane: according to his sons, during a 1963 tour opening for The Beatles, Orbison accidentally left his regular glasses on a plane and for the rest of the stops – and the rest of his career – he just put on the dark glasses he’d also brought, which came to fit in well with his dark suits and dyed black hair.[5] Be that as it may, that look came to define the paradoxical combination of vulnerability and heartache with hidden, hip, rock ‘n’ roll sangfroid that is exactly what I mean when I talk about the cool, aching 80s Los Angeles vibe of certain songs from back then.

In fact, the quintessential such song is one that could have been written not for Roy Orbison, but about him: 1984’s “Sunglasses at Night” by Corey Hart. (Hart is Canadian, but that’s moot; musicians who were from or based in LA are just icing on the cake that is this phenomenon that spanned the continent and the Atlantic and beyond). This song combines cool and inarticulate angst in a quirky way that anticipates Willem Dafoe’s abstract painter/counterfeiter villain Rick Masters in the 1985 William Friedkin film To Live and Die in L.A. (Further cementing the connection between this film and musical trends back then is the fact that it was scored by the English New Wave band Wang Chung). Hart’s enigmatic hit features metronome-like synthesizer programming that recalls the similar sound that made the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” an indelible earworm in January 1983. In between those two, in May 1983 a song came out that in 2019 was recognized by BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc) as “the most played song in radio history”[6]: “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. And in its own more subtle way, this song is defined by a similar metronome-like sound. That is because any era’s zeitgeist is composed of innumerable overlapping tropes and trends.

This falls in line with what Ludwig Wittgenstein called Family Resemblance, or the idea that what unites all things in a broad category isn’t necessarily their each conforming to one narrow definition, but rather, more often, each sharing one or two traits with a few others to form a cumulative kind of continuity. And so it is with this phenomenon of 80s songs that felt as bright as LA sunlight, yet had a tinge of sadness that manifested in certain overlapping sounds, as well as – yes – often those overlapping references to driving too.

Thus, the opening verse to “The Boys of Summer,” Don Henley’s bigger single from his 1984 album Building the Perfect Beast, includes these lines: “I’m driving by your house/Though I know you’re not home.” Then later the lines: “Out on the road today/I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.” And finally, a vision of the old flame he’s addressing in a car herself, listening to popular songs of the day no less:

I can see you
Your brown skin shining in the sun
You got the top pulled down
And the radio on, baby

Unsurprisingly, also, over time I realized I heard sonic echoes between the opening guitar notes of this song and those at the start of a radio staple the following year: “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. Both have lead-ins that ambiguously called to my childhood mind simultaneously the cries of seagulls over a beach and the sour-sound the tines of an old music box I found in the wall of my house would make when I’d twist the key and hear them plucking against the bumps on the little metal, spinning barrel. (Interestingly, the music for “The Boys of Summer” was originally composed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, who played it for his front man, but they decided it didn’t fit with the record they were working on; then at the suggestion of producer Jimmy Iovine, Campbell played it for Don Henley, who wrote the lyrics and recorded the song).[7]

Like the same fingerprints appearing close together under a detective’s magnifying glass, such parallels keep arising the more I look closely at that era. For example, in 1985 (UK) and early 1986 (US) Phil Collins released “Take Me Home,” a song told from the perspective of a mentally ill patient.[8] The year before, Eddie Money had a hit with “Take Me Home Tonight,” which more overtly lines up with the automobile/caring metaphor I introduced above. (e.g., “Let’s find the key and turn this engine on/I can feel you breathe/I can feel your heart beat faster/Take me home tonight”). Yet, the Collins song also has a parallel, sonically, with another adjacent radio hit, in fact the song that most typifies everything I’m talking about here: “Drive,” the somnambular single by The Cars that dominated the airwaves the summer of 1984.

I cannot emphasize enough what a massive impact this song had on not just the pop-rock landscape of the mid-80s, but also on my subconscious building up of a Los Angeles sound aesthetic catalog in conjunction with one tracking car/relationship references in songs. Those two dovetailed together tightly here to make the foundation that the house of this essay is built upon.

As if he well understood what an unusual, melancholy song he was bringing to the band – in its contrast with their predominantly crisp, jangly string of hits – Cars songwriter and frontman Ric Ocasek had bassist Benjamin Orr sing “Drive,” to lend it a different vibe. (However, it should be noted Orr had also stepped in on vocals on two of their previous hits: “Just What I Needed” and “Let’s Go”).[9] The result is a hauntingly disembodied voice, singing a litany of inquiries to a mystery person in such a turgid cadence that the song would be nearly unbearable were it not for the hypnotic backbone of bass notes keeping us engaged, and the periodic holiday chime-type sounds wiggling back and forth, like headlights winking outside the window of someone being driven home at night. Parsing the song’s question structure (e.g., “Who’s gonna drive you home/Tonight?”) reveals that if the narrator is asking it in that manner, then it probably won’t be him behind the wheel. Yet, paradoxically, the song is still suffused with poignant concern.

“Drive” is an important pivot point in this discussion, broadening it from being just about cars and romance to being about cars and caring for those in relation with us in other ways too. The addressee in this Cars song could be an ex-girlfriend, a friend, or just an acquaintance observed at a party. Similarly, just a couple months before, in March of 1984, the band Night Ranger struck unexpected gold with their strange ballad “Sister Christian,” which employed a key automobile term to focus on a brother’s concern about his sister. (It was written and sung by the band’s drummer Kelly Keagy, after returning to the Bay Area from a visit to his hometown of Eugene, Oregon, where he had been struck by how fast his little sister Christy was growing up).[10] In the lead-in to the chorus, the guitar revs like a car’s engine, with the drums pounding under it like rubber tires slapping the road, and then we hear:

You’re motoring
What’s your price for flight
In finding mister right
You’ll be alright tonight

Strangely (or not so much, considering I’m noticing patterns here), that chorus anticipates the lyrical structure of “Drive,” with its narrator asking a question of an unclear other, with concern about that person’s wellbeing in mind.

Going backwards another year, to the summer of 1983, we find another song in this niche genre that contains even more ambiguity: “Big Log” off Robert Plant’s second solo album The Principle of Moments, which became his first Top 40 solo hit.[11] The ambiguity begins with the meaning of the song title, which some say refers to the book in which tractor-trailer drivers record their road hours[12] and others say is trucker lingo for a long stretch of highway.[13] Clarity isn’t needed on that detail, though, because the lyrics make it clear that this is a song about someone driving a long distance with some kind of love on his mind. In fact, Plant’s lyrics list more technical aspects of the driving experience than any other song I’ve covered here – more than any car-centric song to come out in all of the 80s probably. But referencing “lights,” “the clock,” “fueled,” “the miles,” “Should I rest for a while at the side,” and so on, wouldn’t be enough to get this song included in what I’m considering here. No, it’s the masterfully finessed stitching of that conceit to vacillating romantic intrigue that cinches it:

My love is in league with the freeway
Its passion will rise as the cities fly by
…
Driving me on (driving me on)
Driving me down the road
…
Your love is cradled in knowing
Eyes in the mirror still expecting their prey
…
My love is in love with the freeway

Like the multifaceted parade of headlights and tail lights and street lights that enter a truck’s cab on a night journey – along with their glaring reflections on its mirrors – the perspective and meaning of Plant’s lyrics keep shifting here: from the first person to the second person; from the goal lying ahead to the goal coming up from the rear; from the romantic potential in the offing depending on how much work is put into driving to the suggestion that that desire could come to fruition at any moment on the journey. This is a song that (like most Roy Orbison songs) quietly combines frustration and patience, vulnerability and cool. Or, as Ishan Sarker aptly puts it in their 2019 review of this song on the website newagebd:

[The] lyrics of this song proves to be the actual strong point of this track as it projects the feeling of belonging as well as the feeling of missing out on some levels. The lyrics carve out the feeling of longing for a long lost love (it needn’t be a woman) that many of us are searching for. The song contemplates between the idea of resting for a while before the journey ends and the ever longing feeling to carry on as there is no turning back anymore.[14]

With the gist of this song’s lyrics nesting so well with others I’ve discussed, it should come as no surprise that its hypnotic magic-hour-in-Los-Angeles sound anticipates that of “Drive” and many others to come in that decade. This composition came about thanks to Robbie Blunt, Gerald Woodroffe, and Paul Martinez, on guitar, synthesizers, and bass respectively – but also thanks to Phil Collins, who played drums on this and many other tracks on The Principle of Moments.[15]

Collins was instrumental in helping Plant get comfortable starting a solo career after Led Zepplin disbanded following the 1980 death of its drummer John Bonham. In fact, in addition to sitting behind the drum set on Plant’s recording sessions, Collins did the same for the North American leg of the 1983 Principle of Moments tour.[16] What makes that amazing is the fact that by that point Phil Collins was an international rock star himself. Two years before, while on hiatus from fronting Genesis, he had released his first solo album Face Value, which included what would become one of his best known hits: “In the Air Tonight.”

As sometimes happens, “In the Air Tonight” didn’t achieve the level of fame we know it for today immediately. More than two years after its release, in August of 1983 (the month after “Big Log” hit the airwaves), the film Risky Business came out, which included the Collins song memorably played over the scene where Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay’s characters are having sex on the subway. That wasn’t the end of the song’s trajectory up into the 80s pop music pantheon, though. The following year, it was used in the very first episode of the first season of Miami Vice, so effectively that it came to be associated with that Michael Mann-produced show for decades hence.[17] Collins’s song isn’t one that includes lyrics about driving, however its simple drum machine loop (for most of its run time), overlaid with subtle synth and guitar accents and the singer’s distorted vocals, is like the urtext of the palimpsest I’ve been uncovering throughout this essay on a certain kind of sound that many 80s songs had that for me was evocative of Los Angeles.

Moreover, the scene in Miami Vice that used this song (the most famous one; it was also used in the 20th episode of the fourth season) brings “In the Air Tonight” back into the fold, because it depicts Crockett and Tubbs driving in the former’s convertible through the hot Miami night. True, they’re on their way to bust a criminal, which doesn’t fit in with what I have been talking about here. However, there is something else significant included in that scene. In the middle of all the driving, Sonny Crockett pulls over to a payphone and calls his estranged wife Caroline, who is in the process of divorcing him due to the stress his job put on their marriage. (It was an on-the-nose song choice, because Collins wrote it after divorcing his own first wife).[18] Here is their brief exchange:

Caroline: Hello?
Sonny: Caroline?
Caroline: Sonny?
Sonny: I need to know something, Caroline… The way we used to be together – uh, I don’t mean lately. But before. It was real – wasn’t it?
Caroline: [quietly, just after Phil Collins’s voice rises up with the line “I remember!”] Yeah, it was. You bet it was. Sonny, what’s wrong?
Sonny: Nothing, Caroline.

Then he hangs up, leaves the phone booth, gets back into the car beside Tubbs, and as he starts the engine and pulls away, the most famous drum break in rock kicks in. And there we have it: the role of driving in America in the processing of our bittersweet connections with others, as played out over a certain kind of melancholy music.

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Why this is such a consistent theme could probably be fodder for a whole other essay, but I’ll venture to lay out a rough guess: the short history of our country includes so much swirling internal migration – so many moves even within a city we’ve long lived in – that the concept of a certain house as our home is shaky at best, and more often not what comes to mind when we think of a stable external container for our identity and all the ways it does or doesn’t reach out into the world. The truth is, for the last century or more, that role has increasingly been played by automobiles.

Cars are not just our protective shell as we move from place to place; they are also one of the most consistent contexts in our itinerant, chaotic lives. Thus, driving provides an ideal metaphor for a secure setting to work through issues rattling around in our psyches – which usually means unresolved things to do with people we care about.

This gives whole new meaning to the bumper stickers we see every day on trucks and vans and other work vehicles, with a 1-800 phone number and the words: How am I driving? Using the paradigm of the songs I’ve examined here, that could be reframed as: How am I doing connecting with those close to me? Or: What in my life could best be scored by a song that sounds both sunny and sour?

I do want to emphasize, though, that that niche genre was just part of a large output of songs about cars and driving that came out in the 80s. That broad category was strangely heavily represented in that decade. Wikipedia has a page called “Category: songs about cars,” and 19 out of 109 are from then, and considering that survey includes songs spanning 12 decades, the average for each should be 9.083. (Granted, only a few are from the first couple decades of the 20th Century, when cars weren’t yet a common part of mass culture). And that list isn’t even comprehensive by a long shot: it doesn’t include for example the 1980 Bruce Springsteen song “Drive All Night”; the Eddie Money song “Driving My Life Away” and the Willie Nelson song “On the Road Again,” both from that year too; the 1981 Grace Jones song “Pull Up to the Bumper”; the 1985 Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere”; or even the 1988 Billy Ocean song “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car.” But that’s the point, isn’t it: this use of driving as a vehicle (no pun intended) to convey thoughts and sentiments about our lives – and especially regarding the quality of our relationships with others – is too massive a phenomenon to ever circumscribe completely.

After all, even just one artist – Bruce Springsteen – likely has hundreds of articles and chapters in academic tomes dedicated to the considerable subsection of his oeuvre that uses cars and driving to talk about lost souls and bittersweet romance. With American society increasingly atomized and on the move, this trend isn’t likely to lessen. Cars and driving got many mentions on the airwaves before the 80s, and that has certainly continued since.

In fact, now my thoughts turn to one of Springsteen’s successors, sonically at times, but also in terms of often describing the travails and dreams of small-town America’s denizens: the Las Vegas band The Killers. Their 2021 album Pressure Machine includes a song literally called “In the Car Outside.” Singer-songwriter Brandon Flowers begins it by belting out this very telling verse:

I’m in the car, I just needed to clear my head
She’s in the house with the baby crying on the bed
She’s got this thing where she puts the walls so high
It doesn’t matter how much you love
It doesn’t matter how much you try

It doesn’t get much more explicit than that – the use of the car as a place of refuge, a sanctuary in which to contemplate frayed connections with someone important. But this isn’t the only way our vehicle provides a context for our relations with others. It can be a crucible of hope too.

The Killers laid out this scenario back in 2007 on their second album, Sam’s Town, on my favorite song of theirs: “Read My Mind.” Over instrumentation dominated by a synth wash that could have been pulled from one of those Los Angeles-sounding songs I wrote about above, Flowers sings:

It’s funny how you just break down
Waitin’ on some sign
I pull up to the front of your driveway
With magic soaking my spine”
Can you read my mind?
Can you read my mind?

That’s the power of a cultural tool like this: it can pivot us in many directions. Listening to these songs, we can relate to them each in turn, as they reflect back where we’re at in our lives. Through contemplating these characters contemplating heavy thoughts while behind the wheel, we can wrest control over our own. These songs, they can be the sign we’ve been waitin’ on, to move forward bravely, to see what’s around that next hairpin curve.

[1] Willman, Chris "The Sunset Grill is a Place to Sing About" Los Angeles Times January 2, 1986

[2] Whitburn, Joel (2004). Top R&B/Hip-Hop Singles: 1942-2004. Record Research. p. 216.

[3] https://www.billboard.com/music/Billy-Ocean/chart-history/HSI

[4] https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/billy-steinberg

[5] https://iloveclassicrock.com/roy-orbisons-son-reveals-the-simple-innocent-truth-behind-his-fathers-signature-dark-glasses/

[6] "Sting's "Every Breath You Take" Is the Most Played Song on Radio [Video]". GuardianIv. Retrieved 10 June 2019.

[7] https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/mike-campbell

[8] VH-1 Storytellers: Phil Collins". VH-1 Storytellers. 14 April 1997

[9] https://americansongwriter.com/drive-the-cars-behind-the-song/

[10] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Night-Rangers-revisit-Sister-Christian-and-San-2595773.php

[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20170302112516/http://www.billboard.com/artist/366086/robert-plant/chart

[12] https://powerpop.blog/2020/06/02/robert-plant-big-log/

[13] http://www.newagebd.net/article/71454/big-log-by-robert-plant

[14] ibid

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principle_of_Moments

[16] https://ultimateclassicrock.com/robert-plant-phil-collins/

[17] https://www.vulture.com/2013/01/americans-recap-pilot.html

[18] ""In the Air Tonight" (1981) | Phil Collins: My Life in 15 Songs". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 19 October 2016