Better than the Beach Boys’ boasts about that deuce coupe. More casual swag than Rick Ross’s shine on the Maybach. Bolder than Beck’s clumsy Lothario taking his shot with a Hyundai. Even Prince’s deft moves on a hard-to-handle Chevy somehow fall short of the sheer torque created by Joe Walsh’s nonchalant FM-radio brag about an underdog Italian sports car.
This story originally appeared in Volume 15 of Road & Track.
“My Maserati does one eighty-five,” Joe Walsh sings on “Life’s Been Good.” These were not lyrics that needed to be deciphered or deconstructed. They were facts, a plain-spoken accounting of the louche life of a late-century rock ’n’ roll hedonist. “I lost my license,” he continued (on the carbon-slim chance that you can’t sing along at home), “now I don’t drive.” The song lingered on the Billboard charts for several months in 1978, earning rock-canon status and perpetual FM rotation that remains pervasive today. It was also the rare pop-cultural marketing windfall with enough forza to save a struggling automaker. In 1978, Joe Walsh climbed from the wreckage of the Eagles long enough to release a four-minute memoir that painted a picture of a luxe, spiritually bankrupt rock-god fantasy life that every Seventies American boy I knew would give a testicle to experience. “Life’s Been Good” confirmed everything we hoped was true about rock ’n’ roll excess—groupies, drugs, trashed hotel rooms. It informed the sum total of everything we knew about Maseratis to that point: They were Italian, they hauled ass, and they were decadent enough for rock stars. This was an era of peak guitar-rock stardom. Album sales were counted in the millions, and groups like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones traveled in plush, private commercial jets with their band logos painted on the side. From the back seat of my mom’s used Buick Century wagon, a Maserati sounded like salvation.
Maybe other kids had cooler parents with Italian friends who came over to smoke and gesticulate at the family dinner table—maybe they knew of this Maserati. But in the American Everytown where I grew up, Maserati was meaningless pre-Walsh. And with good reason: Italy in the Seventies, with its gas crises, labor disputes, and punishing luxury taxes, had offered anything but la dolce vita for any ambitious car company.
So by the mid-Seventies, Maserati was practically an international ghost. There was no marketing budget and no new actual cars to market. In 1974, the carmaker sold only 150 cars in its home country, and it went into liquidation a year later. By the time “Life’s Been Good” was soaring up the charts, Maseratis were harder to find than burrata in a Vermont supermarket.
In August 1975, De Tomaso leveraged some backing from the Italian government and committed to resurrecting Maserati, starting by rebranding its own Longchamp in the form of the Maserati Kyalami, which arrived to little fanfare in 1976. Road & Track didn’t even review it.
“Maserati is one of the grandes dames of Italian racing,” says Santo Spadaro of Domenick European Car Repair in White Plains, New York. “But if you showed people the Maserati trident, most people would say ‘Neptune.’ Meanwhile, Ferrari’s Prancing Horse is one of the world’s most recognized brands, like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.”
Like his son does now, Spadaro’s father repaired most of the Ferraris and Maseratis around New York. Santo turned 15 the year “Life’s Been Good” came out, and while he was thrilled to hear FM radio intersect with the family business, he doubts it helped the company bridge those lean years. “People buying sports cars then wore three-piece suits,” he says. “I don’t think they were moved by pop and rock.”
Still, as for building brand awareness among future Maserati buyers, no expensive ad campaign (even if Maserati had the money to pay for one) could have matched the impact that Walsh’s raunchy guitar and tale of jaded, faded stardom delivered for free.
And it might have helped the company close the enthusiasm gap just enough to carry it into the Biturbo era, when Maserati started exporting cars again in the form of 1982’s twin-turbocharged V-6 notchback. R&T wrote at the time: “The new 4-seat notchback coupe certainly will not disgrace Maserati’s performance image, at least not if the manufacturer’s claims of 180 bhp DIN at 3500 rpm and 2425 lb curb weight are to be believed. This results in a claimed 133.5-mph maximum speed and 0–100 km/h (0–62 mph) in 6.5 seconds.”
I’m sorry. What’s the maximum speed again? One thirty-what . . . ? Even the mid-engine V-8 Bora of the Seventies couldn’t break 180 mph. It doesn’t matter. Walsh, who never claimed his ode to the good life to be a work of journalism, didn’t own and had probably never even driven a Maserati when he wrote the song. In fact, Maserati’s main value as a lyric is its inherent exoticism and its four syllables. For the first and perhaps only time ever, it had rhythm Ferrari didn’t.
A couple of years ago, Walsh told Rolling Stone that he eventually bought a 1964 5000GT, having been slightly shamed by the song’s success. “Everyone was making me feel really guilty,” he said, when he’d confess to not owning the car. “The look of sadness on their face.” So he got himself a Maserati.
“I don’t know if it does 185,” Walsh admitted. “I chickened out at 140.”
