Elliot Easton tells a dinnertime story to entertain his tablemates in Madison, Wisconsin—most of Nick Lowe’s band and a reporter. Seems that one place the Cars played on the 1980 Panorama tour was an open-air venue, had been constructed on the site of the Leopold-Loeb murders, in which the unlucky victims had been carved, spindled, mutilated and scattered. Aware of this historical quirk, the Cars’ set designer, Steve Bickford, walked around the grounds randomly drawing white-line bodies, police style. Cars humor. The tableful quietly returns to its rapidly cooling stuffed pork chops.

Ric Ocasek: “I was an altar boy, and every Saturday, I’d serve at a funeral. I was five, six, seven years old, and I’d sit there with the whole grief thing around me, watching people get dropped into the ground and thinking nothing of it except how afterwards I’d get two bucks. Then they’d throw in a couple of weddings for optimism.”