Crossfire

"Crossfire" was the only number one Vaughan ever had on rock radio, and it's the most band-written thing in his catalog — a Double Trouble group composition with a riff that behaves less like blues than like a funk-rock machine part, all octave-jumping unison lines between guitar and bass, tight and metallic and slightly menacing. The verse rides a stop-time figure with Reese Wynans's organ filling the gaps; the chorus opens into a wide, shouted hook. Lyrically it's the darkest thing here: working people caught between forces they didn't choose, "day by day, night after night, blinded by the neon light," hurried through a life that grinds them down and leaves them stranded in somebody else's war. Vaughan's vocal is harder and clearer than on the earlier records — sobriety audible in the diction — and there's real anger in it rather than blues resignation. The solo is compressed, urgent, built on repeated bent phrases that ratchet upward rather than wander. Released in 1989 into a radio landscape of hair metal, it stood out for sounding like adults playing. It works as a commuting song, or for anyone who has spent a week being processed by a system and wants that named out loud.