As a kid growing up in the 1960s in Melbourne I was exposed to a myriad of cars, many of them American, but few Cadillacs. No doubt they were too expensive and most Aussie families were on beer budgets while the Caddy required a champers taste with a wallet to match.

But, we did hear about about them, just about every time we turned on the radio. For Cadillacs are just about the most popular car when it comes to song lyrics.

One of the fathers of Rock n' Roll, Chuck Berry included references to Cadillac in at least four of his songs. These included Maybelline, Nadine, No Money Down and You Can't Catch Me.

Perhaps the best known of these was Maybelline which includes the following lyrics:

As I was motivating over the hill

Saw Maybelline in a Coup DeVille

A Cadillac Rolling on old Glen Road,

Nothing out run my V8 Ford

A Cadillac doing about 95

It was bumper to bumper side to side

Berry is just one of hundreds to write and/or sing about Cadillac. Particularly Coupe' de Villes. Others prominent in the field include Bruce Springsteen (Pink Cadillac) Meatloaf (Two out of Three ain't Bad) and Aretha Franklin (Highway of Love).

The first Caddy I saw in Melbourne was a pink one owned by Elvis. It was brought out here as a promotion, as I recollect by a car dealer. The overwhelming impression was the massive size and the amount of gadgets. Our cars were paupers by comparison.

Elvis was, of course, a Caddy fanatic and probably did more to promote the marque than any advertising. This also helped inextricably tie the knot between rock 'n' roll and cars of the 1950s, rock's very foundations. That link continues today, and is probably growing through the proliferation of events such as the Gold Coast `Wintersun' festival that has run for many years.

If there's a car that seems to have cemented the link, it's the 1959 Cadillac Coup DeVille. It was not the only one though. The 1957 Chevvy is in there as is Ford's Thunderbird.

These cars were, in this generation, as wild as the music, as outrageous as Elvis' hip movements. At least that was our parents view. At the heart of the matter is the 1959 Caddy's fins.

The mother of all fins.

The Coupe' deVille was a Cadillac model from 1949 through to 1993, but it's the 1959 model that infiltrated pop culture. In the first half of the 20^th century we had little to smile about. Two world wars and the Great Depression left many scars.

By the late 1950s people were starting to understand they could enjoy themselves. Car designers, for so long on the side-lines or designing war machines, at last in the early part of the 1950s could express themselves. That expression came in the form of cars that had style, not just function. In some ways the early 1950s have a parallel to the early 1930s.

In that era also cars started to develop style. Cars like the 1933 Rolls Royce Phantom 11, Continental faux cabriolet. But the events of 1939 put an end to style and it took another 20 years for it to reappear.

When it did, it came in a rush.

Perhaps the irony of the 1959 Cadillac, is that it's fins were just about the biggest on any car, ever, but they came at the end of the fin era. They were the last, desperate struggle of fins to stay alive in the US. Even Cadillac ditched the look. The 4^th generation of Caddy Coupe deVilles lasted from 1959 to 1964 and as the model refined in that five years the fins simply grew smaller with each facelift, until they all but disappeared in the 5^th generation.

Fourth generation Cadillacs were powered by either a 390 cubic inch V8 or a 429 cubic in V8. They were luxuriously appointed and usually weighed in at well over two tonnes.

They were heavyweight in every sense and, to many people, epitomise the happy-go-lucky rock 'n' roll era of innocence of the 1950s.