In 2013, Cross told Songfacts:

Well, the interesting thing about that tune is that we had a band and we’d play every night. We were doing this Paul McCartney tune called “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five,” and we’d get into this big jam in the middle of it. It’s funny, I just saw McCartney and I didn’t tell him this, but in this big jam on “Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five,” in the middle of it I did that “ba da da da, da da, da da.” I did that part.

So I thought that felt really cool. I thought it felt like it had something, some magic, so I built the song around that. That was the first part of the song, and then I built the rest around it.

It didn’t have any words. We were living in Houston at the time, and on the way down to Austin to record the songs, it was just a beautiful Texas day. I took acid. So I wrote the words on the way down from Houston to Austin on acid.

And I grew up with a lot of cowboy movies. Serials and stuff, like The Lone Ranger and these cowboy serials where they were always chasing the bad guy. And I lived in San Antonio near Mexico, so there was always this anarchistic allure about if you could get to Mexico, you could escape the authority. Also, Mexico was a place where you could go down there and drink and do all this debauchery that as a kid, you think sounds really cool. So getting to the border in Mexico was a fascinating thing to me.