In 1979, Ric Ocasek discussed the Cars' carefully customized image for our cover story with Jon Pareles
For some reason, when we’re on tour all our dressing rooms have blackboards. So we chalk up New Laws of the Universe like, “What is not there, will be,” and “All roads lead to other roads.”pulled the mysterious little dashboard lever and the car roared. Nice. And no small accomplishment. He’d been working secretly on his father’s Mercury Comet every day after school, getting it ready for the nights when anybody could enter the races at Thompson’s drag strip in Cleveland.
Elektra Records signed the Cars in November and set up a six-week recording schedule for February and March 1978. But it took only twenty-one days in London to complete their debut LP. Released in June,Everybody liked it: New Wavers recognized Ocasek’s Velvet Underground debts and the cunning ambivalence of his lyrics, while rock fans and radio programmers picked up on the catchy tunes and meticulous arrangements.
Ocasek was born into a Polish Catholic family in Baltimore, the son of a computer systems analyst, and attended a parochial elementary school. He was kicked out in fifth grade for offenses he insists he doesn’t remember. “I wasn’t feeling too good about being pushed around or having to believe in spirits and things,” he minimizes. “There were a lot of fears, a lot of restrictions that people built into your mind.
Ben Orr’s approach to rock & roll was a bit more sophisticated. The teenage Or-zechowski had fronted the house band on the Cleveland TV rock show, which featured British invaders like the Rolling Stones, Peter and Gordon and the Dave Clark Five. As a child Ben had entertained his parents’ friends by miming Elvis Presley records: “I always knew I had something special,” he says, straight-faced.
“I was attracted by Ben’s voice the first night I met him,” says Ocasek. “He was singing Beatles songs, and I thought he had the greatest voice. By now, we know each other so well I hardly talk to him.” Cambridge clubs preferred quiet, thoughtful fare over hard rock, and, casually adopting the prevailing local sound, Ocasek and Orr soon found themselves in a folk trio called Milkwood. “We were playing around town and somebody asked us if we wanted to make a record,” Ocasek relates. “In two weeks we recorded that Milkwood thing.”
And he was getting better at assembling them. Ocasek’s early 1976 model, Cap’n Swing, thoroughly impressed Boston DJ Maxanne Sartori. In her two p.m. to six p.m. shift on WBCN-FM, Sartori had helped break Aerosmith, and she consistently boosted area bands. In this case, she was swayed when she heard Cap’n Swing at a station-sponsored Newbury Street Music Fair. “They were amazing!” she recalls. “Here was this band I’d never heard of, that sounded like a cross between Roxy Music and Steely Dan.
“It was beautiful to put that first bunch of songs together,” Easton says with a grin. “It was the first time it was so easy in any band I’d been in. We knew we wanted to stick it out. The way it worked was, it would either be on a cassette, or Ric would pick up his guitar and perform the song for us. We’d all watch his hands and listen to the lyrics and talk about it. We knew enough about music, so we just built the songs up.
“I remember staying in a basement in Ohio for four months, going through piano chords three notes at a time to see if they worked. Nobody knew theory, but there were sounds there….” He trails off for a moment.
“I wanted everybody’s character to be more animated,” he explains. “Greg was little and funny — he should be littler and funnier. Ben was going to be like a sex-symbol-type guy, he should really get into that. Elliot is one of the best guitarists anywhere, so when he does his solo he should play it right in the people’s faces. Ric’s so tall, he just has to stand there and it’s pretty much of a show. Me, I’m just in the back.
“Once I saw a rat running around out front” says the owlish Hawkes. “Really — they’d go in under the stage. Pretty treacherous territory, the Rat.”he Rat is certainly no place to be at midnight on a Sunday. I follow Robinson downstairs—he has to meet a girl about a haircut — to where some twenty regulars are ignoring the band onstage.
While the band’s sound has an undeniable freshness, much of it is owing to their shrewd amalgam of many late Seventies pop, rock and New Wave styles. And they have handily sidestepped the punk-label pitfalls that might have undermined their cause, keeping the energy on a short leash, presenting themselves as mysterious without seeming aloof or arcane, and demonstrating taste without an off-putting air of artiness.
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