The Cars – An Appreciation

I came to the Cars in the middle of the story. Sort of.

I knew about the Cars, I knew a little of the Cars. As I’ve said before that if you turned on a radio turned to any FM rock station anytime after 1978 and listened for two hours you’d be more likely than not to hear the Cars. FM played the holy shit out of that first [self titled] album and not without reason. Of the 9 songs on that album, at least six [!!] are FM staples. [Good Times Roll, My Best Friend’s Girl, Just What I Needed, You’re All I’ve Got Tonight, Bye Bye Love and Moving In Stereo] Moving In Stereo is of course best remembered as the song to which Pheobe Cates bares her breasts in Fast Times At Ridgemont High [Yes there WAS music playing!] even though it did not appear on that soundtrack.

And I certainly remember Let’s Go hitting the airwaves, an amazing slice of power pop fitting in with Cheap Trick [I Want You To Want Me, Dream Police], Blondie [One Way Or Another, Dreaming], the Babys [Every Time I Think Of You] and the Knack [Good Girls Don’t, My Sharona]. Ah, junior high. Mixed times. Girls. Skating at Big Wheel on Saturday afternoons. Six Flags Over Texas. Rejection from girls. Cliques. Not fitting in. Kiss and E.L.O. going disco. Roller disco. Disco. Did I mention Disco?

But the Cars first showed up on my doorstep/turntable in the form of Panorama. I don’t even remember why it showed up – I think it was a present, so maybe it was a birthday? This was not a major album. People moaned that was cold and heartless and it wasn’t ‘the first album.’ Is it experimental? Yeah. Elliot Easton said “The first time Ric played the new songs for us, I thought they sounded weird – like inside out music.”  Is it the Cars album that seems to fall through the cracks? Sort of. I don’t care, I love that record. This was something new, so different from anything else happening. And I ate it up. From the phased and slashing opening chords of the title track to the 5/4 meter of the “hit” Touch And Go, the riff heavy metal lite of Don’t Tell Me No, the brooding Chaz theme song Misfit Kid, the Roxy Music leaning You Wear Those Eyes to the bombastic closer Up And Down, the band just locked in and never let go. Keith Richards talks about he and Ronnie Wood and this “magical art of weaving” in the Stones. The Cars were more like a series of cogs and sprockets and gears all meeting together in precision.

Take for example Moving In Stereo. It starts off with one of those eerie space movie phased tones, then a deceptively simple guitar fill, then Ben Orr’s voice joins the mix for the first verse. Then the band kicks in. The drums holding a steady line, Orr’s bass slipping in and about, the oil in those cogs and gears, then secret weapon Elliot Easton and Greg Hawkes add those hook lines, trading splashes, runs and fills across the steadiness of the drum line and the mercurial bass lines that keep it all pumping. And then there are vocals. Ric Ocasek has that distinctive nasal, reedy tone and cold, often flat delivery that works so well on Good Times Roll, Touch And Go, Since You’re Gone, You Might Think and Magic. Ben Orr has that warm tone that works so well on Drive, Candy-O, Let’s Go and Bye Bye Love. One could argue that the fact that Ric Ocasek [with occasional help from Hawkes] penned all of the Cars songs lends a certain uniformity to the catalog. The lyrics tend to be very abstract. Even in the notoriously upbeat You Might Think there are lines like “you think you're in the movies and everything's so deep / but i think that you're wild when you flash that fragile smile..”   

In short order I had all four by the time or shortly after Shake It Up came around in the fall of 1981. Shake It Up contains my favorite Cars track, another odd time thing against a normal track, this time the click track on Since You’re Gone. [I add yet again that I SHOULD have seen the Cars on this tour, but some people who were supposed to be waiting in line went for coffee and I didn’t get to see them until the Heartbeat City tour when I got up early, drove the ‘73 Duster up the freeway and waited with a handful of kids at the Seminary South Sears. But oh, how jealous I was of the kids that fall in their jerseys from the Shake It Up shows.]

And of course, that brings me to Heartbeat City. The glory days of MTV. The summer of Magic, You Might Think and Drive. Over the years, my opinion of this album had dimmed quite a bit, maybe due to over-exposure. Listening again to the Elektra Years, I’m surprised at some of the album tracks like Stranger Eyes, Why Can’t I Have You and It’s Not the Night. On the other hand, no amount of time or wishful thinking can save I Refuse as in I Refuse To Listen To This Song.

Working at the Sound Warehouse, I remember buying the Cars’ Door To Door and Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation on the same day. [Wikipedia says they were released a week apart.] Permanent Vacation fell into regular rotation and I was wicked disappointed by Door To Door. The lead off tracks Leave Or Stay and You Are the Girl felt too sugary-pop and formulaic. History has been kinder to my appreciation of the Cars’ 1987 offering than Aerosmith’s. I will still occasionally slap on Door To Door [or a few tracks from it] while the less said about Permanent Vacation the better. There were/are some good songs on there like Strap Me In [the last single which barely made it to the Hot 100], Double Trouble, Fine Line and Everything You Say. It just wasn’t Heartbeat City or Shake It Up. That didn’t mean I or the public at large wanted them to go away. But Door To Door arrived to an amazing indifference and poor sales. A tour was cancelled and the Cars just kind of faded into the ether. Word at the time was that there was a lot of indifference within the band also. Orr and Easton had released one solo album each and Ocasek had already done two. Was Ocasek being accused of hoarding the ‘best’ songs for his own albums? Was drummer David Robinson still smarting from Mutt Lange programming all the drum parts on Heartbeat City? Was it just too much familiarity, ten years together now it’s time to go? Or some mix of all of these things?

But gone never quite meant forgotten. Various collections would show up every few years, the best being the 2 disc set Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology with the liner notes sadly missing from the recent Elektra Years box. And as FM because fragmented and boxed into smaller and smaller categories, the Cars were once again staples of what was now “Classic Rock,” once again besides the likes of Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, the bands they were so unlike both then and now. They fit better into the “Top 40 Oldies” format that has switched now from the Motown/ Golden Age of AM Radio era of our parents to the late 70s / early 80s / Golden Age Of FM Radio of my own youth.

Which brings me to the present. I picked up The Elektra Years after reading a couple of online notes about Ric Ocasek himself overseeing these remasters [or in the case of The Cars, Candy-O and Panorama, re-remasters]. And while I will once again bemoan the fact that there are no new notes about the making of the albums and there are still a handful of tracks “missing” which leaves the collection “incomplete”, I appreciate the effort to make the band again sound like they did on those licorice pizzas. But what I appreciate most is revisiting of the catalog of a band that was one of the first bands I found for myself, that started me on this never ending journey to discover new and old sounds. Coming back to a band like the Cars is like returning to Grandma’s kitchen in that it’s familiar, safe and heartwarming. Hearing them again gives me a touch of that feeling like I’m 13 again, eyes, ears and heart wide open.