It was My Best Friend’s Girl.
That’s the one that caught my ear. Sometime in the late 70s we visited my grandmother who lived in the projects in Ambridge and one of the neighbors took us down the hill to run to the bank and the grocery and in her car she had a cassette of that immortal first Cars album. While I waited in the car, My Best Friend’s Girl came on. That first riff is a hook, the hand claps are a hook, the backing vocals are a hook and that little galloping riff Elliot Easton throws in after the chorus [stolen from the Beatles I Will] is a stolen hook! It's hooky as hell and fuck it is so fun! One has to be one of the lowest living catfish NOT to be hooked by it.
I suppose that only weirdos like me “Schreive” from Diner remember moments that change their lives [and B-sides] by music. Or when music changes your life.
Over the next 8-10 years I would fall in love with the band and [most] of their output. I’d search B-sides for non-Lp tracks, buy the extended dance mix of one song. I’d replace vinyl with CDs and CDs with remastered CDs only to be confounded by a second remaster with the bonus tracks I hadn’t gotten in my box set. Fortunately Amazon cured some of those missing tracks. But hearing My Best Friend’s Girl that day or hearing Let’s Go blasting out of radios on the bus next to Journey and the Knack...[ and by the way, let's hear that snigger up your sleeve getting thing past the censors LP cut of Good Girls Don't here and there.] 6 albums over 10 years. Far less than the Clash put out in their 5 best years and not counting The New Cars or 2011’s so-so Ben Orr-less Move Like This. [Why the band wouldn’t bring in a bassist / 2nd vocalist like ex-Utopia Kasim Sulton... ah but that’s another rant.] Let me just say IMNHO, a Cars without Ben Orr was a sin. Ben’s vocals were natural and warm against Ric Ocasek’s sometimes cold, distant and robotic tone.
Ric Ocasek was the man behind the machine. As the song writer [although keyboardist Greg Hawkes occasionally got a co-writing credit] he apparently led with an iron first in a velvet glove. Those huge sunglasses of the early years were meant to hide behind. But the songs!!! On those 6 Cars albums I can count the total stink bombs on one hand. There are three or four “Best /Greatest” compilations and I don’t need to go over the songs because they are STILL staples of FM radio. AOR style “Classic Rock” and certainly any “Hits of Yesteryear” station. And that’s is it should be. The Cars were one of those bands that EVERYBODY could agree on.
My favorite, though it is not their best, is Panorama. It was the first one I owned and I played it to death. Not as pop or polished as The Cars or Candy-O and frequently missed by those “hits” because Touch And Go wasn’t a great big smash. But I have never cared what anyone else thought. Yeah I know all of the other Cars records are damn catchy, although for a long time I resented “Mutt” Lange’s treatments on Heartbeat City. I relented after listening on the box set. But it is still probably my least favorite as a whole though there are great songs like Drive, Magic and You Might Think.
Ric’s first two solo records Beatitude and This Side Of Paradise were much darker than the songs that appeared on the Cars records. Beatitude remains another of those unsung records that got me through my teenage years. They frequently made my mix tape love letters to a girl who really never liked me as much as I wanted.
In the first or second week of summer break in 1984, I dragged myself up to the Sears at Seminary South mall about 7:30, 8:00 to get in line for Cars tickets. In that old lime green ‘73 Duster with the cassette deck bolted under the dash. About a dozen of use hung around, then rushed upstairs to Ticketmaster when they opened. I got lower balcony, dead center, maybe 15 rows up. Dad drove / went with me and we got bonked on the head by two girls dancing and shouting “Wang Chung is EXCELLENT!” [This was the Dance Hall Days Wang Chung, a couple of years before Everybody Have Fun or even To Live And Die In L.A. Still I bought Points On the Curve that summer because of that show and it too remains one of those teenage favorite albums.] The concert was fairly straight forward, no lasers, fire or smoke bombs.
I guess I gave up on Ric - really kind of moved on musically in the gap between the Cars [somewhat disappointing, though history shows it's held up very well after the first two songs] Door To Door [1987, same day as Aerosmith’s Permanent Vacation] and Ric’s 1991 Fireball Zone. It’s a shame because listening to it now it’s a fine record, as good as any of his solo records. But by then “We” had moved into louder, lipsticked and hair sprayed bands, then louder, angrier, flannel dressed bands, then... I don’t know. Ric’s pop rock was passe to radio. Not that we listened to Top 40 radio anymore. Ric hadn’t changed, we had and he got lost to a lot of us. But he was still active. Ric went behind the desk, producing Weezer, the Bad Brains, Suicide, Romeo Void, D Generation, a couple of No Doubt songs (don’t ask me if they were hits, I don’t get No Doubt), Bad Religion, Nada Surf and others. Not so much in the last decade, Ric certainly earned the right to drop out and live the life of a retired rock star. He apparently approved the Cars last remasters sometime in the last couple of years.
An now one of the great songwriters of our generation is gone. Ric’s legacy is no doubt cemented in rock and roll history. The Cars first album and Shake It Up are pure masterpieces, the right mix of technology, synthesizers and guitars in rock and roll without losing the human element.
Thanks, Ric. Really. Thanks a lot. There will always be a spot in my heart for your music.
