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.
