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Copyright © 2025 by William Janovitz

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2025937270

ISBNs: 978-0-306-83506-3 (hardcover); 978-0-306-83508-7 (ebook)

E3-20250812-JV-NF-ORI

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword by Greg Hawkes

Author’s Note

Prologue: Rock ’n’ Roll Hair: 1978

Chapter 1 Show Me What’s About to Happen

Chapter 2 Misfit Kids

Chapter 3 I’m in Love with Massachusetts

Chapter 4 Milkwood

Chapter 5 Greg and Richard and the Rabbits

Chapter 6 Elliot and Cap’n Swing

Chapter 7 David and The Cars

Chapter 8 The Rat and the Deal

Chapter 9 Recording The Cars

Chapter 10 1978: The Year New Wave Broke

Chapter 11 Candy-O

Chapter 12 I Like the Nightlife, Baby

Chapter 13 Panorama

Chapter 14 Shake It Up

Chapter 15 Beatitude

Chapter 16 Heartbeat City

Chapter 17 You Might Think I’m Crazy

Chapter 18 Live Aid

Chapter 19 Door to Door

Chapter 20 Since You’re Gone

Chapter 21 Drive Back

Chapter 22 Move Like This

Chapter 23 Hall of Fame

Epilogue: Let Them Say What They Want

Photos

Acknowledgments

Also by Bill Janovitz

Discover More

Selected Bibliography

Notes

To my mother and father, who bought me my first guitar and records and who generally put up with all the racket. And to my late brother, Paul, who was a huge Cars fan.

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FOREWORD

“LET THE GOOD TIMES ROLL, LET THEM KNOCK YOU AROUND…”

In February 1978, we had just finished recording the first Cars album in London at Air Studios, produced by Roy Thomas Baker. If you had told me then that a book was going to be published about our band some forty-eight years later, I would have thought you were crazy. Well, maybe you are, but Bill Janovitz has now written a book detailing the history of The Cars.

Although I wasn’t thinking about it when we were making that first album, “Good Times Roll” was actually a pretty prophetic song. Ric’s lyrics seem to be describing a band on their way up. The press can say what they want while showing old pictures. And it’s good to have friends with “thunder appeal,” be they critics, record company execs, managers, or disc jockeys. If it was real or illusion, we did go on quite a ride, and we all got knocked around a bit, too. This book tells the story of that ride.

My fondest memories of The Cars were those early days, when we were on our way up, before disinterest and dysfunction set in. I must admit, it was somewhat emotionally painful to read some of the later chapters. As time went on, people would occasionally remark that “it must be exciting to be in a famous band.” My standard reply would be “It’s okay, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

Being a musician himself, with Buffalo Tom, Bill knows what being in a band, and what touring and recording, entails. He has done an incredible job of researching our history. On at least one occasion—well, maybe two—there would be a person from The Cars’ past who I thought was dead, only to find out that not only was the person not dead but Bill had already had lunch with them and interviewed them for the book. Several times, I said, “Oh, you should talk to so-and-so,” and Bill would reply that he already had. This book is an “unauthorized biography,” and by that I mean that Bill was not hired by The Cars, and although David, Elliot, and I have cooperated fully and each sat for multiple interviews, Bill is not beholden to us and has been free to tell the narrative as he sees fit, based on the research and interviews that he conducted with people who worked for The Cars, worked with The Cars, or just knew us.

I’ve learned things about all The Cars that I never knew before, and I have come to appreciate the talents and perspectives of the other members of the band—Ric, Ben, Elliot, and David—a little better having read this book. If I were to acknowledge one person who helped the most with our rise, it would be Roy Thomas Baker, who produced the first four Cars albums. By combining the multitrack backing vocal technique that he had perfected with Queen with the arrangements that we had developed and had been playing live for a year, he helped us create something quite unique. Roy definitely had “thunder appeal.”

The last time I saw Ric was when The Cars were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. Somehow, that seems strangely apt. It really was quite a ride, with the last stop being the Hall of Fame. The fact that we were in Cleveland, Ben’s hometown, made it seem all the more appropriate.

And so, “let the stories be told…”

Greg Hawkes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THREE OF THE BAND MEMBERS CHANGED THEIR NAMES. RICHARD OTCASEK became Ric Ocasek, and Benjamin Orzechowski became Ben Orr. Elliot Steinberg legally changed his name to Elliot Easton. When friends referred to Ric in print in the pre-Cars days, it was usually as “Rick.” To avoid confusion, I use their well-known stage names and spellings starting early in the story and keep them consistent throughout the book. Ric’s second wife, Suzanne, kept her surname Otcasek, but to avoid confusion she is referred to as Suzanne Ocasek.

Katherine Bergholtz is the current name of a girlfriend of David Robinson who was then known as Kim Leo. I stick with her current name for subsequent citations, adding “(Kim Leo)” or “(Kim)” for clarity.

I capitalize “The Cars” instead of “the Cars.” When the lowercase “the” appears, it’s quoted from a print source.

Quotes from interviews I conducted are in the present tense. Some are edited for clarity, and others stem from different conversations about the same topic or story. Quotes from other sources are in the past tense, and the sources are usually specified within the text. All sources are listed in the Notes.

Prologue

ROCK ’N’ ROLL HAIR

1978

I’M TWELVE AND HANGING OUT AT MY BUDDY JEFF’S HOUSE. JEFF’S BROTHER is eight years older than us and the coolest guy I know. He drives an orange Camaro. He brings astonishing records home from college. Now, he presents us with the debut album of a band called The Cars. Jeff and I laugh at the simplicity of the name.

There are no hirsute hippies or crusty southern-rock dudes in hats and denim on the cover of this album.

No, there is something far more appealing: the close-up of a hot model with high cheekbones and glossy ruby-red lips that look like they inspired the Rolling Stones’ logo. Her long fingers with matching red polished fingernails are loosely draped around a translucent steering wheel. She’s illuminated in comic-book colors, blue and red, like from a cop car. She’s got her other forearm up to her forehead, her palm turned outward like a silent-movie starlet in a melodramatic display of duress. But she’s smiling, maybe even laughing, possibly singing; her tongue is visible in her open mouth, the tip up on the roof, as if she is about to sing the word “la” or “love.”

We sit on the shag carpet in Jeff’s wood-paneled bedroom as he opens the shrink-wrap and puts the record on the turntable.

The needle drops.

A muted guitar starts on an upstroke, as if someone forgot to push Record until the guitarist started the song. He opens his palm and lets some notes ring out before muting again. This second time through makes it seem that the first time was missing a beat.

I have just started playing guitar myself and could not articulate this sort of thing, but something is definitely different already—that much I know.

My friend is still staring at the cover in his hands. A weird scooping drum sound enters with single hits, and the singer enters.

“Let the good times roll,” he sings.

But he sounds nothing like the old rock and roll and R&B shouters on my parents’ records and oldies radio. This guy has a strange voice and takes the tone of a James Bond villain or the Joker in Batman, about to roll our hero through a logging saw or down a slow-moving creek to a waterfall in a little rowboat. I mean, it’s not like one of those heavy-metal guys who sound like they’re conversational with Satan, but it sounds like these good times will definitely come at someone else’s expense.

Sure enough, he adds, “Let them knock you around.” He rhymes that with “Let them make you [pause] a clown.” I have already surrendered when the beefy drumbeat enters, a synthesizer revs up and begins to swoosh, and the singer finishes, “Let them lead you up in the air / Let them brush your rock ’n’ roll hair.” Then this awe-inspiring gang of backing vocalists that sound like the same guys from “Bohemian Rhapsody” reiterate, “Let the good times rollllllll.”

Well, shit. What else am I gonna do?

LIKE “GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES” ON LED ZEPPELIN’S FIRST ALBUM, “GOOD Times Roll” is one of the greatest openers of a flawless debut LP (the titles are a delicious coincidence). The Cars released their self-titled debut album in 1978. It is a perfect album, one that the band later only half jokingly referred to as their “greatest hits” record. It was no accident those vocals were reminiscent of Queen; they had the same producer, Roy Thomas Baker, who had already cemented his legacy with hit Queen records. But whereas Baker famously layered a lot of vocals and guitars on those Queen discs, with The Cars, he recognized a chance to do something new, more “now.” He kept the big, layered vocals, but only essentially on the choruses, and juxtaposed that with sparse and precise production elsewhere. He explained, “I would run into the Sex Pistols, because they were working over at Wessex. They were saying the usual, ‘All you bands are going to be gone because you’re over-produced. . . .’ I thought, ‘Maybe there is a point where I should be a bit more sparse.’”

These were not the same sort of sprawling epic songs as Queen’s, after all. Though their influences included the Velvet Underground and Suicide, The Cars were more like some of the sleek American power-pop bands of the 1970s (Raspberries, Big Star, the Dwight Twilley Band, Cheap Trick) but with a distinctive East Coast slant. Drummer David Robinson had been in the Modern Lovers with Jonathan Richman and future Talking Head Jerry Harrison. When they broke up, he moved on to the garage-punk band DMZ.

Brilliant bassist Ben Orr might have been a heartthrob crooner in any band he landed in. But it was Ric Ocasek who wrote all the songs and whose stylized voice—with a little Buddy Holly hiccup and a bit of nasally Jonathan Richman quiver—and sardonic lyrics planted the band in the newly coined (and, like most such categories, vague) “new wave” camp. Greg Hawkes’s fat synth sounds being so forward in the mix also heralded new wave.

No matter the presentation, it has always been about the songs, the melodies, and the lyrics that stick. The Cars had all that. But, for rockers, what really set them apart from most new-wave acts was their almost-secret weapon, guitarist Elliot Easton. Trained at Berklee College of Music (as was Hawkes), he had technical proficiency and a deep musical vocabulary. He could be flashy when necessary, but there are no moments in the band’s catalog where he overstays his welcome or repeats himself. He is not known for one sort of style, really. He just wrote and played brilliant little haiku-like solos with exquisite tone.

In 1978, the old school and new school united. New wavers and rockabilly revivalists soon overlapped like a Venn diagram, sometimes within the same band, as with The Cars. The presentation and songs were new, but it rolled and rocked. The Rolling Stones knew it and were spurred on by some of that new energy for their 1978 Some Girls, and some more aging rockers soon followed with their own interpretations of new wave. Guys like Jimmy Page shed their dragon-emblazoned, open-necked jumpsuits and started wearing drainpipe trousers and skinny ties. In his last interview on December 8, 1980, John Lennon talked about The Cars specifically and how they brought an ’80s approach to an older style of pop song, as he did on “Starting Over.” Kids who were into Rush and Van Halen, while they might have balked at Devo, could dig The Cars because they had rocking songs and a new guitar hero. Slash later cited Elliot as a primary influence. Girls loved ’em, and so could boys. “Top-down music in a hard-top world” was the brilliant advertising slogan Elektra used for the debut album. The band became inextricably linked to the rise of MTV. And they sustained this level of adventurous experimentation—slightly subversive pop—and brilliant hitmaking for a decade.

Smashing Pumpkins. The Pixies. The Strokes. Fountains of Wayne. MGMT. LCD Soundsystem. The New Pornographers. All bands influenced by The Cars. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana said that “My Best Friend’s Girl” was one of the first songs he chose to learn on guitar. Weezer, No Doubt, Bikini Kill, and Nada Surf all hired Ric Ocasek to produce their records. In 2018, Brandon Flowers of the Killers inducted his heroes into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He opened his speech by noting, “The Cars were named Best New Artist in the 1978 Rolling Stone Readers’ Poll. Forty years later they still sound like a new band to me.”

The Cars have sold more than twenty million records in the United States alone. The debut album has sold more than six million. They dominated MTV and have stayed on the radio ever since their first demo tape was aired in 1977 by WBCN disc jockey Maxanne Sartori, which got them signed. From cutting edge to an evergreen staple on classic-rock stations, they still sound fresh.

In 1979, a writer for Trouser Press predicted:

The real significance of the Cars probably won’t be understood until their “greatest hits” album comes out sometime in the next decade, because the Cars’ importance, like so many rock bands, will prove mostly subliminal. Regardless of how many polls they top and awards they receive, the Cars will be a crucial band to kids born in the ’60s; today’s teenagers. Anyway, I think the Cars will make their history [on car radios]. And every teenager will associate some personal memory with a Cars song.

I WAS ONE OF THOSE TEENAGERS. AND THAT WRITER WITH THE CRYSTAL ball was Bill Flanagan, who went on to be the editor of Musician magazine, publish books, write screenplays, become an executive vice president at MTV/VH-1, and host shows on SiriusXM Radio.

In the late 1970s, rock and roll resisted premature pronouncements of its demise. The Cars were crucial in that resuscitation. They grew to a towering presence and provided the soundtrack for the 1980s. The ripples from their initial splash informed rock and roll for the following decades. It’s hard to imagine American popular music without them.

WHEN WRITING ABOUT THE CARS, IT’S TOUGH TO AVOID THE BIG, FAT METAPHORS and teed-up puns. So let’s get it out of the way early: On June 6, 1978, The Cars pulled up to the curb of a brick sidewalk in Boston’s Back Bay, sleek and soft high-polished curves, chrome accents gleaming in the summer sun, and released their masterpiece self-titled debut album, one of the most streamlined and ebullient blasts of power pop in the history of rock and roll. An impeccable set of songs perfectly recorded, balancing electric guitars, synths, drums, and vocals, with irony-filled lyrics twisting rock clichés into something wholly new—the musical analog of Andy Warhol’s prints of Marilyn Monroe and cowboy Elvis Presley. Pop art.

Boston already had a couple of rock groups riding high internationally at the time. Narcotic blues rockers Aerosmith had already released five albums that would sell millions of copies to juvenile delinquents nationwide. In 1976, supersonic rockers Boston released one of the most successful debut albums ever, selling seventeen million copies, thus fulfilling the expectations promised by preposterously and unimaginatively naming their band and first album after the entire city. Though all three groups shared rock-and-roll references, none of them would ever be confused with the others. But while the fussy production on Boston sounded astonishingly novel, as if it were beamed down from the flying saucer on the album cover right into Madison Square Garden, it was still a traditional rock album, an arena rock album, full of banner-waving anthems that pumped out of Panasonic Thruster speakers in teenage bedrooms and blasted suburban boulevards from muscle-car eight-track decks—the apotheosis of feathered-hair 1970s excess. Aerosmith was basically the New England version of the Stones—derivative but with undeniably timeless songs. And they outlasted ’em all. The J. Geils Band were also local heroes done good, selling out theaters and ballrooms nationally with their good-time R&B-soul and rock and roll, but they didn’t have their mega-selling hit album until late 1981’s Freeze Frame.

The Cars? This was positively futuristic and familiar at the same time.

Boston—not the band but the city and its surrounds—is a riddle. Is it parochial or progressive? Traditional or modern? Cynical or optimistic? Cold or welcoming? I have lived in the area since 1982 and can tell you that the answer remains yes to all those seemingly contradictory questions. The political environment has long been liberal, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has repeatedly elected Republican governors, and there has always been a socially conservative resistance to cultural change. “Banned in Boston” became a badge of pride for edgier artists and writers.

Culturally, Boston had the symphony, the ballet, the Museum of Fine Arts, and other staid institutions. But it also had the Institute of Contemporary Art, which began as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1937. With young people filling the many colleges, there had been a steady stream of youthful energy to Boston and Cambridge (two different cities but a single metropolis), along with the attendant popular culture, including progressive jazz and rhythm and blues. By the 1950s, that also meant rock and roll. Berklee College of Music was founded in 1945, the first college with jazz as the basis of the curriculum. That school brought young musicians to the city, including Elliot Easton and Greg Hawkes.

All but one of The Cars were transplants. Only drummer David Robinson was a local, and he had been a founding member of the sparse proto-punk Modern Lovers, acolytes of the Velvet Underground but refreshingly lighter in approach, with a collegiate sense of humor—“Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole,” testified Lovers leader Jonathan Richman. Before joining The Cars, Robinson had also pounded beats for the primitive garage rockers DMZ. While the headier Modern Lovers launching from Harvard Square made sense, DMZ might as well have crawled out of a basement in Detroit or Cleveland.

And Cleveland is where Ric Ocasek first saw Ben Orr.

Chapter 1

SHOW ME WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN

IN THE SUMMER OF 1980, GERALD CASALE OF DEVO ENDED A TOUR IN LONDON and changed his flight back to America to stop in Boston so he could meet The Cars. Here was a member of one of the preeminent new-wave bands meeting with another, two groups that ushered rock and roll into the 1980s. Casale had been connected with The Cars by their mutual manager, Elliot Roberts, who had been known for guiding the careers of such artists as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell—icons, but two singer-songwriters associated with the prior decade when the ’60s flipped into the ’70s. Roberts felt he had to stay in tune with what was next in rock and roll and had just added The Cars to his roster.

The reason for the meeting was for Casale to direct two videos for The Cars. This was more than a year before MTV would even launch, and most promo clips of bands were simple lip-synch miming of live performances on soundstages. Casale’s imaginative, scripted, and conceptualized videos for Devo were visionary, and at least Ric Ocasek and Greg Hawkes of The Cars were fans.

Casale had a great time hanging out with the guys while he was in town. “Of course, we were in slightly different realities, and it was that skew, but there was enough compatible overlap, not least of which was the beginning of my cocaine ride. Those guys were already fully on that,” though he couldn’t recall exactly which guys were “fully on.” But “Ben was a dude,” Casale laughs.

I mean that guy, what I was seeing there in my two weeks in Boston with those guys, hanging out with them in their own backyard, he just had an entourage of women constantly around him. It was insane. And while I was there, they actually played live, and I watched the whole scene backstage. I watched him being suave after the show. Girls are around, and he’s focusing on this one. And then there’s this other girl who’s acting kind of jealous, and she wants in on his attention. Pretty soon, he’s got them both talking to each other, and he leaves with them both, with an arm around each one, right? And I’m still this guy who’s pretty midwestern and pretty repressed. And how in the hell did he do that? My god!

And so the next time we got together trying to plan the video, I go, “Wait, what happened the other night? There were the girls, and the one was kind of pissed off, and then pretty soon you got ’em talking, and you leave with both of ’em, and you’re holding onto ’em.” He goes, “Oh, yeah. I just told them if you want to come with me, you two show me a little bit of what’s about to happen.” It ended up inspiring me to write two lines in the Devo song “Peek-a-Boo”: “So please pay attention while I show you some of what’s about to happen.”

BY THE TIME RIC OCASEK FIRST SAW BENJAMIN ORZECHOWSKI—NICKNAMED “Benny Eleven Letters”—Ben was already a teenage heartthrob, “the Elvis of Cleveland” in the estimation of some, appearing with his Beatles-influenced band, the Grasshoppers, on a local Cleveland TV program, The Big 5 Show. Born in 1947, Ben was raised as the overprotected only child of Russian Orthodox parents who had immigrated separately and met in Cleveland. His father was from present-day Ukraine, while his mother was from present-day Slovakia. However, though he was raised as such, Ben was not an only child. Each of his parents had been married and divorced before, and each had other children, Ben’s half-siblings. This was apparently kept a secret from Ben until later in life. His father, Charles, worked as a security guard at the White Sewing Machine factory, and Betty was a stay-at-home mom. His parents were very private and doted on Ben, who started on drums at age eleven and was already on his third band by the time he was on TV. Ben had joined the Grasshoppers after the biggest deejay in Cleveland, Joe “the Emperor” Mayer, who was managing the band, called Ben in to audition to replace a departing member. But they already had a drummer and were looking for a guitarist and singer. So Ben quickly learned how to play guitar, auditioned, and, just like that, got the gig. Mayer, who remained close to Ben his whole life, was like a second father to the musician. In a handwritten biography for David Bieber, who was helping assemble the first press kit for The Cars, Ben cited Mayer as a “major influence in remaining in [the music] business & growing to withstand the rough times ahead.”

An article about the Grasshoppers in the Cleveland Plain Dealer from January 30, 1965, says that “Blonde Benny Orzechowski, 18, plays guitar, but could double on drums” and notes that he goes to Parma High School. Growing up in the suburb of Parma Heights (where Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders also lived part of her childhood), Ben, like many kids his age, was enthralled with Elvis Presley. But unlike most kids, Benny had the bona fides—heavy-lidded eyes, a curl to his upper lip, and a slight overbite that gave him a bemused-looking smirk. An early elementary school picture shows a sweet-faced boy in a bow tie who looks like he’s got the world on a string. Right from the get-go, Ben was an easygoing, soft-spoken charmer whom everyone wanted to be around—not just girls; boys wanted to be his pal or be in his bands. “Their pet peeve?” asks the Plain Dealer in the January 1965 article about the Grasshoppers. “Girls who want to be seen with them just because they are musicians.”

Ben was not only handsome, kind, and charismatic but also one of the most talented of his cohort of musicians in Cleveland, and no one who knew him back in those days was surprised when he finally hit the big time in 1978. He was an effortlessly cool rock star before he ever left Parma Heights. “I always knew I had something special,” Ben admitted to Rolling Stone in an early-career moment of unguarded and uncharacteristic bragging. In another interview, he explained, “I think I was born a musician, actually. I didn’t really have that much choice, had no interest in anything. I didn’t really like school that much, but I grew up on the early radio stuff with Buddy Holly and Big Bopper and Carl Perkins and Elvis, and even a little Johnny Cash thrown in there. A whole lot of rockabilly. I started out playing, actually, rockabilly.”

Richard “Rick” Otcasek (before he dropped the t from his name and changed “Rick” to “Ric”), in contrast, was a gangly, nerdy kid, nicknamed Noodle. He was born to Czechoslovakian Catholic parents in Baltimore in 1944. He was introverted, yet he was also briefly a TV performer. He recalled, “My grandmother had thrown me on a local TV show in Baltimore, where I used to have to sing every weekend, songs that my aunt would teach me, like ‘The Very Thought of You.’ Songs from the forties. And on that show, which was called The Collegians, that had a band that had electric guitars . . . Fenders, and I think that’s what made me want to play guitar.” He loved Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” and was transfixed explicitly by the descending riff of the song. Observing his budding love of Holly, Ric’s grandmother bought him a guitar from the Montgomery Ward department store. He had a friend from a musical family who played the drums, and they would play together. In his own handwritten bio for preparing the first Cars press kit, Ric wrote, “When I was eight I wrote my first song about a zoo on Venus.”

Ric was sent to Catholic elementary school but said he was kicked out in fifth grade for reasons he forgot. As an altar boy, he was turned off by the rigid rules and skeptical of the superstitions of Catholicism. As a salve, Ric started hanging out instead with a youth gang as a way to seem tough. But these gangs were just kids wearing matching jackets, naming their groups after fraternities, and, at their most delinquent, shooting pigeons with BB guns. For the most part, though, he hung out with studious kids who were into electronics. Ric said he developed an outsider’s perspective during his early adolescence in Baltimore, giving him empathy for, as he said, “people who were pretty much not accepted socially or because they were Black or because they were gay or because they were artists or because they were this or that.”

Located where the North meets the South, Baltimore in the 1960s played a significant role in the civil rights movement. The blue-collar city was also grappling with white flight and urban renewal and was down on its heels economically as it transitioned out of steel production and shipping. A foundational hero of Ric’s, Bob Dylan, wrote about such tensions in the city in the 1963 song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a blistering indictment of William Zantzinger, a scion of a wealthy plantation family who killed Carroll, a server at “a Baltimore hotel society gathering.”

Ric recalled to David Fricke in Rolling Stone, “I remember when I brought home the first Bob Dylan album and my father going, ‘What the fuck is that? I don’t want that in my house again.’ Or if I brought home a Black friend: ‘How could you bring a Black guy into the neighborhood?’” Another famous son of Baltimore, director John Waters, would later satirize the racism and parochial nature of his hometown in the 1988 film Hairspray, casting Ric as a Beatnik.

Ric got into solitary pursuits like photography, spending about three years printing his own photos in a darkroom before moving on to electronics. He got a ham-radio license, with no need to leave the basement of his parents’ row house to switch obsessions, but started to feel alienated from his family and would spend a week or so at a time as a beach bum, haunting and sleeping under the boardwalks of Ocean City, Maryland, during the summer. His widow, Paulina Porizkova, explains, “His father would beat him, and his mother was an alcoholic, but she would stop his dad from hitting him more. She was sarcastic like Ric. His father told him the best he could hope to do was to be a mailman. Ric really resented him for that.” Ric also had a sister, but they didn’t get along. As adults, they would get together sporadically, but then he would tell Paulina, “I never want to see that woman again.” “I’m not really sure what the root of the issues was with them,” Paulina says.

One friend says Ric confided in him that he left home and lived with an aunt for a while. The friend, Luis Aira, recalls being at a reading at Amoeba Records in LA when Ric published a book, Lyrics and Prose, in 2012. “He got onstage and for twenty minutes went on about his horrible childhood,” Aira says. “I was starting to get freaked out because the audience was all there to listen to ‘My Best Friend’s Girl,’ and he’s talking about all this heavy, heavy shit about his childhood. And that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, man, all these years he’s been carrying this shit inside.’” Ric would still see his parents as they got older and softened a little. But the old edges would poke through.

In 1960, when he was sixteen, the family relocated to a suburb of Cleveland, Maple Heights, for his father’s job as a computer systems analyst with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at the Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. Cleveland was grappling with many of the same changes as Baltimore, with a similar demographic makeup. Ric’s father was from the city originally, but it did not feel like home to the already alienated Ric. Sixteen is a tough age to move, and life in this new place began painfully. “I got punched in the face the very first day of school,” he said. “Knocked on the floor. For nothing. Just because I had my hair dyed blond. . . . See, it was a trend in Baltimore to dye your hair blond in the front. . . . Anyway, people stared at me a lot because I was tall and skinny, but later on, it worked to my advantage.” He would grow to six foot four.

But Ric decided he needed to buckle down and get good grades to get into college to escape his dead-end suburban life and troubled family. He graduated Maple Heights High School in 1963 and started going to Bowling Green State University, near Toledo, and then Antioch College. He married Constance Campbell in 1963, and they had a son, Christopher, the next year. It was a shotgun wedding after Constance became pregnant.

Ric was struck by seeing Benjamin Orzechowski singing on local TV. The Big 5 Show was soon syndicated and renamed Upbeat. “It was before Shindig! and Hullabaloo,” says David Spero, whose father, Herman, was the show’s producer. “They both took their vision from Upbeat.” Spero was only in his young teens when he started working on the show, holding cue cards. Then he started writing. Ben and the Grasshoppers would often back performers as a house band. One picture shows Ben next to Paul Anka. By 1968, the program would be carried by more than a hundred stations and featured other national and international acts like Otis Redding, the Monkees, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, the Easybeats, and even the Velvet Underground. Says Spero, “It was the first show that had Black and white dancers together. Stevie Wonder had a white dancer on the set with him. This caused some problems. They refused to show it in some cities in the South.” But even in Cleveland, hotels were segregated.

Like Shindig! there was also a house band on Upbeat, with the producers cycling in different local groups to act in that capacity. In August 1964, Ben’s Grasshoppers started their thirteen-week stint on the show, and by the fall, they were opening for the Beach Boys and Dave Clark Five in local arenas. In fact, the Grasshoppers and the Dave Clark Five played David Spero’s bar mitzvah. Ben and some of his fellow Grasshoppers would look after young Spero, who went into radio before becoming a manager for such artists as Joe Walsh and Cat Stevens. He would remain lifelong friends with Ben.

The first time Ric heard Ben was on Upbeat. Recalled Ric, “He was singing ‘You Came into My Life’ with his band the Grasshoppers.” Ric didn’t last at college, dropping out and getting back into playing guitar after having dropped it as a teen. He was not so much interested in becoming a musician as a songwriter. Dylan served as his primary inspiration. “I liked Buddy Holly, I liked his pop songs, melodically and everything, but that was like, okay, we can talk about anything now,” he said.

He started dropping into open-mic nights at local folk clubs, including a place called Hootenanny’s near Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He began writing immediately and started to look for musicians to form a band simply to hear his songs performed. He said, “I never wanted to just play. I was never interested in that end of it, I was more interested in making the songs.”

Meanwhile, Ben had not even lasted through high school (though a 1978 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer describes him as a “Valley Forge High School graduate”), dead set as he was on becoming a rock-and-roll star. He had the talent but also the look. He was even featured in the July 30, 1965, issue of Life magazine, in a photo spread titled “Big Sprout-Out of Male Mop Tops,” about teens swept up in Beatlemania, sporting the longer mop-top hair and style of their Liverpudlian idols. Under a photo of a smiling Ben is the caption, “As part of his $7.50 treatment in a Cleveland men’s hair salon, Benny Orzechowski, 18, wears a hairnet, while his stylist—known as “Frank The Razor”—expertly pats the teased tresses into place.” In most contexts, “Frank the Razor” and “Benny Eleven Letters” together might connote a more menacing outcome than a haircut. His future Cars bandmate David Robinson remembered getting that issue of Life as a kid himself. He could not believe it when he later found out that Ben had been one of those kids whom he himself wanted to emulate.

Along with drummer Wayne Weston, who had played in the Grasshoppers, Ben formed the band Colours, recording “You Came into My Life.” They were on their way to a bright future—literally; in 1967, they were driving a rented convertible down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with a couple of girls for company, to meet with someone from Roulette Records, who had expressed interest in the new band’s demos. During a pit stop, Weston went to call his mother from a pay phone. She informed him that Ben had been drafted and needed to return immediately. Weston turned around and looked out the store window at Ben and the girls in the convertible, top down, Benny laughing and on top of the world. Weston, who didn’t have the heart to break the news, told Ben that he needed to call his own mom, Betty, and that’s when he heard that he’d been drafted and needed to return.

They never made it to Florida. Ben had to fly home to report the next day. As Ben was her only child, Betty tried in vain to keep him out of the service. After about a year, the strings she pulled—with his manager and friend Joe Mayer contacting politicians—got him an honorable discharge as the only “surviving son.” But by that point, Ben had been through boot camp and came out a changed, dispirited man. “Luckily, I didn’t have to go to Vietnam,” he told Jane Scott in his hometown Cleveland Plain Dealer, in June 1978. “But when I came back I had mixed emotions about music for a while and was a little disoriented about what I wanted to do.” Close friends described him at this time as transformed from gregarious to taciturn and aimless. Said one, “He went to work at a clothing store, sort of living out of his car.”

Chapter 2

MISFIT KIDS

I dream frequently; sometimes, they come out funny.

—“Misfit Kid,” Ric Ocasek, 1980

IT WAS THE LATE 1960S, AND RIC WAS DREAMING, BUT HE WAS ALREADY married with a child and working in Columbus for Ohio Bell Telephone as a draftsman, using his knowledge of electronics to draw switching systems.

He was listening to a lot of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and other folk musicians. And he was deeply under the sway of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti was not just a writer but a catalyst, founding the legendary City Lights Pocket Book Shop near San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1953. The bookstore provided a home to like-minded writers like Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg, who, along with others, became known as the Beats. Ferlinghetti’s work, like that of his cohorts, was deeply influenced by jazz music, contemporary American vernacular, modern art, and popular culture. Ric’s love of poetry also extended to earlier influences on the Beats, like e. e. cummings. Richard Brautigan was another favorite of his. “I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting,” he said, and he would cite Ferlinghetti in interviews for his entire career.

He also loved the Velvet Underground, led by Lou Reed and John Cale, whose first record, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), was produced by their patron Andy Warhol. The band failed to attain much commercial success, even as their avant-garde dissonant moments like “The Black Angel’s Death Song” were outnumbered by sublime pop songs like “Sunday Morning.” But their influence is immeasurable, and their legacy among musicians is canonical. Musician and producer Brian Eno in 1982 quipped, “Lou Reed . . . said that the first Velvet Underground record sold 30,000 copies in the first five years. . . . I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”

Ric was one of those fans who formed a band. “I loved folk music for the lyrics and the finger picking and the Velvets for the art and the lyrics as well,” he said. He would take friends and fellow musicians to La Cave in Cleveland, a rock club that evolved out of a folk club. He caught the Velvet Underground there, and afterward he ended up at a party with Lou Reed. The two didn’t talk. At the party, Ric tried marijuana for the first time. It would remain a constant in his life.

The first band he formed was the Hampstead Incident, named after the Donovan song. The band soon changed its name to ID Nirvana, playing a “psychedelic folk sound,” as described by John Wiley, the band’s bassist and guitarist who worked alongside Ric at the telephone company. Ric was also getting into heavier psychedelic stuff and left-of-center music like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. Drummer Steve Dodge was seventeen when Ric spotted an index card Dodge had put up on a music-store bulletin board looking to join a band. “We had pretty good rapport right away,” Dodge says. “I was Ric’s first drummer back when he was determined to put a band together. He’d done quite a bit of solo folk. He bought amps and was all in. He had a vision.” Ric had bloodred business cards made. They read:

ID Nirvana

Unconscious Instinctive Energy

Wiley, a Vietnam veteran from the US Marines, was on an eight-string bass. Zane Johnson played lead guitar. Dodge recalls Ric taking him and John Wiley out to see Jefferson Airplane for Wiley’s birthday. They were into the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, and some of the more flower-power stuff of the day.

The band played sporadic gigs, including a show at a fairgrounds, their set coming after Bob Seger’s, performing as the crowd thinned out. “It was a little bit depressing, but we did our thing,” Dodge says. They also played at the World Theater, which screened midnight movies. The James Gang with Joe Walsh also played the theater.

Dodge remembers how dedicated Ric was. “I just remember working on the craft of the arrangements in detail. He always had that long-term goal, and he just kind of made it an inevitability in his mind. He would go up to Cleveland to talk to a record executive about a contract. As soon as we had any kind of original songs recorded, he would go see people.” But it took Ric a great deal of effort to overcome his anxiety. “He said, ‘I get a lump in my throat many times throughout the day.’ He had doubts and fears.”

Ric insisted on playing original material when most bars and clubs wanted 100 percent cover bands. Supporting Ric’s vision was the first time Dodge felt like an artist.

Dodge knew Ric was twenty-four, and he looked to Ric as an older brother. When asked if there was some experimentation with psychedelic drugs that might have inspired or complemented the music, Dodge replied, “Well, he introduced me to a lot of things, let me put it that way. I was young and impressionable, and I led a double life. I was the all-American school-band kid in the day, but at night, I was bar-hopping with Ric and watching him. He was smooth with the ladies, I’m telling you.”

Dodge got to see Ric leading as much of a double life as he could get away with. Dodge thinks he had stopped working at the phone company around this time, while Connie, as Dodge knew her, worked at a bank. “He was a house husband, and he said, ‘Sometimes I sit around here ready to go berserk, man.’ Daytime TV on and a kid, just a rug rat, Christopher was literally bouncing on his knee.”

Ric was at odds with himself, a little lost and unpredictable. Dodge says, “We went to this big-ass music store one time, and he went up to the top floor looking for guitars and just walked out with one of the guitars, kind of to just do it. He stole a guitar.”

In 1968, Ric met Ben there in Columbus. In Ric’s recollection, Ben was working as a booking agent looking for bands to play at colleges in the central Ohio area and came with his girlfriend to see ID Nirvana at a bar. Ben recalled that both he and Ric were booking bands and decided to form a booking agency together. “He told me he could sing, came to my house and sang the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ in the sweetest voice I ever heard,” Ric told Magnet magazine in 2016. He was stunned, immediately recognizing that Ben was a natural musician. Little did he know then that Ben was also a team player. Even though his rock-and-roll dreams had hit a speed bump when he got drafted, Ben was essentially a lifer, willing to take on any role to fulfill his destiny as a musician. Ric intuited that he had found the perfect partner. As he would later note, Ben was the light to his dark, opposites attracting: tall, angular, brown-haired Ric versus cuddly, blond Ben, with bedroom eyes, who always appeared to be in soft focus. “Next day, he joined that band and every band I had up to and through to The Cars. He was my best friend. . . . We were practically married. He had great ears. I adored his personality and that voice of his—it was so much better than mine.”

Ric was relieved to have Ben join. Dodge explains, “[Ric] didn’t really ever intend to be the lead singer or lead guitar player. He said it’s too much pressure.” Dodge says that Ben took over as Ric’s “sidekick.” Dodge jumped ship to join a band that had label interest and steady gigs, and ID Nirvana carried on with a few other members. In late 1968 or early 1969, the band recorded demos of four songs, “Good Things,” “Wake,” “Love Like Fire,” and “Chalice,” at Musicol Studioi in Columbus, where you could get records mixed, mastered, and pressed to vinyl right after recording them.

With Ben, ID Nirvana evolved into a band called Leatherwood in 1969. They had a Laurel Canyon, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young vibe, pastoral hippie folk, but with the Neil Young edge. Ric and Ben started working at a clothing store in Columbus called Family Britches, which was opening an outpost in East Lansing, Michigan, so the two relocated there. By early 1970, the band had been reduced to the Ric/Ben duo that would remain the core of all their projects for the next two decades. Ric would write most—and eventually all—of their songs, but he intuited when Ben should take the lead vocal; there was usually little discussion and no tension about who should sing lead. They moved to Ann Arbor from East Lansing to open yet another Family Britches, but by spring Ben had been transferred back to East Lansing and John Wiley rejoined the band. They did regional shows, sleeping on top of their gear in a van, popping uppers to keep awake while driving. Still married to Constance, Ric met and started seeing a beautiful woman named Suzanne. She says, “I met Ric when I was living in Ann Arbor and he was living in Columbus.”

Soon, Leatherwood decided to head to New York City in search of a record deal. They piled into Ben’s car, and shortly after they made it to the big city, Ric connected with an old-school showbiz manager, Al Schwartz. Schwartz put them up in the Hotel Albert in Greenwich Village. The location—a few blocks north of Washington Square—was inspirational for artists like Ric. And so he got to writing, and his bandmates started arranging the songs. That is, until the city became too distracting. Ben recalled that he and Ric played as a duo while in the Village. “We did shows with such people as Odetta, and once, we went to a New Year’s Eve party at Lee Marvin’s place.” Schwartz found an alternative place for the band to concentrate, a ranch-style house that some friends of his owned a hundred miles upstate in Fleischmanns, New York, about twenty-eight miles from Woodstock, like the fabled Big Pink of the Band and Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.

Once they had worked up a few songs, Leatherwood headed to Vanguard Studios in the city to record demos of three of them. But they ran out of time and money and weren’t able to mix the tracks. They returned to Ann Arbor, where they connected with the burgeoning Michigan hard-rock circuit, opening for such acts as the Amboy Dukes (with Ted Nugent), the MC5, Alice Cooper, and the Stooges, acts that worked with impresario and progressive political force John Sinclair. Ric told the Plain Dealer, “I was writing songs, and Ben was singing a lot of them. We got along pretty well, just two guys running around with no money, trying to be in bands, trying to start bands and ending bands.”

They were partners, but Ric was the clear leader. He was determined that he would never join anyone else’s band. While his personal tastes leaned toward edgier artists, he was also in tune (and commercially minded) to the cultural zeitgeist, soaking up the hippie ethos in the patched-denim-and-patchouli milieu of the Family Britches and these college towns in the immediate wake of Woodstock. They were not pursuing the aggressive garage proto-punk of the MC5 and Stooges; Ric and Ben tended toward the introspective, quieter singer-songwriter scene. Ben had decidedly mainstream tastes, still luxuriating in the Beatles’ and Beach Boys’ melodies and harmonies. That was his wheelhouse.

Ric’s writing was still green. Whenever they tried to slip in an original or two at gigs they got under the pretense of being a cover band, his songs did not catch anyone’s ears. It didn’t help that they were a couple of longhairs gigging the more redneck regions outside the college towns. “Once we got run out of town with guns,” Ric told Jon Pareles in Rolling Stone about a gig in rural Michigan.

They were poor, and Ric was married with a kid. It got so desperate that he pawned one of Ben’s guitars. Ben retrieved it without protest; he understood. They were brothers, which is what Ben would call his close friends, and at this point, there was none closer than poor Ric. Ric had been separated from Constance for several months. They reconciled long enough to have a second son together, Adam, but Ric soon divorced Constance and in 1971 married his girlfriend, Suzanne.

Ben met and would soon marry a young woman with strawberry-blonde hair named Kristina, who was taking a break after graduating high school. She met Ric first when he worked with a friend of hers at JeansWest, a clothing shop in Rocky River. “I swore through high school I’d never get married until I was around twenty-five or twenty-six,” she says. “I was very independent. And my friend Dan, he worked there. I knew him all through high school, and we’d hang out a lot. He was a really nice guy, and Ric and Dan became friends. I went in one day to see Dan and he wasn’t there, and there’s this new guy working there, Ben.” She was not attracted to Ben at first. “And then I walked out to my car, and I had a flat tire, and I went back in and asked for the phone, and I said, ‘I have a flat tire.’ Ben said, ‘Ah, I’ll take care of it!’ Ben’s like this wonderful, capable person to take care of these things. So he went out, and he fixed it, and he was really sweet and nice, and I thanked him.”

Kris came back a few other times to hang out with Dan. One day, he wasn’t there. Ben told her he was renting an apartment in Cleveland close to Dan’s, so he offered to lead her there. Dan wasn’t home. “Ben invited me in, and we spent hours just talking and talking. And there was still nothing. I just really thought he was a nice guy. I had a lot of nice guy friends throughout my entire life. So that’s pretty much how we met. And then he was quite persistent and very sweet and nice.” Ben was five years older than Kris, a significant gap at that age.

She had once confided in Dan that she would never date a musician again after a bad experience.

He may have told Ric because Ric didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know Ric was a musician. I just thought he was one of the managers at JeansWest, and unbeknownst to me, they’d been playing for years. I was falling for this guy who I didn’t even know was a musician. And as soon as [Ben]—this is how it seemed to me, whether it was true or not—once he knew he had my heart, that’s when it was like, “Oh my god, where did this come from?” When I found out he was a musician, he sat down in his living room one evening and played a song for me. I heard what was coming out of his voice and his talents—it was pretty amazing. And then Ric came over within a couple of days, and for the first time, I heard Ric say, “Hey, I’ve got this new song. Let’s work on this.” I was ready for Ben to be working his way up in sales. And then I heard it, and I said, “That can’t be denied.”

Ric and Ben were devoted to each other. But they had not struck upon quite the right combination of other musicians or a winning formula. That would take almost another ten years of hard work, dead ends, abandoned bands, and failed relationships in the duo’s wake. “Ric kept his distance,” Kris says. “When I first met Ric in Ohio, he was friendly and very nice, but he didn’t talk a lot about much. You could tell that he was focused on other things, but that’s Ric. You could tell that he had direction, and Ben did, too. I mean, [Ben] would not stop once he focused on what was important to him. He knew that if he was going to make a career, that’s where it was going to be. He was a pure musician. Ric was more of a writer. Ben could orchestrate, arrange, and play anything. That’s why they worked so well together. And they were so tight.”

Kris says they were “very hippie. And Cuyahoga Park there is so beautiful. Ben and I would go down there and just walk and talk, and it slowly progressed. He wasn’t pushing anything. He was just taking it slowly, the closeness. We both were like a little ‘Is this working, or . . . ?’”

The two couples went on scouting visits to New York and Boston to see where they might want to relocate to try to make it in music. Ric had spent time in New York in the late sixties, crashing on people’s floors, in their cars, and in their bathtubs. A friend recalls Ric telling him that he and Ben rented a spot in a parking garage and lived in a car together for a while.

“I liked doing that, fitting in where I could. I can fold up and fit in small spaces, even though I’m tall,” Ric wrote in Lyrics and Prose. “I’d take my guitar over to Bleecker Street and play at those coffeehouses where you pass the hat. You could make ten to fifteen dollars a night and that was all you needed. Everybody was excited, trying to do things they loved. Peace and love was working for a while. But that faded away in the seventies.”

“California was out because it was too far,” Kris explains. “We were living on pennies. New York or Boston was our choice because they both let bands play original material in the clubs. Back then, it was hard to find clubs that would do that. So I went to New York, and I was totally negative. And then we came to Boston, and it just felt right.”

Ben’s father passed away in 1971, and the dutiful and ostensibly only son returned to help Betty attend to the funeral and other details. Kris Orr says, “His mom had a strong accent, teeny little woman, black babushka when going out, very religious. And whenever he was home, she would let people know Ben was there. They would call him, and he would have his old friends over. And some of these musicians, I didn’t know who they were. I just knew they were nice guys. One of ’em told me, ‘Oh, I taught Benny how to play on this guitar,’ and all this wonderful information about his history.”

While Ben attended to family matters in Cleveland, Ric and Suzanne headed off for Boston, or, more precisely, Cambridge, near “the green pastures of Harvard University,” as Ric’s hero, Dylan, once quipped.

Footnote

i None of the songs have been released.

Chapter 3

I’M IN LOVE WITH MASSACHUSETTS

“I WAS LOST IN THE MIDWEST,” RIC ADMITTED TO WRITER JAMES ISAACS IN 1977. Ric left Ohio with nothing: no traction, no money, and no band. And he left behind a wife and two children.

Ric was intrigued by the idea of Boston, and specifically Cambridge, the city across the Charles River. It was the allure of Cambridge’s past as a hub for folk music, where Joan Baez, Tom Rush, Eric Von Schmidt, Spider John Koerner, and even Dylan got a leg up. Ric still had that Martin-acoustic-wielding, solo-troubadour image in mind when he and Suzanne rolled into town in the middle of 1971. Boston “seemed like a radical city to me, very ‘left.’”

Within a day he went to the Cambridge Common, a triangular park at the western edge of Harvard Square. A band was playing outside, the Modern Lovers, led by Jonathan Richman. A couple of Harvard students, Jerry Harrison and Ernie Brooks, had taken notice of Richman busking solo on the Common. The two were engaged by Richman’s minimalist poetry set against rudimentary chord patterns, like a gentler Velvet Underground. This was no coincidence; Richman was arguably the Velvets’ biggest fan, and the Velvets had gotten more attention playing at the Tea Party—Boston’s version of the Fillmore East—than they had in New York. Richman was also into the Stooges, who had recently released their first record. The first version of the Modern Lovers was formed in 1970 as a direct inspiration by the Velvets and included Richman’s childhood friend John Felice (later of the Boston punk band the Real Kids) on guitar, bassist Rolfe Anderson, and on drums David Robinson, who six years later would join Ric and Ben in The Cars.

Felice and Anderson had left the Modern Lovers, and Richman continued busking solo. His approach was still informed by his heroes in the Velvet Underground, but he expressed concern to Harrison and Brooks about the darkness of Lou Reed’s lyrics. The three discussed poetry, and Harrison and Brooks understood that Richman was a freshly unique artist, so they re-formed the band with him. Felice was still popping in and out, and Robinson was back in the fold. “We went and rehearsed in David Robinson’s basement,” Brooks said. “He lived with his parents in Woburn, Massachusetts, and his mom made us food, like tuna fish sandwiches or something to eat after we’d play.”

Ric recalled, “Being such a Velvet Underground freak, as soon as I saw the Modern Lovers playing in Cambridge, I thought, ‘Man, this is the place I wanna live.’ And I did meet Jonathan after a while. In fact, I used to meet him in little breakfast places in Cambridge, but I didn’t meet David until years later.”

Ric was inspired by the city and was struck by how much music was going on and the support from college and commercial FM radio stations for local bands. However, he was arriving at an ebb in the Boston music scene. The overhyped psychedelic-era MGM Records marketing gimmick of the nonexistent “Bosstown Sound” had not only flopped but also soured A&R (artists and repertoire) reps on the city generally. The Club 47 that he had heard about and wanted to see—the coffeehouse where Joan Baez played her first set at age seventeen and Bob Dylan played support slots but never headlined—had shuttered in 1968. The folk scene had been overshadowed by Greenwich Village, some strands of which led to the singer-songwriters of Laurel Canyon. Boston was not yet pumping out much new or exciting.

But things were bubbling under. The J. Geils Band released their debut in 1970 and put Boston back on the map as a serious music town. The band was fronted by Peter Wolf, who had come to Boston from his native New York City to study painting at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. While a student, he roomed with David Lynch years before he became famous as a film director. A deep music fan and record collector, Wolf started singing with a raw garage-blues band called the Hallucinations in 1965. Wolf’s unabashed attack brought to mind Seattle’s pummeling Sonics and returned some badly needed ass-shaking to the introspective postfolk and postpsychedelic rock scene. Rock and roll needed to get funky again, and Wolf was a significant catalyst to the relatively moribund Boston scene.

In March 1968, Wolf became the second deejay to take to the air on WBCN, a pioneering FM station that soon became one of the most important in the country. Over that spring and summer, Wolf took on the nom de guerre “Woofa Goofa,” spinning an eclectic mix of blues, rock and roll, jazz, R&B, and folk, presented in the jive-talking, streetwise-hipster persona he adopted for his overnight shift. “There was an immense freedom,” Wolf told writer and fellow WBCN deejay Carter Alan. “You were defined by your personality and your music tastes. That was very intoxicating and exhilarating for everyone involved because you realized you were part of something incredibly new.” Along with his cohost, Charles Daniels, nicknamed “the Master Blaster,” and a small cast of characters like Fred “Freddie Blue” Lewis, Wolf’s show reached the hungry ears of like-minded music aficionados, including Van Morrison.

Having taken residence in Cambridge for the year, Van Morrison was in the early stages of working out the material for his solo (heady and introspective, but also funky) masterpiece Astral Weeks with some area musicians. He would call and even send in requests to Wolf on postcards for the jockey to spin obscure blues records. One day, while the Hallucinations were rehearsing at the Tea Party, Wolf noticed a short, stout guy with a clipped Belfast accent talking to someone to try to get a gig. He recognized him as the lead singer of Them, and he soon made the connection that this was the guy who had been making requests on Wolf’s radio show. They became fast friends. Morrison hung out in the radio studio with Wolf, and Wolf witnessed the gigs where Morrison debuted some of the Astral Weeks songs at the Catacombs, a club under what is now Steve’s Pizza on Boylston Street, where Boston’s Back Bay fades into the Fenway.

In 1968, Wolf and drummer Stephen Jo Bladd joined forces with guitarist John “Jay” Geils, bassist Danny Klein, and harmonica player Richard “Magic Dick” Salwitz to form the J. Geils Band. Very soon they added Seth Justman on keyboards. This was a good-time rock-and-soul band, heavy on lesser-known R&B covers, ready to kick down ballroom doors across the country. And they caught on like the boogie-woogie flu in Boston, releasing their acclaimed debut on Atlantic in 1970, the same year Aerosmith formed. J. Geils didn’t have a big hit until their third album, Bloodshot, went gold (sales of more than five hundred thousand) in 1973. Aerosmith signed to Columbia in 1972 and released their debut. But like J. Geils, it would take a few records for Aerosmith to hit it big, though both bands were pulling in sizable audiences at their live shows.

If Ric was taking notice of these two big Boston rock bands, it was not yet evident in his own music. Neither was the post–Velvet Underground, prepunk influence of the Modern Lovers. Instead, he was still writing mostly acoustic-based introspective songs influenced by his love of folk, including stuff coming from England, like the Fairport Convention and Nick Drake. “Well, it wasn’t really folk, but it was at least acoustic,” he explained to Lisa Karlin about his early Boston music endeavors. “I had an acoustic guitar when I came to Boston, and that’s the only one I had, and I found out that I could work around Cambridge and things like that relatively easily, so that’s why I did it. I just ran around, and I just wanted to keep playing basically, and I didn’t know any musicians here, in fact, so I decided that until I met some, I would do that.”

He answered a classified ad placed in the local alternative weekly newspaper Boston After Dark (which became the Boston Phoenix in 1972), placed by guitarist Jim Goodkind—who had recently arrived in Boston from Chicago—looking for a singer and rhythm guitarist for a cover band he was forming with his brother. Goodkind was not impressed with Ocasek’s singing voice. But Ric didn’t want to sing covers anyway; he wanted to play his own songs, and he played a few for Goodkind.

Goodkind recalls:

I wanted to do original music, but I didn’t know what it would be like, what it would sound like, or who I would partner with, and just assumed that I’d be doing cover stuff for a while and trying to make a living doing that. Ric came in and kind of looked the part, but not really a lead singer for a cover band—different, too stylized. After this audition, he had an acoustic guitar, and he asked me if I wanted to hear any of his stuff. And I said, “Sure.” And we sat down, and he played me a couple of things. He played me “Dream Trader.” That was the one that really struck a chord for me. I recognized that he had a real understanding of how to construct a song. I had never really been around someone who had that understanding of melody and hook and how to kind of create meaning with words, but you didn’t know what the meaning really was. And I am embarrassed to say I dumped my brother and the bass player I had hitched to Boston with from college, and Ric and I went out on our own.

The two guitarists worked intensely together for a month or so, becoming best friends. They didn’t know much of each other’s pasts, but Ric, in particular, was an enigma. Constance filed for divorce after seven years, citing “Gross Neglect/Extreme Cruelty.” The divorce decree was issued on March 25, 1971. Part of moving to Boston was leaving the past in the rearview mirror of his Volkswagen. He was having what he later described as a nervous breakdown. He felt like the world was closing in on him.

Goodkind knew next to nothing about the family that Ric left behind in Ohio. “It was almost like he would shut one door and open another, and the door that he shut behind him just kind of stayed shut,” Goodkind summarizes. “I knew that there was a Baltimore part of his past. I knew that ‘Dream Trader’ kind of related to some of that.”

“Dream Trader” might be Ric’s most soul-baring lyric. Rarely again would he be so baldly personal. Against a minor-key vibe reminiscent of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Wooden Ships,” the song describes a “man from Maryland” (pronounced “Mary Land”) who had forgotten how to feel, drinks too much wine, and gets lost in a dream, trading in reality. In the song, the man dreams of a sailing ship to escape, not driving a car from Cleveland to Boston to start fresh. Still, it’s hard not to read into it.

“I knew that he had grown up kind of lonely,” Goodkind continues. “When I think about it, it’s kind of interesting that I considered him my best friend and knew so little about him, but at that time, I was pretty single-minded as well and found a kindred spirit.”

Suzanne got a job at a regional distribution and promotion branch for WEA (the umbrella company of the Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic record labels) in nearby Medford. Ric (still known as Rick Otcasek) got another retail job at the Camel’s Hump, a clothing shop. Ric and Ben did not work at their day jobs for very long. They soon dedicated themselves to being full-time musicians, which was essentially taking a vow of poverty for the time being. Ric would also pop into lectures at Harvard occasionally.

Ric came across as calm, soft-spoken, and self-contained in his demeanor, but he was chain-smoking, always nibbling down his fingernails to the nubs, and his diet consisted in great part of jelly beans. Suzanne would cook him bland food at their apartment at 9 Spring Street in Somerville (just over the Cambridge line). Goodkind recalls spaghetti and ketchup being a menu favorite. One friend surmised he had a weak constitution, if not a digestive disorder. “Suzie was beautiful,” Goodkind says, the only person interviewed who called her by that nickname. “Extremely accommodating and nice sense of humor. I could tell she was very in love with Ric and very supportive of everything that he did, both emotionally and fiscally. We’d be rehearsing, and she would make dinner.”

When I mention to Goodkind that Van Morrison had been working on Astral Weeks in Cambridge a few years before, he recalls that, yes, they listened to Morrison, and they were at least aware of the initial success of the J. Geils Band and Aerosmith. A partial list of some other things Ric was listening to from 1971 to 1973 includes Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Mickey Newbury, Danny O’Keefe, Tom Rush, Jackson Browne, Tim Hardin, Todd Rundgren, and bands like Eagles, Love, David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars, Crazy Horse, Moby Grape, Incredible String Band, Batdorf & Rodney, Seals & Crofts, and Roxy Music. He was still listening to Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground, but he was attracted to strong melodies and, at the time, a gentle touch. “We went to see Linda Ronstadt,” Goodkind remembers. “America opened. We also went to see Harry Chapin showcase his early stuff. Ric liked him more than I did,” he laughs. “I remember a time that Ric and I were in Harvard Square, and Garth Hudson [of the Band] came walking out of the Coop [Harvard’s book/department store], and I said to Ric, I said, ‘That’s Garth Hudson.’ Ric goes, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘He’s the organ player for the Band.’ Ric goes, ‘Oh.’ And he walks over to him, and he goes, ‘Hey, are you Garth Hudson?’ And Garth goes, ‘Yeah,’ and Ric goes, ‘Far out.’ That was it. That was the whole thing.”

They toiled in earnest on Ric’s songs. “We were working on a sort of highly structured, harmony-based folk music,” Goodkind explains. Ric’s imagination began to stretch beyond two-part harmonies and itched to have his old partner Ben singing with him, so he called him and encouraged Ben to come out finally. After all, they had decided to relocate together. “Ric called me and said, ‘You gotta come to Boston. It’s a great town,’” Ben told the Plain Dealer in 1985. “I said OK, and I left. It doesn’t take a great deal of energy for me to leave one place and go to another.”

Ben recalled arriving in Boston, coming over one of the east–west highways that lead into the city. Speaking to the Beat magazine in 1987, he said, “When I showed up, I came in at about three in the morning and drove right over a Rt. 2 hill in Cambridge, and it just looked so stunning, and I said to myself, ‘This is the place I have to live.’ I liked the city so much. And the next night after I got here, we played out. So that about clinched it. And the people in town were mostly young people, and it was a great place for a musician to be.”

Chapter 4

MILKWOOD

BEN ARRIVED IN BOSTON AND ROOMED WITH JIM GOODKIND. HE TOOK UP the bass to complement Jim and Ric on guitars, and the trio started gigging under the name Milkwood, inspired by the play Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. “We played everywhere we could within a thirty-mile radius,” Goodkind explains. “We went as far as Newburyport.” There was even a trip back to Cleveland, where Ben’s old friends were mildly surprised to see him playing bass.

“Ben wasn’t like a super-deep guy,” Goodkind explains. “Ben was Ben. It’s like what you saw was what you got. Ric was the mystery guy. Ben was just right there, right out front. We were friends, but I mean, it was Ric’s deal. He was the one that had my attention and Ben’s attention, and pretty much everybody else’s, other than some of the women who Ben had a certain magnetic hold on. But Ric did, too. Ric was the charismatic character. But Ben was the Paul McCartney of the band. He had the voice, he had the look and the persona. And Ric was sort of the hard-to-reach enigma.”

And though Ben was in a relationship with Kris, she had yet to move from Ohio, and he was a ladies’ man. “It didn’t stop Ben from being Ben,” Goodkind says. Over the course of two or three months, Kris would come to Boston on weekends, and sometimes Ben went back to visit her in Cleveland. Ben would return to Ohio to marry Kris in August 1972. Ric was Ben’s best man, and Kris and Suzanne began to get to know each other slowly over time, forming a close friendship that continues today. Ben brought Kris back to Boston, and, like Ric and Suzanne, they also lived on Spring Street in Somerville. Kris recalls those days fondly. “When Suzanne and Ric and Ben and I would get together, we would laugh so much. I mean, just so many corny things.”

Suzanne, too, remembers it with warm nostalgia. She says, “The early years were never a struggle but rather a happy, creative time when Ric’s writing and his music were evolving as he was edging closer to his dream, and we were starting our family. It was a joyride in many ways.”

Ben worked at the Camel’s Hump clothing store with Ric. “I remember him bringing lots of clothes for me for Christmas from there,” Kris says. “We couldn’t have really afforded anything. We were bare-bones on cash, but it stimulated your creativity. When you have nothing, you really have to be creative. It was a fun time, and there’s no comparison to young love and adventure.” Kris was twenty. Suzanne told her about an opening for a receptionist at the WEA offices. “I did get the job, and I learned a lot about the business. Suzanne got pregnant, and she left shortly after a year. And I stayed until 1977 or ’78.”

Boston was a supportive town for the new arrivals. David Bieber, another Cleveland transplant, had moved to Boston in 1968 to get his master’s at Boston University. He embarked on an illustrious career in the music business, starting in journalism before moving on to record and radio marketing, with long stints at WBCN and, later, WFNX. He got to know Ben and Ric in these early days in Boston, remembering Benny Eleven Letters from the Grasshopper days.

“There was a sense of community in Boston,” Bieber explains.

Kris and Suzanne were working at the WEA offices in Medford. We became friendly and socialized. And I describe that whole era as kind of the equivalent of that Beatles song, “I am you and you are me, and we are all together.” The people who were involved with the alternative media were of a certain age in their twenties. The people who were promoting music were of a certain age in their twenties, as were the people who were making the music. It was like the coalescence of a generation was happening in all phases of pop culture and media. We worked together; we socialized together. We enjoyed each other’s company.

“Yet it was very evident” how broke Ben and Ric were. “My friend Pamela invited Ben and Kris to dinner, and I can still remember distinctively how excited Ben was because Pamela was just a wonderful cook. And she went out of her way for this meal, probably got something like a filet mignon or something, and Ben was in awe of the steak. He said, ‘We can’t afford that kind of meal.’”

With the songs collected and road-tested, Milkwood turned their attention to recording them. Ric had stayed in touch with Al Schwartz, the manager in New York, who offered to help them get a recording contract. Schwartz was about forty at the time. “I recognized Al for what he was,” says Jim Goodkind. “Al was someone who I think was looking to do something quick, as opposed to necessarily do something well.” In other words, Schwartz was not interested in the long-term development of an artist. “I never knew anything about Al beyond: he had some contacts, he had some friends in the business and introduced us to some people, and had obviously had some experience with some of the executives in the record business. But I didn’t know anything about his past. He was a New York Jewish cowboy: western boots, a cowboy hat, and dark skinny cigarettes, that sort of thing.”

Schwartz brought them to New York a few times to meet with and audition for record labels. At the offices of Polydor, they got to meet James Brown briefly. They also auditioned for Paramount. Not to be confused with the old blues record company, this was a label created in 1969 by the conglomerate Gulf & Western, which had recently taken over Paramount Pictures.i

“We were offered this deal,” Goodkind said. “Al was saying we should do this thing. And I said, ‘Shouldn’t we probably get a lawyer to look at this contract and see what’s up?’ And Al said, ‘Well, we can use their lawyer.’ And I was like, ‘But that doesn’t seem right to me.’ And those three guys, Ric and Ben and Al, were like, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.’ And I was like, ‘I’m not going to do this without our own attorney.’ And Ric and Ben said, well, ‘Then I guess you’re not going to be in the group.’ So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ And we did it.”

Perhaps not surprisingly for those who know how such stories go, that meant Ric signed away his publishing rights and ownership of the copyrights of the compositions, not just those on the album but anything else he wrote while under contract for years. He would learn his lesson, but he was in his late twenties, ambitious, and maybe even desperate.

They went to Aengus Studios, built into a barn in Fayville, Massachusetts, a section of Southborough, a rural town about thirty miles outside Boston. Aengus became known for custom-made recording/mixing consoles. Andy Pratt, one of the studio’s investors, was there at the same time, recording his self-titled second album, which contained the hit “Avenging Annie.”

Milkwood entered the studio prepared. The style of the songs Milkwood recorded is par for the era’s zeitgeist. The harmonies and musical performances are solid, including Ric’s fingerpicking. But he was nervous and awkward in the studio, which comes through in his pallid lead vocals. A more committed vocalist might have been able to sell the unremarkable songwriting, and a more experienced producer than Al Schwartz would have known how to coax more confident vocal takes out of a singer like Ric. But he sang in a wispy style, not projecting from his diaphragm.

“They put us in with a relatively new engineer, this guy Nick Koumoutseas. Nice guy. And Al was the producer,” Goodkind explains. “So we had a relatively new engineer, and we had a producer that didn’t really have ears. I mean, he might’ve had ears for talent up to a point. He did recognize Ric as being worthy of investment, but ears in the studio, not so much.”

With his eyes on the clock, Schwartz wanted to move the project along. But the budget, which Goodkind recalls being around $25,000, was a relatively generous figure for a first album at the time. The musicians immediately bought new guitars with the advance, but they still had plenty of money to pay for a reasonable amount of studio time. The main problem was that Ric more or less froze up when the red light came on. “It was almost like it was too revealing,” Goodkind explains. Given the confessional nature of the songwriting, Ric seemed unable to get the words out. It got to the point where there was talk of having Ben and Jim split up the vocals. “Ric was like, ‘No way.’”

When Ben does step up for the lead vocal on his own composition, “Lincoln Park,” we hear someone who can sing confidently. “Ben had to tone himself back to blend with us,” Goodkind says. “Ric had the softest voice in the group. Ben had the biggest voice in the group, and I was somewhere in the middle. Ric’s voice was unique. I always found it mesmerizing. I think the best song on that record is the song ‘Winter Song,’ which is really soft. It’s the last song on the album, and it’s short. It’s like the last song on a Beatles album where it’s just like a coda, and it sounds exactly the way we sounded in his apartment.”

Ben was into Emerson, Lake, and Palmer; the band Yes; and other progressive rock. He was writing around this time, but he lacked confidence and follow-through. “He was a little apprehensive about showing any of his work,” Kris says. “He would write short little things, and then he wouldn’t finish them. But when you read them, it was like, ‘Oh, he should keep going.’ But Ben recognized that Ric was more advanced and focused. Ric wasn’t very interested in cowriting with anyone,” Kris says. “He also had a lot more business sense, so he knew finance more than Ben.”

Ben did love the process of arranging and recording as they fleshed out the songs. While in the studio, the band colored the arrangements with other instrumentation, including Bob Henderson on drums, Jeff Lass on keyboards, David Humphries on congas, and John Payne, who had played on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, on sax. Joining Payne on horns and credited with arranging them was Greg Hawkes, who was a friend of Nick Koumoutseas and lived down the road from the studio with his band Waves in a cheaply rented house. “Greg came in and kind of blew us away,” Goodkind says. “I mean, he came in and did his thing and then left. He was a nice, shy, unassuming, skinny little guy.”

Hawkes’s musical partner, Fuzzbee Morse, recalls, “I remember Greg coming home from the Milkwood sessions, and he thought the song he played on was cool, which was ‘Timetrain Wonderwheel,’ but he heard the other stuff, and he was like, ‘It’s kind of like folk music. I’m not sure what these guys are going for. But that one track was cool.’”

Goodkind explains that he, Ben, and Ric were generally happy with the results after recording. “And then Al said, ‘Okay, leave it to me.’ And the next time we heard it was after he had mixed everything.” It was already mixed and mastered. “We looked at each other, and we’re like, what the hell? I mean, it sounds like we’re underwater.” There was a conflict with Schwartz. “He thought we were overreacting. He thought it sounded really good. We started thinking about, ‘Well, shit, did it really sound like this all the time?’ We were listening on speakers in the studio. Maybe that can be misleading. Maybe they can fool you, which is true to some extent. You can get wowed by volume in the studio, but it wasn’t that. Andy Pratt’s record was really well produced, so the equipment wasn’t the problem for us.”

When the album was released, it barely made a ripple. Milkwood continued to perform and got a few gigs as a result of the album, including opening up for Orleans locally and playing at Hilly’s in Greenwich Village, which Hilly Kristal owned before he opened CBGB on the Bowery in 1973. A review of that show appeared in Record World. “Milkwood, a Paramount Records act, is a refreshingly sunny trio, bringing a blend of skilled acoustic guitar work and fine three-part harmonies to the intimate and comfortable surroundings of Hilly’s,” wrote Phil Gelormine. “Group consists of Richard Otcasek and Jim Goodkind on the guitars and Ben Orzechowski on bass. . . . The inclusion of other material, like Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released,’ was a good idea but the act still needs more variety in the pacing of numbers to ensure maximum audience interest.”

Goodkind recalls, “We went to Philadelphia and opened for Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. We got a gig opening for Jackson Browne. We got a gig opening for John Prine at Passim [in Cambridge], and those came through the Paramount connection. Ric had asked John if he had a song that we could record, and John gave us this song, ‘Blue Umbrella,’ which had not been recorded yet. We never recorded it.”

The wind was quickly gone from the band’s sails. All that excitement over getting a record deal dissipated in a mist of lost opportunity. The relationships between the three members started to strain. “I think Ben depended on Ric a lot more than Ric depended on Ben,” Goodkind observes. “And that sometimes rubbed Ben raw, but that’s going to happen with relationships over a period of time. There was this initial disappointment, and a group depression kind of fed that. And the fact that the album entered the charts at number 500 with an anchor and was in the bargain bins faster than you can count, that was a bummer for all of us. There was all that buildup. And then there’s that letdown, and the letdown was as big as the buildup, if not bigger.”

Goodkind started to consider other options. Schwartz was managing and producing another artist at the studio around the same time, Niki Aukema, who had brought up her keyboard player, Roy Bittan, from New York. Bittan later joined Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Goodkind says, “I was being pursued by Niki, and to some extent by Al, to work with Niki, and that they were feeling excited, the way we had been feeling when we were in the studio, and we were feeling like shit. And one day I was in the car with Ric and I had pretty much decided that I was going to go and play with Niki, and I mentioned it to him, and I just told him that I was thinking about playing some gigs with Niki, and he blew up. I mean, I had never seen him like that.” Goodkind was not quitting Milkwood, just playing some other gigs on a short tour. “He didn’t say anything for a minute. And then he just exploded. And I mean, I wanted to be out of that car—a VW, close quarters. And he just got really pissed. I don’t remember what he said, but it was like, ‘That’s it.’ And I was agreeing with him, basically. ‘I think that’s it.’ And then I don’t remember ever talking to Ben about it after it was done.”

Ric went solo for a while, playing some gigs without Ben. But he preferred to have someone else backing him, so eventually, after the initial blowup, he started reaching out to Jim for three or four shows. “Ric would call me occasionally when he was going through—I mean, they were on welfare,” Goodkind says. “He and Suzie, they had a new baby.” Their first son, Eron, was born in 1973. “He lost his hair.” Goodkind thought that Ric suffered from alopecia exacerbated by severe stress, something that would continue throughout his life. But Ric was determined and single-minded about making a career as a songwriter. “He never thought that it would be anything other than that,” Goodkind says, explaining that Ric had no plan B. “I feel like if you have another option with music, you’ll take it because [music is] an unforgiving path.”

One of the silver linings of the whole Milkwood endeavor, perhaps the only silver lining, was that Ric and Ben met Greg Hawkes.

Footnote

i Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, the circus brand, was an affiliate of Paramount. Ringling appears to have been a music publishing company. It is listed as the publisher of Ric’s songs on the cover of How’s the Weather, the album they made. A promo photo of the band lists Feld Brothers Management Corporation as the band’s management. Irving Feld bought the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1967.

Chapter 5

GREG AND RICHARD AND THE RABBITS

IT WAS AN UNSEASONABLY WARM EARLY SPRING DAY IN 2023 WHEN GREG Hawkes and I met our mutual friend Ed Valauskas for lunch at Stoked Pizza in the shadows of Harvard Law School in Cambridge. Greg and I were early. We had briefly met before, but it was backstage at a chaotic benefit show where dozens of people milled about, so I did not expect he would remember me, and his polite and gentle manner would not give me much clue if he did or did not.

We walked into the restaurant together. “I’d like a drink,” he announced cheerfully. He pointed out a Cars concert poster behind the bar. The restaurant is owned by a couple of rock and rollers, one of whom is Scott Riebling, who played bass for the band Letters to Cleo and recorded a track featuring Greg in 1997.

Greg ordered some exotic tiki cocktail, elaborately presented in an oversize porcelain skull mug, that arrived steaming and bubbling, with a flashing blue light emanating from inside. With his long white hair pulled into a ponytail, he smiled like a kid looking down at a huge ice-cream sundae. I was just tickled to see a seventy-year-old guy in a cannabis-dispensary sweatshirt excited to dip into a cocktail in the middle of a weekday. “Damn,” I thought. “I should have gotten one of those.” But I had to get back to work after lunch, while this retired elder statesman was clearly in a good place in his life, decades after his band sold many millions of records.

Born in 1952, Hawkes grew up in Fulton, Maryland, the only musical one in his family. His parents were both from the Midwest and met in Washington, DC. His father, Lester, was in the navy during World War II. “He got into naval intelligence,” Greg says. “When the war ended, he sort of moved from navy intelligence and started working for NSA, the National Security Agency. My mother [Pauline, “Polly” Hawkes, née Morrison] was also in the navy during World War II. And eventually, for part of it, was working in that group; there was a book called Code Girls. I don’t know that she was doing any of the decoding work, but more secretarial work in that department. And I think that’s sort of how she ended up meeting my dad.” Greg has an older brother who is a crypto-mathematician.

Greg started his musical education on a harmonica his parents gave him as a young child, teaching himself to play “Oh! Susanna” and “Home on the Range.” But it was piano lessons early on that formed his musical foundation. In fifth grade, he began clarinet lessons at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Then he heard the Beatles on the radio, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “that was it,” he says. “It was like the light bulb going off over my head. Wow!” Like countless musicians of his generation, Greg saw the Beatles soon thereafter on The Ed Sullivan Show and immediately took up the guitar.

“I had been taking piano lessons, and, frankly, I was getting bored with it and wanted to give it up. So my dad came back from work one day and said, ‘Well, I’ve got tickets to go see the Beatles! But if you want to go, you’ve got to sign up for another year of piano lessons.” Young Greg recognized a good deal when he saw it. “September ’64. Yeah, it was total Beatlemania. It was a matinee show. They did two shows that day. And I’ve even tracked down the set list online. Baltimore Civic Center, we were on the floor. When the Beatles came on, it was like screaming. We all stood on our chairs. They did ‘Roll over Beethoven,’ ‘All My Loving,’ ‘Things We Said Today,’ ‘Hard Day’s Night,’ which was brand-new. It was like a half-hour set, ten or eleven songs, on and off, no encore.” Greg also saw the Rolling Stones in 1965 and idolized Brian Jones, whom he thought resembled him closely enough for Greg to try to cultivate Jones’s look. He got a Montgomery Ward (department store) Airline guitar and started playing with a band, covering the bass parts, as the band had no bass player.

After graduating high school in the summer of 1970, Greg arrived in Boston to attend Berklee College of Music, where he stayed for two years before dropping out. “I just felt like I was done with the school experience,” he says, explaining he was put off by the rigid pedagogy and low expectations set at Berklee at the time. “I had this one class; it was a composition class, and the guy who was teaching it was this guy, Tony Teixeira. And his claim to fame was that he had written the Doublemint gum commercial. [Sings] Double your pleasure. I used to hate those ads when I was a kid, and I never liked the music. And I was going, ‘This guy’s teaching me how to write music? I don’t think so.’ It seemed that their career goal was to get you a job on the Tonight Show band. And that was the epitome.”

But Greg saw and heard a lot of great jazz while at Berklee, including John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He also attended some Miles Davis shows, including one with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams in Davis’s band.

It seems that most stories of rock-and-roll musicians attending Berklee end with dropping out. But it was a great place to meet other like-minded musicians. Greg met sixteen-year-old Fuzzbee Morse almost instantly. Morse says, “We’ve been pals ever since.” The two of them bonded over their appreciation of Frank Zappa’s music. The first show Greg attended when he arrived in town was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention at the Boston Tea Party. “I loved the Mothers [of Invention] and Zappa,” Greg says. “Especially the Hot Rats, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Lumpy Gravy, Uncle Meat era. Hot Rats, I think, was my favorite.” Morse had been an acolyte of Zappa since childhood, meeting the composer at the age of thirteen.

Greg, Morse, and Ron Riddle formed the band Waves. Morse says, “A couple of other people would go in and out, but we did mostly instrumental music and mostly quite elaborate stuff for the time, and all three of us were writers. We were writing some pretty bold stuff.” It was their friendship with engineer Nick Koumoutseas and the promise of free studio time at Aengus, along with the low rent, that brought them to live in Southborough. Ron Riddle says, “We were just clueless musicians, really, as far as business goes. I think we were under the impression that if we just get good enough, it’ll all happen, which is totally a myth, of course.”

By the end of 1973, Ric was completely done with the introspective folk direction and was looking to form his next band, again including Ben. The connection with Greg led to his band Waves joining forces with Ric and Ben to form a new band. Ric wanted to move well beyond Milkwood. Morse says, “For years, if someone would come up to Ric with, ‘Hey, I have the Milkwood album,’ he would be like, [blocking his face with his arms like a vampire confronted with a cross] ‘Ah!’”

Ric told his pal Jonathan Richman that he was forming a rock-and-roll band. “Then you have to call it Richard and the Rabbits,” Richman declared, and so it was. “Jonathan was a fan,” Morse continues. “He used to come around. He and Ric had a quirky friendship. They just both liked the way the other one thought.” Ben didn’t love the suggestion. For one thing, it thrust Ric’s name up front while relegating the others to being Rabbits.

Richard and the Rabbits began organically. If Ric had any concept in mind, it was simply knowing what he did not want to do: the acoustic-based singer-songwriter stuff. “He’d heard us plenty and knew that we were into these more outside musical areas but also loved to rock,” Morse explains. “Whatever situation Ric was in, he’d write for who was there. He very clearly wrote—once he was in The Cars—for both the strengths and limitations. He wasn’t going to write, say, a funk drum part for David Robinson; not his thing, but he would use whatever was there. So he had—between Greg and me, we play tons of instruments—so we had woodwind parts and mallet percussion and whatever, as well as regular guitars, bass, and drums.” Greg also started playing keyboards in the band, using a Clavinet and a Sound City electric piano.

“Ric would come in with songs that were really fully formed, but he would sort of open the floor up to ’em,” Morse explains. “Everything sort of came together very quickly. Everyone understood each other very quickly, and especially when it was Ron, Greg, and me; we already had spent a couple of years playing together, so we had our own shorthand. Ric and Ben had their own shorthand, and it was really pretty easy. But I don’t remember him ever coming in going, ‘I got this thing, I don’t know what to do with it.’ He always had a pretty good angle on it.”

Morse got to know Ric pretty well, but his past was a mystery to Greg and Fuzzbee. Greg says, “It wasn’t until we [The Cars] were playing Portland or Seattle on the Candy-O tour [1979] that I remember being in the elevator with Ric at the hotel before going to sound check or whatever, and he goes, ‘Well, my son’s coming to the show tonight.’ And I’m going, ‘Wow, how’s that going to work?’ Because Eron would have been . . .” Eron would have been six. It was actually Christopher, who would have been around fifteen. “Then he was like, ‘Yeah, well, it’s my son from my previous marriage,’ and I didn’t know. He didn’t tell anybody that. I’m sure Ben knew. I mean, I assumed Ben knew, but I didn’t. And then it was a few years later that I realized he had had two kids from that marriage. He didn’t say, ‘By the way, I had two.’ He was really private like that.”

Richard and the Rabbits started playing a regular gig at the Poor Farm, a bar in Hudson, an old mill town a couple of towns away from Southborough that provided them a friendly home base filled with locals who were open to hearing new music. “Of course, when we did go off into more obscure material, there’d always be someone going, ‘J. Geils! J. Geils!’ who was popular at the same time,” Morse says. “That was like their ‘Freebird!’” One of the bands they shared a bill with there was Mother’s Milk, featuring guitarist Tom Scholz, the future mastermind of the band Boston.

The band would play downstairs in the bar, and there was a studio upstairs where they recorded. “Ric was always very prolific, so he had a bunch of songs,” says Morse. The onerous contract Milkwood signed with Paramount tied up Ric’s publishing for a few more years. “So Ric decided he was not releasing anything until that contract was up,” Kris Orr explains. “Nothing belonged to Paramount after a certain point. So all this music was being stored up, and then he could start recording new material once the contract was over.”

Morse says Ric and Ben seemed rejuvenated in this new band. “I think they had a huge kick out of it coming from this pretty sleepy folky-sounding thing, which really wasn’t where their hearts were, especially Ben. I mean, Ben was a rock and roller at heart completely, and we were more like young, hairy rock and rollers. I mean, sort of progressive, whatever, but still definitely all rockers at heart. So it worked right away.”

Morse still has the cassettes from the band’s sessions. Around the time of our interview, he was going through some of those recordings from 1973–1974 and shared some digital conversions of many songs. One was “Beantown,” a song Morse cowrote with Ric. It begins with an elaborate sort of overture, no doubt a result of the prog-rock leanings of Waves, while Ric spools off an illuminating but lighthearted autobiographical lyric. Morse recites it during our interview:

Maxanne has got a way with her mouth

The Modern Lovers did a gig down south

Me, I’m moving around from house to house trying to get on the radio

Guess I still got a way to go, oh.

MAXANNE IS MAXANNE SARTORI, A DEEJAY ON WBCN WHO BROKE AEROSMITH by playing them early and often and would do the same for The Cars a few years later. The song’s title is a dead giveaway that the singer is not a native Bostonian, as no one from eastern Massachusetts would refer to the city by that nickname (just as no self-respecting San Franciscan would refer to their city as “Frisco”).

As Morse notes about that recording, “Ric’s singing full out, full voice, and it’s not that Buddy Holly thing he started doing with The Cars, but it’s his real voice, and he’s really singing, Ben too, on that stuff. They’re both singing out. I think they felt vocally liberated.” The liberation is clear in Ric’s more aggressive approach on the recordings. Morse describes “Beantown” as a good representation of the band. “The body of the song actually reminds me a little of Al Stewart’s ‘Year of the Cat.’ It sounds like Al Stewart meets Hot Rats and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which doesn’t really sound like anything.” He says he hears Ric, the person, not Ric, the cool, detached character who came later; “not Ric, the Car,” while emphasizing that he also loved Ric, the Car.

The progress from Milkwood to these recordings—which were mostly recorded live-to-four-track (the band playing and singing live without overdubbing)—is remarkable. “Beantown” has some elements of Steely Dan, with some of Bruce Springsteen’s street-character lyrics, maybe with a touch of Roxy Music’s art rock. Ric was a fan of all those artists. One of the only covers they did was Springsteen’s “Spirit in the Night.” On a longer version of “Beantown,” with an extended introduction, the lead guitars (mixed super hot in the mix) are in harmony (“guitarmony,” as guitarists call it, tongue-in-cheek). It’s kind of like the Allman Brothers playing a Frank Zappa composition or Zappa doing a version of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”

“When we got together, Ric and Ben’s music was so different at that point,” says Ron Riddle. “It was a lot of stuff that was kind of hokey. What we added was fucking crazy. So it became something else entirely, which was extremely fun and pretty commercial, but we couldn’t get arrested.”

On some of the recordings (there’s an album’s worth), the music gets fairly elaborate, with unusual time signatures and other twists, but remains grounded in pop music. Morse says, “Ben kept up with it playing bass. He plays simply, but he just nails it. And Ric was playing rhythm. Sometimes when we were doing those kinds of [complicated] sections, Ric would get this goofy grin on his face because it’s kind of like, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ But I’d kind of show him, ‘Try this,’ and he always learned his parts.”

Mixes of the songs “Twilight Superman” and “Harlequin” can be heard online. The former is kind of like Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” with a country twang. I listened to a cleaned-up version of “Harlequin” with the playback speed corrected (it’s faster than the one on YouTube). It’s also got some early Springsteen vibes, with a little touch of what would later be referred to as yacht rock, soft and smooth in approach, a lot of backing vocals, meticulously arranged, and a vaguely romantic lyric.

On “Harlequin,” Ric is already doing his version of Bob Dylan/Lou Reed–like talk-singing on a few lines. Unlike Milkwood, you can hear The Cars in there somewhere. The scope of this and some of the other songs approaches the ambitious pop arrangements of Todd Rundgren. It even presages Jim Steinman’s work with Meat Loaf, which logically follows, as Rundgren produced (and the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan played on) Bat Out of Hell in 1975–1976. “I Just Don’t Get It” reminds me somehow of both the Kinks (“Sunday Afternoon” rhythms) and early-1970s Grateful Dead. Whatever the influences, what an ambitious leap from Milkwood! Dramatic, expressive, experimental, and novel, it has power-pop leanings and hints at the new-wave approach that came later.

Greg, Fuzzbee, and Ron relocated back into the Boston area, and the band would all hang out, bouncing between Ric’s and Ben’s apartments on Spring Street in Somerville. “It was sort of a clubhouse,” Morse says. “I loved both of their wives. I don’t remember any tiffs or anybody being that pissed at anybody. It was a pretty flowing thing. All easygoing. I got along with all those guys all the way through.” Ric was still ostensibly open to the songwriting contributions of the others, but that door was rapidly closing. Morse says, “I think Ben wrote one song, but after a certain point, Ben was relieved of any songwriting duties. It was pretty clear. And I think later on in The Cars, it came up again, and it was vetoed pretty totally by Ric. ‘No, I’m writing the songs.’” Ben takes the only lead vocal on “Tonight (Midnight Whim),” the weakest of the material I heard.

They were itching to get another record deal and saw their next big break coming down the pike. As Morse explains, “Ben and Ric’s wives were working for Warners, Elektra, Atlantic [WEA]. So they had heard about us. So Warners/Elektra invited us to play at their big clambake lobster-feast thing.” Morse told this story with a location on either Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket, two islands off Cape Cod favored by the wealthy, but Kris Orr recalls this being on one of the small nonpopulated Boston Harbor islands, likely George’s Island, which the company had rented out. The band felt like they were perfectly formed, with a big repertoire of original material and clicking on all cylinders. This was a golden opportunity to play for record execs, some of whom had heard some of the band’s demos. They would be in good spirits, likely a little drunk.

“We had a special setup and hired a guy to help,” Morse explains.

We did sound check; everything sounded great. We’re playing in front of this big field, and then up one level is where the clambake is. We’re kind of trying to time it so that we play just when the executives are coming over. We get the word that they’re just about finished up there, so we go and start playing, and it sounds great. It’s like everything’s working. We got through maybe two songs, and then, out of nowhere, it starts to pour. It’s enormous. I mean, just . . . not even a sign. “Oh shit!” So we have to cover up everything and pull all the guitars and put ’em under this shelter. And then we see that now all the actual executives are coming down, and they might’ve heard a distant something, but they didn’t really hear the band. And we’re sitting there under this cover that’s like a tunnel, me, Greg, and Ron. The three of us, as usual, were together, going, “How could that happen? This is such a setup. This is our day to get signed.” Then the Warners people come down, and they’re all apologizing, “Oh, we were really looking forward to hearing you guys. We’ll have to make it up to you.”

“At that point, it’s like all we really wanted was the lobster dinner,” Riddle says. “At least give me some food.” The dinners arrived for the harried musicians. “And then,” Morse explains, “Ron put his down, and Ben backed the car right over Ron’s lobster.”

“I was like, ‘Fuck! I can’t even get something to eat at this place,’” Riddle laughs.

Ben rolled down his window, looked at the lobster plate under his wheel, looked at Riddle, and shrugged. “That’s showbiz!”

“Ben was like Richard Burton,” Riddle says with a laugh. “Ric was an interesting helmsman—or a captive—of the ship, in that he was, or appeared to be, very mellow. He was more relaxed back then. At least on the outside, it seemed like he was very easygoing. Ric and Ben were one thing, and Greg, Fuzzbee, and myself was like hiring the Marx Brothers. We didn’t have a serious bone in our bodies at that point, except we were all very driven musically.”

This was not even the most absurd gig for Richard and the Rabbits. That honor was reserved for their Spinal Tap–like final show.

They spent the rest of that summer playing more gigs and recording, but momentum seemed to be running out, Morse explains. “I remember feeling kind of like, ‘I love the guys. I love the band, but what’s happening?’ Things all seem to be missing just by this little bit, a little bit star-crossed. So around October ’74, I was getting ready to just kind of abandon ship, and I remember Ric pleading with me. Ric’s not someone you imagine doing this, but begging, saying, ‘No, we got to do this one more thing. They [WEA] want to make it up to us for what happened on the island. They want us to play again for all of the executives, and this time it’s going to be indoors so it can’t rain.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, man, Ric, really?’ He said, ‘No, no, just do this one. Just do this one more gig.’ I was supposed to be in Toronto for something. But we’d already been through a year or whatever of this, so I said, ‘Okay.’”

This brings us to the infamous gig at the roller-skating rink.

The Bal-a-Roue skating rink was a big warehouse-like structure with an incongruous chalet-like A-frame entrance attached, almost like an afterthought. Surrounded by a few acres of parking, it was on Mystic Avenue in Medford, just outside Boston’s city limits. When people think in terms of Boston clichés, they might as well be thinking of Medford, or “Meffa,” as it’s commonly pronounced by locals.

WEA was throwing an after-show party for the English blues-rock band Foghat, who played at the Orpheum Theater on November 8. “I remember as we’re walking in with Ric, there’s all these really pretty young waitresses all on roller skates, and they’re wheeling around these big metal trays,” Morse says. “We go in, and we set up. The same thing as the clambake: sound check; everything’s beautiful.” The band was set up in the center of the rink.

The guy who was doing the sound was a guy named Allan Kaufman, and he brought his roommate, Elliot Steinberg. We start playing once again, boom, sounding really good. Now, all these people are in the room, but we notice that everyone who comes in is given a pair of roller skates. So everyone is in various degrees of ineptitude rolling around this thing, and then here come the big metal trays from before. Now they open them up and what’s in them? Whipped-cream pies. So now they’re handing out whipped-cream pies to all of these people who are stumbling around on roller skates. And we’re one and a half songs in. We had this whole set planned, and here come these people, and next thing you know, the air is just filled with flying whipped-cream pies, and it’s hitting the amps, and it’s hitting the bass, and it’s all over the place. We try to keep playing, but with all this whipped cream on everything. Once again, we have to run and we have to cover up everything. And I couldn’t believe it. It was like, again, “This can’t be happening.” And so I left kind of pissed off.

I went up to Toronto, I came back, and it was in the Real Paper or the Phoenix, whatever the paper was at the time. It had an article about that event, and it talked about how it was “a great party” and “roller skating and whipped cream. Everybody had a blast.” And the last sentence was “Richard and the Rabbits,” comma, “a band,” comma, “also played.” So we didn’t end in a blaze of glory; we ended in the air full of flying whipped-cream pies.

Chapter 6

ELLIOT AND CAP’N SWING

ELLIOT STEINBERG, THE ROOMMATE THAT SOUNDMAN ALLAN KAUFMAN brought to the roller rink, was, of course, the guitarist later known as Elliot Easton.

I first met Elliot in February 2019 when I was fortunate enough to play music with him at the Wild Honey Benefit concert for autism research at the Alex Theater in Glendale, California. He was warm and approachable. Elliot is one of those musicians’ musicians, the kind of guy who can somehow still be widely regarded as underrated even as a founding member of a band that sold many millions of records, significantly helped define the sound of an era, and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Entering his name in a Google search, one of the first results will likely contain the word “overlooked.” But he was never underrated by fellow musicians, least of all guitarists. When I met him, The Cars had just learned they would be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and Elliot, whose emotions stay close to the surface, got a little misty when he told me how much it meant to him, but specifically how much he would have loved for his mother, a singer, to still be alive to witness the honor.

Elliot was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1953 and spent his few years in Forest Hills, Queens, before the family settled in Massapequa, on newly booming suburban Long Island, when Elliot was six. The roads were not even paved yet in his development. “I loved it,” he recalls. “And to this day, I’m kind of a suburban kid. I like to get in my car and go where I want to go and not deal with subways and taxis. I prefer it to city living, to be honest.”

After World War II ended, his father, Joseph, went to cosmetology school on the GI Bill and eventually started a chain of beauty salons in Queens. Elliot’s mother, Gloria (maiden name Schwartz), was a Juilliard-trained professional singer who encouraged Elliot, her firstborn of five children, in his musical endeavors. “She had a show on Yiddish radio, so she sang a lot of that stuff, but she sang pop, more like a Rosemary Clooney or Patti Page kind of thing,” Elliot explains. “She entertained, opening for the comedians, up in the Catskills, and had a radio show and did live appearances. But she had a stage mom from hell, my grandma Eva, who would give her barbiturates to go to sleep at night after shows, and then speed to get up in the morning to go to school, and then pills to stay up that night to do a show, and then pills to go to sleep, and then pills to wake up to go to school. And so my mother grew to hate it. She just hated that life so much. She only knew it that way. She didn’t know that it could be pleasant.”

Gloria’s unhappiness extended to home life more generally. “As a kid, her family was very prosperous,” Elliot explains. “Her father was an umbrella manufacturer. In fact, that’s how my mother and father met because their two fathers were card players and played pinochle together. ‘I have a son who’s twenty-six.’ ‘I have a daughter who’s twenty-six. They’re getting kind of old. We should put them together; they should get married.’” Unlike Gloria’s father, Elliot’s dad, Joseph, was not an adept businessman.

We had some lean times, and I don’t think she was very happy at all. There was a lot of yelling and fighting, and it’s kind of a hallmark of those two families anyway, at least on my mother’s side. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had been in Bellevue [psychiatric hospital] with what they then called a nervous breakdown. And there were mental issues, and the way she brought my mom into the entertainment world just wrecked it for her. She ended up in this life in a suburban house. I think, in a lot of ways, she was disappointed with the way her life turned out, although she was a very loving mother and great and funny and wonderful. I think that there was some conflict there.

Elliot started playing guitar at a very young age, becoming interested after seeing the television host Jimmie Dodd play on The Mickey Mouse Club. “He played a mouse guitar, and it was a Martin tenor that they’d fixed up with the Mickey Mouse face on the front. And I had one of those! I had a Mickey Mouse guitar. And the cowboys all played guitars. I loved Roy Rogers. I was so crazy about it all. Those were the early days of TV. And then, of course, right around that time, I saw Elvis on television, and that was it. It was all over.” It was a story his family loved to tell. “I saw Elvis, I got a glass of water and a comb, and I brought it to my mother and had her do it all up and pull it down. And I had my Mickey Mouse guitar, and I’m standing in this little mirror on this credenza we had, and I’m checking myself out. I was three years old and trying to figure the guitar out. I was a rocker.” When he grabbed the guitar, the naturally left-handed Elliot took up the pose of a lefty guitarist, with his right hand on the fretboard. “If you look at pictures of that kid, the eyes are the same, and even the way I’m holding my hands and everything, it’s like I had a natural thing for it. I could even pick out simple melodies on that plastic thing, which astonished my parents. Everything you do when you’re a baby, your parents think, it’s like you are a genius.”

Like Greg, Elliot took formal clarinet lessons in school but didn’t stick with it for long, never giving up his first love, the guitar. He took a few guitar lessons. “Mostly I learned by ear and off of records,” he says, “just moving the phonograph needle back, and back, and back, and just trying to analyze what was going on and figure out where on the [guitar] neck it was. And that was great ear training. It was really a great way to learn the guitar on an organic level.”

In the handwritten biography that he wrote for The Cars’ first press kit, Elliot said, “Joe McCarthy & crew castrated rock & roll, so I largely ignored the Joey Dee’s, Tommy Vee’s . . . Fabians, Avalons, Rydells, who were lying thru their teeth at the time.”

Naturally, the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show affirmed his belief in rock and roll and cemented it all for Elliot. “I was ten years old when the Beatles played the Sullivan Show and couldn’t even sleep that night, just tossed and turned, and it galvanized me; I saw my future. ‘That’s what I want to do.’ And so, by thirteen, I was way into it. But the thing about the Beatles was that I almost felt like I could musically grow up with them because each of their albums was a progression. So, by the time Rubber Soul and Revolver came out, I was ready for it because I had absorbed what led up to it. I’m not saying I was ready for it in an LSD kind of way, or I had been smoking pot yet, or anything like that. But musically, each progression I was able to absorb, and on whatever level I thought I was able to understand it.” The Beatles were able to synthesize all these influences, even avant-garde ones, and present them still as pop music. “It could be a psychedelic tape loop song, next to a country-western-feeling song, next to a ballad, next to a song with horns, and it all sounded like the Beatles. And as far as an influence, it led to some really great albums and some really bad albums, as all things do [laughs].”

While his mother had abandoned her dream and soured on music as a profession, Gloria still loved to sing around the house, and when Elliot became good enough, he would accompany her as she sang. Other parents in the Steinbergs’ neighborhood were active music fans. “A lot of my friends’ parents were very left-wing kind of people.” As a fourteen-year-old, Elliot campaigned for Democrat Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 election. The same year, he took a bus to Washington and stood in the Resurrection City encampment on the Washington Mall.

So folk music came into it, from the Weavers to Folkways Records, and that led to Newport Folk Festival stuff. And Bert Jansch. I heard in ’65, ’66. So I heard “Black Waterside” before I heard [the Led Zeppelin appropriation] “Black Mountain Side.” So I was lucky that way because it wasn’t just the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin for me; I was listening to all this Doc Watson and Skip James, and a lot of Taj Mahal with Jesse Ed [Davis], and the Band—Robbie [Robertson], rest in peace—and Roy Buchanan, and a lot of Telecaster players. But Mike Bloomfield was like a king for me and Cream-era Eric Clapton. I don’t think anybody plays a slow Chicago blues better than Mike Bloomfield. But the folk stuff was really important to me, and I still love it and mostly play acoustic at home and fingerpick.

One of the first concerts Elliot attended was in 1967, at the age of thirteen, the Monkees at Forest Hills Stadium, with the still-obscure opening act, Jimi Hendrix.

A friend of mine had an extra ticket to go see the Monkees, which I never would’ve bought a ticket for the Monkees anyway, even at that age. And so I thought, “Sure, fine.” My parents gave me permission to get on the Long Island Railroad, and we were just going to see the Monkees. And this guy came on in this flowered outfit, playing left-handed guitar, which I noticed right away. And he had big afro hair and scarves, and he was visually incredible. And then he started playing. At that point, we were just trying to get clean, clear guitar tones on electric guitars. I never heard a guitar sound like that, a woman’s voice. It made my hair stand on end. And it was a crazy show. I mean, I don’t know how many songs he got through, but he was humping his guitar and having sex with the amp, and all the little girls are screaming, “Davy! Mickey!” and screaming for the Monkees, and they’re all there with their mothers, and their mothers are covering their eyes because Jimi’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I remember the tonality of his voice. I remember him saying, “Please listen to our music, man. Please listen.” It made such an impression on me because he had just played Monterey [the Monterey Pop Festival], so he wasn’t famous yet, except with the musical cognoscenti of the world, this guy Jimi Hendrix. But I hadn’t heard “Hey, Joe,” “Purple Haze,” or anything like that yet. So if you had told me he was just dropped in from another planet, it would’ve been a perfectly acceptable explanation to me.

Little did he ever dream that he would perform at Forest Hills himself twenty years later. Gloria would attend when The Cars played there and confess, “I was always telling him, ‘Turn it down, Elliot!’”

While in high school, Elliot would use his lunch money to buy as many records as he could at May’s department store or Record World in Roosevelt Field. The Beatles and Stones were givens for any teenage rock and roller, but Elliot went deeper into “musical archaeology,” delving into whom the British bands were covering and discovering their influences. He emphasizes that in his later teens, he became even more a fan of late-’60s American music, what might now be classified as Americana: jug-band music, country and western (especially the Bakersfield variant), folk rock, and R&B. He was a particularly attentive student to subtle groove players like Cornell Dupree (a New York–based player who backed Aretha Franklin, Bill Withers, Donny Hathaway, and King Curtis, among others), Reggie Young (a Memphis session man who backed Elvis Presley and dozens more big names), and the Muscle Shoals–area session musicians.

“As a seventeen-year-old kid, I was pretty precocious. I’ve been playing music my whole life. I didn’t take up guitar to be popular with girls or be able to strut around like some jerk. I mean, I’d been playing since I’m a baby, and so maybe I just heard the music differently.”

Elliot was obsessed with guitars. He would take the bus to music stores to just gawk at guitars and be able to try some out. “And all I would leave with was brochures,” he said. “I would take these catalogs with me to school, and I’d hide ’em inside my book so the teacher would think I was reading my textbook, and I’d be studying my ’66 Gibson catalog.”

After taking a job washing dishes at a restaurant to save some money, he ordered a custom lefty Telecaster in late 1970 from the music store Gracin’s in Freeport, Long Island. He would call the exceedingly patient store’s owner, Bernie Gracin, every couple of days to see if the guitar had come in. After a while, Gracin offered to lend Elliot a left-handed Fender Jaguar to hold him over until his Telecaster arrived in early 1971. “It was so kind, but also got me off his back,” Elliot noted.

Cut to 1979, after the success of The Cars debut album, Elliot was at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show in Chicago, a convention with new gear on display. He noticed Bernie Gracin standing nearby, so he walked over to reintroduce himself.

I go over, and I say, “Bernie, my name is Elliot Easton. I don’t know if you’ll remember me, but I used to come to your store and just hang out. And I was a left-handed kid.” He stops me. He goes, “Wait, you’ve got to meet my wife.” And he drags me—he had tears in his eyes—he drags me over to his wife, and he goes, “This is the kid I always used to tell you about.” And was so happy that my career was going well, and it was such a warm moment. And so it was like a direct link to my childhood obsession with this stuff. And I got to share that with these guys that I used to pester when it was just a dream.

Elliot had formed a teenage band called Washboard Slim. “You can imagine. It’s very of the time. My friend Donnie Feldman played keyboards and five-string banjo. He was a brilliant musician. We played this one bar called Mr. Magoo’s in Massapequa. We’d alternate sets with a stripper, which was really funny, because all of a sudden, my dad took a great interest in my career.” They entered a battle of the bands in Oyster Bay, and while they fell short of first place, they won a $500 gift certificate to the Sam Ash music store. He spent his share on a Les Paul after trading in his Tele.

Among the repertoire of Washboard Slim were some early Grateful Dead songs. Elliot later caught the Dead on Halloween night 1970 at Stony Brook University, which he remembers as a stunning show.

And just to jump up to the early nineties, a friend of mine from the Gibson Artist Relations office in New York was going to a Dead show that night at Madison Square Garden and invited me, and I got to spend the whole show standing on Jerry’s side of the stage and hanging with him and his tech guy, Steve Parish. I had a big fat joint and smoked it with Jerry, and we’re talking; we’re having a great time. He’s sitting there while they’re doing the drums [long drum solos], and we’re just hanging out, partying on his side of the stage. I said to him, “Jerry, I was at that show, do you remember the show at Stony Brook? Halloween night 1970? Was that as good as I remember it?” He looked at me real funny. He goes, “We still talk about it.”

After Elliot graduated high school in Massapequa (the school also produced Brian Setzer of the Stray Cats, Jerry Seinfeld, and the Baldwin actor brothers, whose father was Elliot’s social studies teacher), he headed off to college at Brockport State University in Rochester, New York. He was eager to escape his crowded and sometimes unhappy household and intended to be on his own from that moment on. He was accepted at Berklee but could not arrange the financing. “So I went to Brockport for the simple reason that it was the one college that accepted me that would require me to move away from home.” While there, he learned about the National Defense Student Loan program. “If one of your parents was in the army or in the armed forces, you could get a college loan. It was about $5,280 for a year at Berklee with the dorm and everything, and meals. I got this student loan, and I was able to pay tuition, and they gave you a book of coupons to pay it back. It was $10 a month to pay back. I think I was still paying it back when Candy-O was out.” He left for Berklee and never came home to live with his parents again. But like Greg, he didn’t graduate, completing four and a half semesters on an accelerated program.

One of the greatest things that I came out of Berklee with was learning the nomenclature, learning the language of music. It taught me the names of sounds that I already knew—what they sounded like in my head. And knowing all that language of music later enabled me to communicate with other musicians in the studio in various situations—rehearsal, writing—to be able to express what I wanted to and know the name for it. So that was very, very valuable. As far as influencing me on a musical level, I’d say I already loved jazz. If you haven’t already guessed, I have pretty eclectic tastes.

Elliot started playing in a country music group at a bar in the Combat Zone, Boston’s sleazequarters, its version of New York’s old Times Square. “Eight sets a night, eight to two in the morning.” Asked if he recalled the name of the venue, he answers, “Edward’s. It was just a Schlitz sign. It wasn’t even fancy enough to have a name like the Cowboy Cafe. It was just a friggin’ Schlitz sign with the name. Donnie [Feldman, his friend from back home] was playing with me, and basically, that kept me out of Long Island. It was twenty-five bucks a night per man.” But Elliot was not even pulling twangy bends from a Telecaster yet. “For the first few months I was playing bass because they didn’t have a bass player.” The band he was in in Brockport had bought him a Fender Precision. “I hated playing bass in the band. I used to leave the bass behind my amp at night, and I’d go home for the next day. And I came back one day, and my bass was stolen. I think subconsciously, I was hoping it would be stolen.” Leaving an instrument at a dive bar in the Combat Zone in the seventies was not subconscious anything; it was like putting a “FREE STUFF” sign on the bass.

Elliot flipped hamburgers at a place called the Fatted Calf in Kenmore Square as a day job. He moved out of the South End neighborhood to Jamaica Plain, where he roomed with a friend, another Long Islander, named Allan Kaufman. “Allan, at the time, wanted to be a soundman, mixing sound for bands. And he came across an ad for a band that needed a soundman. We went down; I had nothing to do that night. He was going to see the band, and it turned out to be a Warner Bros. party for Foghat at a place called the Bal-a-Roue skating rink outside Boston,” the whipped-cream-pie gig.

Richard and the Rabbits. And I remember being struck on hearing them. I’d heard a lot of bands around town, and it was the first band I heard where—when you hear local bands in clubs, and they say, “We’re going to play an original now,” it’s like some shitty song. This was the first band I’d heard playing pretty much nothing but their own stuff, and all the songs were good. So I could picture these being records and thought that I had an understanding about what the music was. I could do something with this. I could play to this. And I felt that the guitar player who was in at the time had a little bit more of a fusion kind of approach, and I was seeing it sort of as an edgy kind of pop thing.

Kaufman got the job, and Richard and the Rabbits soldiered on for a few gigs, including at least one at Oliver’s, across from Fenway Park, where Elliot caught them again. But the band broke up soon afterward. Ric and Ben retreated back to an acoustic duo, billed as “Ocasek and Orr,” though their hearts were not in it. A promo photo captures the duo as if they were taking instructions from Carly Simon’s 1972 hit “You’re So Vain.” It shows Ric in a wide-brimmed white fedora, strategically dipped just so, as he gazes off to the side, in a tight, unbuttoned polyester shirt with a necklace. Ben looks a little androgynous, also showing off his chest, with a neckerchief. As the photo is black-and-white, we don’t know if the scarf was apricot, but they do look like they were walking onto a yacht.

Elliot recalls seeing the Ocasek and Orr duo at the Idler, a small pub in the basement of the Blue Parrot, a bar and coffeehouse in Harvard Square. “Allan stayed on with them mixing sound, and Allan also loved playing percussion. So he’d jump up onstage and play congas and stuff with them.”

While the guys were struggling to make headway, Kris Orr was shifting into music retail and promotions. There was obviously some tension, as she worked in the record business while Ben and Ric were treading water. Whenever she found an opportunity, she would promote Ben and Ric’s music. “I kind of felt a responsibility in a way, and I was passionate about it,” she says. She promoted the label’s records at retail and wholesale shops.

Ocasek and Orr recorded demos at Northern Studio,i a new facility in Maynard, started up by Bill Riseman of Aengus (where Milkwood had recorded). The demos featured drummer Glenn Evans, Greg Hawkes, and guitarist Tom Yates helping out. “We went in and recorded live-to-two-track,” Evans recalls. “One song after another.” These recordings include “Never Gonna Get Over You,” a soft-rock song, and “Start It All Again,” which is another confessional ballad from Ric about being aloof and “hard to reach.” There is the first of two versions of “You’re Always Brighter,” which had originally been “She’s Always Brighter,” a midtempo minor-key two-chord R&B number. The first version has an acoustic guitar driving the arrangement and is sung by someone other than Ben or Ric, someone who sounds like Ronald Isley of the Isley Brothers. The singer’s name has been lost to time. Evans said, “It was a disco session, and they brought in some guy to sing. Ric was trying to sell songs to the record companies. He kept feeding them songs, which is what you’re supposed to do. He knew what he was doing.” They also recorded an inventive cover of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday.”

Kaufman would repeatedly tell Ric and Ben about this amazing guitar player he had for a roommate, who was scraping dimes together at Edward’s bar in the Combat Zone. Elliot appreciated the boosterism but would beg Allan not to overhype him. Ric and Ben, though, as well as their wives, loved Allan, and they trusted his opinion. Elliot continues, “I eventually got an invitation to go over to Ben’s apartment in Somerville to have a little jam with them. So I brought my guitar along, and after some small talk, Ben sits there like this [crossing his arms], ‘All right, play something amazing.’ So, of course, I was paralyzed. When someone says something like that, you can’t play at all. So we talked a little more and relaxed a little bit and were having a good time and eventually started playing, and they liked what I was doing. And so I was on their radar.” Elliot started to accompany Allan down to the shows at the Idler and other venues, bringing his guitar along. He would join them on Ric’s songs, as well as covers like “How Long” by Ace. Greg recalls meeting Elliot at one such show at Jonathan Swift’s, a club in Harvard Square.

Ric and Ben had loved Richard and the Rabbits, and in an interview decades later, neither could recall why the band had broken up. They were nevertheless undeterred from a rock-and-roll band format. “Everything before [The Cars] was all learning experience,” Ben explained. “So you get your act together over the years, and yeah, we pretty much knew what we were going to be. We had discussions from time to time.”

“Ric was in the process of thinking about forming his next band,” Elliot says.

And during that time, I remember going over to Ric’s house, I think in Somerville, and his son Eron was a baby with peanut butter and jelly all over his face. And we were so poor. I mean, I remember helping Ric—someone was throwing a chair away on the sidewalk—and helping him bring it up to his apartment. We had nothing. And Ric was formulating his next idea for a band, and that band grew into Cap’n Swing. I’d go up there, and he’d play me records he liked, which was interesting because the thing about The Cars is there’s five different record collections. It’s not like a bunch of guys who went to high school together and have the same record collection.

RIC WOULD PLAY ELLIOT RECORDS BY JOHN CALE, BRIAN ENO, AND THE Velvet Underground, the latter of whom were a little too primitive for Elliot’s tastes. But Elliot loved Chris Spedding’s intense guitar work on Cale’s 1975 Helen of Troy album, which included a version of the Modern Lovers’ “Pablo Picasso.”

Elliot wanted to join a great band that played compelling original material. He was not a driven writer himself; he just wanted to support killer songwriters. Ben’s role was as more of a sounding board for Ric. There was a deep connection and implicit trust between the two, so Ric would generally first play his songs for Ben. “They were so close that I’d often see Ric working on a lyric, and their heads were together, and they would figure out which one of them was going to sing something,” Elliot explains. “And so there was a closeness there because they had already been together almost ten years before The Cars. Two people within a band may have a different dynamic and a different relationship, and Ben was very close with Ric, which I think hurt him later on. I think Ric looked to him with the songs, not necessarily for help with writing the songs, but kind of figuring out who should sing them.”

Ben’s taste was more mainstream, which, when serving as a sort of executive editor for Ric, might have balanced Ric’s edgier sensibilities. As Fuzzbee Morse notes, Ric wrote for whichever band or musical configuration he was in. And his main partner was a handsome natural musician who loved popular and accessible artists, from the Beatles to Abba. “He liked great pop music,” Elliot recalls. “He liked the Beach Boys. We all loved Brian [Wilson]. And I don’t know, the funny thing about Ben is he was very closed, a very private guy, but he seemed to like the usual stuff.”

But apparently Ric had considered moving on from Ben at this stage. In a 1997 profile of the band by Steve Roeser in Goldmine, Elliot said Ben was not going to be in whatever the next band or project Ric was formulating but that Ben “demanded his way back in. Ric wanted to try it on his own. Ben was not having it.”

Elliot was the first puzzle piece of a new band that Ric and Ben started putting together. “Ben loved Elliot,” Kris says. “Elliot is so intelligent.” Greg Hawkes was unavailable; he was out on the road with Martin Mull’s “ . . . and His Fabulous Furniture,” a musical-comedy act. The drummer for that gig was Richard “Schtix” Adelman, who had drummed with the 1960s Massachusetts band Orphan (Greg also did a stint with that band), and then Jonathan Edwards, who collaborated with Orphan. Adelman, who later became Donna Summer’s drummer, recommended Greg to Mull.

“I loved comedy music anyway, like Bonzo Dog Band and the Zappa stuff,” Greg said. “So I was thrilled to be in Martin’s band because it wasn’t just being in a band; it was like being in show business. It was a show. And between the songs, he would do these routines and tell jokes and do these little monologues that would lead into the next song. He was just a funny guy.”

On the Martin Mull tour, Greg was a utility man, a multi-instrumentalist playing saxophone, clarinet, flute, glockenspiel, harmonica, and percussion. It was the first time he had been paid a salary to be a musician. He toured with Mull for about a year and recorded with him on the 1975 Days of Wine and Neuroses album. “We went to the Record Plant [in New York] to record it. I met Elaine [Greg’s wife] at a Martin Mull show when we were at Paul’s Mall [in Boston]. Also, when I was with Martin, we did a show, a Soundstage show for PBS that was an hour show, and it was basically Martin’s thing. For his guests, he had Flo & Eddie. And so that’s where I met Howard [Kaylan] and Mark [Volman, together known as Flo & Eddie].”

While the Mull show was kind of vaudeville, Spike Jones–type stuff, Greg was still in tune with the cutting edge. He was interested in Brian Eno’s work, particularly Another Green World (1975) and his later collaborations with David Bowie, though Greg was not a big Roxy Music fan.

While Greg was out of the picture, Ric, Ben, and Elliot fleshed out a band. Danny Schliftman was a friend of Elliot’s from Berklee and joined on keyboards. Allan Kaufman suggested that Ben should not only move into the role of front man, but do so as a noninstrumentalist singer. Ben reluctantly went along with it. “We had a bass player from Brooklyn, New York, named Todd Roberto, who was heavily influenced by guys like Phil Lesh and Jack Casady,” Elliot says. Glenn Evans was on drums. “Ric had to drive to a gig with Glenn in Glenn’s truck, and he was blasting Buck Owens the whole way, and it just drove Ric nuts, which cracked me up,” Elliot laughs. “He hated it.” So Ric didn’t like the twang very much? “I guess not. He didn’t seem to mind it when I did it on ‘Best Friend’s Girl.’” Evans recalls he and Ric getting along fine, though he found Ric to be aloof.

The new band was christened Cap’n Swing. Kaufman hustled, acting as a de facto manager, booking the band wherever he could, including Mirage, a discotheque in Kenmore Square, where they played on off-nights, Tuesday through Thursday. An ad for that run of shows announces, “Live Performance Nights . . . Featuring An Almost Famous Rock Band,” which was their recurring tagline. The ad had the band logo: a bearded guy in Superman tights and a cape, with a musical note emblazoned on his chest, swinging from a trapeze. It was designed by David Bieber’s sister, Lorna, who was a graphic artist at the Boston Phoenix. David Bieber recalls, “A particularly dismal gig in Laughing Alley near Kenmore Square . . . an amp exploded, and the spewing smoke cleared the room of all twenty-three music lovers in attendance, and it was just a mess. The amp was smoking, and it was just embarrassing. It was frightening. I felt so badly for these guys.”

“We never rehearsed,” Evans says. “We got together; we’d play the skeleton of the songs, ‘Here’s how it goes.’ We just went into the studio. It was ‘One, two, three, four, go,’ and Ric never told anybody, to my knowledge, what to play. It was very free musically.” And they gigged. “We played a lot,” Elliot says. “We worked a lot of college mixers. There was a club in Peabody and Uncle Sam’s in Ipswich.” They played at Li’l earls [sic], another discotheque, in Gloucester. And they really cut their teeth regularly playing at a venue on the South Shore called Bosco’s, located in the basement of the Bell Buoy restaurant and nightclub in Scituate.

Scituate was a gritty seaside town back then, and Barbara Rhind was booking fourteen acts a week at Bosco’s. Rhind had started as a waitress and stinted as a bartender at the Bell Buoy. “The original name was supposed to be the Brass Ass, but the little town of Scituate wouldn’t let us open up under that name,” she laughs. The booker at the club valued Rhind’s opinion about the acts he brought in. When he left, she took over hiring talent.

She says Allan Kaufman

was constantly down there and constantly hounding me. He was just like a gnat, and he just wouldn’t stop pestering me about coming to see this band called Cap’n Swing, and I’d never heard of them. And I guess his persistence—and that is what gets me to book a lot of bands; if you’re persistent with me, I’ll make the effort. So I went to the Mirage on a Tuesday night, and I was mesmerized. I was like, What is this? I mean, this guy’s got me coming into Boston, but I got hooked, and I went back. They played there for three nights, a Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And I took every single night off and went there to go see them. And I said, “There’s something about this band.” I want to say it was the simplicity of it. I ended up booking them after the three nights, and I got ’em for dirt-cheap money just to get ’em into the room. And we did zero business with them.

Most of the acts Rhind was booking were cover bands and show bands—acts that played songs people recognized. Scituate was well removed from Boston both geographically and culturally. Cap’n Swing was a hard sell. “People didn’t know what to think of it. I mean, it was just kind of odd music. I don’t even know how to describe what they did, but they did a lot of obscure tunes. Ben is the one that stood out—his looks and his voice, but I was shocked by what he wore. He had this karate outfit on, and I was sitting there thinking, ‘Does he have eye makeup on?’ And I said, ‘Oh, god, I don’t know how that’s going to go over in this little tiny town.’”

Elliot considers Rhind’s support as so fundamental to the development of The Cars that she was one of the first three names he suggested as interview subjects. Rhind even allowed Cap’n Swing to rehearse at the club.

Ben and I would be sitting there, and Ric would be up on the stage, and he’d yell over, “Hey, Ben, what do you think of this?” And he’d play something, and Ben would look at me and say, “What do you think?” And I said, “I think it’s a hit.” And to me, I used to always say, not just to Ben, because we were pretty good friends back then, but to a lot of bands, if I can remember a song that is an original when I walk out of a room, that, to me, is a hit. The more simple that it is, the easier it is for people to remember. And one of the things I used to always tell a band is, “Start your sets out with a cover and end it with a cover. Put all your originals in the middle.” And people will say, “Oh, man, that sounds really good. Where do I know that song from?”

Rhind had great ears, and, like the booking agent who preceded her, the band trusted her opinion. “She also had a very special kind of friendship with Ben,” Elliot says.

Rhind explains, “There was a relationship, but we were off and on. I mean, back then, god, I was dating musicians left and right. I was running a club, and there’s no way to keep a relationship when you’re doing that.” She remembers Ben as a confident dreamer. “We used to go out to dinner a lot. I used to take him to this place. It was called the Inn for All Seasons in Scituate, but he didn’t have any money, so I always paid for everything back then. And then a couple of times we had gone up on Newbury Street [in Boston]. This is when he was still in Cap’n Swing, and we used to go into the dress shops there, and he would sit there in a chair, and he had me try on all these dresses. And he said, ‘One day, I’m going to buy one of those for you when I become famous.’ This guy never stopped dreaming. He knew he was going places.” She adds with a chuckle, “I never got the dress. But yeah, we remained good friends, and over the years, he stayed in touch, a phone call here, a phone call there. And even when he was in a relationship with somebody, and he was living in Weston [after the success of The Cars], I used to go up to the house up there. He had even bought me a car. So Ben was a super-generous person.”

Cap’n Swing recorded demos of at least thirteen songs at Northern Studio in Maynard on July 13, 1976. Here’s a partial list. Most if not all of these all came from the same session: “Bye Bye Love” (with Ric on lead vocal), “Jezebel,” “Goes on Sleeping,” “You’re Always Brighter,” “Come Back Down,” “So Far Away,” and “Indigo,” which showed up again as “Wake Me Up” as a demo on the expanded edition of The Cars.

Most of the demos can be heard online. Aside from a new version of the Milkwood song “Dream Trader,” the tracks lean forward. There’s “City Lights”—the name of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore and publishing company—a virtual homage to the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” albeit faster. But with few exceptions, Ric doesn’t sound as if he’s trying to sound like any of his influences or catch whatever the current commercial trends were on these Cap’n Swing recordings. Now he was in tune with and even anticipating the zeitgeist. The following year, he would be on the leading edge. With the benefit of hindsight, you can hear how close the songs are from metamorphosing into The Cars. Take the song “Strawberry Moonlight.” The production is crisp; it sounds fresh and sharp. Elliot blazes a solo that is unmistakably him, hinting toward those he did on “My Best Friend’s Girl” and “Shake It Up.” Ben attacks the vocal in the same way he did later on “Bye Bye Love.”

Some of the songs Cap’n Swing played formed the basis of or became Cars songs. For example, Elliot explains they were already doing “Just What I Needed” in the waning days of Cap’n Swing, and Danny Schliftman, who became known as Danny Louis and later joined Gov’t Mule, “came up with that hook. But he didn’t want to get a synthesizer. He refused. The music called for it, and it was kind of a new thing, and we always tried to be on the cutting edge of what was new. That was certainly an aspect of The Cars. And Ric was a new freak all the time.”

On the Cap’n Swing version of “Bye Bye Love,” it’s not Ben but Ric talk-singing more like Lou Reed and early Bryan Ferry. The chorus phrasing is different. And the band itself sounds looser, spacier, and draggy. But the single missing element is Greg’s synths that came on The Cars’ version. The Cap’n Swing music seems to almost be begging to evolve into Cars songs. “But I mean, it didn’t really have a chance to because all we had was a Fender Rhodes electric piano,” Elliot points out. “So it ended up having a little bit more of a Steely Dan kind of texture. It seemed clear to us that the songs could call for that kind of treatment. And Greg was already into that stuff.”

Cap’n Swing was often compared to Steely Dan, but that is not quite precise. It’s much more like The Cars, but it’s just that the right pieces were not quite set into the right places. The attitude is present, especially in the lead vocals, and the material is almost there. Sure, some of it meanders into jam land, but what is more striking is that most of the recorded tracks have big sharp guitar and organic and crisp production—more in common with the contemporaneous pub-rock scene in England—artists like Graham Parker and Dr. Feelgood, as well as hard rockers Thin Lizzy.

Ric was already interested in this sort of simplicity, eager to eschew improvisations and distill his writing. He is heard on these recordings as not only coming out from under his influences but gaining confidence enough in his own voice to allow his preferred influences to remain, undergirding his maturing songwriting. In 1979, he explained that Cap’n Swing was based on what he called “the real new wave, like the Velvet Underground in 1968. As far as New Wave is now concerned . . . Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, and the Modern Lovers were your real New Wave bands in ’72 that were playing the same stuff a lot of English bands are playing anyway. I was punk when I was 16 years old.”

He was pushing back on the then term du jour “new wave.” The term nouvelle vague (new wave) was first coined in 1957 to describe the budding innovative auteurs of French cinema, like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. In the early seventies, such music writers as Dave Marsh and Nick Kent revived the term to describe New York groups like the Velvet Underground and the glitter-rocking New York Dolls. As Ric pointed out, Boston’s Modern Lovers would have fitted the bill as well.

“Punk” was likely first applied to music when Lester Bangs used the term to describe Iggy Pop’s persona in his Creem review of the Stooges’ Fun House album in 1970. That same year, the band Suicide proudly took up the name to bill themselves as “Punk Music by Suicide.” That duo—Alan Vega and Martin Rev—would have a direct influence on The Cars. Sex Pistols impresario and manager Malcolm McLaren applied “punk” to his Sex Pistols. By 1976, the English music papers used “new wave” and “punk rock” interchangeably when covering the Clash, Pistols, and other bands. It caught on in New York as a tool for the underground press to categorize the music coming out of CBGB, like the Ramones, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, Blondie, Television, and Talking Heads. It did not matter that Mink DeVille had little to do with these diverse bands; they played CBGB during the same months, so they got filed under punk and new wave, too.

Like those film directors, most of whom resisted the reductionist descriptor, punk rockers were operating outside the mainstream with a DIY (do it yourself) ethos, finding alternative venues to stage original music that challenged the status quo; rebelling against what they considered outdated, bloated, and overly commercialized pop and rock; and aiming their appeal at disaffected youth, with a political consciousness. Those filmmakers and these young musicians shared many artistic values with the 1950s–1960s Beats.

As most labels are, it was ultimately an unsatisfying and frustrating classification. “Rock” signified something stale and bloated, and “punk rock” quickly became another dumb marketing term. But writers, radio programmers, and record marketers recognized something novel and sought new ways to describe it, so “new wave” stuck around for almost ten years.

Ric was exaggerating by claiming he was “punk when [he] was 16,” but he did get into the music when he befriended the even younger host of the first punk-rock radio show in America. Edward Hyson was another Cleveland expat in Boston. He had reinvented himself as pink-haired “Oedipus,” and in 1975 he began hosting “The Demi-’monde with Oedipus,” his show on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology radio station WTBS (renamed WMBR when Ted Turner bought the call letters for Turner Broadcast Network). “Ric would come down with reels of Cap’n Swing tapes. And he would play them for me,” Oedipus says. “We would talk about it, and then we’d sit there and talk about music, and I’d interview him. Ric was driven, and we became really, really friendly.” Oedipus would move to WBCN in 1977, just in time for The Cars’ debut, and ushered the station through its most commercially successful period, hosting Nocturnal Emissions, his weekly show that featured all-new music, continually turning on listeners to exciting artists.

One of the artists Oedipus played was Patti Smith, who had an immediate influence on Ric. The Patti Smith Group released their debut, Horses, in 1975 and Radio Ethiopia in 1976. Smith’s poetic lyrics were supported by an excellent band that featured her artistic partner, Lenny Kaye. Like Smith, Ric also wrote poetry. In 1976, he published a fifteen-page booklet of poems and pictures, illustrated by Laurie Paradise, called Freely Sing and Paradise. The poems are mostly surrealist free verse (though some have rhyme schemes), filled with wordplay, giddy alliteration, and Kerouac-like neologism mash-ups like “shadyspace” and “noisicians.” Some personal insights could be read into lines like “Sometimes I crescendo with thoughts I cannot shape,” from “sitting still” (like e. e. cummings, Ric uses mostly lowercase throughout). The poem “grandfather 2” is a bald piece of autobiography, describing the titular figure as “a cold unaffectionate man like my father” who “took a swing at my favorite uncle from his death bed.” Ric left five copies on consignment at Grolier Book Shopii in Harvard Square, “just to see if anyone would take it. I never even went back to collect any money—that’s not what I did it for.”

Like Ric, Elliot had an adventurous streak, eclectic tastes, and an open mind but found little to love in punk rock.

I didn’t feel much from most of those bands. I couldn’t really learn from it. I didn’t care about it being some social movement. We weren’t on the dole in America. It was not like a political thing. So it just seemed like a chance for anybody to be in a band and play music, whether they were a musician or not. I really dug Chris Spedding’s playing because he was an English studio player, but he could play primitively. But it was informed by knowledge. Most punk-rock bands would more or less be playing at the very edge of their ability. And I liked something in reserve with Spedding. You knew he could play like [jazz guitarist] Jim Hall if he wanted to, yet he’s playing this totally fierce, in-your-face rock stuff. And I liked that. That had an influence on me.

Of course, this is precisely Elliot’s reputation among guitarists. He’ll play a nice, catchy little ditty, a song within a song, a mini-composition. But he’s just showing you the tip of the iceberg because he proceeds to rip your face off. He plays concisely, then unleashes some flash on a solo—here it is, and now it’s gone.

The pieces, in the form of Cap’n Swing members and their image, were still not quite in place. Maxanne Sartori (to whom Ric gave a shout-out in the Richard and the Rabbits song “Beantown”) heard something she liked in the new demos. Maxanne had been hired by WBCN in 1970 after popular deejay Charles Laquidara flippantly referred to women as chicks while ad-libbing a public service announcement. That brought women protesters to the studio, one or more of whom unloaded actual baby chicks on the desk of the station manager. The pressure was on for this ostensibly progressive radio station to demonstrate that they practiced what they preached. They were compelled to hire a woman as on-air talent. Sartori, all of twenty, was lured away from a station in Seattle. She took over the 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. slot. She had been known as “Max” on air in Seattle, but in Boston, she was Maxanne.

“When I got to BCN,” she recalls, “Arnie Ginsburgiii [the general manager] made me say ‘Maxanne’ because he said, ‘Your voice is so low, they’ll think you’re a man.’ The whole idea of getting me out there was they would have a female, and the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] wouldn’t bother them.” She adds with an endearing sneer, “A bunch of idiots.” (She later found out that there had been an office pool to see which male employee would be the first to have sex with her.)

Maxanne immediately started boosting local talent she found worthy. She is credited for breaking Aerosmith. By choice, Maxanne had moved into an overnight shift, “the stupidest thing I ever did,” she said. “It’s just depressing. You never get to see your friends anymore. You never get to go to movies anymore.” But Aerosmith’s front man, Steven Tyler, followed her like a stray cat back from one of the band’s shows. “It’s all Maxanne Sartori and WBCN’s fault,” Tyler confirmed for WBCN jock and author Carter Alan. “We were ruffling our feathers one night when we caught her attention at a club called Paul’s Mall. And before you knew it, I was sitting on her lap in the studio.” He explained that it was her spinning “Dream On” that made the daytime male jocks perk up and pay attention, especially as she was known for blasting the music at deafening volumes on the studio monitors. “Maxanne would play ‘Dream On’ all the time, maybe twice a show, and we hated her for it,” said Laquidara. “But she absolutely, unequivocally broke Aerosmith, and we owe her big time.” She was the biggest WBCN supporter of young Bruce Springsteen as well. “I had Bruce Springsteen with half the band. I had Bruce on two, three separate times because nobody else wanted him on their show. How tone-deaf can you possibly be? They were just, ‘He’s trying to be Bob Dylan.’”

Maxanne caught Cap’n Swing at the Newbury Street Music Fair, sponsored by WBCN, later that summer of 1976, which clinched her support. “They were amazing!” she told Jon Pareles in 1979. “Here was this band I’d never heard of, that sounded like a cross between Roxy Music and Steely Dan.” She started spinning the demos of “Twilight Superman” and “Come Back Down” on WBCN.

Maxanne brought her friend David Robinson down to catch the band at Paul’s Mall. She had lived for six months around 1972 with David and the rest of the Modern Lovers in a house in Cohasset, a coastal town down on the South Shore, which they rented for cheap in the winter offseason. “There was me, Jonathan [Richman], David, Ernie [Brooks], and Jerry [Harrison]. So five people, and I think my share of the rent was like sixty dollars a month.”

But by late 1976, David had been out to Los Angeles to play with a band called the Pop and was back in Boston playing with an early punk band called DMZ, fronted by Jeff “Monoman” Conolly (who later formed the Lyres). Formed by guitarist JJ Rassler (Maxanne’s “aide-de-camp,” in her words, at WBCN), DMZ had the amped-up ’60s garage-band approach, like a more raw Lyres. They would sound a little like the Sonics or the Stooges, oftentimes with Conolly’s Farfisa organ wheezing in the mix. They rehearsed in the basement of a brownstone on Strong Place in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, where Oedipus lived with five other people. “Bands would come to town, and they would play multiple nights at the Rat,” Oedipus says, using the more fitting nickname for the basement of the Rathskeller in Kenmore Square. It was Boston’s CBGB. Both provided rare homes (swampy hellholes can feel awfully homey to a real rock-and-roll clientele) to bands that played adventurous original material back when nightclubs almost exclusively hired Top 40 cover acts. As Brett Milano, who wrote a weekly column called “Cellars by Starlight” in the Boston Phoenix, noted, “The Rat was a dump, but it was our dump. . . . The men’s room toilets finally gave out in 1987 and were never seen again; by the nineties, it was down to one working urinal.”

Oedipus continues, “So when the Dead Boys would come—and they were from Cleveland, so we bonded over that—Stiv Bators would sleep in the bathtub. Guys would sleep all over the house. The Shirts would sleep there, or Mink DeVille. When Willy [DeVille] came to town with his wife, Toots, they’d be in my room, and I’d go to sleep, and then when I got up in the morning, they’d go to bed. We were all kind of in it together, and we were all united by this scene. That wasn’t being heard on the radio. It wasn’t being talked much about in the press. It was still burgeoning, and it was very, very exciting times.”

It was JJ Rassler who helped Oedipus get started at WBCN by telling him that Charles Laquidara was looking for a writer for his morning show. Once he got his foothold, Oedipus started spinning this exciting new music overnight on this major station. “We were really at the forefront. New York had CBGB, but that music was not played on WNEW. They were way late, way after ’BCN. LA? Not even close. They had ‘Rodney on the ROQ’ [Rodney Bingenheimer], but he was just all over the place. But he didn’t gravitate to punk rock.” Glam was more his thing. “The Runaways was a perfect band for him, and [LA] didn’t really have a great punk-rock band until X. We had a scene here. And then, bands from England, they would start in Boston, whether it’s the Police playing the Rat or the Clash, the Jam, they all came here first. Hilly Kristal was sending up bands from CBGB, whether it be Blondie, Richard Hell, or Television. And then Jim Harold from the Rat would send bands down to them. We never generated quite the same impact. Some of these local bands were great. They were terrific, but they just weren’t good enough.” On September 26, Cap’n Swing and DMZ shared a bill at a daylong benefit at the Rat.

Maxanne bonded with Ric immediately. “I found out that we almost went to the same college [Antioch],” she says over takeout Chinese food in her indigo-painted, tapestry-clad Brookline condo. She emphasizes that while she and Ric became close, “I never, ever, ever had sex with him. He was a married man. I mean, his wife was incredible. Suzanne, when I first met him, he brought me over to their house and they had a two-year-old son at the time, Eron. She was cooking dinner for [Ric], and she made a point of showing me what she was cooking. And it was the most bland food you could ever imagine. I think she was boiling chicken. I think he had Crohn’s disease, and that’s why he was so thin. And he had no hair. He wore wigs, and he had no eyelashes.”

Ben certainly had the hair. “He didn’t just have the hair,” Maxanne added. “Believe me, he worked on that body. He was staying at Suzanne and Ric’s house, which was a very nice house. When I first met Ben, Ric pulled me aside and said, ‘He’s a whore hound.’” Ric told her to ignore Ben. “They balanced each other out.” Ric was intense, and Ben was out for good times.

She and Ric “were just simpatico. We started going to gigs, and I don’t think he really liked going to the club scene, which was basically the Rat and the Club at the time.” Ric trusted her and sought her advice. “I told him the name sucked, first of all,” she says. “Nobody knew what a Captain Swing was. To me, it sounded like Lawrence Welk Dancers, and that does date me.” She goes further, saying about the band, “I didn’t like anything about it except the fact that Ric was really smart. He worked his ass off.”

For drummer Glenn Evans, this was not just another band. “When you play music all your life, and you’re in lots and lots of bands, maybe two or three times in your life, you’ll be in a room with musicians where it just clicks. It’s something special. It just is. And that’s what that band was. It was one of those bands where we didn’t even talk about the music. It was just the creative input of five people. And that’s what came out with Ric’s songs.”

But Evans felt they were not getting anywhere. “I hung out with Ric a lot when he lived in Newton.” Ric and Suzanne had moved to a rented carriage house in the suburb. “I used to go over and just hang out all day. We’d sit at the kitchen table, plot and scheme, and talk. He always told me to hang in there, but I finally just couldn’t. I went back to work with the band I left. I needed to pay my bills, and I did it as long as I could.”

Evans was replaced by Kevin Robichaud. Ben and Ric were becoming exhausted by the seemingly endless frustration of trying to launch a band and gain a foothold. The band made their way down to the storied Max’s Kansas City in New York for a gig as a showcase for potential management and labels, including Steve Leber and David Krebs, who managed Aerosmith at the time. “I went down squeezed in Ric’s Volkswagen,” Maxanne recalls. She had also called hip tastemakers she knew in the city to come and see this new band, including Ramones manager and renowned publicist Danny Fields and Bebe Buell, a model and singer. Buell could not make it, as she was getting ready to travel with her new boyfriend, Steven Tyler. But Ric called her, and they had dinner together. Right off the bat, Ric warned her about Tyler and Aerosmith. She recalls, “He told me to be careful around Aerosmith, that they took lots of drugs, and that Steven was a little crazy. He had a lot to say. He had a lot of opinions.” They clicked and would maintain a friendship for most of Ric’s life.

The showcase was a disaster. As Maxanne describes it, “I watched the show, and the first thing I told [Ric] was, ‘It looks like you guys met at a bus stop, that you were just sort of there, and, ‘Oh, let’s start a band.’ There was no continuity to it, no reasoning.” Around this time, Elliot often wore a beret. Ben would wear eye makeup, armed only occasionally with castanets or other percussion instruments. David Robinson recalled Ben wearing sandals or flip-flops onstage when he saw them. It was time to reconsider their presentation.

“That’s what all the so-called experts said, too,” Elliot concurs.

We stayed at A. K.’s [Allan Kaufman’s family] house in Long Island, Five Towns. And we went and played Max’s, and there were a couple of big management companies there. Leber and Krebs were there, and Bill Aucoin [manager of Kiss and Piper, which featured Billy Squier, who was later in a romantic relationship with Maxanne] was there, and both groups of management companies gave us kind of similar criticisms. They said, “The songs are great; they’re a little bit jammy; could be more concise. Their image is all over the place.” Ben was wearing a silk karate gi and not playing bass. Todd had wild hair and looked like a San Francisco rock musician. The rest of us were just kind of normal. Ric had that extreme black hair and sunglasses, kind of a “New York underground” kind of look. They said, “You’ve got to figure that out.” And they didn’t like the name, and they gave us all these criticisms. So we went back to Boston with our tails between our legs to fix those things and to right those wrongs.

Ben explained, “There was too much space between five people.” Later, he confessed to journalist Mark Mehler, “It was a big disappointment to me. I was doing out-front lead singing, and that never felt right. It wasn’t until The Cars that things started feeling right.”

Maxanne continues, “I said, ‘The rhythm section sounds like cocktail jazz or something. I don’t know; it’s not good.’ Ric said, ‘It can be better.’ And Ben was the lead singer. So Ben didn’t have an instrument then. So I said, ‘I’ve got some suggestions. Fire the rhythm section. What instruments does Ben play?’ And he said, ‘Ben can play anything.’ ‘Okay. Ben’s going to be your new bass player, and I want you to audition David Robinson.’”

Footnotes

i Northern would later be the place where Talking Heads recorded some of their The Name of This Band LP, a session for WCOZ.

ii Now known as the Grolier Poetry Book Shop.

iii Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg was a radio legend who had become general manager of WBCN in 1970.

Chapter 7

DAVID AND THE CARS

OF THE THREE SURVIVING MEMBERS OF THE CARS, DAVID WAS THE ONLY one whom I had not met at the outset of this book. So I suggested we meet on his home turf, the famously picturesque Rockport, Massachusetts, just under an hour from my house. It had been a long time since I had been there, so this was a great excuse for a short road trip. Little did I know I would be hanging out with a guy who is like the mayor up there. Not that his local stature is at all surprising; after all, he is a legitimate rock star, an essential cog in a huge-selling band, not to mention his credibility as a proto-punk pioneer in the Modern Lovers and DMZ.

It was one of those sparkling Massachusetts September days when summer is holding on but has let go of the obnoxious heat and humidity. I arrived early and reacquainted myself with the scenic downtown that rests along the crescent-shaped Back Harbor. I was waiting on the deep-covered porch in front of the rambling old wooden building that houses his gallery and shop where he sells the jewelry he creates. In his emails, he was polite, if perfunctory. Given the outgoing Elliot and friendly Greg, I expected David might be quieter, despite the past interviews I had read or heard. But there were not many of those to sample. And Greg described him as “more of a recluse than I am.”

After I took a few pictures of the buildings across Main Street against a cloudless blue sky, evoking former Cape Ann artist Edward Hopper’s paintings, I saw David striding up to the porch in a fitted Triumph-motorcycle T-shirt, jeans, and long white hair and snowy beard. I thought to myself, “I wish I could be so cool in my fifties, never mind in twenty more years.” He forgot the keys to his shop, but we stood there briefly gazing through the windows at Art Deco cocktail shakers, old movie posters, and, beyond that, glass cases showcasing his jewelry.

David is garrulous, so much so that I wished I had my recorder going as we walked. But I wanted to ease into our conversation and get comfortable with each other. He suggested a place around the bend for lunch, and we walked over, with him waving and popping into his girlfriend’s shop. It felt like we were strolling along on some location for a Hallmark Channel rom-com targeted at older ladies. I mean, the guy looks like the best-case scenario casting for pharmaceutical ads—you know, the ones where attractive and fit actors are grayed up a little to show they’re retired but living super-active lives.

We made our way to the restaurant and were seated outside in the back along the harbor. We were having such a pleasant time that we decided to go to another place for coffee, taking it to go so he could show me his newly restored circa two-hundred-year-old white clapboard colonial house, stunning in its detail and setting, about a half mile up the road from his shop. There, he shared some new passions. He was heading down to Boston that evening to see Babymetal, a Kawaii metal/J-pop band. He showed me some YouTube videos of them and some other artists, like Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, also from Japan. He told me how he was so impressed with her that he once created a custom piece of jewelry and managed to have someone at the record company present it to her personally in Japan. He met her backstage after one of her performances in New York. When someone translated to introduce David, she told him how she had watched and loved Cars videos on YouTube. His enthusiasm is infectious, and his energy level is envious.

The only Massachusetts native in The Cars, David Robinson was born in 1949 and grew up in the suburb of Woburn, the second child of four. His father, Guy, had gone to England in the air corps in World War II and met David’s mother, Margaret, who went by Rene. “She got married when she was seventeen and came over to America a year later or so,” David explains. “She only went to school up to the sixth grade, then the war interrupted schoolkids, and they were taken away from their homes to be safe and sent out to the countryside. Her childhood was fucked up. She was, luckily, intelligent, but she just missed that. The war took all that away from her, and she had three sisters and four brothers or something like that. They were a great family. My father even moved to England.”

His parents relocated to the States to raise a family in Guy’s native Massachusetts, where Guy first took a job at the Watertown Arsenal, followed by a position at Hanscom Air Force Base in nearby Bedford. “He worked super-hard at three jobs,” says David. “He only had one interest outside of work, and that was reading the paper and complaining about politics.” Guy was a liberal with a heightened sense of justice. “He’s the kind of guy that would go up to the State House to yell at people,” David laughs.

An ambitious kid, David managed three paper routes. Like many aspiring musicians in the predigital era, he would take a radio to bed with him, listening until the wee small hours of the morning.

I was obsessed with music before the Beatles. I had a little transistor radio, and I would keep it under my pillow and go to bed and then wait to hear a song. If it took three hours, I’d get like five or six hours of sleep if I wanted to hear a particular song. My sister was two years older, so she was already buying records, stuff like Bobby Vee. So that was when I just realized that I had an obsession; I had to listen to music, whatever the latest music was, I had to listen to it. So I went and saw shows that didn’t have age restrictions. I would see those traveling shows with five acts, unbelievable acts, Gene Pitney, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and other acts on a bill. My father would drive me there and sit in the car. If there was a bar, he would go get a drink in a bar, and then I would meet him outside. I went by myself!

He says his dad could have been an A&R guy.

He tried to get into the music business probably in the late fifties when Elvis came out. I think he literally saw Elvis on TV, and all of his friends were like, “What garbage! Look at that guy.” He said to them, “No, no, he’s going to be really big. This is going to be really big and change things.” Then he did it with the Beatles. The Beatles came out, and I wasn’t that impressed at first. I was listening to the Rolling Stones. I saw the Beatles in their jackets and stuff. The Stones were much cooler. So my father said, “They’re going to be bigger than Elvis.” I said, “No, they’re not!” Two months later, I could see what an idiot I was.

LIKE THE OTHERS IN THE CARS, DAVID BECAME A BIG BEATLES FAN.

David remembers his reaction when he learned that he had seen Ben in Life magazine.

When that issue came out, it was shocking. And they showed examples of Americans, like a whole family with Beatle haircuts, Beatle wigs, all this shit. But the picture . . . I remembered—well, there’s a picture of the people in London, of course, with super-long hair—but the next picture that I had burnt into my memory was Ben’s picture. And I would tell people, “Yeah, they showed this guy in a band or something, getting his hair cut. He’s got a net on his hair.” And then the guy behind him is blurry. I remembered the picture before I even got a copy later. I could just remember all of the details. I had thumbed through that thing. So I think I overheard, years later, after I knew Ben, somebody mentioned it, and I said, “Ben, were you in Life magazine?!” And this is him: [mimes taking a drag from a cigarette, then low mumble] “Yep.” I’m losing it. I’m going, “Ben, that was fucking incredible! I remember everything about your picture.” He’s just, “Yep.” Ben was a man of few words.

David saved up his money and bought a drum set at the age of fourteen.

So I saw a whole bunch of great shit early, early on, at places like the Surf Ballroom in Nantasket Beach. Then, when I was in high school, maybe fifteen or sixteen, we spent most of the summer playing at a club up in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. It was like heaven. We played at night and went to the beach and tried to pick up girls and swim and surf, and then go back to play at the club every night. I think we had maybe one night off. We did all covers, but we were really good. We came in second in the state battle of the bands, but we were beaten out by kids that were five and ten years older and had saxophones in the band. But I think they were just impressed with our repertoire.

Since his mother Rene’s family was across the Atlantic, David was well traveled as a youth, giving him an edge in music and fashion. “I went to England in ’67 or something and brought back the Jimi Hendrix album before it came out in America. So we learned a whole bunch of songs and started playing them at shows, and people were like, ‘What the fuck is that?’” During these shows, David would switch from the drum set to lead vocals. He recalls singing songs by the band Love. “My sister and I walked down Carnaby Street, and I was like, what the fuck? I remember seeing two guys that had hair down to here [gestures around his shoulders], but they were really well dressed, dressed cool. So I bought a whole bunch of mod clothes, brought those back, and that caused a stir, too.” He says there was a shop in Woburn called Men’s Shop, whose proprietor was a fantastic harmonica player. “I remember him trying to sell us mod clothes, and he goes, ‘You boys are going to like these new mod clothes that I got’ [laughs]. He’s showing me mod clothes. But I did buy a couple of things, including a sweater that I wore on the cover of the Panorama album—that still fit me—from 1966. It’s a checkered black-and-white thing. It’s kind of fake fur.”

Guy Robinson was ever supportive of David and tolerant of those outside of the mainstream.

He got me through all the music and long-hair shit. My mother was like, “David should cut his hair, and it’d be less trouble [in school].” He goes, “They’re supposed to teach him, not tell him what he’s supposed to look like, and I’m going up to the school.” She goes, “Don’t go up there. Please don’t go up there.” He said, “They can’t do this to him!” Maybe things had progressed in hipper towns, but in Woburn, when I lived there, I was the only kid in the town with long hair. People used to attack me on the street. “Hey, faggot! Fuck you! What the fuck?” And jumping out of their cars and chasing me and shit. I got through high school. I was protected by a tough kid, but they fucking hated me. And then I got tired of school. I hated it.

After graduating high school, he found his way into a job with a wholesale record distributor that soon opened a record shop, New England Music City, in Kenmore Square in Boston, where he moved over the summer of 1968. He got to meet many musicians, and he gained a lot of listening experience and was exposed to new record releases.

But nothing prepared him for his first encounter with Jonathan Richman. Richman had come back to Boston after hanging out in New York with his idols, the Velvet Underground, and was busking solo on the Cambridge Common, where concerts were also being staged outdoors. The Allman Brothers lived in Boston for a year or two and played a show there as well. David recalls, “I thought, this is fucking great. This is incredible.” But when he brought others to see Richman, “my friends were like, ‘He’s so fucking awful. What are you talking about?’ Everyone hated him. ‘He’s terrible. We can’t stand him.’ So I tried to bring them back a second time, and maybe they’d say, ‘Oh, he’s okay,’ or something. But each time I saw him, I was like, ‘If there were four more guys like him, they would be the most intense, incredible band.’ I didn’t picture myself in it, just some other guys.”

Serendipitously, Richman strolled into the record store one day, and David went to speak to him, slightly starstruck. He noticed that Richman was writing out an index card to post on the bulletin board, looking for a drummer for the band he wanted to start.

I’m working there, and I’m near our corkboard that has band shit. And he comes in. I thought, “It’s the guy from the Cambridge Common! I’m going to talk to him.” So I’m getting ready to talk to him, and he always had a bag with him, like a shoulder bag. He takes out this thing, and he’s got those little cards, and it says—I wish I could remember what it said. But it was something like “Jonathan Richman of Cambridge Common Fame [laughs] is starting a band,” and an exclamation point. “We need a bass player and a drummer.” So I’m looking at him. I said, “Jonathan, I’m a drummer, and I love your music. I saw you on the Cambridge Common,” and this and that. It took about five minutes, and he said, “You are the drummer.” I didn’t have to play or anything.

It started with just Richman and David. “He came over to the house that I was staying in with loads of hippies and pot dealers and shit on Brookline Ave. We practiced in the basement there, and my friends would try to play along with Jonathan’s stuff, and they were like, ‘He can’t even play guitar.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but isn’t he great? Isn’t he crazy? He’s intense.’”

They added John Felice on guitar. Felice went on to form the Real Kids. Rolfe Anderson was on bass. Felice and Anderson were replaced by Jerry Harrison and Ernie Brooks. Their first gig was at Simmons College, and a group from Andy Warhol’s Factory scene made the trip up to see them. “Gerard Malanga was there,” David says. “He’s dancing around. All the girls [students] were like, ‘This sucks!’ They hated us.”

Their second show was supposed to be on the Cambridge Common, but it was rained out, so they moved it indoors to the Cambridge YMCA. “Jonathan had on a little boy’s sweater,” David recalls.

Rolfe Anderson was wearing a doctor’s shirt, like Ben Casey, which was part of why Jonathan didn’t like him; Jonathan didn’t like the doctor’s shirt for some reason. So we do our show. I’m just playing, and I’m not even looking at the audience. So we get offstage. We start to walk down the steps on the side, and there’s a little cluster of people gathered there; right at the front, there are two hippie girls, and I am not exaggerating: they were crying. They said, “Your music was so beautiful. It changed our lives.” And we’re like, “Wow, this is what we wanted.” Then I start to notice between their heads, a big biker guy, and I can see that he’s worked up. He’s starting to go like [making an enraged face and thrusting his chin]. This is what he’s doing. He’s huffing and puffing. Eventually, he’s had enough, and he pushes through the two girls, and he comes up. I can’t remember if he poked his finger in my face or Jonathan’s face or just in between us. He goes, “You guys are the worst fucking band I’ve ever heard in my life.” And he said, “Not only that,” he said, “if I ever see you again, play anywhere, I’m going to kill you.” So, Jonathan and I have the same reaction that we had to the two girls. We both looked at each other and went, “Yeah!”

The Modern Lovers played relatively few shows. The ones they did tended to draw crowds in the low double digits. But they got great press, which led to labels and managers wanting to sign them. They went out to LA in the spring of 1972, recording demos for Warner Bros. with John Cale and with Alan Mason for A&M, a very rare instance of two labels cofinancing a scouting trip for a prospective act. They did subsequent sessions in June 1972 with Kim Fowley. “Kim Fowley was a bottom-feeder,” David says. “An interesting guy and a smart guy, but a sleazy fucking creepy guy, too. I got along great with him. He was funny, but he was a horrible guy.” Fowley came to see the band in Massachusetts. But having no place to stay, he crashed at the Robinsons’ house in Woburn. “He gets up in the morning. He won my mother over because he’s charming. So he got up, goes ‘Mrs. Robinson, for breakfast today, I would like two eggs.’ And she’d go, ‘You’re lucky I like you.’”

The band moved down to Cohasset, where Maxanne Sartori lived with them. “Jerry, he was always thinking of angles,” David says as he recalls how they ended up here.

So he was like, “We have to get a place that we can live in and rehearse in.” Then he was looking in the paper, and there were ads for summer houses in the winter. So we went to two different houses. The first one was sort of an ordinary family summer vacation house, but it had four or five bedrooms. So we rented that, and we had a little bit of room to set up a living room and practice. But right across the street was a giant colonial house with a tennis court and flower gardens and fountains. So the next year, Ernie and Jerry put on suits and ties. They found out that the guy who owned the house went to Harvard. So they went in there, and the guy was like, “I’d be happy to rent to Harvard men!” Little did they know what the fuck we were going to do with that house.

THEY SET UP MARSHALL AMPS, DRUMS, AND A PA SYSTEM AND REHEARSED in the living room.

David had no trouble attracting the attention of women. “These poor girls who were in love with David, they would come to the house to give him a ride home,” Maxanne recalls.

Then they, of course, would expect him to say, “Hey, baby, want to spend the night?” He’d be like, “Thanks for the ride.” He didn’t have a car. He couldn’t afford to have a car. Jonathan Richman didn’t have a car. I think Jerry and Ernie shared a car, but they were Harvard students. They were rich kids from the suburbs. They were sort of babysitting Jonathan. Jonathan asked me if he could smoke some of my pot once, and I let him do it. And evidently, Jerry did not like that. He said, “Don’t you realize how naive and innocent Jonathan is? He can’t do that.” He was only nineteen [he might have actually been twenty or twenty-one], and he lived in a very sheltered Jewish home.

David met Miss Christine Frka in New York through Danny Fields. Miss Christine was a member of the GTO’s, an LA band formed with Pamela Des Barres and other groupies under the mentorship of Frank Zappa. Christine and David became involved.

I started going out with her, and we came back, and we were in Cohasset. She came up a couple of times to visit. Then she decided she was going to go back to California and work on her career, which probably she was thinking about acting, and I don’t know exactly what she had in mind. So she was there for a few months and got a job at a doctor’s office or something like that. I had no phone or anything. I had no money. So we were sending letters back and forth. She started to send me letters, and she seemed way too happy to learn how to give injections to people. “I’m so good at it now.” But I didn’t know what she was doing. I wasn’t there.

So she shows up with her girlfriend, who was Katie Walston, the daughter of Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian. [Christine arrived in the fall of 1972.] And she tells me before she comes, “I’m not on drugs. I know you guys don’t like ’em. So I’m not bringing any drugs. I’m not on drugs.”

She overdoses the first night that she arrives. She’s only there for eight hours, and she ODs. She had woken me up and said, “I need ice.” I said, “What for?” She said, “To put in my needle mark.” So I said, “What the fuck?! What’re you doing?” She said, “Don’t worry, don’t worry. There’s nothing . . . Don’t worry about it at all.” I’m sure what she did, without me being there, was she just forgot about it. Shot up again. Jerry found her.

CHRISTINE DIED ON NOVEMBER 5, 1972. “I HAD TO CALL HER BROTHER, who I’d never met or spoken to, and tell him, and he freaked out, screaming at me, ‘You and your fucking rock-and-roll musicians!’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I just called to tell you.’”

Maxanne explains. “David was kind of a wreck after that. It was nothing that was blamed on him and nothing that he was responsible for. He didn’t do drugs at all. I’d never even seen David take a drink.”

“So that was kind of a turning point for the band,” David says. “Things sort of started to get dark, or at least not as optimistic as things had been, and I was devastated. She was going to be our publicist.”

The Modern Lovers played New Year’s Eve in New York with the New York Dolls, Suicide, and others at the Mercer Arts Center. They signed with Warner Bros. in early 1973 and decided to hire John Cale as the producer for their debut and went back to LA in September 1973. There was a big buzz about the band, and they were being courted by managers, including David Geffen. Robinson says, “One of the guys who wanted to be our manager was Eddie Tickner, who managed Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. So we start hanging out at Gram’s house.”

Richman had started to move radically away from the type of driving attack of the band, influenced by quiet acoustic and Caribbean folk music, among other influences. And he butted heads with Cale, resulting in the album sessions being shelved. “Jonathan Richman got in a big fight with John Cale,” David says. “John Cale walked out of the studio, and our career ended. I was so pissed off at the time. But somebody has versions of Cale playing piano and viola on some of those Modern Lovers songs.”

Richman was also asking him repeatedly to play fewer drums and play them almost impossibly quiet. “I said, ‘I’m through. I can’t deal with him. I’m done with this. I’m moving on.’” He joined the LA-based band the Pop. He went back to Boston to retrieve his belongings, including his record collection, and turned on the guys in the Pop to the recent records by Big Star, which influenced the band significantly. They had proper management, an agent, and great demos, so they played many gigs, including lucrative private parties for sororities and pool parties for teenagers in wealthy enclaves. But the music scene in general in LA was passé, and few labels were interested in unestablished LA acts at the time, so David made his way back to Boston. “David gave it a real shot, and I think you can hear his love of bubblegum and sense of adventure all through our music,” the Pop’s David Swanson said.

“I was a little bit discouraged, but I didn’t really have a plan,” David says. “But Jonathan found me and said, ‘I’m going to start a new band.’ I said, ‘Jonathan, I’m a little wary of this. First of all, do you want me to play a drum kit?’” Richman had been insisting that the band play quieter and had David strip down his drum kit. “He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you can play a full drum kit.’ So I said, ‘If you get me an apartment and pay my expenses to go back, I’ll do it.’ So they did.

“Then we recorded what I think is a great album.” This was Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, released in 1976 on CBS Records. David is the only original member aside from Jonathan on it. “Jonathan pulls the same thing. ‘Could you just play a little more quiet?’ So I play quietly. ‘Could you just hit those two drums?’ And then I’m sitting there with a floor tom with a towel over it, and he goes, ‘What if you just tapped on the side?’ So I said, ‘Jonathan, you can get anybody to do this. You don’t even need a drummer to do this. You don’t need me, so I am leaving.’ I wasn’t angry. I just said, ‘This is a waste of my talent.’ If I have any talent, this is not what I was going to do with it. But I was lucky we made a good new album.”

The seminal Modern Lovers debut LP, with the classic lineup, finally came out on Beserkley Records, also in the summer of 1976, about two years after the original Modern Lovers had broken up. Harrison would join Talking Heads in 1977. However, these tracks were considered demos and were not intended for the final product. It was made up of the 1972 sessions with Cale, along with some made for A&M with Alan Mason, as well as 1971 sessions the band had recorded with Fowley at Intermedia Soundi on Newbury Street. “I remember seeing the guys from Aerosmith on the street, coincidentally, when the Modern Lovers were making demos in what later would become The Cars’ studio on Newbury Street,” David says. “They were like, ‘You guys are lucky to get to record in the studio.’ So I bestowed my blessing [laughs]. ‘Someday, you guys will get to make a record. You’re really good.’”

Back in Boston in 1976, with no band, David Robinson started going out to clubs. The energy in Boston’s nightlife scene was elevated, bars and clubs filled with college students, the drinking age at eighteen, people picking up guitars, invigorated by the burgeoning DIY punk scene that the Modern Lovers helped spur (the Sex Pistols recorded a version of “Roadrunner” in 1976), and Oedipus spinning new records on WTBS. David was gripped by DMZ, who had started with a different drummer. “They were the most fun band at the time. So I went to see them a lot, and it was just chaos,” David recalls. “I would be laughing. ‘Look what they’re doing! I can’t believe it!’ There would be fistfights.” He walked into Strawberries record store on Boylston Street, where DMZ guitarist JJ Rassler worked.

Rassler said he was inspired to form the band after seeing Patti Smith at Paul’s Mall and hearing Willie “Loco” Alexander’s local anthem “Mass Ave” in a club around the same time. DMZ was playing a few gigs at the Rat in April 1976. Rassler was a lookout for shoplifting at the record store, stationed high on a stepladder. “David comes in, and I recognized him immediately,” Rassler recalled.

I had seen the Modern Lovers at least half a dozen times in the early seventies, both on Cambridge Common and a place called the Catacombs. He did a double take on me, and he said, “Didn’t you just play at the Rat Saturday night?” “Yeah.” And he said, “Please let me know when your next gig is. I’ll give you my number, and I’d love to go.” And I said, “Well, frankly, we’re in between drummers right now. As soon as we get a new one, we’ll resume our schedule.” I didn’t want to be blatant about it. But he said, “Well, if you’re holding auditions, is there any way I could get an audition?” And I said, “You don’t need to audition. If you’re at all interested, you got it.”

Rassler points to David as an essential influence on what he calls the “Boston sound.” “Not the MGM Records 1968 ‘Bosstown Sound,’ but what was becoming a new thing centered around the Rat. All of those bands seemed to me to be centered around the drums: Howie Ferguson and the Real Kids, Jeff Wilkinson of the Nervous Eaters. They were incredibly basic and strong drummers, and it was a sound and a beat.” Like a Charlie Watts or Al Jackson Jr. Memphis backbeat and pocket. “It was a sound that, in my opinion, the Boston scene became known for. And if this guy was willing to join, man, we needed him.”

David joined DMZ from May to November 1976. “They were so enthusiastic and cool about it,” he recalls. “So they asked me, and I was like, the elder band man.” Though a fan of the chaos that the band projected, it was another thing to be in the eye of the storm. Rassler explains, “We played some gigs that Robinson was just befuddled by. We played at a place in Peabody that the band that we went on after had peach-colored mambo shirts on, big ruffle sleeves, and they were a show band–type thing.” The club owner approached DMZ after the first song and said, “You’re going to have to turn it down.” After the second song, he came up again and warned, “If you don’t turn it down, you’re going to have to leave.” Jeff Conolly turned to his band and directed them to do the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” and to “turn it all the way up.” The police got onstage, and as they finished the song, they had the band pack up and escorted them to the town line.

“David was a little unnerved about that,” Rassler says. “Conolly got a little bit loopier as time went on, shall we say.

“David told me, ‘I remember one time, I’m hearing everybody, but I don’t see anybody.’ We’re all on the floor fighting and kicking each other. [Guitarist Peter] Greenberg and I would stand in front of the drums with our legs stretched out, so Jeff couldn’t get back up onstage. We wouldn’t let him back onstage. He was an asshole. Some gigs turned out pretty disastrous as a result, and people got hurt. But I remember one time we played with the Ramones, and two of them were fighting and fell down a complete flight of stairs. And we looked at each other like, ‘Well, we’re not the only ones.’”

David, though, was a lover, not a fighter. “The babes that he grabbed were unbelievable,” Rassler recalls. “And some showed up regularly, and you got to know them; others, it was just a revolving door. He was great to hang out with because there were always extras.” But David also preferred just platonically hanging out with women. “David got along with my girlfriend Lynn really, really well. They were good friends,” Rassler says. “David had a habit of changing his nail-polish color in between sets. So he’d have a whole new glow, and he had a little fan, a seven- or eight-inch fan that he’d plug into the dressing room to dry his nails by. And that was right up Lynn’s alley. They’d do their nails together. And the rest of the band were just, ‘Well, okay, whatever.’ David was terrific for accessories. He gave me a jacket, the same jacket that Keith Richards wore on the ’69 tour, that little red Bolero-type jacket. He let me wear it anytime I wanted onstage.”

David did not make any records with the band, but there’s a great raw set from Oedipus’s show on WTBS (later WMBR) called “DMZ—Radio Demos” on YouTube. He says now, “That was fun for a while, and that’s when I got scouted out by Ric.”

“Ric poached David,” says Oedipus.

After the Cap’n Swing come-to-Jesus moment at Max’s Kansas City, Ric retreated to the basement, as when he was a kid. During the fall of 1976, his songwriting shifted into sharper focus, with economic pop melodies and clever and often acerbic lyrics, adding a little distance between the singer and the song. He had just penned the foundations of what would become Cars classics like “Just What I Needed” and “Bye Bye Love,” the latter of which was built on the scaffolding of “Strawberry Moonlight.”

If there had been any doubt in previous bands, Ric was now taking charge. This next band would be a benevolent dictatorship. He decided to keep Elliot and Danny Schliftman (who would soon be replaced by Greg Hawkes) and move Ben back to bass, “where he belonged,” Elliot says. And per Maxanne’s advice, Ric recruited David Robinson after playing him some of the new demos.

When Maxanne brought David to see Cap’n Swing, his impressions were “not good.” David says, “When I first met Ric, he told me that he used to come to Modern Lovers gigs at a place called the Speakeasy in Central Square, and I remembered him in the audience. Never spoke to him, but he was the tallest person in the room, and he always stood at the back. I even said to the other guys, ‘There’s that guy at the back again.’ They’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, we saw him last week.’”

Now in his midtwenties, Robinson was giving his career in the music business one more shot. He received two tapes from bands looking for a new drummer: one from a band called Reddy Teddy and the other from Cap’n Swing. He much preferred Ric’s tape. He said he was almost hoping his next band would fail so he could get on with his life. It might have been the same somewhat desperate feeling for Ric and Ben.

In 1976, Ric turned thirty-two, though few knew his age, something he would hide until his death. As Elliot says,

Ric and Ben had been through the record-deal thing with Milkwood, and they’d been banging their heads against the wall for quite a while. In Ric’s case, he had a family. And also, you have to remember, Ric was nine years older than me. The other guys were like six or seven years older than me. Greg was just about a year older, really around the same age. But there was a big age spread between Ric and me, being the youngest member. He was in a different phase of life than I was. I was just a young kid ready to take it on, and he had a few tries at it and taken a few swings. And this might be his last attempt.

Ben, Ric, Greg, and Elliot had all logged some serious and intense years together in various combinations—Richard and the Rabbits and Cap’n Swing. They were all committed to making it work. Ric explained, “We’d already been through that crap of how do you work the personalities out. David, being the newest member, fit because his musical taste was so close to ours, and when we came together as The Cars, we didn’t have to figure out each other. . . . It just worked.”

JJ Rassler was completely understanding about David leaving DMZ. “Maxanne had talked him into going with what became The Cars. She and I were really close. I still love Maxanne, and I was a little pissed that she was poaching our drummer, but it was who had the better chance of making it commercially, those guys or DMZ? In my heart, there was no question. And it was, ‘Go ahead, David, go do it. This is going to be a bigger break for you.’ And David offered a lot more to The Cars. He was terrific in design and his artwork.”

Elliot recalls, “I think it was as much David’s decision as any sort of a poaching scenario. I’m sure we must’ve asked him if he’d like to be in our band. He looked at it, weighed and measured the possibilities, and he said yes. Beyond that, I don’t really know what any machinations were that got him out of DMZ and into The Cars. But it didn’t seem like it was a big loss to him to switch bands.”

After a mutual tryout in Ric’s basement, David was immediately hooked. “It was just one of those things; we just hit it off. We’re playing, and I’m just looking around. It’s like [laughing], ‘This is it! Okay, let’s take off. Let’s start working.’ It was so good that I could all of a sudden think of new stuff to play, new ideas that I hadn’t used in other bands. I played real basic stuff with the Modern Lovers. Then I started to play more complicated stuff, but more traditional stuff. It was all power pop.”

Ric’s songs had infectious melodies and were concise in structure. They were somehow classic sounding and fresh at the same time. This is what new wave was more than anything: reaching to the best of fifties to midsixties pop music, amped up with new sounds. “One thing I remember about old music or music that I listened to was that it wasn’t hard to remember the song after you heard it, or there were parts that you couldn’t wait to hear in a song,” Ric explained. “I can’t wait to hear this chorus coming up, or I can’t wait to hear this one line. And you sing it over and over in your head, and I think it’s something like when you go around all day singing a song in your head, it’s sort of like a meditative thing.”

Everything fell into place naturally. David was particularly impressed at how effortless Ben made playing and singing seem. And they all liked how David nailed down the backbeat in a simplified rock-and-roll style, discarding the busy jazzier style of Cap’n Swing. “We loved his work with the Modern Lovers,” Elliot says. Given David’s past as a Modern Lover, Ric was excited to have someone he considered a real rock star in the band. David was happy to be back on track and in a band that, in his mind, would have “at least part of the spirit that the Modern Lovers’ music was in.”

The band was rehearsing in a carriage house that Ric and his family were renting. It was part of a property shared with around twenty other folks of a bohemian bent. Past accounts sometimes described it as a commune, which Ric said was “set back in the woods.” The 1979 Rolling Stone piece described the space as “tiny,” “an open trapezoid, maybe eight feet wide at the narrow end, with 15-foot sides fanning out. Plastered everywhere are black-and-white photos clipped from fashion magazines—one of Sissy Spacek, a few stark Helmut Newtons—and those of an array of futuristic fantasy cars. The pipes are painted black, and the boiler is emblazoned with a psychedelic crescent moon design that Ric reluctantly admits he rendered. Here is where the Cars assembled their hit-bound material during the fall and winter of 1976.”

They woodshedded the material during intensive rehearsals over the winter of 1976–1977 and were finally ready to start playing gigs. At the same time, just up Route 128 in Ipswich, David’s erstwhile bandmate Jerry Harrison was hosting rehearsals with his new bandmates in Talking Heads in a house he had rebuilt.

Cap’n Swing was no more; this was a new band that required a new name. Before joining the band, David Robinson had been carrying the name The Cars around in the back of his mind, a moniker that fitted this sleek new sound. “Cap’n Swing sounded like the name of a bar band.” Elliot recalls, “We were sitting around in the basement where we rehearsed, looking for names, and we had some funny names written down, ‘The Pins,’ and it was all ‘The this or the that’ in those days. David came up with The Cars, and right away, we all thought, that’s great! We were surprised no one had taken it before. It was so representative of rock and roll: cars, guitars, music, girls. And also, he was very clever because, being a short name like that, you were able to print it in big letters, like on a T-shirt or on a marquee at a venue.” It would also be forward in alphabetical order in record stores. Maxanne recalls, “David was the one that said, ‘I figured Cars would be a great name because we could just walk into dealerships and beg for the posters and stuff for the last year’s models and get ’em for free.’ I mean, the guy had a brilliant mind when it came to marketing.”

While David was not an art student (contrary to some accounts), he had always been interested in visuals, graphic design, fashion, and image, what would now be called “branding.” David was inspired to work on the band’s presentation, and the band was eager to have a creative de facto visual director. He hatched a color scheme for their wardrobe: black and white and, a little later, red. “It was a big deal when we introduced red,” Elliot deadpanned to Brett Milano. It would become the uniform color scheme for new-wave bands by 1980, from the Pretenders to Gary Numan to the Romantics.

“We played real good,” David told Jon Pareles, “but we looked real funny: tall guys, short guys. Elliot, you would not recognize. Ben used to wear striped bell-bottom pants. They looked like college dudes. When I saw Greg I thought, ‘Another weird-looking guy to deal with.’ He really looked like a hippie—he used to wear corduroy pants and Earth shoes. I’d be showing up in my shag haircut trying to put everything together. Miraculously, it worked.”

They were all happy to be directed. “Ben was very easygoing,” Kris Orr says. “It’s like, ‘You guys just take care of it.’ He knew what his job was: look good, play well, and sing well.”

Like many of their peers of the emerging new wave, they were hippies reinventing themselves. As Joe Strummer said, the punks were disaffected ex-hippies, disillusioned no more.

Their first gig was at a joint out on Route 9 in the suburbs, meant to be a low-pressure way to see how they worked in a live setting. “Some lounge,” recalls David. “I think we called ourselves the Automobiles.” The second show was at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire on New Year’s Eve, a gig that Allan Kaufman had gotten them. Playing for a bunch of drunken servicepeople who were ready for anything felt like a triumph in and of itself. “We figured if we could get through to the air force, we could get through to anybody,” Ric said.

Quickly, they changed out Danny Schliftman for Greg Hawkes, though Schliftman was around long enough to be included in at least one promo photo. As for the circumstances that led to that change, neither Elliot, David, nor Greg recalls details. Says Elliot, “We were playing in a club, and this whole keyboard nonsense came to a head. We wanted to incorporate synths into our expanding sound, and Danny flat-out refused. I remember it being tense at the club.” David says, “That was one of the big things; all of a sudden, Danny was gone.” Elliot assumes that Ric called Danny and told him that he was out of the band. “Danny may have even quit on his own,” Elliot says.

Greg happened to be between gigs. Martin Mull was getting divorced and moving from New York to LA to pursue his acting career, so his band was no more. Ric and Ben visited Greg at his Somerville apartment, and they told him about The Cars, asking him to join. They played him a demo of “Just What I Needed.” He thought it sounded like a hit record. Greg had caught a gig with Danny in the early version of The Cars by that point.

At his house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, which he and his wife, Elaine, refer to as “Disgraceland” due to its Elvis Graceland–like columns along the front (a name Elliot recalls coining), Greg thumbs through a scrapbook that Elaine assembled as the band got going. “This is sort of the very beginning.” He reads aloud, “‘The Cars make their Boston debut at the Rat. February 7 and 8. The band has a new keyboardist and saxophonist, Greg Hawkes, who was once with Martin Mull’s orchestra.’ That was from ‘Cellars by Starlight,’” James Isaacs’s column in the Boston Phoenix.

“Greg never even practiced with us,” Ric said. “Greg came on the first gig we ever played without even knowing what the songs were and played.” Sitting in the same interview, David added, “Right. I didn’t even know what instruments he played. In the middle of the set, I heard something and looked up, and he was playing a saxophone or something, and I thought he was just a keyboard player. I was amazed!”

On the first few gigs, Greg actually played guitar on some songs. “I played on a couple of songs for a while, but then there were too many guitars,” he says. He had been into exploring synths and other keyboard sounds since growing up with the Beatles. He explains, “It was sort of ‘Strawberry Fields’ that got me more interested in being, Ooh, keyboards. Keyboard textures.”

“Ric knew that he could depend on Greg and that Greg was a good guy,” Maxanne says. “And that was what mattered to Ric because he could get him to play what he wanted to do. And he was a nice person.” Greg was the missing piece musically and image-wise. Often described as “diminutive” and “owlish,” he would wear oversize round glasses under straight-cut bangs. He is small and lean to this day, though now his hair is long and gray, pulled into a ponytail.

Personae emerged in the band. “I wanted everybody’s character to be more animated,” David explained in 1979. “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.” Elliot legally changed his surname to Easton to go with his economic musical approach, composing punchy and precise solos that were hooks in and of themselves. “I liked the fact that it rolled off the tongue,” he says. “‘Elliot Easton’ just seemed to flow nicely, plus it had an Anglo flavor to it, so that was that. Also, subliminally, I may have been thinking about Andrew Loog Oldham’s early management partner with the Stones, Eric Easton. It has a similar effect.” There is also an Easton, Massachusetts, and a resonance with “eastern.”

Ric embraced his inherently enigmatic manner, wearing dark shades onstage and, with his towering height and spindly legs, would always be a striking presence. Ben Orr would naturally capitalize on his handsomeness, rich voice, and effortless charisma. Robinson sported a Bill Wyman–like mane, always with a keen sense of style. Maxanne observes, “David could have twenty-five cents in his pocket and look like the best-dressed guy at the party.”

In 1978, Ben described the band. “Easton, our lead guitarist, is kind of hilarious, incredibly funny. Robinson is a typical drummer, a little subdued. Hawkes, our keyboard man, is a living cartoon, and Ric can be bouncy onstage sometimes. You have to really know Ric.” When Greg sported a little mustache, it lent him the hint of Ron Mael from the art-rock duo Sparks. His esoteric and heady tastes ran toward the experimental. “David was the first one who played me Kraftwerk,” he says. “I remember the first time hearing Trans-Europe Express, and I thought it was almost funny. It’s like, ‘Wow, this is going on for fifteen minutes.’ It is the same thing over and over because it was so minimalist, and the melodies hypnotized me.”

The band was deliberate in how they positioned themselves onstage. Like Paul McCartney in the Beatles, the audience would see Elliot playing lefty guitar on the left of the stage, forming a V alongside Ben in the center, playing righty. David designed a modern logo with a chrome font that they used on a backdrop. They would not be very demonstrative in performance, adopting a more cool demeanor.

A few of them attended Greg and Elaine’s wedding in 1977. “First time I met David was at Greg’s wedding,” Fuzzbee Morse recalls. “That was quite a reunion. That was the fledgling Cars—they had just started, and they showed up at Greg’s wedding in black leather. It was like matching outfits. I got a kick out of seeing Ric and Ben going all leathery, looking like bikers.” Morse played Frank Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia” on the church organ.

The Cars played February 7–9, Monday through Wednesday nights, at the Rat. Ric described their initial core audience as “slutty girls and strippers from the Combat Zone.” That same month, they returned to Northern Studio in Maynard and recorded live-to-two-track demos of nine of their new songs. Allan Kaufman, who was still helping out in an unofficial role as a manager/agent, bartered with Bill Riseman, owner of the studio. In exchange for studio time, Allan, Ben, and Ric would do work in the studio, carpentry and painting. Ric put his early experience in electronics to use doing some studio wiring. “And that was the version, from Northern, of ‘Just What I Needed’ that Maxanne was the first one to play,” Greg points out.

“The new band had a punchier, more cohesive sound” than Cap’n Swing, Maxanne told the Wall Street Journal in 2018. “I began playing the demos of ‘Just What I Needed’ and ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ in March during my weekday slot, from 2 to 6 p.m. Calls poured in with positive comments. The Cars’ sound was fresh. It wasn’t punk, hard rock, or folk rock. I thought of it as ‘pure pop for now people,’ the title of a Nick Lowe album.” She also played the demo of “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight.”

“She had already played a couple of things of Cap’n Swing,” Greg says, “and then Oedipus started playing it on what was called WTBS, and a couple of other people at ’BCN played it. But I know she was the first one to start playing it, and then she started playing it every day. It was great!”

She played that first Cars tape so many times that people at the station would hide all the copies to keep her from spinning it even too frequently. The requests started pouring in for this music that no one could yet buy and listen to on their own time. It became the number one most requested song on the upstart station in Maynard, WCOZ, which had emerged as a serious rival to WBCN.

The story of Maxanne playing “Just What I Needed” is famous in Cars lore, a magically rare instance where someone who wielded enough influence and independence at a station that was still free from top-down corporate straitjacketing, with enough faith in a song and a band, and bold enough to push it, almost single-handedly broke a band. She had already established a track record in helping to break Aerosmith, J. Geils, Queen, Springsteen, and others, so everyone listened to Maxanne. As WBCN was a powerhouse, trendsetting commercial station that reported to industry publications, these Cars tracks began to show up on radio tip sheets.

“With the tip sheets,” Maxanne explains, “if you play it five times, it’s going to get around, and somebody in the A&R departments is going to pay attention to it, and that’s all it takes.” Radio tip sheets would inform the smaller radio-station markets what the big cities were playing. Trends would become clear, and potential hits would emerge. As Elliot explains with The Cars, “They’d look at WBCN’s little box on this radio tip sheet, and so they’d go down a list, and number one might say, ‘Aerosmith, Get Your Wings, Columbia.’ It’d be like a column for the label and the album title, ‘Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, MCA.’ ‘The Cars “Just What I Needed,” TAPE.’”

Elliot and the others never forgot what Maxanne did for the band. In his acceptance speech at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Elliot testified, “A&R reps for major labels started flying to Boston to check out this local band, The Cars, whose demo tape got so much airplay that it was being reported on a national level. Maxanne did that.” David says, “She helped with both of my bands [Modern Lovers and The Cars].”

“The combination of the demos being reported on the Gavin Report and all the tip sheets and the lines around the block to see us at the Rat—I mean, the buzz at the Rat was kind of some of what led us to getting a record deal,” Elliot remembers. “At one point, they made it two shows [per night], which they never did at the Rat. They’d have two houses because there were so many people who wanted to see the band, so they’d empty out, and we’d do a second show. It was unheard of. So you knew something was happening.”

Footnote

i The studio would be bought by The Cars in 1981.

Chapter 8

THE RAT AND THE DEAL

MIKE BARNICLE, A COLUMNIST FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE (LATER A PUNDIT on Morning Joe on MSNBC), wrote in 1979:

Down in Kenmore Square, the punk rockers made their way down the steps of the Rathskeller. . . . The crowd, in their leather jackets . . . the kids at The Rat who think affection means whipping each other with chains, the 13-year-olds sniffing amyl nitrate for a cheap high, the 20-year-olds with enough pills in them to pass a pharmacist’s exam, the paper debris in the gutters and the human debris passed out on the benches by the Kenmore MBTA station, jarred the mind and pushed your thoughts across the years to an earlier, easier time; an age when Kenmore Square was a small showcase of architecture and elegance. . . . Now it is a pit of pills and drunk kids who become part of the night; a strip of clubs and fast-food joints where everything collides at two in the morning and makes the square resemble an open sewer where the worst that could ever happen to us walks by in one, long parade.

MANY OF US MIGHT READ THIS VIVID DESCRIPTION WAITING FOR THE punch line: “There’s also a negative side.”

Like visiting Times Square now, walking through Kenmore Square today will give you almost no idea of how soulfully gritty it was before the mid-1990s. With Fenway Park just around the corner, out-of-town visitors might recognize the iconic CITGO sign atop a Kenmore Square building from watching Red Sox games. It’s one of the few elements that have been preserved. The Hotel Commonwealth replaced most of the block where the Rat once stood, and Boston University has gobbled up much of the neighborhood’s real estate. I started going to the Rat to see bands like the Del Fuegos, the Neighborhoods, and the Flies in 1984, underage with an unconvincing fake ID. I wasn’t fooling anyone; I looked like Anthony Michael Hall in Sixteen Candles, so I would more often than not be left out on the pavement, wandering in and out of places like Captain Nemo’s Pizza. But sometimes, I was able to get by the imposing doorman named Mitch Cerullo (we knew him only by his first name), a large man in wide-lapeled polyester suits, a GI Joe beard, and a bizarre head of “hair” that rested awkwardly upon his head like the Sphinx. He spoke through a monotone robotic voice box held at his tracheotomy. Any description beyond that does not do him justice. Just look him up online, and you’ll get an idea. He always seemed to have a smile no matter what was going down.

And something or somebody was often going down in Kenmore. I once took a punch next to the Deli King for being a wiseass when my own band played at the Rat around 1988 (we once opened for Soundgarden in that dank cellar). In the ’80s, there was an opposing dance club across the street, Narcissus, and the crowds from the two clubs were also oppositional, often to the point of clashes. In his book Decibel Diaries, Carter Alan, a WBCN deejay, characterized the physical and cultural chasm across the four-lane veins of Commonwealth Avenue, separated by a wide median: “Like a stone’s throw across the Berlin Wall from one extreme to the other, the fashionably attired gaggles that stepped out of their limousines or poured in polyester finery through the front doors of a mirror-ball fantasy world couldn’t, or didn’t want to, relate to their neighbors in ripped jeans and leather across the square.”

Greg told writer Jim Sullivan, “We were always lumped in with the beginning of the new wave, which, as I recall, was a reaction to the end of the disco era. The Cars fit in more with the—I hate to say mainstream rock side vs. the punk rock side—but we kinda did. We weren’t as sonically aggressive as the punk records were. Plus, we genuinely liked having hooks.”

Elliot and David were sharing an apartment at 382 Commonwealth Avenue, next to the Harvard Club, just a five-minute walk down from the Rat. “Three of the guys were married and were in a different sort of phase of life, and David and I were single,” recalls Elliot. “Right near that was the Aku Aku Chinese restaurant, which was where we’d go after shows. Or the European in the North End until four in the morning. And it was either that or Buzzy’s Roast Beef. We loved being roommates. We just had a lot of laughs, and he was a great roommate to have, and he was really fun. He had a million girlfriends.”

Once you descended the stairs of the Rat and settled into the smoky basement, you would almost always catch a band worthy of your attention. In 1977, The Cars played there a bunch, with support from the great Nervous Eaters, the Shirts, Sass, and others. “I knew nothing about Milkwood, but I did see Cap’n Swing, and they were just okay,” remembers Oedipus.

It just didn’t have the groove, and it definitely didn’t have a spirit that we would find at the Rat where we all danced to music, and we all had a scene going on, and it was all special. Now, we all didn’t have to be punks, or, I mean, you could be the Jam, you could be the Damned, but you could also be Talking Heads. You could be the Shirts. You could be Mink DeVille. But it wasn’t until Ric became The Cars that they became, I like to say, a Rat band that hit that kind of DIY scene that was happening. We weren’t part of that boogie-blues thing that was part of Boston at the time. That did nothing for us. I mean, those days of the Grateful Dead and the lengthy guitar solos of the Allman Brothers stuff, or even the folky things of the James Taylors, not that any of these bands are bad, but it just didn’t fit what we were into. We were angry. We were creating our own scene, and we were passionate. And that passion came through at clubs like the Rat.

Some photos of The Cars at the Rat show Ric in a zebra-print shirt. David has a Sex Pistols T-shirt on in one shot. Ben, David, and Ric would wear shirts with cutoff sleeves. Greg and Elliot, simple T-shirts and jerseys. David’s “chrome” CARS logo banner hung behind them. People dance in front of the stage. Oedipus says that The Cars were not very dynamic to watch. They were “the original shoe gazers, but their songs were so good, it didn’t matter. But at the Rat, we used to dance a lot, and you could dance to those songs too. We just didn’t stand there and watch.” With no merchandise for sale at gigs yet, fans were making their own Cars buttons and badges.

On recordings from the spring and summer of 1977 from the Rat, the arrangements sound more or less like the album versions already. On “Bye Bye Love,” the guitars are beefy, pumped out of big amps. But Greg’s analog synths cut right through. It’s fantastic. “My Best Friend’s Girl” has a different keyboard hook. A few songs carry over from Cap’n Swing, like “Jezebel” and “Strawberry Moonlight.” Greg plays sax on a couple of numbers, such as a cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Somethin’ Else,” with a lead vocal from Elliot. They also would do an inventive cover of Brenton Wood’s 1967 pop-soul song “Gimme Little Sign.” Some of the other covers that The Cars (some dating back to Cap’n Swing) did include “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby,” “Love Is the Drug” by Roxy Music, “We Did It Again” by Soft Machine, and “I’m Waiting for the Man” by the Velvet Underground. When they start “Just What I Needed,” the crowd reacts with notable enthusiasm, familiar to them as a local radio hit.

Ric and The Cars met Suicide, a duo, at their show at the Rat in 1977, before either band had released their debut albums. David turned Ric on to Suicide, having shared a bill with them when he was in the Modern Lovers in 1972. They made a deep and lasting impression on Ric in particular, but he was intimidated to meet them.

Alan Vega and Martin Rev started performing in 1970 at Project of Living Artists in New York. Their name was inspired by jazz musicians they saw nodding out on suicidally dangerous amounts of heroin. It also captured feelings about the war in Vietnam. They spent the early 1970s performing in the New York underground scene, opening for the New York Dolls and others at the Mercer Arts Center and then Max’s Kansas City, where David Bowie, Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, and others were taking notice. Their song “Rocket U.S.A.” was included on the 1976 compilation LP Max’s Kansas City, and their groundbreaking self-titled debut was released at the end of 1977. Vega was like “an Elvis from Hell,” to borrow a phrase from Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club, one of the singers he influenced. He barked, yelped, crooned, mumbled, and moaned out haunting and sometimes tender lyrics, a unique mélange of dreamy blues, doo-wop, and street talk, while Rev played ecstatic pulsating keyboards wired through distortion and other effects pedals and primitive drum machines.

They were galvanized by numerous kinds of music and literature, including Rev’s significant background as a teenager in the New York jazz scene. But their love of doo-wop, Beat poetry, the rhythmic drone of the Velvet Underground, and Krautrock pioneers Can were some of their more obvious influences. During their quieter moments, they could sound similar to Kraftwerk. But they tended to have a more aggressive attack, and with Vega out front in live performance, they would often come across as confrontational.

“We drove up to Boston ourselves,” Martin Rev says. “The dressing room at the Rat was just a little closet with a curtain on the side. Incredible place. So we got offstage, and the band came in and just introduced themselves to us, dressed very commonly, in street clothes like anyone else. It was winter, and it was long coats and this and that. And they introduced themselves. Ric basically spearheaded the entourage, and they said they were The Cars. ‘We really dig what you guys do, and we wanted to say hello.’”

Vega said, “Ben was cool. At first, he was the star. Ric was just the guy that wrote all the songs.”

Oedipus observed his new friend assimilating the music he loved into the music he created.

I knew [Ric] had Suicide near and dear to his heart. He was a late developer; he was absorbing all these musics, trying different things, never satisfied. But the thing about Ric was this was what he was going to do. He was going to be a musician. This was his calling. He wasn’t looking to work in an office or to work at Costco. This was what he was going to do maybe despite his marriages, despite his children. He was driven as a musician. And the brilliance of him is that he finally made it. He finally figured out where he wanted to take his music. And I think it really happened when he took total control. I mean, because after Cap’n Swing . . . and then when he played The Cars for me, it was like, whoa!

“It just clicked,” Elliot says. “The five of us got together and started learning some of Ric’s songs and working on arrangements and kicking around ideas, and it just sounded good pretty much from the beginning.” As for the band dynamic, Elliot explains, “Ric was sort of the sun that the planets revolved around, and he was definitely the center of the band. He wrote the songs and sang a lot of them. And that was never in any question.” Ric would sit with Ben and go over Ric’s songs with the lyric book out. “Songs that maybe demanded a bigger range or a prettier voice, whatever it may be, would be for Ben. They knew instinctively; they’d been working together for years singing Ric’s songs, so they knew how to divvy ’em up. Because, as we all know, it starts with the song. It’s all about a song. So right at the very beginning, you’re going to say, ‘Well, who’s going to sing the song?’ They would more or less work that out in the beginning of the process, and I don’t remember them being wrong about any of them.”

Unlike all the past attempts, things were falling into place for The Cars. Next came professional management. A Vietnam vet, Fred Lewis had worked as a record promoter and distributor for local legend Skippy White, a disc jockey and record-store proprietor who specialized in selling blues, rhythm and blues, and soul records. It was there that Lewis met Peter Wolf, and the two became friends, with Lewis hanging out for Wolf’s shift at WBCN, getting to know Van Morrison when he was around, and getting swept up even more into the world of rock and roll. Wolf soon hired him as a road manager for the J. Geils Band. “I was kind of like the personal manager, road manager, everything guy. At that point, I was a young guy, still learning, really, about the business,” Lewis explains over lunch. When we met, he was eighty, with a big snowy Santa Claus beard, and he describes himself as a recluse. He takes care of his wife, Maria, who had a stroke around 2018. “I knew the history of music pretty well in various ways, but I still was, in terms of managing and working with bands, it was new to me. And so we just went along as we went along and learned in a kind of a way, and I started doing everything, sometimes under the name Freddie Blue [his on-air moniker at WBCN].”

New York–based Dee Anthony was hired to manage the J. Geils Band after it was decided they needed a “real manager,” and Lewis became the Boston promotional representative for their label, Atlantic Records. After about four years at Atlantic and ultimately unfulfilled by the job, he resigned in 1976 and began looking to manage an act with potential. But before he left, he met Suzanne Ocasek and Kris Orr at the WEA office. They handed him a demo by Ocasek and Orr. Lewis says, “And then they became Cap’n Swing, an ‘almost famous band.’ I hated that name. Suzanne calls me up two weeks after I leave Atlantic and says, ‘Listen, do you want to come and see them? They’re playing down at the Rat.’ I think they were still Cap’n Swing.”

Lewis didn’t act on Cap’n Swing, but when The Cars recorded their demo tapes, Kris Orr passed them around, including one for Fred, whom she points out was already getting to know Ric via Maxanne. Kris says, “The first [WEA] convention that we had was down in Florida, and Ric gave me two cassettes, and he said, ‘I don’t know who you’re going to give these to.’” She handed one to an A&R guy at Elektra and one to someone at Warner Bros. “There was a demand for them at that point. Maxanne was playing them.”

Fred Lewis checked The Cars out at the Rat in February 1977. “I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go out and see them.’ I go into the Rat, and in ten seconds, I just said to myself, ‘This is it. These guys are going to be humongous.’ From all my knowledge of working for Atlantic and Skippy and stacking records at record stores and doing everything, reading music books and magazines and everything, it just felt this is going to happen. It’s going to be really big if things are done right. But I mean, at that point, there were a lot of bands in town that were kind of successful in getting airplay.” Aerosmith and the J. Geils Band were established, and then the band Boston broke in 1976 under the management of Paul Ahern and Charlie McKenzie, two erstwhile record promoters who had worked alongside Lewis. “Then my feeling was ‘Jesus, Paul and Charlie were able to do that. Maybe I can do that.’ It was encouragement in a way.”

Lewis signed The Cars in March. He had big plans for the band, like “More Than a Feeling”–level big. “I never wanted them to be lumped in as a ‘new-wave band.’ I wanted them to be bam! Big.” He notes that he even later turned down a press opportunity for the band in a big national magazine because the slant was on so-called new-wave bands. “To me, it was like they were like the Rolling Stones versus [the band] Boston’s Beatles-type of thing.”

In 1979 Ric explained their choice to work with Fred. “It seemed good because he was new at it, and we were new at it, and we worked together on it. We didn’t want to sign with any huge management company or anything because we didn’t want to have the things we were doing infiltrated upon. We wanted to have equal control on how we were presented if that’s at all possible these days.” Lewis says that his years of experience with the J. Geils Band and at WEA and his acquaintance with Kris Orr and Suzanne Ocasek all combined to help them forge the relationship.

Allan Kaufman was left behind in the wake of the new band. Years later, he reflected that he had been partly responsible for influencing Cap’n Swing to be a little too Steely Dan–ish and funky/jammy, which Ric realized was a mistake.

Lewis recalls, “We signed a contract, and then I started working very, very hard to make things happen. I’ve always been specific about things. I’ve always had a long-range plan. I mean, I might have had long hair and looked like a crazy hippie and all of that, but I’ve always planned things out. You have to have a great structure and then build. You got to have a strong foundation.”

He played a tape for Don Law’s team. Law was a local promoter and son of the eminent Columbia Records producer with the same name. “I went to Fred Johansson, who used to work for Don, and I said, ‘Listen, Fred, the band is ready. They can play any gig that you throw at us. Anything. They’re just ready. You just give me a day. Give me twenty-four hours and I’ll have it all together, and we’ll be able to come and do any gig that you need the band to play.’ Two weeks later, Bob Seger.” On March 21, The Cars filled in on short notice for Rick Derringer as support for Bob Seger for his first Boston headlining show, at the forty-eight-hundred-seat Music Hall (now the Wang Theater). Greg had to hightail it back to town from a visit to his family in Maryland. Lewis says he had them play a preliminary warm-up gig in the down-on-its-heels mill city of Lowell. “I think it was for this gig,” he recalls. “It was an important-enough gig where sometimes I would do this. I booked a gig in this really very grungy, sleazy kind of club that was near a boxing ring, run by a couple of very heavy kind of dudes. It wasn’t like they were snapping their fingers to the music.”

They received a standing ovation at the Seger show, according to music journalist James Isaacs, who would go on to write the band’s first press bio. Steve Morse had reviewed the Seger show for the Boston Globe but must have arrived late, as The Cars did not get a mention.

The band kept busy over the course of the spring and summer of 1977. Elliot explains, “We started playing clubs and all the colleges around Boston and New England, Harvard mixers and all these different kinds of gigs. And the Rat. We kind of made a rule for ourselves that one week a month, we’d play in Boston as some sort of a media gig that could get noticed. And the other weeks, we played all around New England and made enough money to actually pay our rent and buy some groceries playing original music, which was not an easy thing to do at any time, really, if you don’t have a record out.”

One such gig was at the elite boarding prep school St. Paul’s, in Concord, New Hampshire. One of the students was Rick Moody, who became the celebrated author of The Ice Storm (1994), among other works, and a musician. “St. Paul’s was, as you would guess, slow to get the message of punk,” says Moody. “I was in this tiny minority at St. Paul’s of people who went from listening to prog, art rock–y glam stuff, to getting into liking some emerging punk thing. For example, I really can remember the day that Armed Forces came out by Elvis Costello and hearing ‘Green Shirt’ and thinking, ‘Oh my god, something revolutionary’s happening.’ Periodically, there was some minor funding for an event with live music at the school. Our entire budget for events for my class was $800 for the whole year. And The Cars played there twice. So that means The Cars were playing for nothing.”

Moody saw them on the band’s second gig at the school in May 1978, just before the single and the album were released. He explains just how novel The Cars seemed. “To say that it was a contrast from the kind of music that we were listening to on campus, or that was playing at dances at St. Paul’s, is to understate; it was markedly, markedly more aggressive, more weird, more cool within an inch of its life than anything that I had ever seen live at that point. They were all in black, and they had the thing down already where they barely moved. And it was the first time I had seen a synthesizer up close and personal. And I was sort of glued watching Greg Hawkes.” Moody says that the kids loved the show. Called for encores, The Cars repeated most of their set.

“A salient memory for me of that show is ‘Moving in Stereo.’ I vividly remember thinking it was the creepiest fucking thing that I had ever seen someone play live. I didn’t know you were allowed to be menacing in that particular way.” Moody saw their stage demeanor as a studied sort of antichoreography.

This relative stillness onstage, the sort of nondemonstrativeness, the kind of icy-chilly exterior thing, because “Moving in Stereo” felt malevolent, and especially the way the synths worked and that basic riff; I think the riff is pretty creepy. That was my experience of it, that the nondemonstrativeness was sort of wired into how the songs worked. And so even when they were poppy, there was still something that was not. It was, “We’re not giving you anything else. The music is the thing we’re giving you.” Ben Orr was so fucking beautiful at the front of the stage with the blond hair and everything; it was all about that. Amazing melodies, amazing playing, and then this fucking Adonis at the center. The way I felt about it was like, “Okay, so this is how the thing is organized.”

They also played in Ipswich, on the North Shore, where they met fellow musician Ralph Fatello, who has remained friends with members of The Cars to this day. (Indeed, he was the one who drove David down to Boston to see Babymetal the day I met David in September 2023.) Fatello’s band, Vinny, was playing regularly at the Ipswich club called the Sunnyside. “The Cars were booked in there on a Tuesday night,” Ralph says.

This is when Maxanne was playing the “Just What I Needed” demo. And there were maybe twenty-five people in the club. That’s where I met them. And the club owner at the time was this little short guy named Bill who had the long ponytail, and he wore the Frye boots, and he was this little guy from Revere. He was like five two or five three, and he had this girlfriend who was like five ten, and she had these huge fake boobs and would follow him around. It was a perfect scene. He kept saying, “Deeze guys suck. Dey suck. I’m not going to pay ’em.” I’m like, “Are you out of your fucking mind? These guys are going to be huge.” I was hip to who they were and who they were going to be just by hearing “Just What I Needed” on the radio. I mean, you’d have to be brain-dead not to realize that something special was happening here. And he kept screaming and ranting and raving. And this is how I met the band: I threatened him. I played the club all the time. And so I told him that if he didn’t pay this band tonight, I would never play there, and I would make sure that all my friends—the Fools, the Nervous Eaters, the Real Kids, whoever else was playing there—would never play there again. He’s screams, “Are you kidding me?!” I’m like, “I’m not kidding you. You have to fucking pay them.” I said, “Bill, someday you’re going to be able to say that you had these guys in your fucking little shitty club.” So I became friends with them.

The Cars also returned to the Bell Buoy in Scituate for four or five gigs, which Greg recalls is where he saw The Cars before joining them. Cap’n Swing had played there almost weekly, the booking agent Barbara Rhind recalls, with very little success. But then people heard Maxanne playing The Cars on the radio and started to turn. “It’s funny, when a lot of people that ended up coming when they were The Cars, that’s when you couldn’t get in the room. And I felt like saying, ‘Where were you guys back then? Where was the support?’”

Ric and Ben had become accustomed to rejection for the better part of eight years, but the encouragement they received from the small but loyal supporters of their projects kept them going. Ric said, “It only takes one person to say it’s great. You can live on that for a week.”

“They never wanted to leave the Rat, funnily enough,” says Fred Lewis with a laugh. “They wanted to just play at the Rat. And I said, ‘No, no, no. We have to. We’re going to take it one step at a time. We’re going to get to the Paradise, but let’s wait a while.’”

Lewis says, “I told them, ‘Let’s really get a big crowd, a lot of people loving you and wanting to see you, and then we can go to the Paradise, and we can sell the Paradise out.’ And that’s what we did.” Don Law opened the Paradise in 1977. It was larger than the two-hundred-capacity Rat but smaller than it is today. It started with a capacity of about five to six hundred people, with cabaret-style tables and chairs. Taking those out could allow for maybe eight hundred. Today, it’s around a thousand.

The Cars opened for Rick Derringer at the Paradise on October 1, starting with “Leave or Stay” (at least the leadoff song on a bootleg of the show), which arguably displays the most Roxy Music influence. It would not be on a record until 1987, Door to Door, their last album before breaking up.

“My role is making the band rich, famous, and happy,” Fred Lewis said back then. Maxanne Sartori says, “Ric wanted me to manage them, and I was afraid of that. There were no women managers back then. When I heard about that [Lewis signing on as manager], I was kicking myself double-time for that one because I had known Fred since 1970. Now it was 1977, and I don’t know if he told Ric that he had managed J. Geils, which he never did. He was their road manager. He never managed them.”

Elliot says, “There was a little bit of a gray area. I don’t know exactly what he did for J. Geils. He told us he was their manager. Somebody in the [J. Geils Band] told us he wasn’t. But he was enthusiastic at first, and we needed a manager.”

At least a few people who are still around and knew the band at that time, especially those who watched Ric and Ben struggling all those years, give Fred Lewis a lot of credit for launching The Cars. One such person is David Bieber, the Boston music and media veteran who knew Ric, Ben, and Fred Lewis. He says,

I was friends with Fred and Maria, his wife and constant collaborator, throughout the 1970s and was eyewitness to many of the events that pervade the Boston Globe article [referring to a 2023 Boston Globe Magazine about the early days of The Cars that fails to mention Lewis]. Fred and Maria bet the rock-and-roll farm on The Cars. They were attentive to every nuance and detail in the band’s development, even establishing the Carlisle, MA, address for The Cars’ fan club as “Cars Isle, MA.” [The band] desperately needed the managerial skills, record-industry knowledge, and guiding business representation that Fred provided. He had been around the track with Atlantic and promotion with the Geils Band earlier, and so he kind of knew the lay of the land. He was connected to the record companies, the record company–speak, and the record company–thought sensibility. So he made that move.

The Cars certainly needed experienced guidance, but they had the songs, the members, and the momentum. They were setting attendance records at the Rat, so they started to move into bigger venues and landed prime support slots, like opening for the J. Geils Band and Bryan Ferry at the Cape Cod Coliseum on June 25, 1977.

In a January 1978 Boston Globe article, Steve Morse called Fred Lewis’s work “tireless promotion,” to which Lewis added, “Straight promotion 98 percent of the time, and tiny lies the rest.”

Lewis was evangelical about the band. This was not just some opportunity for him to launch a managerial career; he believed deeply in them. He lived and breathed The Cars. In a piece for the Real Paper before he connected with The Cars, Lewis said the music industry was ripe for a shift. “It’s got to happen sooner or later,” he said. “This Frampton shit can’t go on forever—it’s getting stale. Sooner or later, one of these punk bands will have an AM hit, and the whole New Wave thing is going to happen big.” The writer of the piece, Rory O’Connor, explained this prediction came two months before Lewis started to hype him on The Cars. Seeing The Cars was the eureka moment for Lewis, a fulfillment of his prophecy.

Lewis played O’Connor the demo while driving him to a Cars gig. The writer noted he had been “singularly unimpressed” with Cap’n Swing, but that all changed with The Cars. Ric told him that the band felt part of the local scene. “We were no more ‘punk’ than anyone else,” he said. “But there was lots of energy.”

Energy, spirit, anger, hope, belief—this is the stuff that punk injected back into rock and roll for a large number of young people on both sides of the Atlantic. There really was a sense of ennui with not only bloated corporate rock and pop but the state of the world generally. The enthusiasm for punk rock brought a significant audience who were hungry for new music to small and medium-size clubs. It was an encouraging platform for a duo who had struggled to break into the music business by playing original songs in various styles. Ben and Ric finally found their place and their scene: people who wanted to hear (and dance to) their songs.

Ric told Rory O’Connor that he was interested in honing the ability to write catchy, uncomplicated songs that snuck in a “little word or phrase” that twists things around. “I write to see what I can draw from people,” he said. Fred Lewis, present at the interview, added, “The odds against someone writing a phrase that will communicate with millions of people across the world are phenomenal. As the song says, he’s in touch with their world [referencing The Cars’ song ‘I’m in Touch with Your World’]. It’s the touch of genius, the ability to mass-communicate like that. It’s close to a religious experience, like Billy Graham.”

Lewis said it was not easy getting labels to come to see the band. He was constantly sending out demo tapes. The few responses he did get were rejections. But with the demos getting requests from callers into WBCN and WCOZ, record labels started to notice. In the fall of 1977, they came calling. First in was George Daly, an A&R man from Elektra/Asylum. The label was flush with cash from the huge sales of Eagles, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, and other big-name artists. This was the beginning of the most profitable years in the record business. Record-business revenue more than doubled between 1973 and 1978. In 1978, when The Cars album was released, sales of LPs, singles, and tapes brought in $4.1 billion.

Daly had heard about The Cars from at least five different people. “There were three people on the company side,” he says. “There was Kurt [Nerlinger, radio promotion at Elektra], who I saw a lot. And those were the days when excess was the norm. We’d all get together, Kurt and Lou Maglia [sales for Elektra]. We all partied together, and we would talk. Kurt would always get wound up and say, ‘You’ve got to hear this band!’ And Lou was a born-in-the-blood Bostonian,” so he would push them, too. “Maxanne called me and said, ‘I’m playing their thing, and they play all over town, and they’re getting phones.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that’s great, but let me just say, that’s kind of a mirage.’” Daly explains that when radio played their local bands, the bands would often lobby their friends and fans to barrage the stations with requests, inflating the numbers.

“So I got a cassette,” Daly recalls, “and it was”—he pauses—“unimpressive.”

It was frail. And then, the very bizarreness of Ric, in a way, [later] turned the frailty into some kind of glamorous oddness that you just had to get next to and find out what was going on. But there was something about the groove missing. I liked the tunes, but remember, without the benefit of the multiple vocals, without the benefit of the sort of layering . . . I’m not saying they wouldn’t have made it somewhere somehow, but I listened to it, and I thought, “I don’t think so.” I don’t believe The Cars would have been broken by that cassette. That’s all I can tell you. They needed to be on a major [label], and they needed to have great production. They needed to have juice. I mean, I’m not faulting [Maxanne] in any way. She had great ears.

INDEED, DALY WOULD SOON HIRE MAXANNE IN THE A&R DEPARTMENT OF Elektra.

After our discussion prompted him to listen to the demos again, Daly emailed me: “The Cars we know had a strange, really miraculous chemistry, and every single molecule of that magic chemistry was needed. They are all present on The Cars, not here on the demos. Like butter/butterfly: close appearing, but not the same at all.”

Yet not only did Maxanne and the local Elektra reps keep pushing, but Daly’s own sister, Barbara, in school at Harvard, invited him to come visit her. She told him that there was this great band playing on campus, The Cars. He happened to be on the East Coast at a music-industry conference in Florida. He figured this would be a good way to go check out the band, but it really was an excuse to see his sister on Elektra’s dime. Still, there was such a buzz about this band that he was obligated to check it out for himself, so he came to Boston.

The band set up in a cafeteria on campus and started playing. Fred Lewis sat down next to Daly. “The group was good. I thought first, ‘Is Ichabod Crane the lead singer?’ But he started singing, and I realized the tunes had the real transistor-radio magic from the fifties. They were basically ditties. They were repetitive childlike playground slogans, ‘best friend’s girlfriend.’ But they were musical. They were slathered in attitude; I guess new-wave attitude or whatever. And Ric owned them. Ric projected them. Whatever he was, whatever color was being beamed out, you had to look at it.”

One of Ric’s great breakthroughs in this new batch of songs was the assimilation of his literary influences and his ability to smuggle psychedelic, even transgressive, poetry into the verses, an offbeat point of view glimpsed in a shell game with memorable sing-along anthemic choruses. Mick Jagger did it, and so did Ocasek’s exemplars like Lou Reed and Bryan Ferry. So, for example, that girl who is now with his best friend has seemingly S&M gear like nuclear boots and drip-dry gloves and bites her lip in reaction to love. In “Bye Bye Love,” a title borrowed from the Everly Brothers’ hit written by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, there is an “orangy sky,” “wavy midnight,” and a narrator slipping into insanity, not unlike a William S. Burroughs character.

In 1978, Ric told writer Toby Goldstein that the listeners of his songs “forget about the verses when they hear the chorus.” Ric didn’t fully come into his own as a songwriter, “with all these hidden innuendos just waiting to arrive,” until he was in his early thirties when he could nimbly weave art with pop. But most songwriters never do. It just seems that some of the ones who get there, like Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Smokey Robinson, and the Beatles, set the bar high by reaching such achievements in their twenties.

Ric saw his lyrics as a painter might see his palette. They were intended to serve the music and leave an overall impression, and any attempt for listeners to reverse engineer the songs, ask what the words meant, or remove them from the overall context of the songs was a futile approach that he compared to the Reader’s Digest version of a novel.

And now he finally had the right band to put it over. George Daly continues,

When Ben came up to the mic, I was like, “Okay, how come he’s not singing more?” And the girls loved him. Once you’ve got that face—bands have a face, Ric and Elliot and Ben—once you have three guys in the front that the people can look at, you’ve covered the sexual angle. Ben was a good bass player, but when Elliot played, I thought, “There’s complexity to this band.” He did some [Merle] Travis picking, he played his Chet [Atkins] thing, and I was like, “Okay, that’s what I need.” And then actually when Elliot did that solo [on “My Best Friend’s Girl”] . . . I’ve said this before: you have one job when you go see a band, and that’s to find the best art you can get and bring it home. And the second thing is, don’t get fired for it. And when he played that [solo on “Best Friend’s Girl”], I thought, “Oh boy.” It was just one of those moments.

Daly says he offered Lewis a deal on the spot. “I got a napkin, and I wrote, ‘Here’s the deal, $30,000. I need five years, five albums.” The $30K was a signing bonus, above and beyond any recording budget. Daly says that they each signed it, and one of them put it in their pocket. “I was a trusting soul, and so was Freddie.” Lewis does not recall the napkin memo but says that he would not have considered it a done deal by any measure, only perhaps an outline of a basic proposal.

Daly said the band loved the deal, and he connected personally with them. He was a musician who had played with Roy Buchanan and formed the band Grin with Nils Lofgren. He knew Allen Ginsberg. He spoke their language. He is still a sharp and witty guy. He got them connected with a lawyer friend of his, Brian Rohan, whom the Hollywood Reporter called “Dope Lawyer to the Stars” in a 2021 obituary. Daly got the deal approved by Joe Smith, the chairman of Elektra/Asylum, and they seemed good to go. Chuck Plotkin, who was Daly’s boss (on paper, at least), flew in to Boston, and the two hung out for the better part of the week in anticipation of catching The Cars again in Worcester, about an hour away from Boston. Joe Smith himself came to join them in Boston.

It came as a surprise, if not a total shock, then, for Daly to bump into Arista Records chief Clive Davis, the man who had given Daly his start in the record business. Davis was there with Bob Feiden, head of A&R at Arista—record-biz titans also in town to check out The Cars.

Clive walks up and says, “George, how are you?” I had worked for him a couple of years earlier. Clive is as discerning in music as a person could be. But I had a signed piece of paper, and in that innocence of youth, we had a deal, and Freddie was acting that way. So I was sitting there, and I saw Clive, and I think I had Chuck with me. I went, “Clive, so good to see you!” He said, “Yes, quite a band.” I said, “Yeah, I signed them last week.” And he looked at me with whatever the physical manifestation is of “You’re dead.” It was like he was sort of the protoplasm or something; some battery got disconnected to his eyes, and I said, “Yeah, that’s how it goes.”i

Elliot remembers it this way: Daly and Plotkin “were the two that met us in Boston and offered us a record deal.”

It was the same night we met Bob Feiden and Clive Davis at Ken’s [restaurant across the river in Boston’s Copley Square] and had a nice calm dinner with them. And they were very nice. They didn’t have a lot of rock and roll on Arista yet. They had, if I remember correctly, the Outlaws, and they had Patti Smith, and they had just gotten Dwight Twilley for the Twilley Don’t Mind record [1977, on Shelter Records, distributed and marketed by Arista]. We had a nice meeting with them. And then we went to the Royal Sonesta in Cambridge and went up to a suite and met with Chuck Plotkin and George Daly, and that was a completely different scene. Those guys were partying, and there was this craziness going on, and that was pretty funny. There were jars, some white powder on the table, that’s for sure. But completely different approaches.

LEWIS ASSERTS, “I REALLY WANTED THE BAND TO BE AT ELEKTRA. I DEALT A lot with Joe Smith, who ran the label as well, because he’s from Boston, so there was a connection of sorts. He was a great deejay from Boston back in the day.”

Another label, Robert Stigwood’s RSO, also made an offer at some point, but after they reviewed the proposed contracts, it came down to Elektra and Asylum. Greg says, “Ric was leaning towards Arista. I think he liked Clive’s showbiz vibe. I think he was a little seduced by Clive Davis.” But, explains Elliot,

when Warners and Elektra conceded to a couple of points that Arista did not want to concede to, we decided to go with Elektra. And also, Elektra was Elektra and had such a great history. As a matter of fact, it’s a funny aside, and if you remember the first Cars record, you’ll know what I mean. They had already changed their label from that big stylized E to the butterfly thing. And we asked them to go back to the old label. If you remember, they would also print the band’s logo [in the band’s font]. “The Doors” was written in their logo. “Love” was written in the Love logo. So we had them do the big E for Elektra and The Cars logo because we wanted a classic Elektra record.

When asked in 1979 why they went with Elektra, Ric said, “It seems like Elektra wasn’t like a giant label. It seemed like we would get attention from Elektra. They also seemed like they were the most energetic as far as wanting to have us. They were constantly bothering us, and it seemed like if they wanted us that bad, it might be good. . . . Elektra, in the old days, used to be a very innovative label, and we just decided on Elektra. I mean, they’ve taken some chances.” This was, after all, the label that had signed the Stooges, whom all The Cars guys liked. “I have rarely been shocked by anything,” David says. “Iggy with the Stooges shocked me.”

The Cars signed the contract on October 20. They opened up for Foreigner at the Orpheum later that night. The earliest mention I found of The Cars in the Boston Globe came two days later. The nonbylined piece reads, “BIG CONTRACT FOR HUB ROCK BAND. Cars, a Boston hard rock band that owns the attendance record at the Rat and has opened at major concerts for Geils and Robin Tower, signed a multi-year, multi-album deal with Elektra-Asylum Records on Thursday. It is a ‘six-figure’ contract, according to manager Fred Lewis, who gave no further details.”

In Daly’s mind, though, the deal was sealed when he got there first and jotted down a deal memo right then and there in a Harvard cafeteria. “This whole reality could have been just off in some other universe if Fred had not honored the napkin. So that was important to me. And Fred was conversant and didn’t make any claims and didn’t ask me anything, didn’t ask for any cocaine. And he was just a guy who did his thing. I liked him.”

Bill Flanagan, a Rhode Island native and Brown University grad, was working in a record store and writing about music for Trouser Press and other alternative magazines. He recalls, “It was a big surprise when you picked up the Phoenix, the Real Paper, and read ‘The Cars had been signed to Elektra Records’ because they seemed like a kind of third-tier band in Boston. They were new. We didn’t know the history. We didn’t know they had been around in different formats for quite a while. And it was sort of a surprise because it was still an unusual thing for a Boston band to get a national record deal.”

Greg says, “I remember that when we got the advance, it was like a signing bonus, and it was sort of, we roughly each got five thousand bucks, which was a lot of money for me at the time. In fact, Elaine’s idea was to use the five thousand as a deposit, and we bought a house in Littleton that cost forty thousand dollars, and then we sold it. Then we bought a house in Lincoln in 1980 for a hundred and twenty grand. I thought Elaine was smart for doing that. I think the other guys in the band bought cars.” Elliot recalls them going to buy new clothes at Trash and Vaudeville in New York’s East Village.

After years of destitution and desperation, Ric and Ben could finally breathe. Ric, in particular, had felt it hard to do so. He might have boxed up his past, compartmentalized his first marriage and two kids, and left them behind, but it was not without remorse. He had felt unprepared and could not live up to the responsibility or afford it in his mind. Constance’s divorce settlement was for a small amount of child support, and even that was too much for Ric, who did not pay it. But now that he had a little money, he called Constance and said he realized he could not be forgiven for what he had done in abandoning her with two kids. Now, he told her he wanted to pay an appropriate amount for the children. He did not have much, but it was the beginning of what he believed would be a career that earned something substantial. Instead, Constance, who had remarried, sued him, and they settled on a financial plan for the kids.

Greg recalls the actual recording budget being laid out for about $50,000, while Elliot remembers it as $85,000, quite a healthy sum. Daly says, “To be honest with you, I didn’t look at the deal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the deal. There were no budgets listed [on his napkin memo]. I didn’t write a budget. And as soon as you have a hit, you can rip all that stuff up.”

The band gathered friends to toast their major-label contract. Included was Anne Marie Foley, who had been a fan of the Ocasek and Orr duo ever since they were playing the Idler in Cambridge when she was an underage teenager from nearby Waltham. She followed them through Cap’n Swing. An avid rock-and-roll fan, she attended every show she could on the Cambridge Common, so she had even seen David with the Modern Lovers and later at the Rat with DMZ. She became lifelong friends with the band, but she and David became particularly close. Ben would cut her hair when she was low on dough. She would also babysit for Ric and Suzanne when they were in a pinch.

When I first met David, Elliot and David were roommates in the Comm. Ave. apartment, the corner of Comm. Ave. and Mass. Ave. Elliot was always around, and we all became really, really good friends. We kind of hung out as a group. We’d all hang around just listening to new artists and going to the Paradise or whatnot. I didn’t know David as well until he joined The Cars. And when they became The Cars, it was just like a whole new ball game. You could tell it was something special. Their songs were getting better, the vocals between Ric and Ben, and, I mean, they weren’t the most exciting band onstage, but their songs really made you want to keep going and see them. It was the most exciting time.

To celebrate the record deal, the band assembled at the home of their soundman, Thom Moore. Moore had met the guys via drummer Glenn Evans when they were in Cap’n Swing. He reconnected when The Cars played the Rat. Ric hired Moore, who would stay with the band for the long haul. Foley baked a cake. “It was like, ‘Wow, look at how long I’ve been following these guys. And here I am. I’m ensconced in this little family.’”

The next step was to figure out whom they could get to produce the album. Various names were bandied about, such as Tony Visconti, whose work with David Bowie the band admired. Interestingly, after he signed the band, Daly said, “There was a real force at the label proclaiming—and this is from the promo guys that had to go out to the stations—that they sounded too much like David Bowie and they couldn’t get any airplay.” Bowie’s 1977 “Heroes” was a favorite of some or all of The Cars guys. Ben was capable of singing like Bowie, and “Heroes” has a distinctive blend of crunchy and inventive guitars (from Robert Fripp and Carlos Alomar), synths (from Brian Eno and Bowie), melodies, and danceable rhythms, all elements that sound their way into The Cars’ albums. Bowie himself was someone they considered asking to produce them.

A 1978 interview with Creem reads, “To produce the album, The Cars wanted someone who could really handle electronics. They tossed around the names of Chris Thomas (Pink Floyd) . . . John Lennon, and even Bjorn and Benny from Abba.” Lennon was just a pipe dream. The latter was not a joke; David and Ben both liked Abba. “I liked anything that I thought was good,” David says. “I liked all kinds of different music, mostly pop music and mostly popular pop music. I would tell people that you can write a great song and sing a great song, do all this stuff, but it’s just some of the factors of making a great record. You have to sell it to somebody. So if somebody can make a great record and then it becomes a hit, to me, that’s the ultimate thing to be wishing for.”

Elliot recalls that they met with Gary Lyons, who had just produced Foreigner. “The funny thing about that was he was [Roy Thomas Baker’s] protégé at the beginning, and he passed on us, and Roy took us. Roy came to a snowed-out gig at a gymnasium.”

This is another famous inflection point in The Cars’ origin story. Maxanne says, “I advised Ric a lot on the stages of that deal and on producers, and my choice for the producer was Roy Thomas Baker. So I guess I had some influence there.” She was friends with the guys in Queen, yet another band she was instrumental in breaking in North America, and Queen was also on Elektra. Greg doesn’t recall any other producers being discussed. “Once we signed to Elektra, it seemed like that was Elektra’s suggestion, and that was their first choice. And it was like, ‘Oh, the Queen guy!’” The band marveled at the sounds of the Queen records but were as, if not more, attracted to Baker’s engineering work with Free (“All Right Now”) and other groups. They loved how fat those tracks sounded on the radio, which they would come to learn from Baker’s expertise in microphone and recording techniques. But according to Ric, they “didn’t choose Roy on the basis of what he’d done before” but rather chose him “because of his wonderful rapport with electronics and people.”

Baker came to a sparsely attended gig The Cars played. Some remember it being in the gymnasium of a forgotten high school somewhere on Boston’s South Shore, while Elliot asserts that it was College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. Fred Lewis, who recalls Baker being his idea, drove him out there in his little green Karmann Ghia. He says, “I always wanted Roy because what I felt he could do was expand the sound.” The band was aware that Baker would be there. “We played as well as we could,” Elliot recalls. “We knew it was an important thing to do.”

“I was asked by Elektra to see the unsigned band in Boston,” Baker said in a 1979 interview with Howard Cummings. “Since I was going to be cutting the Journey album [Infinity] in New York, I said OK. I went up in a freezing storm and saw the group at a gig, along with seven other people in the audience. I liked the songs, the feel, and their approach.” He had heard the demo, which he remembered some record companies rejected because it was “too modern.” That was just what he needed. When the Sex Pistols called him out to his face for his overproduction in the mid-1970s, he took it to heart and thought he should try to work on a project where he could make a sleeker sound, which would, in relief, lend more drama to any big parts. He saw The Cars as a band primed for precisely such a treatment, with straightforward verses and giant sing-along choruses. He had produced tracks like that already, such as Queen’s 1975 “You’re My Best Friend.” Still, “With The Cars, you had this band with a sparse rhythm section and a unique singer in Ric Ocasek, but when the harmonies kicked in, it was a wall of sound. They came at a time when rock radio really needed some freshening up,” Baker said in another interview in Mix magazine. “He was living a very high life in LA, and he wanted to get back to Earth a little bit,” Lewis says.

“It was such a blizzard that nobody came,” Ric said in 1979. “The sound was just bouncing all over the walls, and it was a ridiculous gig. And I remember Roy sat by the soundboard and never left his seat for the whole set, and then came back to the dressing room, which was a locker room, and seemed like he had heard things in the music that we would’ve wanted somebody to hear. We had seen a couple other producers prior to Roy and just didn’t like them. We just could tell right away that they wouldn’t be right. And Roy just seemed to say the right things.”

Baker went backstage and flitted around like a Monty Python character, asking the guys, “Hello, my loves! Do you guys want to go make a record in London?” Only David had ever traveled outside the eastern states. They were ecstatic. They asked, “When?” “February,” he answered. Just over a year after the band played their first show, they were headed to George Martin’s AIR (Associated Independent Recording) Studios in London with the producer of Queen.

Fuzzbee Morse watched as his former bandmates regrouped in a few more iterations after Richard and the Rabbits and finally somehow hit pay dirt.

It’s like in anything, you learn what doesn’t work, and you learn what does work. You discard what doesn’t work. And I think Ric was just honing and honing and getting closer. And he really wanted to be in a band that was popular. He wanted to be in a band that was on the radio and selling records, and he didn’t want to be in an obscure thing. And I think once The Cars found this sort of very concise, tight format, it was easy for him to write in that format because he’s like, “I know what I’m doing. I’m writing these kinds of songs with very tight rhythms and very tight structures.” He was clearly the songwriter in Richard and the Rabbits, but he had other guys who would write sections of music, and he was cool with that. He became more of an autocrat in The Cars, especially after Cap’n Swing; I know he was very unhappy with that. I think maybe things were just a little all over the place, and at that point, he was like, “I want focus. I want a very focused thing.”

The Cars, of course, had the exact opposite luck as Richard and the Rabbits. We play for what’s supposed to be an entire audience of executives twice and get rained out and whipped-creamed out. They play a gig in a snowstorm. There’s like eight people in the audience, and one of ’em is Roy Thomas Baker [laughs].

The band was raring to go. In January, Ric, for his part, was amazed that he finally had a real record contract but also brimmed with confidence, telling Steve Morse, “We were kind of starving just four months ago,” while shaking his head. But he also added, “Anything I listen to, on the radio or stereo, I now feel equal to.” But David took the confidence to another level, stating, “I don’t consider the Rolling Stones any better than me. I’m just as legitimate.” For a band that had yet to make a record together, this bold attitude from an experienced teammate was edifying.

Footnote

i Fred Lewis remembers only the one show at Harvard, with both labels showing up there. He recalls inviting both Daly and Davis. “I was going back and forth from one room to another,” he says. A Boston Phoenix tidbit in October 1977 mentioned Davis catching the band in Worcester. Elliot recalls a second show being at “Holy Trinity, or Holy Shit, or something.” The Globe piece in 1979 also states that the gig was at College of the Holy Cross. A 1979 Trouser Press article described the hot pursuit. “Clive Davis (Arista) and Joe Smith (Elektra) showed up at Holy Cross College in Worcester on the same night to see the band.”

Chapter 9

RECORDING THE CARS

SEEING THE BEATLES IN CONCERT AS A CHILD CHANGED GREG’S LIFE. BEN was in a band pretty much modeled after the Fab Four and was even featured sporting a mop top in Life magazine. David’s would-be talent-scout father convinced his son that the Beatles would be huge. He was captivated by the Life issue in which his future bandmate appeared. Ric, older than them all, more a product of the early years of rock and roll, combined his love of Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles into his own shiny melodic songs with arch lyrics. And it would be tough to find a bigger fanatic for the Fabs than Elliot.

So how to measure the elation the five of them must have felt to be flown to London to record with this star producer in AIR Studios, owned by the famous Beatles producer George Martin? “It’s unbelievable to think of compared to today because this was a new, relatively unproven band,” Elliot marvels forty-five years later.

We go from playing our first show on New Year’s Eve to being at AIR Studios in London in just a year. And we get Roy Thomas Baker to produce us. Elektra flies us to London and puts us up in this mansion in Mayfair with a couple that cooked and cleaned and polished the brass doorknob on the front door every day. This was crazy, man. We had a couple of really nice cars to get back and forth to the studio on Oxford Street. It was just the red-carpet treatment from the word go; amazing for a band that hadn’t made a hit yet, or a record even. I remember sitting in the living room in the house with the guys, and Warners sent over a pile of records and a record player. We were just having so much fun.

Greg described it as their version of Help!

They had breakfast every day at a greasy spoon called the Lido Cafe, about a block away from AIR. Ric named his music publishing company, Lido Music, after it.

“We didn’t know if it was going to be successful or not,” Elliot says. “We just hoped that it sold enough that we could do it again and we’d make another one.”

Back at home, Boston was buried under the Blizzard of ’78, and much of the region was without power for weeks. “Being in a new country, waking up, and having a whole different environment around you,” Ric said in 1979. “It was more fun to have more distractions in a different environment. It was more inspiring.”

The Cars recorded in Studio 3 at AIR. Kate Bush was in the largest studio there, with a full orchestra. Elliot continues,

At one point, Paul McCartney was next door. He was just there for maybe a day or two, but I’d heard that he was in the next studio. But you wouldn’t dare [try to meet him]. George Martin came in a couple of times to listen and lie down on the sofa in front of the mixing console, in front of the board. And we played a track. The track ended. And he said, “That’s not bad, actually.” And we would be crestfallen! We’d be like, “Oh, man.” And then he’d leave the room, and the engineers would go, “No, no, you don’t understand! That’s the best compliment he ever gives anything. If he says, ‘That’s not bad, actually,’ he means it was great!”

The original AIR was located at 214 Oxford Street, right on Oxford Circus. The band worked daytime hours. The song arrangements were so worked out that tracking was done in about twelve days. Elliot recorded all his guitar overdubs in a day and a half. Mixing the songs took nine more. So, there was only a short amount of downtime to get out and soak up the city. Baker took them out for Indian food, still a rarity in the United States. Ben, though, was a lifelong addict of spicy food and would later carry around bottles of hot sauce.

Elliot recalls clubbing and seeing Johnny Thunders and Ultravox. He went shopping and found a white leather motorcycle jacket at the Kensington Market. “I thought it was cool as hell,” he says. “In fact, I’m wearing it on the back cover of the first album.” I turn over the album cover to have a look. “There it is,” Elliot says with a giggle. “It’s at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame right now. So I got this jacket, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m pretty cool in this jacket.’ And Chris [Stein] and Deb [Harry] from Blondie came in. They were recording backing tracks for her to sing to on Top of the Pops. Chris sees my jacket, and he tries to trade me for his jacket. I was like, ‘No way.’ And I had this shoulder bag that I bought on Charing Cross Road where all the guitar stores are, and it had the Vox logo, and he wanted that. I was like, ‘Get out of here!’”

Blondie had just released their second album, Plastic Letters. Later, in 1978, they released Parallel Lines, their big breakthrough, spawning six singles. In September 1977, Talking Heads released their debut album, 77. Elvis Costello’s stellar coming-out LP, My Aim Is True, was released in July. Like The Cars, all those albums had streamlined, punchy songs that were infused with the energy and attitude of punk rock but were just classic pop songs exquisitely executed in a fresh presentation. Of course, Blondie had the stunning Debbie Harry out front singing. But Elvis leaned into the geeky look with oversize Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses. And David Byrne of Taking Heads embraced his awkward-artist persona, a hero to introverts. These sorts of front men might have made Ric Ocasek relax into himself a little more naturally. Cheap Trick combined two Ben Orr–like natural rock stars with two quirky bandmates, putting heavy power into their pop. The same month The Cars were in the studio, February, the debut single from Squeeze, “Take Me, I’m Yours,” was released in England, and the B-52s were recording their first single, “Rock Lobster.”

There had always been an appetite on both sides of the Atlantic for more music that was rootsy but fresh, unpretentious, pure pop and rock and roll, whether it came as glam, pub rock, power pop, punk rock, or, in the new vernacular, “new wave.” Even the heartland rock and roll of the Dwight Twilley Band and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and English roots rockers Dire Straits was getting grouped under that marketing umbrella. The guys in The Cars saw a kinship with most of these artists. And they had punk cred because they had David, started at the Rat, and embraced the DIY ethos (getting a self-financed demo tape played on the radio) that punk rock encouraged. But the spirit also informed the music a bit.

“You couldn’t help but be caught up in that,” Elliot says. “You could feel sort of a sea change coming where it was moving away from prog and all that pretentious kind of, like lasers, and Boston [the band], songs about King Arthur, and all that stuff. And it’s almost like in a lot of things, it was almost like a correction, a market correction. It went too far out, and then it got reeled in all the way back to three chords and just screaming into a mic. But somewhere in between, there’s a happy medium, which I think is where I lived.”

And it was where Roy Thomas Baker wanted to move, having been partially responsible for some of the bloating that necessitated a correction. But he wasn’t about to strip it all down to just “three chords and the truth,” screamed into a microphone. He did want to record The Cars as they sounded in live performance, more or less, but he wanted to hone and accent certain strengths they possessed. As part of his deal to produce the album, Baker had negotiated for George Daly at Elektra to fly over a rare Stephens forty-track recorder on the supersonic Concorde jet.

“Roy, almost anticipating the glory of the infinite number of tracks that digital has, said, ‘I need more,’” Daly recalls with a laugh. “And he bumps into this semi-eccentric but talented engineer [John Stephens] who says, ‘I’ve got a machine I made that has forty tracks.’ Not many records were made with forty tracks.” Before Leon Russell started using one in 1973, no one could make such records. “Part of the sound you hear [on The Cars] that’s so glorious is the multiple, multiple vocal overdubs,” Daly says. “I was head of this big A&R division, a major label, a hot major label, Eagles and Joni, and so forth, and I still was sort of looked at sideways by the billing department. Good old Joe Smith said, ‘Whatever you want, man, whatever you got to do.’ Sent on a Concorde in a seat. It cost like $1,500 of 1977 money.”

A 1979 article in RE-P (Recording-Engineer/Producer) magazine says that the machine’s inventor, John Stephens, “carried [the recorder] across the Atlantic as baggage to prove its portability.” It was delivered to Baker in London in January. Greg Hawkes says Stephens stayed on through the sessions. Stephens was present in the control room half the time doing maintenance, ensuring the machine stayed running.

In 1975, Baker had been limited to a single twenty-four-track machine producing the groundbreaking “Bohemian Rhapsody,” as the technology of linking and syncing two machines together was not available to him at the time. So he had to continually bounce mixes of the Queen song (the opera section of which alone took more time to record than the entire Cars album) down to two stereo tracks (a process called bouncing) to open up the rest of the tracks for the thick layering of all the vocals, unison parts, and harmonies. Each bounce down of tape loses a generation of quality (the sound gets duller and more distorted) and commits elements of the song to a partial mix. While an expert engineer like him knows how to make such decisions, it is nevertheless limiting and can be frustrating to those with grander visions. And Freddie Mercury and Roy Thomas Baker would try to outdo each other’s grand visions.

But engineers working on tape, no matter how many tracks, could—and some still do—exploit the limitations of the technology to their advantage. Tape compression, for example, is something that Baker raised to an art form and is critical to understanding how the timeless sounds of the first Cars albums were achieved. Engineers would freak out a little when Baker would run the meters into the red, “saturating” the tape and mixing board with somewhat distorted recorded musical information. He even went so far as to cover meters with masking tape and just relied on his ears. At a certain point, the music on the tape does not actually get louder. Instead, he explained, “What happens is the bottom end fills out. It is technically distortion, but it is also bringing out those nice third and fifth harmonics that you want to hear. Doing it this way adds a tremendous value to the bass end. It makes it grind and pump out on the radio more. It’s apparent volume, as opposed to actual volume.”

Of course, all that recording tech is useless if the artists themselves don’t produce quality music and sounds. The Cars were all excellent and prepared musicians, and the songs and arrangements were ripe for recording.

Baker would record the band playing live but was keeping only enough of the original tracks for the band to know where they were in a song arrangement for when it came time to overdub. So what would be left would be the drums, bass, rhythm guitar, and a guide vocal (also called a scratch vocal, to be replaced later). Then Baker would start with the backing vocals so he could use as many available tracks as possible to do his layering. Once those were all set, he would move on to the instrumentation.

For us gear geeks who want to know the source of these creamy and beefy sonics, the key instruments included Elliot’s 1977 Gibson Les Paul Standard with new DiMarzio Super Distortion pickups. He also had his 1977 Fender Telecaster, with a Bartolini Hi-A Firebird mini-humbucker pickup in the neck position. There is not much acoustic guitar on the album, but Elliot says he also used a Martin D-35, “which was used very sparingly (you can hear it faintly in ‘All Mixed Up’).” Ric used his Gibson SG that he played from Cap’n Swing right through The Cars and his “Pepto Bismol pink [Fender] Jazzmaster,” the age of which Elliot was uncertain, though it was probably a 1974. It had started with a sunburst finish. A 1982 Musician article reads, “Ocasek’s . . . favorite guitar is an eight-year-old Fender Jazzmaster, painted pink. ‘I use it on every record, all the time.’”

They were all adventurous and interested in the latest tech. “Some of the effects that are on the first album are really long drum effects,” David recounted to Brett Milano.

They sound like keyboards. There’s a lot of ’em that people have always thought were keyboards, but you could get this three-minute delay on all these really weird, mostly sort of outer-space kind of sounds. You can hear them at the ends and beginnings of songs. So you had to program those, that sound, if you could find it again, into the drum machine, and then if anybody bumped the equipment or turned a knob, [Baker] would go to hit a sound that was supposed to last three minutes and it would end in about five seconds. You’d have to try to figure out where it went, where it was just like knobs and foot switches everywhere.

Elliot remembers Baker triggering synthetic drum sounds. “I watched Roy Thomas Baker invent triggering,” he said in an interview with Zac Childs.

Check this out: There was no Akai [sampler], nothing like that. Then David played his real rack tom on the song, “Let the Good Times Roll,” boom! Then Roy fed that track through a small little wooden Auratone speaker. Almost every recording studio would have this little Auratone speaker in their studio to check what mono sounded like and to hear what it would sound like on a car radio. It was sort of like a crummy little speaker, but it was very typical, and it was good to check your mix on that. It had to sound good on that, too. So what Roy did, he turned it on its back, that little Auratone speaker, so that the cone was facing up. Then he took the Syndrum pad. [The Pollard Syndrum was the first commercially available drum synthesizer, invented in 1975.] It was like an electronic drum pad that you’d hit. [Baker] turned it down on top of the cone and he fed that tom-tom track through the Auratone speaker, and it was loud enough that it would punch the Syndrum and make it go “Boom! Boom!” every time David hit his tom on the recording, and it triggered it.

After Ric’s guitar, it’s the triggered drum sound that opens “Good Times Roll,” the first song on the band’s debut album. This effect was so integral and identifiable that David and the band’s crew figured out how to replicate the sounds in live performance situations. This was such a novel texture that, in combination with the big guitars, Greg’s synths, and the vocals, it sonically defined The Cars. “[Greg] was really into the old, funky keyboards,” said Geoff Workman, who engineered the record. “He had a Vox Continental and a Farfisa and a little old Moog . . . instruments that looked like they’d come from thrift stores, but he got these really interesting sounds out of them. . . . Greg would just plug and play.” He also used a MiniKorg 700S, an APR Omni MK1, and a Yamaha CP-30 electric piano.

But Ric and Elliot kept to the basics, with classic guitars straight into Ampeg amps. All the distorted sounds came from driving the amps hard. The delay sounds were actual tape delay rigged up by Baker. The producer also provided the chorus-like guitar effects by using a varispeed technique, using tape machines, where a musician records a take and then doubles or triples the part, playing the same exact thing again. The engineer would record the subsequent takes at a slightly different speed, resulting in a performance that is just slightly out of pitch with itself, “for that shimmering Beatle-y sound,” Elliot explained.

Ric’s guitar, panned hard right in the stereo mix, opens the song, the album, and the recorded career of The Cars in a literally offbeat way; on the upstroke, kind of like reggae without it being the actual reggae that many American and English players were starting to incorporate into their material. If you’re counting “one-and-two-and-three-and-four,” Ric comes in on the second “and,” as if they hit the Record button late. The droll and lagging guitar riff sets a tempo that’s almost too slow. That’s all in one stereo channel. In the other, there’s an out-of-synch electronic blip that beats like an oscillator pulse. The Syndrum hits are panned left. Then, in the middle, there’s a straining and somewhat distant voice suggesting that we all should let the good times roll.

Ric’s lead vocal is commanding, in a pretty deep echo, as if in a small tiled room. He drags out and enunciates his words, almost like Frank Sinatra might, so that he adds a little more to the end of the line “a clown-uh.” A listener paying any real attention to the lyrics would have to wonder if, indeed, good times were in store. Ric explained that the song is “not really about ‘good times’ at all. Actually, it’s about paying for things twice and not knowing it.”

The rest of the band falls in around the thirty-second mark, Greg swooping in on a synth, David rolling in with a drum fill, and Elliot’s reinforced “chunka-chunks” panned hard left, as well as his phased bends on lead guitar in the center. And then the gigantic backing vocals hit you with “GOOD TIMES ROLL.” The guys would all sing in unison at the same microphone layering each part.

“‘Good Times Roll’ has about 50 voices in one part,” Baker said. “But the thing is, it vanishes after one line. It consists of a four-part harmony, quadruple-tracked. Three voices multiplied by four is twelve, multiplied by four again, is forty-eight voices singing that part. The three guys singing the same part started out on one track, then that was triple-tracked, and so forth for the first, second, and third-part harmonies.”

But even with forty tracks to work with, Baker was bouncing down the mixes to make room for even more tracks. Ian Taylor, who would become Baker’s engineer in 1980, says, “Anybody who’s worked with Roy would know this expression: He’d always push the talk-back button down and say, ‘Doubly-poos! Doubly-poos!’ which meant we’re going to double it. And then ‘Triply-poos! Triply-poos!’ which meant we’re going to do it again. That was his little, it was like, ‘You’re just going to do it every time,’ and so he goes through every chorus, every little background line, and do one. ‘Okay. Doubly-poos!’”

Still, Baker noted that “the concept on [The Cars] is the open approach: to songs, simplicity, and sound. No stifling or overproduction techniques for the sake of doing it. We left the holes open.” He just chose his spots where they’d go big. When they first heard it back, the guys were blown away. Greg adopts a high-pitched English accent to imitate Baker: “‘Oh, would you like to hear it now?’ It was like, ‘Wow!’ This sounds like a record.” But there was some ambivalence. Ric recalled, “We were scared. ‘Roy, we can’t do that. We can’t sing that live.’” Baker dismissed such concerns: “You’ll get used to it.” And Ric did get used to it and quickly learned to love it. Greg, though, was never worried. “I didn’t have this impression of, ‘Oh, this is overproduced’; I was pretty impressed.” Elliot agrees. “I don’t recall any trepidation or hesitation about it. We were just blown away. We just sounded fucking amazing. It did. It sounded amazing. But yeah, we could never reproduce those gigantic, huge background vocals live.”

Baker has a big personality, described by Ric as “flamboyant” and even “outrageous.” During the sessions, he always kept the mood up and light. The band had a collective appreciation of the absurd and an irreverent sense of humor. They got a kick out of Baker’s eccentricities. He was, in Greg’s estimation,

not exactly very proper. I remember one time he was supposedly on this diet that his doctor had given him and had all these things that he couldn’t eat or drink. And he goes, “Oh, it doesn’t say anything about champagne!” [Greg mimes downing a bottle.] And he would carry a briefcase. He would always have with him sort of a proper dining set, like a napkin and a set of silverware and a little bottle of Coleman’s mustard, the spicy English mustard, and maybe a little salt and pepper thing. And if you were going to have lunch or something at the studio, he would have his little place setting with his silverware.

Ian Taylor says Baker went even further on some sessions, sending multiple flight cases of cookware ahead of his arrival at a studio, and he would actually cook the meals, announcing to the artists what the menu would be that day.

“He was eccentric, you know, a snob,” Ric said in 1978. “But he was also comical and totally on top of things. And he was interested in our band, not just in doing the project.” Ric said Roy made the band sound professional and pointed out that Baker’s background in recording classical gave him expertise in using room mics, which he applied to rock bands.

The overall mix of the album is riveting right from “Good Times Roll,” balanced perfectly with no instruments competing for space. Baker lets the whole production breathe at a time when rock on the radio (like their city-mates Boston) tended to have weighed-down or airless production, like some records by Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac. Those big vocals are so present, so in your face, that they sound almost three-dimensional. They would record the vocals not in an isolation booth but out in the big live room, capturing natural sound reflections. Baker didn’t even use baffles to stop instruments from bleeding into the mics set up for other instruments, which is notable because everything sounds pristine.

The drums punch right through, with Ben’s bass locked in. “Roy loved loud drums,” David told the Wall Street Journal. “I had tuned them so they were boom-y and bass-y. I also had super-thin wood drum rims, which helped my tom-toms pop.” On “Good Times Roll,” Greg laces in more than a few memorable hooks, like that little repeated four-note figure that gallops along as a transition into the second verse (around 0:53) and then follows that up with the up-and-down figure that Ben doubles with his bass starting around 1:05 and remaining through that verse. He adds a catchy figure at the next prechorus (“Let them leave you . . .”), which snakes through the holes left by Elliot’s bends. Elliot begins his understated solo with a little T. Rex “Bang a Gong” rhythm. A big “good times roll” vocal separates that from Greg’s solo, which repeats his earlier four-note figure. The rest of the recording builds by varying the vocal arrangement between the backing vocals and Ric’s vocals. The ending vamp went on longer than what’s on the album, but at about 3:36, you can hear a tape edit where they tagged on (or skipped to) an actual ending instead of a fade-out.

Baker had seen British bands copying American rock and roll and then saw British rock become dominant. He saw The Cars as part of the first cohort of American bands to incorporate those influences from across the Atlantic. He reckoned, “There’s quite a few similarities between what The Cars are doing and what, say, Marc Bolan [leader of T. Rex] would have been doing if he was still alive. . . . The Cars are the first generation of the turn-around.”

Ric starts “My Best Friend’s Girl” with palm-muted chords, on just two or three strings, a percussive, minimalist effect that became a Cars calling card. For a predecessor, listen to “Wild Weekend” by the Rockin’ Rebels, an instrumental 1962 hit. Handclaps join on the other side of the stereo, an homage to the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” You can hear the natural room echo on the claps. David’s drums sound even bigger than on “Good Times Roll.” He says, “I overdubbed timbales to add a Latin feel. They’re the bright, metallic-sounding drums that appear just before we sing the chorus.” The timbales also trigger a growling drum synth sound, like someone is destroying an asteroid in a vintage video game. As with some other songs on the album, there’s a slight natural push and pull with the tempo. David was not locked into a click track, which is when a metronomic beat is laid down to tape to keep a steady tempo grid. “The technology to try to play with a click track can be awful and harsh sounding. I wish that we had [used a click track], but I don’t remember doing it,” he reports. “I get nervous and speed up, and sometimes the whole band speeds up together, which is okay, but sometimes I’m ahead of them.”

Under the chorus of “Best Friend’s Girl,” Elliot plays a walking rockabilly riff with a slight bluesy bend. After the chorus, he lays down that famous part inspired by George Harrison’s part on “I Will.” Harrison had been influenced by Chet Atkins on “I Will” and other songs like “All My Loving.” It’s just a sweet little spot from Elliot, who saves up the big guns for the full head-spinning solo at around two minutes in. The whole song is an amped-up tribute to Buddy Holly’s brand of rockabilly, from Ric’s opening guitar to his Holly hiccup on the line “a reaction to luh-uh-uh-uh-ove.”

But what Elliot unleashes distills a number of his own influences, like Jesse Ed Davis, Jeff Beck, Roy Nichols, and James Burton. It’s country inasmuch as it bends and twangs and follows the chord changes instead of playing against them like a blues-oriented player might. It’s cleanly executed, with a little slap-back echo, but the tone is on the edge of breakup distortion, and the conclusion, with a flurry of hammered-on and pulled-off notes, is blistering like a rock player’s attack. And he had played many of his parts while battling flu-like symptoms.

Influences aside, it’s pure Elliot Easton and grabbed the attention of young guitarists. Slash cited Elliot as one of his favorite players. “I always was into melodic guitar solos that were within the confines of a song, that really enhanced a song,” he said in a 2010 interview. “All my favorite guitar players, from Eric Clapton to Elliot Easton, Joe Walsh to Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Rick Nielsen, Joe Perry, they all had these great thirty-second—if that—little guitar breaks that really said something and carried the song along.”

Heady company. Like Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze, Elliot is known for his concisely potent, hummable, and memorable solos. The Cars and Squeeze each released their debut records in 1978, still the height of the era of the rock-guitar hero. The trend of long onanistic guitar solos arguably reached its apex (or nadir, depending on your outlook) around this time. Van Halen, with virtuoso Eddie Van Halen unleashing furious squalls of tapped notes, released their first album the same year. However, this was also post–Ramones–Sex Pistols, so the guitar pyrotechnics were regarded as cliché by many fans and players alike, while a return to basics, if not an outright embrace of a certain primitivism, brought things back to earth for mere mortals.

While many so-called punk and new-wave acts threw out the baby with the bathwater by minimizing solos or jettisoning the guitar completely, still other forward-leaning artists found new expressive uses of the instrument, new textures, even leading to sonic leaps forward in the way that Jimi Hendrix had unleashed the then unforeseen potential of an amplified guitar a decade prior. Before his notable tenure alongside Talking Heads, Adrian Belew came up through the ranks of Frank Zappa’s combos and then added animalistic and otherworldly highly processed guitar solos to David Bowie’s Lodger album (1979), as he would soon thereafter on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. The band Television would sometimes carry on for fifteen minutes of guitar improvisations.

What Elliot plays on the records is just the tip of his iceberg. Like his bandmate Greg Hawkes, he never shows you all his cards. He comes in, slaps you like a Zen master, and exits.

And then there’s Greg. The man is like an octopus, reaching for multiple keyboards. He enters “My Best Friend’s Girl” on electric piano with Ben on the chorus. He soon adds a reinforced bass sound on synth, like a trombone, just a hint, under Elliot’s solo. Then he moves to a staccato sixteenth-note part with an organ-like sound. He varies that yet again during the last verse, bringing it up to a higher octave. For the outro vamp, Greg introduces a strings figure on the ARP synth.

When they were finished recording “My Best Friend’s Girl,” Baker felt it was a little too slow, so he sped up the tape enough to push the pitch up a full step, from the key of E to F. They would play it live in E, because F is not an easy key for guitarists to deal with.

The lyrics are peak Ric, spinning an homage to atomic-age 1950s, with a wink at a little bondage gear. He said, “At some point, I realized my lyrics didn’t include the words ‘My Best Friend’s Girl.’ So I pulled out the lyrics someone had typed up and added a chorus in the margin in pen: ‘She’s my best friend’s girl . . . but she used to be mine.’ I liked the twist. Up until that point, you think the singer stole his best friend’s girl based on how good he feels about her. . . . With the last line of the chorus . . . you realize the guy didn’t steal his best friend’s girl—his friend stole her away from him.”

Like Elvis Costello’s antiromances, Ric spins a hangdog self-deprecating love-triangle story more entertaining than Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl”—while not as caustic and comic as Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” that also was released in 1978. “I have a quick point of satiety when I write,” he told Lisa Robinson in 1982. “I definitely don’t go overboard. I don’t dwell. I don’t change a lot from my first impressions of what I’m doing lyrically.” He called himself a “stenographer for the masses.”

Ric’s vocals on the album are bolder than all past recordings and previous iterations. When Greg returned to the fold and joined The Cars, he says, “It seemed to me all of a sudden like Ric’s voice was stylized.” Ben’s vocals were always fully formed, and he comes across as perfectly natural on the album. “But Ric had that more staccato kind of Buddy Holly thing,” Greg adds. “Also, his look was getting stylized, too. He wasn’t like the hippie haircut. He was starting to do the kind of combing it back and the sunglasses thing. So it was a simpler, more straight-ahead approach.”

The lead vocals were recorded as scratch takes during the basic tracks. The backing vocal layering would be recorded to a rough mix (also known as a monitor mix) with a scratch-track vocal. After those were finished, Ric or Ben would go out into the live room and sing the keeper lead vocals. You can hear the natural ambience of the room and the space around the vocals, in addition to any reverb or delays Baker added in the mixing process.

Even though Ric wrote almost all the songs (Greg shares a cowriting credit on “Moving in Stereo”), this is far from a singer-songwriter fronting a band assembled in the studio to record his music. Instead, it is a band with a leader who is writing specifically for that band. As Elliot explains:

I think one of the keys to the recipe that made The Cars was that we were all into different kinds of music, and quite often, that was like a rub. I would say my kind of American-influenced kind of stuff that I brought to them might’ve been some people in the band’s least favorite element because they were into edgy, weirder stuff. I’m playing what I’m playing; I’m playing rockabilly licks in “Best Friend’s Girl.” And what they do might’ve been my least favorite element. I try to bring it back to what I like, and that push and pull of all those different influences made for an unusual combination of elements.

Ric would come to rehearsals and either play the songs for the others or play a cassette of himself performing them, sometimes to a rudimentary drum-machine pattern. The band would write their own parts early in rehearsals. “It’s usually just a guitar and my voice,” Ric said, explaining the process in 1979. “It’s in pretty rough form. It’s the verses in the choruses in all that are in the right places and we have to take it and first decide if everybody is inspired to do it. And then, if everybody is, we start it from scratch. We just sit there and do it. And I think that’s about the most fun because when you’re finished, you’ve got something that was never there before. It was like the sketch, and then we’d all add the color to the sketch. That’s when it becomes a Cars song.”

The band would record their rehearsals and listen back to hone their parts. Greg says, “I would think, ‘Gee, I should simplify. Maybe it doesn’t need any keyboards in the verse, and they should just come in the chorus.’ And on ‘Just What I Needed,’ there’s not really any keys until I come in [after the first chorus]. And that was one of the things I kind of learned that first year, how to simplify and focus it down.”

But there would not need to be much discussion between them. Ric and Ben continued their method of intuition over who should sing the lead vocal on any given song. Bassists and drummers have to be in sync, but even Ben and David didn’t talk about it. David remembers, “We never worked together on parts. He would never say anything about ‘What if you do this?’ We would just start playing, me and Ben. I never asked him to change anything. He never asked me to change anything except once; it was the backward beat.” Here, David refers to the last verse of “Just What I Needed” after the guitar solo. Around the 2:12 mark, he turns the beat around, switching where the snare and the kick drums fall. For most of the song, he plays the snare on the two and four beats, a typical rock-and-roll backbeat. But after Ben sings “and wasting all my time time” (the repetition of “time” inspired by Lou Reed’s “Sister Ray”), David switches to the snare on the one beat, also called the downbeat, with the kick drum going to where the snare was, and snapping back to the backbeat at 2:20, as Greg’s synth line reenters. With this, David provides another musical event, an extra hook in an already hook-laden song.

“What I did was I made the kick drum backward, too, but [Ben] was already playing another part. So he said, I think all he said was, [he mumbles it for effect, in an imitation of Ben], ‘What if you changed the thing there?’ So I played it by myself. I said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re right. What I’m playing is not good at all.’ So I just played with what he was playing. That was the only time that we ever communicated about parts.”

It’s a fun twist to the song. “I thought I stole it,” David says. “I mistakenly thought that somebody did that on a record, but then when I went back and listened to the record years later, they didn’t actually do that. I thought it was the song ‘Virginia Plain’ [the 1972 Roxy Music single], but it wasn’t.”

Ric starts “Just What I Needed” with the muted eighth-note chords, and Elliot kicks in the door with those stereo-doubled, pinpoint-staccato power-chord stabs. It is no wonder Fountains of Waynei lifted those in-your-face stabs for their homage to The Cars, “Stacy’s Mom.” But the riff and pattern were actually first suggested on “Yummy Yummy Yummy” by the bubblegum pop band Ohio Express. It’s consistent with the pop-art rock that was The Cars. But Elliot says, “Forget ‘Yummy’ and think ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ [by Tommy James and the Shondells] for a much more accurate example of intent.” These references, along with Elliot’s rockabilly riffs and Ric’s Buddy Holly vocal bits, were reaching back to pop before turned-on psychedelia, prog rock, and general 1970s heaviness. This was something lighter, a step back to leap forward. Remember, even the outwardly retro Stray Cats featuring Elliot’s fellow Massapequa native Brian Setzer and the old-school swingin’ British Rockpile were lumped under new-wave marketing.

With his first vocal on the album (he sings four of the nine songs), Ben enters “Just What I Needed” with the sarcastic first line, being nonchalant about having his time wasted by this relationship, a cue possibly taken from Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” And most adolescents identified with the next line about losing one’s mind while the subject is standing so close.

Opening the song, David plays the beat but only on the snare. Elliot points out that the chords in the verse match those of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” “Ric wrote it, so I assume neither credit nor blame, but it’s interesting, though, because that [Beatles] single was so profoundly pivotal for my generation of rock and rollers. Actually, the earth shifted on its axis.” And just as Elliot had marveled about how the Beatles had exposed him and millions of others to unconventional sounds by incorporating their experimental influences into rock-and-roll music, The Cars were sneaking in edgier underground elements via almost bubblegum pop.

At the top of the next verse, David fleshes out the pattern with the kick drum and hi-hat, and Elliot slides back in, also muted like Ric but adding more movement to the chords as a counterpoint. As they near the end of the verse, Elliot starts opening up the chords, and the influence on Weezer (with whom Ric would later produce) is obvious. Greg Hawkes glides in on a new synth hook, answered by a couple of overdubbed figures from Elliot. The whole break swings fiercely. The performances build in intensity; you can hear the hi-hat opening slowly, and David hits it harder as Elliot and Ric open up the muted chords as the verses lead to the chorus. Ben descends his bass line a half step as variation, creating a new chord at around 1:26, which he does not repeat the next time through.

Ben’s vocals are doubled (if not quadrupled) when they hit the chorus for the first time. He is answered by the stacked background vocals, echoing the lead vocals. A close listen reveals Elliot also laying down some bending doubled guitar parts. Then he unleashes one of his concise melodic solos that he would become known for. You can probably hum it from memory. It is only sixteen seconds long but manages to take us on a journey and tells us a story, with a punch line that we just start to understand as the joker is out the door. We don’t know what hit us, but we are left slaphappy. Unlike many guitar solos, this is not some sort of improvised exploration that might be different every performance; it’s a composition within the composition, as all of Elliot’s Cars solos are. It elevates the song, serving the whole. It is difficult to imagine the song without it. Audiences at their live shows would be bummed if it had not been played note for note. It’s like the great George Harrison solos, a little bit of country and a lot of rock and roll. He ends it with a sort of saturated version of Buddy Holly’s riff on “That’ll Be the Day” in reverse, ascending instead of descending. We can discern many of his influences here. But mostly, he keeps the music rooted in tradition, foreshadowing the rockabilly revival in the early ’80s.

In this solo, we hear a key to Elliot’s general approach in The Cars, which is playing with the chord changes so that when Ric’s rhythm guitar is on E, Elliot’s lead lines are within the E major scale. The song switches to B, and Elliot slides into notes within that scale, and so on, over C-sharp minor (C#m) and G#. This may sound basic, but most rock lead guitarists in the 1970s played bluesy licks. Blues playing usually means playing against the chord changes, typically in a minor pentatonic scale, which creates some dissonance and tension. For guitarists, it doesn’t require changing hand positions and scales; you just play with and against the chords as they change. He adds, “I also got the approach of playing through the changes from jazz players.”

To follow the chords, a soloing guitar player has to change hand positions up and down the neck of the guitar to choose notes within the changes lest it sound unpleasantly dissonant. To do so fluidly, especially over a song that is moving along at a crisp clip, requires advanced familiarity with the guitar neck and a deep musical vocabulary. Some background in basic music theory helps considerably, though many players can become musically fluent by ear. Think country players compared to blues guitarists, and you get the idea.

The postsolo verse of “Just What I Needed” returns to form, but in the second half David does his beat turnaround, and Elliot’s bending parts come up in the mix and snake around the vocals. The final chorus repeats and pauses before it hits a new coda (heralded by Ben’s exhortation, “So bleed me!”), an outro with Greg playing an up-and-down slide whistle–like part on the synth, soon joined by the guitar, while the gang vocals sing the title phrase in between the figures, and it all trails off in that modulating space-age synth note like a flying saucer hightailing it out of here. A perfectly written, arranged, and performed pop song.

Funny to think at the time, years after Ziggy Stardust fell down to Earth—and even though this mixture of guitars, synths, and sarcasm was just a new twist on rock and pop—to kids like me, some of the sounds on The Cars LP did feel like it was left behind by aliens. Did the world shift on its axis as it had for Elliot’s generation when they first heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? That would be overstating it. But it did feel like a significant recasting was underway.

Even more alien than The Cars, Devo also released their debut LP in 1978, and they took that android vibe started by Bowie and Kraftwerk a few years before and brought it to cartoonlike levels—in a good way. Devo also had Ohio roots, forming in Akron. They had already released two singles in 1977. “Mongoloid” backed with “Jocko Homo” was released in March of that year, which Greg says he was listening to around the time The Cars were recording the first album. This was the year Devo performed their second single (released in September 1977), a brilliantly deconstructed cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on Saturday Night Live, blowing the fragile eggshell minds of adolescents and the hardened craniums of older rockers as well. Neil Young was famously a fan.

On “I’m in Touch with Your World,” David Robinson offers a similar industrial percussive breakdown approach to Devo’s Stones cover, albeit at a considerably slower tempo. The song actually has more in common with the wacky musical comedy of Spike Jones, a leader of 1940s jazz bands, who peppered his spoofs with unorthodox cartoonish sounds like car horns, belches, flatulence, and gunshots. While David provides a disjointed drum pattern, the band adds ratchet, triangle, woodblock knocks, whistles, glass breaking, and a kitchen-sink plethora of percussion and horn sounds. Despite all that instrumentation, it’s a sparse recording. Until it’s not, such as when it explodes with guitars on the bridge. It’s the sort of quiet-loud-quiet dynamic that such bands as the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. (both bands formed in Massachusetts) would mine in the late ’80s. Greg would perform most of the noises in live performances with the same vaudevillian élan he brought to the Martin Mull shows. Ric’s lyrics seem to be the product of the William S. Burroughs cutup technique, assembling random phrases that sound great together. “Everything is science fiction” came from Greg mishearing the lyric “everything you say is fiction.” He explains, “It wasn’t until we were recording the vocals on the first album that I realized he was saying, ‘Everything you say is fiction, and I ought to know.’ So I went in. I said, ‘Ric, I always thought that was ‘everything is science fiction.’ He sort of looked at me for a minute, and he goes, ‘Ah, I like that better.’ And then changed it for the keeper take.”

A personal favorite is “I’m a psilocybin pony.” Though, by all accounts, Ric’s hallucinogen days were over, he would have a fresh memory of tripping with Ben back in the day. They all still smoked a good amount of pot. “Ric had the best pot ever,” says Luis Aira, who would become one of Ric’s best friends. “Yeah, all of us were [pot smokers],” Greg says. “Maybe Ben, not quite as much as the rest of us. But Ric smoked all the time in his own little sort of secretive, private way. He’d always have a little pipe and just be sort of surreptitious about it. He wasn’t the ‘pass the joint around’ kind of guy so much. But Elliot and I were always smoking buddies, as it were.” You can imagine being high and first hearing Roy Thomas Baker’s killer mixes back on the big studio monitors, with bass and drums thumping the chest, fuzzy guitars and synths buzzing the ears, and layered vocals popping out above it all.

Finishing side one is “Don’t Cha Stop,” the most punk-informed song in the set, albeit driven by George Harrison–like riffs, with Greg throwing in a Moog synth line like that in Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.” “Just a cartoonlike indulgence in your typical macho theme,” said Ric, “a parody of that stance.”

Flip the album, and they come back and hit you with “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight,” one of the most rocking songs they’ve ever recorded, a throbbing, pummeling pop song that hangs so long on one chord, building up tension for the glorious release of the choruses. Ric provides a lyrical riff on “love the one you’re with,” or, more darkly, “when things get too quiet, and you’re willing to put up with any company,” he said.

Elliot peels off one of his all-time great solos over that one chord, which pulses with Greg’s synths, exploding on that final chorus. It has a little Cheap Trick vibe to it. While he explains that they were not a reference point here, Elliot said he enjoyed Cheap Trick’s eponymous debut album (they released it and In Color both in 1977), and he became friendly—and later traded lefty guitars—with drummer Bun E. Carlos. David says, “I consider [Cheap Trick] sort of a discovery. I found their first album. I liked it. I didn’t stay interested for too long. Everybody liked different stuff. If we made a list of a hundred things, maybe like twenty-five of those things we’d all agree on. The rest is all different stuff.”

Not done yet, they saved “Bye Bye Love” for the seventh song. Ric was somewhat inspired by “Little Black Egg,” a jangly garage folk-rock song from the Nightcrawlers, which The Cars would later cover. “Electric angel rock and roller” is a shout-out to Maxanne, finishing with “I hear what you’re playing.” For one of the many great subtle moments on the album, listen to what Ben does on bass from about 0:10 to about 0:14. It’s like a lead bass part, locked tightly to David’s kick drum. It is a deeply pleasing groove. “Ric and I had had the same faith in Ben to do stuff,” David says. “Ric never asked him to do anything.”

Glenn Evans, though, shyly divulged that the syncopated part that frames the song as the beginning and end was his idea when the song was first arranged by Cap’n Swing. He offered this only after being prodded by his partner, Kathy, during our conversation. “I get weird talking about this stuff. But yeah, I kind of wrote the hook to that. It was like we did the song; we needed an ending. So I stood up, and I said, how about this? And I just sang it, and Ric said—it was so weird—I remember the look on his face. He just said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’”

But Elliot says that’s a “complete falsehood. It was most assuredly me. I distinctly remember adding the extra syncopation ‘answers’ on the end.”

Other than “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight,” side two is all Ben singing lead, just as side one was all Ric aside from “Just What I Needed.” At least in these early days, Ben was happy to play a supportive role by singing Ric’s songs, and “Bye Bye Love” has some of Ric’s most inspired poetry. In 1986, Ben said everything leading up to The Cars was about getting

a record contract so we could put our music out—so that Ric could put his music out. . . . And you’d do the song even if you didn’t particularly care about the lyrics. The process just carried over when you did care about the lyrics. It was a natural process. Ric’s lyrics were just there. They needed to be done the way they were done; you just had to search for ways to put the lyrics across. I really don’t know about the aesthetic value of Ric’s lyrics. I don’t need to know. That’s not what they’re there for. Sometimes, with the way he writes, you’re conscious about doing a lyric. At times it just sort of comes off so naturally you don’t have to even think about it. It just comes out of your mouth.

And by all accounts, it all still came more easily for Ben than almost anyone else in rock and roll. “Ben was one of the best singers ever, as far as I’m concerned,” David says. “He was like Frank Sinatra or something. He’d be sitting around; we’d be fretting about this and that. ‘Ben, you want to go out and do your vocal now?’ He’s like, [shrugging] ‘Yeah, I can go out. I can stay here’ [laughs]. He’s always got a cigarette. So he would go out there, have the cigarette, we’d go, ‘You ready?’ ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ So then we’d roll in, and we’d be like, ‘Wow, that take was so fucking good!’ Someone might say, ‘Ben, do you want to do it again?’ ‘I could do it again if you want.’ He rarely did, as I recall, more than a couple of takes.”

Though Ben and Ric had distinctive voices, many casual listeners still do not realize there were two lead singers in the band. As with the Beatles, many listeners had difficulty discerning who was singing lead on any given Cars song. “I like Ben’s voice a lot,” Ric told Lisa Robinson. “I think his voice suits some songs better than my own. I think it’s interesting when people come to see us live, and they don’t know which one’s going up to the mic for a song. I mean, some people really can’t tell the difference, I don’t know why, on the records. I mean, I hear that so often that ‘I didn’t know Ben sang that. Oh, I’d love to come to see you play live because then I find out who’s going to sing what.’”

Ben and Ric had been together for so long that despite their distinctive natural tendencies, they did start to meld. Much of that had to do with the fact that they were both singing melodies that Ric wrote, so they tended to be in the same range. But also like Beatles fans, once listeners paid close attention, it became pretty clear who was singing. Ben was like Paul McCartney and tended to be smooth and more of a natural pop singer, and Ric was a bit more angular, a little edgier like John Lennon. At times, the assignment for who would sing what went against type, which makes a certain kind of sense. For example, Ben could round out an edgy rocker or a quirkier melody. “I did keep in mind that if it needed to have a good voice, it should be Ben,” Ric said in the final collective interview the band did in 2000.

Case in point, “Moving in Stereo.” Written by Ric and Greg, an early demo features Ric on the vocal. Greg weaves oscillating and orchestrated synths against Ric’s distorted chords for a creepy bluesy soundscape reminiscent of Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing,” released the previous year. Ric slides a couple of fingers up and down the neck, leaving open strings to ring out for a pleasant dissonance. It is one of their most Roxy Music–like numbers.

Most of the elements from the demo are retained for the finished studio version. Greg’s countermelody hook is moved sooner in the arrangement and repeats more frequently. Interestingly, Ben takes the lead vocal for the studio version and starts with an even more Bryan Ferry approach, but about halfway into the song, he starts singing in a higher octave, elevating the track. Of his role in cowriting “Moving in Stereo,” Greg recalls, “I just happened to have gotten in early in the process where Ric had his guitar riff, but I did the little melody, the bass thing, and well, just a lot, all the melody, all the keyboard stuff. And the other cowrites that I got with Ric,ii I would go over to his house and just hang out late at night. It was always a late-night kind of thing. And we’d start something on the LinnDrum machine or something, just get a little beat going. Then he might get a couple little chords, or I might have a little chord progression, and then he’d think about it and then start adding lyrics to it.” I observe, “He seemed to trust you musically more than almost everybody.” Greg replies, “I think so. I would say I think we were the most simpatico as far as what we envisioned The Cars to sound like.”

The production and arrangement of “Moving in Stereo” builds, layering guitar harmonies, countermelodies, and counterrhythms. Sleigh bells move in sixteenth notes over the splat on David’s snare. Ben uses a Mutron Divider pedal that provides a two-octave sound. Just focusing on his inventive bass parts is a highly rewarding listen. He’s in a pocket with David on the basic verse parts. But there are astonishingly funky syncopated parts around 1:35 and 3:59. His vocals and their delay get slowly panned back and forth in the stereo mix (moving in stereo, get it?). Greg’s synths are the star here, with ear-candy flourishes, sounding like the wind blowing at one point and ringing glockenspiel-like notes in a higher register. He considered his role in the band to provide textures, not solos. The track climaxes with an android-like effect on Ben’s vocals, launching it off into hyperspace, described by Ric as “hypnotic pulse and thunder punch.” He claimed the studio engineers would come in from the hallway when it was being played, afraid that the studio gear was frying. Near the end of the track, Baker ran the vocals through a pitch-shifting harmonizer, making them slightly flat, to give the illusion that the band was not speeding up as much as it does as the song progresses.

It cross-fades right into “All Mixed Up.” Baker told Mix magazine, “I love segues because I like records to be continuous, and it gives me a good excuse not to turn off the music and put on something else. Sometimes the record company initially didn’t like them, not for artistic reasons, but because they thought that disc jockeys would have a problem taking the record off at that point. . . . What made it funnier was disc jockeys played the segues even more on that album. They played the first three or four songs of The Cars’ first album together, too [laughs]. Even now, they are still playing the segues.”

“All Mixed Up” is one of the most traditional rock songs, albeit a midtempo ballad, on the album. It even has a “Be My Baby” homage, quoting Hal Blaine’s famous drum part. The choruses feature Greg playing a sort of trombone sound on synth. The second chorus repeats, and Greg peppers it with staccato echoing piccolo-like filigrees.

Greg takes the song home with a sax solo as it fades. There are hints of Al Stewart’s 1976 hit “Year of the Cat,” a lush production by Alan Parsons. The decision to put the sax on happened in the studio. Shortly before they went to record, when the band played it live, they would close with a big guitar solo to close their sets. Even the demo they recorded at Northern has a guitar solo where the sax is on the final version.

“Ric always used to sing ‘All Mixed Up.’ I don’t remember Ben even trying to sing it,” Greg says. “And then, somehow, in the studio, he ended up singing the lead vocal on it. And I don’t know whether it was Roy’s suggestion or whether it was Ric who just said, ‘Ben, why don’t you try?’ Ben would just go along wherever.”

The demo of “All Mixed Up” that the band had recorded at Music Designers studio the previous year has Ric singing, a much more aggressive approach, though most of the elements of the final arrangement are there, including the two-part answer harmonies on the chorus. “You can really appreciate Ben’s vocal quality here,” Ric said. “Just that little catch, that little sob in his voice that makes it so unique—and the songs so affecting.”

Once the mixes were done, they discussed the sequencing of the songs for the album. The band always assumed the leadoff track would be “Just What I Needed,” so they were mildly shocked when Baker suggested starting with “Good Times Roll” instead. Not only that, but he slotted “Just What I Needed” third, after “My Best Friend’s Girl.” As a result, the album draws you in, revealing the songs and building for maximum impact. Baker said, “We conceived that from day one: that the first three songs on the album would be the singles, but in reverse order. . . . We did that because most people play the first single, as the first song on the album, but forget about the rest of the album.”

The label held a wrap party for the band. “We had a big party at that beautiful house that they had rented for us in Mayfair,” Elliot recalls. “And all kinds of people were there. Paula Yates—she was a wild girl. Some of the guys from Bad Company and Boomtown Rats, I think maybe some of the guys from Generation X or Ultravox.”

If “All Mixed Up” suggests that the soft-rock days of Ocasek and Orr were not gone completely, the overwhelming tone of the album demonstrated they were moving music forward, even if they glanced in the rearview to their own past and rock and roll’s history generally.

Ben’s old pal David Spero was working in radio as The Cars were getting ready to release the album. Spero said Ben was not sure if people would like the music. “He sent me a test pressing of it, and I played it for everybody at the radio station. And I’m sure, as everybody else felt when they heard that first album, this is the start of something new. The Cars were legitimately the next step in rock and roll. They had taken kind of what Devo was doing and made it popular.”

Devo started as an art project, a Dada-inspired conceptual band formed at Kent State within the days-long hiatus that followed the infamous May 4, 1970, massacre of students by the National Guard. May 4 galvanized Gerald Casale, who lost two friends that day. “The day I stopped being a hippy,” he said. Devo’s later commercial popularity was almost purely accidental (the hit single “Whip It”), as The Cars did everything in their control to tap into the mainstream while staying true to their artistic vision. Still, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh slagged The Cars at the time as “unashamed, frightening clone music,” which Greg dismissed to writer Jim Farber for People magazine as “petty jealousy.” Elliot added, “Look, we’re just a bunch of semi-intelligent lamebrains who made enough mistakes in the last 50 bands we were in to do things right for once.”

When asked about this and how Devo thought of The Cars, Devo’s Gerald Casale says, “I’m sure [Mothersbaugh] was snarky because. I mean, of course, we took ourselves pretentiously, stridently seriously as artists back then, and we just thought The Cars were a cleaned-up commercial version of what we’d been doing. And it turns out that’s not really a criticism, is it? It’s like [Ric] crafted these pop songs that everybody could like, and they had all these new-wave elements in them and parts that sounded Devo-ish. And he had that kind of glib, self-referential delivery, like the parenthesis delivery; ‘I’m not really singing, I’m imitating a singer singing.’ But with Roy Thomas Baker producing, it just sounded incredible on the radio.”

As he reflects back today, Elliot says, “Greg has much more feeling about Devo than I do, which is zero.” After we discuss Devo’s start as an art project, Elliot continues,

Well, that’s just it. Same thing with Talking Heads. They were a bunch of RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] kids. I’d been playing too long. I was into Chicago blues and soul and R&B and the Band and all that shit in Bakersfield. What did I give a shit about Richard Hell or Talking Heads? What did that have to offer me? I dug Mink DeVille because they were doing Brill Building–type stuff, so I could relate to it, and I loved it, but the art-rock end of it, not really; I was more into American music and the best of English rock and roll: Beatles and Procol Harum and Traffic.

BUT ELLIOT NOTES THAT HE IS SPEAKING FOR HIMSELF, AND LATER CASALE would direct music videos for The Cars. Elliot says that Ric was always looking for new influences to soak in.

“I never tried to analyze it, first of all,” Ric said about the debut album in 1979. “It may be a good record, well thought out and interesting, and I was happy with the record, but I had zero idea what would happen with it.” Ben explained, “We had the idea we were just going to do our own kind of music, and we were going to be as avant-garde as we thought we could be. We never counted on selling records in the millions,” which is something David agrees with today.

“We had no idea really whether or not it was going to sell,” David says. “We just thought it came out well. We thought maybe it was a little too quirky if people were trying to talk about how to describe it or what category it might fit into. Then we got caught up in descriptions like ‘new wave.’ So that didn’t help, really. But yeah, the other guys, we all admit we didn’t have any particular goal except to make something we liked. So Roy Thomas Baker was perfect for that. He just recorded us the way that we just happened to sound then. He never offered any opinion about the future or anything like that. We all had fun.”

David Spero’s reaction at the time, as a friend and a radio guy, was that this would be big. “The songs were so strong, the messages hit everybody. I mean, who didn’t want to get together with their best friend’s girl? You know what I mean? They spoke to us, but they were speaking to us as people in our twenties instead of in our teens. . . . It came out at a time when we kind of needed that.”

The Cars’ friend David Bieber, who in 1978 was hired by WBCN as creative-services director, explains what a breath of fresh air The Cars were.

The world in that period, I think that the seventies, especially the midseventies, were just so grim and ugly and despondent in a way. I consider the sixties to be from the Kennedy assassination until the Nixon resignation, even though it was ’63 to ’74. And then you went into this period of despair. It was almost like the country needed to recover from everything that had been happening at such a breakneck speed. . . . All credit to Maxanne and her great ears and her ability to find things. Not everything that she gravitated towards necessarily had commercial success, but to my mind, she had a pipeline to my musical brain.

One of the first people Ric played the finished album for was Jim Goodkind, his former bandmate in Milkwood and first musical partner in Boston. He called Jim to come hear it at Ric’s place in Newton. “Ric and I sat down on the couch and smoked a little weed, and he played me the thing, and it was like, ‘Holy shit! You’ve accomplished your dream. Got a producer that knows what he’s doing.’ I mean, it’s amazing the impact that a producer can have. He gave me a red promotional 45 of ‘Just What I Needed.’ I told him, ‘Congratulations, you’ve done it. There are hits on this record.’”

Baker came back and played the finished mixes for Elektra’s head honcho, Joe Smith. Baker explained that this was unusual, as usually the A&R department would play Smith the records. Smith told Baker, “This is remarkable. I’ve been around this business for many years, and this is the most remarkable thing I’ve ever heard.”

Baker played it for George Daly. “I’m sitting in a room with nobody there, with Baker, who’s nervous putting a tape on, and I’m becoming a twelve-year-old, which you have to do to be in the game. I sat there, and the tape played. I’d had a code I developed at Columbia. I’d write the title of the song, and I’d write two numbers, and they were one to ten. And one was the tempo. The overall rating tempo helped me remember the song, just seeing a number. And for the rating, I inverted the range. So the best song would be the lower number.” He still has this list and sent me a photo of it. “I looked down the list and there were a bunch of ones. And I remember writing this down and thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to change everything.’ It was just a bunch of hits. And to this day, the first record is the greatest-hits album. I loved it. I immediately was like, ‘Oh, I can go to lunch now.’”

Footnotes

i With the help of my late friend producer Mike Denneen.

ii Greg would usually have at least one during each album session, not all of them making the final cut.

Chapter 10

1978: THE YEAR NEW WAVE BROKE

THE CARS MIXED AND MASTEREDi EVERYTHING THEY RECORDED AT AIR except for an early stab at “Night Spots,” which Greg recalls as “very bare, minimal. It might’ve not even had any drums.” This version has not been released. All the bonus tracks on the 1999 expanded version of the album are demos and live recordings, but they would record a new version of “Night Spots” for Candy-O.

For the debut album’s cover art, David and his friend Jerome Higgins had assembled a black-and-white collage. It was evidently more raw than Elektra or Fred Lewis wanted. “David wanted the front to be the collage, like a punky thing,” says Lewis. “And my feeling was, ‘No, no, no. It’s rock and roll. You’re going to be here [raising his hand off the table]. You’re going to be a standard band. You’re going to be the band that people want to get up to.’ And so I fought, especially with David, quite a bit.”

In 1979, David observed, “[Elektra] is not used to people even taking an interest in album covers. A lot of bands couldn’t care less about their album cover. . . . But we came in with our album cover all done.” He put a record (not one of theirs) in a sleeve and mocked it all up, including shrink-wrapping it with a sticker that read “Promo Copy.” “I said, ‘Here, it’s all done. You guys sell it.’ And they just couldn’t believe that we had done that.” David’s concept ended up being used for the inner sleeve.

The band flew to Los Angeles for a photo shoot with Elliot Gilbert. They met Judith Silverman, a makeup artist hired for the shoot. She became friends with all the guys, but Ben in particular, and the two would become closer over the years. Silverman, who goes by Jude, recalls they shot for a day or two in various locations.

Under the art direction of Ron Coro, Gilbert produced the shot of the Russian-born model, poet, and musician Natalya Medvedeva, whom Jude had worked with in the past and was suggested by her. Silverman was directed to coat Medvedeva in white makeup, like a geisha. The final shot shows her with a slightly more natural pallor, in a sort of bemused state of duress, perhaps pulled over by the cops or after a crash at the translucent wheel of a car (what art department could resist the pun, right?). Ric ruefully referred to it as the “sperm-colored steering wheel.”

While that sort of new-wave femme-fatale vibe was quite titillating to adolescent boys (author included), the band—whom Gilbert shot for the back cover—was not happy with the results. Elliot says that as a twenty-something-year-old, “At the beginning of this amazing ride, I wasn’t going to question someone like, ‘Hey, what’s going on in the art department?’ But I didn’t really feel it was representative of the vibe of the band. It was sort of a West Coast–y, wow! yippee! streamlined kind of thing. And as we know, The Cars had a slightly darker vibe to it, to the band, and which I think was pretty well represented by the cover David did.” It didn’t seem to the band to have the same class as the Roxy Music covers that also used models. They felt like they were being marketed too similarly to overtly commercial cock-rock acts like future touring mates Foreigner or some slick “West Coast band,” to use Elliot’s term.

Fred Lewis liked it “because she had a maniacal look on her face.” Either way, he had to make Elektra happy. He was up in their offices constantly, lobbying the promo people. Having been one himself, he knew how to work the room like a politician. He had even been with the band while they were in London, schmoozing and greasing the wheels with the Elektra/WEA reps. George Daly, as A&R, also had to shepherd the record and rally the forces at the label. He was met with some resistance, with some promo people telling him it sounded like “an English record” and “too much like David Bowie.” Sure, it doesn’t take a leap to imagine Bowie doing “Good Times Roll” alongside his 1976 “TVC 15.” It has that same swing and swagger. Ben could also sound a little like Bowie at times, so when confronted with something so novel, Bowie might have been the nearest reference point for some at the company. Daly says, “There were social currents. Disco was coming on, as were R&B and dance music. I mean, when you’re in the business, it’s not high fives and slapping each other in the back. There’s so many extraneous externalities that can mess things up.”

The question of categorization was important to gatekeepers at increasingly segmented radio stations and to those tasked with marketing artists. The concern of Elektra and Fred Lewis regarding David’s initial concept for the cover being “too punk” was just one example. New identifiers were coined, generally by music journalists. The Cars were not so easy to put in any one bucket, which should have been considered a strength, which is how the band itself felt.

The year 1978 was a watershed period for rock-and-roll music. Look at this sampling of some other lean-and-mean albums that came out that year: the Police’s Outlandos d’Amour, Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp, Cheap Trick’s Heaven Tonight, Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model, Blondie’s Parallel Lines, Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food, the Jam’s All Mod Cons, Patti Smith’s Easter, the Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope, and Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool. Some classic-rock fans peg 1971 as the greatest year, others 1968. It’s a fun but futile barroom discussion, but 1978 has to be in the running, as it also saw other classics like Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town and Kaya by Bob Marley and the Wailers.

“It’s always been pop music, hasn’t it?” Ben asked rhetorically. “I guess we sounded different because we had a certain kind of rhythm section. People weren’t used to our rhythm sound—that eight-beat doonk-doonk-doonk kind of thing [referring to Ric’s guitar style of playing downstrokes eight beats to the bar] with the bass and drums really clunking away. That’s what made the sound.”

The first single, “Just What I Needed,” was released the last week of May. Things were lined up as well as they could be. “In those days, there were forces besides the music that a big label could bring to bear,” George Daly says with a laugh. “The forces were the rapport that the radio guys had with the station by delivering a lot of hits.” After I laugh at the double-entendre drug reference, Daly clarifies, “The Eagles and stuff, okay, your honor? And so they worked the record, and all you got to do is have phones [requests]. And it got phones, and phones were the difference between the living and the dead.” Daly adds that, as with any big hit, after a big push from the radio promo people, a single will gain “centrifugal force. You start the wheel spinning, and it was a hit, and it would become a bigger hit. It would just take off. So these promo guys went, and they got a little bit of resistance, but then they got phones, and they stayed with it, and all of a sudden it started catching fire, the first single, and they worked hard, and they spread the song. They made a hit out of it.”

The album was released on June 6, as “Just What I Needed” was working its way through radio region by region. In the years before the Federal Communications Commission was deregulated—before the corporate consolidation of the industry when a few companies took control of almost all commercial radio stations—playlists across the country were not as homogenized as they later became. FM radio, especially, was more in tune with its local listeners, so good deejays and program directors had the instinctual ability to predict what might hit in their regions, and they took chances, as Maxanne had done with repeated success at WBCN. A hit could organically break out from one or two influential stations, spreading nationwide.

“I remember the day that the first album came into the record store, and we put it on,” writer Bill Flanagan recalls,

and one of the guys in the store who had a band of his own said, “That’s one of those records you can really love, or you can really hate, and you could justify either reaction.” And I think he meant that, on the one hand, it was new and fresh and poppy, and on the other hand, it was—for what at the time would’ve been called a punk band—it seemed pretty suspiciously commercial. I thought it was good. At that time, the rules of punk and new wave were just sort of forming. There wasn’t this strident kind of Stalinist rule book that we have now. It was just anybody who wasn’t copying either Emerson, Lake & Palmer or the Eagles.

The single debuted at 90 on the Billboard Top 100 singles chart the week of June 16 (it would peak at 27 in September, the first single by an act marketed as “new wave” to crack the Top 40). Kris Orr was dialed in to what was happening in the record and radio business. She said, “I called Ben immediately and said, ‘Oh, my God, it went “hit bound” on RKO. You guys are golden!’”

They had a big record-release party at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston on June 23, with more than a thousand people in attendance to celebrate and watch The Cars perform. Ric asked Oedipus to deejay the event. “He wanted me to play punk rock, even though it was a Cars thing,” Oedipus says. Ric had played the album for Oedipus before it was released to get his reaction. Curiously, the edgy Oedipus chose “All Mixed Up” as his favorite song on the record. “You could even hear these kinds of songs—that they’re not kind of major-key, happy songs.”

David recalls, “We do a concert for the release of the album, a big party at a hotel in Boston. So my parents are both there—Park Plaza—and so are news crews. So somehow they find my father. They ask him, ‘So Mr. Robinson, what do you think of your son’s band?’ My father said, ‘Oh, yeah. My son’s group is really good, but I like the hard stuff better.’” When the reporters asked what artists he liked, apparently Guy answered, “I like Black Sabbath more.” David says, “Iron Maiden was his favorite group.” Guy wrote a letter to the editor of one of the Boston local papers, lauding a positive piece on The Cars. “I am writing you . . . to commend you on an article about The Cars, America’s next big rock group. Being the father of David Robinson, the drummer, I am naturally prejudiced. . . . This article was, in my opinion, the best ever written about them. . . . Guy Robinson, Woburn, Mass.”

The guys’ families were understandably thrilled to see the hard work pay off. Elliot’s mother would call in Cars requests at the progressive Long Island station, WLIR. “All the deejays knew her and that she was my mom,” he says. “They loved her.”

While at the release party, the band met Dan Weiner, who would be their booking agent for the next three years. He had been turned onto the band by Brian Rohan, the lawyer who had represented them in their contract with Elektra. “Brian was just nuts and an abrasive, very intelligent, zillion-story guy,” Weiner says. “I had The Cars before I had Aerosmith, and he called me and said he had something for me to listen to. And, of course, it was amazing. I went to Boston, and it was not like I had to go through any kind of audition. Basically, I met the band, and it was a done deal. And we were in business.”

It took a month for the album to squeeze into the Billboard Top 200 album chart, the week of July 1, when the top album was Saturday Night Fever. But it moved up ten slots the next week, ten more the next, and twelve more the following week, climbing in similar double-digit increments over the summer as the band toured the country. It continued to rise for the rest of the year and into 1979, when it peaked at 18 in March. It would be number 4 on the Billboard Top 200 of the Year chart in 1979.

It was striking that the single performed as well as it did in Top 40, which back then primarily meant AM radio. But it was on AOR (album-oriented radio) FM stations, with fat stereo sound, where The Cars also caught fire, with Roy Thomas Baker’s punchy production jumping out of car radios and home stereos. “The whole idea is to make you sound louder so that it jumps out in your face,” Baker explained. “The trick to this has to do with creating apparent volume, as opposed to actual volume. See, the radio station’s compressors will react to actual volume and turn the music down. That’s why some people’s mixes will actually sound quieter than the song previous and the song being played after.”

That summer, you could walk or bike down the street and hear “Just What I Needed” wafting out of the open windows of cars and buildings. You’d be lying on the beach and hear it between “Hopelessly Devoted to You” and “Night Fever.” Kurt Loder wrote in Circus magazine, “Cars provide the perfect soundtrack for an endless summer drive . . . an uncompromising attack . . . the best warm-weather musical news since the Beach Boys grew up.”

The band spent the summer on the road. “Maxanne wanted to be their road manager,” Lewis says. “She came and asked me, and then I asked the band, and they said no, which shocked me. It really upset me. And then I had to go back. This was one of the things I would do. I’m always the guy representing the band, so I always try to make sure that whatever happens, it’s not a bad reflection on the band. I’m the bad cop. I regretted it for a long time, and I’ve always wanted to tell her, but I have never had a chance to tell her. But yeah, she wanted to do that, and she would’ve been a wonderful road manager for them.”

Instead, Steve Berkowitz was hired as a tour manager for the band around the time the album was released. A native of the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, he had multiple connections to the guys, going back to the late 1960s and early ’70s when he worked with David at the record store in Kenmore Square. He was a musician himself (a blues-focused guitarist who once subbed for Hubert Sumlin backing Howlin’ Wolf, among other high points), and he had tried to play with David and Jonathan Richman in pre–Modern Lovers germination. Like David, Berkowitz had been convinced to give it a go because he had seen Jonathan on the Cambridge Common. “Even though he didn’t know any chords, he would play it and wail away and jump up and land on his knees,” Berkowitz explains. “It was all very impressive.” But Berkowitz could not find a fit with Richman.

Berkowitz had also jammed with Elliot at blues nights at the Speakeasy in Cambridge before Cap’n Swing formed, and the two shared Allan Kaufman as a mutual friend. Berkowitz also knew the WEA promo people like Fred Lewis and Charlie McKenzie, and after McKenzie cashed out of his success with the band Boston, he joined Berkowitz in a management company called GRQ (for Get Rich Quick), managing local hero Willie “Loco” Alexander. He heard the buzz about The Cars, and, with his personal connections to them, he was caught up in the excitement. At one of the local shows before the album came out, Ric told him, “You should be our tour manager.”

Berkowitz says, “I liked the songs right away.”

I liked the whole gestalt of how they looked, how they sounded, how well rehearsed they were, the fact that it was pop, it was punkish. It was very well crafted. They were very serious about how they were going to play. I mean, Elliot is very exacting in the way that he plays with tremendous knowledge and background, and history. And it’s only later you go, “Wow, he must’ve composed the shit out of that.” In their shows, it looks like he’s just rocking his ass off. Greg is always looking for an outer orbit of something. And David and Ric had this idea of the whole picture: the way it sounds, the way it looks, the way it’s promoted. There’s a way that this has to go. Everybody was enamored of Roxy Music at the time—how they looked, what were the album covers like, and what was the message that they were sending us. And it was new, it was old, it was traditional, it was tomorrow. How did they do that?

Berkowitz was swept up in the band’s ambition

of wanting to be new, wanting to make good music, wanting to be fashionable, and wanting to be big. And that was intriguing to me, the whole idea of team pursuit and a mission, and I believed in The Cars’ mission and thought, “We can really go; I mean, this can be fun. I will forsake all others to take this gig for $150 a week as the tour manager, and let’s make this thing go.” I don’t think there’s a bigger high than, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome The Cars!” and the lights go off and the crowd goes nuts. I just don’t know if there’s a better thing than that. And then you’ve got to do it, then you’ve got to back it up. So at the beginning, my job is: Is it set up for them to do what they do?

Fairly soon into his new role, Berkowitz felt he became a de facto comanager of the band alongside Lewis. “He was called the manager, and I was called the tour manager. That’s not necessarily how all the details broke down,” Berkowitz says. Lewis was the general, directing the big-picture strategy, while Berkowitz was the eyes and ears on the ground. After telling him I spoke with Berkowitz, Lewis advised, “Be careful; a lot of times, the tour managers feel like they’re the managers.” Indeed, this theme would play out again late in The Cars’ career. Says Maxanne today, “Steve Berkowitz was the guy who took most of their responsibility.” Elliot, though, says, “Berkowitz was never the band’s manager; he was the tour manager.”

The Cars joined the Charlie Daniels Band and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at the Cape Cod Coliseum on June 3, playing to four thousand people. They played a string of six sold-out shows at the Paradise in Boston over the last week of June into July. “I think in Boston they were waiting for The Cars,” Ric said in 1979.

Ric personally invited Suicide, the downtown New York duo, to support The Cars at the Paradise. The pioneering pair played often-heavy proto-industrial music but still rooted heavily in early primitive rockabilly. They had an outsize influence on important artists, including Ric, Joey Ramone, and Bruce Springsteen, who covered one of the quieter—you could even say tender—Suicide songs, “Dream Baby Dream.” But Suicide alienated the mainstream rock-and-roll fans who were exposed to them. The crowd waiting for The Cars at the Paradise was not patient, and Suicide’s Alan Vega provoked and fed on the audience’s hostility, taunting any vocal detractors within the crowd.

“That’s when the Paradise had tables and chairs,” Oedipus explains. “Ric really pushed the boundaries—Suicide! It was not remotely like The Cars, but he loved the band, and he had them open, and people were livid. They hated them, booing. They started whipping glass ashtrays at Alan and Martin [Rev]. These things are big. They get hit with them and keep going. And the ‘Frankie’ [‘Frankie Teardrop’] scream, it was phenomenal.” Greg also loved Suicide. He recalls, “Alan was having some interaction with the atmosphere. ‘Oh, you suck. Like the Red Sox!’ In this New York accent. They were so in your face.”

After Boston, The Cars hit the road for a combination of support shows and headlining gigs. “It started more regional on the East Coast,” Greg explains. “Then the West Coast and Chicago. And then it took a while for the whole country to catch up.” Along the way, they played with compatible acts like Cheap Trick and Todd Rundgren’s Utopia but more often found themselves on motley-looking bills with the likes of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Blue Öyster Cult, Journey, Marshall Tucker Band, Kansas, Thin Lizzy, the Kinks, Styx, and Foreigner. “As a new band, I would open for anybody unless it was somebody that I absolutely detested,” Ric said. “We will be opening for Styx, and I don’t know a Styx song, or even what it sounds like.”

They liked the guys in Foreigner, but Styx, not so much. “They were such assholes,” David says, laughing. “There were a couple of times I tried to say hello to them, and they just didn’t even want to say hello to me. We’re in a hallway, and I don’t know, they’re waiting to go on. We say, ‘Hey, how are you guys doing?’ They completely ignored us! And Elliot goes, [cartoonish voice] ‘Oh, nice to meet you!’ Then, as we observed them on the tour, they were just wimpy guys. They weren’t cool at all. I didn’t like their music either, but still. So we made fun of ’em after that, especially Elliot. They were meek.” Ric said, “I can’t fuckin’ handle [Styx]. All we did for two weeks after that was sing to each other in fake-operatic voices.”

Even when bands liked each other, there would be behind-the-scenes power struggles. “One of my early real tests was The Cars were opening for Cheap Trick” at the Palladium in New York, Berkowitz recalls.

And they had this big guy [Kirk Dyer] and he had been like an all-American football player, and they’re not giving us a sound check. And I’m going, “The house opens in half an hour. We’ve got to get at least a line check. We’ve got to play. We can’t suck here.” My job was to make it good for the band. Finally, the guy has just given me a load of I don’t care. And I said, “Look, Kirk, I don’t really care what you say, and you’re a great big guy, and in a few minutes, you’re going to get really mad at me, and you’re probably going to pop me and beat the shit out of me, and I’m going to be laying bloody on the floor. And then I’m going to get up, Kirk, and I’m going to say, ‘Great, we still get twenty minutes for sound check,’ so I don’t really give a fuck what happens.”

The low point of the first round of touring America came at the Park West in Chicago on July 28. The band was booked for a free afternoon show sponsored by the radio station 93-XRT. The Cars got such an enthusiastic response that someone at the venue suggested that they keep their gear set up and open the performance scheduled that evening by Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts and his band. Elliot had seen the Allman Brothers on the final night of their legendary run at the Fillmore East in June 1971. While he loved Duane Allman’s playing, he was not a fan of Betts. Plus, he notes, “Lines were being drawn in the sand, and Ric wasn’t gonna appeal to a southern-rock crowd.”

“That was the nadir,” Greg says. “It was just the wrong crowd. It was like they weren’t having any of us.” The southern-rock crowd was yelling things like “English fags” at The Cars, throwing ashtrays, beer cans, and other items at the stage. Many Americans were under the impression that the band was English. Until his final days, Ric would get asked if he was from England. Greg continues, “When a beer bottle hit the side of the keyboard at the end of the song, I just left. The only time I ever walked off. I think we had done maybe six songs.” He later mused to the Boston Globe, “Like Rodney Dangerfield said, ‘Tough crowd. Tough crowd.’”

Elliot says, “I never blamed Betts for his rude and rowdy audience, but it was a sea of cowboy hats, so it was almost a political situation.” Ric told Trouser Press that year, “We tried to irritate them as much as we could. . . . We just felt if they missed the train, they should stay on the train with Dickey Betts going south, west, whatever. Contrast is the essence of change, and if they didn’t catch on, who cares?” And making the case that The Cars were the future and Betts was traditionalist, if not archaic, Ric explained, “We’re like an ’80s band; we’re not looking for a ’60s audience.”

As challenging as it was presenting themselves to the crusty old traditional rock fans in major cities, imagine what it was like just passing through the more rural and suburban places between gigs. “One night we were somewhere in the Midwest, and it’s two or three in the morning,” recalls Berkowitz, “and we go to a Denny’s, and David at this point has got purple henna in his hair, he’s wearing some crazy jacket, and he’s wearing skin-tight leather pants. So we’re at a Denny’s, and we’re about to leave, and there’s an old African American guy just looking at him. And the guy says, ‘What are you?’ to David, and David says, ‘What do you think I am?’ And the guy goes [pauses as he mimes looking someone up and down], ‘Scuba diver?’”

They knew they were a radical departure from the middle-of-the-road USA, so such reactions were unsurprising; they were somewhat provoked as the band cracked into the commercial mainstream on their own terms. Lewis wanted to get them in front of all types of audiences—the bigger, the better. He believed in the ability of The Cars to win over crowds with their good songs, even if the presentation was foreign to middle America. Like the band, he felt the music biz was underestimating the intelligence and openness of the vast mainstream rock-and-roll audience to new music.

“I think that their appeal was, they were much hipper than a lot of the people that they appealed to,” says their booking agent, Dan Weiner. “I mean, some of the combinations I saw were shocking, embarrassing that we did it, that they did it, et cetera. But they did. And they grew, I mean, so quickly.”

They wouldn’t have to worry too much about winning over other acts’ crowds for long, though. During the tour with Styx, the single and album snaked past records by the likes of Shaun Cassidy, Donna Summer, and, yup, Styx on the way up the charts. The popularity of The Cars had become so undeniable that they moved into the headlining spots.

Kris Orr recalls seeing the success finally flower:

When I was talking to the retail stores every week for three, four years, I got to know these buyers really well on the phone, and at the end of the conversation, either they would bring it up, or I would bring it up: “So how’s Ben doing?” They were always very kind and curious. We’d talk about Ben and Ric, from Richard and the Rabbits to Ocasek and Orr, because they were forming other bands, trying to figure out what to do. And it was so nice to talk about what they were doing and where they were playing. Once things started to happen with The Cars, they were right on top of it, which I was thrilled about, and so it made me feel like a thousand pieces of the puzzle finally came together.

WHEN ASKED HOW BEN FELT, SHE REPLIES, “HE WAS EXCITED, BUT HE didn’t get overly excited because he knew it could fall apart.”

A couple of months after the release of the album, George Daly was hiking through Yosemite National Park with his girlfriend. “We were walking up in the woods, and there was this big tree, and about at a guy’s height was carved The Cars RULE. And I thought, ‘I’m here in Northern California. This record came out about a month ago. Well, holy shit, I got a hit!’”

Fred Lewis was careful not to wear out the band over his tenure as manager, but that first summer was all about building as fast as they could, nimbly targeting hot spots. He also paid close attention to how they were received. “I was the one that encouraged them not to jump around onstage,” he says. He encouraged them to offer a contrasting alternative to what were already arena-rock clichés. “Everybody else wants to jump around, and the guitarist should jump around and do flips.”

The almost unanimous consensus of people who saw The Cars over the years is that they were not an exciting act to watch perform. This has more to do with what mainstream audiences expected in 1978 than the actual musical performances of the band, which were virtually flawless. First, it’s important to understand how much of a dance band The Cars were when they started. Mike Howell, who wrote one of the first articles about The Cars, included in their first press kit, explains, “Until they started doing arenas, I perceived them, received them, and enjoyed them as a dance band. They were a great club band, and I think that gets lost.” You can see this in the band’s first promo video, lip-synching to “Just What I Needed” in front of a live club crowd,ii dancing, not even watching the band. Howell became lifelong friends with Greg in particular and saw the band’s entire career arc. “You talk to anybody who was down at the South Shore gigs; those shows were really nuts. And it’s funny, Ric was always ice cold, but the whole place was going nuts.”

The 1969-era Rolling Stones, who produced one of the first big arena tours, started setting the bar high for such big venues; an act needed to reach the cheap seats. The year 1978 was well into the era of live spectacles pioneered by the Who, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and other rock giants. It was the height of arena rock, lasers, dynamic and often pandering singers, light shows, and massive stage sets. Kiss was literally playing with fire. Parliament-Funkadelic brought the Mothership down. And even on a smaller scale, as a form of rebellion against such excess, punk rock brought its own visceral and theatrical presentations and its own costumes.

On the other hand, many serious fans of rock and pop music—not just jazz or classical—went to see a performance of real music and were not as concerned about being dazzled by extraneous trappings. Indeed, such showmanship might raise suspicions that the acts were covering up for musical deficiencies. For example, Deadheads were not looking for Jerry Garcia to windmill his strumming arm and yell, “Hello, Syracuse!” Closer to what The Cars were doing, Talking Heads were taking the stage in preppy street clothes. Though David Byrne was compelling in his oddball way, they were not yet paying as much attention to concert presentation as they would later, perfecting it on the 1983 Stop Making Sense tour. The hipper cognoscenti understood that the chill presentation was part of the package.

The Cars’ performances were precise, and the stagecraft was stark and low-key by design. The 1977–1978 backdrop of the chrome Cars logos looked charmingly amateurish. They did not have much to say to the audience. “Ric hardly ever said anything beyond a ‘thank you,’” Elliot says. Ric explained, “I always had this philosophy that I didn’t want to try to teach the audience how to react to music. I would rather them do what they want. I would rather just play the stuff and then let them sort of react however they wanted to without prodding them. . . . People probably took that as being sort of cold or aloof, maybe it was in a sense, but the way I felt about it was, for me, it was more philosophical. It’s more like you don’t have to tell them to put their hands together. You don’t have to tell them to. They have brains. They can do what they want.” Elliot said in a later interview, “We didn’t want to be showbizzy.” The Cars felt like they got the reputation for being cold “because we didn’t do that Pavlovian thing that they all go to a show to expect. We asked a little more of the audience, perhaps.” In the same interview, Ric agreed, “We didn’t have any mob psychology going on.”

“If you saw them live, you would swear you were listening to the record,” says David Spero, the old Cleveland friend of Ben’s who was a broadcaster and artist manager, intending it as a compliment. “They were kind of the first band who really tried to sound like their records. They had an incredible live sound.” Spero, who managed Joe Walsh, goes so far as to assert, “I think the Eagles learned from The Cars that you can go out there and make it sound as great as the record sounds.”

Listening to recordings—or even watching videos—of early Cars, you’d be hard-pressed to arrive at any other conclusion than that they were an extraordinarily great-sounding live band. On July 18, 1978, they were captured live at the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland by radio station WMMS, a station that was naturally pushing The Cars and getting a great response from its listeners. Live at the Agora: 1978 was officially released by Rhino Records in 2017. The fresh energy of the band jumps out of the grooves and grabs you, demanding your attention. Here they are in Ben’s hometown, where Ric had come of age, returning as conquering heroes. The warm reception provided an extra jolt, as had the pierogis and borscht delivered by Ben’s mom, something she would do whenever she was around.

John Gorman, a native Bostonian who worked his way from writing into radio, had been at WMMS in Cleveland since 1973, so he was at the Agora show. The station and club would work symbiotically, with the station tipping off the promoter which artists were coming up through the charts. Gorman had seen Ocasek and Orr as a duo back in Cambridge and then caught Cap’n Swing down at the Bell Buoy in Scituate on a visit back home. He learned about Ben’s past as a teenage star in the city, and here he was now, witnessing the homecoming.

The banter from the Agora stage captures how tickled they are to be in this new position after so many years of struggling. The chatter with the pumped-and-primed audience continues throughout this electrifying set that captures the band already in full form. Regarding the live show on these early tours, David says,

Well, we were too loud from the beginning, especially Elliot, and I spent years fighting with the soundman. I said, “Give me this. Give me that” [in his monitors]. I tried little speakers, close ones, far away. At one point, I had cabinets this big on either side, like monster headphones. Then they would keep turning up. I had a battle at some concerts. I had to watch their mouths, and Did they just skip a verse? I’m like, Where the fuck are we? So I would be just hearing [makes a clanging distorted noise]. I am thinking Fuck! This is going to sound like shit. Luckily, when we recorded things, filmed things, it was okay, but I always thought I was just fucking everything up.

When The Cars played the Roxy in LA in August, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman of the Turtles—Greg’s heroes “Flo & Eddie” of Zappa’s Mothers of Invention—were among those who attended. He had met and played behind them during the Martin Mull show. “I remember John Entwistle was there, and he was dating Lita Ford,” Elliot recalls. “Cher was there. It was like the whole town came out. We were like the new hot thing. All that stuff is part of a dream come true. You want to be in the club, and that always feels good when people who you’ve admired for years come up to you and tell you that they like your record or enjoy your work and stuff like that.”

The opening act was David’s old group Pop (they had dropped “The”). In his review of the show for the Los Angeles Times, the nationally influential syndicated journalist Robert Hilburn began, “Just when it seemed we had already used up our 1978 quota of outstanding rock shows with Springsteen, Petty, Costello, and the rest, The Cars band motored into town Thursday night.” He called their album “easily the most arresting American rock debut so far this year . . . one of those rare collections that is both mass-oriented and cultish. It should appeal equally to progressive, art-rock, and Top 40 enthusiasts.” Discussing the lyrics, Hilburn called Ric a “master at the use of understatement and irony as wry, provocative devices in rock. The songs aren’t always what they seem.” He interviewed Ric during the sound check, who gave his age as twenty-seven, shaving off seven years. “I could do something like [Foreigner’s] ‘Hot Blooded’: ‘I want to meet you after the show.’ But that’s just silly [bleep] to me,” Ric said.

Hilburn followed up this piece with a full-page interview with Ric in November, in which he noted that Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, teen idol Leif Garrett, and the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones also attended The Cars show at the Roxy. Hilburn wrote that “Just What I Needed” stood out “so forcefully” on mainstream radio “that you felt stations had put it on by mistake. Here again was a record with pulse and vitality. No more of that easy-listening slush or cosmic Kansas-spun pretentiousness. The lyrics didn’t sound like they were lifted by some dime-store greeting cards.”

Ric’s friend model Bebe Buell also attended the Roxy. They had first met in New York when Cap’n Swing showcased at Max’s Kansas City, though she did not see that show. They had dinner and remained friends, calling each other frequently. He would send her letters and poems. She says that one of those poems was called “All Mixed Up” and formed the lyrics of the song. It was a purely platonic relationship, she emphasizes. Suzanne knew about this friendship. But the Roxy show was the first time Buell had seen Ric perform. She was not impressed with the stage show, she confesses. “I just thought the only pizzazz was coming from Ben, and David Robinson was very . . . he had a bad-boy thing, so he looked real good back there on the drums. I thought Ben Orr was so beautiful and such an amazing singer.” Ric told her he wanted to have Ben sing more.

He goes, “Eventually, everybody’s going to figure out that I can’t sing.” And I said, “Listen, Ric, you can sing. That’s like saying Iggy Pop can’t sing. You’re a stylist. You have an individual voice.” I fucking loved his voice. And when I met Ben, I remember Ric said, “You two could be brother and sister,” because we both had the cheekbones and the big blue eyes. And it was funny. We kind of did look related. So Ric obviously had a type that he liked to bond with. I’m not talking about date; I’m talking about his spiritual relationships. There was a look to it even. He would always say, “You and Ben are like angels. You have a glow.” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll take it.”

A few days after the LA show, Neil Young and Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner and Jack Casady came to check them out at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco. It was a big deal for the guys that the old guard came to see them. The glorious show was broadcast on KSAN-FM and can be heard on YouTube. In his review for the Contra Costa Times, Russ Yarrow wrote, “The Cars . . . play devastatingly good rock and roll. . . . The band has assimilated the trappings of punk—Ocasek dressed in leather pants, leopard-skin shirt, and wraparound Italian shades—but plays closer to the airy style of groups like the Raspberries, a Cleveland-based band of the early ’70s that Robinson credits as a large influence. When they were at their best Sunday . . . they tapped a wide-open expanse of a sound that could have gone on forever.”

Syndicated music columnist Lisa Robinson featured The Cars in August, the same month they played huge arenas and stadiums, such as the show headlined by Fleetwood Mac at Cleveland’s Lakefront Stadium on the twenty-sixth. Robinson would form an ongoing trusted friendship with Ric, who was undoubtedly impressed by her past as a supporter and friend of Lou Reed, among other heroes.

As The Cars took off in America, it had a somewhat existential effect on Ric, if not everyone in the band. “We just went from clubs to arena rock, which I can’t stand anyway,” Ric said in an interview with Toby Goldstein that appeared in November in the UK music paper NME. “The adjustments are like—well, in Boston, you’re home and then you go to your gig and you come home and eat doughnuts and see what’s on TV. But now the schedule’s tight that you’re up and you’re gone and you’re out all day and looking for time for yourself. At least an hour if you can find it. And it’s not like you can go write a song when you want, you just have to wait. And the gigs are all big. There are 20,000 at each concert and they’re . . . screaming drunks.”

Ric was now thirty-four, and Ben turned thirty-one in September, though they did their best to hide such numbers. A 1978 NME article repeated the myth, calling Ric “a 27-year-old potential star.” They were billed as the next big thing at the same time that people were making fun of the Rolling Stones, genuinely questioning if they were too old for rock and roll. Mick Jagger was only one year older than Ric, who was three years older than Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. Ric was also older than other icons of the 1960s, such as Neil Young, Eric Clapton, and Steve Winwood (who started with the Spencer Davis Group at age fourteen). Says Anne Marie Foley, “When I dated David, I was probably nineteen or twenty, and I remember at the time him being in his twenties, maybe later twenties, and I used to think, ‘Oh, this guy’s so old.’ I used to think that was so weird.” Soon, though, she no longer noticed the gap. “They seemed like my contemporaries. I just bonded with all of them so much. We were all peers.”

In September, they were on the Midnight Special show, performing “Just What I Needed” and “My Best Friend’s Girl,” which was released as a single on October 10 and made it to number 35 on the Billboard chart. They recorded the television episode playing to no one but the crew in a studio, with footage of an audience edited in later. Atlanta Rhythm Section hosted, and the other performers included Van Morrison, Crystal Gayle, Ambrosia, and Sea Level. “After the show, Wolfman Jack [the host] came back and told us we were great,” Ric said. “He never saw our segment, though.”

A few days later, Ric and Greg gave an interview with the Oakland Tribune. The piece noted how tickets in the Roxy in Los Angeles sold out immediately, and they were booked into the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium a week later, selling that out in hours. The writer, Larry Kelp, described Ric as “an art-deco ’50s greaser.” Ric listed Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, and “even the Ramones” among his favorite lyricists.

In his enthusiastic review of an August 7 show at the Bottom Line in New York, New York Times journalist Robert Palmer noted that “My Best Friend’s Girl” “has to be the most charming new rock song to come along in some time. . . . It is too early to tell whether Cars has the group chemistry to get to the top and stay there, but the stylistic synthesis the band has effected so brilliantly should be around for a long time.”

Some critics remained skeptical. In a review of the same Bottom Line show, Roy Trakin of the underground New York Rocker magazine wrote, “The Cars were impressive in their ability to faithfully reproduce their recorded sound, a bit disappointing in their reluctance to abandon routine. . . . Often the hooks are so potent that the music sounds almost too accessible. Ric Ocasek himself told me that he didn’t think it was necessary for people to have to work to understand things, especially in pop music.”

Trakin was troubled by Ric’s statement and pondered whether “hooks” were positive or negative as he watched the underground becoming mainstream. The review came at a pivotal point when a few places like CBGB and the Rat were pushing out the new hitmakers, and critics accustomed to championing the club scenes were uneasy about it all once it started breaking through to the mainstream. The concern of inventive and intelligent rock-and-roll music being “too accessible” revealed an elitist insecurity, as if the critic worried that he was losing his underground cred by succumbing to these infectious melodies. “As long as I’ve known him,” Elliot says, “Trakin has always gotten it wrong.”

Trakin continued, “The phenomenon of hooks-oriented bands like Blondie, Cheap Trick, and The Cars is now upon us. The new wave instinct for shorter songs and a pop orientation is coming true. . . . Unfortunately, it is the most polished bands, those boasting the shiniest surfaces, which are now beginning to taste commercial acceptance in this country. If The Cars succeed, can Talking Heads or even the Ramones be far behind? Probably not, but their garage-band backgrounds are receding, all the same, further and further into the past. Am I just a hopeless nostalgic in wanting these groups to retain at least a degree of their underground charm?”

Of course, Blondie and Talking Heads would indeed top the charts and sell out arenas around the world. Even the Ramones would score global success and longevity. The scenesters might have preferred to keep this newer music as a secret handshake among the dwellers of cellars like the Rat, but The Cars and their cohort were spoiling all of that. The Cars passed one million sales in America in October, a month before the release of the debut album from the Police, three months before the release of Blondie’s breakthrough single “Heart of Glass,” and four months before the US release of Cheap Trick’s best-selling album, Cheap Trick at Budokan, finally broke them big. Talking Heads were achieving gold status, selling more than five hundred thousand of their 1978 LP, More Songs About Buildings and Food. In 1979, Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz said that his band was sick of hearing about The Cars. “Sometimes people from radio stations tell us we should sound more like The Cars. These dumb FM radio people say, ‘You guys are great, but you should get smart like The Cars and use Roy Thomas Baker.’” Instead, their album was produced by Brian Eno, whose presence loomed large as the new wave broke on the shores of America in ’78.

Kit Rachlis was the arts editor of the Boston Phoenix, where he wrote one of the most inspired pieces about The Cars that year. He caught up with them in Dayton, Ohio, where they opened up for the Doobie Brothers on July 27. They were still transitioning from support act to headliner, and the indignities were still something they had to contend with. As Rachlis noted, it was such stops in dingy arenas in smaller cities, with the opening act’s name absent from the marquee, that “form the backbone of most national rock tours.” The writer caught them while the band blasted Dwight Twilley on Ben’s tape deck in the dressing room. Ric explained how all was going to plan: “We said we were going to keep the songs simple . . . so they could sound like anybody could play them. We weren’t going to let the hooks get lost in tremendously long instrumental breaks. We wanted lines and things—nooks and crannies—that people could whistle while they were making breakfast. And at the same time, we wanted to give them something to think about—something that wasn’t too typical—to take it out of the realms of pop-schlock.”

Rachlis described the band’s studied indifference onstage, which was met by—no surprise—the crowd’s indifference. Ric explained how they use the red-white-and-black color scheme as a visual focus, a design aesthetic that permeated their entire stage presentation down to the color of the amps. “Ideally, everything will be futuristic,” said Ric, “very modern, lots of straight lines, European.” As Rachlis noted, this made “harsh demands on the audience.” Here were The Cars prodding 1970s middle America into the ’80s. It wasn’t going to be easy. As Rachlis described it, “The only time barriers are broken during the evening is when someone hits Ocasek directly in the mouth with a ball of wadded tape (‘Never missed a beat,’ he said later).” But the band did win over the audience with the guitar heroics at the end of “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight,” and they got an encore, unusual in any opening-act situation.

Rachlis also penned The Cars’ first album review in Rolling Stone. It was a largely favorable take. “Leader Ric Ocasek once sang that he lived on ‘emotion and comic relief,’ and it’s in this tension of opposites that he and his group find relief (comic or otherwise) between the desire for frontal assault and the preference for oblique strategies.iii This is the organizing principle behind not only the single but the entire LP, which is almost evenly divided between pop songs and pretentious attempts at art.” Expressing the opposite view of Trakin, Rachlis wrote, “The pop songs are wonderful. . . . As long as The Cars’ avant-garde instincts are servicing their rock & roll impulses, the songs bristle and—in their harsher, more angular moments (‘Bye Bye Love,’ ‘Don’t Cha Stop’)—bray. The album comes apart only when it becomes arty and falls prey to producer Roy Thomas Baker’s lacquered sound and the group’s own penchant for electronic effects. . . . But these are the mistakes of a band that wants it both ways—and who can blame rock & rollers for that?”

The hipper Trouser Press simply glowed. “It’s hard to believe that this is The Cars’ first LP,” wrote Jon Young. “Even the bugs that plague a five-album band have been eliminated. Ric Ocasek’s tunes display lyrics of exhilarating depression.” Creem writer Billy Altman weighed in with another positive review. “This is a band which seems to be headed into fourth gear towards the future while cruising in reverse down memory lane at the same time. How they done did it, I don’t know.” Michael Snyder wrote in the Berkeley Barb, “No first LP should sound this good.”

The commercial success and most of the critical response in their own country were delicious, and as the biggest market in the world for record sales, it would be financially life-changing. But The Cars were naturally excited to tour overseas in November, playing shows in Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, and England, just as the album was being certified gold (more than five hundred thousand sales) in America.

In England, where music journalists held enormous sway as gatekeepers, there was a pronounced critical backlash to what was perceived as an inauthentic act, cynically repackaging artsy and underground influences and watering them down for maximum commercial appeal. Even more to the point, the Brits sensed corporate America was trying to exploit innovative English artists and sell it back to them—coals to Newcastle, as an old saying goes. But the hype machine surrounding the band tainted any honest assessment of the record. In New Musical Express, Max Bell wrote of the band’s show at the Lyceum in London, “Amidst mutterings that WEA have pulled a gigantic marketing scam on their latest hot proteges, the absence of atmosphere and rooting hordes of converts indicated that a touch of suspicion was in order,” adding a prescient slant on the eventual Nirvana lyric, “C’mon, Cars, entertain me.”

What was this perceived offensive “marketing scam”? “It was a lousy picture disc,” says David. The band’s record label had the hubris to release their first single with a picture disc. It was a rudimentary design of a crudely drawn cartoon hot rod on a light-blue background. “They never liked us,” David says forty-five years later. “We got off on the wrong foot. We went over there and started doing interviews, and the first interviews were like, somebody said, ‘What about the rumor that you guys were hyped into the charts with your single?’ So, we don’t know anything about this. We had to ask somebody, ‘What are they talking about?’”

Greg recalls,

The record company in England put out a picture disc for whatever the singles were—“Just What I Needed.” I think they did two or three of them. And there was some kind of controversy where Warner Bros. in England was stocking picture discs only in stores that were reporting. I don’t know. There was something about it, not payola exactly, but it was somehow some controversial thing that we had no idea what was going on. But also, we did get the sort of thing about, “Oh, it’s sort of manufactured American rock” or something. I guess it was pretty hardcore kind of punk rock over there at the time. Somehow, they thought we were pretty, I don’t know, packaged.

“It was like people accused Brian Epstein of buying fifteen thousand copies of ‘Love Me Do’ to get into the charts,” Elliot says. “This time it was this Cars’ picture single, and they were saying that Warners was only supplying it to the record shops that reported. And it wasn’t true! You could buy it at any Boots chemist, anywhere. But there was this backlash, and they thought we were some sort of calculated thing designed to take your money.”

Fred Lewis blames himself a little, saying, “I was always in contact with the promotion people there [in England] and working with them to really promote the record, which they did to the point where they even overdid it some, I guess.” But, he says, he was not aware of all the machinations, never mind subterfuge, the record companies were up to over there. “The picture disc and, oh, they were doing something where they were putting too many records out into the market or something. I don’t know. Record labels do odd things sometimes. I had no knowledge of that, but afterward I read about it. But they were selling really well. They were selling records. I mean, it’s not like they had thousands of records that got returned. But yes, they probably got aggressive because they wanted to make the band happen.”

AC/DC was starting to break big and were on tour at the same time. “We’re kind of missing each other,” Steve Berkowitz recalls.

And somehow, either we go to see AC/DC in London or AC/DC comes to see us, and we’re both Warnersiv bands in Europe. All the gigs we played were packed. So were the people who bought the tickets and came to see the band wrong? This critic was right there in the dressing room. Ric said, “Him again. Fuck that critic.” And Angus Young said, “I don’t make the fucking records for the fucking critics of the NME.” He says that in front of the guy, and Ric kind of goes, “Yeah, that’s right. Fuck him.” Smacking away at the band that’s rising or successful is a very edgy, good thing for a new young writer who wants to make a rep to do.

The sold-out show at the three-thousand-seat Lyceum Theater in London on November 23 was exceptionally well received by the audience. “There were heads jumping up and down everywhere,” Ben told Boston Globe writer Steve Morse soon afterward. “People were pogo-ing and smacking elbows into each other’s faces. . . . They’re still into that over there, especially when you get the hard-core rockers in there.” After the show, which was held on the American Thanksgiving, there was a big party with a turkey dinner with former members of the Sex Pistols and Boomtown Rats as guests.

While in London, Ric had a satchel with notebooks with lyrics and song ideas stolen from a cab in front of a club. The bag was recovered, somewhat miraculously, but “somebody stupidly kept the lyrics,” Ric joked in the final interview The Cars did as a full band. In the same interview, David recalled, “The Melody Maker said something like, ‘Who would want to steal the lyrics from this band?’”

These early dings and slights were formative. It was disappointing to this group who loved so much English music. David says now, “The funny thing is, we don’t get it. Everything that we do is almost entirely based on English bands.”

In his mixed review of one of the London shows, the NME’s Max Bell, who had panned the album, reluctantly admitted, “Enough people have nice positive things to say about The Cars to make me wonder if it isn’t a case of simple incompatibility. Them and me, we didn’t get on. I made the effort, they played three encores.”

Despite the critics, “Just What I Needed” would make it into the Top 20 in the United Kingdom, and the second single, “My Best Friend’s Girl,” would debut at number 10 in its first week and, in two weeks, make it to number 3. But after the rapid ascension in America, the band was generally humbled overseas. “Right back to the clubs,” Ric said in 1979. “Yeah, we went right back to the Rats of the world . . . little halls, three-hundred-seaters, and it was great to do. We were wiped out, too. That was at the end of the American tour. We had pretty much, boy, we had been through it, and it was real fun, though. It was, I think we had a great time in Europe.”

The Cars appeared on the program Rock Goes to College, a BBC broadcast that was simulcast on radio and television. The episode was filmed at the University of Sussex, Brighton, and it is a relatively raw presentation of the band’s performance in a pub-like atmosphere in a student union, with a rambunctious audience. “I remember being backstage at that Rock Goes to College thing,” Elliot says, “and there were young punk-rock kids, and they were giving us a hard time about being some big rich American band. We didn’t have a pot to piss in,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, we were just starting out, but the press really created this impression that we were some corporate thing. It was ridiculous.”

As can be seen on YouTube, Ric’s guitar cable comes unplugged during the first song, “Just What I Needed,” and he kicks it as he spins to walk toward the side of the stage, presumably to get the attention of the stage tech. At the end of it, applause is delayed and muted. After the first number, presenter Pete Drummond comes out to introduce the band, and he is almost drowned out by rowdy boys jeering. But there are also hearty cheers when Drummond announces the next song is “Good Times Roll.” Ric’s guitar playing has a more pronounced reggae upstroke here.

The band is animated enough for those of us who don’t need, say, an Alice Cooper or Kiss show with pyrotechnics or blood. In the live video, the frontline guys all interact with each other quietly, making eye contact and leaning into each other at times. Their movements are more subtle than David Lee Roth’s, for sure; no spread-eagle jumps to be found. But they’re all the more intense for it. Lanky and towering, Ric is impenetrable behind his aviator shades. With round wire-framed glasses and straight bangs, Greg looks like a smaller, slighter, less blond new-wave John Denver. David is mostly obscured and off camera, though shots show him unfazed and steady. But all focus goes to Ben, center stage. As he sings, Ben, standing high in Cuban heels, stares ahead with those dreamboat eyes.

“I didn’t know Ben’s magic until I started seeing film of us,” David says. And referring to his position in the back, he explains, “I’m looking at the back of his head, you know what I mean? And I can see he’s moving around. He’s doing shit. Then the first time I saw him from the front and then saw the audience, I thought, it’s fucking Ben [laughs]! It’s all about Ben! He’s a master. Got a smile. He’s completely got it down. It might be stupid and corny, some of it, but man, does he have it down. Girls going crazy, swooning. And then suddenly, Ric looks like a cartoon character. He’s jerking around and stuff like that. But Ben always knew his audience. He knew it was loads of girls.” In 2000, Brett Milano asked, “Ben, did you think of yourself as the sexy one?” Ben answered, “Hell no! Randy, maybe, but not sexy.”

The Rock Goes to College crowd had a vocal hostile element. One wiseass punter seems to shout out, “Thank God it’s free,” before they launch into “Don’t Cha Stop.” Right between the first verse and the chorus of “Bye Bye Love,” Ben glares at an audience member, and he mouths the words, “I’m gonna get you.” He had first looked over at Ric or Greg with a smirk that seemed to ask silently, Did you see that? Steve Berkowitz explains, “I think it was gobbing, as I guess it was called in those punk days. I think that they were getting spit on and maybe stuff thrown at them. And that’s not nice in any way, even though that’s maybe what audiences did. The Cars were American. I mean, people don’t spit on us.”

Though looking like an “electric angel rock and roller,” Ben Orr’s Cleveland street roots were never gone, and he was not a guy to mess with. And not to be forgotten, David had been in the eye of the storm at the Rat with DMZ and threatened with death by a biker at a Modern Lovers show. Elliot had to deal with the overserved and undersexed gents who might stumble into the seedy joint he played in Boston’s Combat Zone. Faced with an edgy foreign audience, the band could function like a team, if not like a gang. Their steely reserve only makes the performance even more potent rock and roll.

They made their way to France and played another television show, Chorus, filmed at Théâtre de l’Empire on November 27. The video online is excellent quality, with intimate close-up camera work from an operator who prowls the stage. David’s midriff is exposed, and he looks like he has a twenty-four-inch waist. Greg looks dapper in a red sport coat with a penguin badge pinned to the lapel. The band seems to be in good spirits, loose, and smiling at each other, a rarity in performances.

Ben said he “hated Paris” and was dismayed when people would “fall back on their French,” even though he believed they could speak English. It took significant adjustment for the band this first time performing overseas, especially after the triumphant success on their home turf. Aside from the recording session in London and David’s family visits to England as a kid, they had not been to any of these countries.

“The first time we go, they’re very American,” Berkowitz says with a smile. “I’m not saying that they’re rubes, but they’ve never been there before. And they know all about English bands, and they’re wearing the clothes, but they were like, ‘Why can’t we order cheeseburgers and watch McHale’s Navy?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, because they don’t have McHale’s Navy here. And by the way, there is no such thing as to-go here.’”

“Elliot was so homesick,” Ric told Boston Globe writer Steve Morse, “that he stood on the bed singing ‘America the Beautiful’ in an operatic voice.” This makeshift stage was an extra-luxurious bed at the swankiest place they stayed, the George V Hotel in Paris.

Berkowitz explains, “It was a bizarre tour because their accountant said, ‘We’re not going to get out of the country with a lot of the money. They’re going to take it in taxes. So spend as much money as you can.’ So we’re in Paris staying at the George V, the most expensive hotel in the country.” Ben admitted, “I felt inhibited by the place. It was so prim and proper.”

“One or more of them was always complaining about everything,” Fred Lewis says. “Ric and I talked a lot on the phone. When we were on the road, we’d go out, we’d eat, and we talked a lot. Ben was not really one who talked much. He was a very quiet guy. Elliot and David and Greg, there were a lot of complaints from them all the time, starting from right in the beginning. ‘Why isn’t this happening?’ Or ‘Why can’t I get that?’ Or ‘What’s going on with this?’ It was just constantly that way.” Elliot disputes that the three of them were always complaining and does not recall being homesick. “I enjoyed the whole thing. It was a good tour.”

Photographer Ebet Roberts came along with them on the tour. She had met them on a shoot for Crawdaddy in the summer of ’78 when she took the well-known shot of them in the streets of New York as a woman jogs by. “That was a complete mistake,” she says. “We were just shooting, and that girl ran by, and I had the camera up. I didn’t know she was coming, and I was just like, boom. It was the fastest timing ever. I hadn’t even heard their music, but I just sort of had a wonderful time photographing them.”

Ric called her that fall. “Ric called me on a Monday or Tuesday. He’s chatting away, and he goes, ‘What are you doing Thursday?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, why?’ And he said, ‘Well, I was hoping you could go to Europe with us. Whatcha doing for the next three weeks?’ And, of course, I panicked. My passport had expired.” They helped her get an expedited renewal, and she boarded the plane with them for an all-expenses-paid trip to cover their tour, the idea being they could use some shots.

“I probably felt closest to Ric, but I love them all,” she says. “I just felt Ric and I were completely on the same wavelength, and he was interested in art and music, and we sort of had the same pace. He was great. He was very down to earth and warm and caring. Ben liked to party a lot. Elliot liked to play guitar a lot. And Greg was great to talk to. David didn’t seem to be in a great mood. They seemed to get along fine but would go in different directions.”

The Cars played the Paradiso in Amsterdam, a former church and one of the great venues in the world. Around the corner was the Milkweg (Milkyway), and Roberts recalls enjoying some of the famous space cakes (hash brownies) with Ben. Both venues continue to operate today.

The Netherlands was the only market where “All Mixed Up” was released as a single, and it went to the top of the charts. Steve Berkowitz had gotten to know Monique van Dorp, the head of publicity for WEA in Holland, via long-distance calls. “She picked—the only place in the world that picked ‘All Mixed Up’ as a single because she would go to the label meeting and listen to the whole record,” Berkowitz says. “And she goes, ‘Boy, I like that last song there, “All Mixed Up.”’” And that’s the only place in the world it was a single, and it was their first number one.

“We didn’t like each other at all, but she liked the band, so she didn’t care whether she liked me, and I didn’t care if I liked her. And she was another incompetent European, and I was another loudmouth wiseass American with a leather jacket who wouldn’t take his sunglasses off inside. ‘What’s with this guy?’ She’d say, ‘Even in the Middle Ages, men would raise their visor.’” But Steve and Monique soon became a couple and were married for forty-four years until she passed away in 2022.

A week after the Rock Goes to College show, the band was in Bremen, West Germany, for a similar live performance of their set for the show Musikladen. It was two days after the Paris show, and the preceding day was spent enjoying the Hamburg DOM fair, similar to the Bavarian Oktoberfest. “David got drunk as a skunk,” Lewis says.

Elliot explains,

It was a giant tent, like the size of an aircraft hangar. And they had three oompah bands, one in each corner of the room, and they were all playing simultaneously; it was this crazy thing. And the waitresses and pretty girls would go up to you, and they had these gingerbread heart-shaped cookies with ribbons baked onto ’em, and they put ’em around your neck as a valentine-kind of thing. And they kept coming around with these schnapps, I think apple schnapps, and they insisted that you had three at a time. And Greg asked them, “Why three?” They said, “You must have three because it is good.” And they follow that up with beer tankers, like this big [miming a giant stein].

So they were hungover as they made their television debut there, but David was in particularly fragile condition. “They put me in a car and drove me to where the Musikladen thing was and then woke me up and said, ‘Okay, it’s time to go on.’ I was like, ‘Okay, okay.’ I went out there, and I played the show in a complete daze and then went back to this cot, and then they woke me up and put me in the car and took me away, and I didn’t remember anything about being there at all, except that I was blue-green.” He actually does appear to be some shade of sea-foam green, but it’s an exhilarating set, with Ric more animated than usual and even peppering in ad-libs, such as those in “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight.” On the unreleasedv “Take What You Want,” Greg joins on guitar, center stage. Over the “Peter Gunn Theme”–like groove, Elliot stretches out a feedback-drenched solo, bringing it to “Train Kept a-Rollin’” Aerosmith territory.

Berkowitz says that the European tour was “very telling. And to some degree, was maybe the beginning of the end of Fred because it wasn’t organized very well. . . . But they had to work hard. We’d never had jet lag before. And we’re going from already being pretty big to not being so big over there. Though, the tour, they were pretty good gigs.” The tour consisted of only six shows, but it was intense. The only one that did not sell out was in Hamburg. Ric said the band didn’t make any money on what would end up being their only tour of the United Kingdom and Europe. While Berkowitz considered the tour a good bonding experience, the band figured, why work so hard when the fruits of their labor were so instant and bountiful at home?

So back home they went, playing more shows in the Northeast, headlining a Boston Garden December 11 WRKO Christmas benefit emceed by John Belushi. The Cars topped the bill with Pablo Cruise, Eddie Money, and Livingston Taylor. “They wanted us to do a promotion, give away a car,” Fred Lewis says. “And the band was like, ‘Oh, we’re not going to do that. That’s ridiculous.’ It’s like, ‘We’re above that kind of thing.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, we have to do this. It’s important. I have a plan. There are steps you got to take.’”

Even though Steve Morse of the Globe was rooting for them, he had to call ’em like he saw ’em. “As hard as it is to say this, they sputtered. They are in the big leagues now and they have some work to do,” he wrote. After noting a bad sound mix and poor lighting, which was somewhat out of the control of the musicians themselves, Morse noted that the band “seemed unaccountably withdrawn and did not project into the large arena as they needed to.” He wrote that Elliot’s “confidence and stage presence have soared since last seen, but the set never fully came to life. They still acted like a band on the way up, not one that has arrived.”

Maybe they had a little work to do, but it had been a heady and head-spinning year for The Cars. And they wanted to keep spinning, so they would begin work on their second album in February 1979, just as the third single, “Good Times Roll,” was released.

Meanwhile, the first album kept selling, going from a gold record in October to platinum (sales of more than one million) at the end of December. It peaked at 18 on the Billboard Top 200 in March 1979 and ultimately would spend 139 weeks on the charts. Elektra was understandably thrilled.

“The major-label process had gears in it in those days, and the gears were highly perfected,” says George Daly.

There was capital, there was discernment, there was an audience that was pretty homogeneous. There was a promotion system. . . . The whole thing was sort of a culmination of a lot of things—and this is not the “golden age” bullshit, but it was pretty much a golden age—and The Cars represented everything working right. Ric knew what it was like to be a star with hits, and he wrote the hits. He wasn’t like a bard doing something unusual and different. He really did what he felt would be appealing and attractive. I mean, I know they were different, but they played right down the middle of the road. And to their credit, they did their thing, and to our credit, we did everything right. Everybody knew they had something good.

I remember being surprised. Joe Smith [head of Elektra] called me, and he said, “You did really good with The Cars.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What do you want?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he looked at me like I was negotiating, and he said, “Well, do you want this much percentage or cash?” I had no idea what he was talking about. I really didn’t. I was a musician. I didn’t have much of a business background, right? I ended up actually taking cash, and I probably ended up with a third of the money I would’ve made if I had taken the [royalty] percentage [because the record kept exceeding expectations, eventually selling more than six million copies].

Ben said, “We figured, back in those days, that if we sold maybe 50,000 records it would be great for us. We had no idea as to where it would go or how large it would turn out.” In another interview with Lisa Karlin, he reflected, “The Cars just sort of happened without anybody really realizing it. I didn’t really realize it. Being through a number of bands, it seemed like the next best shot. So we had a try and it just happened real fast. I didn’t really have time to think about it.”

Decades later, when asked if he remembered life changing for him, Elliot answered, “That didn’t necessarily happen. All my life, I thought, ‘Gee, if I could just make a record and have that piece of plastic in my hand. You made a record, then everything would be great in my life. Everything I’ve ever wanted would be . . .’ And what I found in some ways was that it was somewhat anti-climactic because it didn’t fix everything; I still had good days and bad days. . . . You still go home alone at night and have to live with yourself.”

Footnotes

i Mastering was by George Marino at Sterling Sound.

ii Greg thought it might have been recorded at the record-release party.

iii A reference to Brian Eno.

iv Elektra was part of the WEA group, Warner Bros., Elektra, and Atlantic.

v It was later included in demo form on the expanded issue of the first album.

Chapter 11

CANDY-O

“YOU KNOW, IT’S VERY EASY, NOT BEING ACCEPTED,” RIC OCASEK SAID IN 1979. “You get used to it. Being accepted is difficult because you become concerned with maintaining that acceptance. I try not to let it bother me.”

The Cars had certainly been accepted. They began 1979 on the cover of Rolling Stone. “It was really exciting and it’s not what you expected,” Elaine Hawkes says. “I remember one day, I was at the checkout of some store and there was Rolling Stone, and Greg was on the cover.”

It was less than a year since they had recorded their debut album. They had won the Best New Artist category of the magazine’s Readers’ Poll, something they also pulled off in Creem, Crawdaddy, Teen, and Circus magazines. And on January 8, they were announced as one of the nominees for the Grammy Awards for Best New Artist, alongside Taste of Honey, Toto, Elvis Costello, and Chris Rea. The Cars was also nominated for the Best Album Package category. The nominations goosed record sales.

The meteoric success of The Cars seemed to take the music industry by surprise, though not those in the know around Boston—boosters like Maxanne Sartori, Oedipus, Jim Harold at the Rat, and Barbara Rhind—or the band’s friends and early fans. And least of all, the band themselves.

As Ric told Jon Pareles in the lengthy Rolling Stone profile accompanying the award, “We were ready.” He told the San Francisco Examiner that even he didn’t know exactly how to explain the rapid popularity. “But I suspect it’s the personalities of different people in the band. All of these guys have something special about them. They all have something strong within them but it was never tapped. Everybody in the band feels the other one is capable of doing what he does better than anyone else.” He went further with LA-based broadcaster Jim Ladd on the nationally syndicated InnerView radio show, saying that the band was getting along better than ever. “We’ve known each other for longer than the two-and-a-half years The Cars have been together. We still have a lot of fun together and communicate quite a bit, on the road and at home. We still get off on each other. We still respect each other, and learn probably more from each other than any outside thing.”

There was an esprit de corps as the band readied themselves for recording their second album. They were so busy that there was “no time for fussing and fighting,” as their heroes once sang. “It got bigger and bigger, and it was all good,” Greg says when recalling this period. “From my perspective, it was ‘all things are looking up.’”

“Socially, The Cars were always an interesting bunch,” Elliot wrote in the liner notes for the expanded edition of Candy-O. They all brought distinct elements that produced the band’s chemistry. “Success wasn’t spoiling The Cars around the time,” Elliot wrote. “We were a group of guys still full of excitement, but tempered by a little experience. . . . We were not some band of brothers—we were different guys with different perspectives, but we spoke to each other and listened to each other.”

“They all loved each other,” Kris Orr says. “They all loved what they each brought to the table.”

And while the momentum was undeniable, to some observers, the band’s enthusiasm was curbed, which Pareles attributed to following the example of their leader. “On a personal level, a curious kind of wariness reigns,” he wrote. “Ocasek’s detached demeanor appears to have rubbed off on the rest of the guys; on- and offstage, emotions are kept in check. But aren’t emotions, and content, what rock is all about?”

Pareles was also skeptical enough to question Ric’s stated age, noting Ric “claims to be twenty-nine but looks a few years older.” And, understanding how personal tensions and power dynamics can challenge the longevity of most bands, the writer added an important qualifier before quoting Ben, noting that Ben “is for the moment [emphasis added] content to be Ocasek’s accomplice. ‘I like singing Ric’s stuff.’” In the same piece, Ric characterized his relationship with Ben: “By now, we know each other so well I hardly talk to him.” On paper it reads as an odd way to describe a friendship or collaboration, but Ric also possessed a wry sense of humor that likely got lost in translation. Pareles was struck by Ocasek’s specter-like presence and quiet charisma, his power of subtle persuasion.

Ric wrote in creative spurts, often recording raw demos of more than a half-dozen song ideas in a row, sketches that he would go back and listen to only after recording them all. Months could go by without such a creative burst, but the band had managed to arrange about half the next album while they were out on the road. The momentum of the band spurred his creative juices. He said, “After the tour and everything for the first record, I just think everybody was kind of dying to do new stuff, and I was kind of really ready and dying to write, too. We didn’t have time to think about following it up or living up to the next. I think we were just swept up and going forward.”

“How the hell do you overcome the dreaded sophomore slump?” Elliot asked in the liner notes of the reissued Candy-O. “Our band somehow managed to answer one of the eternal questions in rock-and-roll history. In a way, that became our overriding theme for Candy-O. The problem for any group lucky enough to be making a second album soon becomes pretty damn obvious. Basically, it all comes down to this: you have your whole life to prepare for your first big album. Then once that debut comes out and actually hits, the clock starts ticking, and you have just a few months to try and follow up and not fall flat on your face.”

There are contradictory accounts about whether Elektra wanted the band to wait a little while longer before recording and releasing the second album or to take more time to promote the hot first album. Elektra’s George Daly recalls no such pressure at the label. Furthermore, the band toured straight through December and would head into the next recording sessions in February 1979, with their second album released the following June. So perhaps there was no hectic rush to get it out, but that certainly is not an unusual delay. It was a reasonable amount of time to set up the much-anticipated follow-up to a hit record. The debut would hit two million sales around the release of Candy-O. The first record would remain on the charts for the better part of three years.

The band said that they didn’t feel any real pressure to follow up the first album either in terms of any creative formula or in terms of sales. If anything, they felt relieved and, as Ric said, ready. Discussing it with Robert Hilburn, Ric said, “We’ve been working for a long time to get into a position where people would be listening to our music. The success only motivates me to want to write better. I feel like I have someone waiting out there to hear the music this time. I know it’s not just something we’ll be making and have to file away in the basement.”

However, Roy Thomas Baker said he, at least, felt the pressure from the label. He paraphrased their directive: “Give us another one just like the other one, but different.” Baker said there was a relative dearth of songs. “Getting the songs together was harder” on the second album, he said. Such was the typical challenge of coming in right from the road to record the follow-up to a smash-hit debut album.

Still, Ric said, and the three surviving members agree, that they operated out of intuition and responded to whatever Ric wrote. Commercial considerations, while not ignored completely, were not a motivating factor in the creative process. They only wanted to satisfy themselves. After the enormous success of the first record, smart people at Elektra knew to stay out of the way.

The band was looking forward and not interested in a rehash of anything they had already achieved artistically. They did, of course, want to remain on the radio and continue to have hits. Given how well they had gotten on with Roy Thomas Baker, never mind the triumph of the album, it was an easy choice to carry on with that winning combination. The team of the band and producer had an easy familiarity and momentum in place. According to interviews in 1978, Ric had considered heading back to London to record, but after their tour and all the travel, they decided that Los Angeles in February sounded like a more palatable option. “Roy Thomas Baker had a beautiful home on Sunset Plaza Drive,” Elliot says. “So we just said, ‘Let’s go to LA this time instead of damp England.’”

But Baker explained that the British Musicians’ Union cracked down on them, pointing to a rule that The Cars would have had to hire union session players. “So we were forced . . . to work in LA, even though we all wanted to work in England.” Baker was under the impression that “the Cars hated LA, but said they’d work here because of the facilities, and as a result, the album was done under duress as far as they are concerned, because they were forced to live in a place which they didn’t like because the facilities are here.” The surviving members say they welcomed the change and enjoyed LA, if only on a limited basis. “I don’t know why RTB said that we hated LA,” says Elliot, who lives there. “We loved it!”

They would record at Cherokee Studios on Fairfax Avenue near Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, a facility where Baker had already worked. The band stayed at the Sunset Marquis Hotel. “Now it’s a fancy place, but back then it was just a funky rock-and-roll hotel, like the Gramercy Park in New York, where bands stayed, which was great,” Elliot explains. “You’d meet all kinds of people there and other bands who were staying there, and you could socialize around the pool. So that was a great experience.” Greg says, “I loved the whole LA thing. The Sunset Marquis was just a five-minute drive away from the studio.” They could drive on the right side of the road to pick up hamburgers and maybe even catch McHale’s Navy reruns during their downtime.

And Baker was in a familiar top-notch studio owned by the Robb Brothers, a hilarious trio of sweet guys who were musicians themselves (a sixties band called the Robbs) who went out of their way to make everyone happy.i Their first studio was at a ranch next to the Spahn Ranch, where the Manson Family lived, so that came with some stories. They later had a studio on a yacht, lending legitimacy to the retroactively applied descriptor “yacht rock.” “Roy would sort of tell stories about him going out on their boat,” Greg says, recalling Ben probably took a cruise with them. “Oh, they were wild in those days, man,” Elliot says. “Super-friendly guys, great atmosphere, and they treated us well there.”

This new album would sound closer to what the band actually sounded like live, with less vocal stacking and a bit more streamlined. But, says Elliot, there was no conscious overarching plan. “We never thought about our music that way. It was just, ‘Here’s the latest batch of songs; it’s a new year. What have we got? What are we going to make of it? Let’s see where it goes.’ And that’s just what we always did.”

The process for selecting and arranging the music remained largely democratic, perhaps even more than on the first record, though Ric was the sole songwriter with no cowrites. As they had with the debut, the band had decamped to Northern Studio in Massachusetts for preproduction, working out the songs and their parts. The expanded edition of the album includes four demos from those Northern sessions, including the nonalbum track “They Won’t See You.”

Ric explained that year that while he supplied the songs in their barest forms, the band fleshed out the arrangements. “I think everybody in The Cars is open-minded and creative enough that they would do anything: Nobody’s holding anything back,” he said. “Everybody appreciates the more radical, experimental kinds of music and likes it. But sometimes, when you’re put together with five pieces, things are not as minimal as they could or should be. Everybody’s developed a unique personal style, and we rely on their input. If they did it, it’s good enough.”

“Let’s Go” appropriately leads off the album, certainly with its title, but it also immediately feels like a familiar extension of the debut. For many of us, the first two albums seem almost like a single piece. Yet not only are the backing vocal layers peeled back and not as in your face in comparison to the first album, but the lead vocals are a little lower in the mix, a change that continues into the next track, “Since I Held You.”

“Let’s Go” is a tutorial on how to craft a killer pop song, from composition through the arrangement to the performances and the production. It begins with a crash, like “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” by the Who. It holds for two bars while Ric clicks his signature eighth-note downstrokes. David enters with a backbeat for two more measures, and then Greg kicks in with his first infectious hook, that riff on his newly acquired Sequential Prophet-5 synth that sounds like a man growling “pow-pow-pow-pow/pow-pa-pow-pow.”

Ben’s lead vocal is double-tracked, sketching the portrait of a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl who’s above the fray, driving (perhaps racing) a car, combining two of the foundational themes of rock and roll. The teenage heroine of “Let’s Go” has so far been “holding out.” In one of the most memorable images from Ric’s canon, she’s described as “a frozen fire,” which is as good a description as any for The Cars’ music itself. I have only found one other use of that phrase before the song, a title of a 1977 children’s book written by James Houston, an unlikely inspiration for Ric, though perhaps they had a copy at the house for Eron. Ben told writer Jim Sullivan, “Some of the lyrics are just there poetically, and you’re not quite sure what they mean. They mean something to Ric. I never ask him what he means. I don’t listen to songs for lyrics, at least the first few times. I listen for the melody.”

After the release of Candy-O, Ric himself went deep about his approach to lyrics in a discussion with the Boston Globe’s Steve Morse, who called him “a master of the cryptic phrase” with a “love of abstraction.” Morse pulled out some choice lines from the album. He pinned Ric down enough to have him admit to being cynical about romantic relationships, but Ric explained, “I don’t know what I’m going to write about before I do. I look for different things, but I like to leave things in poetic suspension.”

Greg enters the second verse with his second synth hook, a stringlike countermelody sitting over the top of the vocals. David gets the spotlight for the prechorus (“I don’t want to hold her down . . .”), with a rumbling elongated fill over the tom-toms, panned across the stereo mix, while Elliot plays moody arpeggiating chords with a watery, chorus-like effect. The chorus has another huge hook, the anthemic declaration, “I like the nightlife, baby,” likely soaked up from the 1978 Alicia Bridges disco hit “I Love the Nightlife.” The song’s subject might be a cheerleader, as the chorus ends with a cheer. It echoes a 1962 hit called “Let’s Go (Pony)” by the Routers, a California surf band of the early sixties. That song begins with the same rah-rah clapping pattern and the exhortation, “Let’s go!”

“Ric got sued for ‘Let’s Go,’” Elliot says. “There isn’t a high school football game that takes place that people don’t do that cheer. The Routers, maybe it was [pronounced] ‘the Rooters’ because you’re rooting for a team, I don’t know. But the song bears no resemblance. It’s got nothing to do with our ‘Let’s Go.’ And the fact that that handclap went in there and the song is called ‘Let’s Go,’ they took a shot, but they didn’t get anywhere with it. It was laughable because, to me, it was just like a football cheer or a cheerleading thing. Nothing to do with that old song.”

But as with “Bye Bye Love,” Ric continues his habit of knowingly recycling titles of previous songs and referencing rock and roll’s past. “Let’s Go” combines girls, cars, and the nightlife for a spicy update of stuff you’d hear in early Beach Boys songs. The Cars’ songs are pop-art pieces, a musical version of the mirrors artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns held up to American commercial culture. Or, as Peter Goddard wrote in his book about the band, the songs “are about pop as much as they are pop.” Mitchell Schneider observed, “If the Cars satirize, mock, and trivialize pop, they embrace it and celebrate it too.” After all, this is a band who just cut to the chase and, instead of just writing songs about cars, named their band The Cars.

Elliot’s solo features a new hummable melody played in unison by Greg. For the third verse, harmony is added to the lead vocal. It all gets repeated, ending with a zinger of a syncopated riff.

And then on to “Since I Held You,” a potent pop number with a Byrds-like folk-rock guitar part, barely edging three minutes, packed not just with guitar but with synth ear candy and the building and layering of vocal parts, including the call-and-response chorus. It has some echoes of Elektra labelmates Television’s crystalline twin-guitar interplay. Though Elliot, for one, was not a fan of Television, Ric was. He would later have Television’s Tom Verlaine play guitar on his solo record This Side of Paradise. The guys in Television certainly detected the influence.

“Elektra sent over a bunch of tapes while we were on tour,” said Television’s Richard Lloyd. “When we heard the first Cars record, we said, ‘Uh-oh. This is like our music, only right down the commercial alley. This is gonna take our place.’ You know, they’re gonna sell a million of these Cars records, and they’re gonna tell us that we should be like them.”

For guitar fans, especially guitar players, Candy-O might be filled with even more delights than the debut, if not immediately, perhaps on repeated deep listens. There are so many engrossing textures going on, some right out in front and others subtle, all serving the songs and building the arrangements. It’s part of a tradition that runs from Les Paul to the Beatles, through Jimmy Page’s work in Led Zeppelin, and on up past James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders and Elliot, to players like Johnny Marr of the Smiths. Elliot was a fan of Tony Hicks of the Hollies as well, someone he feels is not given enough credit for adding perfect parts to songs, like George Harrison.

While some synth-forward artists embraced the chillier sounds of technology and relegated thinner-sounding guitars to a narrow layer back in the mix, if not eschewing the instrument completely, Elliot kept the band rooted in organic American music while informed by the innovations of the Brits. His parts were like a history lesson on the electric guitar. The title track, “Candy-O,” builds off a choppy rhythmic riff similar to Wilko Johnson’s style in Dr. Feelgood, much like Andy Gill’s staccato attack in Gang of Four on that band’s debut—Entertainment!—the same year. He did not mention those players; I just hear similar approaches. Elliot did, though, cite Chris Spedding directly as an inspiration for the sound on “Got a Lot on My Head,” another heavy guitar track.

“I don’t think there’s a good player starting from the twenties through to the sixties who has escaped my attention,” Elliot said in a later interview. “And if I find merit in something, I’ll go right ahead and steal it.” Another time he explained that he has “huge ears—for nuance and phrasing or the particular way a guy is trying to say something. . . . Always had a feeling that I was hearing something my friends weren’t. The most important aspect of that process is that I know where I am in this whole lineage of music.”

His intelligence, grace, and taste meant he always knew what to play and what not to play in a song. He considers himself a songwriter’s guitarist. It was not like these solos just came to him as he improvised; he would take a cassette home of the basic tracks, with a scratch guide or lead vocal and all the backing vocals done, and compose his solos as homework, as he did at the Sunset Marquis during the Cherokee sessions. Sometimes, he would start by singing the solos into the tape to break out of muscle-memory habits of putting his fingers in the same spots and patterns. Other times, he would sing a harmony to the original guitar melody and then replicate the harmony part for the solo, jettisoning the original melody. “I’m never going to be a shredder,” he said, meaning a superfast player. “It’s just not in my nervous system. But I hear beautiful melodies in my head. If I can sing it, then I can play it.”

Elliot added new guitars to his previously sparse arsenal.

It was at a time when it seemed like the quality of Gibson and Fender had gone down some, and people were more embracing vintage instruments. At the same time, I had noticed a company like Hamer was making high-quality instruments in the style of vintage Gibsons. There were also these Dean guitars, and they were very high-quality. They were made by Dean in Evanston, Illinois, in a little shop, and it was a really good guitar. And so I got in touch with Dean [Zelinksy], and by then, the band was happening. And so he was knocked out that I reached out to him and he built me a guitar, and I remember he brought it to Cherokee. He came with his girlfriend and they brought the guitar to me at Cherokee, and I plugged it right in and started using it on a track right away. I tuned it up, and I plugged it in. We were doing guitar overdubs, and I started playing it, and that amazed him. I blew his mind. People associate me with those Deans, but I really only played them in ’79.

“It’s All I Can Do” is next. Though it was one of Roy Thomas Baker’s favorites and a timeless Cars song, the band quickly tired of it, and it was soon dropped from their set list. “I just don’t think Ric liked doing it,” Elliot says. “I would never have minded playing it. And I still get a lot of nice comments about the guitar on that one. It has a nice solo on it.” David plays an inventive stutter-step beat.ii With the big, layered backing vocals, beefy guitars, flutey synths, and some classic lines like “When I was crazy, I thought you were great,” it is another of the tracks on the album that feels the most like a continuation from the first record.

It is followed by “Double Life,” which is one of the most distinctive Candy-O numbers, sparse, with surfy, echoing guitar bends that sound almost like a slide or lap steel guitar, harking back to Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk.” It explodes in the middle with one of Elliot’s great solos before returning to its austere base. The song, which would be the third single from Candy-O, almost didn’t make it onto the album. Baker told Ric they needed more songs, which is when Ric brought out the demo tapes. They modeled the album version on the demo, starting with a drum-machine track and building from there, “which actually set the direction of the third album [Panorama],” Baker explained.

The title image comes directly from another of Ric’s primary influences, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who began his poem “Lost Parents,” “It takes a fast car to lead a double life / In these days of short distance love affairs.” Ric seemingly never mentioned the borrowing of those lines, and the band members don’t recall knowing that. Greg sees the song as confessional. Since we are talking about newly minted rock stars here, few would be surprised to learn that women made themselves available. Ric always had flings, even back in the Ocasek/Orr-duo days. “It’s a song about having affairs, having a secret life,” Greg observes. “‘When you idle at the stoplight, better get your signals right.’” Ric had always been moving on through relationships. “With Suzanne, it was more than I was aware, especially early on,” Greg says. “It became more obvious as time went on.”

Ric cited the song as an example of a recurring theme in his work, which was “the act of not expecting” love, that people should depend only on themselves and not what others bring to them in a relationship. He said, “I really don’t witness much love or emotion between people.” He described his songs, and music generally, “as a way to get beyond loneliness. . . . Just turn on the radio and there it is: a sense of belonging. Without having to surrender to anybody else’s needs.”

“Double Life” repeats the infectious refrain with overlapping vocals as it cross-fades into the urgent unabashed Suicide homage “Shoo Be Doo.” Ric’s distant lead vocal swims in slap-back echo above a churning maelstrom of synth and minimalist drum-machine crunch. When they first started experimenting with it, the song went on for forty-five minutes.

As Suicide was such a foundational band for Ric, it was only a matter of time before their influence appeared conspicuously in Cars material. Says Martin Rev, one half of Suicide, “When I heard the [first Cars] record, it was an incredibly well done, well produced, colorful, interesting, not-obviously-old-hat pop record; rock and roll, but not totally in the past. It was nothing I would relate to, technically and musically, for what I was doing. It was maybe what I should have been doing. I would’ve been a lot more successful. But what I very consciously did not do was construct and write songs like that. So they did, and they reaped the rewards of it materially. I reaped the rewards aesthetically.”

Suicide’s album had come out in the interim, centered on the harrowing ten-minute masterpiece “Frankie Teardrop” (it is not for the faint of heart), and Ric’s admiration was cemented. Rev and Vega were chuffed when Ric, in particular, championed Suicide in the press. “Now, they’re one of the largest bands in the world,” Rev continues. “They’re doing regular press, Rolling Stone, all the big stuff, major. And Ric is talking about Suicide. And I mean, up to then, of course, all the groups on that level would never, of course, talk about us. But [those other groups] weren’t part of our milieu anyway. It was just a major surprise to see that, on that level, being mentioned.”

“These big pop bands were supposed to be arrogant, all bullshit, but the Cars were very cool guys, especially Ric,” remembered Suicide’s singer Alan Vega. “I kept thinking, ‘Why do they like us? What’s going on?’” Ric told Vega and Rev that he wanted to produce Suicide, which he would do in early 1979.

“Shoo Be Doo” is so blatant a tribute that it might as well be a cover. But The Cars do add their own touches, such as Elliot’s profoundly mournful chords and Greg’s synths positioned more precisely within the arrangement than the often chaotic Suicide tracks. “‘Shoo Be Doo’ was one of the first really electronic things for The Cars,” Greg says.

On “Candy-O,” while Greg’s synth bubbles, Elliot bends into a solo, becoming a bluesy squall with what Eric Clapton called “the woman tone,” a round, mellow distortion played with just the neck humbucker pickup, or both pickups with the treble turned all the way down, into a Marshall amp. Clapton used it quite a bit during his Cream days. Meanwhile, Ben sings in a purposefully dispassionate, almost robotic monotone. It was a curious assignment for a guy with his firepower, like asking David Ortiz to bunt or Venus Williams to join you in doubles pickleball. It’s a song almost perfect for Ric’s quirkier voice. But it was not without precedent; “Moving in Stereo” called only for a similar limited range and depth. The result is that his richer voice rounds off the edges on such angular songs.

“Night Spots” is an intense track that became only more so when they played it live, generally at a faster tempo. Here, it’s relatively relaxed, droning on one chord until the tension is released with a second and then a third chord for the chorus. Elliot follows the first chorus with a blizzard of tapped notes for a solo. Greg plays a sci-fi riff that echoes the “five tones” (re, mi, do, do, so) chosen by composer John Williams for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which itself resonated with the eerie back-and-forth Twilight Zone theme composed by Marius Constant in 1960. Greg had played a similar riff on “Good Times Roll” (around 1:05–1:18) and would carry that uneasy vibe forward. It would become a hallmark of new wave’s ripples in the 1980s. For example, Missing Persons’ “Words,” which was not released until 1982, owes a lot to The Cars. Thomas Dolby’s 1982 hit “She Blinded Me with Science” is another Cars-influenced song that features that sort of sci-fi riff.

“Night Spots” goes out on Greg’s riff, underscoring the vocoder chant, “It’s just an automatic line.” As with Kraftwerk or Devo, it’s as if Ric is presaging the advent of artificial intelligence or the days the robots take over: Here’s a generic placeholder in the lyrics, as if it were spit out by an algorithm. Ric might also have been referring to automatism, a creative approach to art that leaves unfiltered subconsciousness in a finished piece. The lyrics that precede it capture the spirit of two Iggy Pop songs from 1977, “Nightclubbing” and “The Passenger,” both of which feature a detached narrator observing ostensible fun and beauty without being engaged on any meaningful level.

We cross-fade into “You Can’t Hold on Too Long,” one of The Cars’ more Roxy Music–Bowie numbers and the oldest song on the album, dating back to their days before signing to Elektra. It also tips a hat, perhaps, to the Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” with the line “You’d like to come in colors, you don’t know which one.” To arrive (come) in colors originated from arriving ships flying flags with their identifying colors. Obviously, “come” is a double entendre. Ric’s use of the term “gallow glass” is consonant with the flag-flying meaning. Though printed as two words in the lyrics accompanying the album, the term is actually “gallowglass,” Scottish mercenary forces who served Celtic chieftains, such as the titular character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

For a dose of minimalist new wave, “Lust for Kicks” does the trick. It’s mostly driven by Greg’s synths and David’s drums, with an almost cubist abstract lyric describing a modern couple who are apparently codependents in some way. It’s a worthy preview of the eighties. I see pastel colors, triangles, Keith Haring outlines, and Ric wandering into Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

“Got a Lot on My Head” is straightforward garage rock, like something from the early Kinks or the great Nuggets compilations of garage bands, with Elliot’s part inspired by Chris Spedding’s “Get Out of My Pagoda,” and Greg contributing a Farfisa-like organ sound, like Steve Nieve of the Attractions. While the bands sounded quite distinct from each other, fans of the early Elvis Costello & the Attractions records—This Year’s Model (1978) and Armed Forces (1979)—provided plenty of parallels between the two groups. Costello cultivated a literate, nerdy, and neurotic early persona, as did David Byrne and Tom Verlaine in Television. Ric Ocasek’s natural quirkiness, rangy countenance, and darkly poetic point of view were finally coming into mainstream fashion.

This is one of the distinctions between conventional rock acts of the time and punk rock and the emerging so-called new wave of the era. Punk might be more aggressive, blunt, and pissed off in its approach, while new-wave artists tended toward the melancholic and sardonic loners, drawing you into their interior world with more nuance. And there are considerably fewer punk-rock than new-wave songs about personal—especially romantic—relationships. But artists grouped under both these categories tended to feature an antihero dealing with some combination of alienation, self-deprecation, frustration, paranoia, and other qualities you might not expect from the likes of Foreigner, Journey, or many of the southern-rock bands. This is not to say humor, irony, and anger didn’t exist in those more mainstream acts; it’s just that it was the default in the underground, an alternative to the braggadocio emanating from most of those bands filling arenas. Both punk and new wave shone a spotlight on the societally marginalized and the self-described losers. That’s one reason Tom “Even the Losers” Petty got lumped in (and marketed) as new wave around Damn the Torpedoes (1979).

Early Costello and Byrne shared a coiled-up intensity in their presentation. But while Costello seemed like a guy who would spout off and get punched out in a bar (as he actually did in 1979 by Bonnie Bramlett), when Byrne sang detachedly, “Don’t touch me, I’m a real live wire,” you could buy him as a “psycho killer.” It didn’t hurt that he resembled Anthony Perkins in Psycho. That sort of twitchy guy on the edge was a common archetype in Talking Heads songs. Meanwhile, Sting was singing things like “I can’t see the point in another day when nobody listens to a word I say,” before threatening to kill himself, the kind of obsession that would continue through “Every Breath You Take.” With rare exceptions like “Got a Lot on My Head,” where the narrator sings of needing to be institutionalized, Ric tended more toward the detached or bemused narrator, even when he is the one getting hurt, mocked, and abused, as in “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight.” He generally took an observer’s stance, no matter where the narrator is positioned in the account.

The distinction between writers and their narrators is usually clear in literature, less so in songwriting. Richard Thompson told Bill Flanagan, “At the bottom of every record, there should be a disclaimer saying, ‘The views expressed by the singer are not necessarily those of the songwriter.’” Distrustful narrators and songwriters writing in character was nothing new, but there is something about a singer singing (and especially a rapper rapping) their own lyrics that trips people up.

Lou Reed had his “Femme Fatale,” and Costello featured one in his film noir–inspired “Watching the Detectives,” among others, and Ric addresses such a vamp in “Dangerous Type” (my personal gun-to-head favorite Cars song). The song begins with a guitar rhythm lifted from T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On).” Later, Elliot shoots off one of his torrid solos with a call-and-response built into it. The meter of Ric’s lyrics, mostly nine or ten syllables per line, is similar to Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” or “Take Me to the River,” the Al Green song they interpreted.

As they had with “All Mixed Up,” the band chose to close out the album with one of their more epic numbers, fading off into the sunset (or sunrise, maybe, as this is more of a nocturnal number) with a four-chord outro layered in vocals, synths, and guitars. Baker’s mix has David’s tom-tom’s outrageously high in the mix—and I mean that as a positive; they jump out almost like a guitar riff might. “Candy-O had all kinds of weird noises that people assumed were made by keyboards,” David explained. “I had one drum synthesizer, a Synare, that looked like a little weird flying saucer and had a battery in it. It sounded crappy as drums but had amazing sci-fi outer space sound effects. You could set them so if a wave form could repeat, it would run in time with the song. Sometimes, we’d have three or four tracks of those running in the background.”

Overall, the record doesn’t sound as punchy as the debut. The production of the debut is perfect and seems to jump out of the speakers and grab you. While many fans prefer Candy-O, and the quality of the songwriting and performances is consistently excellent, the mix is noticeably thinner than the debut, and it’s a slightly smaller-sounding record. Comparing “Let’s Go,” for example, to “Just What I Needed” makes this point clear. There’s a thicker bottom and a more in-your-face presence to the latter. As Greg observes, Candy-O “is not quite as big or open.” Baker explained that where the band had left a lot of space open on the first album, “with Candy-O, we ‘filled’ some of the holes.”

In 1979, though, Ric told Creem, “The highs are better on the second album. The drums are better, too. Roy knows how to get it out of a little speaker. He’s good at compensating.” Baker said, “Candy-O sounds different from the first LP. It’s much ‘harder’ because Cherokee sounds ‘harder’ than AIR. That’s what we wanted, and it worked.” Ric told writer Lisa Robinson that they added plywood to the walls of the studio. “We put a hard edge on the LA atmosphere. At first I was pretty opposed to doing it in LA, but after we brought the plywood in, I didn’t care anymore.”

Candy-O took only fourteen days to make, two more than the debut. Ben was also thrilled with the results, saying, “There’s a lot of feeling from every individual involved.” He enjoyed the recording process so much that he wanted to start producing other artists, though he never would, and he was writing more songs, though none of them would ever make it onto a Cars album.

The band with one of the greatest debut albums pulled off another rare feat, one of the greatest second albums.

If the band had apprehensions about having a model on the cover of the debut album, they were dispelled by the time of the follow-up. David was a big fan of midcentury pin-up art, particularly that of Alberto Vargas, who became well known for his paintings of his “Vargas Girls” in the 1940s for Esquire, but it was in the fifties and sixties, after he started being featured in Playboy, when he became most celebrated. The artist retired in 1974. It was David who coaxed Vargas out of it to work on Candy-O.

David thought of hiring someone to create something like Vargas’s style until it dawned on him that Vargas himself might still be alive. He had the art department of Elektra track him down in the Westwood section of LA, and he and Steve Berkowitz went to visit the artist. “Next thing I know, I’m at his house; I spent a whole day with him showing me his artwork. That was unbelievable. I had never seen a real Vargas painting ever. He was taking them out from under his bed. He was also chain-smoking, like Lucky Strikes or something, while he was talking to me. And the paintings were just below him and he’s waving his arm, telling me stories. I’m looking at that ash moving around. He had a cup of coffee another time, waving a cup of coffee. I’m just like, my head’s spinning. And then he said he would do it.” David said that Vargas loved the idea of doing the album cover. “He got excited that somebody would come and ask him to do something and that somebody still liked him. I know that he was happy to do it.”

First, they photographed a model and actor named Candy Moore (not to be confused with an older actor with the same name who was on The Lucy Show). Moore and David had a romantic relationship after meeting on the shoot. Elliot recalls, “David had a knack for just having beautiful girlfriends. As a matter of fact, the girl on Shake It Up was a girlfriend of his, holding the shaker.” David says, “I met [Moore] at the photo shoot to get ideas, and eventually we gave the photo to Vargas as a guide, but he was at liberty to do what he liked.”

“I thought it was a challenge,” Vargas said, “because I wanted to get back into circulation—I wasn’t sure I could do it at all.” David assured him he was the man for the job. Vargas answered him, “I would like to try and see if I have all my powers yet. . . . It came out beautifully. Now I am working again, the same as I used to.” Vargas worked from the photos to paint the cover of a redheaded bombshell reclining on the hood.

“The cover got so much attention, way more than I even expected,” David said. “It was pretty much my favorite album, actually, music-wise. Vargas came eventually to one of our shows, and he said, ‘I don’t really know about your music, but I know everybody likes it, and I’m sure it’s really good music. But I think I see something you like about it.’ I go, ‘What’s that?’ He goes, ‘Pretty girls everywhere!’”

It also grabbed some unwanted negative attention. “I remember hearing that some women’s group was complaining about that painting,” David said in 1980. “I wish they’d come up to me. I’d love to confront somebody who’d call an eighty-five-year-old man’s painting of a girl sprawled on a car sexist.” The mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap would not be released for another four years, so the finer arguments over the thin line between sexy and sexist had not yet been fully hashed out. When the interviewer, Mikal Gilmore, challenged David by explaining that “the picture did seem to portray the woman as something of a hood ornament,” David grinned wryly and replied, “Oh, yeah?”

The same month they were in LA recording the album, The Cars were on hand at the nationally televised Grammy Awards in case they won the Best New Artist category. “I was the one that wanted them to go to the Grammys,” Fred Lewis says, “although I think the Grammys are, to me, just ridiculous. But listen, then there’s business, and the label really thought, ‘Oh, the Grammys! You’ve got to go to the Grammys!’ And I said, ‘I want this record company really busting their hump. I want ’em really feeling like the band will do whatever they’d like them to do. They’re working their ass off. We have to show a little bit of respect. Sometimes, we’ve got to do certain things. I mean, it’s not like you’re selling your only child or something.’”

In a video of the show, John Denver roams into the audience, singing a cringeworthy medley of some of the year’s top hits. It’s peak-seventies schmaltz. As he sings Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are,” he sidles up to the row where The Cars are seated. David is on the aisle staring woodenly ahead as if willing Denver not to engage him. Ben is seated next to David, also staring ahead, until Denver does indeed turn to face them. “When John Denver is singing at [Ben], he’s trying to stifle a laugh,” Elliot says. Ben, seemingly unable to contain it, turns his head away toward the woman next to him. They are like schoolkids who were just caught making fun of their teacher. You can also see Greg at the edge of the frame. “That was really funny,” Elliot says of the Grammys. “And then, of course, who we were up against and who we lost to. We were nominated for Best New Artist of 1978, along with Chris Rea, Elvis Costello, Toto, and Taste of Honey. And all of those talented artists lost out to ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie.’ Nice record, nice girls, but never heard from again; Best New Band, Best New Artist.”iii

No Grammy, but as they say, it’s nice to be nominated.

The Cars were bona fide stars. Rapid and dramatic success was bound to change things at home a bit. Ben, who attracted women even when he was broke and playing dives around Boston, was the primary recipient of rock star–worthy attention. And it caused the beginning of the end with his beautiful and dedicated wife, who had supported him emotionally and financially. Reflecting back today, Kris Orr betrays no sense of bitterness.

“I think that once things were given to him on a silver platter, that’s when things were changing,” Kris says matter-of-factly. “It was all there. And it took me a long time to realize that is just so normal in that career.” When asked if it was the rock-star lifestyle in general, Kris replies, “At this point, I realized women were becoming an issue. And either I was very naive, or he cared a lot to keep me. . . . So that was the main one.”

The cracks had started to appear the prior year, between the February sessions for the first record and the time it was released. Kris explains, “I left WEA because Ben and I were having problems, and it was difficult to be there and to see everybody so excited. And I didn’t want [the personal problems] to affect it, so I thought, I just have to move on.” She was hired by Morris Levy, the mobbed-up music-biz vet, to work in marketing at the Strawberries record-store chain. “They were expanding like crazy and all these new stores, and I did all the advertising.” She remembers having the band come in to sign autographs, which was part of her push to get The Cars one of the limited eight-by-eight-foot promo spots on the wall and in

the windows of the stores. It was awkward as the couple was on the rocks, but their problems became more pronounced after the recording sessions for Candy-O.

From his earliest bands, Ben observed that being in a band was about making choices that might compromise domestic bliss. He chose being a musician and most of the side benefits that came with it. But he did not want to let go of Kris.

“Near the point of our separation, when I found out a few things, it was semi-devastating because whether it occurred years before that, I didn’t know what was true or not,” Kris recalls. “Whether situations did or did not happen. He would tell me very condensed versions of what was going on. But he said to me when we decided to separate, ‘Just give me five years.’ [Laughs.] It’s like, ‘Five years? What does that mean?’” They separated, and their divorce would be finalized in 1982.

When success started rearing its head, I had to make a decision. It was hard. This wasn’t a healthy place to be. But I knew I could fall back and get back on my feet. But you always have a piece of that person. And what always made me so sad was I listen to people who get divorced, and they are so angry at their significant other, and it’s so sad to listen to. I think to myself, “My god, how can you feel that way? How can you actually think that way? Because I mean, you really loved that person. It was part of your life, and you loved that life. Why are you being so negative about that person?” Granted, there are mixed emotions. You do go through some of that, but it’s a private process. That, to me, is something that you work with and deal with, and you move forward, and you find all the good in what you had because you only have one life. Why not enjoy it?

Footnotes

i They produced my own band in the early nineties and would spend hours telling us jaw-dropping stories, very often tales of wild seventies rock-and-roll excess, which we naturally lapped up as eager students.

ii The isolated drum track was on YouTube at the time this was written.

iii Taste of Honey did come back in 1982 with a cover of Smokey Robinson’s “I’ll Try Something New,” that just missed the Top 40.

Chapter 12

I LIKE THE NIGHTLIFE, BABY

WITH CANDY-O IN THE CAN AND SLATED FOR A SUMMER RELEASE, THE Cars went back East. While they had some downtime, Ric produced a track for Suicide. He had told the duo, Alan Vega and Martin Rev, that he wanted to produce a whole album, but they all decided to start with one song. It was an older piece called “Keep Your Dreams,” which evolved into “Dream Baby Dream,” one of their most beautiful songs.

Marty Thau, who managed the New York Dolls and had produced Suicide’s first record, set up the session with Ric. He was excited to tell Rev and Vega. “Marty came to me before we started,” Rev recalls. Apparently, the forever-cool Rev did not react with enough enthusiasm. “He said to me, ‘Rev,’ he said, ‘are you alive?’ He said, ‘Man, I told you Ric was going to produce this, and you hardly reacted.’ I said, ‘Man, come on.’ I said, ‘It’s fine.’ I said, ‘It’s all right. But I’m not going crazy over it. I’m not going crazy over a lot of stuff.’”

Asked about the possible tension of a hugely successful mainstream artist wanting to produce a determinedly avant-garde duo, Rev explains that he and Vega respected and trusted Ric to handle the role with sensitivity to their sound. They were open-minded to whatever ideas Ric had. He told them that what attracted him to the duo was that they were not simply music; they were art.

Rev says,

The Cars weren’t a studio-made band, right? So that made a difference. And when we were in the studio, Ric was the most intelligent, loosest, free-thinking, freewheeling guy around. He spent hours in studios, but a very astute musician, at least as far as rock and roll, pop music, the American culture idiom, that genre. And Ric loved production and studied it. Roy Thomas Baker was doing all their albums, and Ric would just soak that in. I mean, he really absorbed it. He really liked that approach to music production. He told me one time, “A hit song can be made, can be manufactured.” And I thought, “Okay, Ric.” They can be constructed because he knew what the radio would play and what they wouldn’t play, what the standards were for radio, and how much the whole thing had to do with the technical compression, how much to do. So the aesthetic he told me was, when people drive to work in the morning in their car, what’s going to get them to change the station? What’s going to get them to stay on the station the longest, so the ratings stay up?

The band had a modest budget, and Ric bought them a new Roland CR-70 Rhythm Machine, which Rev used instead of his more primitive beatboxes. Polished off in one day at the Right Track studio in New York, the edges of the swirling three-chord lullaby were filed down a bit, and a glockenspiel was added, sparkling up the high end. “On ‘Dream Baby Dream,’ I used their rhythm machine, I used their keyboard, and then I found a little kiddy-xylophone thing,” Rev recalls. It was their most accessible track to date, gorgeous by any measure. The repetition, for more than six minutes, adds a tantric, ecstatic quality.

The Cars members actively sought new music, heading to the Rat and elsewhere to hear new bands. They would pop into clubs while they had a night off on tour as well. They observed newer music infiltrating midwestern and southern cities, bringing a subculture with it, in Rat-like small clubs. David explained that The Cars contrasted with some artists who get wrapped up in their own thing and stop paying attention to trends in music and style. Their own success, though, allowed them even more freedom, time, and money to find out what was bubbling under the mainstream. When asked, “Do you ever play with those bands? Do you ever jam?” Ric sneered, “I don’t jam with anybody. I don’t even like the word ‘jam.’ Or the word ‘boogie.’ I hate the word ‘jam.’”

Along with the freedom came fame, which Ric enjoyed, but it had a downside. “It’s getting a little hairy, but it’s still fun,” he said.

People come up and talk to you; that’s fine. We like that. It just depends. There are all kinds of people who come up and talk to you. There’s the total slobbering drunk who just wants to hang on you because you’re there and acts like he’s known you for his whole life and just wants to be there next to you because all his friends are around. And then there’s the legitimate sort of fans who, for some reason, realize that you don’t have time to sort of sit down with everybody in the club and go over your whole career because most of the time, people want to talk to you about your whole career. And it is like being interviewed constantly. But Boston’s pretty good. I think we like it more than we don’t.

One of the bands that a few of The Cars went to check out while back in Boston was the Motels, who played at the Paradise. Marty Jourard was enlisted by his older brother Jeff to play keyboards and sax in that band, which Jeff had formed with Martha Davis, the songwriter, singer, and leader. Marty recalls that when The Cars came out, Jeff sat him down and played him the album two times in a row: side one, flip, side two, and repeat. Marty explains, “Jeff said, ‘I want you to join the band, but I have this idea for this band. Martha’s a great songwriter, and this is how I want to arrange the songs the way The Cars arrange their songs. They’ve got synth and guitar, and they fit together, and everything’s organized. There’s no jamming. It’s verse, chorus, bridge, and lead. It’s a very pop formula.’” Marty had never played synths before joining the band. Martha had a Polymoog that he started with. “We were trying to do stranger sounds and more interesting fresher sounds on synth and on guitar; Jeff had lots of tone, and he obviously listened to Elliot, who was just phenomenal.”

Touring on their first album in 1979, the Motels met The Cars at the Paradise. “The Cars showed up, two or three of ’em, in full concert dress. They did not show up in jeans. They were the biggest game in town in the US, hugely popular because their album had already been out. And there’s Elliot completely dressed like he’s about to go onstage.”

The Cars members were all still getting along well at this point, but things were evolving for sure. They were growing into a sort of brotherhood as they were becoming rock stars. Bill Flanagan, writing for Trouser Press, visited the band at David’s apartment and witnessed a group chemistry still very much intact. “The Cars have the same talent the Beatles had in Hard Day’s Night for picking up on each other’s thoughts and forming a Unified Group Persona.” Flanagan asked who the band sees when they peer out in the crowds. “Orr says: ‘Women, that’s who I see’ [in the audience], Robinson adds, ‘Funny, that’s who I see too,’ and Ocasek tosses in the punch line: ‘All I ever see are fat sweaty guys with tattoos.’”

Ben moved out of the house he and Kris shared in Woburn to a new apartment at 101–103 Tremont Avenue, Oak Square, in Boston’s Brighton neighborhood and started seeing a woman named Amy Sue Reichardt, an aspiring songwriter who called herself Amy LaTelevision. “I remember being out and about with him where women would just be going crazy over him,” says the band’s friend Anne Marie Foley. “He had a string of relationships after Kris.” There were times when Ben was in a three-way relationship with two women. Though the relationship with Reichardt lasted for a few years, those close to Ben used words like “bizarre” and “annoying” to describe her. “He wasn’t as social during those years,” Foley adds. Elliot recalls, “She was a real weird chick, man. I don’t know what her story was. He was writing with Amy LaTelevision. She was always sticking her nose in and trying to get involved in things.”

Candy-O was released in June, climbed to number 3 on the Top 200 by August, and sold more than a million copies in under two months, on its way to an eventual four million, astonishing sales during the 1979 energy crisis, which was leading to a multiyear economic recession. “Let’s Go” was released as a single in June. It is backed with the nonalbum track “That’s It,” a stutter-step showcase for Elliot’s guitar with an “Oh yeah” nod to the Beatles. The single reached 14 by the end of the summer.

America was ready for another Cars summer, whether critics were or not. There was still a lingering sense of This is so good, but is it cool to like these guys? handwringing among the reviewers. Was it too contrived? It was as if some critics could not trust themselves to know if they were being manipulated by something so well packaged. Do the lyrics mean anything? Do they have to? Did the album represent an adventurous departure or a dull repetition of a formula? A sampling of reviews demonstrates conflicting opinions. In a two-page leadoff review in Rolling Stone (teased on the cover as “The Cars New Album Stalls”), Tom Carson somehow arrived at multiple contradictory judgments in an equivocating assessment that concludes, “I don’t dislike Candy-O—after all, it sounds better than practically anything else on the radio—and I still like the Cars. They’re a good band. Their virtue is they’re never anything less than that. Their limitation is they’ve yet to prove they’re anything more.”

But Robert Christgau summed it up nicely in the Village Voice: “Only listeners who demand meaning in all things will find this useless. Cold and thin, shiny and hypnotic, it’s what they do best—rock and roll that is definitively pop without a hint of cuteness. Which means that for them ‘alienation is the craze’ may be a meaningful statement after all.”

Mike Howell had been one of the first local journalists to write about The Cars, beginning with an article in Sweet Potato. He was soon writing for the Phoenix and national publications but felt compelled to stop covering The Cars, as he had become close with Greg and Elaine. He observes that Ric’s lyrics were “clever, weird shit. ‘Psilocybin pony,’ what does this mean? I guess it means at some point, Ric had some psilocybin around, and he had a pad of paper. And I think, in a lot of ways, the eighties rewarded that. I think the sixties were all about earnest commitment. I think the seventies was all about, ‘Okay, it failed. What do we do now? We’re going to amuse ourselves.’ I think the importance of the meaning of the lyrics diminished tremendously.”

In his profile on the band for Trouser Press, Bill Flanagan wrote about “Let’s Go”: “The song has all the chrome pop-rock sound we associate with the Cars, but something more. There is a depth to the recording—a feeling of texture—that was absent from the sometimes brittle sound of the first album. The synthesizer hook and robot guitar are pure Cars all the way, but there is an L.A. twang reminiscent of Tom Petty, and hand claps and a ‘Let’s Go’ shout that can only recall the Ramones. It’s an unholy marriage, but one that somehow works.”

Steve Morse at the hometown Boston Globe believed that the album “proves that last year’s startling debut was no fluke.” As with a few other reviewers, he perceived some influence of the Doors on the new record, given its at-times dark tone. Morse detected a theme on the album, “the frustration of feeling close to anyone or anything.” In a conversation with Ric, the singer told Morse that he was approached by a fan in a hotel lobby in Denver who said, “You know what you ought to write a song about? Whipped cream and ropes.” Ric observed, “She was only 16. So yeah, I do think people seem to be that frustrated all the time. Nobody seems to be on Cloud 84, you know?”

The band paid attention to the reviews to some extent but didn’t let them build them up any more than break them down. A Creem profile caught up with the band in a motel room. “Ric Ocasek was busy perusing a somewhat derogatory Cars review. ‘I knew I should’ve jerked that guy off,’ he said to no one in particular.”

The band launched the record release with a secret show on June 8, 1979, at the Orpheum Theater in Boston, with a capacity of around twenty-five hundred. They had been rehearsing for a week at the venue in preparation for their tour, which would begin in Canada and included a sellout of the sixteen-thousand-plus Maple Leaf Garden in Toronto. An impromptu decision was made to have a dress rehearsal in front of about a thousand invited guests with only forty-eight hours’ notice. A crew from Midnight Special was present. Word leaked out, but fans who called the Orpheum were told the band was not playing. Morse wrote that the performance was “superb.” Describing the harmonies between Ric and Ben, Morse went so far as to conclude, “There really were moments last night when you felt in the presence of a Lennon and McCartney, such was the duo’s brilliance together.” Of the presentation, Morse noted, “The Cars low-keyed it all the way. Lighting effects were minimal and guitarist Elliot Easton, who is emerging as a major force, was less flamboyant than he has been.”

Elliot had really been the most dynamic presence onstage during the 1978 shows, moving to the lip of the stage while taking solos, showing some emotion, and then retreating back out of the spotlight when he was done. But there were signs of an emerging tension between Ric and Elliot, the oldest and youngest members of the band, respectively. Elliot felt like Ric was a big-brother figure, and as we know, that comes with the bad and the good. Ric felt Elliot was a little too much of a showboat and needed to be taken down a peg.

“The only person anybody had any problems with was poor Elliot, because Elliot had never been the center of attention before,” Maxanne Sartori says. “And all of a sudden, he was up there in the spotlight.”

Speaking with the illustrious Andrew Loog Oldham in 2021, Elliot offered the time-tested description of the life of a musician on the road: “I play for free, and I get paid for the other twenty-two hours. People don’t understand the road. It’s the little things, a different pillow on your neck every night. Weird food. The little things that take you out of your comfort zone can be so challenging.”

Oldham replied, “You’ve got to keep yourself entertained in those twenty-two hours.”

“That’s the trouble part,” Elliot quipped.

At times, the challenges went far beyond missing the creature comforts. At a show in El Paso on September 11, The Cars had to “dodge the continuous spitting at them” by a significant number of late-coming wannabe punks, read an account in the Prospect newspaper. It described Elliot getting enraged and fighting back, almost landing a kick, but ended up being contained as a volley of “verbal and hand obscenities.” But aside from the Neanderthals in the front, The Cars were well received. Ruben Villegas concluded his review: “Despite the audience’s spitting, paper cup throwing, and muttered obscenities, The Cars presented an excellent New Wave Concert.”

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .

You can observe how young (twenty-five or twenty-six at the time) and spirited Elliot, in particular, was in the home-video clips from early tours that accompany The Cars Unlocked: The Live Performances DVD (2006). Some of the clips from backstage and hotel rooms show rock-star ennui battled with stoner humor, not to mention a few Spinal Tap–worthy high jinks. “I was just a young, crazy kid, not very grounded,” Elliot admitted.

Off the road, he was alone and would get depressed. He was the only one in the band not married or with a girlfriend, so there was no one to share his excitement with. He thought making a record would solve all his problems. “It was a very hard thing for a twenty-something-year-old to absorb all the success,” he says. “It should have been the happiest time in my life, and it was some of the saddest, loneliest, and worst times in my life.” Success only put those downbeat feelings in stark relief and made him feel guilty, in part because his family didn’t understand. “Your parents don’t ever really get it,” he says. “I’d call home just to have a taste of home, and my dad would get on and go, and, you know how it is, all of a sudden, he’s a rock expert. ‘Hey, is that Freddie Mercury really a fag?’ And I’m like, ‘Jesus Christ, I just want to talk to my dad.’ That kind of stuff. He couldn’t believe that I could have a bad day. But it didn’t fix everything.”

When asked if passions flared on the road, Greg says, “Elliot could be temperamental, and he would get mad and frustrated sometimes. I mean, he’s the only guy in the band I ever saw throw a glass through a window, for instance.”

“Elliot had his dark side even back in the beginning,” Elaine Hawkes observes. “I just sort of remember him once being so mad that he was holding a drinking glass, and he crushed it in his hand. He’s very sensitive and easily hurt. And when he is hurt, you don’t see someone who looks hurt. You see someone who looks really mad. He has that large amount of inner hurt that easily comes out, I think.”

Elliot got Ric particularly annoyed that year when, in an interview with International Musician and Recording World magazine, he casually remarked that when he had first seen Richard and the Rabbits at the skating rink years back, the lead-guitarist spot was held by “a guy who played a lot like [John] McLaughlin. He played a lot of fast runs and stuff—wherever he could fit ’em in. I knew I could fit in better but I had to wait.” This was a reference to Fuzzbee Morse, who had stayed friends with Ric, Ben, and Greg, and it really irked Ric and the others. A few sentences later, Elliot described the Ocasek-Orr acoustic duo as doing the same material as Richard and the Rabbits, “only without the tasteless guitar.”

It stung Fuzzbee. “Elliot made some snarky comment about me in a musician magazine,” Fuzzbee says.

And it really upset the three guys, Ben and Greg and Ric, Greg being the kind of guy who never even wanted to mention it, but it horrified him. Those guys just looked at me as their friend who they’d been in the trenches with. Ben and Ric both called me. I mean, I’m friends with Elliot, and he’s an excellent guitarist and all that, but they didn’t appreciate him trashing me even a little bit, like, “Just be more gracious that you are doing this.” [Ric] was closest to Greg musically. He trusted Greg the most to come up with parts and stuff. But there was something with Elliot that always kind of rubbed Ric a little wrong. It was easy to see.

Today, Elliot says he does not remember this particular incident, but when he hears his quote, he replies that he was not slagging Fuzzbee.

Only that he seemed to me to be coming from a more fusion-y place and that these were great pop songs and I felt that I possibly better knew what these songs needed. It was just my impression from seeing them for the first time. But I never put him down as a player or anything like that! But history has proven that it wasn’t the winning combination of people. I didn’t really mean it as a put-down of Fuzzbee. He’s a fine musician and a great person. It was just when I went and saw them, I just felt like when I was listening to Ric’s songs that night that I knew that I could play to them, and I was hearing something different from Fuzzbee, and I thought to myself, “I would approach it differently.”

The tour, with Nick Gilder opening, lasted four months, from June through October, with additional dates in November and December. It was a headlining tour of mostly venues with capacities between thirty-five hundred and fifteen thousand, though they did join some big package shows, including one with the Beach Boys at the Yale Bowl in New Haven. Eddie Money and Flo & Eddie were also part of the show, billed as Sunfest ’79. They played for thirty thousand at the Rockford, Illinois, Speedway on August 11, with REO Speedwagon headlining a bill rounded out by Head East, Ian Hunter, and the Rockets. Other big shows included opening for the Doobie Brothers the following week and a bill at Cleveland Stadium topped by Fleetwood Mac. Whenever Ben would play in his hometown, he would arrange for guest passes for his friends and family and even provide limos for them.

Except for minor variations, The Cars went out and played the songs as they were arranged, with the same antishowbiz presentation as the first tour. The band liked introducing yet-to-be-recorded songs on tour as they had with “Night Spots” in ’78. “It makes the record company go bananas,” said Ric.

In July, Ric and David gave an extensive freewheeling interview to American Top 40. The unedited raw recording is revealing of a band adjusting to overnight fame. As he would say in multiple interviews, Ric emphasized how the support of Maxanne Sartori at WBCN and deejays at other local stations was instrumental to their success. “Boston right now is pretty exciting for a music city, as exciting as New York or San Francisco or LA,” he said. And he implored other radio stations around the country to do the same. “I think it would inspire a lot of new bands and a lot of new kinds of music. . . . I just think it would be exciting if we could get some local bands, get some bands off the street, see what’s really going on in music and not what the record companies are reacting to.”

He would put his money where his mouth was, producing other acts and trying to bring attention to edgier new music. But his largesse apparently did not extend to at least one erstwhile bandmate. Ron Riddle, from Richard and the Rabbits, caught up with The Cars at one of their early big shows in Boston. “I remember reaching out to him a couple of times, not much, but I was kind of disappointed with him,” Riddle says.

I went to one show, and he didn’t even acknowledge that I was there. I was there with my girlfriend, Judy, who he knew, and she used to be at all the shows. And it was just so weird to see them. I mean, particularly him; he was very sort of shut down. We were, without a doubt, dirt poor at that point. Richard and the Rabbits, we were so dirt poor, all of us, certainly Ric as well. I remember one time when he was living in Cambridge, and we were near Harvard Square, and there was a stereo shop there. We were scheming about going in and stealing a four-track tape recorder so we could do all these demos. We never did that, but it was definitely a plan that we were musing about.

Riddle says that he and Greg remained close friends. “And even though we weren’t really working together then, our relationship’s basically based on humor and the same way with Fuzzbee.” He adds, “Ben was a sweetheart.” So, it was acutely upsetting to Riddle to find that Ric was ignoring him. But it likely was just another example of Ric boxing up his past—wives, kids, and bands—and moving on. He was an expert at compartmentalizing. “He really was very protective about not being involved with anything that had to do with Milkwood or Richard and the Rabbits,” Riddle says. “When The Cars hit, it was like they were supposed to come from another planet or out of nowhere. So, there was no history. It was a little disturbing to me because I’ve always been a musician who likes to help other musicians. I just thought, ‘Dude, you’re in a position now where you can actually help people and give somebody who you’ve been working with a hand up, which I would love to do.’ And that kind of hurt, really.” And while Ben and Greg at least treated him like the old friend and bandmate he was, “I could tell that fame was affecting them, that they were becoming almost caricatures of themselves in a way. It was a mask.” Eventually, Riddle had great success playing with Happy the Man and Blue Öyster Cult, among other bands and projects.

In contrast, in 1979 local artist Robin Lane extolled Ric’s support of local musicians. “When he comes to the Rat, he’s like a professor. . . . He’s so helpful and informative and happy to be listening to the music. And I really feel it’s sincere. And I think he’s just so relieved to have made it.” In the same article by Bill Flanagan, Ben said, “Old friends come up with the cliché, ‘Now that you’ve made it, you don’t talk to me.’” Ric agreed, saying, “They’ve changed more than we have.” David also agreed, saying he still went to the Rat frequently. “Nothing’s really changed except that some people down there act different.”

As they crossed the country, Candy-O rose up the charts, remaining on the Billboard Top 200 for sixty-two weeks. But the band felt they were kept out of the number 1 spot by another “new-wave” band. The Knack was another group that included veteran musicians who had been banging around in other permutations with mediocre results until their debut album, Get the Knack, skyrocketed out of nowhere and brought them to number 1 on the wings of the single “My Sharona.” The Knack particularly annoyed Ric, who was irked that Candy-O stalled at number 3 on Billboard while these upstarts from LA hung on for five weeks in the top slot.

One day, the band thought it would be funny to place a life-size promo cardboard cutout of the Knack in Ric’s hotel bed. Elliot recalls, “We were at a record-store signing and got the local promo guy to slip it into his trunk, then conned the housekeeper into letting us into his room and tucking the Knack into his bed with just the heads sticking out.”

The band members would sarcastically whisper “Get the Knack” as a conspiratorial greeting when they would pass each other on the tour. Though the Knack made a big splash that summer, they were on the charts for less time than The Cars, and their two subsequent albums resulted in severely diminishing returns, the proverbial flash in the pan.

Before becoming a New Yorker writer and best-selling author of The Orchard Thief, Susan Orlean spent some time as a journalist in Portland, Oregon, and profiled The Cars and Candy-O for the Willamette Week alternative weekly paper. In the piece, she quoted Elliot as describing the music of The Cars: “A calculated combination of Coliseum rock and punk rock, designed to steal away children’s money. We fed various types of music into a computer. It told us to be the Cars.” While Elliot’s sarcasm contained some truth for Orlean, she surmised that the “shrewd” band was “only marginally distinct from a lot of coliseum rock’s bluster; in marketing, it’s a middle-brow retread of punk. Yet, probably owing to Ocasek’s talent as a synthesizer of so many alien forms, the Cars sound undeniably fresh.”

Most of the reviews of The Cars’ tour were positive, though it would be hard to find any that were glowing. Most mentioned the “calm detachment,” as a review in the Baltimore Sun read. But the critics found the music compelling enough to sustain interest.

The Cars capped off the summer on August 24 with a show at the Wollman Rink in New York’s Central Park, sponsored by Dr. Pepper and the city itself. It was a hot and humid day, with a rainstorm that passed through, leaving just in time for the opening set by the Records to begin. The rain started up again, but the band plowed through thirteen of their songs in just under an hour before an encore. Nelson George, who would soon become an accomplished author, reviewed the Central Park show for Billboard. He noted that The Cars, “who have emerged as an influential band . . . displayed the skills that have made them so popular so quickly.” In a largely enthusiastic report, George made particular mention of Ben and David: “Robinson and Orr are one of the most subtle rhythm sections in popular music. They are extremely adept at falling into the type of smooth groove that eludes most rock bands.”

Right after the show, as the band slid into a limo, a crowd descended upon them like Beatlemania, which was highly unusual for Cars fans. “But the next thing I knew,” Elliot said, “the crowd was clawing at the windows . . . pushing closer and closer until the roof caved in. We’re lucky we made it out of there alive.”

They got a short respite at home, which was a mixed blessing for the wives of the married guys. The separation was tough enough, but the reentry also took some adjustments. “I feel like I’m intruding on her life,” Greg told the Rocky Mountain News about feeling like an imposition on Elaine when he was suddenly around for stretches at a time.

“I didn’t want to, the whole idea of having my whole identity being a rock wife, really,” recalls Elaine today. “I’d go to the shows, and I’d just be like, you’d see this little group of women come out of the backstage with their high heels, tottering. And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to be one of those women.’ I just didn’t. And it’s funny, I remember years later telling Kris Geils [wife of Jay Geils] that, and she’s like, ‘That’s not the wives. That’s the groupies!’”

Elaine went back to school, getting a master’s degree in art therapy. “I wrote my thesis on the effects of the husband’s routine absence on women. There were no research materials that were directly applicable. I think there was one article, like ‘Wives of Rock and Roll.’ It’s one of those tell-alls, but that wasn’t really what I was looking for. But there were a number of articles written on the effects of deployment on nuclear submarine personnel,” she says, which makes me laugh because I used to compare my own experiences touring on a bus to being on the submarine in Das Boot. “So I made a little support group with Suzanne. And I interviewed Kris Geils.” She also interviewed the wife of someone from Cheap Trick (she forgets who) and Kris Orr. “We’d talk about our feelings about our husbands going away and also our feelings about them coming back. Because generally, by the time they come back, you’ve pretty much got your individual routine down. And then the husbands sweep back in, and it’s like, you’re glad they’re back, but your routine’s disrupted again. And then they leave again.”

Soon enough, they were back out on the West Coast. Writer Steve Pond of Rolling Stone caught them on Ben’s birthday, September 8, in San Diego. Greg and Elliot bought tapes for Ben—the Beatles, Kraftwerk, Beach Boys, and Brian Eno—at a Tower Records store across from the Sports Arena where they would play that evening. While in line at the cash register, the two went unrecognized by two teenage girls next to them, buying a copy of Candy-O. Pond surmised that only Ric was “easily recognizable,” and the rest, even Ben, were “nearly anonymous.” Elliot had led a rendition of “Happy Birthday” during sound check, so Ben warned his bandmates not to mention his birthday onstage that night.

They headlined three shows at the five-thousand-seat Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles on September 4, 5, and 6. Reviewing one of the shows, Cindy Jourdan was prescient in predicting, “The group’s dark, confusing lyrics, haunting beat, and restrained apathetic demeanor make this perhaps the perfect rock band for the ’80s, reflecting the coming decade’s restless mood.”

Suicide opened, their first time performing in LA, and they were greeted with even more hostility than they had been at the Paradise in Boston—like “two roaches out of New York City,” as singer Alan Vega described his duo, booed before they’d even played a note. Unshrinking, Vega informed the crowd, “You suck, just like your Dodgers,” which did little to win over the audience. Ric said, “Everybody gets violently angry at Suicide, which is the reaction they intend to get.”

When asked now if the duo expected to either convert or antagonize Cars fans, Rev says, “No, it never entered my mind to win them over; though it never entered my mind to be provocative. Usually, in gigs, it entered my mind that what I saw and heard and felt was what the provocation responded to. That’s when it entered my mind. And then I continued doing what I was doing with even more gusto, and so did Alan. What else are you going to do? And it’s great because it’s incredible energy when you’ve got thousands of people hating it.”

Rev and Vega knew they were out of their element and had little hope of gaining new fans. Still, they were in the moment, enjoying the experience, however challenging it was. “When the bands finished, you had people come for The Cars, and they had catering,” Rev recalls. “And I remember the people coming in, I mean, the women that came in were like all models. It was another echelon, totally, than the funky, scrubby, dirty guys that we were. And it was all pleasant. But I think I split pretty soon because it was just ‘grab something and eat and go; this is not my world.’”

Before the first show, the promoters warned the bands that Bob Hope’s house was so close, and he was so powerful, that he had gotten the venue to agree to a decibel limit and a ban on performers audibly swearing from the stage. Suicide did not abide. “Bob Hope, who lived not far, maybe a mile or two, called in after that show or the next day,” Rev says. “He said, ‘That group was way too loud,’ which was us. So we’ve got to turn down. Marty Thau was doing the sound then, and Marty’s not one to really be too easy on himself or anyone else to just tone it all down. I mean, he had an axe to grind, too. He was a New York kid, too, from rock and roll days. So I don’t know if we turned it down at all.”

The venue officials demanded the duo be dropped from the bill for “alleged obscenity,” according to Billboard. The band and Fred Lewis refused. “The people are booing and throwing stuff,” Lewis recalls. “I fought with the promoters all night long. I’m talking about, we were up all night long, going back and forth: ‘Well, we’re going to kick you off the bill.’ ‘Well, then kick us off the bill. We can go somewhere else. We’ll find another gig.’ And we went around and around. Finally, they said, ‘Okay.’ And Suicide played again. They were . . . talk about ahead of their time.” Vega thought so. He muttered from the stage that “in six months you’ll love us.”

Suicide was also one of The Cars’ guests when they appeared on Midnight Special for the second time, but they hosted this episode, which aired on September 28. It was just in time for the release of “It’s All I Can Do” as the album’s second single, which would just miss the Billboard Top 40, stalling at 41, though it hit 40 in Cash Box. The Cars had declined invitations to appear on the national television shows American Bandstand and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert because they were too mainstream, and the band thought Midnight Special was particularly corny, especially the show’s presenter, Wolfman Jack, so they initially declined the invitation. But after the show asked again, the band made certain demands they thought the producers wouldn’t go for, such as having full control for curating all the acts for their episode. But, to their surprise, the show agreed to the conditions. In addition to Suicide, the show would feature live performances from the Records and promo videos from Lene Lovich, Iggy Pop, and M (“Pop Muzik”).

The Cars performed five Candy-O songs plus “Moving in Stereo” on the program. One of the demands that they made was that they didn’t want to appear with Wolfman Jack on camera. It was a tradition for the Wolfman to stand aside a lead singer while they both made a wolf call before going into a commercial. Elliot says theirs was “the only episode of the show that had absolutely no talking.” Instead, the bands were announced only with graphic titles. “It’s the only Midnight Special that you’ll ever see that doesn’t have Wolfman Jack howling.”

There was another issue that arose during the shoot, forgotten over time, but one that was a pivotal stressor between them and their manager, Fred Lewis. Elliot says, “We’re onstage, and there was an important decision that needed to be made with our manager. And Fred was on Melrose Avenue buying cowboy boots. We’re all like, ‘Jesus Christ, man, we need our manager right now. The director’s standing here, he needs an answer, blah, blah, blah.’ And the guy’s out shopping. So it wasn’t too long after that that we started thinking about getting another manager.”

With the exceedingly ambitious Ric spearheading, they already felt like they had outgrown Lewis’s capacity to handle their rapid success. Ric had finally gotten his foot in the door of fame and fortune, and the band had capitalized in an enormous way in under two years. He wanted a big-time manager who could not only handle The Cars but guide them to even greater heights. The “Fred Lewis Organization” was just Fred. His wife, Maria, an artist, helped out with fan-club stuff, but not much else. They would hold business meetings out at Fred’s house in Carlisle. Ric would speak up as the leader. “Ben would go straight for the King Kong bourbon,” Lewis said. Ben would barely say a word during any meetings. He just didn’t care about anything other than making music.

“Fred was enthusiastic at first, and we needed a manager,” Elliot says. “But the band got so big so fast, and he was still dealing from a grassroots level and didn’t even have a secretary. There was nobody to answer the phones. We were getting offers from all over the world, and nobody could get ahold of us.”

Their booking agent, Dan Weiner, says, “The years I was with them, I would call, and I’d either get him or an answering machine, not an answering service, but an answering machine. And it got to the point where because it was a big business—The Cars were big—I said, ‘Fred, even if it’s cosmetic, you’ve got to get someone to answer the phone. This is embarrassing. You’re going to lose the band.’”

Fred did hire Amy Rosen (now Tierce), who had worked at WBCN. She had dropped out of high school at sixteen and volunteered on the WBCN Listener Line. She was there for about two years before they referred her to Lewis. “I think I had been hired to try to provide some sense of an organization,” she says. “So now I was the minion who would run around, bring stacks of records to be autographed for WBCN to raffle off, and run people to places.”

Tierce was thrown right into the fire as The Cars played three nights in October 1979 at the Boston Music Hall, the place where they had gotten their big break opening for Bob Seger two years before. It was a big week in the city as the pope was making a tour stop. People who attended the show talked about how they saw the pope and then went to see The Cars. Reviewing the shows for the Boston Globe, Steve Morse pointed out the wisdom in playing multiple nights in a theater setting rather than one night in the large Boston Garden for a band whose “particular style—their reliance on precision and understatement—is not well-suited to cavernous arenas.” Straining to remain positive, Morse wrote, “They don’t pretend to be electrifying on stage, hence they don’t project as well as some supergroups. But for a pure listening experience, there aren’t many bands that demand more by way of deep concentration from their audience. . . . The Cars delivered a flawlessly workmanlike set.”

Sam Kooper and his mobile Starfleet studio recorded the shows. Says Tierce, “It was all just VIPs invited, three nights of me running through, going, ‘He’s in!’ People were just calling constantly and handing me names, and I’m just making sure it’s not total chaos. So that sort of gave me some context because there was no organization.” Tierce says that Lewis was not keeping good records. “Everything was in his head,” she explains.

When asked if he felt he was rising to meet the challenge of running a huge band, Lewis says, “I tried. I hired Amy, and then I was going to expand, but then everything started blowing up.”

“He didn’t know how to work with someone,” Tierce explains. “It was hard for him. And I’ve learned later since I’ve grown up and after I hired my first assistant, it could be very hard to let somebody in. It’s weird when you’re working in someone’s house, and I was in an office downstairs, and he was upstairs,” Tierce says.

It seems unlikely that Lewis would have expanded fast enough to suit the band. But it probably wouldn’t have mattered. The Cars had decided they needed major-league management, and Lewis was in the minors in their estimation. Lewis felt that if it had not been for his preparation, the whole operation “could have collapsed asunder.” He says,

All I know is that the gigs went well, the tours. There were no real problems. I had a good rapport with Elektra. That was one of the reasons I wanted to be there [in the Elektra offices]; they were an extension of what I was doing. It was almost like my office. I was keeping up. I was always ahead of it. “What’s next? What are we going to do in four weeks from now? What are we doing three months from now? And in order to be three months from now, you got to have the next four weeks set up.” Whether I did a great job or not, that’s for other people to say. I tried my best. I knew the band. I had that feel for what was happening. I think when you have a feel for what’s going on, you get on a roll, and things work out.

David says that Lewis seemed like he was actually more like six months behind. “He was fine, but we left him in the dust, really.”

Lewis continues, “Things always work out, and this is what was happening up until, for me, the day we had that meeting, and they said, ‘We want to get another manager.’”

The manager who had prided himself on planning in advance and having a feel for what was happening was admittedly caught on his back foot “when everything started blowing up.” Lewis says he felt ambushed when the band announced their decision to him in a meeting with their booking agents present. The agenda was to discuss tour preparations. “It came out of nowhere. It was like an explosion. That was just like a bombshell for me. Maybe somebody else might’ve sniffed it out.” It became obvious to him that they had been planning this for a while. “I feel as though I was betrayed,” he says. “I think Ric was the guy. He was the main guy I had constant contact with. I was on the phone with him all the time.”

Ric had developed a shrewd approach to business that fitted with his onstage demeanor of an icy leather-clad, gum-chewing praying mantis in black shades. “Ric was always the more business oriented of the band,” says Greg. “He could have been a manager himself if he hadn’t been a musician. When we played in LA, the guys from Elektra came to the band and said, ‘Oh, we’ve been trying to get in touch with your manager, but he won’t return our calls.’ And we’re going, ‘Oh, what the fuck?’ And Ric had that sort of expansionist, ‘want to take it to the next level’ kind of thing.”

In a conversation with Elliot, Andrew Loog Oldham, who was instrumental in building the career of the Rolling Stones, among other acts, pointed out that “every good manager has to have a shade of degeneracy” because if artists “haven’t got a killer in the group, they better get one outside or they’re fucked.” Ric was that “killer in the group.” And like Mick Jagger, he had learned the business well after being burned in the past. But he wanted one outside the group to handle the dirty work or, short of that, at least a manager with a receptionist to answer the phones.

It would be hard to imagine the Fred Lewis of today ever being a go-for-the-throat manager. In his mind, he was like a big brother to the band. “My wife was bringing them food when they had nothing. Back in the beginning, they had nothing. They were hand-to-mouth. I just felt like I put my heart and soul into it, which I’m sure lots of people say these things, but believe me, I did. And I tried to do everything so that they would slowly but surely get it all together and then be a band that was going to be around ten, fifteen years later.”

He may have lacked the killer instinct, but he was determined to get what he felt was rightfully his. He told The Cars he would see them in court.

Chapter 13

PANORAMA

“CARS SPLIT WITH MANAGER,” READ THE HEADLINE IN THE BOSTON GLOBE on January 29, 1980. “Both parties confirm that their dispute—which is of a personal nature and has been brewing for some time—is currently in litigation because [Fred] Lewis is seeking a financial settlement.”

Steve Berkowitz took over the day-to-day operations while the band transitioned to new management. “Fred’s popularity with the guys sunk, and I don’t have anything against Fred, but he was not very good at delegating or not realizing that he didn’t know certain parts. For most of the Candy-O record, I was basically doing the management services,” Berkowitz says. “I was out on the road, and the band was big. And then, for a short period of time, I had to fire some crew members. So I was the manager, I was the tour manager, and for part of it, I was stage-left roadie as well. That was the thinnest I’ve ever been. I didn’t do drugs, so if I was tired, I was tired. I would just keep working.” Berkowitz says that Ric asked him to become their actual manager, but Berkowitz knew he was underqualified. He had watched Lewis get the axe because the band felt he was in over his head.

The Cars met with three big-time managers to be considered: Irving Azoff, Shep Gordon, and Elliot Roberts. First up was Azoff, who had gotten his start managing REO Speedwagon and Dan Fogelberg before joining Geffen-Roberts (David Geffen and Elliot Roberts’s management company), managing the Eagles, and, in 1974, heading out on his own. David recalls, “Well, for us, his big turnoff—we could have just got up and left after he said this—he goes, ‘I make lots of money for my acts. The budget for drugs for the new Eagles album alone was $150,000.’ So we’re looking at each other, like, a manager lets them waste $150,000, and he’s bragging about it?”

Next up was Gordon, whose clients included Alice Cooper, Anne Murray, Blondie, Teddy Pendergrass, and myriad others. He brought The Cars into his office and, presenting them with an Alice Cooper comic book, dramatically turned to the band and said, “This is what I could do for you.” They did not click with Gordon.

Elliot Roberts had started Asylum Records with David Geffen. The label merged with Elektra, and after splitting with Geffen, Roberts started Lookout Management, partnering with Tom Petty’s manager, Tony Dimitriades. Roberts was trying to broaden the agency beyond its California-focused roster and usher it into the eighties.

“When we got to Elliot’s office, he was just in jeans and cowboy boots with his feet up on a desk smoking a big fat joint,” Elliot Easton laughs. Neil Young had spray-painted RUST NEVER SLEEPS on the wall. Easton, a student of rock history, was also impressed that the building was the old offices of the Monterey Pop Festival. “So we just felt comfortable with him. And I mean, he had Neil and Joni [Mitchell], and his partner, Tony Dimitriades, had Tom Petty, and that was cool to us. Later, Elliot had Dylan. He was like a combination of Gene Wilder and Woody Allen. Very funny guy, very witty. And the other guys were cool too, but we just kind of clicked with him.” They had hired Roberts before the Globe piece ran on January 29. Roberts would never have a written agreement with the band.

Steve Berkowitz became an employee of Lookout Management, based in Boston. He considered it his “graduate school.” A big part of that education was participating in the arbitration with Fred Lewis, which would drag on through the following summer of 1980. A retired judge served as the arbitrator as the two sides wrangled in a conference room in New York.

The Cars brought their lawyers. Ric had interviewed three premier entertainment lawyers after the first record had come out. “I bought the record and played it ten times in a row,” says Peter Thall, who was hired by Ric. Thall had been introduced to The Cars by their colorful business manager, Bert Padell, known as the “Accountant to the Stars.” Thall won over Ric by taking the opposite tack of the other lawyers, who emphasized how much money they could make by putting together deals to sell Ric’s publishing. Thall advised all his clients to hold on to their potentially valuable publishing rights—the copyrights. He would also renegotiate the band’s contract with Elektra multiple times as they continued to hit new heights. Thall was called on to help the band disentangle themselves from Fred. Thall hired a former US attorney as the band’s litigator.

Lewis had what he described as a standard management contract. “I made sure Ric had his whole publishing; I didn’t control that or take any stuff like that. I didn’t want to be one of those kinds of people.” Working on percentage commissions, there could be a conflict of interest for managers to encourage a lucrative deal to sell an artist’s publishing, getting a commission on the often large amount. “I wanted to be somebody that treated the band great, and that’s what I tried to do. Maybe suddenly they got upset because I’ve had a seven-year contract. And I feel like, ‘Well, why now? Suddenly, it’s not a good arrangement?’ It was great for the first two albums, but now suddenly it’s ‘Fred’s not equipped.’ It was not a friendly time period during the court case.”

Indeed, it got ugly. “I don’t even think I was there for a year when the band froze Fred’s assets and legal stuff started,” says Fred’s assistant, Tierce. She had been told that Fred had negotiated one of the biggest record deals ever for an unknown band. Her recordkeeping in the short period she was with Lewis greatly helped his case. But she says the other side characterized her as a young groupie after she gave a deposition, implying she was in it only to be close to rock stars. “Apparently, in court, as one would expect from the era and just the misogyny of the industry, I was just an incompetent groupie,” she says. “They were trying to disparage me.”

The band claimed that Lewis had misrepresented himself when he described his experience with the J. Geils Band, giving them the impression that he was Geils’s general manager, not simply a road manager. They challenged the idea that Fred was crucial to getting signed to Elektra. Ric and The Cars’ attorney called Kris Orr. “They wanted me to talk about what I did to help get the tapes to the labels,” she says. “And it was uncomfortable.”

Ric told Steve Morse of the Boston Globe in 1980, “It comes with success. As soon as something happens and you become successful, everybody wants to take credit for it.” He referred to Lewis as “the leech factor” in an interview with Hit Parader.

Ric Aliberti, who had worked alongside Lewis at WEA and helped Maxanne Sartori break Queen while working in promo at Elektra (commencing a long and illustrious career in the music business), was called to give a deposition as a character witness. “Freddie worked it really, really hard. And when The Cars attacked him—it was basically Ocasek—he won. He had a lot of good character witnesses, and I testified. He was at the radio station. He was up everybody’s ass. He worked really, really hard. But once Ocasek started getting famous—he had the rat-bastard gene—all he cared about was his success and his ego, and all he cared about was Ric. It was clearly right and wrong. Ben, though, was always a sweetheart, always a sweetheart. He was fucking awesome. That’s maybe why they were so successful; because they were just so fucking different personalities.”

Lewis’s attorney, Jerry Margolis, called the band’s booking agent, Dan Weiner. The two were friends. Weiner recalls, “He said, ‘I may want to depose you.’ I said, ‘Look, I’ve got to tell you something: You don’t want to depose me.’” Weiner would have to be honest about Lewis’s shortcomings as a manager. “He said, ‘Fair enough. But if you agree to be deposed by the other side, you have to agree to be deposed by our side.’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ That was the last conversation about The Cars I ever had.” Elliot Roberts told Weiner that if he wanted to stay on as their agent, he would have to reduce his commission, which he was unwilling to do, thus ending his time as their agent.

Lewis felt confident that he would get what he was due contractually. “I felt that, well, let’s let a judge decide if I did it right or not. I did win my case,” he says.

Thall says that the initial settlement was a surprise. “He got an award that was shocking. Fred Lewis got an award that was completely irresponsible and inconsistent with the whole case. It was idiotic on its face. So we went back, and we sought a clarification, and then he clarified it.” The arbitrator did not stipulate that a delay in payment to Lewis would result in interest or other penalties. “We could litigate forever, and it wouldn’t cost anything, basically,” Thall explains. “It was a really bad move on their part.” So, the two sides agreed to a settlement in lieu of dragging it on. Lewis got a lump settlement. “I think Fred did fine. I think The Cars did better, but Fred did fine,” Thall concludes.

Tierce recalls that Lewis got his percentage for what he had negotiated for the initial record deal and other revenue generated while under his term.

“I recall that since he was there for the first record, he would continue to get his, I think, 15 percent of the first album,” Greg reports. “But I sort of remember that he wouldn’t from the second album on.”

“Getting loose from Fred was a whole trip,” Elliot says. “It just seemed obvious to everybody that he should collect on whatever he had a part in, and that’s it. But somehow, it dragged into an entire summer.”

Lewis holds no grudges toward the guys in the band, though the disappointment is still present. Like many, he observed that Ric avoided confrontation and simply walled off his past and moved on. After the settlement, Lewis made little traction in managing or producing other artists. The Cars were a hard act to follow. Today, he writes and lives a quiet life with Maria. They have a Siberian husky who is almost twenty years old. “We’re happy recluses,” he says.

With money coming in, the band also moved on with their lives. In December 1979, Elliot bought a 1935 house that was partially renovated in leafy Weston, a classic New England town with high-end properties behind fieldstone walls, just minutes out of Boston. The house at 221 Merriam Street, along with his green Jaguar and growing collections of guitars and gold records, can be seen in a 1981 short documentary called Cars, Guitars, and Elliot Easton.

Ben was his housemate for a short time after he had been forced out of his apartment in Brighton by a devastating fire that ripped through the complex in the middle of the night on December 9. He escaped with only the clothes on his back. The disaster claimed everything, including his Music Man and Vox basses, one of Greg’s synths, his entire wardrobe, and a burgeoning collection of art, including an Erté Art Deco print David had given him as a housewarming gift. He had grabbed a coat and escaped with no time to grab his wallet. So when he went to the bank for cash, he had no form of identification. Steve Berkowitz drove to the bank with an autographed, framed copy of the Rolling Stone cover to show that the man standing at the teller’s window in a wolf fur coat was indeed the same rock star named Benjamin Orr.

“I’d just moved to my house in Weston, so I invited him to stay there until he figured out what he was gonna do,” Elliot says. Later that year, Ben bought his own house in Weston, a split-level stucco midcentury modern house built in 1951 up on a hill at 27 Brook Road, just a mile away from Elliot’s. “It was the first house he even looked at,” says the band’s friend Anne Marie Foley. “He was kind of like that type of guy. ‘Okay. This’ll work.’” He set up a home studio on the first level while the main living area was upstairs. Amy LaTelevision was living there as well. “She was a live wire,” Elaine Hawkes says.

They had a cat named Vermuski, who carried around a stuffed animal, a seal named Dearborn, in its mouth. “One day, Ben came home with a pet pygmy goat he named Spock,” said Ben’s neighbor and friend John Dalpe. “He had these little horns, but we thought they’d be dangerous, so we glued little rubber balls to the end of them. So he was like this totally fanciful creature, and he was a cool little dude, but he would leap. He’d fly through the air. It was just nuts.”

Dalpe and Ben were both bachelors on a dead-end street in the sleepy suburban town, both working night hours. Dalpe worked in television production and preferred editing overnight. “Ben was a very private guy. He and I were very close, lived across the street from each other.” The two would often have breakfast together around three in the afternoon at a diner in nearby Waltham. “Ben would have scrambled eggs with more Tabasco sauce than God intended. Sometimes, we’d just be out, and people would come up, and I found them to be, in many cases, very rude. And he was always very much a gentleman like this. One girl came up and said, ‘Oh, hi, Benny.’ And he said, ‘My friends call me Ben.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, Benjamin.’ And he said, ‘No, my friends call me Ben,’ which was very gracious. Her obnoxiousness increased. And so I would step in at times like that and just be ungracious, kind of just tell them to get the fuck away.”

Ben quickly became a hit with his other neighbors. In addition to sports cars, he bought a Chevy Blazer with a snowplow and showed up unannounced to plow snow off their driveways, often with Dalpe riding shotgun.

LaTelevision, though, wasn’t long for domestic suburban life with Ben. “We used to go to this little restaurant in Lincoln,” Elaine says. “One day, I came in, and they said, ‘Your friend Ben’s girlfriend came in here late last night and demanded we call her a limo. She was leaving Ben.’”

As the band settled in with their new management, one of the issues they had to renegotiate was the arrangement with Roy Thomas Baker, with whom they planned on recording their third album. He was integral to the band’s success, and they treated him like more than a producer; he had become their friend, and they liked to hang out with him outside the recording sessions. He would make a cameo in a music video and even tag along on their 1980 tour of Japan. And he was well compensated. Berkowitz does not recall the exact deals on albums one or two but says that when he looked into the books, “I think he got about as much as the band did. He got more than per guy.” Baker had taken producer percentage points, which is typical. But it was a high cut. Berkowitz said that had to change moving forward, and he was happy to have Elliot Roberts on board to help with these sorts of big deals.

So Baker was back on board for their third album, Panorama. He had a new engineer in tow, replacing Geoff Workman: Ian Taylor, who had worked his way up in studios in England. Taylor had received credit as a coproducer of the Psychedelic Furs’ debut album, but he did not yet consider himself a producer. Recording over April and May 1980, The Cars began at the Power Station in New York.

Ric had been there in January with Suicide to work on a full album. Michael Zilkha, the head of Suicide’s label ZE Records, had pitched the duo on having Donna Summer’s producer Giorgio Moroder record the album, but the band valued Ric’s support generally and were happy with his work on “Dream Baby Dream” specifically. So Zilkha made do by giving Ric a copy of “I Feel Love” for inspiration. “I think Ric viewed Suicide as his art project, and as a result, he did not deliver a dance record,” Zilkha said. “That is what I really wanted.” He said that Soft Cell used the “I Feel Love” template and, as a result, was more successful commercially. But Vega believed that Ric really wanted to have Suicide get some hits. While Ric didn’t charge them for producing, Zilkha had to pay for his expensive Plaza Hotel accommodations and the “most expensive studio in New York.”

While Suicide and Ric were at the Power Station, Bruce Springsteen was recording in the other studio there and would drop by the sessions. Springsteen, who was working on The River, was another famous Suicide fan. He covered their song “Dream Baby Dream” and absorbed some of their atmosphere for his Nebraska album.

Ric mixed the record overnight and sequenced everything the next day. “Marty and I just looked at each other and said, ‘What the fuck!’ It would have taken Marty and me weeks to have done that,” Vega said. He and Rev agreed, “Ric nailed it.”

Baker let The Cars decide where they wanted to record. But when The Cars arrived at the Power Station with Baker, the producer and his forty-track recorderi did not jell well with the Power Station gear or staff. So after about a week, during which they’d finished the basic tracks, they decamped back to Cherokee in LA to finish.

They were back at the Sunset Marquis Hotel as well. Greg called Marty Jourard from the Motels to tell him they were in town. It turned out that Marty’s apartment was about a hundred yards away. “I walked over and I see Elliot standing in the garden, playing the left-handed guitar, wearing a robe,” Jourard remembers.

They were very funny people. They were very rock-star-ry. And I’m hanging out with Greg, and I go, “Come on, Greg, let’s come back to my apartment, and we can smoke some weed.” I had this Thai Stick, so I’m going, “This is cool. I’m smoking weed with Greg Hawkes.” I’m totally buzzed. We’re having espresso, and I had this low-A baritone saxophone. It was huge. I thought this would be very comical to see Greg Hawkes, who was like five foot four, playing the sax, which is about five foot one. I go, “Hey, Greg, play my sax.” So the fucking guy puts on my low-A sax, and he starts to play like this Bach thing, completely shames me. He is better than me. I go, “Okay, okay!”

Despite their enormous success, the band—or at least Ric—entered the studio with a bit of a chip on its shoulder regarding the backlash of some critics who wrote that Candy-O was a letdown, accusing them of insincerity and inauthenticity. “We had abruptly moved from a point in our career of being told, ‘You’re worthless,’ to ‘You’re everything,’” Ric recalled. “We were angry at the people who had failed to understand us before, and angry over what they suddenly expected from us.”

He acknowledged feeling pushed by the critical reception to Candy-O, which he felt compelled to explain suffered from being written in the midst of an intense tour schedule. But the outside judgments did spur the band’s creativity and would result in perhaps their most interesting album. Elliot admitted, “The first time Ric played the new songs for us, I thought they sounded plain weird—like inside-out music.” In the press kit for Panorama, Ric explained that the time between the first two records was “barely enough time to grow out of what we’d first started doing. So Candy-O was Candy-O, and good for what it was. But we feel much more excited about the new music. . . . It feels a lot more like the spirit of the first album.”

The music the band prepared for Panorama was more adventurous and more electronic than the previous two albums. Ric claimed he no longer cared about having hit records. He explained that they selected their most accessible songs for the first album and that the band had much more experimental material that they were not yet confident in recording at the time. While they leaned into that experimentation on Candy-O, Panorama would go markedly further. Ric’s work with Suicide in the immediate run-up was an inspiration and an indication of his current interests. He was also taking notice of new artists like the Cure and Gang of Four.

Ric had a plan for Panorama to sound markedly distinct from Candy-O, and one of the main differences would be using more drum machines, carrying the sound over from his demos. “I don’t know if Roy was really that keen on that,” Ian Taylor says, “but Ric was like, ‘No, no, this is an integral part of the song. It has to be in it.’”

Despite its reputation as experimental and dark, Panorama is filled with catchy pop songs, even if they’re more angular. It’s not as bold, for example, as Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, also from 1980, and another album that bridged the avant-garde, world music, and the mainstream (it achieved gold status, selling more than five hundred thousand copies). Nor is it as dark as Bowie’s gloomy Low (1977). Much of the perceived darkness of Panorama is actually surreal humor. “I look for the joke,” Ric told Dennis Hunt in the Los Angeles Times. “I’m not going to take life as a tragedy.”

After the first two albums, 1980 listeners might have found the surface and attack of the leadoff title track—robotic rhythms and vocoder chants—somewhat off-putting. But listening now, you hear it’s simply an updated study in the blues. The lyrics’ uncompromising narrator takes what he wants. Greg discloses, “I think that Ric wrote that as a response to the disagreement with Fred Lewis, like, ‘I’m going to get what’s coming to me. No surprises, no entanglements,’ and ‘I’m ripping it up. I’m on my way,’ or something, like, ‘I’m moving on.’”

The hi-hat goes into hyperdrive as the song ends. There is no pretense that a human drummer could play like that. It’s like rockabilly made by robots. Ric even throws in a “daddy-o.” Much of the record has the spirit and, in some cases, the direct vocal influence of Elvis Presley. The next track, “Touch and Go,” is similar to Robert Plant’s early-1980s Elvis affectations. The first three songs and four out of the five on side one are sung by Ric, which might be one reason the record feels more jagged.

“Touch and Go,” though, is intensely melodic, with trademark Cars hooks. Ric said the song plays out the question, “How far will you go before you figure out what you will and you won’t accept in a relationship?” It sports a tricky mixture of time signatures that keeps a listener on edge, but it is such a catchy song that it was chosen as the first single. It begins with the rhythm section playing in 5/4 time while the vocal and keyboards simultaneously adhere to common 4/4 time. It is difficult to predict where the lead vocal will land or where Elliot’s guitar stabs strike. This is partially the result of how Ric recorded the original demo. He had a little Casio-like keyboard with a built-in rhythm and bass line so that the beat would end abruptly and start over when he pressed one key and then another, playing chords with one finger at a time.

“They were working it out in rehearsals,” Greg says. “I think Elliot was helping with getting the bass in sync with what David was doing. Because neither David nor Ben would’ve been into prog rock or any weird time signatures. To this day, even when I play the song with [the band] Eddie Japan, I still have to count on my hand while I’m playing it to keep time with what the drums and bass are doing.”

The chorus sections snap back with the entire band in standard 4/4 time, with Ben taking an almost polka approach, surely something the Cleveland boy would have been familiar with. Greg plays a galloping ping-pong synth while Elliot plays a low guitar line on the chorus, like Duane Eddy or the Fender VI-guitar-bass solo on Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman.”

The song features one of Elliot’s masterpiece solos. It almost didn’t make it on the record. The first time he played it for the band in the studio, he was rightfully proud of it and thought they’d respond enthusiastically. The consensus was that it felt overly self-conscious. “I recorded it as a take,” he explains. “They asked me to try a bunch of different approaches until I was in tears, ripped the guitar off the stand, and played the solo. They said, ‘Now it’s great, before it sounded like you were thinking too much.’ I could’ve killed them.”

Said Ric later, “There’s a simplicity to the way it just hangs there, sort of offering a human balance to the high-tech backing.”

Panorama is filled with allusions to other artists and songs. Elvis pops in again on “Gimme Some Slack,” which quotes “Heartbreak Hotel.” It also mentions film auteur Federico Fellini and paints a surreal vision of Ric’s memories of living briefly on New York’s Lower East Side. There’s even a hint of the Velvet Underground’s “Foggy Notion” to the vocal phrasing. The track’s foundation is a four-on-the-floor disco beat with a fast hi-hat pattern. A “beta ray,” as mentioned in the lyric, “goes through everything,” Ric noted. “So it could be a nickname for someone who goes right through you.”

“Getting Through” is surely the only song ever to reference both Buddy Knox’s “Party Doll” and the Stooges’ “TV Eye.” Ric kicks against the pricks of commercialism, rejecting the commodification of his rock stardom. With its train-track beat, it’s like an early version of cowpunk, echoing the psychobilly of the Cramps, who released the single “Human Fly” in 1978.ii Elliot repeats a “Paperback Writer”–like riff throughout and then does a call-and-response round with it to bring the song to a close.

“You Wear Those Eyes” testifies, “I’ll be your mirror,” referencing the Lou Reed song, and Ben sings of losing his “ground control,” perhaps alluding to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” The lead vocals are shared between Ben (on verses) and Ric (chorus). There’s a pronounced Bowie vibe throughout the song. Bowie was working on Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) at the Power Station studio in New York, right around the time The Cars were coming in (though they don’t recall seeing him and surely they’d have remembered), and his “Ashes to Ashes,” which is itself a callback to Major Tom from “Space Oddity,” would be released in August.

Panorama has a lingering reputation as an unconventional, even difficult, album that embraced artifice and technology, unlike the first two albums, which had a more organic rock-band balance. While this is overstated, Ric had started to make more elaborate demos and became enchanted with the actual sound of the drum machines he was using; they weren’t just there to keep time.

“On Panorama, we got a lot more into doing basic tracks with drum machines,” Greg explains. “It started getting more electronic, more sequencers.” Sequencers have been around in a limited fashion as a component of some synthesizers, at least as far back as 1968. However, digital sequencers offered a more expansive capability to program in music and drum patterns. Introduced in 1977, the Roland MC-8 Microcomposer was the first stand-alone microprocessor for music.

David got into programming beats and was proud of the record. He embraced it as the direction in which innovative popular music was going. He was not passionate about playing a drum set per se. “It seems stupid that after two years, you finally feel like you’re doing it the right way,” he said that year. “But there’s so many people that get in the way. The public will never know that everything was fucked up two years ago. We finally organized it completely. . . . Now there’s nobody in our way. Anything we do now is totally representing us.”

Greg says that while the first LP might be his favorite, he was inspired by the change of direction on Panorama, and for a while he counted that as his favorite. There was a genuine spirit of collaboration. Greg wrote in the expanded reissue of the album in 2017, “To me, it represents The Cars’ most stylized, adventurous, and quirky period. It was also our first album of the 1980s, and we were absorbing more industrial and electronic influences.”

“That’s one of the reasons we call the new album Panorama,” Ric explained at the time. “It means changing scenes, the general overview of our last year, and all that. We’ve all been very busy, running around a lot, picking up all kinds of fresh data from other worlds.”

While the album begins with the icy throbbing pulse of a Suicide-like drum machine playing a bare-bones kick-and-snare pattern on the title track, Elliot’s layered guitar parts are all over the song. “It was just sort of natural progression,” Elliot recalls. “The times we were in, whatever the new batch of songs called for, and of course synthesizers were becoming more important, and different sounds. Ric always loved the new and was always just sort of an explorer that way and wanted to chip away at things and break ground. And so I never felt like it was like, ‘We’re going to have less guitar now. We’re going to have more of this.’ It was just like, ‘This is where music is going.’ We were part of the times, and that’s how any of those records came out. I always stress that what I brought was what everybody else hated except the audience. Not hated, but how can I put it?”

“You rooted it in this American tradition,” I reply.

“Yeah. I brought that flavor into the music, which helped give it a uniqueness. There was nobody in Devo doing that.”

Yet back in 1980, listeners would hear his dissonant licks with unusual effects as part of an overall synth-forward churn on the title track, along with a lack of organic-sounding acoustic drums as a familiar anchor, as something foreign. Today, this blend of beefy synths, vocoder lines, and multiple inventive guitar tracks sounds classic and simply awesome. But starting an album with a Krautrock-like 5:45 soundscape might have thrown off those with more pedestrian taste, which was the opposite approach of Candy-O when they led off with the irresistible “Let’s Go.” This was a deliberate strategy. Ric said he wanted “to elevate the underground” to the masses used to being spoon-fed mainstream music.

“I think it’s perfectly valid to incorporate new forms of technology into music,” Greg declared to Rolling Stone at the time. “I think of the Cars as an alternativeiii band—an alternative to the stock rock and pop that still dominate radio. We’re definitely not a tradition-based band. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason to stick with any rock & roll traditions. What’s the point? Traditions exist so we can go beyond them. So, who knows: Maybe as we go more and more beyond traditions, our audience will get smaller and smaller. But probably not.”

The process of building the tracks up from beats and sequencers left Elliot out of the recording process for so long, though, that he got antsy to lay down his guitar parts. He confessed, “One day, we were diddling with something, and I exploded, and I said, ‘Fuck this—I want to play some guitar! Put the title track up!’ And I plugged my guitar in and then was like a maniac—I played the whole thing from beginning to end. They’re all looking at me like, ‘Are you okay?’”

Ric had begun the album process by looking to see where he had left off with his songwriting when they recorded Candy-O, songs that he had put aside unfinished. Then he would start fresh, taking pains not to revisit ground he felt they had covered, even the incomplete material. He fleshed out ideas on an eight-track recorder in his home studio. After working on the first six songs that he had written for Panorama, he claimed that he and the band promptly dropped them and moved on to others. It’s not that there was nothing necessarily wrong with the previous songs, some of which were just a month old; it’s just that they were moving at such a fast clip that they would get excited by the newer songs and fresh ideas. When the album was finished, Ric said he still preferred some of his original edgier and more claustrophobic demos. “But the band can’t always play this stuff the way I envision it,” he explained to Mikal Gilmore.

As with Candy-O, there were no shared songwriting credits on the album, though Greg got one on “Don’t Go to Pieces,” a B-side that appeared on two singles from the record “Don’t Tell Me No” and “Gimme Some Slack,” neither of which would chart. Credit sharing meant a split of the substantial songwriting (publishing) income. In the history of The Cars, Greg would be the only member besides Ric to receive cowriting credit. As Ric would remain the one member who wrote almost all the songs, it led to a widening gulf of wealth distribution between him and the others. It did not seem to be a concern to him.

“With Greg, it was different,” band attorney Peter Thall explains. “Ric told me that, although Greg didn’t write anything, Ric felt that he was there 100 percent of the time in the studio.” Indications are that Greg did contribute to the songwriting of those on which he received credit (if not others), but it does make a larger point about how Ric regarded Greg. “[Greg’s] musicianship rounded out everything,” Thall continues. “I mean, he just thought Greg was the cat’s meow and extremely contributory to the success of every track. So what he did was he shared with him 50 percent of one song on each album.” But it also shows how unwilling Ric was to share credit. Ric’s widow, Paulina Porizkova, said that Ric felt he was throwing Greg a bone by crediting him on some songs, a gesture of his respect for and value of Greg, but not because Ric felt he cowrote songs.

Asked if Ric discouraged the others from contributing, Greg speaks only for himself. “I didn’t feel discouraged from the handful of stuff I got cowriting credit on. But in my case, it just seemed like I would happen to be over at Ric’s just when he was in the mood to start something, and we would start something together. And even on the ones that I did from the ground up, he still did all the lyric stuff. It wasn’t like we wrote the words together, but say in the case of ‘Moving in Stereo,’ I did a big majority of the music.”

Thall set up a publishing company for Greg, and the royalties he received were significant. “Moving in Stereo” was the B-side of “My Best Friend’s Girl,” which was a Top 40 single, meaning royalties on each of the many copies sold. It was also later used famously in the film Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).

Musically, Panorama is a captivating and fresh-sounding album from start to finish. It’s hypnotic. Where it might disappoint is in some of the lyrics. Aside from notable exceptions, Ric seemed to have run low on inspiration, recycling vague femme-fatale figures familiar from earlier songs, with a singer swept along in one nocturnal struggle or another. It is common for writers to explore recurring themes and concerns in different works. He told Toby Goldstein in Creem in 1982, “I’m sure there’s a lot of things I say over and over again, there’s a lot of words I re-use, so they must mean something.” On Panorama, though, he filled out songs with so many pop-culture references that the album sometimes feels like it lacks the depth promised by the denser musical textures and bold experimentation. Compared to the first two albums, there are relatively few memorable, never mind quotable, lines.

Ric described being in the midst of an abundant creative flow. He even claimed that he would prefer to make three albums a year. While he might have had a surfeit of musical ideas, it seemed there were fewer new ideas for what he wanted to say. He offered a possible explanation for the redundant neon-lit noir on the record, revealing that he wrote all the lyrics alone in his basement studio between midnight and dawn. In one interview, he also alluded vaguely to dealing with personal problems during the creation of Panorama. The writer either didn’t follow up on the issue or was shut out from further details, but one suspects the denouement with Fred Lewis was an animating force.

The press kit for Panorama quotes Ric (and offers the pronunciation of his name as “o-KAY-sek”): “I’m just like everybody else, and I’m writing down things that people feel, sort of taking notes on the human race. I’m just a test pilot for mass hysteria.” From this perspective, he is the outsider, the observer, the mirror, a pop artist like Warhol. Ric had similar voyeuristic tendencies to his art hero. Greg reports that Ric had a telescope to spy on women. Others interviewed reported the predilection continued for decades. Says one about an encounter with Ric on a New York rooftop in 1999, “He admitted that he was into looking into the windows of apartment buildings across the street.” It gave him a thrill. He was obsessed with taking Polaroid photos of women.

But lest we conclude that Ric was reducing women to empty femme fatales, he pointed to his line “I want to float like Euripides” in “Gimme Some Slack.” He said Euripides “wrote about relationships between people. Back in those days, as far as most Greek men were concerned, women didn’t have much value. Euripides was sometimes criticized by his contemporaries because . . . he advanced the idea that, yes, women did have some value.”

But it’s when Ric inhabits the feelings of his observed subjects or when he adds some autobiography that the words ring truest. The band points to “Misfit Kid” as one of their favorites. One of the reasons the song connects is because Ric invested himself in it. As with “Getting Through,” we hear him struggling—cut with humor—from his youth as a gangly basement-dwelling loner through his newfound role as a gangly basement-dwelling rock star dealing with the emptiness and expectations of fame. “It’s about wanting to belong to something and having the wrong ideas,” he said of the song. The dream, as the song goes, turned out funny.

With Panorama The Cars were keeping pace with the zeitgeist. For example, the hi-hat and four-on-the-floor beat of “Gimme Some Slack” exemplifies how rock bands incorporated disco, a beat similar to Joy Division’s 1979 “Interzone.” Though more raw and far more gothic-dark than The Cars, Joy Division was another band influenced by the Velvet Underground and spurred by punk rock, also mixing synths with drums, guitar, and bass. The Cure, another English band with early goth tendencies, formed in 1978, with more polish and poppier than Joy Division, adding synth to their sound on the 1980 LP Seventeen Seconds. Ultravox was a more aggressive punk-rock band who evolved similarly to The Cars, coloring their sound with synths and drum machines. Wire was also working in a similar vein, introducing synths into their skeletal sound on their second album, Chairs Missing (1978). The smart, punky pop songs on their 1977 album Pink Flag would likely not have escaped Ric’s or David’s attention. This is not to suggest that The Cars were directly influenced by any of these groups (all from England). They were sowing more influence than they were reaping.

“It was a period of tremendous variety in the bands,” recalls Marty Jourard of the Motels.

A band did not say, “We want to sound like the Knack. We’ve got to come up with our thing.” I mean, just think about it. You got Devo, Blondie, Talking Heads, the Knack, the Motels, The Cars. It all came down to the quality of the songwriting or just the whole package, like Devo or B-52s. They were not trying to sound like anybody else. And Thomas Dolby and Gary Numan, the synthesizer was this universe that you could explore. You’ve got to give credit to these nerds in these rooms that designed these things. You didn’t have to be a tech-head to play them. I could just get really buzzed, and I’d screw around, and I’d fuck up an organ sound, and I’d come up with “Only the Lonely,” which is really hard to replicate. I always call new wave “twisted pop.” It’s very much pop: verse, chorus, intro, and lead, but it’s twisted. The beats are different. The sounds are different.

Much of the impact The Cars had was on young stars who would become icons themselves. Prince, one of music history’s most iconic, was listening. The stylistic leap from his self-titled 1979 album to Dirty Mind the following year would seem to demonstrate that. Prince later covered “Let’s Go” multiple times in concert.

And the impact extended to established artists. It gets no more iconic or established than John Lennon, who picked up on the Elvis Presley overtones of “Touch and Go.” In his final interview on the day he was murdered, December 8, 1980, Lennon and Yoko Ono discussed new wave’s use of retro influences and how they incorporated such music callbacks into their material on Double Fantasy:

Lennon: I’ll give you a for-instance: Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”—which I think is a great record—is, to me . . . it’s the same kind of period-sound as “Starting Over.” I think The Cars’ “Touch and Go” is right out of the fifties. . . . But with eighties styling . . . and that’s what I think “Starting Over” is; it’s a fifties song made with an eighties approach.

Elliot, who lobbied to play on Lennon’s Double Fantasy,iv never tires of listening to the audio of this interview. “It was amazing,” Elliot says. “I mean, he actually sings a little bit of ‘Touch and Go’ to demonstrate what he was talking about, which was the Buddy Holly hiccup, ‘touch and go-uh-oh-oh.’” Elliot wrote on Facebook, “It means a great deal to me that he was aware of us,” he said. “More than I can express. For me, it’s like, ‘mission accomplished.’ We got through to the Beatles and helped inspire John’s music.”

With Panorama recorded and mixed, it was time again for David to design the album cover. He hired a woman who had been a seamstress for Steven Tyler to sew the checkered flag that festoons the cover. The back cover shows the band members arranged in a circle like a clock, each holding a guitar. “David is very specific,” Anne Marie Foley says. “If the tint’s off a pitch, he’s like, ‘It’s got to be fixed.’” She was not exaggerating; when it came to reproducing the Vargas painting for Candy-O, David felt like Elektra “fucked it up.”

David’s exactitude and having a role that was not under Ric’s complete control started to cause tension between the two. While Ric was already unquestionably the band’s leader, the new manager, Elliot Roberts, reinforced that. Roberts was more comfortable dealing with solo artists than bands. But David was never a shrinking violet and knew how crucial he was in creating and maintaining the band’s image. Like another drummer with impeccable personal style, Charlie Watts in the Stones, David had a strong sense of the visual presentation of the band. The two members with the strongest artistic visions and most strident opinions inevitably began to butt heads more frequently while Greg and Ben went with the flow. They would all eventually get frustrated by Ric’s control issues. But the first signs of real agitation emerged between Ric and David. Everyone else tried to refrain from rocking the boat.

“I would have to try to get around Ric and not let him know what I was doing,” David says. “I had a pretty fair amount of freedom with the covers, but I would work on the stage sets, and we had a great set designer, Stephen Bickford,” who was hired for the Panorama tour.

I would have meetings with him and not tell anybody. This was just when I had suspicions [to keep ideas under wraps] [laughs]. I didn’t have a real reason at that point. So, Stephen Bickford and I would work out stuff. We’d come up with twelve ideas, and we’d go, “We can only afford five of them. Okay, we’re going to leave out this. We’re going to leave out that.” Then I would go to where they were building the sets and pick material samples and see demonstrations of all this stuff, but I didn’t tell anybody. So, sure enough, Stephen Bickford’s coming to meet me. Ric finds out that he’s coming and tells him he wants to meet him first before my meeting. So I meet him, and he goes, “Oh, I just met Ric. I don’t even know why he wanted to talk to me.” And I said, “What did he want?” He said, “He was kind of asking about you and the set and all this different stuff.” And I’m like, “That fucker.” I was thinking, “He’s trying to stop me from doing this.”

Ric was aware of the potential problems arising from being the one who sought to control everything. “I sometimes wonder how they handle me,” he confessed to Dennis Hunt in the Los Angeles Times later that year. Talking about songwriting, he explained that if he were in the position of the other members and wanted to write songs for the band, “I wouldn’t let anyone stop me.” He dismissed further collaboration, though. “It doesn’t interest me.” He admitted to always wanting to be in charge since childhood, which he traced to being rejected back then. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to belong to everything, like all kids do. But I remember being laughed at for being different. I didn’t like that. I felt like they didn’t understand me, and maybe I could make them understand if I was somehow running things. Maybe that’s where it started.” He also said he learned how to tune others out from tuning his parents out. “I can be there with someone but not really be there.” In lyrics where he wrestled with these issues of insecurity and control, the songs connect deeper than the dazzling surfaces.

Bickford was already a successful show designer when he was introduced to The Cars by Elliot Roberts. Management recognized the band needed a more professional and striking presentation, especially since it was their image to remain more or less frozen in place onstage. Bickford had designed sets and run light shows for Hall & Oates, Herbie Hancock, and ELO, among others. He was with Bob Dylan (another of Roberts’s clients) for a remarkable seven years.

Steve Berkowitz had seen Bickford’s designs in action on a Hall & Oates tour. “He had designed this Velcro thing where the band ripped the final curtain down, and the background changed, and it was dramatic. I went, ‘We need stuff like that because they’re just going to stand there. So lights have got to move, parts have got to move, lights have got to come in from different places. If we’re going to play in an arena, there has to be something good to look at. You can’t just have spotlights in a black stage and guys standing there going chuck-chick on the guitars; that’s not that entertaining from the back wall.”

“He was a performance artist from San Francisco who was the type of guy who would wear trash bags to the concert, and staple pieces of steak to them,” is how Ric later described Bickford.

“Elliot Roberts thought my work was better than all the other people whose work that he saw,” Bickford explains. “The rock-and-roll industry had a finite number of men who were designing stage shows, not just the red lights, blue lights. They kept getting larger and wider and deeper and more expensive, that type of stuff. So, The Cars were compliant. They were open to my ideas. They were interested in trying something different, and they were supposed to get an infusion of money.”

Bickford says he picked up on the tension between David and Ric immediately. He understood that David had been designing the live presentations, and Bickford perceived that David was territorial about it. He says, “I was nervous. This is my first experience with The Cars, that this guy David Robinson was going to make it impossible for me to continue. He’s going to get me fired because he was the designer. Well, somebody got in there, and the next thing I knew, David knew that he wasn’t the designer. And I’m pretty sure that person was Elliot Roberts.” David responds that he was never a set designer, aside from the time he went to a Chevrolet dealership and grabbed huge unused car advertising images and pasted them as a backdrop for their early shows at the Paradise in Boston.

The dynamics of The Cars had shifted significantly with the arrival of Roberts. “Roberts told the band that I was going to do it,” Bickford says. “There wasn’t a lot of talk.” He presented them with a model. “That was pretty unique in those days. They loved it, and they said, ‘What’s that going to cost us?’ So we talked about everything, $50,000.” The band was taken aback by the high cost, but Bickford was unwavering, simply underscoring, “Well, yes, that’s what it will cost.” This would be for building the set, not including Bickford’s fee. At the end of the tour, the band would find out that Bickford brought home more money than any of the band members.

Bickford did not just design sets aesthetically; he also had to consider the logistics and engineering required for building them, striking them, transporting them, and rebuilding them night after night. He had it built by a construction shop and was naturally subject to engineering standards and safety inspections. The stage for the 1980 Panorama tour had an industrial theme, with a chain-link fence-like screening in front of the amp backline and risers for the drums and keyboards, as well as a riser for Ben, Elliot, and Ric to step up and down, so it encouraged a bit more mobility. They were using wireless systems, so they were not tethered to their amps by instrument cables. Hanging behind all was a scrim with geometric light patterns. “We tried to use as many industrial materials as possible to represent the cold mechanical life that we’re all living in this country,” says Bickford.v

While they awaited the release of the new album and the start of their tour, the guys enjoyed their time away from The Cars. Ben had to deal with putting his life back in order after losing everything in the fire. “He basically had to start his life over,” Ric explained in the press kit for the new album. “He’s taken it really well.” That would surprise no one who knew easygoing Ben.

In addition to Suicide, Ric produced demos and records for Boston bands the Nervous Eaters, Peter Dayton Band, and Third Rail. He worked on a single with the Fast from New York. Iggy Pop wanted him to produce his next album, but it conflicted with The Cars’ touring schedule. Elliot worked with Dean Zelinksy to design custom guitars. “Greg’s been working on some tapes,” Ric explained. “It’s hard to explain the kind of music he does—he just goes into the studio and lays down a lot of tracks.”

Bostonians were delighted, as The Cars not only had remained living around the city but were also seen out and about at clubs, checking out new bands. David, though, says he walked around largely unrecognized. “Twice, I’m going in and out of my building, and there’s what looks like a college student telling another college student, ‘The guy from The Cars lives here.’ I walk past them and go in, and they don’t know who I am.”

Elliot would also sit in with Berkowitz’s blues and jazz jams at the Tam in Brookline. “It was such a different world,” Berkowitz recalls. “Nobody recognized him. It was great for him. He could just play the guitar, and we would say that he was ‘Lander from Sweden’ and couldn’t speak English. I found a picture the other day, Elliot was in it, and my horn section was Branford Marsalis [who was attending Berklee] on sax and Magic Dick [from the J. Geils Band] on harmonica. That was like the horn section.”

Panorama was released in August, spending twenty-eight weeks and reaching number 5 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. “Touch and Go” cracked the Top 40 in early September, peaking at 37 in October, and spent eleven weeks on the Top 100. The album sold more than a million copies in roughly the first four months.

MTV would not hit the air for another year, but artists had been filming promo clips since at least the early 1960s. The Cars had filmed a few lip-synched performance videos and a few more live performances as stand-alone promo clips. But Panorama would mark the beginning of their scripted and stylized videos, more like what MTV would soon become known for.

The first video from the record to be released was for the first single, “Touch and Go.” It was directed by Devo’s Gerald Casale. There had been a mutual appreciation among some members of each band. But there had been at least one earlier snide comment about The Cars by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, who called out The Cars for imitating Devo with a watered-down and commercial sound. “And so talk about karma,” Casale says. “Our management signs The Cars.” Devo was also with Elliot Roberts, who saw an opportunity for two of his clients to collaborate. He suggested Casale as a director.

Casale had never met The Cars. After Devo finished a tour in London, he diverted his return trip through Boston. “I ended up spending two weeks in Boston with them doing those two videos where Chuck Statler, my professional compatriot and partner, he produced, and I directed,” Casale says. “The Cars were very antivideo at the time. A lot of true rock bands looked askance at video. They thought, ‘This is bullshit. This is not rock and roll.’ And they didn’t trust this new breed of director who was basically coming in from an agency or something and a cookie-cutter approach. They were really afraid of looking foolish.”

But Ric liked the Devo videos.

And he thought, well, “That guy, he’s been on the other side of the camera, he understands what it’s like for us.” And no other band was ever doing what Devo did, which was doing it ourselves. So, I spent a long time talking to him and Ben about what they envisioned and what they would and wouldn’t do. And we worked out what each song would be with a budget. They decided to pay for the videos themselves because they were already hugely financially successful. Smartly enough, they thought, “We want to own the copyrights on those videos.” Ric was always very savvy. You could tell he was no-nonsense. He was always thinking about business. We had a good time, and I got to know them pretty well. Ric was kind of inscrutable, but I really had a great rapport with Ben and Greg because Greg was just such a nice, honest, open person.

They filmed the video for “Touch and Go” on July 7, 1980, at Whalom Park, an amusement park in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. Casale begins the clip with a picture disc that they created of the back cover of the album (the one with the guys arranged like a clock) on a large turntable filmed at the Paradise, as Casale recalls. “We built the turntable in there, so they’d be passing by the camera because we couldn’t afford a soundstage with dollies and cranes. I thought, ‘Okay, if they’ll agree to just play what they play on a turntable and come by the camera, it’ll look like I have an expensive piece of equipment.’”

It cuts to Ric in something like a zoot suit, wide with padded shoulders, dancing against a black backdrop. His bandmates emerge one by one, rotating out of the shadows behind him, miming their instruments. Ric sports his trademark mullet, no shades, revealing expressive eyes. “We agreed to find other ways that they could be rotating so that there was this seamless kind of feeling between those interior shots, and then, for the exterior location, they’re doing other things, and the rotation continues. So then the idea came up, but what about teacups [as in Disneyland]?” So they went to the empty nearby amusement park.

Riding the carousel are stone-faced, bored-looking models in classic beauty-pageant swimsuits, as well as the other Cars. When the guitar solo comes in, we cut to Elliot playing guitar in a Tilt-a-Whirl. Elliot and David got motion sick. “The place was deserted, and we were starving, and there was a drinks machine that had these nonalcoholic piña coladas,” Elliot recalls with a laugh. “I drank some, and it made me sick to my stomach because I’m on the rides with all these pretty models.”

Casale also directed the video for “Panorama,” which has no miming on instruments at all. The band members act out a role in a fairly elaborate spy film, which works well with the guitar riff, with its echoes of the “James Bond Theme” and Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme.” Ric is involved in a chase scene through a brutalist office campus (locations included the Boston Federal Reserve building and Boston Medical Center), with the other guys paired off as teams competing to capture him. Ric looks sharp. Casale recalled, “Elliot Roberts . . . said to me offhand, ‘You know, Ric Ocasek’s got a hairpiece.’ It had never occurred to me.” Hair was always very important for rock and rollers, but it would command even greater attention once MTV took hold. Artists got creative with blow dryers, Aquanet, and wigs.

Ben and Elliot strike a suave duo, while David and Greg make an odd couple, with Greg running in short strides like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character. Roy Thomas Baker appears in a cameo as a guy reading a newspaper in a freight elevator. The budget was a healthy one as there was even a helicopter. Casale says, “That was probably the single most big-ticket item, hiring that guy to fly us up over the main part of the city where all the high-rises are in the helicopter with Chuck strapped in a special rig. So he’s hanging out of the helicopter holding this big camera, and I was right next to him, but I wasn’t hanging out,” he laughs.

“They took the doors off the helicopter, and I got to go up, and they’re banking over the Back Bay,” David says.

I had never been in a helicopter before. And Ben had his own car, and Don Saetti—he was a doorman at the Paradise—had his own car, and he had his own gun, which was the best part. He played kind of the Mafia kind of guy in the bar scene. My girlfriend at the time, Patty Blankenship, is sitting there with him, and they’re planning something, but Ben’s in the men’s room, washing his hands, and they come and hit him on the head with a gun. Anyway, we were planning it, and we say, “We’ve got to get a gun for Ben’s scene.” He goes, “I got my own gun” [laughs].

The reviews of Panorama started coming in. Creem’s Jeff Nesin asked, “The Cars are now the royalty of technorock, colonial division. So why am I falling asleep under the headphones?” He was primarily put off by the surface, and he was unimpressed with the lyrics, finding them “snidely shallow and continually reaching for the occluded image—which still would be OK if they just didn’t insist on printing them.”

Boston Phoenix writer Deborah Frost was particularly harsh. “Certainly some of their fans will think they’re really putting their necks on the line this time. Bullshit. If they are, it’s not because the music or ideas behind it are so brainy, but because this is a slapdash job. . . . This year’s model is a lemon.”

In Rolling Stone, Ken Tucker bemoaned the loss of the “chipper” Cars of their debut, calling the new record “an out-and-out drag.” “On Candy-O and Panorama, Ocasek’s compositions offer only two extremes: incoherence and self-absorption,” he wrote. “What these extremes share is a uniformly morose mood. . . . Each line is uttered in the same flat, sinister voice, while the lyrics are sarcastic cut-and-paste jobs that mock our efforts to make sense of them.”

In an interview that year with Circus, Elliot acknowledged that “Ric’s lyrics portray a callous, cynical, and sarcastic person. But he’s really a fairly gentle soul and a very sensitive guy.” It appears that Ric was all these things, depending on the circumstances, as Elliot would continue to learn.

Rolling Stone devoted a sizable cover story to the band. Immediately, words like “stark,” “abstract,” “cold,” and “aloof” set the tone. The writer, Mikal Gilmore, also described Candy-O as “unnervingly formulaic and calculated.” He added, “That sense of reserve also infused Ocasek’s lyrics: passionless musings on sultry, insatiable women,” while describing the new album as “technopop; rigid, electronic rock & roll that favors machine-like exactness over heartfelt expression, and avant-garde minimalism over pop-based tunefulness.”

In the Village Voice, Jon Pareles wondered if The Cars’ audience would be loyal enough to follow the band’s embrace of innovation, asking, “Who knows if that’s what the Cars want?”

Gilmore quoted Pareles and inverted that question. After watching eleven thousand kids rocking out at a September 13 show in Indianapolis and enjoying the “full-weight sensory assault,” Gilmore asked instead if it was actually The Cars’ audience leading the way for the band.

Roy Thomas Baker later said of Panorama’s experimental approach, “If you don’t make a few fuck-ups along the way, you’re not trying.” Such equivocation was not for Elliot, who pushed back, saying that Panorama was “definitely not a rehash of the first two albums, nor is it just some reply to all those fucks who said the last album was nothing more than detached love affairs and hollow relationships.” In Creem, Elliot boasted, “We frown all the way to the bank.”

The Cars once again befuddled critics. They made music that pleased themselves, and by not underestimating the mainstream audience’s intelligence, the band continued popularizing strains that had previously been underground. It was consistent with their deliberate decision to eschew arena-rock crowd-baiting tropes. They were steadfast in their belief that young rock-and-roll fans wanted to be challenged and hear something new. They still had memorable melodies and a guitar hero, and they looked cool. And you could always dance to The Cars.

So, the kids turned out. The Cars of 1980 gave the audiences a bit more of what they wanted: a show scaled to get across in arenas. On a typical night, they would begin the sets with the house lights dropping out and colored lights crisscrossing Greg as he revved up the rhythmic textures of “Shoo Be Doo” on a sequencer, “doing a Marty Rev thing,” he says. David would join in, followed by Elliot playing some guitar leads. Ben would come out next in a black muscle tee and leather pants and take his spot on a riser. When everyone was in their spots, Ric would stride out looking like a jackknife, no guitar, free to shadowbox “in his kind of awkward, gangly way,” as Greg says, with exaggerated jerky movements inspired partly by Suicide’s Alan Vega.

The band wore coordinated black-and-white outfits. In addition to designing the stage, Stephen Bickford was a one-man operation running the lights on each show. One of his tools on tour was having a mic on the stage that fed just to a monitor speaker at his control board. The Cars liked to start each song from black, all the lighting down. Bickford could step on a pedal to turn on his monitor to hear the band talking to each other. “Are you ready? Are you in tune? Okay, one, two, three, four,” and then he would hit the lights.

Bickford would maintain an essential role on the 1980, 1982, and 1984 tours, but he says The Cars “were not real friendly to me, ever. They were uncomfortable around me.” He got to know Ric the most. Bickford found Ric to have a perverse sense of humor with an appreciation for the macabre. “Ric and I took an immediate liking to each other because we liked crazy, screwy, artistic things. He always wanted to test me with his gruesomeness.” Elliot Easton also emphasized Ric’s absurdist sense of humor, saying Ric was one of the funniest people he’s known. “We’d have silly, surrealist conversations.”

After a week of rehearsals in August at the Cape Cod Coliseum—a concrete sweat lodge infamous for its horrible sound and lack of air-conditioning—the first show was in Chicago, followed by the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, one day later. That was particularly meaningful to Greg, who had lived near the venue and worked there during high school summers. Most of the tour consisted of sellouts of venues with capacities of around ten to fifteen thousand. Reviews were mostly positive. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Edgar Koshatka wrote, “One could not, it seems, have ‘cloned’ a more appealing quintet for contemporary ears, all things considered. But the best sign of all is that the band is not retracing its own footsteps; it is obvious that Cars is finding new routes to travel.” In a review of the Omaha show, Pat Higgins wrote, “The typical audience member appeared to be of the heavy metal persuasion, normally found frothing at the mouth at Ted Nugent/Van Halen Nuremberg style rallies.”

The Romantics and XTC would open a few shows. “We all loved XTC,” says Anne Marie Foley. “Every time we would go to their dressing room after a gig, we’d knock on the door, and David would open it, and they’d always be standing there in their underwear. I’d be like, ‘Oh my god, shut the door.’”

But most of the tour was supported by the Motels. “It was one of the biggest tours of the summer,” says Marty Jourard of the Motels. “It was astounding. They were arguably the hottest band in the US that summer.” Listing off venues and cities, he says,

And they were all sold out. They had so many hits, but they were not a good live act. They were flat. And the critics very quickly picked up that they were flat. And there’s this little baby band with this super-charismatic singer, Martha Davis, and they would pit us against them in reviews, and we would always come out on top, even though we were the underdog. And the next morning, we’d all be at the airports, and they read the morning reviews all the time. They had limos, and they flew first-class, and we were in coach, and when we arrived, we’d be scuffling around for the rental car and our luggage, and they would just be getting a magazine and waiting for the limo and read the review in the paper. And it would say, “The Cars were upstaged by this little band.”

ELLIOT SAYS HE DOESN’T REMEMBER SUCH REVIEWS, BUT, “I DO REMEMBER opening for Styx and seeing the reviews praising us and calling them dinosaurs, which caused a lot of tension and uncomfortable moments at airports, having read reviews of the previous night’s shows.”

Jourard continues, “It wasn’t our fault, but it probably soured Ric a little bit. He may have been consciously aloof, and maybe he just went, ‘Fuck you guys.’ I know that he was older than we thought he was, so maybe there was something about that. He would show up for breakfast fully dressed as if he was about to play Madison Square Garden. He never hung out in sweats.” Jourard called him “Ric O-Cash-Check.”

With his six-foot-four frame, Ric already stood out, but he emphasized his striking presence with bold, fashion-forward clothes. The band would all hit the trendy shops whenever they rolled into a town, sometimes with fashion consultants, and come back and model the new outfits they had chosen. Befitting their rock-star status, they’d fly between most gigs and stay at the nicest available hotels, typically taking limos well out of their way after a show to stay at a Four Seasons.

Jourard’s take on the different personalities: Ric was distant; Ben was warm, goofy, but cool. “Greg was just sort of there. He was quiet, as was David. They weren’t as in your face as Elliot.” Jourard bonded the most with Elliot.

Elliot was hilarious in person, not what I expected from his photo on the first album. With that aristocratic name and the blue blazer I thought, Oh, he’s probably “Elliot Easton IV,” a Brahmin blue blood all the way back to the Mayflower. A couple years later, The Cars and the Motels are touring together, and we’re at the O’Hare Airport Holiday Inn, and Elliot phones me, “Come to my room, man, the plane doesn’t leave yet. Let’s get high.” So he lights this fat Columbian joint, and we’re huffing away. I say, “Elliot, it’s so funny to finally meet you, because from your album photo I figured you were this Boston old-money WASP kid, a tenth-generation American.” He goes, “Yeah, and then you find out I’m just a Jew from Long Island,” Elliot Steinberg. He was funny as hell. He was very sociable.

On tour with The Cars, suddenly, Jourard felt like a rock star. “They attracted so many women, and there’s cocaine and marijuana. I was chain-smoking, and there’d be catering and buses and press and huge crowds.” The Cars were systematic about their social life on the road. “They had it all worked out,” Jourard laughs. “Chicks were all over Ben. And what they’d do is they have a hospitality room; they called it a ‘hostility room.’ They’d tell these women to go to room blah blah at this hotel, and it was not their personal room; it would be a separate suite. And you go there, and there’s food, and there’s all this stuff. And so you’d meet there, and it was this neutral territory. And if you met a gal that you liked, Ben told me, this is how you do it. You talk to the girl, ‘I’m going to call in a few minutes.’” Whichever guy was using the system would go to his own room, would call the phone in the suite, and ask for the girl. “‘Is Susan there?’ ‘Susan, there’s a phone call for you.’ Nobody knows who it is, but it’s Ben or whoever. ‘Hi, come to room 416. I want to see you.’ It was very discreet.”

At one postshow party at a high-rise penthouse, some members of a Cars cover band approached Ric with a copy of the Milkwood album, and he threw it off the building. “I was going through a funny thing with Milkwood because it was old work,” Ric said. “Sometimes the Cars would play a gig, and people would bring Milkwood albums and hold them up while I was playing, and Ben and I would look at them and think, ‘What the fuck? Where’s this Milkwood thing coming from? Where’d they get this Milkwood stuff?’ Obviously, it was very different from the Cars. I thought it was like our skeleton in the closet. . . . I was trying to move forward, and so people bringing in old shit was just annoying. Plus, I didn’t really like the Milkwood album.”

On September 17, the band rolled into Hollywood to start rehearsals for a live appearance two nights later on Fridays, ABC’s answer to NBC’s Saturday Night. Larry David was a writer and player on the show that season. Michael Richards (later Kramer on Seinfeld) was also a player. Cars fans were in the audience during dress rehearsals and had to be asked to stop calling for Ben and Ric while they were working out skits and camera cues.

The band left on October 25 for their only tour of Japan. They played two nights at the Sun Plaza Hall in Tokyo, a concert at the Shibuya Kokaido, followed by Osaka Expo Hall, Osaka Festival Hall, and Aisha Kosei Nenkin Hall. They were all small venues, around two-thousand capacity. They were treated like visiting demigods. “It was crazy fans,” says Bickford. “These girls, they would line up in the dressing room for them. They were like Kewpie dolls. And the people in The Cars were very, very nice to them.”

“Such a typical scene,” Greg laughs. “Ben would be somewhere, and there’d be a dozen Japanese girls. Here’s why.” He shows a picture of a smoldering Ben on the bullet train. Two women glommed on to Ben and remained with him, staying in his hotel rooms for most or all of the tour.

“I don’t think you sell too many records in Japan,” David says, “but the thing about Japan is they just devour anything that comes their way. You can be from England or from America; they don’t care. They’ll come and see you live because they know you’ll probably never come back.”

The Cars finished 1980 with an East Coast run that included two nights at the Boston Garden on November 30 and December 1, before closing the year out with two nights at Madison Square Garden in New York. On November 13, they played the Hartford Civic Center with Suicide opening again, as they did the fourteenth, at the Providence Civic Center. Ric brought the duo home with him in a limo between gigs.

The Cars arrived to quite a welcome home in Boston. As supportive as ever of local and burgeoning talent, they tapped the Peter Dayton Band to open the first Boston show. Dayton had been in the beloved Boston punk band La Peste, and Ric would soon produce his new band. New Models—whom Ric would also produce—opened night two at the invitation of David.

Ric broke the news to Globe reporter Steve Morse that they planned on opening a studio in Boston within the next year to record themselves and their side projects and provide a creative space for local talent.

Morse reported that the first night “was the best show the Cars have ever done” in Boston. The hometown gig, as usual, was a special one, and the band rolled out the red carpet for their friends and family. Ben sent a limo to bring some high school kids in his new neighborhood, alongside his mother, to the Garden. Anne Marie Foley says,

They had antique cars come and pick up each of The Cars. David was with this woman Patty [Blankenship] at the time. So Patty comes, and there I am. “Hey.” And it’s all three of us in the car. It was always like that. I mean, literally, if he was on a date, I would be on the date. And I always said, “David, your girlfriends must’ve hated me, man. I’m always around.” But that’s what we were, like the duo. I never had a friendship that was so close with somebody that we were together so much. I mean, I went to Thanksgiving at his parents’ house in Woburn.

Their old pal and supporter Barbara Rhind was personally invited by The Cars to the Boston Garden concert. She brought her boss from the early days at the Bell Buoy in Scituate, the guy who would ask her, “What the hell is this?” when she had booked Cap’n Swing and then The Cars. “I had gotten backstage passes,” she says. “I took my boss, who was the last person that I wanted to bring to that show, but it was to prove a point. I kept saying to him, ‘These guys are going to make it. There’s just something different.’ And I took him, and all I remember him saying afterwards is like, ‘Oh my god!’ He says, ‘Can we get them back?’ And I said, ‘It’s a little late for that.’”

Footnotes

i Elliot recalls them trying to synchronize two twenty-four-track machines instead of Roy’s forty-track. But technical difficulties stymied their efforts.

ii Elliot can be seen singing the Cramps’ song in a home video in The Cars Unlocked.

iii More than a decade before “alternative” became shorthand for a genre.

iv “I was bleeding to play on it,” he says. Instead, the gig went to Earl Slick.

v After the tour, they were able to sell parts of the Panorama set and recouped some of the cost.

Chapter 14

SHAKE IT UP

AFTER THREE WHIRLWIND YEARS, THE CARS FINALLY TOOK SOME EXTENDED time off. With no touring for most of 1981, they were rich rock stars living the relatively quiet life around Boston. Ronald Reagan, the right-wing former governor of California, was inaugurated as the president in January, but the band remained publicly apolitical. The country entered into a recession, and unemployment was up to 10 percent by the end of 1981. The average thirty-year fixed mortgage rate was around 17 percent. But the guys had cash. While Elliot was ensconced in his Weston home, Ben was renovating his own house in the same town.

“I went to see Ben,” David says. “And he had a really odd house. It was more like a clubhouse at a rifle range. It wasn’t like a house, really. It was weird. It was a three-bedroom house that he made into a one-bedroom house. [Laughs] We got on a plane, and he had this drawing with him, and I said, ‘What’s that?’ He goes, ‘Oh, this architect drew me a picture of my house.’ It was the worst-looking architectural rendering, but it had a tower shaped like a guitar. I said, ‘Ben, where’s the old house?’ He said, ‘Oh, it’s right in here,’ and he pointed to this tiny section.”

In the spring of 1981, Ric and Suzanne bought a sixty-one-hundred-square-foot Brookline French country–style estate. David bought a town-house condo in the Back Bay, on Fairfield Street, a two-thousand-square-foot place with three bedrooms that took up the entire second floor of a row house. “After we’d go to the Rat, everybody would end up there,” Anne Marie Foley says. “A lot of bands that played would come over and hang out at David’s after shows. I remember Duran Duran came there.”

But the biggest real estate deal came at the beginning of 1981. Making good on the promise to open the studio that Ric had mentioned to the Boston Globe’s Steve Morse, the band bought Intermedia Studio (though not the building, despite their attempts)i at 331 Newbury Street, in the heart of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Newbury ran from boho chic on the Massachusetts Avenue end, with thrift shops and Newbury Comics—an iconic punk-record and comic shop that opened its flagship store there in 1979—to the straight-up chi-chi chic on the Public Garden end, where the Ritz Carlton hotel stood.

The studio, which began under the name Petrucci & Atwell, was on the edgier western end of the neighborhood, close to Berklee and WBCN, which had a stereo connection to the studio for live broadcasts. Aerosmith, Boz Scaggs, and Cheech & Chong had all recorded albums there, as had David with the Modern Lovers. After all the touring, the idea of further travel to work at top facilities was less appealing, so they decided to build their own. The band enjoyed living outside the music-industry hubs of Los Angeles and New York, and they believed in Boston’s music scene. They had to fully renovate the ten-year-old studio, doubling the size, taking the better part of a year. The Cars rechristened it Syncro Sound.

While the studio was being built, the band attended to their individual social lives. For Ben, that meant getting back to his midwestern regular-guy pursuits, like fishing, hunting, and collecting cars and trucks. Anne Marie got swept up in it.

He’d say, “What are you doing on Saturday?” And he’d come pick me up, and he would bring me to the shooting range in Concord. And I’m like, “Shooting range? What am I going to do there?” And he’s like, “No, come on.” So you went in, and it looked like this old saloon, all these guys drinking. And then you go kind of in the back, and there’s all the guns, and then you go outside, and you shoot guns. The only time I’ve ever shot a gun was with Ben. And then he’d take me to play tennis or take me to dinner or just hang out.

“I can tell you who I thought Ben was,” offers filmmaker Luis Aira, who became friendly with the band around this time. “He was an Elvis guy. He liked blondes, muscle cars, guns and beer, and hot [spicy] food.”

Foley would also go antiquing with David in his 1976 Corvette. One time, his car got stolen. “He used to park it next to Syncro Sound. There was a garage there. And then around Christmastime, we were out shopping, and we decided, ‘Oh, we’re going to stop in front of his house.’ We parked the car, and we brought this stuff up. We were literally upstairs for fifteen minutes, and his car was gone. Stolen. Never to be found.”

“We did a radio interview, and it was Christmas Eve,” David told Motortrend in 2018. “The guy who interviewed us asked us what kind of cars we owned. . . . I don’t like answering those questions myself because if you’ve got an expensive, fancy car, people aren’t going to like you, or they’ll think you’re a rich snob, and the other guys did have other fancy cars,” he says. “So I waved my hand to say ‘No,’ but before I could, the other guys all answered. I felt stupid and I told them I had the Corvette. Four hours later, it was stolen. To this day, I’m convinced it got stolen because this DJ asked us what kind of cars we had.”

On May 28, 1981, U2 came back for their second show in Boston, which would be crucial for breaking the band. They had played a fabled show at the Paradise in December, and WBCN and Carter Alan are specifically credited with breaking them in America. On their return trip, they played the Metro on Landsdowne Street, where Elliot, Anne Marie Foley, and others saw them. “After the show, we invited them out, and they brought the whole tour bus out to my house in Weston,” Elliot says. “Everybody came except Larry [Mullen Jr.]. And we had a little jam session in my basement. I had some guitars and drums and stuff set up, and we had a little jam, and Edge had heard about my legendary guitar collection.”

“Edge, especially, was just in awe of all of Elliot’s guitars,” Foley, who remains friends with U2, says.

On July 4, Elliot met Colleen Kelley, who had recently been dating the prefame comedian and actor Denis Leary when they were both students at Emerson College. The Cars’ friend musician Andy Paley was house-sitting in a mansion along Storrow Drive overlooking the Charles River, with panoramic views of the fireworks over the Esplanade. With Elliot’s help, she started drumming for Boston’s Bristols, an all-girl sixties-influenced band. “I helped the Bristols get instruments with my endorsements and stuff like that,” Elliot says. “She had never picked up a drumstick till she met me.”

Ralph Fatello of the band Vinny, one of The Cars’ early champions, was with Elliot and Colleen on their first date. “Elliot’s like, ‘Hey, man, the Stones are playing at Sir Morgan’s Cove in Worcester, so let’s take the girls.’” This was a secret show on September 14, 1981. The Rolling Stones played under the name “The Cockroaches” as a warm-up for their Tattoo You tour. Three hundred people crammed inside while an estimated four thousand fans were shut outside. “He called the limo, and we zipped over to Worcester.”

“We didn’t have tickets or anything like that,” Elliot recalls. “Everybody said, ‘You’re out of your mind. It’s going to be a madhouse there. Even the Stones are going in rental cars because as soon as people see a limo, they’re going to go crazy and mob it.’ I said, ‘Well, the hell with that, I’m doing it.’ And it worked out. I hired a nice limo. We had a double date, and the driver went to the door and said, ‘I’ve got so-and-so in the car.’ And they said, ‘Come on in!’”

Fatello says, “We pull up at Sir Morgan’s Cove. The people think we’re the fucking Stones. We get into the club, and we stood in front of the fricking Rolling Stones. We’re five feet from the Stones! I’m looking at Elliot: ‘Can you fucking believe this?!’”

Elliot was also dating a woman named Jill Glass, but soon he and Colleen embarked on a long-term relationship. He had previously been married to a woman named Kathy for a very short time. Elliot did not wish to revisit the topic, saying simply, “I was lonely, and I jumped into a relationship that was a mistake.”

On August 1, 1981, MTV debuted on many cable systems nationwide, starting primarily in rural and suburban areas. Against all odds, it would revolutionize the record business, and it added an accelerant to the success of new wave generally and The Cars in particular. Until that date, record companies generally did not see much sense in investing in producing videos. But bands like Devo and The Cars were visionary and had spent a good deal of time and money creating videos before MTV existed. Bands like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were creating mimed performance clips to send to the more corny music and variety television shows on which they did not wish to appear in person, a goal The Cars well understood.

MTV had only about a hundred videos in its library the day it launched, “mostly by marginal or unpopular British and Australian bands,” wrote Rob Tannenbaum in the preface of the oral history I Want My MTV. Partially because of the lack of inventory, The Cars were beneficiaries of a generous portion of airplay in the early days of the channel. “Double Life” and “Let’s Go” were the twenty-first and one-hundredth videos played that first day. “Dangerous Type” came twenty-five videos later, and “Double Life” got replayed a second time on day one. The videos for “Let’s Go,” “Dangerous Type,” and “Double Life” were straight performance videos, with the band lip-synching in live stage settings. But starting with the Gerald Casale–directed “Touch and Go,” the band’s videos started to become storyboarded and performed in various locations, more like the music videos that MTV became known for.

Syncro Sound was not yet ready when the band began recording sessions for Shake It Up with Roy Thomas Baker. So they began work on the album at Blue Jay Studio out in the tiny rural town of Carlisle (population of fewer than thirty-four hundred in 1981, no traffic lights, and only a general store). Coincidentally, it was located a mile from their ex-manager Fred Lewis’s house, on the same street. Opened in 1979, the small studio was a world-class facility built into a bunker, providing seclusion and natural soundproofing.

But by the fall of 1981, The Cars were finally working in their own studio, with Roy Thomas Baker once again producing. He was staying in the North End, Boston’s Italian neighborhood. Ian Taylor was once again his engineer, and the two helped The Cars’ crew finish the studio, bringing in a load of high-end gear and, per Baker’s request, a chef’s-grade kitchen. They had installed Baker’s forty-track machine there for the sessions. They would end up using three demos as the basis for finished tracks, including one that started as an eight-track demo at Ric’s home studio with Greg and a drum machine.

Soon after renovations were completed, at a cost of $500,000, Syncro Sound was captured in a video documentary directed by Bob Tingle and coproduced with WCOZ deejay Lisa Karlin called Cars, Guitars, and Elliot Easton. It features Elliot replicating his solo, one of his finest, on the title track. Karlin conducts on-camera interviews with Ric, Greg, Elliot Roberts, Roy Thomas Baker, Steve Berkowitz, Oedipus, writer James Isaacs, and WBCN’s David Bieber. It was shown on the American Forces Network. Baker and Roberts laud Elliot. Ric also compliments Elliot: “He’s definitely developed a style of his own, which is not easy to do, just from being persistent and playing it. He has a good sense of humor and, as a musician, knows when to play it and when not to. Just basically a good person to have around, Elliot.”

There was not much structure going into the new album. David remembers, “It was loose. We didn’t have the songs all down. I don’t even recall having too much contact with Ric.” In the wake of Panorama, Ric’s songs were aimed back at the commercial center. The first four songs of Shake It Up herald an undeniable return to the more straightforward pop of their first two albums. The opening seconds of “Since You’re Gone” begin Shake It Up in a dark and mechanic way that might have worried those who did not warm to the similar chilly textures of Panorama. Ric is playing fifths in that opening, and then Ben and Greg enter on bass and piano to form a ninth chord, a foreboding effect. However, the song slides into an inspired updated version of The Cars that fans fell in love with on the first two records. Still, they synthesized the experimentation of Panorama into their overarching pop sensibility.

The drum machine they used was a cheap one, the size of a guitar pedal of the era, which David drilled a hole in and attached to his hi-hat stand. “It doesn’t sound like drums at all,” he wrote in the expanded edition’s liner notes. “It sounds like tap dancing.” That inventive chick-ing clap track anchors the rhythm section and pops through in a hard-panned stereo mix of “Since You’re Gone.” It was one of the first times they started to play along in sync with a drum machine. Greg recalls, “That was the first time that I can recall thinking, ‘Okay, we have to play to this because it’s the thing; it’s the beat.’” Ric would build his demos up from a drum machine, which influenced David to lock into the suggested parts. It would bother David only when someone would suggest he make his parts sound like the drum machine. The machine’s steady cadence on “Since You’re Gone” allows David to break from the beat and play different fills like marching-band snare rolls.

Ric fingerpicks a churning two-chord sequence, giving it a little folk-rock tinge, and Elliot plays a languid solo reminiscent of Robert Fripp’s tones on Bowie tracks like “Heroes,” though Elliot was not aiming for Fripp’s sound. “I wanted a sound so thick and sustaining that I could slide my finger up and down and play the entire solo on one string, picking a minimum of notes. I wanted it almost sounding like a synthesizer.” A magnetic generator called an E-bow would have been the most helpful tool for this. It’s a device that players hold on the strings, keeping them vibrating without picking, and would bring out sustained notes as if using an actual bow. But Elliot could not find one, “so I had to go for sheer volume,” he said. “All I did was plug a Les Paul into a Marshall on ten and open up both pickups. I also taped off all the string except for the G string because it was so loud that was the only way to control the other strings feeding back while I slip my finger along the G string and played the solo. That’s how it came about—it had nothing to do with Fripp.”

His solo merges with Greg’s synths, so the guitars sound like synths aping guitar sounds. By the time they recorded the first album, the two had struck on an intertwining chemistry, a double helix that is part of the band’s DNA. Now, it was even more seamless, like the weaving that Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood achieved on guitars.

Greg plays a number of inspired parts on “Since You’re Gone,” textures that range in subtlety: the high-frequency stuff that glistens like sunshine through an icicle, to midrange guitar-ish stuff, to lower oboe-like tones, and even a low-octave acoustic piano sound.

“Ric trusted Greg completely,” says longtime Cars crew member David “Heg” Heglmeier. “Knowing when to play. Sometimes, it’s not meant to be played at all. You have to have a cool ego. It’s about the song. Ric would always say you can’t ruin a good song. Greg’s countermelodies make me laugh. Listen to what he does at the end of ‘Good Times Roll’ [starting around 3:10]. His parts would always blow my mind. The harmonies he worked out with Ric were brilliant.”

“Flute is probably the one I play technically the best in my own opinion,” Greg said in 1982. “But keyboards, I’ll always play because it’s the best tool to compose with. Synthesizers and stuff is where my ear is the best.”

Where Panorama seemingly lacked some lyrical mojo, “Since You’re Gone” comes out with a number of inspired lines like “Everything’s in perfect tense.” Cut with humor, the song’s lyrics are bittersweet. He again alludes to one of his influences, with a line inspired by Bob Dylan’s devastating “I Threw It All Away.” The vocal phrasing itself is an homage to the Blonde on Blonde–era Dylan, the up-and-down talk-singing that Tom Petty often employed. “When I first wrote the song, I never thought about Dylan particularly,” Ric said, “but then when I was phrasing it, singing it, it just sounded like it was like a joke. The people would laugh in the studio when I’d do it, so I just thought it was a joke, so I just left it, and that was one take, like a reference vocal. There’s a certain thing about doing a vocal live right off that I find myself going back and trying to imitate my reference vocal, but the feeling was so much better.”

The title track follows, making for a potent one-two punch, a sixties garage throwback updated for the eighties. The song was written before they recorded the first album, one of the first songs they tried out as The Cars. But Ric was sued by a band in Florida called Broken Heroes, who claimed they first wrote a song with the same title that was very similar to The Cars’ song. A previous iteration of Broken Heroes (under the name Wowii) had been signed to Elektra in 1979 by Maxanne Sartori during her stint in A&R. The Broken Heroes song, even more of a throwback to golden oldies (with some “poppa oom-wow-wows”), is dissimilar from The Cars’ song in most ways, but they both go back and forth on a two-chord progression similar to the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” and share the title refrain. The Cars proved that Ric wrote the song before the Broken Heroes, and the suit was dropped. “We have dated rehearsal tapes from 1979 that include the song,” Elliot Roberts said. “No one at Elektra even talks to Ric Ocasek, let alone plays him tapes.”

David said “Shake It Up” had been “kicking around for years. It never sounded good. We recorded it a couple of times in the studio and dumped it, and we were going to try it one more time, and I was fighting everybody. . . . So we thought, ‘Let’s start all over again, like we’ve never even heard it. Completely change every part.’ And we did. Then, when it was through and all put back together, it was like a brand-new song.” Greg plays an organ riff that harks back to “Let’s Dance,” the 1962 single from Chris Montez, and “Do You Know What I Mean,” a 1971 Top 10 hit from Lee Michaels. The lyrics, which Ric laughed off later, keep with the theme, a simple dance-party anthem. It’s as catchy as a common cold, and that’s before Elliot goes to work on my personal favorite solo of his. The giddy guitar whips out of one of the first Cars bridges with wordsii (which repeats) and draws you in.

“Elliot was such an organized character,” remembers engineer Ian Taylor. He was always on time, with every part of his guitar and amp rig in perfect order and in tune. “Elliot would come to the studio. . . . [H]is guitar solo he would’ve known exactly what he was going to play, to the point that he would be like ‘And then, I’m going to use this pedal with these settings at this point, and then I’m going to switch it at this point here.’” Case in point: “Shake It Up.”

“I wanted it to sound like two different guys,” Elliot explains. “The first half is a Telecaster and has a little bit of chicken picking. And then for the second half where I bust out the melody [he triggers off Ric’s vocal melody], I plugged in a Gibson 355 and cranked the amp up to sound like another guy taking off on the solo.” That bend contains so much soul. “David was in the control room when I did that, and his dad was visiting, and his dad was jumping up and down. He was so excited. He goes, ‘Wow, this is amazing!’”

“But it still reminds me of the Benny Hill theme tune,” Taylor laughs. More a feature than a bug, I say—a solo with a sense of humor.

Elliot had the solo down pat when the band appeared on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Coast to Coast on November 19. Ben played a Steinberger bass, the minimalist headless axe of choice for new-wave bass players. Most bands are anchored by bass and drums together. The Cars, like the Rolling Stones, were a little unusual because they took their cue from the rhythm guitar. The Cars followed Ric, and the Stones (still, at the time of writing this) follow Keith Richards. Like Charlie Watts, David locked down the beat, provided a solid backbone, and rarely distracted from the song with flashy or superfluous fills. “Shake It Up” could definitely fit on any Stones album. In fact, Elliot referred to his part in the chorus as “the Keith bit.”

Ben had to be inventive on how to fit his bass parts into rhythms established by Ric (who would generally write to a drum machine). “Sometimes I find it frustrating,” Ben told Musician magazine. “Occasionally, I like to have something develop around me. Once in a while, it happens, but it doesn’t happen often. It gets classified as the Cars-beat. I try to play around the drums, too. I don’t know where that comes from—probably the old Earth Operaiii album on Elektra. Some of the early Beatles stuff also didn’t follow the drums.”

The ebullient summertime pop of “Shake It Up” is followed by the autumnal melancholy of “I’m Not the One.” Over “Dear Prudence”–like chord changes (broken by a “Penny Lane” meets “The Final Countdown” synth solo from Greg), Ric offers one of his most tender and vulnerable vocals. As a singer, he rarely, if ever, drew out long notes, instead cutting his phrasing into short clips. It might have been one of the factors when they decided who should sing a song, as Ben would often linger on notes.

It’s conceivable that Ric is singing from the standpoint of someone else—perhaps giving voice to Suzanne—who is directing the Dylanesque “It Ain’t Me Babe”–like lyric back at Ric; it is he who could not always be nice and would hide in his shell. It could also be an imagined dialogue, from verse to verse or even line to line, between lovers falling apart. Whatever the case, there is heft and substance here, with Ric putting his heart into the lyrics. It offers a preview of his finest ballad, “Drive.”

After the catchy toe-tapper “Victim of Love,” which David astutely pointed out is a Tom Petty–type song, we finally get the first Ben Orr vocal on the album, “Cruiser,” the last song on side one. It’s one of only three songs on which he takes the lead, versus six from Ric, the same proportion as Panorama (which had ten songs versus the nine on Shake It Up, with Ben and Ric splitting lead vocals on “You Wear Those Eyes”). Panorama features only one Ben lead vocal on side one.

“Cruiser” is more rhythm than melody and betrays the influence of Roxy Music. David plays real drumsiv along with a drum machine. Greg plays a Hammond B-3 organ, which is an unusual sound for a Cars album. It was the only available keyboard in the studio at the time they recorded it. Elliot approached his solo at the end of “Cruiser” like he’s variously George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and John Lennon, each trading licks on “The End” from Abbey Road. “You could tell their styles. John’s is really funky and raunchy, and George’s is really melodic. And Paul sounds like Paul. I had this idea that I was going to be all three, and with each lick, I tried to play with a different approach. I was having a round-robin.”

If side one is all killer, side two is mostly filler. None of their previous albums feels this out of balance. The side-two tracks, while serviceable, sound like less developed Panorama outtakes. But David counts the minor-key “This Could Be Love,” cowritten by Greg, as one of his favorite Cars songs. “Think It Over” has Ben singing in an Elvis caricature, underutilizing his tremendous range and depth as a vocalist.

Elliot used a Roland guitar synthesizer on “A Dream Away.” That one can be read as Ric’s message to himself. There he is at dawn, alone in a room with a “private moon,” finally achieving “the good life.” “The ‘chicken counters,’ it’s like, wow, what a strange little phrase that is,” Greg marvels. “And then ‘fill your bowls,’ I always thought was like a pot reference because Ric always had the way he would smoke. He rarely would roll joints, but he always had a little pipe, and he’d always take a couple of hits. So that’s what I interpreted that from. But then only recently I had this thought that maybe it wasn’t chicken counters, but it was chick encounters.’” It’s like Sam Cooke’s “He’s dancing with a chick in slacks,” which sounds like “chicken slacks” on “Twistin’ the Night Away.” But the lyric as printed in the sleeve of Shake It Up is “chicken.”

The band members rarely discussed Ric’s lyrics, and Ric shared no special insight with them. David preferred having his own interpretation and was more attuned to melody and time signatures. Greg paid attention to the little hooks and sounds of the words and the way phrases flowed. “I would often be either clueless, or I’m also one of those guys that lyrics are almost like the last thing I’ll pick up of a song,” he admits. The few times the band would give feedback to Ric about the lyrics would be if they felt something might be negatively misinterpreted by the audience.

The exceptional song on side two is “Maybe Baby.” The recycled Buddy Holly title (the second in a row after “Think It Over”) gives no indication of the grinding tempest, a suitable epic to close a Cars album, following the tradition of “Dangerous Type” and “All Mixed Up.” It comes out hard with a pummeling assault on stereo-doubled tom-toms by David, an unrelenting gallop through the whole song that creates a wide-screen cinematic scope and sweeping forward momentum. It’s like we’re being carried by horses in a clash of gladiators or zipping through Star Wars in the Millennium Falcon as we zoom past Elliot’s flurry of hammered notes on one side and Greg’s swooping synth slashes on the other. Greg was not sure of what he was going to play on the song until the last minute, uncharacteristically stumped. Ric’s poetic lyric stands up to the immense production.

When you dance between the stars

In the night late sweet and dark

Turn them over one by one

Roy Thomas Baker had originally proposed taking the album elsewhere to mix it, but Ric fought to keep it an in-house project, recorded and mixed at Syncro. The album tracks are sequenced to seesaw between styles of songs. As David Fricke wrote in the expanded edition’s liner notes, “a zigzag of moods and momentum, of textural electronic experiment and real-time live-band performance. The effect was a sly cocktail of froth and foreboding, immediate hooks with a constant underlying tension in the lyrics’ snapshot impressionism and romantic complications.” Soon after completion, Baker stated, “I think it’s the best album they’ve ever done. It’s got that sparkle the first album had, but it’s upgraded technically. And they play better now than they did then.” They recorded two extra tracks that appear on the expanded edition of the album, “Midnight Dancer” and “The Edge.”

Syncro Sound, by this time, had a twenty-four-track recorder in addition to Baker’s famous forty (only there temporarily) and a second smaller studio in the basement level. The main studio and control room were at street level, but the drum room was on the basement level, leaving more area in the relatively small studio on the main level, space that would have been taken up by a drum set and the required microphones. It also provided some modest natural reverberation. But when The Cars tracked, David did not use that designated room and set up in the main live room with the rest of them. All studios, as well as Steve Berkowitz’s office, were connected by audio or both audio and video.

They designed the facility with an Art Deco flair. A March 1982 Washington Post profile set the scene after the album was done and tour preparations were underway: “Blue-stained wood accents the Cars’ trademark black-and-white modernism. On the floor are a couple of hot-pink guitars, an idea of bassist Ben Orr for flashing up the visuals of their live show. Everywhere is the smell of newness, a bell-clear aroma of goals accomplished, status achieved.”

Ben was not one to hang around the new studio unless he had work to do. “He was really professional,” says Ian Taylor. “He sang, he did the vocals very quickly, and so as far as he was concerned, he’d done his part, and he was going home or going off somewhere. He didn’t want to hang around and go, ‘Oh, my bass is a bit low.’ Or, ‘Actually, I think I’d like to redo that little section.’”

Not only were all the hometown distractions they avoided by previously recording outside Boston in easy access, but the studio itself was also a magnet for friends, journalists, musicians, and hangers-on. While the Post journalist was there, an unhinged man tried to break into the studio through a window. Some crew shouted at the guy while Steve Berkowitz shielded a receptionist until Ben led a few of the roadies out to chase the guy down.

“He’s mentally disturbed, man, and we can’t figure out a way to get him off the street,” Ben said, settling down. “I don’t know why he hangs around, but I know for a fact he doesn’t like us at all. Keeps you on your toes, though. We’re really aware that he’s there, and we’ve tried to get the state to, uh, keep him from harm because one of these days somebody’s gonna kill him.”

Such was the inherent danger of having a studio so conspicuously located on one of Boston’s busiest shopping streets. But mostly, there was an open-door policy for friends and scenesters. Syncro, as they referred to it, intentionally became a drop-in center, a creative clubhouse for the band and friends. When bands like Cheap Trick came through town, they would end up at the studio. They partied with Iggy Pop one night after his August 1981 show at the Metro, a few blocks away in the shadow of Fenway Park.v Many local bands would record there over the years, including ’Til Tuesday, and national acts were attracted as well, like Ministry, and Romeo Void, whose breakthrough, “Never Say Never,” would be produced by Ric.

“You could just pop into Syncro,” says Foley. “They had this room downstairs. It was kind of the hangout room, and they had Pong, you know, the video game. They were one of the first ones to have Pong. And then we spent a lot of time in the Japanese restaurant next door. Rick Nielsen [Cheap Trick] and Roy decided they were going to make a bet to see who could eat the biggest piece of wasabi.vi We had so much fun. When I used to tell a story, and if I thought it was funny, I would say at the end, ‘Yeah, we were laughing and laughing.’” Foley pronounces this with a particular Boston accent that sounds approximately like “Yahr we were lah-fin and lah-fin.” It became a catchphrase among the friends. “One time somebody gave me this autograph book, and I’m like [mocking like she’s a starstruck fan], ‘Oh, Ben, sign this book for me.’ And that’s what he wrote in it: ‘We were laughing and laughing.’”

“Syncro was our life,” says Heg. “It wasn’t just something we did. We were there all the time.” Heg was a crew member with The Cars from the beginning. Steve Berkowitz hired him to work for Willie Alexander in the 1970s. When The Cars were leaving for their first tour in 1978, Berkowitz again hired Heg, who started with them on their first tour, primarily as David’s drum tech. But as with the other crew members, they were part of the team and did whatever was needed. Heg became Ric’s right-hand man and is still working with the organization.

When we first spoke, Heg was generous and gracious, even as he begged off from a formal interview, explaining that he does not have anything to add that I can’t find out from Luis Aira and Berkowitz, as well as the band members themselves. “Steve was in the middle of everything; they relied on him for a million things,” says Heg. “And Luis is an unbelievable character, a sweet guy who would give you the shirt off his back.” He explains that Aira would quickly become so close to Ric that “he knew everything personal about Ric.” Oftentimes, it would be just the three of them together, Ric, Luis, and Heg, after a tour or a session.

Writer Bill Flanagan and others almost immediately sensed this success would be encouragement for new Boston bands. The Cars were around town and mostly approachable, which was not so much the case for the bigger established bands in town. “J. Geils Band and Pete Wolf were also part of the scene and checked out things, but they weren’t as available, and Aerosmith was not available at all. And Boston [the band], nobody even knew. There’s some group somewhere who call themselves Boston, but we’ve never seen ’em. But The Cars were really part of the community, and when they built the studio, local bands started working there; it was a real boost. And suddenly, every band in Boston got a record deal.”

While The Cars looked at Syncro as one way to give back to the local scene, not everyone was grateful. David’s old bandmate from DMZ, the infamously thorny Jeff Conolly, had formed the seminal garage-rock band Lyres. One day, he spotted Elliot in his Jaguar.

“I was driving up Newbury Street to our studio, Syncro,” Elliot recalls. “It was one of those things like in Pulp Fiction where [Ving Rhames] is standing in front of Bruce Willis’s car, and he’s like, ‘Motherfucker.’ Jeff turns, he sees that it’s me, he looks at what kind of car it is, and he looks up and down, and he just hawks a big loogie at the car and just spits on the windshield.” When asked if Elliot felt like it was lingering bitterness from David leaving DMZ and jealousy over joining this now enormously famous rock band, or just plain bitterness, Elliot replies, “I don’t know what the fuck he felt, to be honest with you. He just seemed like a really angry guy.”

The studio technology and the clubhouse vibe were novel, as was the idea of taking as much time as they wanted while going back home to their own homes after sessions. They didn’t need to plan a half year or more in advance to book a world-class studio. Nor did they have to choose certain instruments to ship, never mind having to rent gear in another city.

Ric valued recording the music “at the point of inspiration” and with no schedule. Ian Taylor says Shake It Up was a lot more fun than the making of Panorama. The album sessions spread out over about two months. As much as everyone in the band seemed jazzed about the studio as a hub for Cars activity and side projects, it was Ric’s vision, as usual. Boston Globe journalist Steve Morse recalls Ric “was really proud of that place and how they were part of the city.”

“Ric used the studio as a place to hang out. It was for himself, and we were convinced that we would use it,” says David. “I think he also didn’t want to pay for the whole thing. So what happened was, he paid for half, then he paid his fifth, but he was in charge, so we helped him buy it basically.” Ric owned 60 percent while the others each owned 10 percent.

Ric had visions of Andy Warhol’s Factory (and, one would imagine, visions of a tax write-off). He wanted to have a film and video component to Syncro as well. David had met Luis Aira, a young film student at Emerson College. Aira started making music videos while he was in school, around 1979, two years before MTV launched. He made one for the Neighborhoods and another for the New Models. David told Ric about Aira, who was working on a thirty-minute film called Chapter X, featuring many local musicians.

“In 1981, I needed to graduate from college, and my mom didn’t have a lot of money,” Aira says. “To make a half-hour film back in 1981 was like $20,000. Just the stock itself was about eight grand, the development and all that. So I didn’t know how the hell I was going to graduate.” Aira lived a block away from Syncro with his roommate, Denis Leary, a fellow Emerson student. Aira would often hang around Syncro and get to know everyone. “I was a broke college student, so David would take me for lunch every day. He became my older brother, and then Ric became like my mentor.” He put together a pitch deck of the project and handed it to Ric to see if he could get some cash to help produce the film.

In the meantime, he got the idea for a benefit show with his rocker friends. He started by asking the Neighborhoods, whose lead singer, David Minehan, was going to play the lead in the film. “Then David Robinson said maybe some of the guys from The Cars would want to play on that. And I was friends with Jonathan Paley, from the Paley Brothers.” Jonathan and Andy Paley were a Beach Boys–influenced power-pop duo that had just broken up, and Jonathan had joined the Nervous Eaters, while Andy joined up with Patti Smith’s band and started an illustrious production career that included collaborating with Brian Wilson himself.

“The benefit was crazy because Peter Wolf wanted to play in it. Elliot, Greg, and David wanted to play in it, and Joe Perry wanted to play in it,” Aira reports, still a bit incredulous. “So all of a sudden, I have those little pieces from different famous bands. It was at a shitty club called Cyrano’s, and Carter Alan got on the radio [WBCN] and said, ‘Tonight at Cyrano’s! Aerosmith, The Cars, and the J. Geils Band are playing at Cyrano’s,’ which was a lie. I mean, it was just pieces of those bands. But three thousand people showed up. It was nuts. The Neighborhoods played. A bunch of people played. All those guys got together into one band. They called themselves the Young Jacques, and they played that night.” Elliot, Greg, David, Erik Lindgren (of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic), and the Paley Brothers soon recordedvii a surf tune called “Jacques Cousteau” as the Young Jacques.

Aira continues, “At three o’clock in the morning, when the police and the fire department tried to get people out of this club, I walked up to the Mafia guy who owned it, and I said, ‘Okay, well, how much did I get?’ And the guy points to Joe Perry—who was sitting on top of a keg, completely drunk out of his mind—and the guy says to me, ‘Your friends drink a lot.’ And I had made a deal with him that the band would get free booze. So he paid me three hundred bucks.”

Three hundred dollars was not going to get him anywhere. Dejected, Aira returned to Syncro, where he found Ric, who had read the newspaper account of this wild show the night before.

I’m sitting there, all bummed out, and Ric walks in and says to me, “Why the fuck did you have that thing last night? I thought I was going to give you the money.” And I was like, “Wow, are you serious?” Ric paid twenty-five thousand bucks. Paid for my film. From that moment on, I became his in-house filmmaker. I was Ric’s Paul Morrissey [of Warhol’s Factory], basically. I think he just liked the fact that I was an artist and creative person, always creating stuff. I would spend hours and hours at the studio sitting in a corner writing screenplays, and he loved that. I used to write a lot of poetry, all of that stuff. I was a true artist to him.

Aira, like all who were around in 1981–1983, describes an intoxicating and contagious creative energy that buzzed through Syncro. Ric set up Aira with an editing suite in the basement. “Berkowitz hated me because I was an intruder, but I always had the very strong support of Ric and David. So because of those two, I wasn’t kicked out, and I stayed there until I started getting pay gigs. At that point, I rented the upstairs from Syncro, and I had my offices up there.” Aira started to do commercial work, as well as music videos for local and international bands alike, including General Public.

Aira’s relationship with Ric grew, in his words, from “wingman” to “like family.” He remembers meeting Ric’s parents. “That was wicked awkward. It was very weird.” But Ric’s father was proud enough of his son to send a scolding letter to a critic, J. D. Considine, who gave Panorama a bad review in a Baltimore paper. “He goes into record stores and puts the records in front,” Ric said. Ric’s family expanded in 1981, when his and Suzanne’s second son, Derek, arrived. Along with Christopher and Adam, from his marriage with Constance, Ric now had four sons.

Everyone I spoke with who knew of the two described Aira as Ric’s best friend, though they would have periods over the years when they fell out of touch. Aira’s closeness with Ric caused some tension between Elliot and Luis. “Elliot doesn’t like me very much,” Aira says. “He always probably thought of me as a leech or something. Honestly, I think he was a little jealous that I was so close to Ric.” Elliot responds, “I was never jealous of Luis’s relationship with Ric. That’s just silly. And he was a leech.”

But Aira says he got along well with the others. He is still in touch with David. He calls Greg a “true gentleman.” Like many, he did not get to know Ben in a deep way. But he offers a more finely drawn portrait of a person who was more complicated than he appeared. “Ben was very charming. He was a ham,” Aira begins. “He was always flirty with girls and a very good-looking dude, as you know. But in many ways—I know this was just a facade—but in many ways, he came across as a very simple man, and he wasn’t; he was just quiet.” While Ben was nonchalant about the small stuff or even the demands of being in an enormously successful band, he was emotionally invested with people, and not just those close to him, but most with whom he came into contact. He cared. Aira says, “I think that that’s the impression that Ben wanted to give, that he didn’t give a fuck, but he gave a fuck.”

“Ben was a really nice guy,” says writer and friend of the band Mike Howell. “Oddly enough, a really good listener. Most good-looking guys are not good listeners.”

Aira tells me, “I saw the way Ben treated his roadie,” Brian Skarlz, “and that says a lot about a man. He treated him very well.” In addition to Heg, the loyal Cars crew included Skarlz, Thom Moore, Andy Topeka, and Elliot’s guitar tech, Joe Astrella.viii The Cars crew was salaried with health plans and other benefits.

“Ben was such a little boy,” says Katherine Bergholtz, who was then known as Kim Leo. Bergholtz was among the same group of friends from Emerson College as Aira, Denis Leary, and Colleen Kelley. Though she was studying broadcast journalism, she was also a model and did some acting, including in Aira’s film. Elliot was the first member of The Cars she met through Colleen. Shortly after, she met Ric.

One day, I was walking home from school down Newbury Street, and Ric was outside their studio on Newbury and stopped me and said, “Hey, how you doing?” I was like, “Okay, good.” I knew who he was because I think at that time, Colleen was dating Elliot. He said, “You want to come in?” And I went in, and we hung out for a couple of hours, and he was really engaging and very interesting. He was never inappropriate or anything. So, of course, the next day, I walked down the street at the same time just to see him again. We just became friends. I would go visit him after school. He was married. I remember going with him to pick out a gift for his wife for a birthday.

Elliot put her on the guest list for a show at the Boston Garden, which is how she met David, and she soon started dating David. She was nineteen, and he was thirty-one. “But it didn’t seem like he was really old. He was so young-looking.”

With some time off, the band started working on side projects at Syncro Sound, and the Cars, Guitars, and Elliot Easton documentary shows Elliot wailing on a funk-fusion, almost Jeff Beck–like piece with Greg, David, Erik Lindgren, Paul Carter, and Andy Paley. Ric is interviewed while taking a break from producing Romeo Void. Elliot Roberts—looking a little out of his Laurel Canyon comfort zone in a sort of new-wave outfit in a double-breasted shirt and leather pants (as if dressed by Ric)—talks about how Ric and Easton exposed him to Bow Wow Wow, The Teardrop Explodes, and other newer and unreleased music. “The Cars look for new music,” he says. As Syncro got up and running, Ric produced singles and albums there for a number of acts.

While Aria was editing Chapter X, Ric and Ian Taylor were recording Romeo Void, a San Francisco band whom Ric had approached after a show. Ian Taylor engineered the session. “We did three or four days’ recording, and then we mixed it all, and all the gear was packed up. And that night, Romeo Void played at Spit [club]. I went to the gig, and they played all the songs we recorded, and then they did an encore. They played a very rough version of ‘Never Say Never.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my god, why the fuck didn’t you record this?’” He convinced them they had to return to the studio to record it the next day. Taylor prepared the studio that night after the gig and called Ric to tell him he had to hear this song. Ric was busy, but he gave the go-ahead to Taylor. “We recorded that song, and they just did a jam that lasted about—however long it was. And then I sat down with [engineer and tape operator] Walter Turbitt, and we just cut the whole thing together in pieces. There is a recurring sax hook that was the result of an accidental bad edit. It has a skip in it, a little timing stutter that just sounded good,” so they kept it.

Aira laughs, “I heard, ‘I might like you better if we slept together’ a thousand fucking times. They were a jam band. They didn’t seem to be able to write a song. Ian coproduced the Romeo Void record. Ric brought them in, but most of the work was really done by Ian. Ric was just learning how to work his way around a studio.”

Ric wasn’t there for the recording or mixing of the song. “He just heard it when it was finished,” Taylor explains. “But of course, it was part of that session, so he was always listed as the producer. At some point, I thought I should approach Ric and go like, ‘Ric, what happened to the money on that?’”

Another of Ric’s early production projects at Syncro was for Bebe Buell. Before her music career, Buell had been a model (including as a Playboy playmate in 1974) and girlfriend of a number of musicians, including Elvis Costello, Todd Rundgren, and Steven Tyler, who was the father of Buell’s daughter, Liv Tyler.ix She said Ric was one of the first men who didn’t objectify her. He had even gifted her a 1978 vacation to St. Martin. “There was a generosity to Ric that a lot of people probably didn’t know because all I’ve ever heard is people say that he was stingy and tight, and I didn’t see stingy or tight.” The trip was something he kept secret from Suzanne. Even though Suzanne was okay with their friendship, Buell feels that would have been one step too far.

It wasn’t the only secret Ric kept, Buell explains. “He lived a double life sometimes,” she says, seemingly without intending to refer to The Cars song. “What can I say? I mean, he was very good at it. He was very, very, very secretive. I can give you an example of Ric’s behavior, even in marriage, even in times of commitment and love. My girlfriend Paula Yates was married to Bob Geldof and hosted the biggest show on [British] television with my friend Jools Holland. I adored her.” Ric and The Cars had met Yates while they were recording their first album.

We’re all at dinner—Ric, Paula, and I—and you could have cut the air with a knife between the two of them, the sexual tension and the insanity between them, as if I’m not going to notice. They’re both dear friends of mine, and they don’t think I can feel this. And so after we ate, and they were doing the eyes, thinking that I don’t see anything. We’re leaving. And so I said to Ric, “Do you want to share a cab?” Because we were both going downtown. And he said, “Oh, I think I’m just going to walk.” I’m like, “Okay, dude, forty blocks?! Okay, whatever.” And I said to Paula, “Do you want to share a cab?” She goes, “I think I’m just . . . I’ll get a cab.” So they’re like, lollygagging. So I just said, “Okay, I’ll see you guys later. Have fun.” I knew exactly what was going to happen the second I got in that cab, that they were going to go and have mad sex with each other because they were eating each other alive with their eyes during the dinner. So I’m just saying that there was a part of Ric that was able to do these things and not get found out. Nobody knew. So that’s what I’m saying. And there’s a couple of other very, very, very high-profile women who I dare not. . . . Women found him very interesting.

Ric was largely responsible for starting Buell’s music career. “It was only Ric at that point and a couple of other people that sort of in passing would say, ‘You know, you really should just get a band. That’s where your heart is.’ And people would tell me I had a good voice and I had a unique voice, an odd voice. And so I embraced Ric because he was giving me the respect.”

Ric produced two tracks for Buell’s first record, Covers Girl (1981). “I was a little bit of a guinea pig. I think the Bad Brains and Suicide, I think we were a little bit of guinea piggies for him.” She was struck by Ric’s approval and his subsequent treatment of her as a real artist. They recorded her vocals of two covers with The Cars as the backing band: “The Little Black Egg,” a 1965 garage-rock nugget by the Nightcrawlers that was one of Ric’s obsessions, and Iggy Pop’s “Funtime,” which was Buell’s choice. When Iggy visited, they had played the cover of his song back for him, and he marveled at how well Ben had captured his voice on the guide/scratch vocal he laid down before Ric replaced it with Buell’s vocals at Syncro. These two tracks would later be released by The Cars on the 1995 compilation Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology, with the original vocals by Ric on “The Little Black Egg” and Ben on the Iggy song.

“As you know, it was a much more sexist time,” Buell emphasizes. “So when Ric came into my life, I thought, ‘Wow, he really respects who I am.’ I don’t know if he was playing me. I will never know, but he never, ever stepped over a line with me. He was always an anchor, but I think everybody around him thought we were having an affair.” She adds, “I had a crush on David Minehan; I wasn’t interested in Ric! David wasn’t interested in me at all, so I was like a sick puppy over him. But I also still carried this huge torch for Elvis Costello.” She reports that Costello was not a fan of The Cars. “Elvis used to pretend The Cars didn’t exist.” While she said her relationship with Ric was purely platonic, Elliot says, “Ric told me otherwise. In detail.”

Ric encouraged her musically, encouraging her to write, respected her as a lyricist, and turned her on to new music like Skinny Puppy. “I have to put Ric up there as one of my best friends ever, ever, ever,” she emphasizes.

Greg says Ric considered himself the auteur of the Syncro scene. “He always had sort of this vision of being sort of an Andy Warhol type, with the whole Factory. That was partly what the idea of Syncro Sound was: building up the Boston community, the music and video, and working with Luis and doing the Chapter X movie.” Greg cowrote something for the film with Ric called “Backseat Waltz,” but Ric took sole credit for the collaborative work. David recorded a song built around African drumming with a call-and-response chant for the film. He also produced singles, one for Ralph Fatello’s band Vinny and an EP for Boys Life.

David was also sponsored by Polaroid around this time. He had been making experimental photos with his Polaroid camera, test patterns and close-up on television screens, creating abstract color-field images. Polaroid would lend him their studio to reshoot those original small versions using a large-format twenty-by-twenty-four-inch camera. The company appreciated David’s work in part because it demonstrated the color capability of their technology. G. E. Smith tapped David to design a cover for Smith’s 1981 solo album, In the World, giving David carte blanche. He used the large Polaroids to create photos within photos.

Shake It Up was released on November 6, 1981, and the title track was the first single, with “Cruiser” as the B-side, bringing The Cars their biggest hit when it reached number 4 on the Billboard singles chart and number 3 in Cashbox in February 1982. It even charted at 14 on the Billboard disco singles chart. The album cracked the Billboard Top 10, peaking at 9 in December. Again, David designed the artwork, and again, the cover would feature one of his girlfriends, Mary Ann Walsh, almost laughing in soft focus as she shakes a cocktail. When I mention the trend of his girlfriends and the cover art, David explains with a laugh, “We didn’t have to pay them! I still have that cocktail shaker.” Shake It Up would go on to sell more than two million copies, righting the ship from the relatively disappointing one million on Panorama (which most artists would kill for).

WBCN staged a promotion for the album release. David Bieber recalls, “I put it together with Elektra Records. [Deejay] Mark Parenteau gave away a new car while delivering a live broadcast, hanging over the Charles River. We suspended in the car by a large crane—not authorized by city or highway officials or OSHA—facing the huge neon-lit Strawberries Records and Tapes store on Memorial Drive. Talk about ‘shakin’ it up!’”

The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau always seemed to understand The Cars. He wrote, “They’ve always cultivated a dark side—girls make boys want to end it all even after the boys have grown up. They’ve always basked in the shadow of Roxy Music, too. But they’ve never been so stylishly nightmarish—except for the title cut, even the fast ones don’t aim for fun.”

“Now we’re talkin’!” is how Bill Flanagan began his Trouser Press review of the album. “The Cars evidently got their artsier ambitions out of their systems with last year’s Panorama; Shake It Up finds the Boston quintet devoting their considerable skill to melodic pop tunes.” He noted that while some more adventurous listeners might find fault with the overly mainstream approach, “those who retain old-fashioned values will applaud the fine taste and craftsmanship the Cars show here.”

But Steve Morse found The Cars to be going in the wrong direction, contrasting them unfavorably with the J. Geils Band, whose new Centerfold was the biggest hit of their career by a wide margin. Morse’s review in the Boston Globe read, “Shake It Up is a conservative, cautious work that breaks no new ground. The only thing it shakes up is the notion the Cars have a bottomless well of ideas.” He judged it “pallid” and “the first bad record they’ve done.”

Some reviews found the record to have too little in the way of guitars. “I remember reading reviews that made that observation,” Elliot says. “I didn’t recall that because there are so many parts on those songs. If there’s less sort of show-offy stuff, maybe that’s what people are sensing. But I don’t know. I just worked really hard on the music and tried to do whatever it called for, honestly. I don’t remember working less hard. That’s not the party line. I mean, we never had a conversation like, ‘Well, the last record had a lot more guitars. Let’s have less guitar.’ We never had those conversations.”

Everyone was eager to get back on the road, except Ric, who was quite content with all the projects he had cooking at home and did not want to tour much anymore. While the tours grossed prodigious amounts of revenue, they were not netting as much as they could because of the high overhead of staying in luxury accommodations, flying first-class between gigs instead of touring on buses, and the elaborate stage production. So, they would limit their 1982 tour to under two months in North America. Europe was not even considered. “Ric didn’t want to tour,” David says. “So we never tried to sell records in Europe. It was so stupid. Like, ‘Oh, we don’t need the rest of the world. Forget them.’” When asked if that had been the case from the beginning of their career, David replies, “No, I think he liked it. It was exciting. He was the center of attention.”

“I like the road a lot,” Ben said that year. “It’s nice to go out once every couple of years and shake off the dust, as it were. Performing on a stage makes the day worthwhile, actually. You have an outlet, at least it is for me. A lot of young guys want to go out on the road and see what it’s like. So we got a chance in great detail the first few years.”

“It was frustrating because Ric kind of kept them from making more money by touring more,” says David’s ex Katherine Bergholtz (Kim Leo). “But David never really liked touring either. And David didn’t even really like playing the drums, but he also knew that he had to strike while the iron was hot.”

Ric considered himself a writer, not a performer. The touring kept him from writing, recording, and producing others. The creation, not the performance, was his true passion. Greg was the same. He says, “I was always happiest making records and being in the studio. That was sort of my happy place with The Cars. I wasn’t a big fan of touring, although in retrospect, certainly, I wish we had exploited it more.”

They had sold many millions of records, which they rightfully understood as an opportunity to relax a little and branch out to other projects, though when reminded of the relatively small amount of touring they did on Shake It Up, David cracks, “No wonder I have no money.”

Now, with MTV quickly gaining attention, they could sink a little dough into creating videos that would actually offer them wide exposure nationwide (and globally) with less reliance on touring. The video for the first single of the album, “Shake It Up,” was directed by Paul Justman, brother of Seth from the J. Geils Band, who went on to direct films like Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Paul directed groundbreaking and successful videos for Geils, such as “Freeze Frame” and “Centerfold.”

“Shake It Up” shows the band driving in a convertible, cruising down Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, cast with a lot of pretty women who start off thinly disguised as various male and female characters, only to be—surprise!—revealed at the end as hot models. After Ric starts driving alone, David is shown on a sidewalk drumming and then in the back seat with an “old” lady [wink wink]. “I just tried to get through [videos] with my dignity intact,” David said. It’s missing only an appearance from David Lee Roth for peak ’80s MTV. But hey, it was fun.

While in Los Angeles, the band returned to the television show Fridays on January 8, during its final season on air. They played “Shake It Up” and “Since You’re Gone.” Cast member Larry David introduces the band for the second song, “Since You’re Gone.” As the cast bids the audience good night at the end of the show, cast member Michael Richards dresses up like Ric and stands next to him in the exact same pose while the credits roll.

Stephen Bickford conceived of a new set for the Shake It Up tour, which would commence in February. He describes the design that they used: “There were these huge black towers behind them. They were somewhat triangulated. There was a backdrop behind. The spotlights onstage were all coming from one side. There were no spots from the front or the other side. The guys were downstage. They looked like they came on black horses from the Devil’s own cave. They had these black hats and black jackets, and it was just a great fucking show.” Bickford again operated the lights. Ben wore a Spanish bolero hat that he used to dramatically shield his eyes from the audience, keeping his face in shadow and revealing it for effect. One concert review described him in a pirate-inspired outfit, like Adam Ant.

Bickford recalls this era of the band as being fraught. “You can imagine that being associated with Ric gave me a wall that I could stand or hide behind because no one’s going to mess with him, so they can’t come and tell me, ‘It’s got to be darker over there,’ that sort of thing.” Bickford would run his ideas for the stage design by Ric, though David was still very involved and would travel to the shops where the sets were under construction.

Ben did not weigh in about such issues. “Ben would be just sitting at meetings,” David says. Ric wanted to make a cut to keep expenses lower. “But luckily, at that point, I just said, ‘Ric, no, we have to have that extra stuff. It’s crazy. Take a cut in pay to get the extra pieces in there.’ But that ended up being my last freedom, practically, within the band, I was working on sets. No interference.

“So we’re all talking, people are chiming in, and Ben is always the same; he’s there with a cigarette, looking around the room. And it’s like, ‘Is he even listening to this?’ He’s got nothing to add. So finally, we get to him, ‘Ben, what do you think?’ And he’s literally like this: ‘Well, it’s good [mimes blowing cigarette smoke]. And I don’t know about that, but you could do that. That’s pretty good.’ [Trails off in a mumble.] So we look at each other. ‘Was that a yes?’ I said, ‘Ben likes it. He’s in favor of keeping the extra truck!’ Ben was such a mystery.”

The band, on the other hand, nicknamed David “Opposite Man” for his self-appointed role as devil’s advocate, if not a contrarian. He was the check on Ric’s increasing control, maintaining the group’s sliver in the balance of power. Elliot says, “We were getting kind of sick of some of David’s meshuggaas. Because it seemed like if everybody else wanted to go left, he wanted to go right. And it just seemed like it was again and again and again.”

Tensions within the band, mostly between Ric and David at this point, were bubbling up. “Ric kicked me out of the band once,” David says.

What happened was, people always say—like lots of fans, but even sometimes in interviews—“It must be great working with Ric!” So it was at a time when I just really had enough of lying about it or making up a side story about it. So I said, “Well, y’know, he can be a lot of trouble at times.” They seemed surprised. Literally, I couldn’t have said more than two sentences.

It gets back to Ric. So Ric, I don’t even know how he did it, but he got the other guys to agree to kick me out because of that. So they wouldn’t meet with me face-to-face. And then, finally, Greg broke down and said, “Yeah, it’s not fair. We have to hear from David.” So we have this meeting, and Ric’s like, “You’re causing bad vibes in the band.” And I knew what he was talking about. Ben, of course, didn’t have a clue. I’m not sure the other guys even understood. Ric’s version was probably that I was bad-mouthing him, and so it wasn’t good for the band. But it was one thing that I said, that maybe he’s not a nice guy. So I’m saying, “You could have told me about it, and I might’ve changed what I was doing, but you’re just kicking me out. You didn’t even give me a trial or anything like that. I didn’t even hear a really good reason why you’re doing this.” And it was Greg who finally said something. He said, “You know David’s right.” So I got back in. I was almost kicked out for saying that Ric was not a great guy. That’s how close it was all the time.

Says Elliot,

It was a meeting down in the lounge at Syncro Sound, and he was, “Please don’t do this,” and was in tears, and we backed off. I don’t know that anyone was thinking about who was going to replace David. Maybe Ric was already. I don’t know. But that wasn’t really the issue at the time. It was just that David was—I mean, for instance, the song “Shake It Up” was finished for the Panorama record, and David vetoed it. He said, “This song is”—I think his exact words were “dull and pedestrian.” And so we put it on the next record. It was the title track and one of our biggest singles. That kind of finicky, kind of crazy stuff that just got under people’s skin.

David responds that no one thought the song “Shake It Up” was ready to be released before its time. “Ric would have been the one to make the final call anyway. It was a completely different song. And it was Elliot who transformed it with those Keith Richards–like guitar parts and that great solo.”

Still, they had a sense of humor about it. Around this time, radio host Jim Ladd asked Greg and David if there had been any fights in the band.

“Fistfights?” Greg asked. “No. Ric is real good with knives.” David agreed, “He’s a blade man.”

In a 1982 interview with journalist Lisa Robinson, she told Ric that she had read, “Your drummer says he doesn’t even know what half of [the lyrics] are about half the time.” Ric replied, “I think he just says that because it’s like a jab.” Ric also noted, without naming David, that when he made demos, he would play some of the band’s parts on demos as suggestions. “Some people get put off by it,” he said. “I can understand how it would sort of take the thinking out of it and so might cause a little dissension.” He reiterated his respect for all of them as people and bandmates. “The only time I sort of get in the way is when I don’t want something in there.”

Ric also had increasing conflict with Elliot. Elliot says that Ric and Elliot Roberts squelched the Cars, Guitars, and Elliot Easton documentary because the focus was on Elliot Easton, not Ric. It was not aired in North America. Easton explains,

They went to considerable expense filming this thing. And we all contributed a lot of time and effort into doing it. And Elliot Roberts killed it. Also, Elliot nixed me playing on a Peter Frampton album. Certain things that would’ve raised my profile, and I get tagged as underrated. That’s the big adjective used to describe me. And I feel pretty rated, to be honest with you. I have no feelings of resentment about that. But stuff happened, and there’s a reason why I was never sort of branded like a guitar hero or things like that because it was suppressed. And that’s not paranoia. Stuff happened. Things were vetoed, turned down, killed. And so it is what it is.

Roberts had hitched his wagon to Ric, the songwriter. “Ric decided he was a serious songwriter. He didn’t like to share in any of the glory with us,” says David, adding that Ric was aided and abetted by Roberts. Roberts “looked at us and thought, ‘Who’s the leader of this band?’ He picked Ric out. It went to Ric’s head pretty quickly. Ric was doing all of the interviews, and I remember calling [Roberts] up. I said, ‘Why is Ric doing all the interviews? Where’s us?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I’m going to focus on you band members separately.’ At the time, I had no reason not to believe him.”

Steve Berkowitz agrees. “Ric was quite taken by the Hollywood-star thing. He was that guy, though. He had a unique look. He did write most of the songs. It was going to be in his vision, and he became the leader; if he wasn’t always the leader, he certainly became the leader because it’s clear: he’s the one who writes all the songs.”

“Elliot [Roberts] was a one-on-one person. It wasn’t personal,” says Bill Gerber, an agent with Roberts’s Lookout Management who would soon join The Cars’ team. “He wouldn’t know how to deal with three people in a band. He’s just not that guy.” Roberts was used to dealing with Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Neil Young daily. “Neil and Joni were godlike people to him.” Ric was intoxicated by the thought that he might be part of that elite club. It came at the expense of the group, though.

The Cars started the tour in February with Nick Lowe opening. Lowe’s band included pub-rock all-stars Paul Carrack (Ace; Squeeze), Martin Belmont (the Rumour), and Billy Bremner (Rockpile; the Pretenders). At the Boston Garden, David couldn’t locate his father, Guy. Anne Marie Foley recalls, “So we go down the hall and knock on the door, and he’s in there talking to Nick Lowe and the band. David’s like, ‘What are you doing? Is he bothering you?’ ‘Oh, no, Guy’s so funny!’ He told the guys, ‘My son’s band’s good, but you guys, you’re the best.’”

This was the show when David met Katherine Bergholtz (Kim Leo). She remembers both bands going to a party at Elliot’s house. “Nick’s band was crazy out of their minds,” she says. “I got sent home, back to my dorm, in the car with Nick Lowe and two guys from the band. And this was back when people weren’t really paying attention to driving intoxicated. I remember sitting in the back seat thinking I was just going to die, speeding through the tollbooth, and Nick Lowe in the back screaming, ‘I think we’re all going to die!’”

David says that the bands learned that Warner Bros. owned a number of Grand Prix go-kart tracks around the country, so after a few of the shows, David, Ben, and perhaps Elliot would join Nick Lowe and his bandmates and “take over the track. There might be like this one teenage kid who’d be calling his boss and asking if it was okay for these guys to do this. We weren’t supposed to race, but Nick and those guys were crazy-drinking Englishmen and it would be complete mayhem. I have a picture of Ben smoking his cigarette in his helmet, with the visor pulled down.”

Reviews for the tour were mixed, with many repeating the observation that the band displayed little engagement. Reviewing for the hometown Boston Globe, though, young writer Jim Sullivan found a lot to like at the Garden show. He began by noting novelist Dan Jenkins, author of Semi-Tough, “created a world of ambiguity, a world without absolutes, a world where trust was offset by wariness. As it is with The Cars.” Sullivan noted their uncompromising stance and found the live presentation of the balance between melody and “dark moods and dissonant passages” to be “effective and yet ephemeral.”

“Since You’re Gone” was released as a single on March 8, backed with “Think It Over.” It was kept one slot out of the Top 40 in Billboard, but it hit 37 on the UK singles chart. As he had with “Shake It Up,” Paul Justman directed the video for it, depicting a woman moving out while the band sits around playing in the living room of a suburban house while watching TV. Ric plays the chord sequence wearing fingerpicks. Soon, the furniture is moved out from under him, and the band bears witness as he pulls back the bedcovers to reveal his pink Fender Jazzmaster. The tone is pitch-perfect for the melancholy song, a balance of humor against the singer’s ghostly loss.

The tour was completed at the end of March. Though they were off the road for the summer, they were kept near-peak cultural relevance by MTV and a key placement on a movie soundtrack. “Moving in Stereo” was featured prominently in a scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which was released to theaters on August 13. Cameron Crowe wrote the screenplay based on his 1981 book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story. Crowe, who had already scored interviews with big acts like Led Zeppelin as a teenager reporting for Rolling Stone, had, at the age of twenty-one, spent a year undercover as a senior at Clairmont High School. The research was used for his fictionalized novel.

The film was coproduced by Irving Azoff, who envisioned it in large part as a jukebox for the acts he managed, like the Eagles. Soundtracks were big business (though The Cars song would not be included on the Fast Times soundtrack). Crowe had remained friends with Azoff over the years. “He came in, and he helped Fast Times the movie get made,” Crowe told Ronald Hart in Billboard. “And also, we really enjoyed the idea that we were gonna do this album with a bunch of new music, and a lot of them were his artists.”

The teen comedy featured virtually unknown actors who would soon become stars, like Sean Penn, Judge Reinhold, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Forest Whitaker, and Nicolas Cage. Amy Heckerling directed, and she, like Crowe, was up-to-date with new music. “With [the character] Damone, I was very, very, very specific, ’cause it was Pete Townshend and Buzzcocks and Elvis Costello and people that I love,” Heckerling explained. “I loved ska. I loved punk. I loved new wave. So Damone represented all of the things that I was in love with. And then punk was sort of turning into new wave back then, and then Debbie Harry and Blondie started having hits, you know, Cheap Trick and the Knack. Things that started out punky then were turning more friendly, but they still had that drive and sense of fun.”

The various parties compromised on which music would be included, and the resulting collaboration rang true for the times. Teenagers didn’t just listen to Jackson Browne, the Go-Go’s, Bruce Springsteen, or Devo; most kids listened to whatever was on the radio. All this stuff was either on mainstream radio or bubbling under, with hipper gatekeeper types like the Damone character heralding newer bands.

Eric Jenkins, the film’s editor, put together the famous sequence where Phoebe Cates surfaces from a swimming pool and Judge Reinhold’s character, Brad, indulges in a masturbatory fantasy about her removing her bikini top for him. She moves toward him (peeking from the house’s bathroom window) in slow motion and “in stereo.” Despite receiving a very limited theatrical release and barely any marketing, the movie quickly gained word-of-mouth traction, with a 60 percent profit by the end of the year. It became a lasting cultural touchpoint for Gen Xers and is widely regarded as a classic.

The Cars didn’t perform again until the Us Festival in September 1982. A crowd that peaked at an estimated two hundred thousand attended the three-day outdoor festival over Labor Day Weekend in San Bernardino in more than one-hundred-degree heat. There had not been many large-scale festivals in America in the 1970s, so this was going to get noticed. Indeed, the festival’s name was a reaction to the “Me Decade.” Billed as “Music, technology, and people,” it was conceived and financed by Apple Computer cofounder Steve Wozniak for about $12.5 million (adjusted for inflation, about $41 million in 2024) and promoted by Bill Graham. Bruce Springsteen reportedly turned down $1 million to headline the closing Sunday, so Fleetwood Mac was booked instead. The Police headlined Friday, which was mostly punk and new wave, with such artists as Gang of Four, Ramones, B-52s, and Talking Heads. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers headlined on Saturday, which was the bill that included The Cars, sandwiched between Santana and the Kinks. An outdoor amphitheater was built. There was impressive staging, cutting-edge sound, and a video screen hovering over the stage, with additional screens around the grounds. Air-conditioned tents served as video-game arcades. There was even a two-way satellite connection to the Soviet Union in a gesture of goodwill. In many ways, it was a test run for the landmark Live Aid festival three years later. It spotlighted the commercial breakthrough of new-wave acts.

Some video of The Cars’ fifteen-song performance can be seen on YouTube. “Greetings, earth people,” says Greg from the stage before they start their set. Audience shots show bikini-topped women swaying atop dudes’ shoulders, people kicking up dust, dancing and singing along, and baking in the sun-scorched desert.

After the Us Festival, the band returned home for a long break from the road, though not exactly taking “the big vacation.” They played a couple of one-off appearances to finish out 1982, including a surprise appearance at a benefit show at the Metro in Boston in December, playing a blazing mini-set on the relatively small stage. They would keep busy, but The Cars would not tour again until 1984.

Footnotes

i They had actually started by looking for a rehearsal studio: “We almost bought two other buildings in the past three years,” David told the Cleveland Plain Dealer on February 5, 1982.

ii Most of their earlier bridges or “middle-eights,” as they’re also known, were instrumental.

iii This was a 1968 psychedelic/proto-prog album by the Boston band of the same name that featured David Grisman and Peter Rowan, two eminent bluegrass musicians.

iv “I’m Not the One” is the only song on the album that is all drum machine, though David overdubbed the cymbals—always the weak link in early drum machines.

v Though some tellings have Iggy at the Paradise, he played the Metro in 1981 and the Channel in 1982. He played the Paradise the night John Lennon died, December 8, 1980.

vi Elliot recalls the wasabi-eating contest happening at Legal Seafood in Chestnut Hill.

vii At Perfect Crime Studios in Watertown, not at Syncro.

viii All have passed away other than Heg.

ix Liv was named Rundgren and brought up thinking Todd was her birth father.

Chapter 15

BEATITUDE

AFTER THE SHAKE IT UP TOUR, THE CARS LOST A KEY ALLY IN STEVE BERKOWITZ, who had been a crucial player in building their tremendous success. “We were very good in a tight unit going from the first record through the fourth record,” Berkowitz explains. “Basically, at the end of the Shake It Up tour, Elliot [Roberts] didn’t want to pay me what I deserved, and he had some other designs for that money and found a reason to eliminate me. There was money owed to me, a payoff of the profit of the tour. But he made up a reason of why I had to go away.”

Berkowitz had started to manage and produce the Boston band the New Models, whose Casey Lindström would contribute to Ric’s 1982 solo album, Beatitude. “[Roberts] says, ‘I didn’t talk about you being a producer and a manager.’ I said, ‘No, I never asked. Why would I ask your permission for that? You don’t run my life.’ He was looking for a way out with me. I think [Roberts] had a huge divorce-settlement payment coming up, and he saw that was a resource for the money, and he took it. And that was the end of me. My answer to the end of that is ‘Hooray for Hollywood.’ It was just an LA kind of thing, man: ‘It’s not really about you; it’s about me.’”

Berkowitz felt he had no recourse. There were no written agreements with Roberts. Everything was a handshake deal. By the age of thirty, Berkowitz had already accrued serious experience with one of the top bands in the world. But he understood his place in the music biz was still nothing compared to the very powerful Elliot Roberts. And the example of Fred Lewis was fresh in his mind. Lewis, Berkowitz thought, won his battle, but at the expense of losing the war. “I know how much Fred got,” Berkowitz says. “I haven’t seen Fred in the music business again. After that, I went, ‘All right, well, I could try to fight these guys. I could try to get some kind of severance.’ But I actually worked at Elliot’s company. I didn’t work for The Cars anymore.”

Steve recalls that his wife, Monique, “was ready to assassinate everybody, the managers and the band, for just copping out and falling away. But I can’t honestly tell you if Elliot ever spoke to the band about it or not. He probably spoke to Ric.” When informed of this particular explanation, the band members have no memory of ever learning about it.

Ric was Roberts’s main priority. Depending on which surviving member you ask, it’s questionable if Roberts even cared about any of them, never mind Berkowitz, whom he evidently believed was expendable. “I just always liked Elliot Roberts,” Greg Hawkes says with a shrug. “I know Elliot Easton probably doesn’t have fond memories of him, and maybe not David Robinson either, but I just always thought he was so funny. And he was a pot smoker, so we had that in common. Well, not that Elliot Easton wasn’t. In fact, Elliot Roberts hooked us up with this guy who grew pot in Hawaii, and then he would mail it to us at Syncro Sound—pounds, a shipment from Hawaii.”

Ric, though, had started complaining about Berkowitz in front of the others. When asked what that would have been about, David laughs, “Because he probably tried to stop Ric from doing something stupid.”

Greg remembers that when the artwork for Shake It Up was presented for proofing, it read, “Management: Lookout Management: Elliot Roberts/Steve Berkowitz.” Greg says, “And I remember Ric going, ‘Steve Berkowitz isn’t the manager of the band! Why is his name there for that? Elliot’s our manager.’” So, they removed Berkowitz’s name. Steve still has a copy of the artwork with his disputed credit.

Berkowitz continues, “I think that that was the thing between [Roberts] and Ric, that Ric would become like Neil. Ric would become like Joni. Ric would become like Tom [Petty]. According to my discussions with David and Greg, this kind of came out of the blue to them. And [Roberts] was the great big Hollywood guy with all the power and the connections who could call Lorne Michaels, who could call Ahmet [Ertegun]. So you don’t want to fuck with that.” Berkowitz chalked it up to a learning experience in building his career in the music biz.

He had also been working with Ministry for Roberts and Lookout Management. Under the leadership of Al Jourgensen, Ministry went on to become iconic industrial-metal artists but, at the time, were playing lighter British-influenced (so much so that Jourgensen sang in a British accent) synth-pop that gave little indication of their later direction. They recorded demos at Syncro on spec with Ian Taylor, who had caught Ministry their first time through Boston, playing at Maverick’s Techno Groove, a strip club downtown that had a brief run doubling as a live-music venue. Taylor’s demos caught the ear of Elliot Roberts and Steve Berkowitz.

When Berkowitz got the call that he had been fired, he was staying in Amsterdam in a house along one of the canals. “I opened up the door, and I took the Ministry album, which had just come out, and I flicked it into the canal, and it sank. And I went, ‘Well, fuck this. I’m doing something different.’” He started his next phase as a manager/producer for such bands as Boston’s Push Push, on his way to being a multi-Grammy-winning producer and A&R rep for Columbia Records, overseeing Bob Dylan’s archival releases (all the Bootleg Series) among other special projects.

“And you know what? Even after [Roberts] screwed me out of a whole bunch of money, six figures, numerous times, I would see him, and I would be happy to see him, and then go, ‘Motherfucker stole my money.’ But he was one of the funniest guys, and we remained friends. Before he passed away [in 2019], he called me, and he was making amends.” Asked if part of making amends was paying him finally or even acknowledging Roberts screwed him over, Berkowitz replies with a laugh, “Absolutely not. He was an old New York City hustler, so I wasn’t going to get the money back!”

Though he wasn’t producing them, Ric was impressed with Ministry. When Jourgensen had come to Boston, he brought drummer Stephen “Stevo” George but didn’t have a full band. He met bassist Brad Hallen after trying to pick up Hallen’s girlfriend at a Boston club and invited him to add some bass to the in-progress album. Hallen recalls, “A lot of stuff was done, and I just overdubbed bass on some stuff, and as a result my name started circulating through the studio, and Ric dug the band, and he was like, ‘Man, I like your bass playing.’ So, he started hiring me for quite a few sessions. I did a session with Iggy Pop with him. I think maybe Elliot played on it. It was a record that only has come out on a bootleg.” A great-sounding track or two can be heard on YouTube—Iggy backed by early Ministry.

Ric hired George for his first solo album, Beatitude. After the sessions, Ric even asked George if he would join The Cars. Ian Taylor says, “Steve George was such a good drummer. His timing was fantastic, and he was a very powerful drummer. I think Ric was like, ‘Wow, this would be good in The Cars.’ He definitely asked him.” But George did not want to get involved and had something good going with Ministry.

George had met David well before he met Ric. He says,

When we were walking into Syncro to record our demos, I saw David. He was sitting in the lounge in front, reading a newspaper. He looked up at us as we walked through the lobby, and I knew immediately it was David Robinson. I’m like, “Fucking-A! David Robinson, man!” Because he inspired me. When I was in high school, that’s how I learned how to play drums, playing The Cars records and Zeppelin and stuff like that. I grew up listening to those guys. I mean, religiously. I knew those records inside and out. I probably knew those drum parts better than David because I memorized them so much.

So when it came to talking about the time Ric asked him to join The Cars, George was cautious. He explains, “I had to call David before I talked to you because I felt really bad about it. I never told anybody, man. I didn’t know Ian knew. I really felt as coming from another drummer and having so much respect for David, I was kind of put off by it.” David gave George his approval to discuss it for this book, as he wanted the truth to be told. When I next saw David, he said that this was the first time he learned that Ric had asked George to join.

George continues,

I was just blown away, really. It was while I was living in Boston. He called me up one night out of the blue, and he’s like, “How would you like to be the drummer for The Cars?” I don’t know exactly how he phrased it, but something to that effect. I was like, “But I’m doing Ministry. Ministry is my band.” Also, I was young, and those guys were older than me. So to me, I was totally into Ministry. The Cars, I loved them and all that, but they were an older group, so there was kind of like a generation gap, even though I loved them dearly.

Greg was the only other Car to play on some Beatitude tracks. When it came time to hire another guitarist, Ric turned to Fuzzbee Morse, his old pal from Richard and the Rabbits. Morse went backstage at The Cars’ 1982 show in Los Angeles, the first time he had seen his old bandmates since they had become famous. “Ric gave me a big hug, super-friendly, and notably right in front of Elliot said, ‘I’m going to do a solo album. I want you to play guitar on it. They had been pissed at Elliot for something. I think that’s one reason Ric did that in front of Elliot, like, a big ‘fuck you.’” Elliot responds, “I don’t know what Fuzzbee is talking about. They weren’t pissed at me.”

The natural question was: Why was Ric compelled to do a solo record as the undisputed leader and the songwriter on every track on every Cars record? Because the band was still a democracy. The choices of which of his songs they worked on had to be unanimous. After the songs were chosen, the band was usually free to arrange them and imprint their own parts on the recordings. The Cars had a natural and successful chemistry, but, according to Ian Taylor, “Ric didn’t see that chemistry as being a good thing for some reason. Some people have got a desire to do it all themselves a bit, and maybe he had that.”

Before starting the album, Ric explained, “The only things I’m sure of on my record are these—that on half of it, I’m going to do all the instruments, and thematically, I’m going to look for something different. Thematically, it will be different because the Cars are a group of five people. The only person I have to agree with on my own record is me, right?”

Nor would he have to split the money on a solo project. Though he was already wealthy, who couldn’t use a few extra bucks? Elliot Roberts certainly could, and he got paid on commission, so a new solo deal for Ric was a lucrative proposition. Elektra had made an oversight in not signing the band as individuals as well as a group, allowing Elliot Roberts and Peter Thall, The Cars’s attorney, to bring Ric as a solo artist to Geffen Records, helmed by Roberts’s friend and one-time partner, David Geffen. Roberts also presented offers for Ric’s publishing rights. But Thall, who also represented Ric in the deal with Geffen, wisely counseled Ric to hold on to his publishing.

“Elliot Roberts took good care of Ric,” says Thall.

He couldn’t help it, favoring Ric. He couldn’t help it. I represented Ric, never against the band, but I did his publishing work and saved his publishing. So many people came in; they wanted to pay $500,000 an album, $600,000 an album, and his eyes were lighting up. But to give up a copyright that nowadays we know is worth twenty to twenty-five times what the net publisher’s share is, every time you give up a dollar, you’re giving up twenty/twenty-five bucks. And it’s a conflict. And that’s why creative artists need lawyers and not just agents. A rock-and-roll band has an agent and a manager and a lawyer, and that begins to become expensive.

And Ric had expensive tastes. A Chicago Tribune article caught up with him furnishing his new estate in tony Brookline with a collection of 1920–1930s Art Deco designs. Often asked if he was a workaholic, Ric would answer that yes, he loved to work, had no hobbies, and got antsy when he had to go on a vacation. He told writer Lynne Van Matre that all his work, especially being on tour, made him appreciate his family more and vice versa. “They understand what I do, and they don’t always rely on me. I don’t always rely on them, either. But when we need each other, we’re there. I think that makes for stronger people.”

His studio at home, while rudimentary compared to today’s standards, was becoming more elaborate, with an eight-track reel-to-reel recorder, banks of keyboards, and multiple beatboxes all within reach. He was enamored by his own demos, which in the music biz is known as demo-itis. That’s when you compare the later takes done in pro studios with a band, producer, and engineers to the original inspiration captured on a demo. Ric increasingly suggested that The Cars members deviate less often from his original ideas for their respective parts.

Ric worked on his album at Syncro in the summer of 1982 after the Shake It Up tour and would release Beatitude in the second half of the year. Elliot Roberts hired Ian Taylor away from Roy Thomas Baker to work on Ric’s solo record and other sessions Ric produced. Taylor was offered coproduction credit, which he saw as a potential step up in his career. “It was going to be better than just being the engineer on another Roy record. Roy was going to do Mötley Crüe. And I was like, ‘Do I really want to spend two months in a room with Mötley Crüe?’”

By now, Gene Amoroso had been hired to run the studio, taking over one of Steve Berkowitz’s roles. Amoroso had also road-managed early dates for The Cars in New England, including the gig when Roy Thomas Baker had come to see them in a gym, before Berkowitz came on board. But as the band was getting signed, Amoroso was offered a job in the Arista promotions department. After they finished recording their debut, Ric and Heg brought a test pressing to play for Amoroso. “I was blown away.” He told Ric, “This is Led Zeppelin I [Led Zeppelin].”

Ric called him in 1983 to see if he was interested in managing Syncro. “One of the things I really missed was being right there and being close to the music after five years of being in the corporate thing. I’ve got to admit, it was very tempting, and I decided to make the move.”

According to Ric, he would not use Cars rejects or songs he reserved for himself for his solo album. So, he began with the concept of doing a solo album and subsequently wrote songs for it. But according to Greg, at least one song, “Out of Control,” which he wrote with Ric, had been a contender for Shake It Up. Ric had few ideas on how it would differ from a Cars record before he began. But he wanted to work with other musicians he had gotten to know around Syncro and Boston rather than just hiring a group of professional session musicians.

Generally speaking, the lyrics on Beatitude are sweeter and more overtly romantic than much of Ric’s Cars songs, which had tended to be antiromantic up to that point. The album’s title—which Ric pronounced “beat-i-tude,” not “be-attitude”—was intended as a tribute to the Beat writers who so influenced him. He also saw parallels between the Cold War 1950s, when that group of writers flowered, to the 1980s, as the Cold War intensified and social conservatism came back with a vengeance under the Reagan administration. While the music of The Cars was apolitical, he allowed his personal views about societal and political ills into his solo songs.

The leadoff track and second single, “Jimmy Jimmy,” ranks as one of his most direct message lyrics, compassionate advice from one erstwhile misfit kid to a new generation of alienated and apathetic teenage boys. If the message isn’t quite “It gets better,” Ric at least offers, “We’re all in this together” and suggests “something’s going on that you don’t know about.” The video for the song was directed by Luis Aira (who directed another for the first single, “Something to Grab For”).

In an interview with Creem, Ric elucidated. “I was looking at the hardcore scene, in a way, and I was watching these guys dancing with themselves and slam dancing and beating each other up and I was thinking, ‘My god, how far do we have to go to get noticed?’ Jimmy Jimmy is one of those guys.”

But in Ric’s perception, the character could just as well have been a kid who liked only mainstream arena rock. He continued to be conscious of The Cars’ position, trying to elevate the tastes of middle-American kids. “I’ve had short conversations [with members of mainstream bands], and there was a definite difference in the mental attitudes and just the intelligence of the people in the bands and the sense of humor of people in the bands, the whole thing. They felt that we were a bunch of fucked-up kids who didn’t understand show business. And that was great because we don’t understand show business. They are different. But, you know, they’re real successful bands and that’s because that’s what America wants ’cause if they didn’t they wouldn’t accept it. It’s hard to force elitist music down the throats of America.”

Musically, the album gets more interesting as it goes on, but it misses the distinctive flavor and irreplaceable chemistry that The Cars brought to Ric’s songs as a band. It’s not like he took a radically different musical direction; it feels more like something is missing than some exciting new ideas have been added. If there was something about The Cars that was holding Ric back from being considerably more adventurous, it’s difficult to discover here. Instead, there are too many generic and pallid eighties sounds and a surprising lack of variety and dynamics.

This is most apparent on the poppiest song on the album and first single, “Something to Grab For.” It has a commercial ’80s sheen accompanied by the kind of video that you might see for a hair-metal band’s power ballad. Perhaps The Cars could have given it some character and color. But it made it to 47, spending nine weeks on the Billboard Top 100 singles chart, and the album performed solidly, with sixteen weeks on the Top 200 album chart, peaking at 28.

Ric felt liberated because he did not have to use all The Cars when considering how to record the tracks. “One of the main reasons Ric started making solo records was so he didn’t have to listen to input from David,” Elliot explains. “I didn’t care about playing on it at all.”

Ric did have Greg contribute, and their collaboration, “Out of Control,” is one of the album’s more compelling songs. But as with much of the record, it’s linear and gets a little monotonous. The electronic approach to the record continues the path set by Panorama, with sounds that presage the artificial- and cloistered-sounding production of Heartbeat City. Greg says, “To me, the trouble with really all of Ric’s solo records is none of them had the focus of The Cars records.” He and David feel that hiring Greg, a keyboard player who understood his methods, made it an easy choice for Ric. “I would basically go down and do whatever I wanted,” Greg explains.

Ric’s approach to solo records was to add musicians without necessarily playing them other instrumentation that might be in the mix, so often players were just contributing parts in a bit of a vacuum, without the ability to play off existing tracks. He would later weed through the various parts and mix them in or out as he liked. “Now, the trouble with those Ric records is that he would bring in this guitar player, this bass player, this drummer, and there was never that group focus,” says Greg. “That takes a long time. And Ric could be indecisive sometimes.”

David says, “When I listened to Ric’s records, they sound like [the demos] he brought us. But I’m waiting for a chorus or some kind of change, and it never happens. I’m waiting for him to make a big stop and a completely different direction or something, but nothing.”

So why are Ric’s solo songs so different than Cars songs if he wrote all those different sections in Cars songs? “Well, if you ask Elliot, he would tell you that we did everything,” David answers, a little tongue-in-cheek. “But no, they were always rooted in what Ric would bring to us. But what we brought to it was what Ric couldn’t, obviously.”

“Yeah, Ric’s forte wasn’t really in the arranging,” Greg agrees. “When he brought us songs, they were always in pretty basic form.” The two emphasize that once Ric got really into the drum machines, he would get stuck in one pattern and did not really envision how to change for various sections. It locked him and them into something flatter.

But it also was very likely exactly what Ric was aiming for. He was working with Suicide and other edgier bands who eschewed the conventions of pop music. In addition to Greg and Fuzzbee Morse (who plays guitar and keys), Ric hired Stephen Hague,i a keyboardist with Jules and the Polar Bears, a band headed by singer-songwriter Jules Shear, who also sings backing vocals on the album. The band had been at Syncro that summer, working with Elliot Easton, who produced some tracks for them. Shear and Hague would also work on Elliot’s 1985 solo album, Change No Change. Steve Cataldo of the Boston band Nervous Eaters also sings backing vocals on Beatitude. Stephen George drums on the tracks that are not solely drum machines. Casey Lindström of the New Models and Roger Greenawalt of the Boston band the Dark play additional guitars. The Dark was another band that Ric produced at Syncro. It featured Reeves Gabrels, who went on to play in Tin Machine with David Bowie and the Cure.

Ric also produced Rock for Light (1983), the second album by the acclaimed Washington, DC, hardcore and reggae band Bad Brains, attracted to the “sheer crazy energy of it, the speed and the musicianship,” he said. They played so fast that the music veered into speed metal, executed with X-Acto-knife precision. They would break it up with a few chill respites of dub reggae. Rare among punk bands at the time, Bad Brains consisted of trained musicians, including some with a background in jazz fusion. One of them, bassist Darryl Jenifer, was hired by Ric to play bass on Beatitude.

“I think that when Ric got involved, we had just started out, and it was more like someone famous had gotten ahold of us,” Jenifer said. “It was more like a big brother sort of thing.” Jenifer was not a fan of The Cars, characterizing his younger self as a snotty young punk. “I was a little Black Sid Vicious or something.” Ric won the band over by taking them under his wing, buying them expensive gear, putting them up at a hotel in Boston, and trying to facilitate their vision, not imposing his own on the band. Lead singer H.R. explained, “Ric was just polishing the icing on the cake. He’d just polish up those rough edges, and wow, the next thing you know, man, the groove was set, and that’s how we did it.”

Ric was also busy that year recording his friend Alan Vega of Suicide. Finished in January 1983, Vega’s solo album Saturn Strip also features Greg, Stephen George, and Al Jourgensen, who, like Ric, cowrote a song. Luis Aira, who directed two videos for Vega, says, “Alan was probably the one guy that Ric listened to the most. They were like brothers. Alan was more of an urban guru. He had this innate wisdom about the street. Alan was one of a kind.”

“Ric being in my life has just got me through so many bad times,” Vega said. “Just knowing that Ric is there.”

Ric reportedly turned down major-label requests to produce Nina Hagen and A Flock of Seagulls. He was also called in as a possible producer for Bob Dylan. “I met with him when it was suggested I produce Infidels, and he told me about this sound in his head that would be like this. I said, well, that’s not hard, maybe you should get somebody else. It seemed to be a ’50s rockabilly sound. I don’t know if he really wants it or not!”

Bill Flanagan, who would soon be the editor in chief for Musician magazine and wrote an invaluable book called Written in My Soul that included a penetrating interview with Dylan, recalled Ric telling him about possibly producing Dylan. “I think Elliot Roberts was working with Bob by then, if I’m not mistaken. And I think Elvis Costello, David Bowie, and a few people were approached, including Ric. Mark Knopfler ended up getting it. So I think that at that moment, they were sort of fishing to see who might bring Bob into the eighties and the MTV era.” In a 1985 discussion with Lisa Robinson for Interview magazine, Ric even described writing with Dylan at Dylan’s house.

Keeping with the spirit of lending his new-wave sheen to the work of others, Ric gave the song “Steal the Night” to Martin Scorsese and his music supervisor (and erstwhile Dylan sideman in the Band), Robbie Robertson, to use on the soundtrack of the masterpiece 1983 The King of Comedy. It plays faintly in the background of a car as characters played by Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard kidnap Jerry Lewis.

Almost all Ric’s work, though, was with underground and edgy artists. So, was all this some kind of “penance”? That was David Fricke’s devil’s-advocate question, summarizing critical backlash for The Cars “raking in millions” as “a soulless hit machine whose tenuous connections with the new wave are an embarrassment to the real thing.” No, Ric had a genuine zeal for underground artists and relished his role in facilitating such musicians and giving something back. He also acknowledged learning from those artists.

Beatitude was released in January 1983. Ric told Robert Palmer of the New York Times that he planned on recording a solo album and a Cars album every year. He confirmed that he invested more of himself in the lyrics on the album. Palmer concluded, “Cars records are clever, finely crafted, sometimes innovative, but essentially lightweight. Beatitude is more serious, more imaginative, more compassionate, even more fun. It isn’t just Mr. Ocasek’s most personal album, it’s his best.”

Steve Morse reckoned in the Boston Globe that the new record, with “some brooding psychological masterpieces about coping with desperation in the ’80s,” indicated that “Ocasek has become the Dylan of electronic music.”

Ric thought everyone in The Cars should expand and keep things fresh, and they all agreed. Another bass player on Ric’s record was Akio Akashi, a Japanese bassist who played in a band called Ooh Ah Ah. He was a student at Berklee and had first approached David on Newbury Street but could barely speak English. He invited David to come see his band play. “I went to see them, and they were incredible,” David laughs. “At first, I probably had a bigger interest in them than they did with me.” He joined them as a player-producer for a project. The band used a Roland TR-808 drum machine that Akashi had programmed “like a mad scientist,” David says. “It was so detailed. It was unbelievable. . . . I went into Syncro Sound with them and made a demo. The demo came out great, but I think they might’ve been just a little step ahead of their time.” David tried shopping the demo around but couldn’t get any label interest.

Greg made a delightful solo album called Niagara Falls during the break between records. Mostly instrumental and almost completely electronic, it highlights his talent as a synth master. Unlike Ric’s solo album, it bears little resemblance to The Cars. I mean, you could imagine some of the songs being worked into Cars songs, but it has more in common with Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, early Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and more experimental electronic composers like minimalist Steve Reich. But there is more of a playful sense of humor to it that balances out the serious compositional and technical elements. Elaine Hawkes plays flute on “Voyage into Space,” but otherwise it’s all Greg. His guitar work is compelling, like the Adrian Belew–like parts on “Voyage into Space.” “Modern Lunch” and “Back Seat Waltz” were both from Aira’s film Chapter X.

Luis Aira made a quirky, quintessentially ’80s video (random robots, bodybuilders, bikini models, and so on) for “Twenty-Seven Shirts” that features then unknown Denis Leary, Gene Amoroso as a reporter, and Amoroso’s future wife, Alinka. Amoroso loved doing it so much that Aira cast him in some commercials, and Amoroso works as a character actor to this day.ii

But Greg did not have big marketing or radio expectations for the record. He made the album to please himself. The scant reviews at the time of the May 1983 release were unspectacular, but this is a hidden gem of a record. He received a big-spread profile in Keyboard magazine in December 1983. He pointed to Kraftwerk as an evergreen favorite of his, as well as Devo and relative newcomer Thomas Dolby. “But I don’t know,” he said. “I probably spend more on video games these days than records.” Neither Elliot nor Ben had yet begun their own solo albums. Those would come after Heartbeat City.

Bill Gerber came on to serve as Elliot Roberts’s point man for The Cars, filling the vacancy left by Steve Berkowitz. Gerber had joined Lookout Management in 1979 after being introduced to Roberts by Geffen. He started out by managing Devo and added ABC, Scritti Politti, and other new-wave bands to his roster. Devo’s Gerald Casale explains, “Elliot was our manager, and he wasn’t doing a great job. I mean, he did the broad strokes. He got us on Saturday Night Live, which was a game changer, but he didn’t get it [Devo].” So Devo encouraged Roberts to start working with Gerber, whom they had met when Gerber promoted a New Year’s Eve show they played at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

By 1983, Gerber was receiving offers to join other agencies. Roberts enticed him into staying at Lookout by having him help manage The Cars. “I was a big Cars fan when I was a kid,” says Gerber. “When I heard ‘Good Times Roll,’ I thought it was Roxy Music finally making a commercial record. That’s what I thought I was listening to. I was like, ‘Finally, Roxy’s going to break.’”

Like his boss, Roberts, Gerber became closest with Ric, who liked the fact that Gerber was a drummer. The two would discuss music, and Ric would play Gerber his demos, and they’d go shopping together at high-end clothing stores on Newbury Street. “It was a really nice relationship. Elliot [Easton] and I definitely got along. David didn’t really like anybody. He had a real chip on his shoulder. Greg was okay. We had a couple of—he’d be ordering me around, and I’m like a spoiled kid from Beverly Hills, so I didn’t really take to that well; he had every right to, by the way, but I didn’t go for it.”

Greg reacts with surprise at Gerber’s memory of him making such demands, believing Gerber must be confusing him with one of the others. Today, it is difficult to imagine this thoughtful and polite gentleman ever ordering anyone around.

If Greg was the one whom Ric most trusted musically, David was the one with whom he increasingly butted heads, correctly assessing him as a check on his leadership. When they started, it was David who had brought the cred as a Modern Lover. He gave The Cars their visual image, the catalytic force for a ragtag group of ex-hippies and talented Berklee refugees redefining themselves into a sleek and modern band with a cohesive presentation. He was also a rock-solid drummer with a good sense of pop music and a great ear for new music coming from the underground. But now that they were firmly established as a giant band, Ric considered David expendable. Sure, they could get another drummer, but Ric preferred the machines to human drummers anyway.

“I was the only one paying attention,” David says. “It was apathy from some of the other guys, and some were afraid to stand up to Ric. But I stood up and was in trouble all the time with Ric. I confronted him constantly and then had no help, of course, from Elliot Roberts. He just ignored me. I tell anybody who asks: ‘It’s easy to tell you what [Roberts] did for me: Nothing.’” He laughs mirthlessly. “He never did one thing I asked him to do. I never liked him after about the first six months.”

Greg, Elliot, and David began discovering that Ric was making decisions without their input. To this day, they laugh ruefully about things that likely went on that they never learned about. Elliot says, “We’ll never even know all the deals that Ric turned down without us even finding out about it. I remember I accidentally found out about one. Maybe it was the Shake It Up tour, but Chevrolet wanted to just print on the top of the tickets: ‘Chevrolet presents The Cars,’ and it wouldn’t have involved a banner onstage; they just wanted to print it on the top of the ticket, a little printing. And they were going to give each of us a Corvette, and Ric turned that down.”

There is lingering bitterness about Ric’s controlling mien, particularly expressed by David and Elliot, though tempered by the subsequent decades. And, as Greg pointedly emphasizes, he is grateful for what Ric did for him. “It was life-changing.” He feels they “all got along pretty well together until the last year or two.”

While the band did not socialize with each other (few bands do after a number of years together and a certain level of success), there was some continued sense of warmth and camaraderie as they rolled into the mid-1980s. “Part of this whole process of you writing this book is it’s like group therapy for us,” Greg says with a smile. He pauses momentarily, reflecting, and says, “And Ric’s sense of humor, he was like, you wouldn’t even know he was kidding. And then, ‘Wait a minute. Okay, I get it now. Okay.’”

Ben and Ric’s close friendship had dissipated. But it was not yet outwardly affecting Ben. “Ben was like Richard Burton,” Gerber observes, the second person to independently make that comparison. “He was so cool and so handsome, and so just sexy and laid-back and a great singer, a great bass player. Ben was just fun to hang with. He wasn’t very demanding at all. I mean, he never asked me questions about stuff, how many dates or this or that. That was more Greg, and Elliot was very inquisitive and on top of stuff and wanted to know how he was going to be portrayed and how these things were going to be executed and stuff like that. But Ben was a real playboy, so he was usually busy organizing some kind of escapade. That was his part-time job.”

In the fall of 1983, Ben met Diane Grey Page. She was a local television personality at the time, cohosting a game show called Big Money. But she also could sing and released an album on a vanity label that same year called What Makes Me. She hailed from Virginia and had graduated as a theater major from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. First, she headed out to Hollywood, singing in rock bands and modeling. “It was mind-boggling,” she said in 1981. “Everyone was so chrome-hearted, just like all the clichés.” She tells me, “I really was not into the rock scene. I wanted to be a singer, so I admired singer-singers like Melissa Manchester.” After less than two years, she came to Boston, married an investment broker, her college sweetheart, and they lived in their dream house in Lincoln.

“The opportunities for commercials and television took off right away,” she recalls now. “So the music thing kind of got postponed. I ended up doing three thousand television commercials and little bits and pieces of this and that. And then, when I came to Boston, I was kind of a big fish in a small pond. I’d had the LA experience, and I had a wonderful run there because on any given day, I’d have a modeling assignment and then maybe go sing a jingle and then maybe do an industrial narration in the afternoon. And I just was bouncing all over the place. And I had the game show for nine years.”

She was visiting John Dalpe, one of her show’s producers and Ben’s friend and neighbor. “They were very good friends. And so [Dalpe] said, ‘You seem bored. Do you want to come over and meet a rock star?’ And I said, ‘Yep, sure.’” She was unhappy in her marriage. “I was looking for a reset. Ben and I were a perfect storm when we met. It just was crazy.”

Dalpe recalls, “The two of them looking at each other, and it was like, ‘Oh, boy.’ I was like, ‘What’s going on here, and who’s going to kill me?’ I didn’t want to be blamed for any of that, but they really hit it off. And she went into her rock-and-roll stage, and they had a very, what’s the word? I don’t want to say fiery, but they had a . . . vibrant relationship.”

“That was something we all found just so sort of surreal and just out of the ordinary,” Gene Amoroso says. “What attracted her to him? I don’t know. I can only attribute it to Ben’s sort of overall oddness, I guess. She was attractive, but sort of in more of an older kind of, almost like a cougar kind of way. And her style was not the style of girls he was usually attracted to. It seemed a little bit more mainstream, and I don’t know, it just seemed weird.”

“I heard her say it so much: ‘I went to Smith,’” says Elaine Hawkes. “I think she was smart. She was canny also, and I liked Ben, but I wouldn’t pick him out as the smartest band member.”

Diane says the physical attraction “was overwhelming.” But she adds, “He was honorable. He said, ‘As long as you’re a married woman, I’ll be a friend, but we’re not going to take this any further.’ And it got to the point where I just had to make the choice. So I left my husband, and I took a little house in Lincoln or Waltham somewhere, and I went over, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m free and clear.’”

She got swept up in the rock-star life. “We would do fun things. He would send a limo to pick me up before it picked him up at the airport. So we’d do the bottles of Cristal and the fur coat with nothing on underneath and typical rock-and-roll behavior. But when we got together, I think we would start singing together. We had that musical connection, and I wanted to be wild like him.”

Meanwhile, Katherine Bergholtz (Kim Leo) moved in with David in 1983 when she graduated from college. She says, “When I moved in with David, my dad told me that he wouldn’t talk to me. He said, ‘My whole reason for being is to make sure that my kids are protected, and I don’t think you’re doing something that’s going to protect you.’ But David and I had a great, great relationship.” She started getting steady modeling gigs. “We never had one fight. I was with him almost all the time unless I had a job that I was going to stay home for. He just treated me like gold. He was a sweetheart. He was always a gentleman. He was good to my family. He was so good to his mother and his sister, his whole family. David nurtured his whole family and really was generous.”

The rest of the band waited for more than a year to find out from Ric when they were going to record again. “Ric would announce that he was ready, and then he wasn’t ready,” David explains. “So, there would be false alarms all the time. And I was supposed to produce an album by this guy, Enrico Macias.” Macias was an international star in Europe who sang and played guitar on songs from various influences, essentially world music before that vague term was widely adopted. He had already released two dozen albums, but his record company was trying to—as David puts it—“Americanize his sound” to break him in the United States. When people asked him to produce, David would beg off, protesting that he was not a producer. “But then I thought, ‘All I need to do is get the right people around me.’ I made demos and took out the things that were just not going to sound good if he was going to put the record out in America.

“So I get a tape to start working with him, and Elliot’s [Roberts] office goes, ‘Ric is ready. You guys have to be ready to go in two weeks.’ Some crazy thing. So I’m thinking, ‘Oh, well, I’ll wait a little longer to see if it’s a real thing.’ So sure enough, two weeks later, ‘Oh, Ric’s not ready.’” After this happened a third time, David felt ashamed that he started and stopped the momentum of this potentially gratifying project with Macias multiple times, like he was jerking around this respected musician.

By this point, Ric had bought a summer house in Falmouth, on Cape Cod, and Gerber remembers a weekend visit when Ric played him a demo of all the songs he was preparing for the band’s next album.

I remember saying after he played me fourteen songs, “Yeah, that one, I don’t think it’s up to par.” I mean, I don’t know why I’d had the balls to act like I knew better than him about song selection. But what you do as a manager, you try to stay over here objectively and say, “Hey, I think that song’s better than that song,” or “This is the sequencing,” or dah, dah, dah. And it was this one song, I said, that just didn’t sound up to par with the rest of them. And I remember a couple of weeks later, he said, “You were right. I dropped that song.” And I was like, “Wow, I influenced Ric. I mean, I must be okay at this.”

Footnotes

i Hague would soon launch an illustrious career as a hitmaking synth-pop producer.

ii He had a substantial role in Spotlight (2015).

Chapter 16

HEARTBEAT CITY

GEORGE MARTIN AND THE BEATLES. JIMMY MILLER AND THE ROLLING Stones. After four albums in about five years, one of rock and roll’s greatest partnerships between producer and artist had come to an end. The Cars were moving on from Roy Thomas Baker. Or he was moving on from them. It was most likely mutual.

“Ric, after doing four albums with RTB, was looking for a change, so we started talking to other producers,” Elliot reports. “We also met with Steve Lillywhite, who came to Syncro to listen to tapes and actually passed.” Lillywhite had only recently completed a similar first-three-album partnership with U2.

“I think four albums with Roy Thomas Baker is enough,” Ric said in 1983. “I think we’ll get Conny Plank—the German guy who produces Kraftwerk and Killing Joke.” He was likely just demonstrating his hipness by dropping those names. Ric, who loved the drum and guitar sounds on AC/DC’s Back in Black album, was far more attracted to the idea of working with Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who produced three albums in a row for AC/DC (starting with Highway to Hell) that sold more than forty million copies combined. Baker claimed it was his idea for Lange to take the baton for The Cars. In 2008, he said, “By then, I was a senior vice president of A&R for Elektra, and I really wasn’t producing records. I thought Mutt’s work on AC/DC’s Back in Black was phenomenal, with such a great feel, so I dragged him over to Boston to meet The Cars.”

None of the three surviving members recall Baker’s counsel on this decision, nor do they recall meeting Lange before the sessions started. Ric presented it as a fait accompli. “If he did come to Boston, he would have come to meet Ric, not the whole band,” David says. “There could have been five other people who were dying to do it. I would receive no information about anything.”

Highway to Hell and Back in Black arguably represent peak rock production. Organic, warm, cracking, cutting, and kicking. Guitars box your ears while drums and bass pummel you in the gut. Lange had started with straight-ahead productions for artists like the Boomtown Rats and Graham Parker & the Rumour.i But he soon produced giant radio-friendly albums like Foreigner’s 4 (with the washy but massive hit ballad “Waiting for a Girl Like You”). The producer skyrocketed to superstardom on the wings of Def Leppard’s 1983 ten-million-plus seller Pyromania. Though they had started as an ostensibly heavy-metal band, they were more of a hard-rock band with glam-pop sensibilities similar to Kiss. Lange came on board for the 1981 High ’n’ Dry and cranked the guitars up to AC/DC levels. But by their next album, Pyromania, Lange had abandoned the Marshall-amp crunch of Back in Black and High ’n’ Dry in favor of guitars recorded through the Tom Scholz Rockman, the headphone amplifier that emulated amps in a Walkman-like device, which was a way of achieving what Lange called “commercial distortion.”

Lange’s right-hand man, engineer Mike Shipley, stated, “Mutt’s whole thing was, ‘Kids these days don’t want to hear honky little snare drums. They’re all out watching Star Wars and having visual experiences, so let’s make records like that. Rather than going the natural route, let’s make something larger than life!’”

Well, it depends on what you consider “larger than life.” Yes, the production is unnatural and fantastical, like Star Wars, and sounded “modern” for the particular era of pop music, but it’s doubtful that those early days of digital recording will be remembered fondly. Conversely, the late-1970s analog milieu in which Roy Thomas Baker excelled might be considered the apex of studio recording. As a result, Pyromania sounds as dated as Back in Black sounds timeless. The artificial and thin tones of Pyromania, with guitars considerably lower and processed vocals layered more prominently in the mix than those previous rock albums, sounded small and off-putting to me when I heard it on the radio, though they sounded huge and exciting to many millions of other listeners. Overproducing with too much layering and processing can result in diminishing returns.ii

Taking an opposite tack of most recording projects up to that era, Lange recorded the drums after everything else, with everyone playing to an uncompromising click track. As he would with The Cars, Lange produced Def Leppard without drummer Rick Allen actually playing the drum set; all percussion sounds other than the cymbals were sampled, programmed, and sequenced into patterns on the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument). Introduced for the eye-popping price of £12,000 in 1979, the Fairlight was a precursor to today’s digital audio workstations, like Pro Tools and Logic. It was a keyboard synthesizer, sampler, and computer terminal with a screen.

One of the earliest adopters of the Fairlight, Trevor Horn, was, by the end of the 1970s, embracing the technological paths blazed by electronic-music pioneers like Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder. Horn believed “the future is techno” and made hit records by ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Yes, whose “Owner of a Lonely Heart” is a perfect example of his techniques. Of course, The Cars had been embracing electronic sounds since their beginning, and Ric and Greg leaned into that aspect on their respective solo albums.

Between Back in Black and the new Cars project, while recording Pyromania, Lange had, Greg says, “fallen in love with the Fairlight.” His romance was in full bloom by the time he met The Cars. Attracted to the almost limitless ability of control promised by the digital age, Lange had entered a descent into obsessive overanalysis, zeroing in on minutiae and bogging down the recording process so that albums that should not have required more than two or three months began to demand six months to a year in the studio to satisfy him. “Analysis paralysis” describes some of what went down in creating Heartbeat City. Some went further, implying Lange was losing his grip.

“Given those machine sounds, [mixing] was really quite difficult—we were so lost in the process,” engineer Mike Shipley lamented about Lange’s monthslong production of Def Leppard. “We had an end vision in sight, and I would work, and work, and work. Mutt wanted to make things as three-dimensional as possible, sonically.”

A South African native, Lange also became a virtual member of the British Def Leppard, who were younger than any of The Cars and much younger than Ric or Ben. This went well beyond the more honorary “sixth member” status Baker had achieved with The Cars. Lange received cowriting credits on all ten of the songs on Pyromania, not to mention his singing and other contributions to their albums. This degree of involvement would not be acceptable to Ric, who was too stingy to share copyrights with his own band. Still, as they recorded with Lange, Ric would prove to be uncharacteristically compliant in other ways.

In late June 1983, The Cars left behind their own world-class studio and returned to London, where they had begun their recording career and where Lange preferred to work, at Battery Studio. They brought their crew for the duration, including Heg and Andy Topeka, who helped program the Fairlight and kept the keyboards and other gear humming. They stayed in a luxurious twenty-seven-room mansion in Chelsea that had once belonged to Lionel Bart, composer and writer of the show Oliver! It had been a notorious party house. As The Cars were not very famous in the United Kingdom and knew relatively few people in the city, they would not have the distractions that were inherent in recording in Boston while still having the benefit of the cosmopolitan energy of London.

“Steve Strange was our neighbor,” David says, referring to the New Romantic singer of the band Visage. “He was so nice to us. Everyone else was looking down on us, like, some crummy band from America’s here recording. But he tried to bring friends over and introduced us, a super, super nice guy. We had a couple of parties.” George Michael came to one of the parties. “[Strange] brought girls over, but people weren’t too impressed with what we were doing.”

Expecting maybe a two-month process, the band had packed only summer clothes. They would eventually need to go shopping, as the recording would drag on from July through January 1984 due to Lange’s all-consuming methods. “There was no detail too small that Mutt would not happily spend a day or more on it,” Greg says. Lange would not willingly let go of a project until he was convinced he had produced a hit album, no matter how much suffering was inflicted in the process. Mutt told The Cars right off the bat that they would be making a modern-sounding record, using the Fairlight and a lot of keyboards. “Mutt was polite but firm,” Greg reports.

As he had done with Def Leppard, Lange would record everyone separately, set to basic LinnDrum machine beats as a guide. Bass and sampled drums would come last. The idea with the drums, in particular, was that songs could be rearranged more easily within a grid, and they could write drum parts to the final arrangement, adding fills, for example, in spots where they were certain not to compete with other instrumentation. When a drummer first lays down a track with different verse and chorus variations, for example, a band is more or less locked into an arrangement that gets built on top of that foundation. But The Cars were unaware of just how uncompromising Lange would be in adherence to his preconception and excessively painstaking methodology. “It kind of dawned on us as the project took shape,” Greg says.

“You’re thinking, ‘The future is coming too quick, and I’m not prepared to accept that a band can play rock computers,’” Ric admitted in the liner notes to the expanded reissue of the album. But he argued that The Cars ultimately overcame such apprehensions.

Since they were not tracking together, the members were rarely all in the studio simultaneously, especially as summer crawled through the fall and into the winter. Ric and Greg were present almost the entire time. Ben would come in only when he was needed. When it became apparent that their services would not be required for days or weeks at a time, the others would take trips—to Liverpool as Beatles tourists or shopping in Paris. But the trips away were not merely a result of filling up some downtime; some of the members needed to escape the pressured and tedious situation. “That was really the source of a lot of the tension,” Greg explains. The roughly fifteen-year relationship between Ben and Ric began to fray.

The Cars’ attorney, Peter Thall, said one of the reasons Ric shared some songwriting with Greg was because Greg was a stalwart, always helping Ric realize his vision, never vacating his post. “Ric would tell me that when they were doing Heartbeat City, people did their parts, and then they left, and he was stuck there for months doing it himself, coproducing it, really. And Greg was always there. Always there.”

As it was a synth-heavy record, Greg was kept busier than the others. Part of his role, he felt, was adding precision and structure to Ric’s more raw and loose ideas. “I have come to see myself as a music director of sorts,” he explained soon after they recorded the album.

Given his easygoing temperament, discipline, and desire to improve, Greg felt Lange’s demanding perfectionism elevated him as a musician. Many others, not just The Cars, would lose their patience as Lange focused his microscope onto not just song sections, not mere measures, and not only notes but fragments of notes. Lange claimed he could perceive that the LinnDrum machine was slightly out of time with itself. So he spent hours, if not days, rigging up outboard delay units to compensate for this imagined deficiency, muttering, “Pity about that drum machine. It’s off.” The band would have no idea what he was talking about. David recalls the absurdity: “He’s saying to the engineer, he used the term ‘previous.’ If he thought it was too close. So he’d get the guy to move a little bit. Then he goes, ‘Oh, now it sounds late. Back it up. Oh, now it’s still a little too previous.’ Two hours later: ‘I think it’s too previous.’ It’s like, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’”iii

Lange would push the limits of Ben’s famous patience, haranguing him as Lange claimed his bass was out of intonation. Ric, in the liner notes for the 2018 expanded edition of Heartbeat City, lamented, “Poor Ben—he is a great bass player. But Mutt had him in there for days, weeks.” Lange spent two days tuning the bass. Elliot recalls Ben coming in at around four in the morning one night, and when asked how the bass parts went that day, he replied grimly, “Well, I think we got close to getting a bass sound.” Ben—one of the most natural and effortless singers in pop music, accustomed to nailing a song in a single take—had to sing one song for days, zeroing in on syllables, after which Lange would spend days piecing together (known as “comping”) the many parts, in portions as small as split seconds, to create one song. If it was that tough on Ben, imagine the terror that Ric must have faced in the vocal booth. “My vocals on that record sound like every line was picked—a too-good version of me,” Ric confessed.

Lange rode Elliot mercilessly, having him play his parts repeatedly for days at a time while insisting he should try to make it sound spontaneous. At one point, he suggested that Elliot “try one like David Gilmour.” Elliot retorted, “How about I try one like Elliot Easton?” Elliot concluded that while Roy Thomas Baker approached projects with a plan, knowing what he wanted in advance, Lange would know it only after hearing it. And even then, it might be take ninety-two of the same exact thing, “with Mutt looking for God knows what,” Ric said. “All I can say is it’s nothing musical. It’s got to be something religious in the room, because take ninety-two sounded identical to take four.”

They were working on some vocal part like this when Lange kicked David out of the control room. David says, “Everybody was out there singing, going, ‘La la la,’ over and over, for two hours. So I’m sitting in there, and I already know the song. So, in my head, I’m fitting those vocals in the song. I politely said, ‘I don’t think this is the right kind of thing. It’s just not right. I don’t think it’s going to sound good.’ Mutt yelled, ‘I’m a genius!’”

Greg adds with a laugh, “And Mutt goes, ‘Man, you’re blowing my vibe!’”

“Yeah. He said I couldn’t come to the control room. I had a bad vibe. I tell you, I gave the guy so much slack. I just sat there, and I thought, ‘I better say something now if I’m going to say anything. I wanted you [Greg] to come in and hear it, which he wouldn’t allow me to do. He said, ‘They don’t have to hear it!’”

“Heartbeat City was a divisive album,” Greg says. “David obviously feels more bitter about it than I do.”

Lange’s control issues did not stop at the technical side of the process; he was unsparing when it came to critiquing songwriting. He would swap choruses in the place of verses and task songwriters to pen new verses. His young protégés in Def Leppard were malleable. So was even the more established mainstream hitmaker Bryan Adams, who told a story about Lange irreversibly erasing an entire verse down to the drums because Adams had expressed some reservations about it. “Write a new one” was the directive, giving Adams no choice. Ric was open-minded and a confident-enough writer to allow such input. He was also ready to go big and unabashedly sought a hit record. But his patience would also run out. Ric had to push back when Lange tried to actually write and get credit as a songwriter on the album. “I think Ric appreciated the quality of the recording that was happening,” Greg says, “but even he grew frustrated by how long it was taking. As we all did.”

The Cars had sent Lange the band demos, and Ric let him pick which songs they would record. While Ric had told journalists that he had a backlog of songs, some of which he saved for just the right moments, Elliot contradicts that notion. “He didn’t hold songs back. He’d come in with his latest batch, and we’d work on them.”

David also concludes there were not as many songs to choose from as Ric indicated. “He would always say in interviews that he had hundreds of songs for that album. He didn’t have enough songs to make an album, at least in his opinion; songs he wanted to show us.”

Lange dug in on the material and presented some winning ideas. He took the spoken breakdown in “You Might Think” from its original spot in “Magic.” It was a first for Ric. One of the songs that changed the most was “Drive.” The demo can be heard on the expanded edition of the album. It has a disconcerting bossa nova beat that carried over from Ric’s original demo. Lange came up with the sparser rhythm we all know and love, the three-kick-drum, one-snare beat. It’s far more dramatic and suitable for the song. Ric said he never would have thought it was a single when he wrote it.

The band, attracted to the big acoustic drum sounds Lange had achieved on previous albums, was hoping for something similar. Ric beseeched Lange to at least try to mic up a drum set to get a more natural sound and feel. Lange finally relented. Greg recalls that after three or four days of working to get something satisfactory out of a drum set, Lange threw up his hands and exclaimed, “Nah, I can’t get a sound on these things.”

So David spent hours learning how to program drum parts on the Fairlight. He says he was never beholden to the idea of playing the drum set and embraced the challenge and possibilities of learning something new. He points to “Looking for Love” as a drum pattern he was proud of. “But I didn’t like the idea of having no input as the songs progressed.” And it was only a matter of time before he clashed with Lange. “Once I met him and started working, I was like, ‘What the fuck was Ric thinking?’”

When Lange announced they would record the drums last, David thought, ‘“I don’t know about that. What kind of contribution am I going to make at the end? I’ll be slotting stuff in.” And that’s precisely what happened. “I had no influence on anything,” he says.

I had to hope for an opening. So I was in a little room by myself, learning how to use the Fairlight, before I could even write the parts. So that took a while. Then I had big fights with [Lange]. He’s an asshole. I almost got in two fistfights with him. In one of the fights, he said that I wasn’t a good drummer and that he himself was a better drummer than I was. In another one, he said that we had come to him to get a sound that the young people liked—to sell records. We’d already sold like ten million records! His take was that he was going to save our career. I don’t even know why he wanted to do [the project]. Ric, at some point, wasn’t happy with him. He tried to get Ric to change the lyrics. Then he sang.

Greg adds, “I remember that. ‘I’m going to come out and sing with you guys.’ He sings all over it. Before, we’d be out there singing, and Mutt would be in the control room going, ‘Timing’s not quite right; let’s do it again. Pitch is not quite right.’ And then when Mutt came out to sing, he had Nigel [Green], his engineer, do it. And then Nigel was worse than Mutt. ‘It’s not in tune, is it?’ And Mutt would be, ‘Damn! Okay, let’s do it again.’”

“Then he changed some of my drum parts,” David continues. “It takes me all this effort to put ’em in there, and then he’s changing them. My drum roadie, Heg—who’s so into my drumming—was madder than I was. I remember one day he said, ‘The fucking guy changed your drum part.’ He goes, ‘You would never play it like that!’ And I said, ‘You’re right. I would have never played it that way.’ He goes, ‘I hate that fucking guy.’”

“Ric hated fucking Mutt Lange,” Stephen George says. “Whenever I brought up Mutt Lange—because the records sounded great—Ric was just like, ‘Oh, that guy’s an asshole.’”

It’s easy enough to lose perspective and get antsy on even an otherwise enjoyable recording project, sequestered in usually windowless rooms for hours that seem endless, focusing on minute details, seeing few others but the same five or six people every day for weeks or months or, in the case of Lange’s productions, sometimes the better part of a year. At the end of the daily sessions, The Cars would go back and see each other at the same house, albeit a large one. They had some ups and downs interpersonally, as to be expected. “Boston Rock just quoted me as saying the band broke up four times in London,” Ric told the Boston Globe in May 1984. “But I was only kidding when I said that. We didn’t break up or anything. We still get along pretty well as a band.” But he did tell longtime observer Bill Flanagan—who visited Ric at the house, along with photographer and friend of the band Ebet Roberts—that they did fight and that “there were times when people had their plane tickets ready to go home.”

But something beyond the usual studio version of cabin fever was taking hold of Lange. The band felt Lange was losing his mind. Ric said he would not have put up with Lange’s demanding and indulgent ways had it not been for the results, which he would monitor on rough mixes on cassettes back at the house. “We hadn’t done records like that,” he wrote. “We didn’t need to. We could have easily rejected it.” But they could find no fault in the recordings. Ric was impressed. “Mutt was like, ‘I’m not going to do a record that’s not a hit.’”

The project was taking so long that Bob Krasnow, who became president of Elektra Records in 1983, came to find out what was going on. When he arrived at the studio and heard “Drive” and “You Might Think,” he told them to take all the time they needed.

Fortunately, visits from family and friends from the States broke up the monotony. Ann Marie Foley remembers the band seeming exhausted. Mike Howell swung by and enjoyed a stoned surreal trip to Hamley’s toy shop with Greg and Elliot. Elaine Hawkes visited but became bored after a few days and left. Colleen came to visit with Elliot. Ben’s girlfriend, Diane Grey Page, also came over a couple of times. On one visit, she says, “Ric tried to kiss me. I found it humorous. It’s like he had no interest in me at all, but he wanted anything that was Ben’s. I’ve got the most gorgeous man in the world, and no, I don’t think so.” Did Ben ever find out about it? “Oh, no, I could never tell him. Ben was the type that if we went out to eat and I smiled at the waiter, there’d be a huge fight at home. And one time, he burned my clothes in the fireplace, so I couldn’t even look at any man because he was so jealous.”

Steve Berkowitz visited them in London as a friend as well. David’s girlfriend, Katherine (Kim), also came over. “I went there a couple of times. They lived at this great house. I went to Italy to model for part of the time, but David would call me every night when I wasn’t there. He’s a real gentleman. And I never wondered, ‘Was he cheating?’ Because when you’re young, you think, ‘Oh, are they cheating?’ As you get older, you’re kind of mature, but when you’re young, you obsess about it.”

They finally finished recording and went home for the holidays in December 1983. Lange would not allow any of them to be present for mixing. “To have somebody tell Ric he can’t be there, that’s a no-no,” David says. Something seemed amiss when they finally received the mixes after waiting more than a month. They played “Drive.” It sounded great. Next track: “Drive.” He had mixed only one song multiple times.

“We take out the tape, and it’s, I think, seven versions of one song,” David says, still flummoxed. “We thought it was going to be like half the album. Seven versions of one song! We start playing them. We’re like, ‘I can’t even tell the difference between any of them! What the fuck was he doing?!’” They thought that if it had taken that long for just one song, this would go on for many more months. It was unacceptable. The songs had been so meticulously recorded that they were more or less in finished form. All the processing—adding effects, tweaking compression, editing—was done as Lange went along instead of leaving it for the mixing phase. They took the project out of Lange’s hands at that point. David says, “I think he had lost his mind because what happened was he ended up being unable to mix our record. He couldn’t do it.”

Lange’s usual engineer, Mike Shipley, had not been working on The Cars project. He said, “Mutt had started mixing that album and spent quite a few weeks trying to work on certain songs, but he was not well. Nigel Green, the engineer who had been working with him, was not that well either because they’d both been working so hard. The band was getting a little frustrated, so I came over to England to work on it with Mutt.” They had been recording on forty-eight tracks. “We again spent a certain amount of time trying to mix the songs, and Mutt kept asking, ‘Is there a console big enough in this country to mix this record on? . . . Today’s Thursday, so Friday, can you get on a plane, fly to New York, and mix it at Electric Lady Studios?’ We basically ended up where Ric and the band said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to slash through this stuff. We’re used to working fast.’ I set up the best that I could. I spent a day and a half per song, where Mutt would have spent two or three weeks per song. I would get it done fast and do the best that I could.”

Once it was mixed, Lange came to America to master it with one of the greats, Bob Ludwig. But Ric was not happy with the mastering, and he and Greg decided to remaster it with George Marino at Sterling Sound, who had done their other projects. Greg recalls having Roy Thomas Baker come to the mastering as a consultant. As late as February 1984, the working title of the album was Who’ll Drive You Home. Decades later, Greg told Jim Sullivan, “Mutt was the worst for Heartbeat City. He just did the one album because there were definitely people in the band that didn’t want to work with him again.”

So, was it all worth it? Was the band happy with the album? Yes, but with some caveats. “Heartbeat City is where technology has gone,” Ric wrote in the expanded reissue’s liner notes. “You have the classic Cars. Here’s the latest model.” David admits, “I didn’t know what to make of the album. I thought, ‘Did we overdo it?’ My two least favorite songs were on Heartbeat City, and they’re because of Mutt. Literally, he could just have had Def Leppard sing and called them Def Leppard songs. There’s nothing about The Cars in the two songs. One of them is ‘It’s Not the Night.’” Cowritten by Greg, it is very ’80s rock, with, as David observes, no resemblance to The Cars aside from Ben’s vocals. “That’s because Mutt primarily arranged it,” David explains. “He tried to play and sing on a whole bunch of songs. And ‘Stranger Eyes.’ I hate both of those songs. On ‘Stranger Eyes,’ I came up with a really bizarre drum thing that he hated and took off. He wouldn’t let me use it. I was trying to mix it up so it’s a little more interesting. And he didn’t like it.” “Stranger Eyes” would be chosen as the B-side of the “Drive” single.

Greg observes, “People complain. I have seen fans say. ‘Oh, they went pop on that one.’ Other people say, ‘They sound like Def Leppard.’” David adds, “You see: ‘I liked them until Heartbeat City. They blew it—their sound.’” Many of the fans who preferred more rock guitar in The Cars’ sound were again disappointed in the sound of the album. With some notable exceptions, the guitars are low in the overall mix. Elliot would always answer in interviews that he was satisfied when he was serving the songs, the albums, and the band as a whole. In 1985, he explained, “People have a hard time trying to figure us out. I have a hard time trying to figure us out.” He added, “The very nature of the band” was its constant evolution.

Released in March 1984, the album was a monster seller, selling a million copies in less than two months. I was a senior in high school, and it felt inescapable. The videos were on MTV seemingly every thirty minutes. It produced four Top 20 singles, two of which were Top 10. “Drive” hit number 3, the highest-charting Cars single. The album itself hit number 3. It would sell three million by the end of 1985, and total sales exceeded four million.

At the end of June 1983, the month the band went to record in London, Irene Cara’s “Flashdance” was spending its fifth week at number 1 on Billboard’s singles chart. It was a wonderfully eclectic year with everything from the straight-up retro-rockabilly of the Stray Cats to the resurgent Kinks to the synth-pop of Naked Eyesiv charting well. Iconic acts like Culture Club, the Police, David Bowie, and Hall & Oates would all swim around the Top 10 that summer. Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which was released in November 1982, was still dominant, though. The title track from that album would be released a year later as the seventh single, but “Beat It” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” were both still holding on in the Top 20. Jackson’s album held the number 1 slot for seventeen straight weeks and twenty-two weeks over the course of the year. Other acts who had a big year: U2, Men at Work, A Flock of Seagulls, Bonnie Tyler, Stevie Nicks, ZZ Top, Thompson Twins, Spandau Ballet, and the Fixx.

But it was also a pivotal year for underground rock artists who, as The Cars had, would emerge to become commercially successful or at least have an outsize influence. R.E.M. released their stunning debut LP, Murmur. Singular artists like Violent Femmes, Sonic Youth, and Billy Bragg released their extraordinary first albums. Risen from the ashes of Joy Division, New Order’s towering Power, Corruption, and Lies also came out that year, a wonderfully melancholy mélange of drum machines, guitars, and acoustic drums grafted onto dance rhythms. Their “Blue Monday” was an international dance-floor hit, while “Age of Consent” would sweep college radio and soon become a staple of the first wave of commercial alternative stations. The Replacements, Echo & the Bunnymen, and X released great records. These artists started out playing the postpunk club circuit that included the Rat, the place that had launched The Cars.

The Cars blew by such mile markers with their 1978 debut. Now they were gunning for the King of Pop. Released in February 1984, the first single from Heartbeat City, “You Might Think,” brought back some of the classic Cars sound—the crunchy guitars, the eighth-note pulse, an exquisite Elliot guitar solo, and an infectious melody. The spoken-word interlude brings to mind oldies like the 1962 hit “Do You Love Me” (which starts with the recitation, “You broke my heart / ’Cause I couldn’t dance”). The week the single was released, Van Halen’s “Jump” was at number 1. The others in the Top 5 were Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” Nena’s “99 Luftballons,” “Thriller,” and Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me.”

“Hello Again” is the appropriate leadoff track, swooping in with reverse-reverb a cappella vocals. When they disappear between phrases, there is no sense of space, no room sound, and no tape hiss, like getting sucked into a black hole. The synths enter, staccato stereo spikes, while another plays a bass line with a flange-like sound familiar from Def Leppard tracks. The cymbals sound tinny and disappear instantly with no resonance. The guitars sound squelched and buried in the mix. It’s all about the synths, drum machine, and vocals.

“Hello Again” heralded that the album would have the pristine and icy postmodern pop production of 1983–1984. It’s hard to believe that this was a band birthed out of the gritty punk clubs of Boston. Instead of comparing them to rock-and-roll bands, one could find more parallels to those aforementioned rock-pop crossover acts and chirpy synth-pop songs like “Somebody’s Watching Me” and Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters.” It’s peppered with sound effects. After the bridge, there’s a breakdown like “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” the number 1 hit from Yes that previous fall of 1983. Around 2:40, backing vocals jump out in almost 3D for “Wanna feel.”

“Looking for Love” has a similar beat to “Drive,” but busier. There’s a quick guitar solo. What sounds to be flossy acoustic guitars push the chorus along with Pete Townshend–like power strums. Falco covered the song, reworked as “Munich Girls” in 1985, on the same album as the smash “Rock Me Amadeus.”

Released in May as the second single, “Magic” is a quintessential summer hit made for ’80s radio. Ben’s bass more or less leads the way. Synths skyrocket. Elliot plays a soaring guitar solo that, uncharacteristically, dive-bombs out at the end.

If nothing else, Heartbeat City will be remembered as the album that gave the world “Drive,” not only one of The Cars’ finest songs but one of the best ballads of the decade. It became Ben’s signature song, one of only three he sings on the album. When people think about The Cars, it’s probably one of the first three or four songs that come to mind. It is astonishing to have a song like that come out five albums into a band’s career. Few artists can sustain such a catalog, never mind landing a signature song so late in the game.

Ben emotes like the best of ’em over a lush bed of synths, one of the few moments of warmth on the chilly-sounding record. He enunciates as Sinatra might, stabbing the T sound at the end of “great,” around 0:44, for example. After a short half verse, it’s right to the chorus, an example of an old pop-songwriting edict, “Don’t bore us; get to the chorus.” Next come layered vocals like 10cc’s 1975 masterpiece “I’m Not in Love,” though sampled, drenched in backward echo, and played on a keyboard. The resignation in Ben’s voice as he softly delivers the wordless vocalization before the song’s question refrain is quietly devastating. It’s just something like “oh oh.” While Ric was absent from the studio, Lange had Ben change it to something like “Oh, babe.” When Ric returned, he asked, “What is that?!” and ordered it changed back to what we hear on the recording. The middle verse is doubled. The percussion picks up, closer to the original demo, with conga samples joining the echoing tambourine. The backing vocals remain, building the arrangement. Ben sings a little behind the beat in spots, pushing forward a little in others, conversationally. In the third verse, he drags out “you” before barely getting out, almost whimpering “shake.”

Ben felt completely natural singing that particular lyric. It just flowed. “We didn’t really have to think about it,” he said. “It happened right there. . . . It was one of the easiest ones.” He said that went for the arrangement as well. Layering the backing vocals was the only aspect of the song that took some time. “Other than that, it was real easy, probably the easiest one we’ve done. A fluke.”

David, though, feels it was overproduced. “Mutt’s thing for me was still a little too slick, especially for ‘Drive,’” he says. “It was just too straight-out-power-ballad thing. But it was saved by Ben. It’s one of those things where you don’t think it’s in him. When you know his personality and you think, ‘How did he do that? How the fuck did he organize his thoughts and his ability and deliver that when he can barely talk?’ It was like he was just so natural in everything that was needed to be in rock and roll.”

“I was in the studio the night they did ‘Drive,’” Diane Page says. “It was around midnight. And Ben had a picture of me on the music stand, and I watched him record ‘Drive.’ So that became our song.”

Naturally, “Drive” was the perfect soundtrack to personal high school melodramas, real and imagined, and prom slow-dancing. But what was the original inspiration? A few have laid claim to hearing lines from their conversations with Ric played back to the world in this song. Bebe Buell said that the paternal Ric once admonished her after drinking herself into a stupor at her show at the Paradise in Boston and, dropping her off at her hotel, asked—yes—“Who’s going to drive you home the next time, Bebe?” She was coy the first time she relayed that story in her essay for the “Please Kill Me” website, not coming out and stating it was the song’s words. She tells me, “I know there’s a lot of discussion about ‘Drive.’ Everybody wants to claim ‘Drive.’ I don’t claim any of it. I just am telling the story. You can draw your own conclusion.”

Discussing how things were between Suzanne and Ric around 1984, Luis Aira says, “That song ‘Drive’? It’s all about that.” But Aira also recognizes himself in the song. In 2020, he wrote about how he was dealing with depression while at Syncro Sound, in a creative malaise.

“Ric was tired of me just sitting around writing stuff and was always telling me to get out there and get on with my career as a filmmaker. He had a lot going on in his life at that moment and was not exactly in the best mood himself.” They smoked some pot, and Ric played him some of the demos of the songs that became Heartbeat City. Ric drove Aira to his place, a few blocks away. “When I got out of the car, he turned to me with a reprimanding tone . . . and said . . . ‘You got to get your shit together. If I wasn’t around . . . Who’s going to drive you home?’ I didn’t see him after that for a couple of days. He came back into the studio, and he took me into his car where he played me a new song. . . . It was called ‘Drive.’ I must admit it felt like a scolding at first, but it was beautiful, and I told him so.” The way Ric often wrote lyrics was by mixing events of his life experience. “He’d take a bit of this and a bit of that and would find a theme that would become a poem. I can only claim that line.”

Ric said,

Some songs are . . . observations of the kind of messes people can get themselves into. And sometimes they’re just my little stories about people, all of which are true. I’ve said before, they’re like fiction, but it’s like true. I mean, when I write a song, I definitely have a person or the situation in my head, and it did happen or it’s happening. I mean, the person would never find out who it’s about. Maybe they’ll know. Sometimes, I think that the person that I write it about is going to hear it and know it’s about them. And I’ve had people come up to me and say, “Did you do that for me?” And I say no because I don’t want ’em to get nervous. I have to feel feelings that other people don’t—to be a writer, to be at all creative. Some people are not willing to feel such things, so they just sort of go along and live life. But for me, it’s painful.

HE EXPLAINED THAT WRITING TOOK A PHYSICAL TOLL ON HIM, GIVING HIM “back aches, mental aches. . . . I space out.”

Ben had considerably less to do on this album. Two of the three songs that he does sing on the record are those that David dislikes. Even “Drive” was a song initially considered for Ric’s Beatitude, but he wisely held it for The Cars. Written on a small keyboard in a Chicago hotel room, the demo with Ric singing can be heard on the expanded edition of Heartbeat City. He knew Ben’s voice would be perfect for it. Some reviews at the time erroneously credited Ric with the lead vocal even on “Drive,” which was a somewhat understandable mistake, especially as their press and videos—including the one for “Drive”—were increasingly focused on Ric. “It was just a running joke that Ric was the king,” says Diane Page. “Ben knew that Ric was jealous of him, but Ric couldn’t sing. Ben once joked that Ric had only let him do one bass solo in his life. And it was the [descending part on] ‘Moving in Stereo.’ Yeah. ‘Thanks, Ric! One solo!’ So he laughed it off.”

Ben maintained his trademark nonchalance about it in interviews. He told Steve Morse, “Some of the songs I sang . . . ended up on the cutting room floor, which is fine with me because I made that decision as well. We were going for the scope of the whole album, and you can’t put something on that doesn’t fit.” Morse asked Ben why the other songs were cut out and what made them wrong for the album. Ben replied, “They were just quirky songs that didn’t fit in.” So aside from “Drive,” which Ric conceded he could not sing, one of the era’s greatest rock singers was assigned the quirkiest songs that were left off the record, while one of rock’s greatest quirky stylists became more confident with his ability to sing almost everything. It’s hard to argue with the success.

Heartbeat City is more balanced than Shake It Up, the album Ric called his “least favorite” in Rolling Stone (he cited Panorama as his favorite, at least until Heartbeat City). From the standpoint of the overall quality and sequencing of the songs, Heartbeat City works well as a full album, even if it runs out of steam. Neither “Why Can’t I Have You” nor “I Refuse” begs for closer examination due to their generic surface.

Originally titled “Jacki,” the title track, “Heartbeat City,” closes out the album, ending on a high note. A somewhat hidden gem, it has a musical motif coincidentally similar to “Sunglasses at Night,” the Corey Hart single released in January 1984. It’s a great Cars number with an inspired lyric and performance, one that could fit on any of the albums.

From their minimalist beginnings to their almost maximalist new sheen, The Cars made a big play for the center with Heartbeat City. They went for radio hits, and they got them. “Everyone wants a record on the charts,” Ben said. “We’d already shown we can do the underground ideas. So this time around, for Heartbeat, we figured we’d make a little change and keep it a straight-ahead rock and roll kind of record.” Greg said in 1985 that they were concerned that it was “too pop” and they went “too far into the Top-40 direction.”

“It’s what we’ve been doing all along,” Elliot told Gary Graff of the Detroit Free Press in July 1984. “Turning the Top Ten topsy-turvy.” Greg added, “It’s more important for us to be state of the art than commercial.”

By now, Ric didn’t seem to struggle too much with the mass appeal of the band as long as he felt he was putting in some effort on the lyrics and not stealing from other artists. “At least the Cars have their own sound,” he told Creem. He added, as a half joke, “Schlock pop with integrity.”

Aside from a few head-turning production tricks and Mutt Lange razzle-dazzle, they emerged, for the most part, sounding like The Cars. “The Cars don’t sound like any other band,” Ric asserted to Bill Flanagan in February 1984 as the album’s first single was released. “When you hear them on the radio, you can’t mistake them for someone else.” He laughed about using the third person and continued, “Sometimes when I talk about The Cars, it’s almost like I’m talking about some other band.”

“It went a million dollars over budget,” Elliot says, adding that he recalls the initial budget being around a million as well. “It was so expensive at the time that Mutt gave back his advance, which was considerable. I don’t know if we knew exactly what we would be getting into with the whole Mutt thing, but we got a great record out of it.”

About a year later, the band recorded “Tonight She Comes” with Mike Shipley, who had mixed Heartbeat City. “That was the old Cars—we played live in the studio,” Ric reflected. “And it sounded pretty good. But Heartbeat City was the end of that part of The Cars.”

Footnotes

i The wonderfully swinging Heat Treatment.

ii Recall Roy Thomas Baker’s lesson about perceived volume in an earlier chapter.

iii I related this anecdote to Roger Linn, inventor of the LinnDrum. He replied, “It’s fun to read all the mythology that people have invented about my drum machines, even though an analysis of the output shows that the timing is just about perfect. Music is subjective, and that’s a good thing.” Maybe it was the “just about” that Lange perceived.

iv They covered the Bacharach-David song “Always Something There to Remind Me.”

Chapter 17

YOU MIGHT THINK I’M CRAZY

WRITER STEVE POND CALLED THE OFFICE AT SYNCRO TO SET UP AN INTERVIEW with David for an article in the July 19–August 2 1984 issue of Rolling Stone. Pond was informed by the person answering, “I don’t know . . . Ric doesn’t like anybody else but himself and Greg talking to the press.”

Hoping to discuss rumors that David was unhappy with how the sessions for Heartbeat City went down, Pond relayed the message to David through Greg. As the band readied for the album’s release, Ric’s increasing dominance was reaching its limits with the guys, none more so than David. When David returned Pond’s call, he explained to the writer, “There is not a single hand-played drum on the whole record. I hit each drum once and each cymbal once. . . . There were weeks at a time when I didn’t even hear anything they were doing.” He confessed that he had been ready to go back to Boston every few weeks, but the others convinced him to stay, that he would soon be able to contribute. “I’d waited two years. I had a lot of ideas I wanted to try, and this took some of the excitement out of it.”

It wasn’t the only time a reporter was dissuaded from talking with David. He recalls at least one other instance. “David Fricke called me once and said, ‘I thought I should tell you this. I called Elliot Roberts’s office and said, “I want to do an interview with David.” Then [Roberts] said, “No, you can’t do an interview with him. You can do one with Ric.”’ And [Fricke] said, ‘I don’t want to do one with Ric.’ They said, ‘David’s got nothing to say.’ So, who knows what else I missed? Thanks, Elliot Roberts! Can you imagine the fucking nerve?”

David had given up on his past attempts to rally the troops and stand up to what he saw as Ric’s worsening disregard for his bandmates. “I was always the only one. I was doing it for myself, but also for the band as a whole because we would all benefit from Ric not doing all this shit.”

Ben also felt marginalized. Says Elliot, “Even though he wasn’t maybe necessarily the most articulate guy, and probably would’ve been uncomfortable doing all the interviews that Ric was doing, I felt like most of the hurt on Ben’s part—and it was hurt—was he felt as though Ric was kind of shoving him aside.”

George Dassinger, who became the band’s publicist at Elektra during Heartbeat City’s run of success, says there was “no question” that Ric was being pushed as a front man like Tom Petty. “And it was sort of collusive in a sense. It was Elliot Roberts, Ric, and Bob Krasnow, who ran Elektra. They were very tight. So it was very incestuous like that.”

It got even more infuriating when they went on a short press tour in Europe to promote the albums. They would not be performing concerts, but they were all there ostensibly for interviews and media appearances to publicize the release of Heartbeat City. They were all informed that they would divide the interviews.

David explains, “I get my sheet of paper with the interviews, and the schedule says, ‘10:30: David meets (a guy) in the lobby.’ So I’m sitting in the lobby. Twelve o’clock, I give up. Ric’s gone. I can’t find anybody. So I finally got them at like 7:30 at night. I said, ‘The guy never showed up.’” Bill Gerber of Lookout Management answered, “Oh, Ric did that interview.” David was understandably annoyed and answered, “You told me I had to do the interview and gave me the schedule, and I sat down there.” David concluded that Ric was “afraid to come on his own” on the press tour because it would raise questions among the press about the state of the band. “So they went through all the trouble to have this sort of fake thing. Ric did some of the other guys’s interviews, too. So we were talking about it. Ric’s on the Concorde, we’re coming back on a regular plane, and they all get worked up. Even Greg’s like, ‘That was fucked up, making us go over there and do all this shit.’ We came home. Again, nobody mentioned it to Ric.”

“That’s correct,” Elliot confirms. “I mostly shopped. I don’t know about it being actually set up as a ‘fake schedule,’ though. I don’t think it was that diabolical.”

Gerber took care of Ric, making sure he got on his flight. But when Greg asked him to order him a car service for when they got back home, Gerber asked him, “Well, won’t you be speaking with Julia at the office?” Greg said, “Yeah, but I am asking you to take care of it.” Again, easygoing Greg believes Gerber must be confusing him with someone else. Gerber laughs at his younger, haughty self. “I was really kind of indignant, like, ‘I’m not a car guy.’ I was not the most subservient person at that point. Elliot Roberts? You could say anything to Elliot. He would never say no. I mean, he would yell at me, but if a client said, ‘Hey, can you have a car for me?’ ‘Yeah, yeah.’ He wouldn’t know how to do it, but he would say, ‘Sure!’ But then he’d forget, and then he’d blame somebody and believe it was somebody else’s fault. That was the genius of it.”

Gerber explains that the band’s road manager at the time, Richard Fernandez, “was the one that had to always get Ric a Learjet to go here and there. And the band were like, ‘Why are we paying for Ric’s Learjet?’ I was on the Learjet, too, so I wasn’t about to get into it.” Renowned on the circuit of A-list touring acts, Fernandez, whom I reached while he was running the 2023 tour for Steely Dan, is described by all as unflappable. “Richard was the nicest guy,” Greg says. “So nice and calm. Whatever happened. Nothing ever upset him.” David adds, “He didn’t yell at people at venues. He took care of everything perfectly.”

Before they had entered the studio for Heartbeat City, the ever-temperate and diplomatic Greg reckoned, “If there’s a problem . . . you can’t let it blow out of shape . . . let’s take care of it . . . so the band stays together, because why not? Why shouldn’t the band stay together when it’s working well for us? So why cut your own throat? An ego is an ego, and you can fortify your ego within a group if you really want to.”

Elliot Easton was increasingly frustrated with Ric but avoided confronting him directly for the same reasons Greg outlined. Greg now observes that the relationship between Ric and Elliot “just kind of deteriorated as years went by. Earlier on, Elliot would say a couple of things to me, and I was just sort of, ‘Well, that’s just the way Ric is,’ or I didn’t give it a lot of importance or thought Elliot was overreacting a little. There was some tension there that never got resolved, and Elliot always felt like a second-class citizen in Ric’s hierarchy. It was, ‘What am I, chopped liver?’ I heard that expression a few times.”

David, during the same conversation, strikes a bemused tone, adding, “It’s funny that Ric would find the time to hassle Elliot about shit. But Ben, who is completely removed emotionally from the lyrics, from anything, that’s okay. That didn’t bother him.”

In 1997, a decade after The Cars broke up, Ric tipped off his feelings on this touchy subject, telling Goldmine how they decided who would sing a song, he or Ben: “I tried to keep some of the [songs] that had more of a sense of humor for myself. ’Cause I didn’t know if he would interpret ’em with the [original intent].” In the same piece, Elliot said, “Ric started singing more and more songs, which I always kind of felt was, in a way, fitting. I mean, Ben could sing some of those lyrics, but I always wonder if he got it on every level.”

David continues, “He never said, ‘Well, Ben’s dumb and doesn’t understand the song,’ but ‘Oh, Elliot is a shitty guitar player.’ It’s okay for him to say that.”

Elliot says, “I don’t think Ric ever called me a ‘shitty guitar player.’ There’s just lots of little things like that through the years. Ric would just brush me off and then be friendly—hot and cold. He kept me off-balance. Maybe that was the idea. And then, it would come back to me when Ric would be talking to someone else about me, and he’d say what an amazing guitar player I was and that I was incredible. But to me, he might say something, he might compliment something, but it wasn’t the same as what he said to the outside world.”

David continued to steer the band’s visual direction. During the Heartbeat City recording sessions, he used some of his downtime to conceive ideas for the album packaging. He attended an exhibit at the Tate Gallery for Peter Phillips, an English artist influenced by Americans like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Phillips used American commercial iconography in his work, imagery that was right up the pop-culture alley of The Cars, with pinup models, cars, geometric patterns, and vibrant colors.

Upon entering the Tate, the first thing he saw was the painting they would use on the cover of the album, a 1972 acrylic-on-canvas titled Art-O-Matic Loop Di Loop. “That painting is like seven feet high and fourteen feet long. I was so excited to discover it.” David laughs even now, almost giddy at how perfect it was.

So I got in touch with him and met him. Super nice guy. “Oh yeah, you can use the painting.” At the time, I verbally made some promises to him. I said, “It’s always going to have a white border so you just see the painting, and it’s never going to be cut into pieces. You are always going to see it. And it will always, within reason, have your name visible; never use it without your name on it.” It’s kind of a monster. It took a long time. So I get this concept in my head for the rest of the album: it’s going to be a gatefold. We know that it’s going to take up the whole front. I started doing test photographs for the rest of the album. I had somebody make some neon for a shot of Ben.

THE SHOTS IN THE GATEFOLD INCLUDE PICTURES OF BEN LOOKING LIKE HE just heroically landed a biplane after shooting down the Red Baron. “And some of it is related to other artwork by the same artist. Like there are tigers and animals, there are hawks and eagles, then there are car parts.

“So I get my stuff together to take to the art department, and I walk in there, and there’s a new art director.” David asked the man what kind of work he had done in the past. Did he have a portfolio he could show? The guy, affronted, responded, “I did The Bag.”

“So I’m looking at him—what the fuck does he mean, ‘the bag’? And I asked, ‘Oh, did you do the Bloomingdale’s bag that says “The Bag” on it?’ He goes, ‘That was me.’” This was a popular shopping bag with “little brown bag” printed in a large font. “He doesn’t offer anything else. ‘I’m the guy that did The Bag, so I’m going to do your album cover.’ So I took out the painting, and I said, ‘This is going to be on the front.’ He looks at it, ‘But that’s no good.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no. We already have this painting. We’re going to use this painting.’ And he answered so quickly, ‘Well, we’ll shrink it down and put it on the back somewhere.’ ‘No, no, this is the front.’ He said something like, ‘Well, we’ll see about that.’”

David persisted. He would visit the office, and the director would not cooperate with him, still not offering any of his own ideas or alternatives. He started locking David out of his office. David laughs, “I’d be banging on his door going, ‘I know you’re in there. I know you’re in there!’”

David tried to elicit help from Elliot Roberts. “I said, ‘Elliot, can you straighten things out at Elektra?’ ‘Oh yeah, I’ll take care of it.’ Nothing. Elliot did nothing. So, I gave up. Some weeks go by, and I get a phone call, and it’s the art department. They say, ‘Do you have the camera-ready, finished artwork for the album?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? I tried to work with your guy. He wouldn’t work with me. He blew me off. Are you telling me he didn’t make another cover?’ And they go, ‘No.’”

David scrambled to work with them over the phone—in the days before scanning or emailing—trying to convey the original concept. When it was released, David explains,

It’s got that chocolate-red-brown border around it. They laid out the pictures [in the gatefold], and at the last minute they had a picture of Boston, so Boston could be Heartbeat City itself. People conjecture about it. “What city is that? Oh, it’s Heartbeat City.” Elliot [Easton] complained about it. Ric complained about it. I tried to explain the difficulty I’d had, but they didn’t understand what it was like. And I tell people, when you work on a cover, what you do is you defend the cover. You don’t work on the cover. You’re fighting to make it look like it’s supposed to look to you. You’re losing completely some of the time. So it comes out, and we send copies of it to Peter Phillips, who did the painting, with my apology. Never hear from him again.

Decades later, Rhino reissued expanded and remastered versions of the band’s back catalog, including Heartbeat City. It allowed David to restore the packaging design to his original vision. “I was so pleased with the way it came out. It was the best do-over ever because I hated it. I hated it! I fucking worked so hard on a great idea, and I failed miserably. So I package it up to send it to the artist again, and I go and look at his website, and I realize that he’s got a whole thing on his website about how wonderful it was working on The Cars’ cover. There isn’t anything about the bad aspect of it at all. He was totally satisfied. He just never answered.” Phillips was even happier with the new version and sent David a valuable print of one of his paintings.

David also researched video directors, assembling showreels from various directors, and was keen on Godley & Creme, who, like Devo’s Gerald Casale, were musicians (from 10cc) who directed music videos, creating memorable works like the clips for “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, “Rockit” from Herbie Hancock, and their own song as a duo, “Cry,” a groundbreaking black-and-white video where close-up portraits morph into the faces of others.

“I wrote it all up, all the information, and I gave it to Elliot Roberts,” David says. “I could just see him throwing it in the trash. Never came up. I spent two weeks just listening to them and making notes about them and comments about different videos. Nothing. Never heard anything about it at all.”

The Cars went all in on video in 1984. MTV was an efficient way to reach a national audience with frequent regularity, bypassing local radio programmers and relieving some pressure to tour. The first video released from Heartbeat City was for “You Might Think,” famous for featuring Ric’s head on the body of a fly and other permutations as he pursued actress Susan Gallagher in a B-movie send-up. Elektra’s Robin Sloane asked Jeff Stein, who had directed Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell,” to direct The Cars’ song. Stein had gotten into music videos after directing the full-length 1978 documentary about the Who, The Kids Are Alright. Stein initially turned down The Cars, citing the band’s “reputation as being completely boring live,” which he contrasted with the Who, “the greatest live act ever.” But after listening to “You Might Think,” he thought of Charlex—a portmanteau of the first names of partners Charlie Levi and Alex Weil. He had become familiar with their work on National Enquirer TV commercials that blended cartoonish graphics with images of real people and places. They were one of the first teams to use computer graphics for these kinds of special effects. The video would be produced and directed by Stein and the duo.

“One of the worst parts of the video process was pitching ideas to the band,” Stein recalled in the oral history I Want My MTV. “I met the Cars and told them, ‘The band’s in the medicine chest, and then on a bar of soap, and Ric’s a fly,’ and one of them said, ‘Why don’t we just play a turd in the toilet bowl?’ That was the prevailing attitude.”

More than just a funny one-liner, it was emblematic of the “What am I, chopped liver?” sentiment that the Ric-dominated band was feeling. Shot on a soundstage in New York for about two weeks in March 1984, it took months to complete. Meanwhile, Charlex could take no other work. Stein and Charlex fought over credits, and Stein exited the project before completion. Greg said it was the duo who ended up doing most of the creative work. Charlex came to Elektra holding the video ransom for more money than had been agreed to. “One of the guys who worked for Charlex had the video in an attaché case handcuffed to his wrist,” Sloane said.

The Cars had already produced some memorable videos demonstrating their arch and self-deprecating humor, but apparently Ric hated the finished “You Might Think.” “He thought it made fun of the way he looked,” Sloane said. The original version did not yet have the Ric-as-fly-guy part because it was not finished when the official premiere date arrived. They swapped it with the finished clip, which not only went on to win Video of the Year at the inaugural MTV Awards but was also the first music video put in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Even though the band was on the cutting edge of videos before MTV was even conceived, Ric maintained a publicly skeptical stance. He told NME in 1984 that videos “have nothing to do with the song. When you watch a video you don’t even want to hear the music, it’s just background for a film. When ‘You Might Think’ was released here one channel of the [audio] was missing at first and nobody noticed it for a whole week. It’s totally absurd.”

They ended up spending around $400,000 on the video. Gerald Casale laughs, “My misfortune was that when they finally allow themselves to do videos, they choose two of the most unlikely songs they ever wrote—basically anomalies to their body of work—and so they go nowhere. For low-budget videos, they hold up. But then, when they got money, what did they do? They went with that company Charlex and spent four hundred grand.”

As Annie Zaleski wrote in a 2019 reflection for Billboard, “Despite (or maybe because of) his lingering skepticism about videos, Ocasek was the perfect early MTV star. In performance-based Cars videos, he was blissfully unaware of playing to the camera, meaning his persona is pure rock star swagger. He was also a rather fine actor.” Zaleski observed that Ric’s bemused detachment worked well, a wizened character with a highly distinctive image thrust into these unlikely conceptual scenarios.

The video for “Magic” depicts Ric walking on water (in a swimming pool) as a “crazy messiah” who attracted a frenzied following, as described by director Tim Pope. Ric reminded him of a Manson-type character, inspiring the concept. It took only one day to film at the Hilton mansion in LA, even though the clear platform just under the pool’s surface collapsed and had to be rebuilt. The other four members are not shown until three minutes into the four-minute video, tucked away in the corner of the property. The members who are not Ric appear for a combined total of around thirty seconds. If this were the first exposure someone had to The Cars, they would be forgiven for assuming it was a solo act. David sees it as part of “the campaign to get rid of us.” His own mother asked him why he wasn’t in the video for “Magic.” He recalled, “I had to play the video for her, pause it, and say, ‘Look, that’s me.’”

David could still walk around anonymously, even at their own concerts. After shows, Ric would not stick around to say hello to fans, not even at set meet and greets. “He would say, ‘Go down to the hospitality room and come back and tell me if there are any models down there,’” says David. “But otherwise, he had no contact with the fans.” David, though, would try to stop and say hello, particularly if there were just a small handful of fans. “It goes such a long way,” he explains.

They’re so excited. I won’t go talk to fifty people at once who just want autographs, but if there are like six people and they made some long drive, I don’t mind it at all. This happened at least twice: I’m on my way out, and there are some fans here at the gate or whatever, and they go, “Where’s Ric? Where’s Ben?” I’d say, “I think they left.” And they’d go, “Aw, we love The Cars! What do you do?” So I said, “What do you mean, what do I do?” They said, “Are you a roadie?” I said, “No, no, I’m in The Cars.” They go, “No, you’re not.” “Oh my god,” I said. “What makes you think I’m not in The Cars? You saw the show, right?” “Yeah, it was great.” I said, “Well, that was me on the drums.” They go, “Why aren’t you in the videos if you’re in The Cars?”

Ric acted out a drama in the video for the third single, “Drive,” the video that would change his life in multiple ways. It was directed by actor Timothy Hutton, another client of Elliot Roberts’s. In 1980, at the age of twenty, Hutton became the youngest person to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Ordinary People. He lived next door to Roberts in Malibu, and the manager would invite him over to hang out with Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Soon, Roberts asked about Hutton’s ambitions, one of which was to direct, and the two began working together.

“He wasn’t handling any actors, but I was interested in music,” says Hutton, who plays drums. “I wasn’t good enough to play music, but I was interested in maybe doing something with my interest in it. And it happened to be a perfect time because videos were exploding. Everybody was making videos, and the budgets for videos were insane. It was an amazing promotional tool.”

Roberts would often play Hutton tapes of unreleased songs by his artists, one of which was The Cars. “He threw on ‘Drive,’ and I started listening to it, and afterward, I said, ‘Wow, that’s very unlike other Cars songs. I mean, it’s an amazing ballad. Thanks for letting me hear that.’ He said, ‘So what do you think of it? You think it could be a video?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah, I mean, I think any good song can be a video. I think any good song can be a great song with the right video.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you talk to Ric about it?’”

Hutton visualized it as more or less what we see in the final version.

The only thing that I kind of talked to Ric about was “I kind of see it in a place where there’s—like a bar or something, and the woman’s there, and all the men are mannequins and kind of inaccessible, and the woman is the only real human in the story. And it’s fluid. The camera’s always moving. There’s an isolated shot of Ben so that he’s always at a table, but he’s alone, and there’s an isolation about the song.” And I was thinking, “Who’s going to drive you home?” I mean, in a bigger way, “Who’s going to take care of whom? Who’s going to be there at the end of the day? Who is the person who will be there?” So it really wasn’t much more than that. And then little cutaways to some kind of domestic tension, and then come back and have her the last shot, be the only live human who is visibly distraught because of not having somebody that is there for her, not having somebody who one can rely on.

Ric was instantly sold on the concept. He told Hutton, “That feels right. I like that. That’s the song. I would love for you to direct the video.”

“It just all kind of happened really fast,” Hutton says. “Elliot [Roberts] said, ‘All right, well, Ric says you’re doing this.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do I do? What are the next steps?’ ‘Well, we’ll hire a production company to do all of the nuts and bolts of logistics and things and all that, and best to film it in New York.’ And so we filmed it at Kaufman Astoria Studios.”

They constructed a set over the course of a week and held auditions to cast for the woman character. The production team recommended Hutton use the Ford modeling agency.

They asked, “Is there some actress you have in mind?” I said, “No, no, I want a face that no one has ever really seen before. And I want the woman to be tall” because Ric was incredibly tall, so I did not want this mismatch. So I just had in my mind long dark hair, tall and striking, looking to match Ric, who’s a very striking-looking human as well. The first part of it was looking over photos, and then it was kind of like there were five to ten women that kind of fit that description, that had a strong presence about them with strong, very present eyes and all that. And Paulina Porizkova was one. They were invited to come in and have an interview, just to kind of see what they’re like in the room. As soon as Paulina came in, I just thought, “Okay, well, there she is. That’s it.”

Paulina was on the precipice of stardom when she appeared on the cover of the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated in February 1984, the month they were shooting the “Drive” video and a few weeks before Heartbeat City was released. “I think they just put the call out for the hot models in New York,” she says. “Elliot Roberts, who was always so funny and smart and entertaining, always contended that he was the one who picked me.”

Ric was brought in to meet his costar. Bill Gerber, who was present when Ric met Paulina, says, “He just had a complete out-of-body experience when he met her. We walked in, and it was like that scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone is thunderstruck. Ric just took one look at her. He started talking to her, and we walked out, and he was like, I mean, he was shell-shocked. He didn’t know what to do with himself. And that was that.”

“Anybody who saw Ric and Paulina in the same room, there was definitely an energy about them, the way they looked at each other,” Hutton agrees. “It just was very, very strong. There was a strong story immediately. It was one of those things where you just throw a couple of ideas at them, and you put the camera in the right place and let them go, and it just worked.”

Neither Ric nor Paulina was ready to stop on the first day of rehearsals. In 1985, Ric recalled, “Tim was really into the whole Method trip,” explaining that Hutton fostered a fraught atmosphere, wearing Ric and Paulina down. “She was a real natural actress—she’s real good at that,” Ric told Lisa Robinson in 1985. At another point in the same interview, Robinson asked, “Have you ever suffered romantically, gotten obsessed with anyone?” “Definitely,” Ric answered. “Totally obsessed. . . . I think it’s a form of insanity that you go through. You aren’t in very good control of your faculties. . . . It’s hard to work under those conditions and hard to live.”

In hindsight, those remarks appear quite specific. “He just became obsessed,” says Gerber. “They started hanging out. Of course, he was happily married. I mean, Suzanne was a great lady.” More than one person close to Ric remarked on how lucky he was to have Suzanne, not only for her financial and emotional support during the lean years but also as a strikingly beautiful and strong woman and a great mother to two of his four sons. As Mike Howell put it, “I kind of thought he was batting above his weight with Suzanne.”

Ric was forty years old. Paulina was nineteen. An immigrant who had escaped Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, she has been a model since the age of thirteen, discovered by the internationally renowned John Casablancas for his Elite Model Management firm. She was considered by many to be the most beautiful woman in the world, so it’s no surprise that Ric was instantly smitten. What’s more intriguing is that she was “mesmerized” by him. “I thought he was so hot. Tall, lanky, and those blue eyes,” she says. “That’s what I was attracted to.” She had seen him before, on MTV, in the video Luis Aira had directed for “Something to Grab For” from Beatitude. When the video finished and the credits came up, she noticed his surname was Czech. “That was actually kind of a turnoff,” she says. “I was not into Czech guys.”

Paulina says she had no idea Ric was in the band The Cars when she was cast for their video. Indeed, she says that she didn’t know The Cars as a band. When he walked into the room for the first time, she thought, “Holy fucking shit, the man from the video. Ric Ocasek . . . I knew this was the man I was going to marry.” She told Ric that she was nervous and might faint. He touched her knee and told her he would catch her if she did. It was love at first sight, something that was so familiar to her that it was as if they “had already been in love.” She says now that after therapy and doing a lot of psychological work, “Two strangers falling in love across the room are people who instinctively recognize childhood trauma in each other.”

The video opens in shadowy black and white, a noirish setting in an abandoned nightclub. Hutton wanted to keep the colors muted. “That was a very, very specific conversation I had with a cinematographer. We watched a couple of films, and we found the look. I wanted it to be a little bit of a sepia tone at times and feel black-and-white during the argument and create a mood that would match the song. It needed to feel dreamlike. We had many discussions about that and had reference points, and it turned out how I imagined it.” Hutton cites the films of Hal Ashby, Terrence Malick, and Miloš Forman as direct influences. “There was something about [Forman’s] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the interior of that hospital and what it looked like and what faces looked like and the way eyes photographed in that type of light.”

A slow zoom shot closes in on the smoldering Ben Orr, seated alone at a table. As it hits the first chorus, the video cuts to a muted-color shot of Paulina acting out a mental breakdown, splayed out on the floor in an institutional-looking room in what seems vaguely to be a hospital gown, scribbling on a wall behind her. “In rehearsals, I didn’t tell Paulina about the crayons,” Hutton explains.

I wanted that to be a spontaneous kind of thing and have her in this room with this corner of white walls. And it would be a scene that would happen after you saw the domestic tension, the argument. I brought some crayons in, and I said, “All right, so imagine you just don’t know what’s what anymore, and you’re in some room, and you find some crayons, and you want to paint, but you can’t.” She took the idea and ran with it, and that’s how that came to be. I felt like when I saw them in a room together, my excitement was not about continuing to rehearse. It was about capturing it.

Once again, the band doesn’t appear until around the final quarter, this time only in mannequin form, including Ben, the lead singer of the song. “That pissed him off,” Diane Page reports.

But Hutton says he perceived no evident tension.

The way Elliot [Roberts] talked about The Cars, it was clearly Ric who made the big decisions. Also, Ric was the guy who was very interested in film and up-and-coming directors and music and music videos and art. Ric was the one who really wanted The Cars to have a certain look, a certain vibe. And I don’t know to what extent he would include the others. I didn’t get on the phone with the band. I didn’t get on the phone with Ben. So I just kind of assumed, without anyone ever saying anything, that Ric was going to make the decisions. Ric needed to hear the idea, and that’s how it went. And then I met the band, and Ben seemed to be just an incredibly shy, really nice guy. All of them were great. I had the best time working with all of them. Never any tension. When I was filming Ric with Paulina, just the two of them doing scenes, the other members never asked, “Well, why does Ric get to have this kind of side story?”

Hutton says Ben liked the idea of him opening the video with the long, extended 360-degree crane shot around him. “The rest of the band just loved the idea that they were going to be dressed in these weird costumes, almost like a fifties band, like a house band. And they had to be mannequins. They had to freeze. They all had a blast filming it. They were one of these bands that really, really enjoyed the idea of music videos, and they were having a great time with their success. It was as smooth as can be.”

Paulina went out to dinner with Ric and the band at the trendy Odeon in Tribeca, where Ric took her up on a dare to just plop himself down between a couple at a neighboring table. “He just seemed so confident,” she recalls. “But of course, as you get older, you realize he was probably showing off like an insecure kid.”

They left the band behind, and after sneaking a few kisses, he admitted he was married. She rationalized that it must be an unhappy marriage. It wasn’t until months into their new affair that she learned he had children, never mind a previous family with a son who was about a year older than her. They would keep this a secret for as long as they could. He lied about his true age, telling her he was four years younger.

Hutton says, “I went into the editing room for two or three weeks just to make sure that I could get it precise. It was probably Elliot [Roberts] who said one day, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’ And he told me, and I said, ‘Well, I do believe it. I just hope that the fallout’s not going to be too difficult for those who might have this come as unwelcome news.’ But it was none of my business, and they ended up having this amazing life together. And after they got together, I would see them. We would have dinner.”

The Cars created more to sate the MTV beast. Bill Gerber acts as the host of a fake local teen chat show to introduce the outré video for “Hello Again,” directed by Andy Warhol and Don Munroe, neither of whom had directed a music video before. Munroe, who directed a cable-access series for Warhol called Andy Warhol’s TV with music underscoring interviews and segments on fashion and art, did most of the actual direction on “Hello Again.” Warhol conceived and was a featured centerpiece in it.

In the framing device, the kids are asked by Gerber about the problems of exposure to “gratuitous sex and violence” on MTV as Warhol, acting as a bartender, watches the show on a television in the Be Bop Cafe on Eighth Street in the West Village. A car crashes into the set of the teen rap show as the swooping “Hhhhhhhhelllo” of the song starts.

Ric said, “I knew that I’d be performing with [Warhol] at some point in my life.” Over the years, they got to know each other. Warhol picked the song he wanted to direct. They had just done a high-tech video for “You Might Think,” and Ric wanted to go in another direction. They combined grainy Super 8 film with video and a blue-screen backdrop to slip in effects. The Cars joined Diane Brill and a cast of dozens of Warhol’s friends and superstars. John Sex (John McLoughlin) dances with a big snake around his bare shoulders. One of Bill Gerber’s high school classmates, future star Gina Gershon, is also in the video, sticking out her tongue to reveal “hello” spelled out in alphabet-soup letters.

Ric said Warhol “stood there behind that bar for about four or five hours in that one position, just staring out into the bar and watching everything that was going on. Never moved. He thoroughly enjoyed doing that.” The band members themselves get plenty of screen time for a change, hanging out among the denizens of the bar and working an old-fashioned switchboard with Ric front and center. There is a montage of people kissing, an homage to Warhol’s 1963 film The Kiss.

Featuring nonbinary members in the cast and the imagery of New York gay culture, it was a transgressive video for the Reagan-era eighties. By the end of 1983, AIDS had already claimed the lives of more than two thousand people, but Reagan himself would not mention it until 1985, and research funding was tragically slow. There was a stigma and ugly prejudice around the epidemic. The video brought marginalized people onto MTV, one of the biggest stages in America. Alongside “You Might Think,” it is also in the collection of MoMA.

For the Heartbeat City “video album,” a retail home VHS tape, the band packaged the individual clips of “Drive,” “Magic,” “You Might Think,” “Hello Again,” “Panorama,” and “Shake It Up,” along with a behind-the-scenes making of “Hello Again.” There was also a new one for the song “Heartbeat City” (the B-side of the “You Might Think” single) shot by Luis Aira on their new stage set, which was again designed by Stephen Bickford. Luis also shot footage used on television monitors that rotated like a Ferris wheel within the stage set. The band would release The Cars Live, 1984–1985 on home video as well, capturing a show from the Summit in Houston, Texas, on September 12, 1984, that was recorded by Westwood One and broadcast as a radio show.

Bill Flanagan, who in 1995 would become an executive at MTV Networks, recalls his skepticism ten years prior about the impact of music videos. “I remember at the time of Heartbeat City saying to Ric, ‘Do you ever worry with these videos that in ten or twenty years, people are going to look at you like the Monkees?’ And he said, ‘We’re all going to be the Monkees in ten years. That’s not even something to worry about.’”

The tour would begin in late spring. In the meantime, the reviews started to come in after the release in March. As they had been since the second album, they were mixed. Longtime observers of the band seemed initially jarred by the flashy surface of the production. But reviews didn’t matter much for Heartbeat City. MTV and pop radio were selling records.

In a New York Times piece that was more descriptive than a critique, Robert Palmer wrote, “The detached, ironic stance taken by Mr. Ocasek’s lyrics had started to become a kind of stylistic tic; his new songs are considerably more direct. ‘This time, I said what I meant,’ Mr. Ocasek said in a recent conversation. ‘I made a concerted effort on this particular record not to be so distant; if a song was capable of conveying emotion, I’d put that aspect right out front.’”

The Cars had additional national exposure when they appeared for the first time on Saturday Night Live on May 12, 1984, the final episode of the season. Don Novello, in character as Father Guido Sarducci, introduces Timothy Hutton, who, wearing a Public Image Ltd. shirt, in turn, introduces his “friends from Boston, The Cars!” Hutton had lived in Cambridge and Arlington for part of his childhood. The band begins “Drive” with sequencers doing most of the heavy lifting. Ric is on the second keyboard, Ben holds but doesn’t start playing his bass until the second verse, and Elliot poses with his guitar for a while before adding some subtle atmospherics. We don’t see David, who is hidden in the back shadows for the entire song. “They had no lighting on me. I was in the pitch-black,” he says. “My manager [Elliot Roberts] watched it on a monitor, and of course, ‘Oh, it’s just David; no one will notice he’s not there.’ I had lights for the rehearsal, but nobody turned them on for the performance. Our manager’s sitting there; he doesn’t notice one of the band members is not lit?”

It wasn’t just David who felt diminished. In a magazine article, Ric said he was tired of having to shoulder “95 percent of everything that happens in this band.” But he really let Elliot have it, singling him out. Elliot explains, “In between Heartbeat City coming out and my record being done, I played my record for a writer, and he was impressed by it and liked it. So then he next went to interview Ric, and Ric exploded and said, ‘Well, let me tell you about those guys. If I didn’t do everything, they’d just sit in their houses in the country, and if I didn’t tell Elliot what to play, all I would get were blues licks and scales from Berklee College of Music.’”

Elliot’s heart was broken. He says,

It was such a crazy thing to say. It was so off the wall and beyond untrue. I mean, come on, man. “Okay, Ric, show me that lick again on ‘Touch and Go.’ How do you do that? ‘Best Friend’s Girl.’ How’s that go?” It is absurd. I won’t even dignify it. But then we had to go out on tour in support of Heartbeat City. And I wasn’t exactly ready to quit the band because of that, but I just couldn’t imagine stepping out onto that stage every night with the thought that people had read those words, thinking that I was playing what someone told me to play, which was all I had in the band is what I play. That’s my corner of the band.

Elliot addressed the situation head-on with Ric. He was primarily concerned that if Ric believed that, then Elliot was faced with an existential dilemma within the band.

Elliot [Roberts] made Ric apologize to me, which was backstage at the first show. I think the tension was palpable. Ric knew he had put his foot in his mouth. He’d been having a really bad day or something. He made some kind of excuse, but he was almost in tears. And he said he was sorry. And I guess I accepted his apology and just carried on because I didn’t quit the band. But it was awful. And it was a real kind of like—you don’t need me to embellish at all to see that it was complete BS for one thing, and for a second thing, it reveals a very sort of narcissistic kind of side, that he couldn’t even share that the guy enjoyed my music a little bit, that would make him explode, that the guy had heard someone else’s music in the band. Ric did have a thing about wanting to be the focal point of the band, and he kind of, in his head, was the band. Then there was the thing of him and Elliot keeping me down, and that is not something that I was imagining; it was happening. I think there was a sickness there.

Paulina says she appreciated all the guys. “Elliot was so smart and funny. David had the aesthetics. He was the one who you looked at. He was always immaculately dressed. I mean, Ric was a great dresser, but David had him even a little up on that. And then Greg, who was just a sweetheart, super talented, that could play all these instruments, was sweet and funny and kind of delightful and fit in everywhere with anybody. He could go this way; he could go this way. But I thought they were great. But it was like . . . annoyances that Ric had with Elliot.”

I ask, “Like he was an annoying little brother kind of thing?”

“Yeah, a bit like that. Ric would not treat—actually, I think he didn’t treat anybody with a great amount of respect. And I think it got to the guys like, ‘Hey, I’m a contributor here, and I’m a good one, and you need me, too.’”

Elliot explains,

It was always just a funny chemistry between Ric and me. I kind of looked up to him, kind of a big-brother thing, and really wanted his approval, and I worked my ass off in that band. But sometimes, he’d be smiley and chatty and joking with me. And then sometimes he’d almost be like, he hardly knew me. And he picked on me over little things. But he’d be real friendly to me, and then one of his friend friends would come on the scene, and then he’d completely ignore me. And I’m very sensitive and hurt easily.

He didn’t like a lot of the kind of music that I liked, and I didn’t really care too much about a lot of the music that he liked. And that was kind of what The Cars was. It was just an unusual recipe, a combination of people coming together, and that’s what it sounded like. But instead of embracing that, he would say things to me, “I hate blues,” which, how can you love rock and roll and hate blues? That just doesn’t even make sense to me. But it would hurt, and it would inhibit me. He’d say, “Oh, don’t do that on guitar” if it was too bluesy or something.

Ric said he apologized to Elliot and “retracted” the statement. He explained that he was in a pissy mood and walked out of the interview after sparring with the writer. He went further with Toby Goldstein, explaining, “Yes, it hurt him, but Elliot and I get along great, and he’s a phenomenal guitar player. I exaggerated the whole point in a moment of madness.”

Elliot also told Steve Morse in 1984 that they were over it and still friends. The others gave the company line as well, even David, who said, “One outburst in seven years isn’t so bad. . . . I’m sure he regrets it. Now it’s over with and gone.” But today, David is still annoyed by it, saying if Ric had called him out like that in public, “I would’ve read the article, gone to his house, and beat him to a pulp.”

The proverbial calm (heavy-lidded) eye of the storm, Ben was still the equable guy. He went to bat for his longtime partner, extolled Ric’s hard work, and surmised, “Hey, this business gets to you.”

They had to put it behind them. With a monster album, the band planned for a significant tour, which would keep them on the road for most of the summer and fall, again remaining in North America. Wang Chung opened most of the dates. The set list included Ric’s solo song “Jimmy Jimmy,” and they would walk off at the end to Greg’s “Jet Lag.” In between was a set that spanned all their albums. The video from Houston shows Ben with a preppy/Miami Vicei look, with sunglasses on a cord hanging at his chest and a blazer with rolled-up sleeves, looking like one of the Brat Pack villains played by James Spader. He puts the blocky ’80s sunglasses on for an intense midset, where they play “Candy-O” into “Jimmy Jimmy,” segueing into “Moving in Stereo.” After a stellar “Just What I Needed,” they slide into a churning “Dream Away” and then the motorik beat of “Cruiser.” David, working hard behind the kit, looks even preppier than Ben, in khakis and a polo shirt, but also sporting a long braided tail in the back of his new romantic hairstyle. Ben takes the glasses off for a sublime “Drive,” and his big eyes look like those of an anime hero. He holds up his hand in a wave after he finishes, milking out those last notes, and the video cuts to a couple making out. Perfect!

As they glide into “Magic,” we watch Ben wink at cute girls dancing, Ric cracks a smile and later tosses a guitar pick to someone, Elliot reels off another great solo, and Greg mouths some of the lyrics and bops his shoulders as he handles his banks of keyboards. While they didn’t play broad for cheap seats, The Cars wooed the front rows. They were still a club band at heart, albeit one that was destined to play arenas.

On the fourteenth of September, the first MTV Video Music Awards ceremony was held at Radio City Music Hall, hosted by Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler. Ric presented Best Group Video to ZZ Top for “Legs.” As the night progressed, though, with The Cars losing most of the categories they were nominated for, they became resigned to simply being happy to be nominated. But then “You Might Think” was announced as Video of the Year, the top prize of the night. “We kept losing to Thriller,” Greg says. “We were pleasantly surprised to finally win.”

The Cars were on the road for just over three months. They had offers that would extend the US tour by just a week. David explains, “So Elliot Roberts comes to us and says, ‘I’ve got four tentative shows, and it’s going to last a week, and it’s six hundred thousand bucks.’ So Ric says, ‘Oh, no, I’m not touring.’ He said, ‘I decide when the tour ends.’ Just turns it down flat—and was kind of mad about it, too. The Heartbeat City tour was the biggest tour production-wise, so to just play for that short time and pay for that set was really stupid.”

They also had an offer to tour Australia. Greg says, “We did well in Australia.” David adds, “We certainly would have done great on Heartbeat City. I’m not saying do some crazy long tour just for the heck of it. But if you want to tour a little longer, just take a break.”

Diane Grey Page, though, divulges that Ben had a fear of flying that got worse as time went on. “One thing that was very irritating to the band is that after this huge Heartbeat City tour, they wanted to do a European leg, and Ben refused to fly, so they couldn’t do it.”

Ric’s obsession with Paulina, though, was all-consuming. She came along on some legs of the tour. Says Bickford, “I got to know Paulina a fair amount, although she was quite young, and there was an asymmetry in the relationship that I see with men a lot.”

Luis Aira says that Ric’s relationship with Suzanne was already a little rocky before he met Paulina. “He and Suzanne were not really doing well. And then the Paulina thing happened. When I first met Paulina, she was a child—age and in maturity. She was very intimidated by me because I was his best friend at the time. He and Ben were not getting along. So I sort of filled that space where I was the only confidant he had, and a lot of shit went down.”

Bill Gerber says, “We were on the road, and he’d be writing poetry about Paulina. And I mean, he was gone. I think he was tortured. It was very painful. But hey, I’m sure it was more painful for Suzanne, but it was painful.”

Gerber’s time with the band was coming to an end. “I really did all the heavy lifting on Heartbeat City.” At the end of the tour, the band’s attorney, Peter Thall, told Gerber, “I hope you got a big bonus. You did a great job on the record and on the tour.” Gerber answered that he did not get a bonus. He recalls,

And he’s like, “That’s crazy.” And I owned a piece of the company, but I didn’t get anything extra. I mean, Elliot was certainly bonus-ing himself. So [Thall] got me all wound up. So I walk down to Elliot’s office, and I’m like, “Hey, Elliot, how come I didn’t get a bonus on The Cars tour?” I knew exactly what the company had made, and it was a lot of money, especially in ’84. And he was like, “What do you mean?” I was like, “What do you mean, what do I mean? I killed myself. I did the tour. I was on the road. I did the record. I lived in New York, did all that.” He goes, “Anybody can do that.” And I was like, “Excuse me?” He said, “Yeah, anybody can do that.” He goes, “The hard part is signing a hit band.” And I went, “Yeah, you’re right.” And I turned around and went back to my office.

Heartbeat City was nominated for four Grammy Awards, their first nominations since losing Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group on Candy-O. The Cars remained zero for six at the Grammys. But they won Best Video in the Rolling Stone Readers’ Poll for “You Might Think.” In the same February 28, 1985, issue, Cyndi Lauper and Bryan Adams listed Heartbeat City as the music they listened to the most in 1984.

George Dassinger, the band’s publicist, recalls a marketing meeting at Elektra. Lou Maglia, one of the local Boston promo guys who had pushed The Cars before they were signed in 1977–1978, was now a senior VP at Elektra. “Lou said, ‘Do we put out another five hundred thousand [copies] and make another hit single, or do we just leave it be?’ And everybody looked around and went, ‘Just leave it be; it’s doing so well on its own.’”

After the Mutt Lange sessions and months of touring, The Cars were burned out. But more than fatigue, the band endured some internal stress as well. At the time, Elliot said, “I think when we have a chance to catch our breath, everything will heal.”

It would be another three years before The Cars released a new album.

Footnote

i Ben would be asked to make a cameo on Miami Vice, but the scheduled day for his shoot conflicted with The Cars’ appearance at Live Aid. He told this to Martha Quinn on MTV while at Live Aid.

Chapter 18

LIVE AID

THERE WERE ALREADY EARLY INDICATIONS THAT RIC FELT HE HAD OUTGROWN The Cars. He explained that while he loved the band, “I just don’t want it to be my life.” He had achieved more than he even likely had dreamed. He was still not admitting his actual age, but he publicly acknowledged his first family in a wide-ranging and open interview with Lisa Robinson for Interview in 1985.

“I was married when I was 18 years old,” he divulged. “That lasted about four years—and the son from that marriage, Christopher, is now into music. He went to art school, and now he’s got a band called Glamour Camp. I’ve heard their tapes, and they’re pretty good.”

“Why did you get married at 18?” Robinson asked.

“The traditional reasons,” he answered.

Robinson did some quick math. “Wait a minute, how old is Christopher? Eighteen?”

“Nineteen.”

She pressed, “And you got married at 18, so that would make you 37. Are you 37?”

“Well,” he replied elusively, “maybe he’s 20.”

Christopher was born in 1964, so at the time he was twenty or twenty-one, and Ric was forty or forty-one.

Age is just a number, as the saying goes—young at heart and all that. But Ric was old enough to realize that pop music is a fickle business and that his opportunity to break out and establish himself as a solo star like his heroes and some peers would likely not last for long. Beatitude made some ripples but was not in the same league as The Cars. He, Ben, and Elliot would each make solo albums before reconvening for one more Cars record.

Elliot told Steve Roeser, reflecting back in 1997, “I think there was a feeling that maybe we weren’t in the loop anymore, on some level. And that’s pretty much poison for a band. That breeds everything from insecurity to hatred.” He opined that the machinations of Elliot Roberts in that direction were “a foolish move. And I don’t see why people couldn’t have done solo projects and still done The Cars.”

Back in Boston in the fall of 1984, Elliot finished a solo album he had begun in the spring at Syncro Sound (and mixed at Electric Lady). Elliot’s album Change No Change is the closest of any of the band members’ solo records to the rock-and-roll heart of the early Cars albums, an updated blend of modern production sounds with the great power-pop nods to the evergreen classics of the ’60s. The title of the album encapsulates just that philosophy. As the Elektra press release reads, “Foundation and evolution are the two sides which add up to every memorable art [sic].” “As much as things change, they don’t change,” Elliot said in the press release, noting that despite the “synth pop revolution,” guitars always come back to the fore.

The guitar parts are naturally prominent and rewarding. Elliot’s contributions had been minimized on Heartbeat City, but if fans were expecting the guitarist to overcorrect and suddenly become self-indulgent with long and gaudy solos, they’d misjudged Elliot Easton, a man of taste. He said, “I wasn’t trying to prove anything, but always maintaining the same ethic when I go into the studio, which is that everything is for the song, and if you maintain a pretty selfless attitude about it, then you really do your best work because if you’re worried about cramming in your best guitar licks or doing a lot of pyrotechnics and stuff, it really takes away from the song in most cases.”

Instead, we have tight songwriting—Jules Shear cowrote the album’s ten songs—that would be at home next to Dwight Twilley, Tom Petty, the early Romantics, and heartland rock and rollers. “I was digging the Pretenders at the time, stuff like that,” says Elliot. “Just good rock and roll.” Shear wrote “All Through the Night,” a hit for Cyndi Lauper in 1983, and later “If She Knew What She Wants,” which the Bangles scored a hit with in 1986. Shear wrote all the words, and Elliot wrote most of the music.

Elliot’s vocals are not just those one would expect of a sideman; he has the engaging vocal command and tone of a distinctive lead singer. There are moments on the album where his timbre (though not the range) reminds me of Steven Tyler’s. “(Wearing Down) Like a Wheel” was a Top 40 hit and a music video. He played a few shows in the spring of 1985 to promote the record, with his backing band consisting of John K. and Kenni Hairston from Cyndi Lauper’s band. Elliot’s wife Colleen’s band, the Bristols, opened the show at the Metro in Boston.

Elliot also guested on most of Peter Wolf’s first solo album, Lights Out, recorded at Syncro, and joined G. E. Smith and Maurice Starr with others from Boston’s the Jonzun Crew behind the J. Geils Band singer on Saturday Night Live, on October 13, 1984. “I was around Syncro all the time,” Elliot recalls, “so it was kind of a natural progression. ‘Hey, you want to play some guitar?’ And then I ended up sticking around playing a lot of guitar.”

Ben began writing songs with his girlfriend, Diane Page, as early as the summer of 1984 for an album that would be recorded the following year. In the meantime, he returned to Cleveland to participate in a benefit record called C.A.R.E. (Cleveland Artists Recording for Ethiopia).

In November 1984, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox recorded their cowrite “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” in London to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia. Released on December 3, the group of mostly UK pop stars they assembled in the studio was called Band Aid and included members of U2, the Police, Wham!, Duran Duran, Culture Club, and others. The record sold more than a million copies in the United Kingdom in its first week and stayed at number 1 for five weeks there. It was a Top 20 hit in North America and would eventually sell more than eleven million copies worldwide. It raised eight million pounds for relief in Ethiopia within the year.

The success and awareness Band Aid raised led to other charity singles, like “We Are the World,” recorded in January 1985. The C.A.R.E. single that included Ben was one of a number of smaller, more local efforts. It was organized by John Gorman and Denny Sanders of WMMS radio. They called in Cleveland’s own Michael Stanley to write a song (with four others) and took a long shot at inviting Ben. But “Benny Eleven Letters” returned home “without fanfare,” Stanley said, to sing on “The Eyes of the Children” in April 1985, about a month after the “We Are the World” single and video were released. Ben’s old friend David Spero says, “You didn’t have to ask Ben twice. I mean, he was there, and he was a superstar at the time. He didn’t have to fly back to Cleveland and put a vocal on three lines on the song just so we could put his name on the cover. But he did. And he gave back so much to the city that people never knew about because he wasn’t the kind of guy that’d go, ‘Hey, look what I just did.’”

The Cars regrouped for only one show in 1985, but it was a biggie. The success of Band Aid and “We Are the World” led to Live Aid on July 13, one of the most defining events of the 1980s. Co-organizer Geldof started in January 1985 to envision a multivenue, multicountry event with satellite linkups, like the Us Festival. The idea behind the massive concerts was, of course, to raise money. However, in addition to the ticket sales, which brought in between $5 million and $6 million, the two concerts intentionally served as a sixteen-hour worldwide telethon that brought the tally up to an estimated $127 million.

“For some reason, the first person I called was Ric Ocasek of the Cars,” wrote Geldof. “This was coincidental as a Cars song was to play a massive role in the telethon aspect. Ric agreed at once that the Cars would perform. He said he’d tell his manager, Elliot Roberts. I was still very frightened the managers would botch things or, at best, impose unnecessary hindrances.”

MTV had erased the “distinction between the old wave and new wave,” Bill Flanagan points out. “You’d see The Cars, and then you would see the Who.” The Us Festival had billed veteran acts from the late 1960s alongside new and cutting-edge artists. Live Aid would take that idea and expand it to spectacular proportions.

An estimated 1.9 billion people worldwide tuned in for the broadcasts from Wembley and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, where The Cars performed four songs in their twenty-minute set. If you were part of a blockbuster act in 1985, then you were likely onstage in London or Philly—or, in the case of Phil Collins, both. Indeed, live video of Collins arriving via the Concorde in America after his appearance with Sting in London would be cut in during the broadcast of The Cars’ performance of “You Might Think,” to the everlasting annoyance of Cars fans and The Cars themselves.

Days before the event, a CBC TV news team interviewed Geldof. When they were finished, they asked if they could show him something. He said he simply didn’t have the time. They beseeched him, and when he relented, they showed him a harrowing clip that they had edited of news footage from the Ethiopian famine.

“They played the video,” Geldof wrote. “It was a short sequence of a child, weakened by hunger, trying and trying and trying again to stand up on his little matchstick legs. They had edited it over a record. It was the Cars’ ‘Drive.’ The juxtaposition was bizarre. The child’s pitiful courage turned the poignancy of the song into profound sadness.” To say it’s hard to watch is a considerable understatement. But even four decades later, it’s not something to turn away from.

Ric did not know how to react when Geldof played it for him. Geldof took Ric’s stunned silence to be not only tacit approval but a sort of affirmative awe at the power of a song he wrote serving a higher purpose. “It is a beautiful song,” wrote Geldof, “ostensibly about love, but it is also a song about dependence. Something I hadn’t realized, nor indeed had the writer of the song, for when I showed him the video, he was shocked. ‘I never realized,’ he said and broke off, too upset to continue.”

But Ric simply did not know what to say. He was shocked all right, but for different reasons than Geldof observed. “I didn’t know the song was being used for Live Aid,” Ric said. “They decided to use that song for a theme. And then they asked permission when it was way too late and already done. I had to quickly look at the situation and see what was going on and why it was being used. I thought it was not appropriate, but it being a charity situation, I did not want to pull it. I went with that situation. . . . Images of starving children is certainly not what I had in mind when I wrote it.”

David says, “If I wrote that song, I wouldn’t want that in a million years [to be used in such a way]. They didn’t have permission to use it. I don’t understand how they could have thought that was okay.”

But David Bowie was so moved upon seeing the video in the days before the concerts that he insisted to Geldof that it be played during his set on the big video screen at the concert. Bowie was due to play five songs but said, “I want to give up one of my spots to show this. I’d like to introduce it.”

The video had an enormous impact. When the BBC showed it, the phone system was so overloaded with callers making donations that it broke down. “Billy Connolly and Pamela Stephenson were supposed to be doing an appeal after that video,” Geldof continued. “When the cameras came onto them, they were both in tears and couldn’t speak.” The video had the same effect as it was replayed by news presenters. The phenomenon spurred the “Drive” single to number four in the UK. Ric received £160,000 in royalties from the boost, which he promptly donated to Live Aid/Band Aid.

Great songs are bigger than anyone, including—and sometimes even especially—the writer. Ric liked to keep song meanings vague, even when he did have clear intent behind his lyrics. With “Drive,” those are sacred chords over which he laid a simple but deeply affecting melody, with lyrics that asked universal questions about taking care of others. He had to make a snap decision at the moment, erred wisely toward selflessness, and suspended whatever reservations he had about the message of the song. Nobody would have assumed it was written with these sorts of images in mind. It was clearly designed to be a jarring combination. Curiously, Ric’s blunt honesty and cynicism emerged as the years went on, and he needlessly felt compelled to confess he felt he’d been backed into a corner as the song was harnessed to another agenda. It would have been advisable to let it be. He also would not allow it to be included in the later Live Aid DVD release.

“I think the song ‘Drive’ is beautiful, but I cannot listen to it because I only think about Suzanne. It was the beginning of the end of their marriage,” Elaine Hawkes says. She remembers the tension between Ric and Suzanne as the band was heading to the concert. “Even before Suzanne found out [about Paulina], we were all flying to the Live Aid concert, and we’re sitting there, and Suzanne and Ric’s sons were acting up a little bit, and Ric turns to Suzanne and says, ‘Shut ’em up, will you?’ I remember that more clearly than anything else about Live Aid. I thought, ‘What an asshole.’ Those were his children!”

She also could never quite feel comfortable around Paulina. “I felt that liking her would be disloyal to Suzanne, but I really didn’t know her. And it’s funny, I remember she gave Greg a picture she drew. And she was really talented. And I thought ‘Damn! Why can’t she be a bad artist?’ Because she’d already had everything else going for her. And she was so much younger. I was with Diane once backstage, and Diane was pointing out to me how Paulina and whoever she was with were skipping along the back of the stage, and we were like, the cool older women; we’re not going to do that!”

“Paulina was one of those people where you really couldn’t say anything bad about,” says David’s ex Katherine Bergholtz (Kim Leo), who also came to Live Aid. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, what was she like? Was she a prima donna or whatever?’ She really wasn’t. I mean, there was nothing. She was nice, and there was nothing stuck-up about her. She never really cared to get close to any of us. She didn’t go out of her way to make a relationship with us, but she was never rude or anything. She had her own big world going on. She was way beyond The Cars. This woman was famous. David will say, ‘Well, she was never really that friendly to us.’ No, but she was cordial, and she had a life.”

Many acts experienced technical issues during the Live Aid concerts, and The Cars were no exception. They were not accustomed to playing outside and during daylight (they were on in the late afternoon), and they had not performed as a band for the better part of a year. They were nervous, and it was a very hot day. “That was chaos. It was complete chaos,” David says. His electronic drums started to trigger themselves during “Drive.” In the footage, Greg turns his head to check what is happening with the drums. Elliot recalled, “We were playing in front of two billion people and out in the hot sun, those electronic drums started, and Ben’s singing, ‘Who’s going to drive you home?’ And I hear all this stuff just going off, man, going out live on satellite.”

“That never happened before,” David says. “It only happens at Live Aid.” On the previous tour for Heartbeat City, he had been using roughly ten foot switches to call up different sounds. He had it working pretty smoothly on that tour, even as he had to execute the moves in the dark. But there was a ghost in the machine at Live Aid.

I don’t even know what it was. It started triggering the sounds that I play along with on the computer, which is a tambourine here or a click there. It’s like three little sounds, shaker-type stuff. So all of a sudden, other stuff starts going boom, boom, boom. So I just remember looking over and saying [stage whispers], “Shut it off.” [Laughs.] “Shut it off.” So they clicked it off, and I had never actually played without all of that. But then I realized I didn’t even hear most of it; it was just coming out of the PA. It had nothing to do with my ability to play, of course. But luckily, it stayed in sync.

The nerves got to Ben a bit as he sang the wrong second line in the second verse. But he stayed cool, otherwise singing flawlessly as ever, casting a smile over to Diane standing on the side of the stage. “I normed out pretty quickly when we went into the first song,” he said in 1997. He also sang “Just What I Needed.” “And then, before I knew it, we were finished.”

Greg’s Synclavier sampler playback handled the layered backing vocal parts smoothly, but the drum trigger wasn’t the only technical issue they had to contend with. Ric missed his cue to start the lead vocal during the final song, “Heartbeat City” (an odd choice in a four-song set). They were locked into the song’s structure due to the sequencers. “You can’t deviate,” Greg explains. “There was backing vocals and stuff programmed in. There’s whatever it is, eight bars, sixteen bars of intro. Then the vocal comes in, ‘Heartbeat City, here we come.’ So Ric doesn’t sing the first line of the song. And I’m thinking, ‘Uh-oh,’ and he looked at me. ‘Did I miss it?’” You can see this around forty seconds into the video. “To his credit, he just started with the second line of the song because if he had not done that, then the background vocals for the bridge would’ve come in too early, and it would’ve been a disaster.”

So, a band with a reputation for almost impeccable precision and consistency showed a little humanity. One would have to be paying close attention to even notice these slight flaws. Bob Dylan’s shambolic set with Ron Wood and Keith Richards, by contrast, was pretty much an actual disaster.

The vibes were good backstage. “I remember smoking a joint with Paul Shaffer at Live Aid,” Greg reports. “I think during Madonna’s set, we were just sort of hanging out backstage. And he sort of made a comment like, ‘Oh, The Cars are all potheads. No wonder I like you guys.’”

For Katherine (Kim), going from dating David while still living in an Emerson dorm to Live Aid,

It never seemed like a big deal, which David will tell you. They were a really big deal, but to us, it was just normal. I mean, there we were at Live Aid in Philadelphia, and all these people are back there with us, and everybody’s got their little trailers and everything. And we never even took a picture. And David’s like, “How do we not have any pictures from back then?” I think it’s because David and I had such a normal lifestyle. We were never into drugs. I mean, we’d go out to dinner; we’d go to the gym. We were just like an old married couple, even though I was young.

Seven days after Live Aid, the band was at Electric Lady studio in New York with Mike Shipley, the engineer who had mixed Heartbeat City. They recorded the new song, “Tonight She Comes,” for their upcoming Greatest Hits album. While they recorded the basic tracks live, they spent four weeks on the one song. Like “Magic,” it successfully updates the classic Cars sound. Greg plays a repeated keyboard hook that gets as implanted in the mind as the subject of the lyric, who seems to be a recent obsession for Ric. He tosses off some good lines like “She gives me a reason / For feeling alright.” Sure, some teenage boys were likely snickering at the title, but Elliot observed, “It doesn’t actually say that she reaches orgasm. It could also mean that tonight she’s coming over to make popcorn.”

And can anyone have enough classic Elliot solos? Of course not! Here is one of Elliot’s crafty compositions, gliding along the melody and concluding with a dash of flash, a stutter-step riff, and sustaining into a fade. His tone is updated for the era, one dominated by hair-metal bands, but it is undeniably Elliot Easton. Guitar virtuoso Steve Vai loved it so much that he transcribed it for Guitar Player magazine in 1986. Elliot told Brett Milano that the “reason it’s so dense” was because the band took four weeks to record the song. “I had so much freakin’ time to figure it out!”

Ric was already working on his second solo album, This Side of Paradise, and was planning on using “Tonight She Comes” for that album. Instead, Elektra asked for a new single to sweeten the appeal of the Greatest Hits record. It worked well, becoming yet another Top 10 hit for The Cars. The collection was released in October 1985 and went six times platinum, peaking at number 12 on the Billboard Top 200 in December. It was the ninth-top-selling album of 1985. It went only gold in the United Kingdom but sold four times platinum in Australia. “I’m Not the One” was also released as a single, and it would make the Top 40.

Where Ric’s solo album Beatitude eschewed the more upbeat-pop shine of The Cars in favor of at least a bit of experimentation, his This Side of Paradise was another play for commercial success. Released in September 1986, it has the radio-friendly synth-pop sounds of the era. The guitars have the politely tamed ’80s rock sound, what Mutt Lange called “commercial distortion.” But the roster of players is impressive: Billy Idol’s partner, Steve Stevens; Adrian Belew; Roland Orzabal from Tears for Fears; G. E. Smith; Tom Verlaine; Tony Levin; and even Elliot Easton, Ben Orr (backing vocals), and Greg Hawkes. Ben and Ric both recorded solo material at Wool Hall in England around the same time. David was the only band member not included on the album. All the other four members appear on the song “True to You.”

Elliot says that the album “was an excuse for Ric to stay in New York and see Paulina. It was a big part of it because he took a year to make the record, and it didn’t need to take that long. He spent a million dollars on the record, but he was really just hanging out with Paulina. He wanted to come to New York a lot.”

Paulina would appear on Late Night with David Letterman later that year. At age twenty-one, she served as a great foil for the acerbic Letterman, who enjoyed poking fun at models and actresses in ways that would certainly be challenged as misogynistic today. “You think?” she asks facetiously when I make this observation. “He was notorious for bringing models on for that.” Many would go on with their guards up or try to overcompensate and match wits, ending in cringy moments. Watching it today, Paulina comes across as sharp, self-deprecating, confident, and witty. Letterman mentions that GQ magazine included her on a list of the one hundred smartest people in America. He asks, with a skeptical deadpan, “Now, how did you get on this list?” As the audience laughs, she rolls her eyes. “I don’t mean that in a derisive sense,” he says. “No, of course not,” she volleys. And then she throws a well-timed jab: “Are you on the list?” The crowd laughs and cheers.

Released as a single (and a high-budget video), “Emotion in Motion” hit number 15, the only Top 40 single Ric had as a solo artist. Its baldly romantic lyric is uncharacteristic of Ric. Evidently, someone had a hold of his heart. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the opening line—melody and words—seems to have inspired Jim Steinman’s 1993 hit for Meat Loaf, “I’d Do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That).” And it was not the first pop song to use that little melody. Elliot says that when the band later discussed splitting publishing, “he was getting really mad at me. I said, ‘Well, what hits have you had without The Cars?’ And he mentioned that song ‘I Would Do Anything’ [“Emotion in Motion”]. I said to him, ‘But that’s a Bread song’” (referring to “Everything I Own”).

This Side of Paradise peaked at 31, three slots lower than Beatitude. “I didn’t think Beatitude would be a big seller, but I thought This Side of Paradise was much better,” Ric told Creem in 1988.

Still, I was totally aware of the fact that people don’t like musicians in bands to break off and go on their own. They don’t like to see the family split up, just like they wouldn’t like to see their own families split up. I’m the same way. If I like a band and someone goes off to do a solo record, I don’t wanna hear it. But, if anything, these solo projects gave me an opportunity to mess around by myself in the studio. I approached them the same way I would a Cars record, but I thought, by using different musicians, they would sound different—only to find they didn’t.

Ric considered touring on the album and talked about putting together a band that would include Greg, Stephen George, and Steve Stevens, but it never got anywhere.

Inspired by Live Aid, the fashion world took up the cause of the famine in Ethiopia. In November 1985, Ric and Paulina were both present, though not necessarily seen together, at the Palladium for the Fashion Aid benefit in New York. Ric had already been very interested in fashion since working in clothing stores in the 1960s. When The Cars started selling albums in 1978, he could finally spend serious money on clothes. He was a particular fan of Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. He started to influence how Paulina dressed.

Ric started living in an apartment he kept in Greenwich Village and spending more time with Paulina. Elliot was still living in Weston with Colleen, though they, too, had recently gotten a place in New York. Greg was still with Elaine in Lincoln. In January 1986, David bought a property in the Bass Rocks section of the Cape Ann town of Gloucester. It consisted of one old eight-bedroom house and a separate guesthouse. As depicted in The Perfect Storm, Gloucester is a hardscrabble New England fishing town. But given its dramatic shoreline and relative proximity to Boston, it also has grand old homes and expensive waterfront real estate.

Katherine (Kim) moved there with him. “He knew I loved the ocean,” she says. “I came home one day, and there was a note. ‘I went up to Gloucester to look at a house,’ and he might’ve bought the house that day. It was really weird. It happened so fast.”

But she wanted to have children, and David did not, which ultimately ended the relationship in the fall of 1987. “It wasn’t a proposal or anything, but we were talking about marriage,” she recalls.

We never talked about it before. I was so young, and it just never came up. But then we were talking, and he said something like, “Well, I don’t ever want kids.” And I was like, “Oh, god, okay, wait a second. You don’t want kids?” We weren’t planning to marry or anything, but if we were, that would be a problem. So I thought about it and called my parents. I’m like, “What am I going to do? David doesn’t ever want kids. I mean, I don’t know. Should I stay here?” And my dad was like, “Listen, no, you can’t. He’s not going to change his mind overnight.”

SHE LEFT DAVID IMMEDIATELY AND CUT OFF CONTACT, MAKING A CLEAN break. “I actually was working at the Gloucester Daily Times selling advertising. It was Christmas, and David came down to the Gloucester Daily Times and walked in the front door. He was like, ‘Could you come outside for a minute?’ And so I did. And he had all these gifts in the car. And I was like, ‘David, I can’t take these gifts. You’ve got to go.’ So he left, and we didn’t talk until ’94 when I had my first child.”

When David eventually sold his Gloucester property in 1992, the price was nearly $2 million. But the extensive restoration of the fixer-upper, with him doing most or all the work, almost broke him. And it pretty much killed his social life. He had moved from the thriving Back Bay of Boston to a town that, as the crow flies, doesn’t look so far away but is about an hour’s drive, so the few people who came to visit did so infrequently. “It was really bad timing, a bad move,” he says. “I was still young and single. I was renovating this house, and I got lonely up here. I lost touch with a lot of my friends.”

SOMEWHERE IN LATE 1984, ELEKTRA ASKED BEN IF HE WOULD MAKE A SOLO album. When he agreed to do so, he had music but no lyrics. He had been writing music all along. Greg recalls hearing recordings back at the apartment Ben had in Brighton. “Some of them may have even been early versions that I always thought had more personality to ’em before Diane was involved or before he was involved with her, and they were always very pop, kinda Beatles-y McCartney-esque material.” Greg says he doesn’t think Ben ever presented songs to Ric after the Milkwood-era days.

Asked if he had heard Ric’s new album, Ben said, “Yes, I like it a lot. Yeah, he worked real hard on this one and I’m proud of him. I’ve heard Elliot’s, and I’m proud of him, too.” Asked if there was a friendly competition, Ben shot it down. “I don’t think it’s a competition. I think everybody’s happy for everybody else because we have a little time between the Cars albums, and we have a chance to get out and do something else.”

Beyond having no prospect of bringing songs to The Cars, Ben’s role became severely diminished, starting with Heartbeat City. As he had with David and Elliot, Mutt Lange personally insulted Ben, making the naturally gifted singer and bassist feel like a hired hand, tearing apart all his parts and rerecording them to the point of exhaustion. Ben had watched the number of songs he sang lead on dwindle from five on each of the first two albums to four on Panorama and finally down to three each on Shake It Up and Heartbeat City. He told Rob Tannenbaum that between Ric and Greg, the song arrangements, and even his bass parts, were “pretty much mapped out by the time I get to hear it.” Outwardly, he appeared to take it in stride as he did with everything in life. But those two words in the quote, “get to,” might offer a peek into his feelings. When pressed, Ben answered, “It’s fine with me. Ric’s the leader.” He said he was satisfied in his role, just along for the ride, and happy not to have to think about things too much.

The Tannenbaum article in Musician magazine offers some of the most candid glimpses into Ben’s insecurities. He confessed to being afraid of interviews in the past and explains his shyness. “I’m real tough to get to know,” he admitted. “It takes me a while to accept people.”

Indeed, like Ric, Ben was a private guy, especially when it came to personal matters. Once, Ben casually remarked to Greg that he was going on a hunting trip with his brother. “I said, ‘Brother?’ And he just mumbled something.” Greg thought Ben was an only child. But when he was about fifteen, Ben learned he had a half brother on his father’s side named Charles, after their father. In fact, Charles was one of five half siblings. There were half siblings on his mother’s side as well, but Ben did not get to know them. Kris Orr never met them while she was with Ben.

“Chuck was like twenty-five or so years older than Ben,” says Jude Orr, who would marry Ben in 1991. Chuck’s kids—Ben’s nephew and nieces—were a little older than Ben. The family got to know each other more when The Cars’ first record came out. Ben would send limos to bring them to the shows in Ohio. He would introduce his bandmates to others as his “brothers,” so they were a little confused when they learned he had a real brother.

Ben was not the most diligent when it came to finishing the songs. He had bought a condo in Kauai, Hawaii, and admitted to “horsin’ around. I went to Hawaii for two weeks and stayed for three months.” He panicked when it came time to write words for his songs. Diane helped by critiquing his lyric ideas, and, eventually, they started to write together, beginning around February 1985. Diane, who had been a theater major in college, released her own album in 1983. But she had never written a song before. They figured they would try one, and Ben would be able to know immediately if the collaboration could work. It did. The first song they finished was “Stay the Night,” which would be the first single. They would zip downstairs to Ben’s home studio when inspiration struck. The lyrics for about half the songs were written on his speedboat, which he had recently bought and christened Blue Di after Diane.

In addition to the demos Ben had done at home, he had done some preproduction with Thom Moore at Syncro, where he intended to record his album. But Elektra had another idea, namely, recording at the Wool Hall studio in Beckington, England, a converted sixteenth-century farmhouse co-owned by Tears for Fears, who set it up as a studio. Producer Mike Shipley had already worked there. He and Larry Klein were hired to coproduce Ben’s album, to be titled The Lace. After working with The Cars, Shipley had coproduced Joni Mitchell’s Dog Eat Dog with Klein, who was married to Mitchell, played bass and keyboards for her, and coproduced her album. Klein loved The Cars, particularly Heartbeat City.

The producers decided the song arrangements needed some significant restructuring work. Some of the songs were not yet completed. Ben was still writing lyrics on the plane to England in January 1986. When he landed in London, he had issues with his work permits not being ready. Cars attorney Peter Thall recalls,

When they asked for his papers, he said, “My manager told me that my work permit would be sitting here waiting for me, so if I can leave now . . .” And they said, “Well, we don’t have any work permit, and you’re not leaving.” They put him in a room. Ben was easygoing, but he had a little anger in him. He was not a vengeful person. He called me. One of my younger partners who loved Ben, Loren Chodosh, happened to be in England. So I called her, and I said, “Ben, our Ben, is at the airport, and he is stuck, and they’re going to deport him. He is really angry.” And she went to the airport, she got him deported to Amsterdam, and then everything got straightened out, and then he came right back the next day, and then everything was fine.

BUT THALL SAYS THAT IT WAS A PRIME ILLUSTRATION THAT “ELLIOT ROBERTS just did not take care of anybody except Ric. And it wasn’t right, but it’s what it was.”

Before Ben arrived at the studio, Klein, Shipley, and guitarist Mike Landau—who played on the Joni Mitchell album—worked on the arrangements and made new demos. Klein acknowledged Ben was so hard to read that “it was hard for me to know what he was thinking. . . . I was very emphatic that I wanted him to like all the changes. It was hard to get a take on whether he did or not.” But the new arrangements formed the template that they followed. All the drums were programmed on the Fairlight by Ben. He played a little rhythm guitar but no bass guitar, only keyboard bass.

Klein had been playing on Peter Gabriel’s landmark So album. When they were finished, Gabriel allowed Klein to do some work at his studio on Mitchell’s next album, Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm. Klein was hopping between the two studios and two projects. He played some of Ben’s recordings for Mitchell. “She said, ‘Oh, I love Ben’s voice! Let’s bring him in to record some background vocals.’” As a fan of hers from the early 1970s, Ben was over the moon to contribute to a couple of Joni Mitchell songs.

Ben didn’t have lyrics for the new parts that they had added to his songs, so they took a break. After five months in England, Ben needed to get back home. He reflected that the time at Wool Hall was dispiriting: “No sun, constant wind, drizzle and clouds—just misery. The highlight of the day was, like, dinner.” The recording team reassembled a little later at Blue Jay studio in Massachusetts, adding Elliot’s parts and layering backing vocals. Soon after returning home, Ben and Diane got engaged.

Released in October 1986, The Lace is a fine mainstream pop record of the era. Ben described the material as “honest-relationship types of songs. . . . It’s not poetry for poetry’s sake.” Jim Sullivan sensed an allusion to, if not a subtle dig at, Ric. “Well,” Ben replied, “you read reviews about Ric’s songs, and some of the lyrics are just there poetically, and you’re not quite sure what they mean. They mean something to Ric. I never ask him what he means. Some things [I sing in The Cars] I don’t really relate to, but I just do it for the melodic approach, not because I believe what he’s saying.”

Diane remembers being interviewed at a radio station in Cleveland. “They would do this, ‘Make It or Break It,’ and they’d play it, and the callers would decide. So we did the interview at the station, then we jump in the car to go to the next station, and we hear them play it. The first time we heard it on the radio, we were screaming in the back, just going crazy. It was just so exciting.”

“Stay the Night” spent twenty weeks on the Billboard singles chart, peaking at 24 on Valentine’s Day 1987, when the number 1 song was “Livin’ on a Prayer” by Bon Jovi. The album peaked at 86. A gauzy video directed by Jean Renard shows Ben all by his lonesome, wandering through a dark house and studio, plaintively writing and recording in between blank stares. He goes out for a walk and passes Diane, playing a stranger, on a steamy, nocturnal city (Toronto) street. It did well on both MTV and VH-1. Renard directed a second video for “Too Hot to Stop,” which shows Ben as a surprisingly stiff front man without a bass or guitar. Thom Moore, Greg, and David also make cameos as his backing band.

Elektra did a solid job of promoting it to a point. “Elektra had a big interest in Ben,” says George Dassinger, Elektra’s publicist at the time. “I mean, ‘Drive’ and the ‘Drive’ video changed everything. Ben was okay until he did a video that they didn’t like [“Too Hot to Stop”]. I remember being at a marketing meeting when [Elektra] said, ‘We’re not going to do anything to help this video.’ And I thought, ‘How can you do that?’”

Elektra had encouraged a solo album from Ben but did not anticipate that it would upset the status quo of The Cars. Ben was made to feel not simply that he was second banana to Ric but as if his solo career were a threat to the band.

He was being advised by Jean Renard. In addition to directing the two videos, Renard had shot The Lace album cover (front and back). Renard had a production company that worked in fashion, sports, and celebrity marketing. He met Diane Page and David Robinson in this relatively small scene in Boston. This led to some work with The Cars as a band. “My official involvement with Ben started with The Lace,” Renard says, “even though we were friends way before that.”

Soon, Renard was advocating for Ben personally.

I managed Ben and advised him for years. Since he was in a management contract with Lookout that was ongoing . . . I came in to represent Ben’s interests where he felt they were not being looked after. It did not make me popular with Elliot Roberts or Elektra, but oh well, Ben was first and foremost my friend. Elliot Roberts was a smart and powerful manager and businessman who did what he thought was best for The Cars, which translated to what was best for Ric. Simple enough and hardly surprising, but very shocking for Ben, who was wired differently and motivated to make music with his friends and have a great life.

Renard contends that The Lace “was a huge annoyance for Elektra and became even more so when it had a hit. We were all naive in thinking that if you get a big song, make a good record, you win, and all would be great.” Renard points to Ric’s jealousy and complicity with Elliot Roberts and Elektra to redirect focus on Ric and The Cars—in that order. Renard assumed the role of protector of Ben’s interests. “I was not beholden to anyone else and not in the least intimidated by the power players at the table. In a perfect world, there should never have been the need for me or anyone else to protect Ben’s interests, but there clearly was, and the job fell to me.” David diplomatically counseled Renard to “leave it alone” when it came to pushing the issue about Ben’s status. However, Renard would remain an adviser to Ben well into the 1990s.

Diane says Ben’s insecurity and his own jealousy were becoming pronounced, pointing to his diminishing her credit for cowriting The Lace. She is shown only as a pair of eyes peeking through the blinds on the back cover and is in the video only as a cameo passing him. “I took him to some TV and society functions, and he was very uncomfortable, very insecure, and very jealous. So we had all of those differences, and I started having to give up everything, staying at home with him. He was loath to give up any kind of credit. You can see it in the interview with Mark Goodman on MTV. [Goodman] had to pull it out. ‘I think you’re writing with someone.’ ‘Yeah, that’s my woman.’ And in ugly moments, he’d go like, ‘There can only be one star in this family.’”

She says she got calls to write with Steven Tyler and ’Til Tuesday’s Robert Holmes, but Ben did not allow it. He eventually forbade her from continuing to take modeling assignments. “Everything started going away. I’d left everything. And now he was trying to just not let me leave the house. . . . But I just loved him, and I chose to be with him and stay with him and write with him and get engaged, and I just couldn’t help him.”

Whether he had originally intended to or not, Ben also did not tour to promote the album. He was happy to be at his condo in Hawaii and await the next Cars activity, which was not a sure thing by any measure. Ric was gunning for a solo career that would make the rest of The Cars expendable, except Greg, who was by Ric’s side when he appeared on Saturday Night Live on November 8, 1986. They did two songs, “Emotion in Motion” and “Keep on Laughing.” Ric also sat in for a “Church Lady” skit with Dana Carvey with hilarious results. Dressed in black leather and sunglasses, he plays a clip of John Sex writhing with the snake in the “Hello Again” video.

Ben was also, in his own way, laying the foundation for a possible career after The Cars. “If that works out, fine,” he said. “I am totally casual about it. I’m resigned not to be driven crazy. I’m not going to let it happen. Then you get into weird stuff—drugs, alcohol. . . . We’ve got a few dollars tucked away, and whatever happens, happens. We’re just having fun and trying not to hurt ourselves.” Sadly, he would get into the weird stuff and hurt himself before long. Part of it was inactivity—idle hands being the devil’s workshop—part of it would be the deterioration of the band, and some of it was mental illness.

“You have to split for a while and then come back, and you can be friends again,” Ben said. “Not that we’re enemies when a tour finishes or anything like that. It’s just time to stop. You go on from there.”

“[Ric and Ben] had grown up together, and it didn’t really get strained with them until around the time the solo albums started appearing,” says Greg.

Much of the tension was dealt with passively or not at all by these five men. Ben and Ric had brotherly ties from their early partnership, the shared struggles, and, ultimately, astonishing success over their roughly eighteen years together. But they had mostly lost the connection by 1986. Kris Orr offers, “I think Ric and Ben became so tight that there was bound to be a point where it would explode.”

Chapter 19

DOOR TO DOOR

“BEN SHOULD HAVE HAD A HUGE CAREER ON HIS OWN,” DAVID SAYS. “HUGE! Songwriters should have been begging him to record their music. . . . Elliot Roberts dismissed all of us, all of our solo shit. Wouldn’t help anybody. Didn’t care about any of that.”

In November 1986, Ben held a big party at Syncro Sound to celebrate the success of The Lace. But neither he nor Ric—the two front men of The Cars—had recorded their recent albums at their own studio. The band recorded only one album there, Shake It Up, more than four years prior. It would be natural for other big artists with recording budgets to ask what was wrong with the facility if the band itself was no longer using it. The place was losing money. The band members had to contribute their own cash to keep it afloat. In December, they shuttered their clubhouse.

Ric felt he outgrew Boston, which might have happened eventually, even without the Paulina impetus. He told Greg, “I think I should be running in the New York and London circles more than Boston.”

So New York is where The Cars finally reconvened in April 1987 to make another album. The band collectively decided they did not want to go through such a laborious process as Heartbeat City again. And while they had taken a break after that album, Elliot said that they were still burned out and should have considered an even longer hiatus. As he recalled to Andrew Loog Oldham, “So we went into Electric Lady, and for the first time, we made a record of tunes that were rejected for all the other records.”

Reflecting on Heartbeat City, Ric wrote, “Each Cars record has its own character and its own life—its own reason for being.” It would be easy to be glib about it and conclude that the Door to Door album’s reason for being was to be the nail in the band’s coffin. But at the time, what was its real motivation? That was unclear. It was just a matter of going through the motions. “Door to Door was an unfocused follow-up,” Greg said in an interview with Charles F. Rosenay. “It was the least of our efforts.”

They didn’t even have enough new material when they came together at Electric Lady studio. “Ta Ta Wayo Wayo” and the very Roxy Music–like “Leave or Stay” are songs that go back to 1977, deemed unworthy for the first five albums. But they had fun pulling out the old songs, and fun had been in short supply for years. Still, they were following up their most successful record (in terms of the number of hit singles) with a self-produced album consisting of filler spanning back ten years.

This would have been a natural time, then, for Ric to open himself to songwriting contributions from his bandmates. Elliot recalls a 1987 meeting to discuss songwriting and publishing. “The thing about Ben wanting to write songs only really came up at this disastrous meeting where I wanted to discuss sharing the publishing. We met in a hotel in New York, and it was a funny thing. I was at the front desk trying to find out what room, and I see Ben at the front desk, and he says to me, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’m like, ‘What am I doing here?’ So he thought he was coming to have a meeting with Ric about writing songs.”

The relationship with Ric and Ben “was the most unpleasant,” Greg adds. It came to a head when Ben not only asked to write a song or two for the album but also brought songs he had written with Diane. In 2011, Ric recalled, “I said, ‘That’s not gonna happen.’” He said they played some of Ben’s songs in the early days. “But dear Ben—I could never get into the lyrics. I almost didn’t want them part of the thing. Maybe it was the controlling.”

Luis Aira says, “Ric’s reaction was like, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ And Ben didn’t like that very much, but Ric was right. I mean, the songs sucked.”

David also recalls a far-harsher reaction. “Ric actually said to him that his album stunk. And it sounded like the lyrics were written by a fifty-year-old divorcée, which they were. [Laughs] But actually, I think she did a really good job. I’m not sure Ben could have written any words. I thought it was, surprisingly, actually good. Ric was always embarrassed by, to some extent, Ben, but certainly a lot of his girlfriends. I think particularly her. And Ric made the mistake, as weird as Ben was with his relationships with women, you don’t put down these women. I mean, he was going to defend her.”

“Ric thought Ben was making bad life choices,” Paulina says, partly referring to Ben’s increased drinking. But she adds, “Ric didn’t like Diane. He would make fun of Ben’s solo album.” But she says Ric still loved Ben. “It’s not that he didn’t love him. He was hurt by Ben, by Ben getting jealous, and by Ben bringing in his girlfriend, and it was suddenly not just Ric and Ben anymore; it was like Ric, Ben, and his girlfriend. And that’s really what the big divide was between him and Ben.”

“Diane was sort of known as the Yoko Ono of The Cars,” Elaine Hawkes says, the same comparison Paulina makes.i “That was her driving [the push to write songs for The Cars] because Ben would’ve been agreeable.”

Greg observes that it’s rarely a good idea to have someone’s romantic partner outside the band try to make contributions. “Ben never came forward with original songs. He never—even at rehearsal—brought up the subject. It wasn’t until he was hanging out with Diane Grey Page. I knew that Ric wasn’t going to go for it. And I heard the songs that Ben brought in, too, and I wouldn’t have been up for that as Cars material myself.”

Why didn’t Ben ask Ric to collaborate and add lyrics to Ben’s compositions? Ric didn’t want to collaborate with anyone, and Ben would have learned that in the early 1970s. Ric needed to share a few credits with Greg because he knew he was in a tough spot without Greg to help give his music form and color. In case there was any doubt on that front, he worked with Greg on all but one of his solo albums, and that one exception was the first after the demise of The Cars. But Ric would return to him.

Over the years, Ben would confide in and vent to David Spero, his old friend from Cleveland. “I know that Ric and Ben had an amazing relationship, and they didn’t have an amazing relationship, and they had an amazing relationship again. I mean, any band of brothers is going to go through the same thing. I’m sure he would’ve wanted to have more say in songwriting or have more of his songs, but it’s not like it hurt The Cars. And when you’re in that situation, as I told Ben more than one time, I said, ‘Look, it’s a band. What’s best for the band? That really has to be the only thing that anybody deals with.’”

Barring actual collaboration with Ric, the band tried to at least discuss a more equitable sharing of publishing revenue. This was the reason for the meeting in New York. David says, “Elliot, I’ve got to give him credit for going to try, but he approached Ric to try to get Ric to share royalties because we all worked on the songs together. I’m not sure if he went as far as to suggest other people write songs, but Ric was like, ‘Psht! No.’ Just like, ‘No, that’s never going to happen.’”

“Right,” Elliot confirms.

Bands do it all kinds of different ways. Some bands split everything evenly no matter who writes what. But he wasn’t legally bound to share any of his songwriting, and so he chose not to, even though the demos that we were often presented with were very skeletal, bare songs that you might not have ever picked to be anything special or hit until we got our hands on them and put some meat on those bones and came up with hooks, intros, solos, instrumental passages, counterpoint lines, on and on and on. Outros, grooves, everything. It’s rock and roll. It’s not Beethoven. And I kind of always feel like the song isn’t really done being written until the final mix is done.

ELLIOT DESCRIBES WHAT RIC BROUGHT IN DEMOS AS “THESE SKELETAL LITTLE tick-tick-tick songs” from which the band created “big records. And that he had less to do with that than Greg and I. He wrote the thing, but we would flesh ’em out, orchestrate, and make them sound great.”

For even casual listeners of The Cars’ and Ric’s solo albums, there can be no doubt as to the veracity of this point. But close listening of The Cars’ albums rewards listeners with a treasure of parts, textures, and arrangements, all thoughtful and weighty contributions of the members.

Greg points out, “Van Halen split their publishing four ways, no matter who wrote the song.”

“Jonathan Richman did,” David adds. “Even I’d have to tell Jonathan, ‘Jonathan, you don’t have to do that.’ He goes, ‘No, the Modern Lovers is a band.’ That’s what he said. ‘If it was just me, that would be different, but we’re a band and we recorded those songs.’” U2 and R.E.M. are two other massive bands who split the publishing equally.

“Where Ric thought, ‘Nope, the songs are the songs, and everything else is just arranging,’” Greg says.

While that’s a valid argument, it doesn’t preclude sharing some of the publishing revenue with your band, especially a band that’s contributing so much to a sound that the absence of that band results in solo records that are notably pale by comparison. How can you sustain the group so that nobody feels that they have to go out to tour for eight months at a time to maintain their lifestyle? You could argue that was not Ric’s responsibility. Indeed, he limited touring to a few months on their biggest album when most acts would do a world tour and maybe even include a second US tour. While they would have made a lot more from such touring, the band members were all making a great deal of money, thanks to Ric’s songs and leadership, but they all made crucial contributions. Even the most die-hard Ric Ocasek fans would have difficulty arguing that his body of work as a solo artist was as impressive or lasting as that of The Cars. Sharing a portion—it didn’t have to be equal shares—of the publishing income “would’ve made the inequality a little bit more equal,” Greg says. “And plus, if you’re arranging, you’re coming up with parts, you’re in effect composing parts to go with the song.” Greg suggests that the same proportion of ownership of Syncro Sound—where Ric got 60 percent and each of the others got 10 percent—would have made sense.

Songwriting credit aside, Elliot says, “Just on a spiritual level, to somehow acknowledge the contribution in that way because we all spent our lives trying to get good on our instruments, be creative, and pour the best of what we had into those Cars records.” Think of it as profit sharing in a successful business made up of loyal team members.

It might have taken until 1991, years after their breakup, for Ric to publicly admit just how important Greg’s parts, at least, were to The Cars. “That was Greg Hawkes’s genius with the Cars,” said Ric in EQ magazine. “He had a fabulous idea of what made a hook.”

Elliot says Ben “was completely unaware that we were all meeting, that it was a band meeting about the possibility of going forward, and it dissolved into just more or less acrimony.” This was the time when Elliot suggested that Ric’s only solo hit, “Emotion in Motion,” was a lift of “Everything I Own,” a song by Bread, which pissed off Ric. “Ric got mad and upset, and nothing happened, and nothing came of it.”

Ric and Ben had hit a point of no return. Ben started acting angrier and drinking more. Due to his mother’s alcoholism, Ric was particularly sensitive to people drinking around him. “I couldn’t have a beer in front of the fucking guy because immediately he would go like, ‘You’re a fucking alcoholic,’” says Luis Aira. Paulina affirms this. “It’s like if I would have a glass of wine, he goes, ‘So what are you an alcoholic now?’ Yeah, that was a little tricky.”

Ric appointed himself the producer of Door to Door. Ric’s producing The Cars could easily be justified and made sense on some level because he had now helmed several outside projects as a producer. But Greg, who hasn’t listened to the album since it was finished, says, “Ric started to think of himself as the Jeff Lynne of the band, where Jeff Lynne is the singer, the writer, and the producer. But in my opinion, he didn’t have quite the talent to do all three. I don’t think he had a complete vision of what The Cars were. Jeff Lynne’s solo records sounded just like ELO. It was all him. He had his thing. But in my view, Ric was never successful in that type of undertaking.”

Elliot says, “Ric was not one of those guys who could leave a band and be a solo artist. He was not Phil Collins. He was not Sting. He was a very shy, nervous guy who didn’t really even like getting onstage. And together, we made this huge band that was one of the biggest bands in the world. Together. And all those elements were essential to the success of the band—of course, the songs, but everything else, too.”

Ric and Greg had started recording tracks for whatever songs Ric had. Greg cowrote “Go Away.” As with Heartbeat City, drum parts were recorded later, despite some reviews and accounts of the album that say the band all recorded basic tracks together. “For some reason, the public doesn’t realize that the Door to Door album is all drum machine,” David explains. There had been no rehearsals, so the band members were responding to the songs for the first time when they arrived at the recording sessions. David again had to program beats to existing song arrangements. “I thought drummers would be all over me, and I think they weren’t because I programmed it exactly as I would’ve played it.” However, many of the drum parts suffer from a distinct lack of the natural human swing David would bring on a drum set.

Ben arrived in New York late for the sessions, and he was caustic. Greg says, “Ben, at one point, sort of goes, ‘Oh, so he’s a producer now.’ Ben would go in to do his vocals or a bass part, and he’d just go in and wouldn’t say anything. He’d have his sunglasses on. It’s like, ‘What do you want me to do?’ Like, ‘Okay, produce me.’ It’s like, ‘I dare you.’”

But Diane explains that Ben was on vacation when Ric called to tell him to be there the next day. “Ric called, and he goes, ‘We need you in New York City tomorrow morning for a session.’ And Ben said, ‘But I’m in New Hampshire, and I’m in a cabin.’ ‘I don’t care. You’re getting there.’ And then he’d go and sit for days before they used him, and it was just totally unnecessary.”

The passive-aggressive side of Ben that Greg saw was just the tip of the iceberg. Ben was dealing with rage and depression, which he tried to drown with booze. Diane says,

The good times, oh my god, when we fell in love, and the sky was the limit because the two of us together could do almost anything. And Ben had the sweetest side to him. One Sunday, he grabbed an acoustic guitar, and he said, “Let’s go sing at the elderly home.” And we walked in. Nobody had any clue as to who he was or why we were making up words to the Christmas carols. But I mean, he would do sweet things like that and make food for his neighbors. And he was so sweet until he wasn’t. The erratic behavior just increased and was sometimes fueled by the alcohol, sometimes not. But there were warnings. He would go to the freezer and grab a bottle of hundred-proof Stoli and just start. And that was it. I knew that day was either going to be dangerous or, at best, really bad.

While Ric was the official producer, all involved (including him) said they were pretty much left to produce themselves. While that sounds like a collaborative spirit had returned, that’s not how it worked out. “It wasn’t a group effort,” Ben said in 1997. “I felt that was wrong,” he added. “It was already written in stone when I got there. And that’s not a way to do an album.”

Ric was sideways with everyone in the band in one way or another. The shared struggle of the early years, having the same goals and ambitions, all of that had dissipated. “Now, maybe, people are trying to come up with other goals,” Greg said that year. He had long been the band member Ric trusted most musically, and the two had begun the tracks for the new album together. But Ric alienated him as well. “Ric and I had a period of our own towards the end of The Cars, at the end of the Door to Door record, we just had—well, we had a disagreement on the production credits for one thing,” Greg says.

It’s important to stress how reluctant Greg is to complain. It’s against his nature, as is seeking credit. But here, it was warranted. “I wanted coproduction credit because I felt like I had done work. I had talked to him about it, and I was under the impression it was going to be a coproduction, and then it didn’t happen. And I don’t know, it just got too unpleasant.”

“When the record came out, his credit wasn’t on it, and he started crying,” Elliot says. “That’s how hurt he was and how betrayed he felt. And he was the tightest with Ric in the band. He’s the only one who ever got a cowrite. So he had an easier relationship with Ric than I did. Yet Ric would still turn around and do something like that. That tells you something.”

Even the “Deep Dive” website for the Rhino rerelease noted the album was “co-produced by Ocasek and fellow bandmate Greg Hawkes (although you wouldn’t know it from the album itself, since—for whatever reason—Hawkes’ co-production credit only appears on the songs when they appear on compilations).”

Ric had tried to screw over Greg before. It was over the song “True Love” from Ric’s 1986 solo album, This Side of Paradise. Ric provided the lyrics and the melody over the music Greg had composed. But Greg still was allowing it to be considered “Ric’s song.” He explains, “But then Ric was going to use all the tracks without his vocal as a soundtrack for some film, with him as the composer. And I’m like, ‘Now, wait a minute. Those are all my keyboard parts that you had nothing to do with.’ And I remember going to Peter Thall about it, and he said, ‘Well, would you do it if it was a cowrite?’ So I think I agreed to that since it was parts written to his original song. I did make a stink about that one, and rightly so.” Asked if maybe it was an oversight, Greg replies unequivocally, “It was intentional.” It was only during the process of this book that Greg learned of Danny Louis’s contribution of the “Just What I Needed” melodic keyboard hook in the early days of The Cars. “I remember hearing that demo and asking Ric who had come up with that line. He said, ‘I did.’ See, that’s an early example of Ric taking credit for someone else’s work.”

Though Greg has not listened to Door to Door, it is not an unlistenable record. The Cars at their unfocused worst were still The Cars, capable of pumping out solid, catchy pop songs. For one thing, having a lot more guitar back in the mix was a welcome return to form. But Ric was distracted by his new love affair. In 1987, he and Suzanne would become separated, and in 1988, divorced. Though breakups can produce some of the most effective records, that’s not the case here. “Double Trouble” sounds less like a Cars song than the most generic ’80s rock songs on Heartbeat City. Interestingly, though, it has acoustic guitars, a rarity on a Cars record, strumming in stereo. Ben was assigned the lead vocals to this one. “Everything You Say” is a minor-key country-tinged number. “The lyrics are like a Johnny Cash song,” David says. “So I told everybody, ‘Let’s get Johnny Cash to sing with Ben.’ Nobody wanted to do it.”

Recording completed, Ric filmed a cameo as a Beatnik for the original John Waters film Hairspray (1988), shot in Waters and Ric’s mutual hometown of Baltimore in the summer of 1987. It was not Ric’s cinematic debut; that had come the year before in Made in Heaven, with his new friend Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis.

Door to Door was released in August. They managed to score another Top 20 single with “You Are the Girl,” which would bring some satisfaction and a few bucks to Greg as the cowriter. Two others cracked the Top 100, “Strap Me In” and “Coming Up You.” The album made it to 26. It would be their first album not to go platinum, barely passing the five-hundred-thousand mark to achieve gold.

They rehearsed in Manhattan for a tour that would commence on September 17 in Flint, Michigan. By now, Ric and Elliot both had places in New York. Elliot and Colleen got a condo there sometime around 1985, partially with the idea of Elliot doing session work for other artists. Colleen got a job working for fashion designer Danny Gershon (Gina Gershon’s brother) in New York, so they went back and forth to Weston on weekends until selling the house in 1991. Ric was living in New York more or less full-time.

Before they embarked on a tour, the company line in the band was that they were “having fun playing again.” Or so said their leader. They were also planning on a six-month “world tour,” according to the Boston Globe. “We’re going to Japan, Europe, Australia—the whole bit,” Ric announced. Greg, though, was already saying that this would likely be his last tour, though he hoped to keep the band going as a recording entity like the Beatles or Steely Dan. And David says, “I got suspicious of Ric’s behavior. He said, ‘We have to go to Europe and tour.’ I thought, ‘He doesn’t want to tour. What’s going on?’ And then Elliot Roberts said things like, ‘Ticket sales are starting to slow down.’ And I was suspicious of some of the gigs. There wasn’t any advertising.”

Greg emphatically concurs, “There were no ads.”

David continues, “I realized—this is my opinion—Ric wanted to tour to make himself look good so that people wouldn’t say he left the band and broke the band up. Especially back then, he could’ve done something like that—calculated a thing with our manager as sort of a story.”

The record was a bomb by Cars standards. The tour did not go well. A review of a typical show in Montreal in November said the hall was “near empty,” which the journalist ascribed to the band’s reputation for being so poor live, based in part on their previous appearance in the city.

Peter Thall says, “I never had the impression that Elliot Roberts was a genius. He might’ve been, but I didn’t see what he did for The Cars. I mean, he let them go out on the Door to Door tour to arenas, and I went to Charleston, South Carolina, or something. Two hundred people came. That should never have happened.” The promoters took a bath after being hyped by Roberts that this was going to be a massively successful tour. Still, Ric believed in Roberts, and Roberts had placed his bet on Ric. But as Gerald Casale, one of Roberts’s former clients, told Jimmy McDonough, Roberts was “the best liar I’ve ever met, and I don’t say that with judgment, because to be in this business you have to be an incredibly creative liar.”

Lookout Management’s Jeff Kramer was now on the road with the band, replacing Bill Gerber. Paulina recalls, “Elliot Roberts, of course, was the world’s funniest, wittiest, sharpest, et cetera. And Ric adored him because Elliot was such a personality, and Ric loved people with big personalities as long as they liked him. So Elliot was great. And then Elliot hired Jeff as an assistant.” Kramer was first hired to help Ric with This Side of Paradise, as it was concurrent with other Cars activity. Paulina continues, “Initially, when Ric and Jeff met, Ric really didn’t like Jeff because, and again, this was very Ric-specific because Jeff was wearing a baseball hat on backwards, and that is a no-go for Ric. I was like, ‘So how was this new guy?’ And he’s like [grumbles], ‘He was wearing a baseball hat backwards.’ I said, ‘Say no more. I know exactly how you feel about it.’ But yeah, that contempt lasted for only a little bit. And then Jeff and Ric became friends, and then they became really good friends.”

Ben did not travel with the band, choosing to take his own bus with Diane and Thom Moore and meeting up with them at the venues for showtime. Greg was skeptical about Ben’s claim about a fear of flying. He and Elaine recall Ben egging on a helicopter pilot to do dramatic stunts as they arrived at the Mountain Aire festival in 1984. But it seems that Ben did have a real aversion to flying. Still, by this point, he was also distancing himself—physically and emotionally—from the band. “We rented T. G. Shepherd’s tour bus, and boy, do we have fun on that,” Diane Page says. “It was basically fear of flying. He was massively insecure and frightened, and then trying to cover it all up, and then the rage, and then the alcohol. He was very angry. Just angry all the time.” The bus was expensive. It required more than one driver to get to shows on time.

Rather than take it in stride, it upset Ric. “It was an irritant to Ric,” says Diane. “And I think Ric wasn’t happy that Ben now was writing. I think he felt threatened by that. They had such a love-hate thing, and such jealousy, and Ric was always very aloof. The band never hung out together. I asked Ben to put in a pool in Weston. It was a really very modest ranch house, and he did put in a pool. And one time, everybody but Ric came over.”

Ric was starting to reap what he sowed with his disregard for his band and, in particular, his friend and partner of twenty years. “He always looked like a lovesick puppy around Ben,” says Ric’s friend Bebe Buell. “I think he kind of worshipped [Ben]. I think he worshipped his beauty and his voice. But maybe with time, that became competitive.”

Ric later lamented that no one was talking to each other. But at the time, he was staying in fancier hotels while the band didn’t even realize it was coming from their money.

Greg got along with everyone. But he admits that “Ben got pretty dark.” Ben had let his resentment grow until it blistered. His insouciant exterior had shrouded a growing tempest. It got so bad on tour that Ric called David to tell him Ben had barricaded himself and was trashing a hotel room. Ric pleaded with David to stop him. “So I go down there, knock on the door, he opens the door, ‘What’s up?’ I go, ‘Is everything okay?’ ‘Yeah.’ I walk into his room and look around. There’s nothing going on at all in his room, but I think it worried Ric more so that he might miss a gig. Ric would talk about him all the time. ‘Now he’s drunk,’ and all this kind of stuff. Most of it wasn’t true.”

But much of it was. Says Elliot, “Ben was kind of in a dark place on that last tour, which didn’t even make it west of the Mississippi. We called it quits before we got to the West Coast. It was selling so badly. He was completely isolated from the rest of the band. We all flew from gig to gig at a great expense. He got his own tour bus, and in the hotel rooms—I’m told; I never went—he had a gun. I’m told that he was putting aluminum foil, like Elvis, over the windows and darkening the room. So clearly, he was not in a very good space.”

So now, David wasn’t the only squeaky wheel. In their own ways, the others all spoke up or otherwise let their dissatisfaction be known. Paulina says, “I remember when we were out on tour for Door to Door, and Ric would be sort of angry at moments about this or that. Again, small, what I thought were trivial things. And I would go, ‘Well, why are you being so mean towards Elliot? I mean, he’s really funny. He’s really nice. I don’t get it.’ I didn’t see the underneath layers that had been fomenting for years. But of all five of them, Ben is the one who I knew the least.”

The turmoil in the band started to surface publicly. A January 10, 1988, syndicated article by Detroit journalist Gary Graff was headlined “Cars Trouble Has Ocasek Exploring.” Ric called out his bandmates, or at least one of them. “Some people are really paying attention to what is going on in music. And some are along for the ride, if you know what I mean.” He declined to name anyone specifically in the band, explaining that they might read it, but it sure sounded like it was aimed at Ben. Graff also quoted a concert promoter who calls Door to Door “their worst record ever. They’ve made Cars Lite, like Bud Lite.” Ric kept blabbing. He said he was motivated by the lack of the record’s success. “Right now, I feel like I really have to explore other avenues. I feel like I want to completely divorce myself from the general sound.” When Graff pointed out that his solo records don’t sound much different from Cars albums, Ric conceded, admitting he doesn’t understand why that was either. But he thought the band was holding him back. “Sting had to leave the Police to really get noticed. . . . I’ll make some extremely drastic changes, that’s for sure.”

Indeed he would. Later that month, the band was called in for a meeting at Peter Thall’s New York office to plot out plans for what would be next for The Cars. Elliot Easton recalls a previous meeting in LA. “There was another meeting at the Sunset Marquis Hotel with our accountant. And he had prepared all these folios of things that we were going to go over and look at. Ric was in a really pissy mood, and I happened to be sitting next to him at the table, and everybody was sort of passing them, taking one and passing them to the next person. Ric just threw it across the room and, just instantly, the vibe of the room got very uptight.”

Ric and Elliot Roberts did not attend the New York meeting. “Everybody connected to the band is there except our own manager and Ric,” David says. “Elliot Roberts didn’t even care if he was going to manage us anymore, didn’t care what we were going to do. Didn’t even bother to come to the meeting. So we’re waiting for them to come, and everybody realizes they’re not coming. I remember our accountant, he said, ‘What’s wrong with these guys? I’ve never been to a meeting like this. Your manager?!’ That’s how little Elliot Roberts cared about us. Can you imagine not having the courtesy to even act like you had some concern for your clients?”

“I don’t think Elliot Roberts particularly did anything to help keep the band together,” Greg agrees. “I think it was sort of like, ‘Oh, well, Ric’s going to be a solo thing.’”

That’s how David and Greg found out that Ric was quitting. “Not even a phone conversation, nothing,” David says. “We played our last gig. The next time I expected to see him was at this meeting, and that was it. Never spoke to him until years later.”

Elliot Easton says he found out first from Ric. “Ric told me he was leaving the band. He was mixing a King Biscuit concert for broadcast at Electric Lady in New York, and I lived in Soho. It was just a walk to Electric Lady. So I went to the studio, and I was hanging out with him listening and stuff, and on a break. It was wintertime, and he said, ‘I wasn’t going to say this to anybody until after Christmas. I didn’t want to ruin anybody’s Christmas, but I’m leaving the band.’”

Diane recalls Ric calling Ben while she and Ben were in Hawaii to break the news. The couple was there working on new songs to follow up The Lace. “And when we got the call from Ric, that’s when things really began to spiral. It was just one phone call. ‘I’m pulling the plug on the band.’”

Greg, David, Ben, and Elliot briefly considered soldiering on in a different direction, perhaps as a studio-only band or even without Ric, as implausible as it seems. David says, “So the four of us are like, ‘Well, I guess it’s up to us now. What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘I don’t think we should continue.’ And we just generally were all in agreement, and that was it.”

Once Greg spoke to Ric and asked why he had not attended the meeting, Ric shrugged and asked, “Why would I go to a meeting of a band that I’m not a member of anymore?”

Ben later blamed himself. In 1997, he said he was sure he “broke the band up. It wasn’t workin’ out the way it should have.” Did he mean the refusing to fly? Or letting his bitterness toward Ric become obvious? Probably those feelings and more. But much of it had to do with the inequity that Ric fostered.

Ric later acknowledged he felt he had taken The Cars as far as he could and wanted to move on, citing the eight months spent with Mutt Lange as the pivot point. “It contributed greatly to the band eventually disbanding,” he said. “He’d had it,” Elliot said in the 1997 interview. “The band didn’t break up, so much as Ric quit. . . . I think he was really just fed up with all the hassles with interpersonal stuff.”

An announcement appeared in Steve Morse’s “Rock Notes” column in the Boston Globe on January 29. An Elektra spokesperson said, “There’s no official release on it, but it’s pretty official: They’re breaking up. We don’t really have a comment, because what do you say about something like this? All the Cars are pretty strong talents . . . but they’re all different people at this point.”

“Bands are such a knucklehead proposition, anyway,” Elliot said years later. “People are always feeling slighted by this or that. . . . But I never thought it was over, really, until Ric said it to me.”

Katherine Bergholtz (Kim Leo) says, “We took it all for granted that it was never going to go away. It just seems like such a natural way of living, and it never seemed like a super rock-star life, not even going to Grammys.”

Ralph Fatello, who had been a fan and friend to all the guys since The Cars’ earliest days, laments, “Honestly, when they were in with that flow, that continuous upward creative flow, you thought it would never end. I mean, it always seemed like there’d always be another Cars record coming, another new video coming. And when it finally did dissipate, it was almost like, wow. I mean, ten years, but ten years, man. They were significant. They made a statement.”

Footnote

i Please don’t come at me about the old Yoko-broke-up-the-Beatles cliché. Even though most people know that’s not the truth, it’s become a cultural reference point, and I am just the messenger.

Chapter 20

SINCE YOU’RE GONE

“IF IT WASN’T FOR MY BOYFRIEND, I’D BE A LONELY PERSON,” PAULINA PORIZKOVA told the Boston Globe in November 1988. “He’s sacrificed some of his life for me. He goes wherever I go. I’m not alone. Next year, I’ll sacrifice some of my life for him, go where he goes. . . . I want to share my life’s experiences with him.”

The writer of the piece, Marian Christy, discreetly kept the boyfriend anonymous. But news of Ric’s divorce from Suzanne broke at the end of December, along with his intention to marry Paulina, in a Boston Herald article. It said he would give up an estimated “$4 million in real estate, three cars worth $70,000, and pay $3,000 a month” in child support. He kept four Warhol portraits of himself that he had commissioned, one of which he gave to Elliot Roberts. Suzanne probably would not have liked to keep those hanging.

Ric and Paulina bought their spacious (estimated around fifty-seven hundred square feet) town house on Gramercy Park in New York when his divorce was finalized. The seller was Elektra Records head Bob Krasnow, “Ric’s old boss,” Paulina says with a smile, though Krasnow had it on the market. They married in August 1989 on St. Bart’s, witnessed by a small group of family and friends, mostly hers, though Luis Aira and Peter Thall attended. Thall had been helping Paulina with professional representation and her family getting settled in America. Thall’s daughter was the flower girl. None of The Cars were invited.

It was a depressing time, if not for their ex-leader, then for the rest of the guys. After Katherine (Kim) left him, David had a yearslong relationship with a woman named Jennie Grace from Philadelphia. It ended within weeks of the band breaking up. They had been introduced by David’s sister, Lynda, who has been a theater actor and playwright in the Boston area for close to forty years. “I know he was madly in love with her, but I think that she wanted to have kids too, and he didn’t want to have kids,” says Anne Marie Foley. “So she eventually moved away to Philadelphia. I think she got married and had a kid or two, but he stayed in touch with her. And then after that, it was just like he’d meet somebody here and there, date for a while. It was never any long-term specific thing.”

Greg’s identity was wrapped up in the band. “I was depressed for a long time. I stopped doing music because I wasn’t of the mind to wonder what other band I could play with or anything. I was more like, ‘Gee, what can you do after The Cars?’ It’s like, it’s only going to be a downgrade, whatever I do. So I didn’t do anything. And then, a couple of years later, Vanessa was born [in 1990; their second child, Annie, would be born in 1994]. So it was like, okay, I was like the stay-at-home dad, while Elaine was working in McLean [Hospital] for several years.”

He remained angry at Ric for a long time. “Ric had contradictions,” he explains. “But besides becoming more at peace with things, I’ve appreciated that people were complicated. And he could be the nicest guy in the world, and then he’d do something—it’s like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ But everybody’s complicated. I didn’t talk to him for at least a couple of years.”

When the topic of Ric’s compartmentalization surfaces with Aira, he says, “Everybody suffered from it. Everybody: Ben, David, Greg, all kinds of people. I mean, the one thing that Paulina said in one of her many [interviews] that I read was that when he smiled, it was like the sun came out. That’s true. That’s true. When he smiled, he had this charisma that just could fill up the room.”

After being the stay-at-home dad for a year or so, Greg got the call that answered his question, “What can you do after The Cars?” The answer was: work with Paul McCartney. No downgrade there. “Chris Hughes was the producer who called me up to do it. And he had been the producer on This Side of Paradise, that Ric solo album. Chris got the gig to produce ‘Motor of Love.’ When McCartney played him the track, he said, ‘I’d like it to sound a little like “Drive” by The Cars.’ And so Chris said, ‘Well, I know Greg.’ And Paul said, ‘Oh, should we have him come over?’ And so then Chris calls me, ‘Would you fancy coming over to London to work on a Paul McCartney track?’ ‘Let me think about it. Okay!’”

It’s a gorgeous and lush track that combines McCartney’s own style with circular influences like Brian Wilson, 10cc, and, yeah, The Cars. Greg was determined to play it cool and not fanboy out about the Beatles. “But in his control room, he had a little shelf of CDs. And darned if he didn’t have The Cars Greatest Hits in his studio there. But I was definitely anxious. I was like, Should I even mention the Beatles? I didn’t know if he’d want to talk about ’em. Or was he fed up with it? Did he hate ’em at this point, or just not want to talk about ’em? But after five minutes, he just started telling Beatles stories.” Paul showed Greg his Hofner bass with the last Beatles set list taped on it.

“That really buoyed his spirit,” Elaine Hawkes says. “But after that, he didn’t really feel like anyone was interested in anything he did.”

In the early 1990s, Elliot formed a new band, Band of Angels. “After The Cars broke up, I wanted to do something else. I found this singer, his name is Danny Malone. He was in a band called Diving for Pearls, and we wrote some songs and got a deal with Atlantic, and we went out to LA, and Roy Thomas Baker produced the record. I had Stan [Lynch] and Benmont [Tench] from the Heartbreakers filling out the band. I played guitar and bass, and they did drums and keyboard. We made a pretty damn good record, and you couldn’t have come closer to a record being released and not have it be released.” Doug Morris at Atlantic decided not to release it. “We were flabbergasted. And the excuse that was given to us was that Mick Jagger’s solo album was coming out that quarter, and he wanted to put all his promotional money into that, which did nothing. And so that record didn’t come out. But as a postscript, when Rhino issued my solo record Change No Change, they asked me to pick what I thought were the best five songs off the unreleased record, and they put it on there as bonus tracks. So you can kind of hear half the record.”

Ben was not making another solo album, but he and Diane had gotten a publishing contract from Warners to write songs for other artists, taking a six-figure advance. She explains, “So we took the money, and he spent the money, and no songs, and day after day and month after month, and they’re going like, ‘Where are the songs?’ So I went in the studio, and I wrote five songs, and I put both of our names on them, just trying to do something. And ‘Half a Heart’ [the song she wrote about them falling in love in 1983] was one of them, and they liked that.”

But in short order, the couple would break up. As Diane observed, Ben was “always drinking,” as far back as when they first met. But the downward spiral accelerated with the demise of the band. She says,

More disturbing was the mood swings and the Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior. He would walk in and out of a room, and his head would be spinning, and he would just go into these things. And sometimes they’d last two or three days. He’d go into his room, lock the door, and put on this music that was like death-sounding heavy metal, just so loud. He just couldn’t help himself out of these times. He started collecting weapons and reading Soldier of Fortune, all these mercenary magazines, and very twisted sexual things. And if I got him out of the house to take a walk, he would insist on an ankle holster.

HE WAS GAINING WEIGHT AND WORE CAMOUFLAGE MORE OFTEN THAN NOT. Diane thought she could fix him, but he needed professional help. “I tried to go to—I won’t say management, but the powers that be, I tried to tell them he really needed help.”

She had left him and returned nearly a dozen times, even renting her own place. Finally, they hit rock bottom.

One night, I had to call John Dalpe [Ben’s friend and neighbor] because I had a pillow over my head, and Ben had a loaded gun pointed at me, and he would say things like, “This ship is going down, and I’m taking you with me.”

So it was time to leave, and I loved that man with everything I had. I left my home, thirteen acres in Lincoln, a private plane at Hanscom Field, and a Mercedes. I left all of that to be with him, and I never would’ve left him if I could have gotten him back together. He begged me to marry him, have his child, and stay there. He said, “I’ll do everything. You don’t have to do anything. Please, please, please.” He was just begging me, and then I couldn’t stay. It broke my heart. It really did.

My friends were just like, “We’re tired of hearing about this. If you go back, we don’t want to know.”

THE EMOTIONAL ABUSE WAS SEVERE AND PROLONGED. AND THEN, “THE gun thing; I knew I was going to die there if I didn’t get out.” She asked Ben to put her things out in the driveway, and she had a truck pick them up.

When I ask Dalpe if he would say Page’s account is inaccurate or incomplete in any way, he answers, “I wish I could. Ben had a lot of . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with Zen masters, but they have a tendency to say, ‘As big as the front, as big as the back.’ It’s like yin and yang. There’s a white and a black side. Everybody has many facets, and sometimes, as brilliant as one side is, the dark side is as dark. But having said all that, Ben was really the type of guy who would plow your driveway. He loved animals, but he also hunted. He was a kind, kind soul. And yet I think he had demons.”

After Diane left him, Ben could not stand to be alone for very long. He had stayed in touch with Judith (Jude) Silverman, the makeup artist he had met on the photo shoot for The Cars’ first album. They were just friends at first. He told her he was married (to Kris). Jude, though, recalls when their friendship crossed over into something more serious on one of the band’s earliest tours in October 1978. While they were in California, he asked her to meet with him on the road. They had two nights in Fresno.

As this was to be a platonic visit, he was supposed to arrange a separate room for her, but apparently the hotel was overbooked. His backup plan was a second bed in his room. Ben was not there when she arrived, but he had put a boom box in the room with a note: “Press here.” It played the Mel Brooks song “High Anxiety” from the 1977 comedy of the same name. Out came Brooks’s voice crooning,

High anxiety

Whenever you’re near . . .

My heart’s afraid to fly

It’s crashed before

But then you take my hand

My heart starts to soar once more

“I thought, ‘This guy’s hysterical. He has a great sense of humor.’ And while I was there, which literally was less than an hour, maybe a half hour, he’d had three different people call to check on how I was. Did I need anything? Is everything okay?”

Ben came to take her to the show. “In their dressing room, they had a huge bathroom, and David and Ben and I were in there, and they start joking around, and they were so funny. I was almost on the floor laughing. And then I saw them play, and that was amazing. I just couldn’t believe how talented they were. I thought they were incredible.” Back at the hotel, “He puts on some music, he just puts his hand out, and we start dancing around the room. And as that evening progressed, it just completely changed our relationship for both of us and how we saw each other. And I said to him, ‘Is this really different? Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Is this my imagination?’ And he’s going, ‘No, it’s not your imagination.’ I guess both of us fell in love on the same night.”

But The Cars were just getting going, jetting around the country. She was busy with her work and life in LA. Jude was reluctant to consider Ben as anything more than a friend. During these years, she was seeing other men, including musician Johnny Rivers. But soon, Ben asked her to come live with him in Massachusetts. “But that was out of the question for me because I was not about to give up my career. I was very successful.” They would see each other whenever he was around California, but it was fleeting. He was with Amy LaTelevision and then Diane Grey Page.

Ben called Jude to hang out with him in 1984 at the Hilton mansion for the filming of the “Magic” video. She knew nothing about Diane yet, but Diane knew about her. Diane says, “He said, ‘Oh, I had this makeup artist friend named Judith, and she’s really nice’ and whatever. And I knew that they had been lovers.”

Ben would continue to call Jude periodically to check in with her. On one of those calls, he said his relationship with Diane had ended. Diane says, “She was the first one to call. She was the plausible one if he wanted to marry somebody really fast.”

Jude says, “He kind of started wooing me a lot, very seriously. And he really wanted me to live with him and this and that. And I go, ‘Well, what would I do in Boston?’ I mean, I really loved my career at the time. So it was my birthday, and he said, ‘This is the perfect time. Please come now. I’d really love to see you and just do it.’” She was reluctant to trust him, taking time off work to fly across the country. But she eventually agreed.

“So I go to Boston. He sent me a ticket, and I get there, and he is not there. I wait, and I’m calling, and he doesn’t answer.” He had ghosted her in the past, so she was exasperated. “I’m just done. And while I’m up there getting a ticket home, he comes running, and he goes, ‘Oh my god! Oh my god, I fell asleep! I fell asleep at the end of the bed. All night, I was up. I was really excited you were coming.’”

He brought her to his Weston house, telling her to relax and take a bath but not to come into the kitchen. When he was ready, she saw that he had decorated his swimming-pool area with tiki torches and was grilling vegetables for her favorite meal, the lobster and grilled-vegetable salad from the Ivy restaurant in LA, accompanied by Cristal champagne. Little did she know that he was about to propose to her. He had written it out. “Ben could be the most magical person I’ve ever met in my life. He wasn’t like anybody else. He was really a different person. And all of the guys, The Cars were all really amazing people. I just want to say that I loved each and every one of them, and they’re so talented, all of them.”

They were married in Kauai on Memorial Day weekend in 1991, their favorite place. She upended her life and career in LA and moved to Weston, where she knew no one. There would be rare get-togethers with Greg, Elaine, and David. Elliot and Colleen were mostly in New York after selling the Weston house in 1991, renting a weekend house in Connecticut. They married that year, also in Kauai. They eventually relocated to LA in 1993. Their daughter, Sydney, was born in 1995.

So it was Jude and Ben alone most of the time. They watched a lot of TV. He taught her how to scuba dive in the pool. Eventually, they stopped going to Kauai, most likely due to his increasing fear of flying. But they would take day trips, visiting Vermont and other places in New England and Canada. Ben was considering a move to Vermont and was looking for properties. Having attended Dartmouth College in nearby New Hampshire, it was nice for Jude to be back in the region. She had a friend from school who lived in the Boston area, but she had her own family and obligations, so they would see each other only occasionally.

Jude says she never saw Ben just pick up any of the many instruments he had around the house and play for fun, unlike her former boyfriend Johnny Rivers, who would sing songs to her and have people over to play. But he was still working on songs, with the goal of releasing another solo album. Around 1989–1990, he began collaborating with John Kalishes, a local Boston musician, who helped Ben finish songs. The two became friends, and they assembled musicians to play behind Ben on some recordings he made at local studios, including the idyllic Long View Farm in rural central Massachusetts. Greg Hawkes and members of the band Boston were among those who contributed.

“They weren’t of the quality it should have been for him, in my opinion,” Jude says. “There was a magic between Ric and Ben. And Ben agreed.” The songs sound like remnants of mid-1980s pop-rock radio. “River of Fire,” written by Stan Meissner and Glen Burtnik, has a big chorus like John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire.” “Little Mind Working,” written by Ben and Kalishes, has a Simple Minds vibe. Jude said he wrote the song aimed at a stalker he had. “The police were involved,” she says. “It was a huge deal.”

And there was a song about his feelings regarding Ric, a tender ballad. “Do You Know What It Feels Like?” He sings, “So very hard to watch you act, my friend . . . You lose a lead, a broken car, you drop a beat, and there you are. . . . And so a time to let go and take to the road without you . . . The tables have turned and the bridges have been burned.”

No labels showed interest, so the demos didn’t lead to anything more, and Ben’s spirit continued to suffer. Elliot says, “I wasn’t in much touch with Ben. It seemed like he was in a dark place and didn’t necessarily want to talk. He was like that. He could be very closemouthed and very to himself. And I wasn’t around the block from him anymore.”

Ric phoned Ben multiple times in the early ’90s. Ben would usually not answer or return the calls. The rare times he did answer, he would just not speak. Jude recalls,

I said to him, “Look, everybody deserves a hearing; even if you’re mad at them, everybody deserves at least to be heard out and then for you to make a decision based on what they say. But I think it’s important that you at least do something with that. I know you two really cared a lot about each other and were close for a long time, and if you want to work with them or not, that’s totally up to you. You do what you want. But I think that everybody at least deserves to be able to tell you what’s on their mind and in their heart.” So after that, he did agree to talk to Ric.

Paulina says, “Ric really did love Ben, and he was pretending he didn’t for a really long time because Ben didn’t like Ric. Door to Door, that was a disaster. The tour wasn’t selling well, the album didn’t sell well, and everybody hated each other by the end. I do remember him making a little overture towards Ben, and Ben not answering would’ve just made him say, ‘Okay, well, that’s it. He’s dead to me.’”

Greg was unaware of Ric’s calls to Ben. But after a few years of no communication, things began to thaw between Greg and Ric. Still, Greg never knew what Ric was thinking. There were some false starts. Ric would call Greg with some plans for various projects or tours, and then Greg would not hear back from him about it. But in 1990, Ric hired Greg to help him record “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” for Simply Mad About the Mouse: A Musical Celebration of Imagination, a direct-to-video compilation of big music stars covering Disney music. Paulina makes a cameo in the video, which mixes live-action with animation. That led to Ric enlisting Greg on solo records.

“He called me up and said he was working on some songs or working on an album and wanted to know if I was interested in coming down and doing a couple of things,” Greg says. “So I did that off and on. But when I did that, more often than not, I would just go down and do stuff at Ric’s house, in his basement studio. Sometimes, I’d spend a day, just on my own, and then he’d come in at night.”

I ask, “So did you accept that basically as an olive branch of any kind?”

“Yeah, I did, but it was still musical rather than social.”

A few folks interviewed would see Ric and Paulina socially in New York during these years, including Aira, Bebe Buell, and Gene Amoroso. “I was down in New York chasing my acting career,” Amoroso explains. “It was Luis, and it was Alan Vega and Ric.” In late 1987, Ric produced another Suicide album, A Way of Life, their first since 1980. Amoroso continues, “He was with Paulina, and we rekindled our relationship, and I hung out with him a lot. We did a lot of things together—Paulina and him and me and my wife. We’d go over to his house a lot. Ric and I were always really good friends, but I mean, again, Ric had a veneer, and few people got inside that, but we were as friendly as he could be to anybody. But Luis broke the veneer.”

Luis says he had a hard time once Paulina entered the picture. “I can’t express to you how wonderful I thought Suzanne was. I was very sad. That was part of the reason at first that I really didn’t click with Paulina because I was so close to Suzanne. As the years went by, Paulina gained a little bit of my respect.”

When asked if Ric had any issues relating to Paulina, given the “asymmetry” of their years, as one friend put it, Aira says,

The only thing I see that they had in common was a bit of an obsession with fame. Paulina said to me, “Out of all of Ric’s friends, we were talking, and we think that you are the only one who’s a true artist because you’re the only one who didn’t become rich.” I was like, “What the fuck? Is that an insult? Or what the fuck is that all about?” My wife looked at me like, “Oh my god. That was disgusting.” But yeah, there was that obsession, which I never had. I spent a lot of time with Ric in situations where he had a lot of fans around him and stuff, and we almost got killed a couple of times by the paparazzi. We went through some crazy shit where we’re being followed around. And so I saw that ugly side of fame.

Paulina did have a certain lack of tact at the time. In 1992, she justified her affair with then-married Ric in the 1980s, telling Redbook magazine that Ric and Suzanne “would have broken up anyway. [And] she can say, ‘At least he didn’t leave me for some old fat pig. Or another man.’” Today, she’s far more tempered, though still open and frank. She explains that aside from the undeniable physical attraction she had to him, Ric’s age and place in life, his confidence, and his wisdom represented security. “He was a man, like a grown-up man.”

Bebe Buell says she used to help get Paulina on the phone for Ric when they started their affair. Paulina was living with an abusive boyfriend. Buell had mixed feelings about abetting Ric while he was married to Suzanne. “But I was a kid too. I was only twenty-four, twenty-five [in 1984, Buell would have actually been thirty-one]. I know a lot of people want to blame Paulina and come after her and beat up on her. She was nineteen years old, they met, and he was her life, and I’m a witness to that. That was her life.”

As time passed, Buell observed how smart Paulina was and became more assertive about how her life with Ric would develop. The couple wanted to start a family and tried to get pregnant, attempting in vitro. “I never saw two people that wanted a child more than they did,” Buell says. Their first son, Jonathan, arrived in 1993. Oliver was born in 1998. Ric would have six kids, all sons, with three different wives.

Paulina created the CD cover for Fireball Zone, which Ric recorded in 1991 with coproducer and guitarist Nile Rodgers, Chic’s mastermind. The title was taken from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. But none of Ric’s albums would chart after the 1980s.

It was an era of more novel and interesting music being made by people who grew up listening to The Cars. A new underground was coming to the surface, bringing rock guitars back into prominence. The Pixies, who started releasing albums in the mid-1980s and who inspired so many bands themselves, were big Cars fans. Leader Black Francis said, “I loved the Cars. . . . Not being a real accomplished guitar player, they didn’t have a lot of punk rock attitude, but they had this kind of reserved gun gun gun gun kind of thing going on, that I connected with. The Cars were very influential on the Pixies.”

In 1991, Nirvana, one of the most notable bands influenced by the Pixies, released their game changer Nevermind. “My Best Friend’s Girl” was one of the first songs Kurt Cobain learned on guitar, and Nirvana covered it multiple times, including at their famous 1992 set at the Reading Festival. But those guys were still in their twenties. Ric was about to turn fifty. Still, he kept his ear out for the cutting edge in other artists and would soon work with many of the artists who found success in the wake of Nirvana breaking through.

Elliot contributed guitar to recordings by other artists as varied as Berlin to Brian Wilson (with his old friend Andy Paley coproducing the latter with Russ Titelman) in the ’80s and Jerry Lee Lewis to Amy Rigby in the ’90s. Moving to LA plugged him into a network of musicians who appreciated the depth of his talents. His old roommate from Boston Allan Kaufman, who had done sound for Richard and the Rabbits, was now a big-time record executive and movie producer. “The day I moved [to LA],” he says, “A. K. brought me to this club in Beverly Hills called Tatou, and he had me up onstage playing with [Jeff] Skunk Baxter and Billy Preston.”

Elliot appeared alongside Difford & Tilbrook (from Squeeze) and Syd Straw on the first MTV Unplugged, hosted by his friend and collaborator Jules Shear. He also played sideman for Hall & Oates, filling in for Tom “T-Bone” Wolk. “I had met them—well, I’d met them a lot of times—but we kind of bonded in Tokyo at this concert that Yoko Ono put on, ‘The Greening of the World.’” This was held in December 1990 to commemorate what would have been John Lennon’s fiftieth birthday. “Oh, my goodness, there was Miles Davis, Hall & Oates. . . . I played with Linda Ronstadt and Peter Asher. We did the Beatles’ ‘All I’ve Got to Do.’ And I played with other people, too. And then those guys [Hall & Oates] saw me playing and liked my playing, and then afterward we were kind of bonding and joking and stuff like that. So they remembered me. So I guess when T-Bone left, they thought, ‘Hey, maybe Elliot would work out.’” Did he like touring with them? “It was fun,” he says. “It was fun to play more R&B-oriented music, which is something I love and never really got to explore with The Cars at all.”

Ric invited Greg to work on his next album, 1993’s Quick Change World, another attempt at mainstream rock and pop radio. Most of it is anodyne, but some of it, like “Riding Shotgun,” is downright embarrassing. Ric was not largely to blame. The album resulted from a compromise with his label, Reprise, who sent him back into the studio after he presented them with a collection of more exploratory, experimental music. Ric intended it to be called Negative Theater, packaged as a double CD with an accompanying book of poetry. The title concept goes back to how he characterized his approach with The Cars in live performance. “I certainly philosophically didn’t want to prod the audience to react to anything,” he said. “To me, it was more like negative theater. We didn’t really talk to the audience. I didn’t see that being a part of this band.”

Much of the rejected material is more interesting than Quick Change World, which includes roughly half the Negative Theater songs. He published the book separately, describing it as “prose and photographs that I’ve done over the years. Some of them doctored and some of ’em just as they were, and it’s kind of like it’s a little autobiographical.” In addition to his photography, Ric got into painting, works he would later exhibit. Aira says, “He took lots of Polaroids, but the first stuff I saw resembling a painting was around the Negative Theater.”

After bringing Greg back into the fold, and with his solo career going nowhere, Ric tried to convince Ben to consider a Cars reunion. Jude Orr says Ben finally agreed to talk with Ric. “Ric was really offering Ben a lot. It was really an amazing deal.” Ben rarely complained to Jude about Ric or the band. But he told Jude the reason the band broke up in 1987 was Ric not sharing any publishing royalties, something he also voiced to Diane. “Ben was really livid about that and didn’t feel he could trust Ric,” says Jude. But it was Ric’s need for attention and control as well that broke the bond the two men had. “In the beginning, the cameras were always on Ben, and I think Ric got very upset about that,” Jude says.

“[Ric] really went out of his way to settle things with Ben, but Ben was unresponsive,” Greg told Jim Sullivan of the Boston Globe in 1995. “To this day, I don’t know what the major rift between them is. And I think Ric is a little confused, too.”

When Ric was asked about their falling-out in 2011, he called it “a real cold war that lasted about 23 years. I could never really figure out exactly why, but I think there was a lot of jealousy because I wrote the songs and I got a lot of attention. And there was all kinds of weird stuff, like he said, ‘My girlfriend writes songs, let’s use one of those or two of those.’ I said, ‘No, that’s not the Cars.’”

In the 1990s, Ben was still being advised by Jean Renard. Aside from Jude, Renard was the main outside voice in his ear. Working with Ben, Renard helped assemble musicians, booked studio time, and offered Ben guidance on how to handle negotiations with Ric and The Cars. He says, “Things got so bad and upsetting to Ben that when it came time to think about moving forward, Ben wanted to discuss making changes but would not meet with Ric directly. So I did.”

Greg said in 1997 that there had been “serious talk” about reuniting in 1994. In 1994, Ric said, “I mean, if the Berlin Wall was torn down and Pakistan made a truce with Israel and communism fell, I guess The Cars could get back together.” Around that same time, four of the five Cars convened at SIR rehearsal studio in New York. Whatever happened in Ben’s world led him to be the only one not to meet. Today, Greg has a vague recollection at best, and David has no memory of this, but Elliot recalls flying back from LA for it. “It might not have been a very complicated decision,” Elliot says. “It might have just been: ‘It’s been several years. Let’s give it a try.’ We played for two days without Ben. It sounded kind of empty without any bass, so at one point, I even picked up a bass. It was pretty clear that it wasn’t going to work.”

Ben was skeptical and unwilling to trust Ric, but if he had been on the fence, Renard had some sway over his decisions. Renard felt they had invested too much, emotionally and financially, in Ben’s solo career and wanted to grow that. “As we contemplated a second solo album, Brad Delp, Charlie Farren, and many others came into sessions, and, essentially, many of the demos were created using the folks I knew from Boston,” says Renard. “I pulled in every favor I could to make this happen as Elektra was not receptive, wanting instead a Cars album.”

But once again, Ric alienated Ben. Greg remembers a meeting around this time when things were getting smoothed out. “But then Ric said something at the very end that irked Ben again,” Greg says. “Ric sort of made a remark about, ‘Oh, man, I heard this story that you had locked yourself in a room with your girlfriend, and you had a gun, or something.’ And Ben was done.”

Anne Marie Foley was one of the few who stayed in touch with Ben. “He was always such a good friend to me,” she emphasizes. “I can tell you one thing: if you needed anything, Ben would be there for you. As far as needing somebody to talk to or a good friend who would drop everything for you, Ben would do that.”

David says, “Ben wasn’t too bright, but he was by far the nicest person in the band. The most loyal friend.” But by the 1990s, he was not checking in on his bandmates, even when he was in their neighborhood. David had not played much music since the breakup. He would do some work as an extra in films produced around eastern Massachusetts, like Housesitter and The Crucible. But he mostly hung around his home on Cape Ann. “Once I was sitting in a restaurant down there, and Ben knows I live in Gloucester [almost an hour’s drive from Ben’s house], but he’s never called or visited or anything. So I look up, and I see Ben coming up the street, and he’s got a whole group of people worshipping him as he’s walking, little kids holding onto his sleeve and all this stuff. And everyone’s looking up at him, and he’s just walking with his friends. And I go out there, and I go, ‘Ben, what are you doing?’ He goes, ‘Oh, these are my friends from Cleveland.’”

Jude accompanied Ben to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame opening in his hometown of Cleveland in September 1995. His old friend David Spero was there.

Ben and his wife sat with me and my wife for the show and all that stuff. This is the day they opened the building, and Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Jerry Lee Lewis, I mean, everybody in the world was there. And this was at the private dinner after the show, I think it was. And it was a pretty heady night for everybody there. And I don’t think he ever, in his wildest dreams, thought that The Cars would be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It was just great to spend that much time with him. He was getting an awful lot of attention, and he was incredibly gracious with everybody. But you could see that’s not who he was. He was really uncomfortable with that side of it.

As with Diane, Ben’s mood swings dictated the tone of his marriage with Jude. Their marriage was an emotional seesaw. “He could be the most delightful person or interesting and fun. We had a great time, and we laughed really hard.” But then he could go dark for long periods of time. “When I moved [to Weston], he was my only friend. So I wasn’t used to that. I didn’t know that guys ever went silent. I didn’t know that was a thing. I knew girls did it sometimes, not me, but I didn’t know that was a thing, and that was really difficult.” When asked what might trigger those periods, she says, “Literally nothing. Maybe alcohol. Probably alcohol related, I would guess.”

She explains that Ben felt paranoid that she was judging him when it came to drinking. “One of Ben’s friends said, ‘Oh, but you don’t drink.’ And I go, ‘Well, what do you mean I don’t drink? I drink.’ He said, ‘Well, Ben said you don’t drink.’ I go, ‘Well, I don’t get drunk. I mean, I maybe have a couple sometimes, but I just drink a normal amount.’ But I thought it was odd when he told them that I didn’t drink, and I said, ‘I drank right with you.’”

What Ben meant, evidently, was that she was not a hard drinker. He knew he had a problem and thought she would eventually hold it over him. “I think sometimes he just wanted to have a reason because when we were in the house, even when he was silent, he would follow me. I mean, for him to get mad, it was about something so trivial.”

For the most part, she was trapped without many people to turn to. She had no house key because they were always together. They knew one or two people in the neighborhood, but Weston is not a typical suburban town. It’s somewhat rural, with houses set privately on big wooded lots, and their house was up a long driveway. “I’m really a people person, so I would just go and be by myself rather than just being around someone who’s not talking to me. So I’d go to a movie; I’d go to dinner by myself. I mean, if the waiter or waitress came up and talked to me, I was so happy.”

She recalls, “I said, ‘I will put up with a lot, and I will go through it, and one day I’ll just be gone.’ And that was the truth.” And that’s what happened. She went back to LA in 1994. Ben was lost without her, but she refused to return. They separated in 1995. He sold the Weston house and moved to Reading, Vermont, the same year. By 1997, they were divorced. Once in Vermont, he became a virtual recluse. To the musicians he had been collaborating with, it was as if he just vanished. Greg says, “Once he went into Vermont, I barely spoke to him.”

Chapter 21

DRIVE BACK

IN THE FALL OF 1995, THE CARS RELEASED A FORTY-SONG DOUBLE-CD COLLECTION of greatest hits and rarities: Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology. It was mostly spearheaded by Greg, who, along with Ric, was the de facto band archivist. Elektra didn’t want to release it officially, so they licensed the project to Rhino, and neither Ben nor Ric would speak about the CD to Jim Sullivan of the Boston Globe.

With that release came rumors about a possible Cars reunion. The Globe had run a piece in September that year about the opening of the FleetCenter, which was the new Boston Garden. “There is still behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get three of Boston’s most historic rock groups—the J. Geils Band, the Cars and Aerosmith—together for the FleetCenter opening. Ben Orr said the Cars are willing to do it but are waiting for a decision from co-singer Ric Ocasek.” In a November article, David said, “I hope for everyone’s sake that this can come together,” while he noted that Ben was unlikely to join. Greg was less optimistic. He said, “I just don’t think it’s going to happen.”

Also in 1995, Elliot began what would be an eleven-year stint with Creedence Clearwater Revisited, the band put together by Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, the original rhythm section of Creedence Clearwater Revival, to play the band’s catalog. Leader John Fogerty, who refused to play CCR songs due to lawsuits with the band’s label, Fantasy Records, sued his former bandmates to try to stop them from using a name that he felt was too close to the original CCR. It was controversial. But Elliot, a fan of the band since high school, stayed above the intraband fray and the controversy, just happy to play with one of rock and roll’s illustrious rhythm sections. In addition to hitting Fogerty’s well-loved riffs, he could jam out with extended improvisations for minutes at a time, a much different approach than the concise and composed Cars parts. “I could take eight-minute solos on ‘Susie Q’ and ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine’ and explore my bluesy side and do all that. So that was great. For the next eleven years, I was doing a hundred shows a year.”

Elliot also started the concept of Elliot Easton’s Tiki Gods, recording tracks influenced by a variety of 1960s instrumental genres like surf guitar, the tiki-bar cocktail culture “exotica” of composers like Juan García Esquivel, and soundtracks to spy films and spaghetti westerns. Working as a one-man studio band, he recorded “Monte Carlo Nights” for a compilation called Pulp Surfin’. Two years later, it was on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown movie. Elliot would flesh out a real band for the concept around 2012 and released an album in 2013.

Ben kicked around with various combinations of the musicians who had worked on his demos. In the summer of 1994, he met Edita Hartig, a bartender at the Hawk Inn and Mountain Resort in Plymouth, Vermont, where he played a one-off as a trio with his friends John Kalishes and Kevin McCarty. They called themselves the Beacon Hillbillies (a joke reference to the old Boston neighborhood Beacon Hill). It was his first time onstage in years. He and Edita hit it off, and she was one of the main reasons he would make frequent trips to Vermont, eventually moving there. Hartig moved in, and on September 29, 1995, she gave birth to their child, Benjamin Charles Joseph, Ben’s only child.

The gig led him back into music and performing. He assembled a new band called ORR, using some of the musicians who played on his demos. They debuted at a holiday party at the Rat at the end of 1994 (attended by Greg and David), continuing to play there several times in 1995. An hour-long semi-unplugged set by the band was videotaped at Boston’s South Station, a commuter hub, in February 1995 as part of the WBOS Music Festival for the Earth. Ben looks like a man out of time in his feathered shag, fringed black leather, and a choker. He would gig sporadically with multiple versions of this band until around 1999.

Brad Hallen, who had been in Ministry and played on Elliot’s Change No Change in the ’80s, was hired for bass in the final lineup of ORR. While those past Syncro connections didn’t hurt, Hallen was recommended by his friend Tom Hambridge, who had been in ORR since 1996. John Kalishes, the musical director, called him. “Ben wasn’t even there when I did the initial audition,” Hallen says. The band would generally rehearse without Ben. “When he got the word that a bass player was hired, he came down, and we rehearsed a little bit. We did some tunes off his solo record. Hallen stayed on for about a year. “We did ‘Moving in Stereo,’ ‘Bye Bye Love.’ . . . I mean, ‘Drive’ was just like, god, every night he sang that he just killed it. So emotional, man. He had a lot of passion, but he was a tricky guy. He really was, because of alcoholism. I mean, he kept everything very close to the chest. And because I wasn’t drinking, I wasn’t hanging after gigs, late-night hangs, and stuff because I didn’t want to be around it. I was newly sober then, just a couple of years. So I didn’t want to be around, of course, crazy shit.”

Even before he took the audition, Hallen had checked with Kalishes about the level of abuse that was going on.

I said, “Look, man, I can’t be around a lot of partying. I dunno where you guys are at with that stuff.” And they’re like, “Oh, no, we might have a drink or two after the gig, but that’s it.” I was like, “Okay, cool. As long as there’s nobody shooting dope or sniffing coke or whatever. I don’t want to be around that.”

The first gig I did with him was a festival in Virginia. I showed up at Logan [Airport] at six in the morning. These guys are already drinking out of flasks. Right to the bar. A zillion drinks on the plane and stopped at the liquor store on the way to the hotel once we got down there. So by the time we got to sound check, they were fucking shit-faced. But you know what? And Ben was like this a lot, but he always gave a hundred percent. Sang his ass off.

As a recovering addict, Hallen recognized Ben’s drinking as self-medicating. “It’s a deadly symptom, but obsession and compulsion are really what it’s all based around. I mean, when you’re that wealthy and famous, it’s really easy to hide. You’ve got a lot of people that are taking care of you slash enabling you, because the cash cow—you don’t want to upset that.”

“AS A RULE, I’D RATHER LIVE IN THE FUTURE THAN THE PAST,” RIC SAID IN 1997 when asked about a potential Cars reunion. He continued following his desire to be on the cutting edge, though he increasingly concentrated on his role as a producer for others and less on his own music. He produced records for Black 47 in 1992 and 1993, and in 1994 hit it big, producing Weezer’s debut album. It was his first production for a band that sounded indebted to The Cars. And like The Cars debut album, Weezer (or Blue Album, as it’s referred to) was a smash, certified gold in four months and double-platinum by the following year. As with The Cars, the album featured prominent guitars playing eighth-note downstrokes while mixing in (now-retro) synth sounds and infectious pop melodies. Weezer was also influenced by the huge success of Seattle bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam, who, like so many other great ’90s bands, pushed the level of guitars high in their mixes.

Leader Rivers Cuomo grew up in an ashram where he heard very little rock music. “Somehow, we got a Kiss record smuggled into the ashram,” he says. “Besides that, music started for me when we left the ashram, and I heard Quiet Riot on the radio. That’s what really woke me up.” He had heard The Cars on the radio during those years, but he didn’t have the records.

Cuomo was an accomplished shredder—a fast-playing metal guitarist—but the LA-based Weezer was the product of his evolving tastes. He had strong ideas about how he wanted the band to sound: unadorned, indie, and natural, with super-dry sounds and big guitars. In other words, like a Steve Albini recording. “I don’t think we really were aware of who [Albini] was,” Cuomo says, “but that Pixies [Surfer Rosa] album he did was a massive influence for sure. We wanted it to be as simple and as innocent and almost amateur sounding as possible. We heard Pavement shortly before making the record, too, so that was an influence. But when we heard that, it was more like, ‘That is so cool. We can’t sound like that, but let’s get as close as we can.’”

Cuomo didn’t want anyone compromising his vision. “I wanted to produce it. The record company was just very adamant. ‘This is your first record. You need a producer.’ And then I was just grocery shopping, and I heard ‘Just What I Needed’ come on.” He thought to himself, “Actually, that’s kind of what I want to do for the Weezer album. It’s got those distorted guitars and that amazing synth line, and it’s the same kind of chord progression, and it just sounds so cool.”

Ric got their demo tape from Geffen and was blown away by it. Cuomo recalls,i “He came to our rehearsal. The room was so small, and we were right in front of him, and he said it was loud, and it just pinned him against the wall.” Ric compared it to the classic 1980 Maxell-tape “Blown Away Guy” ad with the guy sitting in front of a hi-fi system in a Le Corbusier LC2 chair, his hair, a lamp, and a wineglass blown back by the sound. “He thought it was great, and he paid all attention to me, and he thought, ‘That’s the band: the writer.’ And after that rehearsal, he was like, ‘All right, I’m in. I’m ready to go.’ He was hoping we would pick him.”

Ric asked if they would come to New York to work, as Paulina was pregnant. They recorded at Ric’s preferred studio, Electric Lady. He promised the band that the record would turn out exactly how they wanted. “And that is the truth,” Cuomo testifies. “There were times where he stood up to the record company and said, ‘This is their record. I think on this point, they’re wrong. You think they’re wrong, but it’s their record. They have the right to do this the way they want to do it.’”

One of the main lessons the band learned from Ric was how to layer guitar tones. For example, one track on its own might sound thin, but layered in with bass guitar added cuts through the mix. Ric even persuaded Cuomo to use Ric’s own Gibsons, a 1950s Les Paul Jr. and a Special. The P-90 pickups have a particular punch to them. “He had this way of being persistent but not causing a fight. So eventually, I just tried it, and over time I learned that he was a hundred percent right, and that is the Weezer sound that we use to this day, and I used the same guitar on the two other records he produced.”

Ric welcomed Cuomo and his bandmates into his Gramercy Park house and basement studio. Paulina was sweet to the band, reading their palms. She eventually introduced Cuomo and Matt Sharp to younger girlfriends of hers. “Matt went off with one, and I went off with the other, and I had a relationship with her for a bit that was long distance. So some of the songs after that album were written about this girl Paulina introduced me to.” Sharp wrote a song about it, “Friends of P.,” for his other band, the Rentals.

Cuomo marvels,

All over that basement, in the halls, there were his album awards, and there were thirteen million copies sold, and it was awesome and inspiring, but at the same time a bit of a cold splash of water in the face. It was like part of me is dreaming that someday we’re going to be these massive stars and just have this huge success. But then, looking at that award, it was like, “But you know what? We’re not going to be the biggest band in the world. It’s like he’s already far surpassed what we’re going to do.” Until I saw that award, I thought, “We’re kind of going to be infinitely big and infinitely satisfied with what we’ve achieved.” But no, there’s going to be a ceiling, and there’s going to be somebody on the other side of that ceiling.

Ric advised Cuomo. “We had a one-on-one talk in his basement about sharing publishing credit with band members. And he said something that really stuck with me. His view was that the credit goes to the person who puts the pen to the paper when the paper is blank. And at another time, he said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t sign a publishing deal.’ And I didn’t, and it had massive financial consequences for me for the positive.”

He also gave valuable advice on song selection. “Buddy Holly” was written after Ric came on board. “I wanted to save that song for the second record because that was the last song I wrote for the Blue Album, and it was like the synth and everything,” Cuomo explains. “It’s kind of a new sound. That’s what I want the second album to sound like. It was Ric that said, ‘You might want to put that on this album.’ And he kept at it, and eventually we relented.” It was the second single and a huge video on MTV. But, of course, Ric might have had a personal affinity for the track. It’s arguably the one that sounds most like The Cars and is named after Ric’s first musical hero. Ric would return to the studio for Weezer’s third (known as the Green Album) album in 2001.

“I was impressed by how nice he was and just very sweet, almost kind of like a feminine sweetness,” Cuomo says. Ric was gentle, accommodating, and encouraging to younger artists. “I like to do first albums for a band, but not so much after that,” Ric told Steve Morse in 1997. Matthew Caws of the band Nada Surf spotted Ric at the Knitting Factory in New York in the summer of 1995 and handed him a demo cassette by his band, which Ric accepted graciously, asking if Caws’s phone number was on the tape.

“He was really friendly when I went up to him and talked to him,” says Caws. “I was a fan. My older sister and I stared at the records and obviously listened. I particularly love that photo of him [on Shake It Up] where he is holding that half-moon guitar. Just like, what a cool outer-space character.”

Two weeks after handing him his demo, Caws got a call from Ric. “My roommate was like, ‘You should listen to the answering machine.’” Ric invited him to his and Paulina’s town house. Caws rode his bike up on a “dreamy New York summer night; cool, warm, starlit—everything all at once.” Ric welcomed him in. “He was a huggy fellow. He drew you in. I’m kind of huggy too, so I responded to that. Paulina sits next to me to chat while he’s making coffee. And she said, ‘He really loved your phrasing,’ which was just so great. And he was really friendly.” When Caws later wrote about the magical night, he explained, “It felt like the first time someone from outside the band and our circle of friends had seen something in me.”

On the strength of their demo, Elektra offered Nada Surf a deal. Ric also set up a call with Maverick Records, who offered a contract, as did Warner Bros. They went with Elektra, The Cars’ label, and recorded the 1996 High/Low album, with Ric producing yet another impressive debut from a new band. After a day of preproduction, they went to Electric Lady. Caws says Ric was quite hands-on. “Ric spent a fair amount of time fussing with drum sounds. He would let Bruce [engineer Bruce Calder] do his thing, but then he would get in there and mess with EQ. He’d mostly hang back, but at appropriate times, he’d be like, ‘Let me fool with this.’ He was pretty plugged into audio.” He would also often select the first take of a song while the band wanted to try to improve with subsequent takes. But Ric was almost always right, says Caws. “His opinion was very valuable to us. He was a father figure in that sense. We wanted to please him, which is a great producer’s role. It’s the audience you want to please and that you trust.” Ric also would not allow anyone from Elektra to come to the sessions. The label heard the record only when it was finished.

Also in 1996, Ric produced a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” by Courtney Love’s band, Hole (featured on the soundtrack to The Crow: City of Angels), and albums by such notable artists as Bad Religion and D Generation.

In 1997, Ric signed a new deal with Columbia Sony Records. His A&R rep was Tim Devine, while the label heads were Tommy Mottola and Don Ienner. Ric wanted to produce himself, as usual, but the label required him to hire an outside producer. Five or six years prior, Devine had met Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade, producers making waves out of Fort Apache Studios in Boston, which they cofounded. The pair’s reputation grew as producers of bands like the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Radiohead, Lemonheads, Juliana Hatfield, and, though we were not as big as some of the other groups, my own band, Buffalo Tom. Slade and Kolderie had been in a band called the Sex Execs, who had worked frequently at Syncro Sound in the 1980s, where they learned a lot from Thom Moore, who had passed along techniques gleaned from working with Roy Thomas Baker.

Devine thought they would be a good match to work with Ric. But the duo had also produced a record for Hole. Though he had gotten to work with them on the Fleetwood Mac cover, Ric had apparently wanted to produce the full album with Hole and lost out to Kolderie and Slade, though they only learned that later. But Ric asked them if they wanted to do his record, and they agreed to a deal.

They were enthusiastic about the prospect of working with Ric and went down to SIR rehearsal studios in New York to meet him. They quickly learned that Ric was disgruntled with the whole idea. “He was pissed that they wouldn’t let him do it himself,” Slade says. “And he had a stick up his ass about us because they were selling us as these new Boston producer guys, and he had this idea of ‘Well, I’m a Boston producer!’”

So they were met with an aggressively cold shoulder. They came in to say hello, and Elliot Roberts was there. Roberts announced to the band, “Hey, guys, the producers are here to bust the vibe.” The band—other than Greg who was also there and acting in his typical gentlemanly fashion—was also being standoffish. Slade tried to strike up a conversation with a musician but soon gave up and shrugged his shoulders. Roberts sarcastically told Slade, “Psshht! Good job!”

Says Slade, “I felt like we were being overtly hazed. Later I realized what Roberts was doing was what Ocasek told him to do.” He was playing his usual role as bad cop. “I went over to talk to Ric, who wasn’t giving me the time of day, and the guy is wearing eye makeup. Like, why would a fucking guy wear eye makeup to a goddamn rehearsal? Right then, I had this overwhelming feeling of ‘I fuckin’ hate this guy.’ Because he’s hazing me, refusing to talk to me, and he’s wearing eye makeup.”

Slade and Kolderie kept their cool, stayed professional, and worked on the preproduction. The band and arrangements were tight, so they offered only a few suggestions. They entered Electric Lady Studios the next day and recorded some basic tracks. They could do nothing right in Ric’s eyes. At the end of that day’s session, they made him a cassette of rough mixes. He came back the next day and announced, “That rough mix was the worst rough mix I have ever heard in my life.”

“How do you respond to that?” Slade asks rhetorically. “He chain-smoked pot, which I have no problem with, but his weed sucked! [Laughs.] He was always smoking this shitty Mexican weed, and it was not helping his personality.” Paulina would pop in and out of the studio. “She was terrific,” Slade says. “She was a hoot and a half, genuinely funny. She would mimic Ric. I enjoyed her.”

Slade and Kolderie understood fairly soon that Ric “was trying to get us to quit.” They got the basic tracks down. On their first phone call, Ric had agreed to do overdubs up at Fort Apache. The duo got the studio all set up, all the guitars tuned, warmed up the amps, and Ric didn’t show up at the appointed time in the afternoon. “He’s not there that afternoon. He’s not there in the evening. He’s not there at eight o’clock. And I look at Paul, he looks at me, and we say, ‘We’re being stood up.’”

They called their manager, who called Elliot Roberts. “And strangely enough,” Slade recalls, “manager to manager, Roberts said, ‘Yeah, that’s beyond the pale. I can’t believe he did that.’ We were done.” Ric called and left Slade a message, which he kept, saying, sheepishly, “Hi, this is Ric. I’d like to talk with you, but you probably won’t call me back.”

“So did we quit or were we fired?” Slade asks today. “The answer is somewhere in the middle. He made it impossible for us to work with him, so he should have just fired us. But he played these silly games.”

Ric had originally intended to ask Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins to appear as a guest artist, according to Slade. But in order to placate the label, he asked Corgan to coproduce. So instead of producing younger acts influenced by The Cars, now one of the influenced was going to work producing Ric. Sometimes, it takes younger producers who appreciate the essence and legacy of veterans to refocus them on their strengths. Modernizing a trademark style is a tricky thing to balance. But it’s good songs that ultimately matter, and Troublizing has a few of those. It’s the closest of Ric’s albums to The Cars’ original sound, which Ric himself had been lending to the aforementioned new artists. He didn’t necessarily hear it at the time.

Roughly half the album was done before he brought in Corgan, who says, “I do remember hearing all the demos and not really wrapping my head around a lot of them. I still have the tape, and I should go back and listen now. I’m sure I missed some gems.” Corgan chose five out of thirty songs to work on.

Greg was staying at Ric and Paulina’s house while working on Ric’s records. He says his relationship with Paulina “was always slightly uneasy.” Greg recalls a time when he woke early, the first one up in the house, so he started playing video games on their TV. Unbeknownst to him, Paulina had paused the game after achieving her personal high score the night before, hoping to resume it in the morning. “I had messed it up because I didn’t know, and I sort of feel like, ever since, she never forgave me.”

He says, “But once Billy Corgan got involved, I stuck around for a couple of days and thought, ‘There’s nothing for me to do here. Okay, Billy’s taking charge.’ I felt like I was just kind of standing around, and I wasn’t getting any direction from Ric and not any from Billy Corgan either. So I thought, ‘I think I’ll go home.’” Corgan, though, now says, “I wasn’t aware of the Greg-Hawkes-being-involved part. I met him at Ric’s house, and he was really nice. I would have loved for him to be involved, so any disinterest didn’t come from me.”

“Right from the start, I knew I wanted a musician to produce this record,” Ric said, apparently in a dubious version of events. “The reason I chose Billy was because he is just as obsessive about music as I am. From all the material I had read about him, he really presented himself as his own person, one with individual ideas and the way things should be done. He believes 100% in what he is doing.”

“We had become friendly, and it seemed to grow out of that,” Corgan says. “He really put his trust in me and was willing to let me kind of run things, which in hindsight surprises me now because he was such an alpha.” Corgan says that the idea of refocusing Ric on a particular sound “never crossed my mind. My intention was simply to work with one of my heroes and hopefully introduce his brilliance to Gen X in any way I could. Working with him and calling him a friend was one of the great honors of my life.”

The final album was built from all the basic tracks that Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie had recorded. The label had also hired Ron Saint Germain to finish recording the overdubs. “Ric lied to him,” Slade says. Saint Germain had become known as a mixer more than an overall producer, and he asked Ric if he could mix the record and Ric promised he could. “But Ric never had any intention of letting Ron mix it,” Slade explains. “He wanted [Steve] Thompson and [Michael] Barbiero.” Barbiero is the one who is credited as mixer. Kolderie and Slade declined to be listed in the credits.

“So here’s what happened, though,” Slade says.

Sony likes it. They want to deliver on this whole “We’ll make you a star” thing. Tommy Mottola and Donny Ienner set up a huge party at headquarters, had it all catered, to launch the album. They had all the press there to do interviews, lots of guests. Guess what? Ric doesn’t show. So they’re waiting, and they’re waiting, and everyone is sitting around, and Ienner, who was well known for his violent temper said—and we heard this from our manager—“Fuck that guy! Fuck it! This thing is over!” And he made good on his promise. The album got released, but they stiffed it. I think it sold maybe three hundred copies in the first week. The company stiffed the album because he didn’t play the game. He dug his own fucking grave. You couldn’t even find it in the stores. There was no promo. I thought, “Ah! It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy!”

But Ric claimed he no longer felt driven by commercial success. He wanted to keep writing songs because it was his primary vocation in life. He related to something he read about old painters who kept going well past their glory years, applying their experience and wisdom to trying to improve constantly. That perspective would be handy when he drew only three hundred people to his old stomping grounds at the Paradise. Accompanied onstage by Melissa Auf der Maur of Hole, Brian Baker of Bad Religion, Ira Elliot of Nada Surf, and Greg—all of whom played on the album—Ric played an hour, peppering the short set with a few Cars songs. David was in the audience, as was Paulina. Auf der Maur sang lead on “Drive.”

Greg also worked with younger musicians who had grown up listening to The Cars. He recorded with Boston-based Letters to Cleo in 1996 and again in 1997. “When we were asked to record ‘Dangerous Type’ for The Craft movie soundtrack, we pretty much considered it a Hail Mary when we reached out to Greg to ask if he’d come to LA and record with us at Ocean Way Studio,” says Letter to Cleo’s Kay Hanley. “If memory serves, it was one of the quickest yeses we’ve ever received, and we were absolutely shocked—until we met him.” Greg was on the same flight as the band from Boston to LA. They met him curbside at Logan Airport. “He was dressed in sweatpants, sneakers, and some sort of Disney sweatshirt, a fashion statement to which he adhered strictly. He was shy with an easy smile and quick laugh, not the least bit hesitant to answer any and all Cars queries or spill the tea about people and bands from the era. Experiencing Greg recording forever changed my attitude about keyboard players and synths, which you’ll remember were anathema to our guitars-only sensitivity of ’90s rock.”

Her bandmate Mike Eisenstein recalls,

He was just the sweetest from the get-go. I also remember The Craft soundtrack producer Ralph Sall had the idea for a breakdown chorus (of which I was quite skeptical). Up until this point, Greg was really just re-creating things he played on the original. But he really made this new section come to life. His choices were so musical, and he pretty much played the perfect part right away and then put an overdub over that, just perfectly orchestrated, with synths, almost instantly. I was also proud that he liked my guitar solo. He appreciated that I used Elliot’s solo as the foundation but took it in my own direction. Elliot is really a true guitar hero of mine. Then, when Columbia decided to make the song the single, it was so cool that he was up for appearing in the video. It was probably a year later that we invited him to the studio to play on a few things on our Go! album. It was just nice to have him contributing. He has played with us live a few times, and it’s always a blast.

In 1998, Ric worked with one of his pivotal influences, Jonathan Richman, producing I’m So Confused. Despite his protests to the contrary, Ric was also becoming reflective about The Cars’ legacy, sharing stories, archival demos, and home videos with younger musicians. In 1998, guitarist Doug Gillard joined Guided by Voicesii, a venerated indie psychedelic garage-rock band founded in the early 1980s by Robert Pollard. Pollard intended for the band to graduate from its underground beginnings, which consisted of mostly lo-fi home-recorded albums. “We wanted to go bigger this time,” Gillard says. “The main impetus was because, at the time, Matador [their label] was being distributed through Capitol, and we were excited about that. We wanted to go big and have a producer.” As a couple of guys from Ohio, Ric Ocasek’s name jumped out at them from a list of potential producers. “Bob [Pollard] wanted to have a radio hit.”

Pollard sent Ric cassettes of demos, and Ric shared some of his own, including the demos from the first Cars album, which Pollard played on the band’s van on tour. “He called the compilation ‘Rain Jams.’ That was Ric’s title for his own demo compilation. They were all on acoustic guitar, and Ric was singing ‘Just What I Needed’ and things like that. He sang Dylan.”

Perhaps being tipped off to the Guided by Voices’ reputation as beer swillers (they would typically have a cooler onstage as part of the act), and with his sensitivity to those who drank, Ric told the band that there would be no alcohol consumption allowed in the studio, though he would sneak off and smoke pot by himself. “We’d had a couple of drafts at lunch one day and then came back, and I guess we were laughing,” Gillard says. “We were a little loud coming back into Ric’s house, and he was just sitting there, and he goes, ‘You guys got all fucked on beer, didn’t you?’ “Fucked on beer? I wouldn’t say ‘fucked,’ I mean, we had a couple of sips of beer.”

During the recording sessions with Guided by Voices, he told stories about The Cars and even showed mundane home videos from the Door to Door tour. “Ric was derisive, and he was very about himself, and it could be funny at times,” Gillard says. “I mean, he very much made sure that everyone knew he was in command and this and that, but he was a little dismissive about Elliot, and he was always complimentary of Greg. I didn’t ask him really about anyone else. Well, we talked about Ben, but this was the fall of 1998, and he and Ben still weren’t talking or communicating at all. Ric was kind of sad, though, saying that toward the end of the tours, Ben was traveling on his own, with guns and booze.”

Ben cycled through a couple of oldies-type acts at the end of the ’90s. First was the Voices of Classic Rock, which mostly played lucrative private corporate events. Mickey Thomas, the singer from Jefferson Starship, had started the show band. It included members of Toto, John Cafferty, and other old pros. That led to a call from Derek St. Holmes of the Ted Nugent band inviting Ben to join Big People, a new aspiring supergroup based out of Atlanta, with some other veterans of classic rock, including Pat Travers, Liberty DeVitto of Billy Joel’s band, and Jeff Carlisi from .38 Special. Carlisi had given The Cars direct credit for inspiring him to modernize his southern-rock band. Specifically, he based the riff of their big hit “Hold on Loosely” on the guitars of “Just What I Needed.”

Ben started commuting from Vermont to join Big People in Atlanta. The band had formed organically out of mutual respect and friendship. He met Julie Snider Mennie at one of their performances in the area. They soon got engaged. It didn’t take long for this new group of people to feel like a kind of family. It was a rejuvenating new chapter for him.

But not long after the band formed, Ben told his friends he was not feeling well. He started to lose an alarming amount of weight. In May 2000, tests revealed that he had terminal pancreatic cancer. He soldiered on through the summer while receiving chemotherapy. Carlisi recalled, “The doctor says, ‘You’ve got three or four months,’ and we’re not knowing what to say. . . . Before we could say anything, Ben said, ‘Well, start booking as many gigs as possible. I’m going out the way I came in, doing what I love.’” He sometimes needed to be wheeled to the stage and took hits from an oxygen machine during the shows.

In August 2000, all five of The Cars were finally in the same room together. The occasion was a video interview conducted by Brett Milano, to be included on the release of the DVD The Cars Live: Recorded Live on Musikladen 1979. The others had flown to Atlanta to shoot it to make it easier for Ben. The band, close friends, and family assembled for dinner at a Ruth’s Chris Steak House the night before. “Ric and Ben went off alone to the bar and sat there and talked for quite a while,” Elliot recalls. “I’d like to think that they were getting some resolution and making amends or putting some things to rest.”

“I was spooked,” Greg says about the dinner and the interview. “I could barely talk, just seeing how bad Ben looked and how I just knew he was dying, and I don’t know that I’d really seen any of my contemporaries going through something like that. I knew he was sick, but I didn’t know he was that sick. Even beforehand, I was thinking, ‘Oh, gee, maybe this’ll smooth things out, and maybe we will do some other Cars project or something.’ But as soon as I saw him, I knew he was dying, and that was a shock for me.”

The video shows how the guys individually handle the situation. Elliot is chatty, telling some of the usual stories about the band. “It was heartbreaking,” he says today. “Of course, we kept it together while we were with him, but when I got back to the hotel room, I just fell apart. I wanted to be up and smiling and positive, but the poor guy looked like he weighed about eighty or ninety pounds, and he was just skin and bones. And he’d walk a few steps and have to get into his wheelchair. Brian Skarlz [Ben’s roadie from The Cars] was there taking care of him.”

David, in a tan suit with round wire-rimmed glasses, also tries to maintain a veneer of normality and lightness. Ric acts like they’ve all been buddies the whole time, though at times he seems to glower as Elliot speaks. Greg appears visibly shaken. He and Ben say the least. There is a tone of regret for lost years, perhaps a belated realization that what was important—a singular collaborative chemistry, friendship, even a brotherhood—had gotten derailed by insecurities and egos. They knew they were saying goodbye to one of their own. A profound sense of loss permeates the meeting.

Greg and David have not watched it since. David says, “I regretted them using it.” Today, the pair say it should not be included in future documentaries about the band. Still shaken by the experience as he recalls it twenty-four years later, Greg says, “It was emotionally disturbing. I don’t know if that’s the right word. I mean, I felt like at least Ric and Ben made up, kind of, a little bit. We thought that Ric had his arm around Ben.”

David adds, “They took off for a while and came back. I was never sure that they had talked about it, but it looked like they did; it felt like something transpired. I don’t know what.”

In 2011, Ric said, “It was just a solemn little meeting. We kind of got back to a point of no grudge for the moment, and he was being strong and wonderful. But how much can you make up in a day after you haven’t seen each other?”

At one point, Milano asks Ben, “Did you think of yourself as the sexy one?” Ric jokes that he thought he was the sexy one. Ben, his cheeks hollowed out, a Cleveland Browns jersey hanging like a flag around his skeletal frame, answers, “No, I’ve always kept my one foot on the ground. It’s just a show, an act, and then you leave the stage, and you’re somebody else. But nobody else sees that except these guys and the crew. And that was terrifying.”

Footnotes

i Cuomo referred to notes he kept about the process.

ii He would also join Nada Surf for a period.

Chapter 22

MOVE LIKE THIS

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE, GIVEN THE FRAIL STATE BEN WAS IN, BUT AFTER THE August interview with The Cars, he flew to Alaska for another three Big People performances on August 25 at the state fair. These shows would be his last. He returned to Atlanta, entered hospice care, and passed away on October 3, 2000, at Julie Snider Mennie’s place, surrounded by Julie and members of Big People. He was fifty-three.

In the days before he passed, Ben called family and friends, including his old Cleveland pal David Spero. “I could hear in his voice how weak he was getting. And in the last conversation that we had, I could barely hear him talk. And I mean, he knew the end was near, but he wasn’t ready to say that. He said, ‘There’re just certain people in my life. I just want to thank you for being in my life.’ And I said, ‘Hey, man, I’m sure you’ve made a much bigger impact on me than I made on you.’”

When she learned Ben was dying, Diane Page tried calling, but it was too late; she was told he was in a coma.

On the morning he heard that Ben died, Greg put on “a couple of Cars albums—which I hadn’t done in some time—just to hear his voice.”

Ric was devastated. “Ric wasn’t very good at emotional stuff,” Luis Aira says.

He kind of clammed up whenever anything emotional happened. And he always showed his sadness through anger, and he was a very witty guy, so he could get really cynical and sarcastic. I think part of the reason I remained friends with him for so long was because I was probably one of the very few who would point out flaws. One time he said to me, “Nobody likes me.” And I said, “Well, maybe if you weren’t such an asshole. . . .” So when Ben died, Ric was really pissed off. He called me that night, and instead of being like, “Oh, Ben died, and I’m sad about it,” the first thing he says to me is “It’s the fucking Chinese food that killed him! He kept fucking eating that shit every fucking day.” And it was true. I would have lunch with Ben many times, and every time he would order from this Chinese restaurant that was on Boylston Street, and it was so hot that he’d be talking to you, and tears would be coming out of the side of his eyes.

OTHER PEOPLE POSITED THAT HIS LOVE OF HOT SAUCE AND SPICY FOOD contributed to his illness. However, decades of smoking and alcoholism had to be considered as more likely factors.

After reflecting on the notion, Paulina concurs, “Luis is right,” that Ric’s expression of emotions was often expressed via anger. “It was sort of a simmering cold, mean anger that would get vindictive.” But she says that emotion transformed when he saw Ben in Atlanta, and she saw only utter sorrow.

He was really mad at Ben until Ben died. That was really heavy. This is when I realized how much Ric actually had loved Ben all along and that he had cut him out—shut him out because it was so painful to him that they no longer had the friendship. Once he found out that Ben was sick, Ric stopped talking for a week. He couldn’t really function. He got incredibly upset. He went really dark. And at that point, he still shared everything with me. I was surprised. I was like, “But wait, I thought you hated Ben for the twenty years I’ve known you. You’ve hated the man. So I’m really confused by your incredibly strong reaction.” And then he sort of had to unspool that yarn and admit that no, he was hurt by Ben. He was really upset and kind of terrified of seeing Ben. And then, when he came back from that [interview in Atlanta], he cried. He cried for a few days. He said that seeing Ben was just like the worst moment in his life; he was so sick and so thin and that he knew it was the last time he was seeing him.

Bebe Buell recalls an inconsolable Ric. “I think, subliminally, they were soulmates. He was almost like a lover. I felt that the loss was guttural, like one would scream and cry over the loss of a child.”

Paulina posits, “By the time that he spoke to Luis, he had probably managed to lock the box on that one as well, but he must have given Bebe the raw version, which is unusual for him. He also had an interesting relationship with Bebe. Sometimes she was great, and sometimes she was not.”

Five years later, Ric spoke about the emotional fallout. “It was very sad. It’s hard to even comprehend because a year before that, there was nothing wrong. So no one really expected that. To make it more sad, he had a little boy who was about four at that point, and when I went to see Ben in Atlanta, his little boy was there, too. It was sad for me, because I have kids. . . . I guess I didn’t really believe it.”

Ben’s memorial was held in November at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in his hometown. It was put together by his old pal David Spero, who was at that point the Hall of Fame programming director. David Robinson and Greg Hawkes attended.

“Ben was like a mystery. I found out so much more about him after he died,” David Robinson says. “I had known only a little bit about Ben’s friends from Cleveland. He was like Elvis! Ben was Elvis in a lot of ways; he kept all his friends and had a gun collection. But after the service for him, I was almost crying. People were coming up saying, ‘Ben helped send my kid to college.’ One after another. People would come up and go, ‘My house burned down, and Ben was like a saint. He was like a saint.’ Helping all his friends; I never knew about it. He’d never mentioned it ever, any of these things that he’d done for people.”

“The songs that he sang in The Cars, to me, always had the most heart because that’s who he was,” says Spero.

He had the biggest heart in the world, and he’d do anything for anybody. People at the memorial were coming up and saying, “My daughter had cancer, and she was a big Cars fan, and she had met Ben, and next thing I knew, we had no bills.” Incredible! And he was never public about it. I mean, I knew about it from just being with him a lot. “Oh, I’ve got to go do this. . . .” He did things for Make-a-Wish constantly all over the country. He was just one of the good ones, man. He was one of the good ones and died way too young.

Kris Orr also came to the memorial. “I wasn’t prepared because there were so many people that started coming up to me and introducing themselves. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute. This is just so too much.’ I was there just to bring my heart.”

LIKE BEN, AIRA SAYS DAVID “HAS A HEART OF GOLD. HE SUPPORTED HIS parents, his brothers, his sisters.” Anne Marie Foley says, “David also took care of his mother for years, who had Alzheimer’s.” After selling his house in Gloucester, David moved in 2003 to the center of Rockport, the next town over, with a history as an artist’s colony. He lived first in an apartment over the Country Store in the heart of the town center. David was interested in the town’s history, became friends with painters, opened up the Windemere Art & Antiques gallery, and began making women’s jewelry. He also established the Hula Moon restaurant because he couldn’t find a great place for his friends and himself to eat. As with Syncro Sound, it proved to be less of a sound investment than a great place to hang out.

He continued to be the point guy in The Cars for designing the various reissues. He partnered with Christo Tsiaras for most of the work. “One year, we worked on nine repackages,” he says. “[Tsiaras] knew about Photoshop and different things, so he was learning stuff while I was learning stuff at the same time. So we’ve worked on a dozen T-shirt designs, covers, and just everything.”

THE RESURGENCE OF APPRECIATION FOR THE CARS WAS FULLY IN BLOOM BY the early 2000s. Fountains of Wayne were perhaps the most overt about it with their song and video “Stacy’s Mom.” A Cars homage, it features guitar stabs that are so close to those in “Just What I Needed” that Ric was convinced they were samples, even as he was flattered. Elliot did as well. “Chris Collingwood [of the band] sent the track to me before it came out,” he says. “I really thought that they’d sampled the chord stabs from ‘Just What I Needed.’ He told me that they hadn’t, but it’s an obvious homage. They asked Ric to be in the video. He demurred” [laughs]. Instead, there’s a little kid at a bus stop in a Ric outfit, a license plate that says “I Ric,” and a re-creation of the Phoebe Cates scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. They attempted to get Paulina to play the nominal mom role that ultimately went to Rachel Hunter.

In 2004, Ric finally relented in allowing Cars music in advertising for the first time. Circuit City ran TV commercials with “Just What I Needed.” He characterized the decision as largesse on his part. “Maybe I’m a little bit better off than the band, financially, because I do a lot of other things in my life,” he said. “But I got a little bit of, ‘Oh, could you please? We could really use it!’ I kind of fell to that, even though philosophically, I really never wanted to do that. But after Dylan did Victoria’s Secret, I thought, ‘If Dylan’s gonna do it and Lou Reed’s gonna do it, maybe I’ll just forget about what I said 30 years ago and do this.’ So I did it. Plus, Ben’s estate gets a cut.”

The band’s old friend Mike Howell, who remained close with Greg, observes, “I didn’t get the sense that Ric was that concerned about the other guys’s welfare postband. He wasn’t worried about if Greg was having to make mortgage payments or if Elliot was in, say, Belarus with the remnants of the Creedence Clearwater band trying to earn a living.i Whether he was such a cold person or whether he just felt, ‘I met my obligations within the band,’ or whatever, but I think there was a little bit of ‘Hey, man, you’ve got five houses. . . .’”

The era and circumstances seemed ripe for a Cars reunion, which put the tragedy of Ben’s death in even starker relief. Ric said that if his old partner was around, he would consider it. But the other guys, Greg and Elliot in particular, wanted to forge ahead with a reunion. That led to the controversial New Cars.

“It came from, first, an attempt to put The Cars back together,” Greg explains. Allen Kovac, who managed Mötley Crüe and Blondie, contacted Greg about reuniting The Cars. “We were talking to Ric about the idea, and he said, ‘Well, I might do it,’ but then wouldn’t commit to anything. And then went from that to ‘Well, I’m never going to do it.’ David was also interested until Ric said, ‘I’m never going to do it.’ And so it was really more Elliot who suggested, ‘Well, we could do it without Ric. Why can’t we hire another singer?’ It took a while for him to convince me.”

Elliot had met Todd Rundgren and suggested asking him to front The Cars. “Todd gave it the credibility that it would’ve needed to try to pull off something like that,” Greg says. “I had been a Todd fan anyway, and so I thought, ‘Wow, you think Todd would do it?’ It seemed like Todd thought that it might be good financially, which I figure was his reason for doing it.”

Rundgren was not initially keen on the idea, but he also needed the money. He was suffering from well-publicized financial woes, including personal bankruptcy. Elliot and Greg were also looking for another source of income. Elliot says he left the CCR band in order to revamp The Cars. Greg, at least, had benefited from a reliable stream of royalties as a cowriter of a handful of Cars songs until that changed dramatically when digital-music piracy began in the late ’90s. “That was also the time when Napster came out,” he explains. “I was pretty comfortable with getting Cars royalties and being a stay-at-home dad. And then, all of a sudden, our royalties went down. It was like 40 percent of what it had been the year before. I couldn’t count on royalties from The Cars to keep me comfortable enough not to work.” While Ric was well buffered financially, he would have felt the pain of losing even more considerable income.

Though Ric was against the idea, the band finally took advantage of the fact that they, as three of the original five business partners, had always had voting rights in the business known as The Cars. “Greg didn’t find out until the New Cars that they each even had a vote and that it shouldn’t have been Ric deciding everything all along because they were each a share of the band,” Elaine Hawkes explains. They simply had been kept in the dark when certain decisions were presented to Ric.

“It’s true,” says Greg. “And I guess the other four guys really didn’t have anybody advocating for us. If Elliot Roberts was just agreeing with Ric, was telling Ric what he thought we should do, or what he thought Ric should do, then there was really nobody else sort of advocating for us. I like Peter Thall, but he never said, or nobody said, it is a corporation. I mean, we knew it, but there was never really anything that you would call an official corporate meeting.”

They considered billing themselves as The Cars, but a compromise was made. Says Greg, “Ric said, ‘Well, if you call it the New Cars, that might be okay.’ Ultimately, he let us do it without suing us, but still wasn’t happy about it.”

“The shit hit the fan,” Ric told David Fricke years later. “Lawyers got involved. It must have cost a ton of money in legal fees that I wasted, the Cars wasted, for fucking no reason.”

“Ric said, ‘There’s no Cars without Ben,’” Paulina recalls. “And then once Ben died, that was one of the problems. Ric kept saying, ‘I don’t understand. That’s not The Cars. It can’t exist without me or Ben.’ He was livid about it. It did not endear the band members to him.”

Elliot got the ball rolling with a call to Rundgren. The Tubes’ drummer, Prairie Prince, and Utopia bassist and Meat Loaf’s music director, Kasim Sulton, joined Greg, Elliot, and Rundgren. “Todd is such a chameleon that he really fit in that space,” Greg says. “The band was really good, but it was just an uphill struggle the whole time.”

Some of the results can be heard on the 2006 live album It’s Alive! The long-term plan was to record new material and continue honoring the legacy of The Cars. A couple of new studio songs were included on the live album. But the results were, at best, middling. Rundgren’s voice had dropped from his boyish timbre of younger days to a huskier, deeper octave, lower than Ric’s and even Ben’s voices. But he was a far more entertaining performer. “Todd was great,” Elliot says. “Todd put on a great show, always brought his A game, and was a great guy. Had a lot of fun. It was a bus tour, so we had a good time together. He sang and played his butt off every night, as did Prairie and Kasim.”

The band lasted about two years. The spring 2006 tour was cut short when Elliot broke his clavicle, falling on the band’s tour bus when the driver slammed on the brakes, taking him out of commission. The tour was a money-losing failure. Elliot says,

It sounded good at the time. Greg and I felt like [David and Ric] didn’t want to tour, didn’t want to play, and we felt like this is our recorded legacy, and we wanted to celebrate it and share it with the audience. We knew they would love to hear it. I could make a lot more money doing a lot less work [compared to the CCR tours] and be my own boss. But it didn’t work out that way. It was a disaster. We were on a shed tour with Blondie opening, and we were an unknown band with two original members and three guys from Todd’s band. People didn’t know what we were about, and promoters were cutting their wrists. It was one of those horrible situations where everybody would be gathered at the front of the stage. The arena was empty. It was awful, man. Awful fucking situation. In fact, we got sued by the merch company for the advance they’d given us for the tour. We had to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars. What can I say? But that happened.

Elliot had now participated in two controversial reunions opposed by the original bandleaders. “The side stuff is not by choice,” he confessed. “If the Cars had been busy all that time, I would have been perfectly happy.”

If in private Ric was pissed off, in public he kept a high-road stance. He even had fun with it, putting Todd Rundgren “on notice” during one of his several recurring appearances on Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report.

Ric was never a fan of touring and was keeping busy at home in New York. “He hated performing,” Paulina confirms. “He always said, ‘I’m not a circus monkey.’ He preferred writing songs and producing other artists. That was where he felt he had complete control.”

The couple also spent a lot of time at their second home in Millbrook, in the Hudson River valley in upstate New York, where his next-door neighbor was Mary Tyler Moore. The property, which they bought in 1997, had a guesthouse with a studio, and Stephen George would engineer projects for Ric there and at studios in the city. In addition to his role producing bands—adding No Doubt, Le Tigre, Brazilian Girls, and others to his impressive record—in 2003, Ric became a senior VP of A&R at Elektra. He listened to unsolicited demos, trying to uncover gems to sign to the label. His bandmates were reached by Boston Globe journalist Joan Anderman when he took the job. David wryly offered, “Ric’s idea of a commercial group is Suicide. I can only assume he misunderstands the job description.” Ric later called that “100 percent accurate.”

Sure enough, he was gone by 2005, lasting “not even a year,” he said. In 2007, Mark Shanahan of the Globe asked him what happened to the job. “They never got around to signing anyone I recommended,” he deadpanned. Many of the new artists he loved—Devandra Banhart, the Killers, Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie—enjoyed considerable commercial success and longevity.

Ric released his seventh and final solo album, Nexterday, in 2005, the magical title supplied by one of his sons, who did not yet have the word “tomorrow” in his vocabulary. Ric pulled in some of the musicians he worked with in the 1980s: Greg, Darryl Jenifer, Roger Greenawalt, and Stephen George, but the lackluster music doesn’t match the spark of the title. The album included “Silver.” More than a requiem for Ben, it’s a confession of regret for letting go of such a valuable friend and collaborator. Ric sings, “Wishing you were here to make things right / To turn my darkness into light.”

It was another disappointment from a commercial standpoint. His albums usually went over budget. Around this time, he switched his management. Jeff Kramer left Lookout Management and established his own firm, OK Management, taking Bob Dylan, Ric, and, by extension, The Cars’ ongoing business concerns with him. He added Paul Simon to his roster.

“Ric really trusted Jeff,” Paulina says.

I think when sales weren’t what Ric was hoping for with his solo records, and the deals weren’t what Ric hoped, I think Jeff and Ric thought, ‘Oh, well, maybe that’s Elliot’s [Roberts] fault. And if I go with a younger guy who’s really into me and doesn’t have to also worry about Neil and Tracy Chapman and all these other acts, then I’ll get more attention.’ But then he ping-ponged between the two of them a few times from Elliot to Jeff and then from Jeff back to Elliot. He would be really bitter and unhappy when his solo records came out, and he felt like the record company wasn’t doing enough and there wasn’t enough promotion. And he did sort of blame everybody for the failure. He would go through that and be bitter for a while, and then he would just sort of shut it off, just turn off the tap, and move on.

This was, otherwise, a very happy time for the couple and their young family. “They were amazing years,” Paulina says.

There were a lot of really, really good years, actually. I would say after we bought our house, once he left his wife and got that sorted out, from there and on for probably twenty years, even though his career was going down, our home life was pretty great. And I think he could also balance it in his head with “Look, I’ve had a great career. I’ve done amazing things. I’ve sold tons of records, but I never got to be around for my kids very much. I was never a very present father. And so I get to do that now.” And I think he did tell himself that a lot to make himself feel better about the career moves not being so great.

Was Ric a good dad? Paulina answers with characteristic candor.

I think he was the worst dad to Adam and Chris. I think he was a mediocre dad to the middle two, and he was a great dad to the last two. I think that’s how it went. I think he tried a little bit more with his middle two, but he didn’t do enough. And I think they all feel a little robbed of having a dad. I think I took it as my mission that I was, well, I had found somebody who was very much like my father, and I was going to turn him into a great father to all the children. And I didn’t realize it wasn’t up to me.

“It was all about the Cars,” Ric confessed to David Fricke in 2011. “There was no domestic life. I was always sad for the children.” He added, “One son by an earlier marriage is a recovered drug addict. . . . I’d always think, ‘Is it my fault?’”

He seemed to have an easier time playing the father-figure role to young bands than playing an active role in his first sons’ lives. “Ric wasn’t very nice to Chris,” says Luis Aira, who became friends with Ric’s first son after they ended up living close to each other in LA. Their friendship pleased Ric. “He knew I was very close to his father, so he wanted to know more maybe. I don’t know. Chris is a mini-me of Ric. The voice is the same, the looks are the same, the wit is the same, and a lot of the personality is the same. It’s really freaky.”

When I mention that Chris expressed bitterness publicly about Ric, calling him a “deadbeat dad,” Aira says, “Bitter is a very slight description. Chris is very angry. He said Ric got lucky. He called him a shitty writer. Chris said I was Ric’s real son. I think Chris has better memories of Ben than he does of his own father.”

In 2020, a year after Ric’s death, Christopher granted an interview with Page Six. He had posted a photo of Ric with Chris and his brother, Adam, on Instagram. He wrote, “You don’t exist. We didn’t either.” Chris explained that Ric didn’t reach out to them for the entirety of their childhood until he started having success. “There may have been a touch of guilt, but I also think he wanted to say he was becoming famous, and I think that gets into one of the more universal things in that he was just simply a narcissist,” Chris said. For a while, Chris lived in New York. “I was living a few blocks from him for a year or two and saw him once maybe and I just decided I had to get as far away as possible as I could,” moving to California. As a teenager, Ric’s presence was hard to escape, with the videos being on MTV all the time, compounded by his striking physical resemblance to his father.

“He didn’t have the sort of conscience to keep him grounded, so he just kept going and always went for the next thing, even if that meant abandoning or neglecting children,” Chris said. “That was fine with him. I don’t think he thought much about it.”

It’s perhaps ironic that Ric was a serial abandoner who, Aira says, “had abandonment issues. That’s the first thing I got when I moved to LA. The first thing Ric says to me is ‘You abandoned me.’”

Eventually, Christopher stopped talking even to Aira. “I made the mistake of saying something nice about his father.”

“The man that my children got to know, they wouldn’t even recognize that dad,” Paulina says. “They wouldn’t even know who he is. And Ollie’s even said to me a few times, ‘I know that Dad did these things, or people said that he was like this, but I cannot imagine him that way. That’s not the dad I know.’”

FOR ALL HIS PROTESTATIONS OF NOT WANTING TO REVISIT THE PAST, RIC also mined the band’s history when he assembled The Cars Unlocked, a DVD of home videos and various live clips of The Cars, taken from the video cameras that fed to the projection screens at the concerts, spanning almost their full career. His son Eron edited it.

Adroitly navigating the past-present continuum, Greg joined Flo & Eddie (Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan) of the Turtles on East Coast tours (they had a separate band on each coast). He had met them while playing in Martin Mull’s band in the pre-Cars days.

While he considers the New Cars a dud, the consolation for Greg was reconnecting with Todd Rundgren, which led to an ongoing stint as a sideman. “I ended up being in Todd’s band for almost fifteen years. So it was sort of a second career, although I really credit Mark Volman as the one who got me out of my retirement.”

Starting around 2001, Greg also became an aficionado of the ukulele, releasing an album of Beatles covers called The Beatles Uke in 2008. He had been gigging around Boston with Tim Mann and a few other folks doing all sorts of songs, including wistful and often moving versions of Cars songs. He formed Greg Hawkes’s Ukulele Trio with Mann and Greg Allison. Mann had met him at the great Music Emporium shop in Lexington.

“Greg’s wife, Elaine, came in and bought him a ukulele as a Valentine’s Day gift,” says Mann. “Sure enough, he became a regular customer.” Eventually, Mann invited Greg to a gig Mann was playing, and Greg showed up. They became friends, with Greg inviting Mann over to the house, where they’d jam on the ukes. “I’ll never forget, he greeted me at the door with Elaine and with the two kids, he had the whole family there to greet me, and I just thought that was the classiest gesture ever. And to this day, I still think I’ve not seen anybody else do that. And it really touched me.”

They started playing around locally, not advertising “Greg Hawkes from The Cars,” just informal, low-key gigs, even starting at an open-mic night or two. Greg was happy to get out of the house to go visit Mann at his apartment and drink a few beers with Mann and his friends, “like a boys’ club,” Mann says. And the gigs grew out from there. Eventually, word got around town that Greg was doing these side gigs. He even taught a ukulele workshop at the famous Passim coffeehouse in Harvard Square.

At the end of 2009, talk turned again to the idea of a Cars reunion. Ric, long the holdout, finally came around to the idea. Indeed, according to him, it was his idea to call Greg and Elliot. “I just thought, it’s been a long time since I played with these guys,” he said, “but they’re the ones that will do the best job. They’re the ones that I wouldn’t have to explain things to, they wouldn’t have to get used to the way I write, they’re already inundated with all that. I’ll just put out a feeler and see if they’d be interested in doing it.”

But Elliot says it was his initiative. In 2011, he recalled,

I called Ric up. I hadn’t spoken to him in a while, but he’s an old friend and we just had a nice chat. I asked him what he’d been doing, and he said he’d been writing songs. Ric was real happy with them and said they were different than some of his past ones. I said, “That sounds great—what are you gonna do with them?” He told me he figured he’d just make another solo record, and that’s when I asked him about making a new Cars record. Ric liked the idea, and after a few weeks, he’d made some calls to Greg and David, who also thought it would be fun and agreed to give it a try.

David says,

Ric called me up, which was kind of rare because I had talked to him, I think, a few months before, and I said something about “If you ever want me to play on any of your records . . .” because he never asked me to play ever on anything. And he didn’t turn it down, but he was not listening, I think. So then he called up and said, “Hey, I’ve been working on some new songs. I thought that maybe they would be good for a Cars album.” I didn’t think that he meant a Cars album. I thought he meant a Cars-sounding album. I was waiting for the next part of the story. I said, “What do you mean by a Cars album? You mean The Cars would play on it?” He goes, “Yeah.” So I was like, “Yeah, let’s do that.” And it was such a short phone call.

Given the past animosity, it might be surprising that David and Ric were interested in working together again. But, says David, “A crazy thing is that when we got back together in 2010, Ric was just like he used to be when he was nice in the old days,” meaning 1977–1978. Asked if Ric had softened, David replies,

Totally, totally. He became very concerned about me, if I was happy, and if the other guys were, trying to include everybody. He had completely flipped. I hoped that he just had a revelation. Like, “I had been harsh, and we’ll try again. And since it’s the old band, let’s try the old way, being nice.” I realized that he was not obnoxious again.

I think that if Paulina knew how bad Ric had been treating us, I don’t think she would’ve been that interested in him. I know enough about her to know that she wouldn’t like a guy bossing the band around, telling people what to do, cheating, and hiding.

DAVID FEELS LIKE RIC CREATED A PERSONA THAT HE PRESENTED TO PAULINA. “He actually did re-create himself. He probably told her that we get along great. ‘Oh, yeah, I respect those guys. I like working with them.’ I can’t imagine him telling her the truth. ‘I despise David, and I sabotaged all this shit.’”

Paulina says,

Ric, I think by the last record, understood the value of his bandmates. He seemed to be letting go of a lot of the anger after the New Cars. When he finally put that all aside and gave it another shot, it seemed like he had finally gained that perspective that comes with age, that we’re not going to be here forever, and that this is a gift and we should try to take advantage of it when we can. These were relationships that meant something.

We went to see David in Cape Ann. He had a little restaurant, and it was really sweet, and it was nice to see Ric give it a chance again with all of them. He would suddenly talk differently about them. It was that back-and-forth. Sometimes, he would go on about Elliot Easton, like [she adopts a nasal imitation of Ric], “He’s not the guitar player he thinks he is.” Then he would go, “Elliot Easton is like a George Harrison! He’s got these hooks that are so melodic that they’re singable, and that is pretty extraordinary.” So again, it depended on how much grief Elliot gave him at any given time.

Around the time of Move Like This, Ric was also struggling with both his physical and his mental health. Ric was acting strangely a year or two leading up to the reunion. Heg, Ric’s right-hand man until the end, told David, “I have to warn you, Ric’s behaving really weirdly.” David laughs, “So if he thought Ric was crazy, Ric was definitely crazy.”

Luis Aira says that Ric was acting increasingly hot and cold, “sweet and sour,” as if he were bipolar. Paulina discovered that Ric was taking antidepressants. She says,

He had heart issues where he had atrial fibrillation, which, as you know, it’s not the end of the world, but he used to laugh about this when we first met him, that he was the world’s biggest hypochondriac. And I was like, “Well, I’m only matched by my own hypochondria, so we’re great together.” We both had anxiety attacks, and we both had the sort of overblown sense of our migraines perhaps being brain tumors [laughs]. It was nice to know that you weren’t the only one that felt this way.

So when he started talking about this skipping that he had, I was like, “Okay, well, obviously, let’s make sure that it’s not dangerous.” This is kind of when he started withdrawing from me, too, emotionally and physically. He didn’t really let me in on what he was doing or what the medical situation was, the pills he was taking. I was shocked. I went into his bag to get something, I think, during the last Cars tour, and I was pulling out all these bottles of antidepressants, and I was like, “What is this?” I had no idea. And I felt really blindsided by that because I thought we told each other everything. So, again, this was my mistake. He kept secrets, and he kept secrets from me, whom I thought he kept no secrets from. So, I don’t entirely know what his physical thing was because this is about when he stopped talking to me. In retrospect, I think it’s because he didn’t want to be seen as anything less than perfect by me, and withdrawing from me was easier than letting me in on it.

I also think as he got older, he started perhaps realizing that the way he had been acting—shutting people out—would make him a very lonely man. And I think he made a conscious decision to do better because there’s a lot of people that met him later on in his later years that—my son cannot believe that he was anything but this tall, soft-spoken, incredibly gentle man with good manners and a sweet smile and sparkly turquoise eyes. It’s sort of like they can’t believe that he was anything but that.

When it came time to get the band back together, Ric said, “For me, it was like, fuck the past. Life’s too short. This might be fun. I was really curious about how it would be.”

Expectations were low among the guys. The first thought was maybe to just make something to give away online. David and Ric discussed producers. They both had independently discovered the band Snow Patrol and enjoyed the production by Garret “Jacknife” Lee. Lee had also worked with U2, Weezer, Bloc Party, R.E.M., and the Hives. Ric called him. David recalls, “Garret Lee says, ‘I love The Cars. They’re one of my favorite groups.’ At the time, he was working with Phoenix, and the guy from Phoenix loved The Cars and wanted to sing on The Cars’ album. And it just unfolded from that phone call with Ric saying the words ‘Cars album,’ which he could have said at any point in the previous twenty years.”

Ric sent demos to the rest of the group. They gathered for preproduction and some recording at Ric’s Broken Beak studio in the guesthouse at his country home in Millbrook. Although the old band in-jokes and dynamics resurfaced, everyone was older, with the wisdom and perspective of age. The most significant change was the void left by Ben’s death. Ric felt he had lost his closest friend. They decided they would not get someone to play in place of Ben. Greg and Jacknife would play the bass parts. Ric would sing all the songs.

They produced about half the record themselves, with Stephen George engineering. Ric taught him a great deal about recording guitars—how to mic them and stack them for the ideal tone. As George became a producer in his own right, he says, “I would always be in the back of my mind, ‘Okay, what would Ric do?’ He was such a great producer, putting the artists at ease. I remember one time we were recording and doing lead vocals. When you did lead vocals, it was like being in church with Ric. I remember one time I stood up to change the compression levels. I stood up, and the singer could see me. Ric was like, ‘Steve, you’re fucking up.’ He wanted just quiet, lights down.”

There was also another studio down the road called Millbrook Sound, owned by Paul Orofino, where they did a lot of the guitar overdubs. Orofino had an enviable collection of vintage amp heads and speaker cabs. The drums were all electronic, played live by David on pads. They would then run through samples of various sounds, and David would choose which he liked best to be triggered by the electronic drum parts he’d laid down.

The tracks they recorded with Jacknife Lee were done in about two weeks at Village Recorders in LA. “The Cars have always had a futuristic sound, and this is something we wanted to keep—tight, taut, and lean,” said Lee, who, like Stephen George, greatly admired Ric as a producer and loved The Cars. The studio was close to where Elliot lived with his new wife, Jill Glass. He married her that year, separating from Colleen in 2007 and divorcing in 2008. He and Jill had dated in Boston in the 1980s, around the same time he started seeing Colleen.

“I never forgot Jill and thought about her all the time. Around 2007, my marriage to Colleen was winding down,” he says. “I was doing a Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp tour as a counselor, and one of my campers was a private investigator named Troy. We hit it off as friends, and he gave me his card and told me that if I ever wanted to find someone, he could usually do it in a day.” Troy tracked down Jill’s parents on a cell phone, shocking them as they walked along a Cape Cod beach. They passed along Troy’s number to Jill. When she called Troy, he asked her if she remembered Elliot Easton. For some reason that she herself could not explain, her first reaction was “Why? Is he in jail?” Troy gave her Elliot’s number. She said, “No, I don’t call boys. Have him call me.”

Says Elliot, “Now, I knew nothing of her whereabouts; she could have been a grandmother living in Spain for all I knew.” Jill was living just ten miles down the road from Elliot in Studio City. She had never married, busy with a career as senior vice president of marketing at A&M Records. “We talked for three hours on that first call, went to lunch at a little Italian café, and have been together ever since, married in 2010.” So, it was a big year of reunions for Elliot. First with Jill and now making a new Cars album.

David didn’t want it to end. He says, “I had a blast. It was just like we made the first two albums again. Everything was great. Ric was nice to us. I loved all the songs. We were doing it in his house and then driving about two miles away to a studio to do overdubs and vocals. So it was easy. There was no time pressure or money pressure. All the pressure was off. Mostly, Ric was being nice. That was the thing. I think Elliot might not have liked it. He didn’t get to play enough solos.”

This was one of the few preconceptions entering the project; there would be few solos. Ric considered guitar solos as somewhat archaic. Greg recalls, “There was still tension with Elliot and Ric. Ric had even expressed to me before recording that he didn’t think there should be a lot of guitar solos.” Ric gave him examples of newer bands that were not featuring solos. “It seemed like Ric was into Snow Patrol at the time and just sort of trying to bring a different approach.”

David says,

I had to talk Elliot down a couple of times. He came to me twice to complain about it, and I tried to explain to him I didn’t care one way or the other. Whatever the song requires. But I thought that the songs didn’t really require his kinds of solos. And I tried to just say to him, I said, “Look, it’s not just your solos. When you play on a Cars song, you play like four other incredible guitar parts that even if you didn’t play that solo, you would’ve been a great contributor to the song.” And I said, “If you listen to the radio, they’re kind of out of style almost, but not guitar playing, just the kind of traditional solo where it stops and a guitar player plays his thing. Look at U2. They’ve never played a guitar solo. They hardly even harmonize or anything. There are no solos. But in their songs, the instant they come on, you know it’s them by the guitar playing.” But he wasn’t quite buying it. Then he came back again later. I think he was trying to show where he could put solos in, and I think that Garret Lee was okay with the idea of there not being solos.

But it wasn’t just about a lack of soloing for Elliot, who says,

That record was complete fucking bullshit. After I had actually encouraged Ric to make a Cars album, he decided he wanted to do it in a quicker, cheaper way. And this was unthinkable to me: He hired this guy, Jackknife, whatever his name was, and the guy started the record without us in LA. He laid down a drum machine and skeletal tracks, and he put a bunch of guitar parts on. Now, nobody ever played guitar on a Cars record but me and Ric. This guy was playing all kinds of lines and stuff, and I didn’t even have a chance to sink my teeth into the songs. And I was freaked. How dare Ric! I still get mad thinking about it, that Ric allowed it, and then if I tried to replace one of Jackknife’s parts, he said, “No, why are you replacing that?” And so the record was, for me, a complete bust. It was just a bad time for me.

Fans noticed, and Greg and David saw some of their complaints. Greg says, “Once it came out, I saw a lot of comments on Cars fan pages. It was like, ‘Hey, why no Elliot solos on this record?’ Elliot felt slighted.” Elliot says, “I remember one comment said, ‘I thought I’d be missing Ben, but I was mostly missing Elliot.’”

Stephen George says,

The vibe was good. Everyone was having a good time except Elliot. Elliot was so fucking weird, man. He and I used to go out and party and get high and raise hell. And when he showed up, it was like we never met. He wasn’t even talking to me. He was just really short, totally not very friendly at all. So everything was cool until Elliot showed up. There weren’t fistfights or anything like that, but Ric was basically producing the recording sessions. And in the role of producer, you’re going to tell somebody what to play or what not to play. So he was doing that a lot to Elliot. And Elliot was really fucking pissed off.

The title itself is one of the band’s in-jokes, a nod to their reputation as stiff in concert, though it’s also a line in “Too Late.” Move Like This was a welcome return, despite deficiencies, with good songs and satisfying sonics. It begins with “Blue Tip.” By now, New York’s downtown music scene was vibrant with a slew of new bands with a collective reverence for the late ’70s and early ’80s. The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, in particular, betrayed a fondness for The Cars. Bone-dry and mechanically funky, “Blue Tip” might as well be an LCD Soundsystem song, specifically the 2005 track “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House,” perhaps a winking display of circular influence. “Sad Song” instead just cuts to the chase, plumbing a straight line to The Cars’ debut album, as if to say, “If Fountains of Wayne can drop specific references to Cars songs, why can’t we?”

A sense of lost time runs through the album’s lyrics. “The time will run away from us like time it will do,” Ric sings on “Soon.” In “Too Late,” he wistfully considers “things that never end” and celebrates each morning. “You go back in time / Fix it good fix it fine,” he sings on “Free.” With ten songs polished off in under forty minutes, The Cars stayed true to their reputation for concision despite it being the era of long CDs.

“Ben was gone,” Elliot says. “Ben, Greg, and I always did the background vocals together. We were the Singing Background Brothers: Leif [Elliot], Amos [Greg], and Denton [Ben]. Well, with Ben not there, all of a sudden, David decided he’d get on the mic and sing with us. The only problem is he can’t sing. And so I said, to either Ric or Greg, ‘It’s bad enough Ben isn’t here, but now David’s singing.’ And the whole thing was just fucking stupid. And Ric let it happen.” Responding with surprise to the intensity of Elliot’s sour memories of the sessions, David says, “I really like the album and the backup vocals are just fine.”

Elliot doesn’t blame Lee, who “would only have been doing what Ric said was okay for him to do. But what am I to make of that? It wasn’t really a good Cars record. Once I saw what was going on, I was no longer invested in it. It’s like, ‘Are you kidding me? We got another guy playing guitar? Fuck you.’ I mean, it still gets me pissed.”

To be sure, Ben’s glaring absence and the minimization of Elliot’s guitar disrupt the direct link between past and present, diluting the band’s potent and singular chemistry. In the liner notes, they wrote the dedication, “Ben, your spirit was with us on this one.” Like a jigsaw puzzle missing a central piece, it’s an incomplete picture of The Cars.

But where Ric being left as the sole lead vocalist could have resulted in something like one of his solo albums, the record instead sounds like he’s once again fronting The Cars, the leader of an extraordinary band. Such exquisitely balanced combinations are rare and should not be taken for granted. Maintaining such equilibrium within even the most successful teams is challenging, though, as personalities and egos clash, or at least rub. And adventurous artists want to grow, to leave the safety of the gang—and the limitations; there might be a sense that others are holding them back from creating something fresh and new. But bands reunite because they miss that magical chemistry when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. While some reunions are just crass cash grabs, many others are genuine attempts to recapture a collaboration, a combination of the right people who created exceptional music. That’s the story of The Cars.

Jody Rosen concluded his Rolling Stone review, “Long after we thought we’d heard the last from them, the Cars have made their darkest, most romantic album. It pulls you along.”

They played eleven shows, a promo tour, including a final stop at the Lollapalooza festival in August 2011. “I was kind of surprised we did that many,” David says, “because [Ric] said he was only going to do ten. At one point, he showed me a map. ‘We only need to play here, here, and here and there.’ And I’m like, ‘I think that’s only eight shows, Ric.’”

Greg says that they found out years later from manager Jeff Kramer that Ric was having medical issues and feared passing out onstage. “I don’t know whether he had some heart issues. But yeah, I know he did eventually develop emphysema. When we were doing the tour in 2011, Ric was sneaking cigarettes, but he didn’t want Paulina to know. He was also using an iPad onstage to remember lyrics, which is not unusual. But he was a little self-conscious about it.”

They appeared on The Colbert Report. By this point, Ric and Stephen Colbert were friends, and Greg had his family with him. Momentarily breaking from his right-wing character, Colbert says, “You were a hu-uuge band for me.”

The tour was ultimately bittersweet because of the absence of Ben. They left an empty stool with Ben’s bass leaning against it. “The tour was okay,” Greg says. “Although, from my perspective, I feel like we should have hired a bass player. Ric just felt like Ben couldn’t be replaced, so we shouldn’t get anybody to replace him.” That left more work for Greg. “Some songs were programmed, so we had to play along. There were a couple of songs where I played kind of left-hand-style keyboard bass, and I played actual bass on a couple of songs. One was ‘Touch and Go,’ and I programmed the keyboards and played to that. The other one was ‘I’m in Touch with Your World,’ which didn’t have much keyboards in it anyway.”

In his review of the House of Blues show in Boston, longtime Cars observer Brett Milano noted the band was “too obsessed with precision and too inclined to go high-tech at the expense of rocking out. . . . The bass parts were nearly all programmed, and drummer David Robinson played an electronic kit that didn’t have the kick of a real drumkit. This made the entrance on ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’ more of a whimper than a bang.” Milano pointed to Greg playing the bass guitar for a couple of songs as the “main set’s liveliest moments.” But he said they were “too tethered to the backing tracks, even pausing before ‘I’m Not the One’ so Hawkes could reboot his Mac.”

“I think that tour just kind of put a cap on it,’ says Elliot. “That was a really hard tour to do without Ben. And David decided to play electronic drums on that tour instead of his drums. And he was fussing with it, and it didn’t sound good, and you couldn’t hear it onstage. But I played my ass off every night and went to the lip of the stage and burned those solos. And Jeff [Kramer] said to me at the end of the tour, he says, ‘You’re MVP,’ and he gave me a beautiful guitar for being MVP.” Elliot was singled out in reviews as a high point of the show. “And you can imagine what Ric would make of that and how that would affect the next time I saw him. Knowing his psychology a little bit, and his views on things, and reading that I’m the most exciting thing and the only one who even moved onstage—that must’ve driven him nuts, and it probably inspired more of his dissing of me.”

Sarah Rodman of the Globe noted that at one point, Ric uncharacteristically asked the Boston crowd, “You know we love you, right?”

Perhaps he had softened. Somewhat.

Footnote

i Elliot says, “Some years I made more with CCR than I did with The Cars.”

Chapter 23

HALL OF FAME

MOVE LIKE THIS WOULD BE THE FINAL CARS ALBUM. RIC HAD GOTTEN ONE last album and tour out of his system. Paulina says he “came away from that record seeming a little bit lighter.” He, Greg, Elliot, and David all returned to their respective lives to resume what they’d been up to before the reunion. Ric was back in the producer’s chair, working with Weezer for a third time, among others, but he mostly scaled back the amount of outside work he did. He pursued painting more diligently, even appearing at a gallery showing or two of his work. In 2012, he released Lyrics and Prose. As the title suggests, the book collected his lyrics and included his early poetry, as well as handwritten notes and doodles. Nearly everyone who worked with him would remark on his prodigious doodling. He would sit on a sofa in the back of a control room with a sketch pad, scrawling away.

Ric read some of his work and performed a couple of songs at Amoeba Records in LA to promote the book. By that time, Luis Aira was in sporadic touch with Ric and attended the event. “He talked about his childhood and all dark things.” Ric gave him the brush-off, though. Later, Ric called him. “I pick up the phone, and he goes, ‘Hi, it’s Ricky.’ And I said, ‘Oh, Ricky, fuck, man. The last time I saw you, you treated me like I was a journalist for a local newspaper.’ And he said, ‘Why? What did I say?’ I said, ‘You were a totally cold asshole to me. What the fuck was that all about?’ And he said, ‘I don’t remember.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, this is weird.’”

More than one person thought of themselves as Ric’s best friend. But, as Bebe Buell says, “Ric could compartmentalize his best friends,” just like he had boxed up or walled off his previous families. Next to Aira, Jeff Kramer might have been Ric’s best friend by this point. “I continued being friends with Ric,” says Aira. “But the last few years were difficult because of his marriage. Paulina and him weren’t really clicking, so that was a difficult time.”

“Ric really did mistake adoration for love,” says Paulina. “And so it was really hard for him to receive any kind of criticism. He took it very personally. It meant that you didn’t like him. Not that you didn’t like his choice, but that you didn’t like him. And he would cut people off left and right, and if you exhibited any pushback, he would cut you off. But then the minute you came back and said, ‘Hey, man, how are you?’ you didn’t even have to apologize. You just had to be nice, and he would welcome you back.”

IN 2013, ELLIOT STARTED THE EMPTY HEARTS, A GARAGE-ROCK SUPERGROUP, with Clem Burke of Blondie, Andy Babiuk of the Chesterfield Kings (and author of a few essential books on music gear), and Wally Palmar of the Romantics. They were all longtime friends. Elliot said that Andy called everyone and asked, “What do you think about putting a little band together . . . playing the kind of music that reminds us of why we wanted to play music in the first place when we were kids?” They were joined on their first self-titled album by Ian McLagan of the Small Faces and the Faces. Given their pedigree and personal connections to Ringo Starr, they also got the legendary Beatle to play drums on their 2020 “Remember Days Like These” single, a dream come true for all of them, none more than Elliot.

On the other end of the sonic spectrum, Greg was all in on the ukulele, performing that instrument and keyboards on a 2014 tour opening for his old friends the Motels. He also played a uke version of “You Might Think” on the children’s show Yo Gabba Gabba! in January 2015. The following year, he produced an album for the Boston-based band Eddie Japan and shortly thereafter joined them onstage to play a few Cars covers at some of their local shows. They had such a great time that the band suggested doing a whole set of Cars covers. It took a bit of convincing for Greg, as this could be seen as a Cars member in what would essentially be a Cars cover band. However, Eddie Japan, which features veterans of the Boston music scene, is not exclusively a Cars cover band, even though they continue to do Cars shows. Thankfully, no one is in character (no wig-wearing Ric singer, for example). The singers, David Santos and Emily Drohan, are stellar, and the band’s execution of The Cars’ recordings is impeccable. Greg plays more of a front-man role than anyone would have expected back in The Cars days. He pauses between songs to tell anecdotes and offer insights into certain songs and parts. After the show I saw, with my jaw sore from uninterrupted smiling, Elaine Hawkes asked me what I thought. I told her I loved it. “Right?!” she said. “It’s like The Cars, but fun.”

As this book was being finished, in November 2024, David made a surprise appearance on drums for a couple of songs at an Eddie Japan show at the Cut in Gloucester. The fans went nuts. David and Greg graciously stuck around to autograph items and pose for photos. I ask if it was surreal for David to hear these songs covered by another band. “Not really,” he says. “They have a woman singer [Drohan] on some of them, and the other guy singer [Santos] is different enough that it’s not overly close.”

He said there was one band he knew that he saw cover a Cars song once. “Thad Bernard. I think he was in a band called Feat of Clay at the time. He actually played with Ric before [on Ric’s album Quick Change World]. I heard him play ‘Bye Bye Love.’ I thought: ‘What a great song!’ Something about hearing it in another context.”

David was ensconced in Rockport, continuing to run his gallery and creating jewelry. In addition to his house, he renovated some other properties he owned in the town. He also spent roughly three years restoring a car, a 1969 De Tomaso Mangusta, featured on a 2008 episode of the television show Chasing Classic Cars. He continued to oversee the various rereleases of The Cars’ albums, including the Rhino packages. He met his current girlfriend, Nancy, in 2018 and renovated yet another house, a 1900 colonial in town that he had to essentially rebuild. His painstaking attention to detail resulted in an incredibly tasteful restoration.

AFTER BEING NOMINATED FOR A THIRD TIME, THE CARS WERE INDUCTED into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, the fortieth anniversary of their debut album. It probably meant the most to Elliot, the biggest rock historian in the group. But all four felt gratified for the honor and the chance to regroup and see each other again. They had a big dinner for friends and family at an Italian restaurant hosted by Jeff Kramer.

Anne Marie Foley was there. “There were just so many sweet times back then in the early days,” she says.

But you know how things change when bands get big, and people move on. So I didn’t really get to see Ric a lot. And Elliot moved away, too. So the only one I saw consistently was David because he was like my best buddy. David called me the day before it was announced, and he’s like, “Anne Marie, you’re not going to believe it. We’re going to be inducted.” And he invited me to go. He took care of everything. I went and got to reunite with everybody, and it was really one of the most special moments in my life. I was crying when they were up there. It was just kind of a full circle.

They rehearsed for the reunion performance at the House of Blues in Cleveland, running through the four songs they would play during the ceremony, “Just What I Needed,” “You Might Think,” “Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Moving in Stereo.” They asked Weezer bass player Scott Shriner to fill in for Ben’s bass parts. Ric sang all the songs. The band had requested that Roy Thomas Baker be the person who inducted them at the ceremony. But the Hall of Fame was gunning for someone more youthful with some star power, and Baker had some health issues. So it was decided that Brandon Flowers of the Killers would give the induction speech, and it was a tremendous one.

Flowers began, “On the back of what is now established as one of the greatest debut albums ever made, The Cars were named ‘Best New Artist’ in the 1978 Rolling Stone Readers’ Poll. Forty years later they still sound like a new band to me. . . . While everybody else was sweating it up on the dance floor in their polyester suits or fighting it out in the punk clubs, these guys cruised in and made you look like you were working too hard.”

Then it came time for the guys to give their individual acceptance speeches. Elliot went first, thanking Flowers. “It’s a thrill to be here and to join the ranks of all the incredible artists who have already been inducted. I’m blessed to be in a band that has in some way made a contribution to the music, and this is quite an acknowledgment of that tonight. . . . How lucky I am to have realized and to live my childhood dreams in a way. There’s still sort of a dreamlike quality to all of this.”

His mother received a special mention. He gave love to his bandmates, enumerating their specific strengths in The Cars. And he expressed deep gratitude for Maxanne Sartori. “We will forever be indebted to her for incredible support in getting this thing going.” He later said, “[Maxanne] was so pleased that I did that because she really felt a little bit let down by a certain tall, skinny lead singer who she’d really helped to make rich and famous.”

Maxanne told me, “I was never remunerated with money. I got their undying appreciation, and when they got inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Elliot was amazing. So that’s all I needed. I thought it was great. The people in the audience clapped when they heard my name. It means I didn’t waste all those years.”

Elliot concluded his speech. “Finally, Benjamin, who’s sadly no longer with us, but whose incredible voice, solid bass playing, and good humor was such a huge part of the band’s success. And not a bad-looking guy, either. Cleveland is Ben’s hometown, and they’ve always been very proud of him here.”

Greg spoke about the impact of the Beatles. He emphasized the contributions of Roy Thomas Baker and Mutt Lange and named about a dozen behind-the-scenes members of their loyal crew and management teams. He thanked Martin Mull, Todd Rundgren, Howard Kaylan, and Mark Volman for their collaborations. Elaine and the kids, of course, got shout-outs. “And I’d like to say thanks to Kraftwerk and Devo just for being so good.” And finally, “Without Ben’s innate talent and his rock-star good looks, it’s unlikely that we would be up here tonight.”

David said, “I’d rather just play” than give a speech. He thanked his mates “for letting me play in the band.” He wrapped up his short and sweet speech with the affirmation, “I can’t believe that I’m here and I will be in the Hall of Fame with musicians that have meant so much to me. I can’t even describe what that’s like. Everybody knows about the power and glory of rock and roll, the magic, and it’s here.”

Ric began, “When the band first started, Ben was supposed to be the lead singer, and I was supposed to be the good-looking guy in the band, but after a couple of gigs, I kind of got demoted to the songwriter, so I went with that one. But obviously, it’s hard not to notice that Benjamin Orr is not here. He would’ve been elated to be here on this stage in his hometown. It feels quite strange to be up here without him because we miss him and love him dearly.” He thanked his bandmates, naming all but one, Elliot.

Was it an oversight? “I was standing right next to Elliot, who looked at me,” Greg says. “Not only that, but when Elliot’s giving his speech, Ric’s chatting it up with Brandon Flowers the whole time. And I’ve even seen some comments from people who just had watched the show and said, ‘Ric’s not even paying attention.’ I sort of would write it off as ‘Oh, well, Ric just forgot because he’s in the spur of the moment.’”

I ask, “Because he wouldn’t be that petty, right?”

“I wouldn’t think so. But then, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think it was intentional, but it is funny that he not only doesn’t mention Elliot, but he’s talking to Brandon behind Elliot when he’s given his whole speech. So I don’t know. It’s kind of weird.”

Paulina says with a laugh, “I was so upset about him not mentioning me that I completely forgot that he also didn’t mention Elliot.”

Elliot, whose daughter, Sydney, was in attendance, said the week to that point was healing. He was able to get a lot of issues he had with Ric off his chest and thought they had put it all in the past. “But you know what, man? Ric was still Ric, and if you watch that Hall of Fame induction, I’m making my speech, and he and the guy from the Killers are joking and laughing and talking behind me while I’m almost in tears talking about my mom and how much this all meant to me and full of love, and thanking all the people that I thought I should thank, and thanking Ric for his beautiful songs. And he’s just fucking laughing and joking and ignoring all of it. And then Ric made his speech, and he thanked everybody in the band but me.”

The video is painful to watch. Ric really does seem to go out of his way to show that he’s ignoring Elliot’s speech. Even Flowers seems uncomfortable as Ric continuously leans over to chat with him.

Naturally, Oliver, Jonathan, and Paulina were there in the audience. No one outside their inner circle knew the couple had been separated since 2017. Anne Marie Foley even took a photo of them from behind as they walked from the hotel hand in hand to the ceremony.

But on May 2, 2018, about two weeks after the ceremony in Cleveland, Paulina posted on Instagram, “Our family has always been and still is—a well-built car. When the four of us are together, we can go wherever the road takes us. But as a bicycle, my husband and I no longer pedal in unison. So, we’re ditching the bicycle. The photos of our happy family are, in fact, happy family photos; we are just no longer a couple. The love we have for one another is so wide and deep it’s practically intangible, and that sort of love can never disappear. Expect to keep seeing happy family photos.”

Nine days later, she was photographed by paparazzi in Miami, holding hands and generally looking romantic with screenwriter Ed Solomon. “That just sent Ric ’round the bend,” Bebe Buell says. “He just couldn’t handle it.”

Luis explains that Ric was “not right in the head. Jealousy consumed him. Paulina posted a pic of her and her boyfriend, and for Ric, that was a dagger in the chest.” Aira said he was “the wingman for the divorce and all that. When I saw that Paulina was posting pictures of herself on Instagram with some other guy, I kind of put away however pissed off I was, and I started texting him, and he started texting me back. So we were starting to click back together. I was very concerned about him that last year.”

Paulina should not have been surprised, as she said that Ric had been prone to jealous rages from their earliest years together. He told her even her gay male friends “would turn straight for you.” His control issues were not limited to The Cars. He forbade her to take certain modeling jobs.

She explains,

He had a lot of love to give. He was one of the most gentle men that I’ve ever known, and I confused it with kindness. He wasn’t necessarily kind. He was incredibly gentle, and he really wanted love. He wanted to love. He wanted to be loved, and he could never seem to quite figure out what it meant or how it was supposed to look. And I think he thought that we had it for a long time. Again, when I never questioned him for the twenty years that we were together, when I sort of worshipped him, that was good. Those were good times. But he needed that kind of attention. And, of course, guess who’s going to provide you with that kind of attention? Puppies and children.

I add, “And young bands just starting out. The ones who called him a father figure.”

“Correct,” she answers.

And he loved those guys. I mean, he loved those bands. He was really proud of the work and the achievements. To them, Ric could do no wrong, and as long as Ric could do no wrong, you had the best version of Ric that there was. He did not want to be seen as anything less than perfect, really. And you can’t be married to somebody for thirty years. . . . And of course, he got me as a child of nineteen, and as you grow into a woman, I started seeing it like, “Oh, I think I might’ve married my dad. Okay, well, I’m fine with that because it works great. I don’t see that as a problem; the father that I didn’t have, and now I found this very similar man who does love me. I mean, that’s awesome. This is what I needed and wanted.” But yeah, my growth didn’t stop at a certain time. I kept evolving. I kept growing up as a woman, as a human being, and that was not good for our marriage. And then, of course, the worst thing of all is when you start to have contempt for your mate, which is deadly to any marriage. And that happened eventually in ours.

The couple was still living together in separate rooms in the same house in Manhattan. Paulina wrote, “By the time I was 50, my husband hadn’t touched me in years.” She turned fifty in 2015. She says,

He let it be known to me that he was fine to coexist in this sort of roommate state where, unsurprisingly, I would take care of the house and everything, and we would smile at each other in the morning and say, “Good morning,” and I would give him his yogurt and his coffee and make sure he had dinner at night. That was fine with him. He didn’t need any more than that, and he kind of couldn’t understand that maybe I did. I’m very stupid for thinking I’m pretty smart.

I then interpreted it as if he doesn’t care. He has ceased to care. He doesn’t care to talk to me. He doesn’t care to touch me. He doesn’t care that I come to him and say I want out, so he just doesn’t care. So okay, I need to move on. When I told my friends that I had told Ric that I wanted out, they all went, “Well, it’s about time. I mean, you’ve been beating this dead donkey for years.”

“I believe Paulina,” Bebe Buell says. “Why would this woman say that he rejected her and wasn’t interested in her anymore if it weren’t true? Why would a woman say that about herself? I know how it can be. I have spent time around him. I’ve stayed at their house. So yes, he sleeps until a certain hour, then gets up. He had his same ritual every morning, his yogurt, his cantaloupe or whatever. He was obsessed with cantaloupe and coffee. He would get dressed, and then he would go down into his studio, and that was that. You didn’t see the guy.”

He would not simply get dressed like he was going down into his basement; he dressed like he would be modeling for a photo shoot, says Paulina, who once described him as an upside-down exclamation mark. He would spend most of the day in the basement. She says,

And when I asked him to talk, he said, “What’s the use of rehashing old shit? Why can’t you just be happy?” That was kind of his mantra, “Why can’t you just be happy?” And he didn’t seem to understand the concept that one can’t be happy in a bubble, that if you are married to somebody who’s miserable, you can’t be happy. But this was a very odd time when he started withdrawing, and he would complain about his heart skipping a lot. And again, being somewhat of a hypochondriac, he would sit around and then take his pulse for, I don’t know, ten hours a day, and that’s all he did.

Paulina observes that the last Cars album had kept him busy and distracted. “He was rejoining other people that he had been distanced from. Maybe that was keeping him company.” But work had started to slow down dramatically for him. It led to depression for someone who was essentially a workaholic. As his marriage disintegrated, it added to the spiral.

Early in 2018, Ric and Heg attended a tribute to Suicide at the small Bowery Electric club in downtown Manhattan, near where CBGB once stood. He performed “Dream Baby Dream” as a surprise with Martin Rev.i The pictures of the pair onstage show Ric beaming. “To have that time, that moment where, wow, that was a really good farewell,” Rev recalls. “Here I am; I’m reminding him and reminding myself of what he did for us. And he was so happy about it.”

Rev regretted not being able to work again with Ric. He also thought Ric should be more adventurous in his solo work. “I would say, ‘Ric, it’s time to get crazy again, and I’m around.’ I would do it with him. I wouldn’t do it with just anyone. Because it’s him, I would do it if he said, ‘Come on and let’s just play and let’s do something. Let’s record and do whatever comes.’ We could have made a crazy great solo record for him. ‘You can take chances. You don’t have to worry about anything.’ But he was in the world that he wanted to be in.”

Ric told Rev that he was “downsizing.” “He told me they were thinking of selling the place. I thought, ‘Oh, shit, man, how can you sell a place like that?’ But I realize the kids, Paulina’s kids, had grown up, too. When I heard that Ric and Paulina were separating and getting the divorce, they were like the couple of the century. They were like America’s favorite couple to us. I mean, you’d never think about them getting separated in the earlier days. It all kind of came together with the house being sold.”

Ric was reeling from the public attention to his imminent divorce and, specifically, from his perceived betrayal by Paulina. Buell explains, “Ric’s generation—or Todd’s [Rundgren] generation, or even Elvis [Costello], who’s a little bit younger than them—had a sexist upbringing, and there was a need for them to control their images for reputations. They will destroy you before they let it affect their secrets.”

The last version of Ric’s will had been written five or six years earlier. It became relevant, though, as 2019 came around and Ric became ill. “When I found out that he was sick, I was surprised because he hadn’t smoked as far as I knew for a long time,” Buell says. Paulina says he quit in 1999 or 2000. Buell continues, “But I guess he had smoked like a fiend and drank coffee constantly. And the damage that does, even if you quit, can linger. He didn’t smoke for the last fourteen years of his life; he used to smoke a lot.” He was also dealing with emphysema, high blood pressure, and clogged arteries. Aira said, “His two favorite things to eat were liver and onions and those ugly, incredibly awful candies called circus peanuts.”

In the summer of 2019, he had redrawn his will without letting Paulina or his family know. The separation and divorce process was ongoing. In late August or early September, he went in for a surgical procedure to remove cancer in his lung. “I was in New Orleans for the summer, and he was at home with Oliver, and he went to our terrific doctor, who would just ask him to do a CAT scan once in a while because Ric was a very heavy smoker in the past. He just said, ‘Ric, I would like you to have one just to be on the safe side.’ And they found lung cancer, stage zero, not spread at all, a small little thing. Ric called me to tell me. I said, ‘Okay, I’m coming back. When do you need me?’”

She returned home early to care for Ric as he recuperated. She brought him coffee on the morning of September 15, 2019, and found he had passed away overnight. Paulina was virtually paralyzed by the discovery but gathered herself to alert her sons. The family notified Jeff Kramer. Chris called Luis Aira, who in turn called the band members. “I wasn’t supposed to call David,” Aira says. “I called him anyway.” Heg called Greg, and Greg called Elliot, who had already heard the news on the radio.

Heg, Ric’s stalwart, was naturally among the first to be alerted. The loss was still raw when we chatted in January 2024. “Ric was like my brother,” Heg explains. “We went through a lot in life together.” He was exceedingly careful about overstepping his boundaries with Ric, explaining that maintaining a professional relationship and a close friendship is a delicate balancing act. “Once guys got comfortable with the gig, some of them got overcomfortable.” He was on guard for that danger but says, “Even that faded as the years went by. . . . It’s still really emotional, and I know you’re supposed to pick up and move on. For me, though, it’s like family stuff.”

The medical examiner’s report stated that “hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease was the cause of death and that pulmonary emphysema was a contributing condition.”

Ric had significantly diminished Paulina’s share of his estate in his revised will. Under the new terms, she would get the two properties. The Gramercy house was first listed for $15.25 million, eventually selling for $9 million. She would also inherit their full mutual retirement savings. He left their two sons, Jonathan and Oliver, 80 percent of the rest of the estate, his royalty income, and song publishing copyrights, with a value estimated at $5 million. There was also about $115,000 in cash and some personal assets. His sons Eron and Derek got the remaining 20 percent. Chris and Adam received nothing. Paulina explains that “when things were still good,” she and Ric had drawn their previous wills jointly, and whoever died first would leave the entirety of the estate to the other. After the surviving spouse’s death, his six sons would receive equal shares of his publishing income. “I left it at that,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, we’ll share it equally between the kids.’ But I don’t think it was ever written down.”

Paulina would have likely been entitled to far more if the divorce had gone through before Ric passed. However, she was still his spouse and, therefore, entitled to an elective share of the estate, even if she had been excluded in the will. Under New York state law, that would amount to a third of the estate, with the children splitting the balance. But before going in for his surgery, Ric purposefully excluded Paulina by saying she “abandoned” him. Abandonment in this context is a precise legal term, one of the exceptions to the statutory right to the elective share. So, in addition to whatever assets they owned jointly (like joint bank accounts, for example), she would have received an estimated $1.7 million on top of the real estate and retirement funds.

When the news of Paulina’s exclusion from Ric’s will broke that fall, she was cast as a victim in many press accounts. And she would be vilified by other people who took the “abandonment” at face value. But those close to them offer a more nuanced picture.

“When Ric died, it had a profound effect on me because of what he did to Paulina and his existing children, not his two youngest, but I’m talking about his firstborn children, who are his doppelgängers,” says Buell.

He left them out of his will, and then he left Paulina out of the will. I mean, it was really a very complex situation. And the karmic aspect of it, the fact that he and Paulina were separated, she wasn’t running around or doing anything sleazy; they were separated. They were living their own lives, yet she was still nurturing and caring for him. And here’s the irony: she said good night to him and offered him his cookies. She was going to meet Ed [Solomon] because at midnight it was going to be his birthday. So Ric literally died on the same day as Paulina’s then lover’s birthday. So karma is a very intricate web, and that’s why I felt it was important for me to talk about Ric and the complexities. The talent that he exuded was enormous. You can’t just dismiss him, but I felt that for him to leave this planet in such ire, it broke my heart.

Paulina contends that it was clear she hadn’t abandoned Ric. In fact, she thought they had an amicable split, and they continued to socialize and share family moments. “This vindictive last act was a complete shock because he acted as though he didn’t care. I was dating somebody towards the end of our separation, and he knew all about the guy. I thought, ‘Oh, we are getting really close to them meeting.’ I was very needy. I think I was seeing him as the man that I always wanted him to be rather than the man that he had proven to be. The fact is that, yeah, he could be really cruel and vindictive, but he could also be incredibly gentle, wonderful, charming, and loving. He had all of those qualities.”

Speaking of the “abandonment” term, Paulina says, “It’s something that Ric knew about me. I don’t have anybody in my close circle who doesn’t know how terrifying that is and was to me. So it was an interesting choice, and I’m still not clear whether it was just a legal aspect of it. His lawyer said, ‘You know what? A great way to get out of this one is to just claim this,’ or if it was, in fact, something that Ric felt.”

“He had abandonment issues,” Aira emphasizes.

So Paulina going out with other guys, I know that deep inside was something that would’ve hurt him. The whole thing of her playing this loving housewife thing—I think that leaving her out of the will was more of a symbolic thing because, after all, the money was going to her kids and Eron and Derek. Eron never abandoned his father. When his father moved to New York, he moved to New York, and he married Paulina’s cousin, for Christ’s sake. Eron was the devoted son. The last two, Oliver and Jonathan, they had that. The other kids didn’t have a father who was there for them all the time. I think the people who really got screwed were Chris and Adam.

A year later, Chris wrote his bitter Instagram post calling out Ric as an absent father. “I can see why,” Paulina says. “I think to him and Adam, it felt like they were the invisible kids, the ones that Ric never actually had. It caused a lot of pain in the family between the brothers. Allocating a certain amount of money to a certain kid might sound great to your business accountant or something. But when it’s a family, it’s brother against brother. I mean, it’s a shitty thing to do. I can see why Ric did what he did to me, but the kids, I think that was kind of hard to come back from. Well, actually, everything was hard to come back from.”

Paulina says,

Towards the end, the only person that I feel like Ric really trusted was Jeff [Kramer]. Mario [Testani, their business manager and accountant] works for Jeff. So yeah, I mean, obviously, this was all set up and made to be the way it is. They all worked it out together. Given that Mario was also my business manager and that I thought Jeff was one of my oldest friends, it was a little shocking. They must have thought that I was doing something terrible to Ric. They must have bought Ric’s part of the story here, or else it was just good for them. I don’t know which is which.

“Jeff [Kramer] was vague,” Greg says. “But he said that she disparaged Ric a lot and was saying, ‘Well, she had the house and the [Millbrook property],’ and she was trying to get a cut of the estate, which was to go to the kids, I guess.”

Elaine Hawkes says, “There were all these articles about ‘poor Paulina. He took all her money . . .’ And we’re like, ‘Wait a minute. She’s got a town house in Gramercy Park worth whatever, ten million, and she had a boyfriend and was about to leave.’ I mean, I think she painted herself as a sort of big victim, which I thought was ironic because I really would’ve thought Suzanne was more of a victim than she was. But maybe Ric just leaves victims wherever he goes.”

Paulina’s heard it before. She says, “I think the one thing I have never done was play the victim. People can say whatever they want, clearly, as I’m very well used to. But I think that is the one thing I haven’t done is play the victim. When it dawned on me what the situation was, I went to battle, and I said, ‘Hey, I think I deserve at least my third as per New York law.’ So that was that. Did I want to blame it all on Mario and Jeff? Yeah, kind of. It would be convenient if I could.” Jeff is the executor of Ric’s estate. Paulina explains that Kramer and Testani are empowered to administer the trust “and to pay their own salaries” as trustees.

“Did I take a huge hit in lifestyle? Yeah, of course,” she says.

But I would have with a divorce too, and I’m fine. I don’t have anything to complain about. So yeah, no complaints on that side—only that yucky idea that the man I spent my whole life with didn’t want me to have that. That felt really, really bad for a long time. But there’s no bitterness towards him anymore. There really isn’t; only when I’m speaking directly about the will and I’m putting myself back into when this happened and how it felt—that’s when I get a little angry. But that is not my life. Most of my life is being really grateful for having spent so many great years with him. And he was a pretty extraordinary man.

Funeral preparations were made in Millbrook, which is where Ric was buried. Elliot, Greg, and David were not invited. A week later, Greg played ukulele with Tim Mann at a tribute to George Harrison in Rhode Island. “So it was not lost on me that it was the first sort of musical thing that Greg did, or maybe any of them did since Ric had passed,” Mann says. He passed on the fifteenth, and we did this gig on the twenty-first, and that was the last time he and I actually played together. And the last tune we did in that set was ‘Drive,’ and it was powerful, man. It was hard to get through that one, I’ll tell you. But all I can say is that there were two players when we started that tune, but it felt like by the end, maybe there were three up there. There was some help.”

Enigmatic Ric maintained his singular sense of mystery until the very end. Obituaries ran, stating he died at the age of seventy. He was actually seventy-five. The age thing was vanity, with a little music-biz razzle-dazzle as well—the next big thing breaking at the tender age of thirty-four. But his true secrets were deeply emotional. Even as a songwriter and poet, he somehow was able to keep most of that personal inner turmoil under wraps.

About three years before he passed, though, Ric played Paulina some of his new songs. “He loved Buddy Holly but also the Carpenters and Burt Bacharach. He had a crush on Karen Carpenter for a long time. He adored her voice. And those last songs incorporated all of that.” She felt he revealed more of himself in those than he had in most of his body of work. But he could not finish them. On the day of his funeral, she came across the lyrics for “Soon” from Move Like This. She read the lyric aloud. One of the lines was: “I’m sorry for what I’ve put you through.”

She says, “I had never really paid attention to it. It was a song he had written for me, and it was kind of a hard look into the future. I thought, ‘Oh my god.’ It really got me.”

“Our dad was a prolific doodler,” wrote Jonathan and Oliver Ocasek, posted on The Cars’ Twitter account. “His passing was sudden, unexpected, and beyond heartbreaking. Yesterday, we found this last doodle on his armchair. He couldn’t have known what it would end up meaning to us. We love him so much.”

The doodle read, “Keep on laughin’. It is what it is.” It’s printed in Ric’s handwriting on his headstone.

Footnote

i Alan Vega died in 2016.

EPILOGUE

LET THEM SAY WHAT THEY WANT

THE WESTERN END OF BOSTON’S NEWBURY STREET IS BUZZING WITH MORE activity than in the early 1980s when The Cars established their Syncro Sound home base at number 331. This end of the block is still slightly funkier than the eastern end, but only marginally, so there is something poetic about the fact that the old Syncro storefront is now a “cannabis boutique.” When I mentioned it to David, he deadpanned, “They probably never got the pot smell out, so it was easier to just open a pot shop.”

At the time, in May 2024, David, Greg, and I were in Gloucester for a show celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuggets compilation album of now classic garage-rock singles, produced by the esteemed Lenny Kaye, writer and guitarist in the Patti Smith Group. Just as I had been fortunate enough to sing a song with a group that included Elliot in 2018, here I was with Greg and David singing three songs, one of which was the Modern Lovers anthem “Roadrunner,” a song destined to be the state song of Massachusetts. Lenny and Peter Buck of R.E.M. fame were strumming away on either side of me, Hugo Burnham (Gang of Four) and Jon Wurster (Mountain Goats) pounding drums in a band of other luminaries.

This was only the third time David had performed the song since it was recorded in 1972. The first time was only four months prior, in January 2024. The second time was in March on the same stage with my band, Buffalo Tom. David laughed, “This is my only gig now, playing ‘Roadrunner’ on this stage.” Greg posted on Facebook, “Ha, this was the first time I’ve gotten to play onstage with David Robinson since we played at the R&R Hall of Fame in 2018!”

Could you imagine telling me when I was a kid listening to The Cars for the first time that I would perform this anthem with two of them? Or telling high school Bill that Peter Buck of my then favorite band would join us? That I would play a Kinks song in Los Angeles with Elliot Easton just before The Cars were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? It’s all surreal and wonderful. It’s an honor that I do not take for granted. And so has been writing the story of this legendary and beloved band.

“We should do it before someone else dies,” Greg laughs, referring to this book. David and Elliot each offered a version of the same dark half joke.

Greg showed me his scrapbooks and played me some Cars tracks, including early demos, most of which have turned up in various collections and expanded editions. But then he delved into never-before-released material recorded by Ric. “I’ll do the usual disclaimer about how nothing’s done,” he says, hitting Play. Ric sings softly, “Sometimes when you feel in trouble, and all roads show you no way out.” The track sounds like a fleshed-out demo. Greg was not sure when this particular one was recorded. But he had recently overdubbed keyboards on it.

Somewhere around 2020, Jeff Kramer and David “Heg” Heglmeier sent Greg eighteen or so songs that Ric had recorded to see if Greg felt he could do something with them. As the saying goes, Heg knows where all the bodies are buried. After The Cars broke up, he remained Ric’s right-hand man until the end. “Heg really loved Ric, and his loyalty to him was like no one else’s,” Paulina says. “We still meet for Ric’s birthdays or Ric’s death day, and we have dinners together with the kids because he really loved Ric, probably like no one else, really. I told Oliver, ‘I’m going to be talking to a writer doing a book about The Cars.’ And Ollie said something like, ‘I hope he talks to Heg too.’ He wants to be sure that someone discusses the amazing parts of his dad. We are all complicated and nuanced people, and it’s very easy to make somebody out to be a bad guy or a saint.”

Heg eventually sent more recordings from Ric’s vault, now numbering more than two dozen. One, “I Just Can’t Stay,” sung by Ben with a harmony from Ric, predates The Cars. Greg calls it “the most ‘Free as a Bird,’” a reference to the John Lennon demo that the three surviving Beatles finished. Its skeletal demo form has been colored with overdubs and sounds like a great yearning ballad with prominent acoustic guitar.

I was a fly on the wall at Q Division Studios in Cambridge one day in early March 2024 as Greg laid down some more keyboards on these. He and producer Ed Valauskas, along with engineer Joel Edinberg, played me nine tracks they’ve been working on.

Ed is a premier bassist and producer. We have played music together since the 1990s. He’s one of the catalysts that helped get this book rolling. In the spring of 2021, he began working with Greg on the recordings and brought us together for lunch two years later.

Once Greg had started working through the recordings at home and at Q Division, he wanted to get Elliot and David involved. “It took a while to even get David to do it,” Greg says. “Then Ed had the idea of going up to Gloucester.” They took the project to Tony Goddess’s Bang a Song studio there to make it easier for David to overdub drums. The idea was that they would need to convince him to come only one town over from Rockport instead of commuting an hour each way to Cambridge. David responds that he was always on board with the project, but it took him a while to prepare to do it, clearing time and getting back into playing drums again.

At Q Division, they pulled up “One by One.” A Post-it note indicated that it was the last thing Ric was working on. Over a four-on-the-floor beat and a loping acoustic guitar, I watched as Ed laid down a bass part. To bring it full circle, he was using Ben’s old Ampeg bass amp, which Ed bought in 1996 from someone who had acquired it when it was left at the old Cars rehearsal studio.i

Some of the songs, like “The Factory,” had been presented to the band before. That song’s industrial theme is enhanced by overdubs that Valauskas and Edinberg captured as Q Division was under construction in its new location. They ran hundreds of feet of microphone cable to record contractors clanging, which magically fitted snugly into the tempo of the Panorama-like song. “Can’t Stop the Rain,” with some grungy guitar, was written around or before Candy-O. Some sound more like classic Cars than others. At least two, “Crossing the Line” and “Crazy over You,” are loungey numbers that Ric had been experimenting with, possibly with the idea of making a whole album in a jazz standards–like format, something like Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely meets Leon Russell’s original haunting recording of “This Masquerade.”

Elliot said he was finally ready to add guitar parts in the summer of 2024 as I was finishing the manuscript. He was a little slow to get on board with the endeavor. Greg wrote me on August 14, “Elliot played on two tracks last week, ‘Can’t Stop the Rain’ and ‘I Just Can’t Stay.’ They sound great!” I got to listen to them just before sending off my final draft, and they do indeed sound great. Elliot’s twenty-five-second solo on “Can’t Stop the Rain” is sure to put smiles on the faces of fans, as it did for me. And he added a hook that runs through the song, completely transforming it from the version I heard months before. “There,” I thought. “Along with Greg’s synth part, that’s how the band took Ric’s demos and turned them into Cars songs.”

The new music is an unexpected gift. Save for one brief reunion more than a decade ago, The Cars stopped being a band in 1988. But David, Elliot, and Greg—and the estates of Ric and Ben—have remained a business partnership for nearly fifty years. They were all optimistic that disagreements about Cars business would not get in the way of giving their fans unheard Cars music.

Like a family, band dynamics are set early and are stubbornly resistant to evolution. Old grudges are not always easily set aside. Egos can be a challenge to suppress. Maturity hopefully brings wisdom, a broader perspective, and compassion—for one’s partners and one’s own younger callow self. Time apart and mutual loss should breed an appreciation for the shared legacy of the survivors.

The Cars are beloved. They’re classic but sound fresh and relevant. The band plays a crucial role in the 2023 romantic comedy Your Place or Mine with Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, who plays a Cars-obsessed character. Ten of the band’s songs are on the soundtrack, but, as Elliot said, “It’s as if our music is another character in the movie!” We can expect more such placements. As I was finishing the final manuscript, Primary Wave Music announced a deal with Ric’s estate for the acquisition of his entire back catalog of music with The Cars and solo, as well as a NIL (name, image, and likeness) partnership with the estate. The amount Primary Wave paid was $45 million.

Elliot summarized his feelings on the band’s legacy. “I think the thing I’m proudest of is that we’re a band that you can hear a few seconds of it, and you know who it is. That we’re a band that still matters to people and that we made some kind of contribution that added another link in the chain and just moved the thing along a little bit. And I’m very proud of that. I’m proud of the music we made, proud of my work with the band, and I’m proud of these guys.”

“We were a band that, for years and years, loved each other and had a good time,” Ric said in the band’s final interview. Seated beside him, Ben said he remembers “enjoying the music that we played and still having it recognized by the kids of the kids that used to be at the concerts. Good camaraderie, glad we’re all friends and lived through all that for about ten years.”

David has noticed a significant uptick in appreciation for the band since Ric’s death. He has periodically engaged with fans on social media sites dedicated to the band. He enjoys their gratitude when he chimes in to correct inaccurate posts. When he goes to see other bands, especially in larger venues, he thinks, “I can’t believe I did that.” “When you’re in the middle of something like that, you don’t realize the scope of it until later. You’re just paying attention to the minutiae. But when I am at a big show, I look around and think, ‘I did this?’ I look back at our history, and I’m even more astounded at what we did.”

David’s reflections are bittersweet. “I have to say, in the last few years the band was together, Ric and Elliot Roberts spoiled things for me when the rest of us weren’t given much say in making decisions as a team any longer. Despite that, I’m happy we managed to make such great music together for ten years and have the chance to add Move Like This and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to our story—which isn’t over yet. There are many roads to success, but you really need the perfect group of partners, and that’s just what we had. We made our mark!”

Sitting on Greg and Elaine’s porch in July 2024, Greg also discusses the use of the band’s songs in more recent movies and television, including Brain Dead (2015), where “You Might Think” is compared to an actual earworm. It’s a particularly favorite usage of his. He also talks about one they regretted passing on, a little movie called Top Gun, which wanted to use “Stranger Eyes.” It was even used in an early trailer for the film. The producers had to instead turn to composer/producer Giorgio Moroder for “Danger Zone,” sung by Kenny Loggins. The soundtrack album sold nine million copies.

Greg offers his denouement for the band: “I’m amazed by and grateful for the longevity of The Cars and the fact that somehow it didn’t get pigeonholed as just an eighties band. I mean, there are certain songs I hear: ‘Oh, that’s a definite eighties thing.’ But there’s something about The Cars that has been able to transcend that. Despite everything, I have a warm recollection and fondness for The Cars.”

As I leave, Greg says, “Good to see you, Bill. Don’t be a stranger. Let’s go get pizza at Stoked again!”

The pleasure would be all mine.

Who doesn’t crank up the car radio when a Cars song comes on? If such a person exists, I never want to ride shotgun with them.

Footnote

i It was in the Cambridge Music Complex on Alewife Brook Parkway, across from the MBTA station, about a mile down the road from Q Division.

Elliot Easton, always a lefty guitar slinger. Age three, 1956, Brooklyn. Courtesy of Elliot Easton

Ben with a friend, 1971. Courtesy of Kris Orr

The Modern Lovers, David Robinson, John Felice (in back), Jonathan Richman, and Jerry Harrison, on the Cambridge Common in 1971. © 1971 Steve Nelson

Ben, Jim Goodkind, and Ric, Milkwood rehearsal, 1972. Courtesy of Kris Orr

David and Anne Marie Foley. Courtesy of Anne Marie Foley

The Cars at the Rat in 1977. © Robert Post

Ben, Greg, and Elliot at Peaches Records in Northfield, Ohio, 1978. Courtesy of mikepetrellophotography.com

The Cars in New York City, 1978. © Ebet Roberts

Roy Thomas Baker and Ric Ocasek.© Ebet Roberts

Ric Ocasek in London, 1978.© Ebet Roberts

The Cars in Hamburg, 1978. © Ebet Roberts

Ben and Judith Orr, Midnight Special taping, 1979. Courtesy of the photographer, Judith (Jude) Orr

Gerald Casale directing Ric Ocasek in the music video for “Panorama.” © BC Kagan

Elliot on his Jaguar in the driveway of his home in Weston, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Elliot Easton

Ben at a Grand Prix go-kart track, 1982. Courtesy of David Robinson

Michael Richards and Ric Ocasek in a dressing room at the television show Fridays. Courtesy of Elliot Easton

The Us Festival. Photo by Elaine Hawkes. Courtesy of Greg Hawkes

Ben Orr with fans in Japan. Courtesy of Greg Hawkes

Elaine Hawkes, Greg Hawkes, Diane Grey Page, and Ben Orr on Ben’s boat, the Blue Di. Courtesy of Greg Hawkes

David Robinson and Katherine Bergholtz (née Kim Leo) at the Balsams in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. Courtesy of Katherine Bergholtz

Elliot Easton and Ben Orr share a microphone at Live Aid in Philadelphia, July 1985. Greg Hawkes seen in the background. © Ebet Roberts

Ben and Diane in the band’s trailer at Live Aid. Courtesy of Katherine Bergholtz

David Robinson on the shoot for the “You Are the Girl” video. Courtesy of Greg Hawkes

Ric Ocasek, Paulina Porizkova, Iman, and David Bowie attending “7th on Sale Benefit” on November 29, 1990, at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

Greg with Paul McCartney. Photo by Linda McCartney. Courtesy of Greg Hawkes

Greg and David at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Courtesy of Greg Hawkes

Ric and Greg at rehearsals for the performance at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Courtesy of Greg Hawkes

Paulina Porizkova and Ric Ocasek on their way to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Courtesy of Anne Marie Foley

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WITHOUT THE PARTICIPATION, KINDNESS, generosity, and trust of Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes, and David Robinson. Once Greg agreed to participate, he announced, “Let the stories be told,” which instantly became the book subtitle.

Soon after I met and performed with Elliot in February 2019, we started messaging back and forth about music, books, and guitars. I pitched writing a Cars book almost immediately. My friend Paul Blumenfeld suggested I write an article about the experience of performing with Elliot, which I did. Ron Hart kindly posted the piece, “The Zen of Elliot Easton,” on RockandRollGlobe.com. Elliot liked it and sent it to the band and management. But the book project didn’t yet get the green light from The Cars camp.

Not long thereafter, my Leon Russell book came to fruition, and that took up a couple of years, during which Ric passed away. After publishing the Leon Russell biography, I began my pitch again for a Cars book. I was able to win over the three surviving members.

I thank the bighearted people behind the Wild Honey Foundation for autism research. David Jenkins was instrumental in connecting me with Elliot for that show, and I can never express enough gratitude to him for all that he does. Thanks to Paul Blumenfeld for a great suggestion. Every once in a while, he’s right. I call him a serial “incorrector,” but he is a superconnector!

After helping wrestle the beast that was the Leon bio, I wouldn’t blame Brant Rumble, my editor at Hachette Books, if he’d had enough of me, but he’s back for more. I appreciate his faith and expert guidance, and I am grateful to work again with Hachette/Grand Central. Thanks to those on the present and past teams, including Mary Ann Naples, Michelle Martin, Michael Barrs, Michael Giarratano, Ben Sevier, Beth DeGuzman, and Matthew Ballast.

Thanks to my agent, Peter McGuigan, for his patience and the assistance of his team at Ultra Literary.

My pal Ed Valauskas was helping Greg Hawkes finish the unreleased Cars material and set up our lunch meeting. Ed and Greg were gracious in allowing me to sit in and listen to the recordings as they took shape. Ed is too often an unsung hero. And so he was behind the scenes of this book. Ed also was kind enough to be an early reader for feedback.

My love and endless gratitude to Laura St. Clair, my in-house editor, wife, and best friend, for her endless patience, her careful first read of the manuscript, and her thoughtful suggestions.

Thanks to my bandmates, Chris Colbourn and Tom Maginnis, for their early reads and for putting up with me since the mid-1980s.

As always, Andy Leach and the team at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives were invaluable and hospitable. And to the David Bieber Archives here in Massachusetts.

My appreciation for those who connected me with interview subjects and others or provided me with research sources and materials: Annie Zaleski, Matt Wardlaw, Michael Creamer (who also caught an error at my first public reading of the nearly completed manuscript and agreed to be one of my early readers), Steve Reynolds, Blair Smith, Neal Ward, Pete Gulyas, Ben Lee, Jonathan Bekemeier, Joe Shanahan, Anne Marie Foley, David Bieber, and David Dunton. Without the help of Lisa Traxler, I am pretty sure I would not have been able to meet and win over Maxanne Sartori. Lisa also helped in that initial interview, and thanks to Maxanne for taking me as her plus-one to see (and be privately serenaded backstage by) Jonathan Richman at the Somerville Theater in December 2023. It was my honor to see them reunite backstage after decades, and I was so moved by the concert itself that I kicked myself for not seeing Jonathan perform since the 1980s. Go see him any chance you get!

Thanks to the local writers who wrote in depth about The Cars: Jim Sullivan, Brett Milano, Joan Anderman, Sarah Rodman, Mark Shanahan, and, most of all, Steve Morse, who passed away soon after I finished this book. In addition to being a great music writer, Steve was a sweetheart and giant supporter of local music. May he rest in peace.

Finally, I am deeply indebted to all those I interviewed, many of whom suggested and connected me with others. In addition to David, Elliot, and Greg, these folks all gave me as much time as I needed:

Luis Aira

Ric Aliberti

Gene Amoroso

Katherine Bergholtz

Steve Berkowitz

Stephen Bickford

David Bieber

Bebe Buell

Gerald Casale

Matthew Caws

Billy Corgan

Rivers Cuomo

John Dalpe

George Daly

George Dassinger

Steve Dodge

Michael Eisenstein

Glenn Evans

Ralph Fatello

Bill Flanagan

Anne Marie Foley

Stephen George

Bill Gerber

Doug Gillard

Jim Goodkind

John Gorman

Brad Hallen

Kay Hanley

Elaine Hawkes

David Heglmeier

Mike Howell

Timothy Hutton

Marty Jourard

Fred Lewis

Tim Mann

Rick Moody

Fuzzbee Morse

Oedipus

Judith Orr

Kris Orr

Diane Grey Page

Paulina Porizkova

JJ Rassler

Martin Rev

Barbara Rhind

Ron Riddle

Ebet Roberts

Maxanne Sartori

Sean Slade

David Spero

Ian Taylor

Peter Thall

Amy Tierce

Dan Weiner

Also by Bill Janovitz

The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (33 1/3 Series)

Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones

Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History

Discover Your Next Great Read

Get sneak peeks, book recommendations, and news about your favorite authors.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alan, Carter. The Decibel Diaries. University Press of New England, 2017.

. Radio Free Boston. University Press of New England, 2013.

Cateforis, Theodore. Are We Not New Wave? University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. Wild Dreams of a New Beginning. New Directions, 1988.

Flanagan, Bill. Written in My Soul. Contemporary Books, 1986.

Frank, Josh, and Caryn Ganz. Fool the World. Macmillan, 2006.

Goldstein, Toby. Frozen Fire: The Story of The Cars. Contemporary Books, 1985.

Hermes, Will. Lou Reed. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023.

Kaman, Philip, and Peter Goddard. The Cars. McGraw-Hill, 1986.

McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey. Random House, 2003.

McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me. Grove Press, 2006.

Milano, Brett. The Sound of Our Town. Commonwealth, 2007.

Milliken, Joe. Let’s Go! Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Myers, Paul. A Wizard, a True Star. Jawbone Press, 2010.

Needs, Kris. Suicide: Dream Baby Dream, a New York City Story. Omnibus Press, 2015.

Nobakht, David. Suicide. Indiana University Press, 2004.

Porizkova, Paulina. No Filter. Penguin, 2022.

Tannenbaum, Rob, and Craig Marks. I Want My MTV. Penguin, 2012.

Tobler, John, and Stuart Grundy. The Record Producers. St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

NOTES

Prologue

The John Lennon interview: December 8, 1980, Dave Sholin RKO Radio, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRkmqLRyLWc.

“jazz as the basis of the curriculum” of Berklee: https://www.berklee.edu/about/brief-history?_gl=1*1ukyz7b*_ga*NDkyMDc0MTg4LjE2ODUwMjM3NTg.*_ga_9LBMM9K FNJ*MTY4NTAyMzc1OC4xLjEuMTY4NTAyMzc2My41NS4wLjA.

Chapter 1

Some of Ben’s backstory comes from Joe Milliken’s Let’s Go! Benjamin Orr and The Cars (see Selected Bibliography). Future references in the notes will read “Milliken.”

Ric’s nickname and more background from Interview magazine, March 1987, interviewed by Lisa Robinson. Future references will read “Robinson, 1987.”

Lisa Robinson also conducted an interview with Ric on May 17, 1982, at Syncro Sound. Future references will read “Robinson, 1982.” https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=hsIgHuwxQfM.

More background on Ric came from a discussion with a live audience at SiriusXM, moderated by Mark Goodman, recorded on April 28, 2016. Future references will read “Goodman, SiriusXM.”

Jon Pareles, “The Cars: Power Steering,” Rolling Stone, January 25, 1979. Future references will read “Pareles, 1979.”

David Fricke, “The Return of the Cars: After 24 Years, the Ultimate New Wave Hit Machine Roars Back onto the Road,” Rolling Stone, June 9, 2011. Future references will read “Fricke, 2011.”

Chuck Yarborough, “Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2018: The Cars Began Their Drive in Cleveland: Inductee Profile,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 8, 2018. Future references will read “Yarborough, 2018.”

https://musicianguide.com/biographies/1608001327/Ric-Ocasek.html.

Andy Greene, “The Cars’ Ric Ocasek on the Hall of Fame: ‘It’s a Good Cap to the Bottle,’” Rolling Stone, December 13, 2017. Future references will read “Greene, 2017.”

Artisan News Service interview with Ric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsj_SDLbm-g&t=882s.

Chapter 2

Robinson, 1982.

Kristine McKenna, “Eno: Voyages in Time & Perception,” Musician, October 1982.

Goodman, SiriusXM.

Hampstead Incident information from Milliken.

“The Cars Take Off Fast in the Record Derby,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 9, 1978. Unsigned byline. Future references will read “Plain Dealer, 1978.”

ID Nirvana songs and studio: https://www.buckeyebeat.com/idnirvana.html?fbclid=I wAR2uD6hSPdc2UoZAU06St8fT9mN3gtZoTHw4P1FYz2UUryvu8s4BlpvhHYc.

More on Musicol: https://pitchfork.com/features/article/9067-musicol/.

Steve Roeser, “The Cars Shake It Up, Drive It Out,” Goldmine, August 1, 1997. Future references will read “Roeser.”

Yarborough, 2018.

Pareles, 1979.

My interview with Luis Aira provided some backstory related to him by Ric.

Chapter 3

James Isaacs, “Cellars by Starlight: The Cars Rev It Up,” Boston Phoenix, August 9, 1977.

“seemed like a radical city to me”: From Brett Milano’s Sound of Our City. See Selected Bibliography. Future references will read “Milano, book.”

Background on Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers comes in part from an interview with Ernie Brooks at https://pleasekillme.com/modern-lovers-bassist-ernie-brooks/.

Goodman, SiriusXM.

Background on the Hallucinations comes in part from Music Museum of New England, https://www.mmone.org/the-hallucinations/.

Additional details about the Hallucinations and on Van Morrison’s time in Boston and Cambridge in part from Lauren Daley, “Howl with Local Legend Peter Wolf in Beverly,” boston.com, undated byline.

More background on Morrison’s time in the area comes from Ryan Walsh’s book Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. See Selected Bibliography.

Ric’s quotes about his early days in Boston taken in part from Cars, Guitars, and Elliot Easton, a documentary with interviews by Lisa Karlin. Future references will read “Karlin, doc.”

Ric’s divorce details found on Ancestry.com.

Pareles, 1979.

Chapter 5

Greg Hawkes interview. Stan Soocher, “Keys to the Cars,” Circus, November 14, 1978.

Chapter 6

Toby Goldstein, “The Cars’ Night Connections: Rhythms of Life in ‘Heartbeat ‘City,’” Creem, November 1, 1984. Future references will read “Goldstein, Creem.”

Zac Childs, interview, “Elliot Easton—Truetone Lounge,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvg1NPWPTJY. Future references will read “Childs.”

Jean-Charles Costa, “Cars ’79: Candy-O v. the Sophomore Jinx,” International Musician, November 1979. Future references will read “Costa.”

Brett Milano, final interview with all five members of The Cars, August 2000, for inclusion on The Cars Live DVD, released October 24, 2000. Future references will read “Milano, interview.”

Greg Hawkes interviewed by Donna Neale and David Curry for their Night Thoughts: The Cars Podcast, episode 31, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W-VG09Xzuw&t=3535s&pp=ygUaZ3JlZyBoYXdrZXMgbmlnaHQgdGhvdWdodHM%3D.

Kris Needs, Suicide: Dream Baby Dream, a New York Story. See Selected Bibliography. Future references will read “Kris Needs.”

Pareles, 1979.

Carter Alan, Radio Free Boston: The Rise and Fall of WBCN. See Selected Bibliography.

David Volker, “The Cars: Driving to the Top,” Northeast Scene, July 1979.

Mark Mehler, “The Cars Enjoy Golden Days with Tour and Third LP,” Columbia Features syndication.

Chapter 7

Heather Atwood, “Just What He Needed,” December 16, 2023, https://www.theother cape.com/blog/david-robinson.

Kembrew McLeod, “Ruby and the Rednecks at the Mercer Arts Center,” chap. 27 of The Downtown Pop Underground, https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/downtownpopunderground/story/ruby-and-the-rednecks-at-the-mercer-arts-center/.

http://www.thepop.us/read-me.html.

Jeff Tamarkin, “Interview: The Cars,” Record Review, October 1979. Future references will read “Tamarkin.”

Tony Beradini, “Moving in Stereo,” audio interview with all members for The Source radio program.

Raw audio on an interview with Ric and David for American Top 40 radio, recorded in July 1979 in Boston. Future references will read “AT40.”

Philip Kamen and Peter Goddard, The Cars. See Selected Bibliography. Future references will read “Kamen/Goddard.”

Stephen Colbert interview with Talking Heads, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, October 25, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-2CfqA9P0Y&t=513s.

Pareles, 1979.

David Fricke, “The Cars, the Police, the Knack, Nick Lowe—the New Rock Rattles America,” Circus, October 2, 1979. Future references will read “Fricke, Circus.”

Plain Dealer, 1978.

Chapter 8

Jim Sullivan, “Long May You Run: Greg Hawkes Turns 70,” Rock and Roll Globe, October 21, 2022, https://rockandrollglobe.com/new-wave/long-may-you-run-the-cars-greg-hawke s-turns-70/. Future references will read “Sullivan, 2022.”

Kris Needs.

David Nobakht, Suicide: No Compromise. See Selected Bibliography. Future references will read “Nobakht.”

Steve Morse, “Sound: The Cars on Road to Success,” Boston Globe, January 12, 1978.

AT40.

Lisa Karlin, “Moving in Stereo, the History of the Cars,” The Source radio show, 1982. Future references will read “Karlin, The Source.”

“My Role Is Making the Band Rich, Famous, and Happy,” Greg Hawkes, turning pages in his scrapbook in 2023, read this quote from Lewis aloud.

Record sales: https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/.

Toby Goldstein, “The Cars: M’Cadillac’s Goin’ ’bout 104,” New Musical Express, November 18, 1978. Future references will read “Goldstein, NME.”

Jim Ladd, InnerView radio program with Ric, 1979, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5efLXsGYyHU&t=1713s.

Bill Flanagan, “The Cars,” Trouser Press, August 1979. Future references will read “Flanagan, 1979.”

Stephen Demorest, “The Cars That Ate Aerosmith,” Creem, November 1978.

John Young, “No Puns Please, We’re Cars,” Trouser Press, November 1978. Future references will read “Young.”

Some quotes from The Cars’ 1978 press kit.

Howard Cummings, “Roy Thomas Baker,” R-e/p magazine, August 1979. Future references will read “Cummings.”

Rick Clark, “Roy Thomas Baker: Taking Chances and Making Hits,” Mix, April 1, 1999. Future references will read “Clark.”

Chapter 9

Charles F. Rosenay, Fun Ideas Podcast #146 with Greg Hawkes. Future references will read “Rosenay.”

Greg Hawkes’s Facebook post, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=11289721171243 67&set=pb.100057352514146.-2207520000.

Milano, interview.

Don Waller, “The Cars,” Mojo Magazine 1978 New Wave Special 30th Anniversary, 2008. Future references will read “Waller.”

Clark.

Pareles, 1979.

Childs.

https://cherryaudio.com/news/the-syndrum-saga.

Kamen/Goddard.

1989 press kit: “Richard Ocasek Talks About The Cars’ Debut Album.”

Cummings.

Goodman.

Flanagan, 1979.

Marc Myers, “The Story Behind the Cars’ ‘My Best Friend’s Girl,’” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2018. Future references will read “Myers.”

John Tobler and Stuart Grundy, The Record Producers. See Selected Bibliography. Future references will read “Tobler/Grundy.”

L. Wayne Hicks, “How a WBCN Deejay and a Harvard Dining Hall Concert Helped The Cars Get Their Big Break,” Boston Globe Magazine, July 12, 2023. Future references will read “Hicks.”

Video: “Slash: At Guitar Center, Technique and Style,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxtCyFQam0k&t=0s.

Some material here from my Rock and Roll Globe article, “The Zen of Elliot Easton,” March 11, 2019, https://rockandrollglobe.com/new-wave/the-zen-of-elliot-easton/.

AT40.

Waller.

Clark.

Quotes from Ric and Ben, Lisa Robinson, syndicated article under various headlines, Field News Service, August 5, 1979. Future references will read “Robinson, 1979.”

Alasha Dunn, “Remembering May 4—an Interview with Devo’s Jerry Casale,” April 30, 2020, https://www.kent.edu/art/news/remembering-may-4-interview-devos-jerry-casale.

Brian Knight, “Oh Yes, It’s Devo: An Interview with Jerry Casale,” Vermont Review, 2005.

Chapter 10

Pareles, 1979.

AT40.

Milano, interview.

Waller.

Kamen/Goddard.

Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave? See Selected Bibliography.

Guy Robinson quote from an unsourced newspaper clipping found in Greg Hawkes’s scrapbook.

Clark.

Billboard, October 28, 1978.

AT40.

Jeff Giles, “Why the Cars Roughed Things Up on Their Second LP, ‘Candy-O,’” June 13, 2015, https://ultimateclassicrock.com/cars-candy-o/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral.

Milano, interview.

Young.

Ric Ocasek 2005 interview for Rockline: https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=sOC0XETHg6I&t=96s.

Robert Hilburn, “The Cars Drive Through Borders,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1978. Future references will read “Hilburn, 1978.”

Russ Yarrow, “The Cars Are Suddenly Hot,” Contra Costa Times, August 21, 1978.

Goldstein, NME.

Harold Goldberg, “It Took The Cars Two Years to Make It Big in Rock ’n’ Roll,” Buffalo Evening News, September 22, 1978.

Larry Kelp, “Cars Driving to Forefront of Rock and Roll Popularity,” Oakland Tribune, September 17, 1978.

Roy Trakin, “The Cars: The Bottom Line, New York,” New York Rocker, September 1978.

Barbara Charone, Creem, October 1, 1979.

Kit Rachlis, “On the Road with the Cars: Boston’s Hottest New Group Tastes Life on the Outside,” Boston Phoenix, August 15, 1978.

Michael Snyder, Berkeley Barb, June 1978.

Rock Goes to College: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N8MZhnsQmU.

Interview with Elliot on the Howard Stern Wrap-Up Show, April 13, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzmkxg5Ez5I.

Chapter 11

Washington Rock Concert magazine, August 1979.

Candy-O press kit.

Panorama press kit.

Grammy information: https://www.awardsandshows.com/features/grammy-awards-1979-227.html.

Milano, interview.

Billboard, June 23, 1979.

Waller.

Tobler/Grundy.

https://www.rhino.com/article/december-1979-the-cars-release-double-life.

Mitchell Schneider quote sourced from Kamen/Goddard book.

Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me, 1996. See Selected Bibliography.

Costa.

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning: Poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. See Selected Bibliography.

Mikal Gilmore, “The Cars Take on Their Critics,” Rolling Stone, October 30, 1980. Future references will read “Gilmore.”

Kris Needs.

Tamarkin.

Bill Flanagan, Written in My Soul. See Selected Bibliography.

Shake It Up expanded edition liner notes.

Cummings.

Robinson, 1979.

https://www.vargaspinupart.com/pages/about.

David’s quotes about Vargas combine the AT40 interview, my own interviews, and a 2017 Rhino Records promo video for the release of the Candy-O expanded edition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcwGOZkzyKg.

Chapter 12

AT40.

Flanagan, 1979.

Elliot interview with Mark Daven, Guitar Radio Show podcast, November 7, 2018. Future references will read “Daven.”

Tamarkin.

Costa.

Toby Goldstein, “The Cars’ Panorama’s Cracked Windshield,” Hit Parader, January 1981. Future references will read “Goldstein, 1981.”

Stan Soocher, “Cars Race to the Top with ‘Panorama,’” Circus, November 30, 1980.

Cindy Jourdan, “The Cars at the Universal Amphitheater,” LA Weekly, September 14, 1979.

“Talent Talk,” Billboard, September 22, 1979.

Chapter 13

Steve Morse, “Cars in High Gear,” Boston Globe, September 7, 1980.

Goldstein, 1981.

Kris Needs.

Nobakht.

Gilmore.

David Fricke, “The Cars Crusade for Provocative Pop,” Trouser Press, November 1980. Future references will read “Fricke, 1980.”

Panorama press kit.

Jake Jenkins, “The History of Sequencers,” March 24, 2021, https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/the-history-of-sequencers/.

Jeff Giles, “How the Cars Pushed Back with Their Third Album, ‘Panorama,’” April 15, 2015, https://ultimateclassicrock.com/the-cars-panorama/.

Katherine Yeske Taylor, “Gimme Some Slack: The Cars’ Panorama at 40,” September 7, 2020, https://rockandrollglobe.com/new-wave/gimme-some-slack-the-cars-panorama-at-40/.

Toby Goldstein, “A View from the Edge: The Cars Don’t Get Easily Amused,” Creem, May 1, 1982. Future references will read “Goldstein, 1982.”

Sam Kemp, “Listen to John Lennon’s Final Interview in Full,” December 16, 2021, post of Lennon’s interview with Dave Sholin on December 8, 1980, https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lennon-final-interview/.

Elliot interview with Andrew Loog Oldham, “Andrew Loog Oldham’s Sounds and Vision Podchat,” November 2 & 9, 2021. Future references will read “Oldham.”

Dennis Hunt, “The Man Who Drives the Cars,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1980.

Noel Murray, “Ric Ocasek,” November 7, 2006, https://www.avclub.com/ric-ocasek-1798210119.

Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks, I Want My MTV. See Selected Bibliography. Future references will read “Tannenbaum/Marks.”

Devon Ivie, “The Good, Better, and Best of the Cars, According to Elliot Easton,” August 20, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/08/interview-elliot-easton-on-the-cars-and-ric-ocasek.html.

https://www.concertarchives.org/concerts/the-cars-the-romantics.

https://www.concertarchives.org/image_uploads/photo/image/333745/large_Daily_Nebraskan__Lincoln__Neb___1980-10-06.png.

Tom Lanham, “A Previously Print-Only Conversation with Ric Ocasek, 2005,” https://magnetmagazine.com/2019/09/17/takemeback-tuesday-a-previously-print-only-conversation-with-ric-ocasek-2005/. Future references will read “Lanham.”

Ben sending limos for friends and family: Milliken and my interview with Anne Marie Foley.

Chapter 14

K. S. Wang, “Celebrity Drive: The Cars’ Drummer David Robinson,” August 24, 2018, https://www.motortrend.com/features/celebrity-drive-cars-drummer-david-robinson/.

Bill Flanagan, “Cookin’ with Roy Thomas Baker,” Trouser Press, January 1982.

Jim Ladd, InnerView radio program with Greg and David, 1982.

I blend my own interviews with Elliot about “Since You’re Gone” with an interview he did with J. D. Considine, “The Cars Shake It Up,” Musician, January 1982. Future references will read “Considine.”

Karlin, The Source.

Marc Holan, “The Cars: This Year’s Model,” Northeast Scene, December 23–30, 1981.

Cameron Cohick, “The Cars Collide with Local Band over Infringement,” Fort Lauderdale News, December 25, 1981.

Toby Goldstein, Frozen Fire: The Story of The Cars. See Selected Bibliography. Future references will read “Goldstein, book.”

Liner notes, Shake It Up expanded version.

Daven.

1982 Ric interview with David Sholin, The Creative Factor, https://youtu.be/kacI2VaXlnU?si=4-qYeMTI6dpLoYI3.

Tannenbaum/Marks.

https://www.concertarchives.org/image_uploads/photo/image/394182/large_Purdue_Exponent_-_Purdue_University_-_West_Lafayette__Indiana_1982-02-17.-.jpg.

“Ben did not weigh in about such issues”: This paragraph blends quotes from David from two different interviews I had with him, with two tellings of the same story.

Ryan Uytdewilligen, “Is Fast Times at Ridgemont High a True Story? Real Inspiration Explained,” February 20, 2022, https://screenrant.com/is-fast-times-at-ridgemont-high-a-true-story/.

Ron Hart, “‘Fast Times’ at 40: Amy Heckerling and Cameron Crowe on the Musical Tug-of-War Behind the Iconic Soundtrack,” Billboard, August 12, 2022.

Merrie Monteagudo, “1982 Us Festival No Woodstock,” San Diego Union Tribune, September 6, 2022.

Trailer, 1982 US Festival: “The ‘US’ Generation—Documentary Coming Soon!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWQKNxuGqg4&list=PLA3420A592C29FA0A.

Chapter 15

Goldstein, 1982.

Michael Goldberg, “Ric Ocasek Worms on a String,” Creem, March 1, 1983.

Robinson, 1982.

Kamen/Goddard.

Mark Segraves, NBC 4, Washington, DC, https://www.facebook.com/SegravesNBC4/videos/heres-cofounder-of-the-cars-ric-ocasek-talking-about-why-he-wanted-to-work-with-/673046056199140/.

Andrew Sacher, “Bad Brains Interview: Darryl Jenifer Discusses the Band’s Classic ’80s Records,” March 2, 2021, https://www.brooklynvegan.com/bad-brains-interview-darryl-jenifer-discusses-the-bands-classic-80s-records/.

Len Comaratta, “Interview: HR (of Bad Brains),” November 21, 2012, https://consequence.net/2012/11/interview-hr-of-bad-brains/.

Nobakht.

Richard Cook, “The Cars That Ate America,” New Musical Express, October 20, 1984. Future references will read “Cook.”

David Fricke, “Ric Ocasek,” Musician, March 1983.

Robert Palmer, “Ric Ocasek Branching Out as a Solo,” New York Times, January 12, 1983.

Steve Morse, “Ric Ocasek: Soloing with a Local Beat,” Boston Globe, January 13, 1983.

Diane White, “You Actually Don’t Know Who She Is?,” Boston Globe, September 18, 1981.

Chapter 16

Julie Panebianco, “Ric Ocasek: Beat-Attitudes,” Boston Rock, January 26, 1983.

Waller.

Jake Brown and Larry Crane, “Mike Shipley: Def Leppard and Mutt Lange w/ Thomas Dolby and Corky Cortelyou,” Tape Op, March–April 2017.

Jim Farber, “Trevor Horn Defined ’80s Music, Then Kept Going,” February 6, 2024, https://www.vulture.com/article/trevor-horn-adventures-in-modern-recording.html?fb clid=IwAR1sGrpda44FnpYP4Jv_kMZ9SEEPcIvLHmaaqc4vjZmkGFxudUH8TMX9wXs.

https://www.shadyoldlady.com/location/3085.

Bill Flanagan, “The Cars,” Music and Sound Output, February 1980.

Oldham.

Liner notes to the expanded edition of Heartbeat City.

“All I can say is it’s nothing musical. It’s got to be something religious or, because take ninety-two sounded identical to take four,” Ric told engineer Ian Taylor, who told it to me.

Bryan Adams interviewed by Jeremy White, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8bkhR7i4TM&t=418s.

Childs.

Interview with all the band, “Up Close with The Cars,” August 26, 1987, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqbXJGpHUoE&list=PLYoSCGQwBSlcInIJOQ8aZULnQLmdfjZ bU&index=51.

Steve Morse, “Cars Upbeat About Their New Sound,” Boston Globe, March 25, 1984.

Sullivan, 2022.

Jerry Bishop, ABC Spotlight Special: “The Cars with Ric Ocasek.” Syndicated radio show aired on September 16, 1984.

Steve Morse, “The Cars Navigate a Bumpy Road,” Boston Globe, July 26, 1984. Future references will read “Morse, July 1984.”

Steve Pond, “Drive, He Said,” Rolling Stone, July 19–August 2, 1984. Future references will read “Pond.”

Chapter 17

Karlin, The Source.

Roeser.

Some of the information regarding the videos came from MTV’s “Pop-Up Video” show, which displayed facts and trivia on-screen during video plays.

Cook.

Tannenbaum/Marks.

Annie Zaleski, “Shake It Up: Ric Ocasek’s New Wave Cool Made The Cars Unlikely MTV Visionaries,” Billboard, September 16, 2019.

Lisa Robinson, “Ric Ocasek,” Interview, March 1985.

Paulina Porizkova, No Filter. See Selected Bibliography.

“The Cars: Making of ‘Hello Again,’” MTV 1984.

Morse, July 1984.

Goldstein, book.

Toby Goldstein, “The Cars’ Night Connections: Rhythms of Life in “Heartbeat City,” Creem, November 1, 1984. Future references will read “Goldstein, 1984.”

Chapter 18

Goldstein, 1984.

Roeser.

Elliot interview with the Rock Today radio show, August 13, 1985.

Ben interview with MTV, July 23, 1984, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kALhPm72wOA.

John Gorman, “24 Years Ago—the C.A.R.E. Sessions—the Story and Video,” https://buzzardbook.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/24-years-ago-the-c-a-r-e-sessions-the-story-and-video/.

An interview with Ric in unedited footage found at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive for the Time-Life History of Rock ’n’ Roll, a 1995 ten-part DVD series.

Milano, interview.

Brett Milano, liner notes for Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology (Rhino Records, 1995). Future references will read: Milano, liner notes.

John Dolan, “The Cars’ Ric Ocasek: 17 Essential Songs,” Rolling Stone, September 15, 2019.

Roy Trakin, “The Cars: The 50,000 Mile Tune-up,” Creem, January 1988.

Rob Tannenbaum, “Benjamin Orr: The Cars’ Mr. Casual Steps Out,” Musician, March 1987.

Ben and Diane interview with the Rock Today radio show, April 1986.

Jim Sullivan, “The Rewards of Rock Stardom,” Boston Globe, November 1, 1986.

Jean Renard quotes edited together from multiple emails with the author.

Chapter 19

Oldham.

Liner notes to the expanded edition of Heartbeat City.

Rosenay.

Fricke, 2011.

Ric Ocasek, “The Basement Tapes,” EQ, December 1991.

Roeser.

Jim Sullivan, “The Cars: Still in Gear After All These Years,” Boston Globe, November 5, 1987.

Door to Door press kit.

Steve Morse, “Cars Getting Ready to Hit the Road,” Boston Globe, August 23, 1987.

Mark Lepage, “Fans Finally Had Fun with The Cars,” Montreal Gazette, November 16, 1987.

Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography. See Selected Bibliography.

Gary Graff, “Cars Trouble Has Ocasek Exploring,” Knight-Ridder syndication, January 10, 1988.

“The Cars—Heartbeat City 40th—the Late Ric Ocasek, Greg Hawkes,” In the Studio with Redbeard, https://www.inthestudio.net/online-only-interviews/the-cars-heartbeat-city-ric-ocasek-greg-hawkes/.

Chapter 20

Marian Christy, “The Sweet Smell of Modeling Success,” Boston Globe, November 20, 1988.

“Ric Ocasek Changing Wives,” Boston Herald, December 31, 1988.

Jim Sullivan, “Design: My Place, Greg Hawkes,” Boston Globe, September 30, 1990.

Paulina’s quote to Redbook via “Consolation Prize,” Boston Globe, September 23, 1992.

Josh Frank and Caryn Ganz, Fool the World: The Oral History of a Band Called Pixies. See Selected Bibliography.

John Soeder, “Ocasek Chronicle Cars’ Musical Path,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 17, 2006.

Ric interview with Artisan News Services, exact date unknown, but likely around 1999. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsj_SDLbm-g&t=888s.

Jim Sullivan, “The Cars Compilation Recalls Glory Days,” Boston Globe, November 10, 1995. Future references will read “Sullivan, 1995.”

Andrew Goldman, “The Return of Ric Ocasek,” New York Times Magazine, May 6, 2011. Future references will read “Goldman.”

Roeser.

Chapter 21

Sullivan, 1995.

Suzan Colon, “Ric Ocasek on Working with Billy Corgan for New Album, How He Invented Himself,” Rolling Stone, April 17, 1997.

Steve Morse, “Smashing Cars?,” Boston Globe, September 12, 1997.

Michael D. Vogel, “Ric Ocasek—Troublizing: Chronicles of a New Wave Surfer,” Venice, October 1997.

Jim Sullivan, “Ocasek Smoothly Puts It in Forward and Reverse, Live,” Boston Globe, November 24, 1997.

Deborah Evans-Price, “Jeff Carlisi: Structure Without Formula; Guitar Playing Influences His Writing,” American Songwriter, March 8, 2021, https://americansongwriter.com/jeff-carlisi-structure-without-formula-guitar-playing-influences-his-writing/.

The fan blog https://sweetpurplejune.wordpress.com/, run by Donna J. Neale, and her YouTube channel have been very useful sources for links to videos and past articles. Neale and David Curry also hosted Night Thoughts: The Cars Podcast. Ben interview with Craig Garber and “Everyone Loves Guitar,” November 26, 2020 (at about 14:10), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teTu7wl-5Cg&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fsweetpur plejune.wordpress.com%2F&feature=emb_imp_woyt.

Goldman.

Chapter 22

Ben Orr obituary, Philadelphia Inquirer, October 6, 2000.

Jeff Niesel, “Friends and Bandmates Pay Tribute to Ben Orr: Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Hosts Memorial Service for Cars Bassist,” Rolling Stone, November 13, 2000.

Lanham.

C. Bottomley, “Fountains of Wayne: Mothers I’d Like to . . . Fantasize About,” VH1.com, August 28, 2003, http://www.vh1.com/artists/news/1477720/082803/fountains_of_wayne.jhtml.

Paul Myers, A Wizard, a True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio. See Selected Bibliography.

Fricke, 2011.

Joan Anderman, “Ric Ocasek in the Driver’s Seat,” Boston Globe, June 29, 2003.

Goldman.

Mark Shanahan, “Hello Again,” Boston Globe, October 10, 2005.

Andrea Swenson, “Sweet Relief,” City Pages, May 11, 2011.

https://concord.com/concord-albums/the-cars-move-like-this/.

Joe Charupakorn, “Interview: Elliot Easton—Hello Again,” Premier Guitar, May 8, 2011.

Andy Greene, “The Cars’ Ric Ocasek on the Hall of Fame: ‘It’s a Good Cap to the Bottle,’” Rolling Stone, December 13, 2017.

Brett Milano, “Cars, Ocasek Do Little to Rev Up Hub Crowd,” Boston Herald, May 27, 2011.

Sarah Rodman, “Cars Get Their Engines, Longtime Fans Revved Up,” Boston Globe, May 27, 2011.

Chapter 23

Jonathan Clarke interview with Elliot for “Out of the Box” on Q104.3, https://q1043.iheart.com/featured/out-of-the-box/content/2020-09-21-the-cars-elliot-easton-on-covid-pandemic-im-not-going-to-die-of-stupid/.

Oldham.

Morgan Hines, “‘Never Cried as Much’: Paulina Porizkova Is Moving Out of the Home She Shared with Late Ex-Husband Ric Ocasek,” USA Today, October 17, 2010.

Danielle Mayoras and Andy Mayoras, “An Estate Fight May Be Coming over Ric Ocasek’s Estate,” Forbes, November 13, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/trialandheirs/2019/11/13/an-estate-fight-may-be-coming-over-ric-ocaseks-estate/.

David Browne, “Paulina Porizkova Remembers Ric Ocasek’s ‘Incredible Gentleness,’” Rolling Stone, October 4, 2019.

David Browne, “The Mystery of Ric Ocasek: ‘He Tried for Happiness, but Underneath Was a Lot of Pain,’” Rolling Stone, October 18, 2019.

Colton Bradford, “A Sitdown with the Bay State Band Member Who Gave ‘The Cars’ Their Name,” March 31, 2022, https://www.nbcboston.com/entertainment/hub-today/a-sitdown-with-the-bay-state-band-member-who-made-the-cars-move/2682741/?fbclid=IwZXh0b gNhZW0CMTEAAR3Qgl5s_w7CzfRydFb3y59AYMQN2o8O9YDTnLGLafRtbOHpH 36PlGK2rn8_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw.

Epilogue

Jem Aswad, “Cars Frontman Ric Ocasek’s Song Catalog Acquired by Primary Wave Music,” Variety, September 5, 2024, https://variety.com/2024/music/news/cars-ric-ocasek-song-catalog-acquired-by-primary-wave-1236131102/.

Lisette Voytko-Best, “The Highest-Paid Dead Celebrities of 2024,” Forbes, October 29, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2024/10/29/the-highest-paid-dead-celebrities-of-2024/#:~:text=In%20keeping%20with%20estate%20deals,bucks%20in%20the%20great%20beyond.