CARS WERE OFF TO A FLYING START
By the end of the 1970`s, rock music, with the exception of punk, had become boring, clinical and far too workmanlike.
Bands like Led Zeppelin were on their last artistic legs and way past their glory days, Pink Floyd, Rush and all the other progressive rock acts of the day were taking their art far too seriously, even if they were technically brilliant musicians in the studio.
Disco was providing the fun, but for a lot of rock`n`roll fans, the soundtrack to Grease and Saturday Night Fever was never going to substitute for the void which had never been filled since the death of Buddy Holly and when Elvis starting making cheap second rate movies.
Many obscure rock acts were waiting in the wings for the day when the record companies finally come to their senses and gave a new wave of retro-rock acts a fair go.
One such band was an eccentric, idiosyncratic and quirky fivesome called The Cars, led by the unmistakable Ric Ocasek.
The band was made up of Ocasek (rhythm guitar & vocals), Benjamin Orr (bass guitar and vocals), Elliot Easton ( lead guitar and backing vocals), Greg Hawkes (keyboards, sax, percussion and backing vocals) and David Robinson (drums and backing vocals).
They had a unique electrified loopy sound which grabbed you with its hypnotic retro groove.
The bands awesome debut, the 1978 self titled The Cars, was one of the many albums from that year which broke the commercial shackles and made progressive rock look
about as exciting as Bing Crosby.
The album had no less than 6 hit singles, well some were more successful than others, starting with one of the great rock`n` roll songs of all time, certainly in my lifetime.
That song is a blistering twin guitar extravaganza called `Just What I Needed`, a song which would make my top 10.
`Good Times Roll` has one of the most irresistible, densely and metallically crisp guitar riffs fueling it, along with a lot of pops
and squeaks coming from the keyboard of Greg Hawkes.
`My Best Friends Girl` is the probaly the most 50`s-ish tune on Cars No. 1, lyrically you could guess where Ocasek was coming from - at one time his mate must have
backdoored him and stole his girlfriend.
That might explain why Ocasek`s face always looked a bit sunken in. `Bye Bye Love`, like `Just What I Needed`, was sung
by Benjamin Orr and is a more contemporary and polished number which gave Orr a chance to prove what a great lead vocalist he was.
Orr also sang lead on the most spaceage and static song on the album `Moving in Stereo`. While not the best song we could have expected from The Cars in this set, it has grown on me over the years and I could just see it being used posthumously in a sci-fi flick or in the soundtrack for the next James Bond movie.
Man I`d laugh if it ends up on there, I should get a spotters fee if that happens don`t you reckon?
`You`re All I Got Tonight` is a lively untempo guitar powered number which has
cynical Ocasek written all over it. Ric Ocasek was the only lyric writer in the band, but the deal was that Benjamin Orr sang nearly half the songs, the ones which Ocasek was not suited to sing because of his self acknowledged mediocre voice.
It never got any better than `Just What You Needed` as far as I`m concerned, even though The Cars had heaps of other great songs on this album and the ones after it.
Benjamin Orr never sang better, except maybe for the song `Drive` on the 5th Cars
album `Heartbeat City` and Ocasek/Easton got stuck into the twin guitar thing and jammed out of the most timeless pieces of rock`n`roll since `That`ll Be The Day`.
Orr died not that many years ago from pancreatic cancer, so a Cars reunion unfortunately is very unlikely to happen.
Go and buy yourself a Cars CD anyway and get a taste of the music which resurrected rock out of the musical doldrums back in the year of 1978.
New Wave, wasn't that what the survivors of the "disco" period were called. I actually don't rate The Cars as highly as you, to me they were all about POP music and radio airplay genre. the quality of the band members and there fore their songs stood out from the average, but their place was firmly in Popular, mainstream, marketable easy listening music.
ReplyDeleteI think if you listen to a classic type radio station you can hear their hits on a regular if not daily basis still.
I think i might have heard `My Best
ReplyDeleteFriends Girl` on the radio at about
2am a couple of years ago LOL. Just
thought i had better say that before
i have Ric Ocasek sending me a face-
book message telling me to shut the
something up haha.
I had the radio on all weekend, doing some work in my shed, and the Cars were given pretty good airplay, I did try hard to not see them as a pop marketing tool for the record company, but in the end couldn't they are so damned perfect at what they do.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I actually looked on the net and saw some live "Cars" and if they could have had that kind of energy in their recordings,. . . .well just maybe. They are awesome live.