As my regular readers (reader? heh heh) might know, this one has been a long time coming. That's because I was just about to write this about a month and a half ago, and I suddenly got sidetracked listening to the various members of the band's solo albums.
By the mid-to-late 1970s, the prog rock that I loved was under attack by the young barbarians of the punk rock movement. This didn't really thrill me. I had no real interest in The Sex Pistols, and I only came to know The Ramones during the '80s.
But there were artists and bands associated with this movement that I did like, such as Patti Smith and Blondie. And eventually, they kind of morphed with the public perception into the new wave movement of the late '70s and early '80s.
The Cars were a Boston band who came together in 1976. Prior to this, various members had played together in other projects, but this was when the classic lineup of guitarist, singer and songwriter Ric Ocasek, singer and bass player Benjamin Orr, lead guitarist Elliot Easton, keyboard player Greg Hawkes and drummer David Robinson became The Cars. They released their first eponymous LP in 1978, and went on to produce a total of six studio albums before breaking up a decade later.
Sadly, Benjamin Orr died in 2000 of pancreatic cancer. Easton and Hawkes briefly banded together with Todd Rundgren in 2005 to form The New Cars (which mostly played covers of Cars and Rundgren songs.) Then in 2011, the surviving original members of the band regrouped to produce one more album, Move Like This. Ocasek died in 2019, thereby assuring that we'd never see another Cars project again. (Although we could possibly see a reunion of The New Cars, which I personally wouldn't mind.)
So really, The entire Cars output consists of seven studio albums, one New Cars album mostly of live covers, and the various solo projects of the individual band members. Robinson is the only one who never put out a solo album, while Orr, Easton and Hawkes put out one original studio LP each, and Ocasek put out six or seven (depending upon how you count them) solo projects. It's not a huge output, compared to most of the artists I've written about before, but it's not terrible either. (Hawkes also released an obscure soundtrack album that's impossible to find these days, and an LP full of covers of Beatles songs performed on the ukelele. But I've never gone down those particular rabbit holes.)
Truthfully, though, the meat of The Cars' reputation rests on the shoulders of those first five studio albums, from The Cars (1978) to Heartbeat City (1984). Everything else I mentioned is the equivalent of dessert, plus an after-dinner mint.
So what do I like about The Cars, and why did they make my Favorite Artists list?
The Cars got off to a great start with me from that first single, "Just What I Needed". I liked the attitude, and I loved Orr's use of synths. After listening to the great classic keyboardists of the '70s, Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson, and their majestic, sweeping styles, this song featured the synthesizer being used in a far different way, adopted for a pop format. It's still kind of sweeping, but here, it's driving home a hook, as it functions as an instrumental chorus. As the '80s went on, synth pop would feature synthesizer lines that were even shorter and poppier. But few of them would grip me the way the synth line does here.
In fact, "Just What I Needed" already featured a number of the elements that would make The Cars so popular. The Orr/Ocasek vocal style (and I'm embarrassed to tell you how many years it was before I realized that it was Orr on lead vocal here and not Ocasek); the trademarked Easton/Orr chunka chunka guitar and bass lines; and the attitude of the vocalist's relationship with the various women he sings about are all contained here, in their very first release.
So yeah, the first couple of elements I like about The Cars are definitely their songwriting (most of their songs were written by Ocasek, although Orr wrote a significant number of them early on), and Hawkes' use of synthesizers. (I didn't mind the chunka chunka guitars, or the nearly-spoken vocals, but while they were key elements of the band's style, they weren't my favorite pieces of that style.)
The second thing I loved about The Cars was their level of consistency over those first five albums. I'd rate the first, the second and fifth slightly higher than the third and the fourth (we're talking The Cars, Candy-O and Heartbeat City over Panorama and Shake It Up), and the sales figures bear me out on this. But really, we're talking maybe half a star's difference here, and odds are that if you like one of these albums, you like them all.
The Cars' last two albums are fairly average, but like I said, they're just minor additions to the main part of the band's catalog. Likewise, The New Cars project was kind of fun, but the project only created two or three original tracks.
As for the solo projects, as I've learned recently, there are some treats to be found there. The Easton album is fairly ordinary, while the Orr LP is a decent little pop rock album. The jewels to be had, though, are Hawkes' almost entirely instrumental Niagara Falls (1983) (which unfortunately you can only buy on vinyl, but you can hear the whole thing YouTube), and the first Ocasek solo album, Beattitude (1982). Several of his other solo projects are pretty good as well.
The Cars didn't have a reputation as a great live band, but they're one of the bands I'm still sorry to have missed. They were a great singles band, though, and they came along at a time where singles were coming back into prominence over albums. I don't put them in the same category as great '70s bands like The Who and Pink Floyd. But they were a great bridge from the rock-centered music of the '70s to the pop-centered music of the '80s. And now that I know that they're really gone, damn it, I miss them.
And that's really all I have to say about The Cars.
