Ric Ocasek: In Memory Of…

By Steven P. Wheeler

Fans of ‘80s rock have had a tough time the past few days. First, we lost the everyman of rock Eddie Money, and yesterday the head mechanic of The Cars—Ric Ocasek—passed away at the age of 75. The similarities between these two is as interesting as their public personas were different.

Both were from the East Coast—Eddie from NY and Ric from Boston, where he moved from Ohio in the early ‘70s. Both found their initial taste of stardom relatively late in life, both in their Thirties, and both with classic debut albums; Eddie in 1977 and Ric with The Cars in 1978. But where Eddie was brash, outspoken, and clearly loved the stage, Ric was the quiet, quirky artist who never seemed overly comfortable under the concert lights.

Although The Cars were not flashy onstage, they were consummate professionals, sticking to Ocasek’s brilliant songs as recorded and not getting self-indulgent along the way. But they showcased, without pretension, the vastly underrated six-string prowess of Elliot Easton, the keyboard hopping of Greg Hawkes, and the versatile rhythm section of the late bassist and co-lead singer Benjamin Orr and drummer David Robinson.

And while neither Eddie Money nor The Cars were perhaps anyone’s #1 favorite artist, they were very likely in the Top 20 of favorite artists for millions of rock fans of that particular era. And that is what made them so successful, along with their genuine gift of creating infectious music and memorable lyrical hooks.

They were harmless in that sense, both focusing on creating irresistibly melodic works without offending anyone. You won’t find any annoying political screeds in their work that pit us against each other. And maybe that’s why their music transcended beyond their careers during their lifetimes and will continue to do so now that they are gone.

“I don’t write political songs. I can watch the news on TV or read it in the newspapers and it’s already distorted enough. I certainly don’t need my news from some rock star who believes they are also an authority on the news.”

Ric Ocasek (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Today, I’m reminiscing about my meeting with Ric Ocasek, not long after The Cars had disbanded and he had released his third solo effort, Fireball Zone. While we can all mourn the loss of this unique and hugely successful music artist, who let his music do most of his talking, it’s also a good time to revisit some of his timeless work that will far surpass his 75 years in this mortal sphere.

Ocasek’s pop sensibilities and his sometimes dark and humorously sarcastic lyrical tones (often masked behind upbeat music and poetic imagery) are not surprising when Ocasek revealed, “I love the Carpenters and I love the Velvet Underground.”

This seemingly bizarre blending of tip-top pop craft with haunting tones riding a driving beat is what made Ric Ocasek such a unique songwriter, one like no other. This was minimalist rock at its finest, with otherworldly textures thrown on like the most delectable of frostings. Thankfully, Ocasek was around long enough to see The Cars inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame just last year.

Unlike his perceived public image, when we sat down back in 1991, I found Ocasek to be extremely personable, candid, talkative, and quick with a laugh. Just a regular guy, who just so happened to have created some of the most timeless music to have arisen from the ashes of the ‘70s as his band would go on to reach even further heights of success throughout the ‘80s.

In an MTV-enhanced era where countless one-hit artists shot up the charts and quickly disappeared, Ocasek and The Cars were a welcome mainstay for a dozen years spitting out hits so quickly that it was hard to keep track of them all, and still is all these years later.

As many of the bands (insert “image” here) who gained a little success through MTV failed to capture audiences outside the core viewing audience, Ocasek’s tasty song craft managed to bypass that limitation. His songs pleased not only the teens of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s with their fresh new sound, but Ocasek’s mastery of melody and a unique lyrical approach also bridged the gap with the older classic rock fans who could also appreciate the engaging riffs that were the foundation of their “New Wave” sound.

In a polarizing musical decade, Ocasek and The Cars were arguably the only band that found success across all musical camps. No easy feat, and a legacy that lives on today with even this era’s teens.

Born in Maryland, the Ocasek family moved to Ohio when Ric was in his teens. After graduating high school in 1963 and spending a couple of years in college, he dropped out and met his future musical brother, Benjamin Orr, in 1965.

Unlike how The Cars would burst on the national music scene in 1978, seemingly out of nowhere, Ocasek definitely paid his dues for more than a decade in and out of bands as often as most people change their socks. “I was probably in 15 bands before forming The Cars,” he said, “and some of the guys in The Cars were in some of my earlier bands. Elliot [Easton, guitarist] was in one of them, [keyboardist] Greg Hawkes was in one of them, and Ben was probably in ten of them [laughs].

“I thought that maybe we’d get a little record deal, be a cult band and put out a record. That was what I was envisioning at the time.”

Ric Ocasek (Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“So with The Cars, it was Ben and I, and then we brought Elliot back and we brought Greg back, and then we just had to find a drummer and David [Robinson] was the one we wanted. And what was good about this band when we started was that it was about the songs; it wasn’t about musician egos.”

But it still wasn’t any overnight success, as The Cars played around the East Coast for a year-and-a-half before they landed their record deal with Elektra Records. “I think my songs were just getting better,” Ocasek said modestly, “and the band itself really spurred a lot of that writing inspiration for me. With that band, compared to all the other ones, we were getting fans and it was clicking along and going pretty well.”

Ironically, Ocasek never thought that his band would find mega-stardom. “I thought we might get a record deal, but since all those other bands I was in didn’t achieve that, I really didn’t know. I thought that maybe we’d get a little record deal, be a cult band, and put out a record. That was what I was envisioning at the time.”

Riding the New Wave

“I’m sure that timing was a part of what happened with us getting signed because radio was much more open in those days,” Ocasek explained. “We were just a local band in Boston and we were getting our songs played on local radio, which was pretty unheard of at the time. So there was a rebellious scene going on in music, and we happened to be there at the same time.”

But they were also being lumped in with bands and artist who were much younger than they were. Ocasek was already in his mid-Thirties when the band signed their first record deal. “We never considered ourselves to be New Wave or part of a movement or anything like that,” he told me. “We were around before that term ever came into being. But I think because we were a new band that played rock with some different colors and the lyrics were a bit obscure that the press started putting us in that New Wave bucket.”

Debut Stardom

With the release of their self-titled debut The Cars were instant stars, shocking the band members themselves. The album has gone on to sell more than six million copies in the U.S. alone. With three infectious hit singles—”Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl” and “Good Times Roll—along with a slew of more adventurous FM rock radio standards like “Bye Bye Love,” “Moving in Stereo” (cue Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight,” The Cars were soon everywhere.

With a little help from famed producer Roy Thomas Baker, who was the studio captain behind Queen’s layered epic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” The Cars took their already unique sound and turned it into perfection in the studio. “The first Cars’ album is a totally live record. We literally went from the clubs into the studio. We finished recording that album in 12 days,” Ocasek said with a laugh. “That really was a live album with quite a bit of overdubbed harmonies, which was [producer] Roy Thomas Baker’s idea.

“[Those harmonies] actually shocked all of us, but we really liked it. We liked how harmonically thick it was even though we were never a band that sat around and sang in harmony with each other. But when Roy came up with that layered harmony sound, we liked it so much that we stuck with that kind of harmony vocal sound throughout our recording career.”

When I spoke with the legendary Baker a year earlier we had discussed how he had made a name for himself with bands like Queen, but how his work with The Cars was as sparse as Queen’s kitchen sink productions.

“That first Cars’ record is still selling,” Baker told me over some afternoon martinis. “I knew it was a good album when we were making it, but I really had no idea it would be as big as it was, and still is.

“With that record, because I was being put down in the press for over-producing everything,” the blonde producer told me, with a laugh, “I made a conscious effort to over-produce under-producing.

“With The Cars, if there was a hole in the music, I made it bigger rather than filling it up with textures and things. That’s where you get that magical feeling of ‘air’ on that album.”

Ocasek agreed, saying, “That’s interesting that you talked to Roy about that. What Roy brought to that first record, besides his craziness and enthusiasm, was that he knew a lot about ambient mic’ing because he had done a lot of work with orchestras in his past, and that helped us get the sound of that record that a lot of people still talk about.”

Interestingly enough, the Bean Town band recorded the album at AIR Studios in London, which was then owned by the biggest producer in the world, George Martin of Beatles fame, who showed up to compliment the band during the sessions, as Ocasek recalled: “More than once George Martin would poke his head in the studio and listen to what we were doing and he’d say, ‘You know, you guys got a hit record there.’ We would just laugh, because we never dreamed along those lines. We always thought of ourselves as a cult band making a record for 30 people.”

The success was immediate and Ocasek kept cranking out the hits for the next ten years. In all, The Cars would release five consecutive platinum and multi-platinum albums (their sixth and final album Door to Door went Gold in 1987) and an endless string of such hits as “Let’s Go,” “It’s All I Can Do,” “Double Life,” “Touch and Go,” “Don’t Tell Me No,” “Gimme Some Slack,” “Shake It Up,” “Cruiser,” “Since You’re Gone,” “You Might Think,” “Magic,” “Drive,” “Hello Again,” “Tonight She Comes,” among others.

Staying Grounded

Despite the incredible success of The Cars, Ocasek managed to keep his wits about him. His advanced age in terms of finding his first taste of success and the monumental global stardom that was still to come played a big part in not falling into the pitfalls that fame can bring.

“I think all of us in the band tried to ignore what was happening, because you can get hung-up on your own press and even start believing it, which is worse,” he explained. “I think I tended to get more jaded about it all as the success continued to grow with each album. Maybe it was my fear of getting sucked up into the star trip, which wasn’t anything I was really interested in.

“If you’re able to sit back and really take a hard look at your own reality, you can avoid it. It’s a matter of saying to yourself: ‘Am I really as great as these people say I am?’ or ‘Am I just the same person who is working really hard at this and always focused on trying to get better?’ You also realize and say to yourself that I was doing this same thing before anyone accepted it, so this isn’t about me.”

Ocasek didn’t forget the years and years of struggle, which helped him keep his feet on the ground when the band’s fortunes were rising higher and higher. “As a struggling writer or musician, you are always thinking your stuff sucks because no one is paying attention,” he said. “And then all the sudden people start saying it is good, and you sit and wonder, ‘Why was this not so good yesterday and now it’s amazing?’

“It’s really hard to wrap your head around it if you think too much about all of that outside stuff,” he continued, before adding with a laugh, “I just started telling myself that I’m just that same person who just has to keep getting better, and that inner challenge goes a long way in getting all that other nonsense out of your head.”

On an even more personal level, being married to one of the world’s most famous models didn’t exactly keep the tabloid wolves at bay. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova met when she was the actress in the band’s hit video for “Drive.” They married five years later, although their 28-year marriage ended amicably last year. But at the time of our talk they were newly married and the singer-songwriter discussed dealing with the tabloids.

“Well, it happens from time to time,” he said calmly about media stalkers, noting that other celebs welcome and seek out the attention. “Some of these other couples go out a lot to get the attention and even let the paparazzi know where they’re going to be and things like that.

“I’m just a guy who likes to work rather than spending my time out in the public eye trying to get attention. Then again, I get attention just walking down the street because of the weird way I look [laughs] and Paulina obviously gets noticed because of the great way she looks [laughs].

“But, yeah, when we go out together it can be hard. Although we do live in New York now where you are a little bit more anonymous, but we don’t go to the big rock & roll events or things like that. We’re just not out promoting that we’re together, you know. I try to keep the family separate from other parts of the business, like the so-called glamour and all of that stuff.”

Technology Cars’ Style

What always made the music of The Cars so unique is their ability to incorporate basic rock riffs and driving rhythms with a slice of techno pop. Something for everyone within a single song, and no band did it better than Ocasek’s crew.

“The thing about The Cars is that we weren’t afraid to incorporate technology into our music. That goes back to when I was writing my first songs. I would be sitting on the floor with my guitar, a pen and paper, and an old Univox drum machine, that only had two beats, but it kept that tempo for me to write along with it.

“Then Greg Hawkes, our keyboard player, really got into programming and that stuff. I kind of stayed out of it. To this day, I don’t really know how to program a sequencer, but I’ve always been the kind of person who writes things up in longhand rather than typing them [laughs].”

As successful as their sound was, it was also the beginning of the end for Ocasek, even though it led to one of their most memorable albums, Heartbeat City.

“The mixture of the band and the songs and those various forms of technology we would incorporate in the studio was fun, but on the other side of it, it did become too relied upon later on in the band’s career,” he admits. “It probably peaked around the time of Heartbeat City [their massively popular fifth album in 1984].

“We made that album with [producer] Mutt Lange, who had just gotten a new Fairlight sampler, and he was really involved with learning how to use it during those sessions, pretty much at our expense,” he says with a laugh. “I expected that record to be much more live, like we did on the first album, because Mutt had just produced things like AC/DC’s Back in Black album, but it really became our most textured and layered album, but, all that aside, I really do love the record we came out with.”

The Break-Up

However after the band’s sixth album, Door to Door, in 1987, Ocasek decided that The Cars had run its course. “Basically, it did get too technological for me, and some members were just too disinterested in forward motion. I didn’t want to get too redundant and rely too heavily on the sound we always had.

“It was pretty much by mutual agreement,” he maintains. “It was twelve years together and I think our spark plugs just kind of burned out, you could say. I still love all the guys in the band.”

Ode to Orr

The band’s other lead vocalist Benjamin Orr passed away in 2000, and in 2005, on Ocasek’s final solo album Nexterday, he recorded a musical tribute to his longtime friend with the song, “Silver.”

MTV and Music Videos

The Cars were one of the most popular bands during MTV’s heyday in the ’80s with some of the most innovative videos ever produced, from the silly to the sublime. However Ocasek says he was never looking to translate his songs and their meanings into the video side of the band’s career.

“It’s funny, because I actually try to do something entirely opposite of what the lyrics are,” he said. “I’ve done some videos that completely suck that I’m totally embarrassed about, but I’ve also done some that I really love.

“On the one side, I love videos because of the imagery that’s being created. I find all that very artistically inspiring. But as far as it being related to music, I think the video revolution has hurt the mystique of music.

“I always thought it was fun to use your imagination with music. There was something cool about not knowing exactly what your favorite band looked like until you went to their concert. Or to listen to a song on the radio and imagine what the lyrics were about rather than to have it visually shoved down your throat.

“I like the visual medium but I do think it is also stifling the imagination of the bands, who are also now forced to not only write and create music, but they also now have to think about this entirely other medium. But. more importantly, I worry about the viewers because I think it detracts from using your imagination and that potentially could lead to a loss of long-term creativity.”

Legal Problems

At the time of our meeting, Ocasek had just released his third solo album Fireball Zone, his first since the break-up of The Cars. It had been three years between albums, which was an eternity in the music biz at the time. “I was changing record labels at the time, moving from Geffen to Warner Bros., and that took quite a bit of time, legally.

“I was also spending a lot of time with visual arts; my photography, collages and paintings. I also moved to New York and was moving into a new house. So there was a lot of non-musical things going on and that helped me in looking for inspiration. It’s funny,” he said, smiling, “because when people point out that it’s been three years, those years seem like months to me.”

But the real delay had to do with leaving his record label. Lawyers. Can’t live with them and unfortunately in the music business you can’t leave without them. “I had a lot of success obviously with The Cars at Elektra,” Ocasek explained, “but I moved to Geffen for my first two solo albums [1982’s Beatitude and 1986’s This Side of Paradise]. But by the time of this record, I started to feel stalemated at Geffen. Suffice it to say that I just didn’t feel like I had a good artist rapport with them at that point.

“They just wanted me to make Cars’ albums, but without The Cars [laughs]. I always felt that about them and I really didn’t want to stay under those conditions. I did two albums with them, but was contracted to do five, so it took a little while to work out all the legal stuff to get out of the deal. I just think that Warner Bros. is more of an artist-oriented company.”

Solo Albums vs. The Cars

One of the big questions had to do with the fact that since Ocasek literally wrote every song that The Cars recorded, how does one differentiate between The Cars and a Ric Ocasek solo album. “Of course, I wrote all the songs for The Cars, so some of my solo stuff is obviously going to be similar because it’s difficult to stay away from what you do artistically,” he said. “But I will say that, for my solo albums, I did try and choose the things that were more un-Cars-like because I wanted to establish myself as a solo artist. Of course what my perception of what Cars’ music is may be different than what fans or critics think it is. I’m in my own little bubble here.

“But in answer to your question, one of the differences is that when I would present all my songs to The Cars, the band together would choose the songs for whatever album we were working on. And while I’m certainly happy with all the songs that the band did choose, it doesn’t necessarily mean that all those were the songs that I would have chosen, left to my own devices. That’s probably the main difference is the actual selection of the material that made them Cars’ songs versus my solo material.”

Songwriting with Ric

“As far as my lyrics, I never co-write. I have co-written on a few Cars’ songs with Greg Hawkes [‘Moving in Stereo,’ ‘This Could Be Love,’ ‘It’s Not the Night’ and ‘Go Away’] and I co-wrote one of the songs, ‘Touch Down Easy,’ on this album with Rick Nowels. Those few instances are with parts of the music, because lyrically I want to be single-minded about it.”

When it comes to the lyrics of Ric Ocasek, they are often thought of differently by the audience than by the writer himself. “I think people will always dance around to a beat, no matter if the lyrics are morose or not. It’s like ‘Good Times Roll,’ which is not about letting the good times roll at all.

“Because I’m so inspired by the poetry of Voltaire and E.E. Cummings as well as new poets, I like to paint images with my lyrics. I like to create an open mood, with no beginning or end. It’s a mood enhancing element for my songs, using some surrealism to conjure up little cinematic word images.

“With radio, we all used to use our own imagination as to what the lyrics convey to us personally. And I always felt that once the song is put out there, it belongs to everyone’s own imagination. Anyone can think whatever they want as to what they think my songs mean; that’s perfectly fine with me.

“The thing is, I’m not trying to teach anyone anything. I think people are already taught enough about what to think about everything, and I don’t think that’s really healthy in the grand scheme of things. I’m just trying to say things in an interesting way; sometimes I think they’re funny and sometimes I think they’re serious. But I’m not one to preach ideas.

“In the Chinese theatre they have done the same plays for 2,000 years. They have the same costumes and the same presentations but they bring them up to date. By the same token, the major theme of pop songs has always been relationships and that won’t ever change because we live in a world of human relationships. That’s what I thrive on as a writer.”

Behind the Scenes

Lost amidst his overwhelming success with The Cars is Ocasek’s outside work as a producer throughout the past four decades. Here’s just a few of the notable hits and wide array of bands and artists he produced…

Romeo Void

Weezer

Nada Surf

Bad Religion

No Doubt

The Cars Reunion

In the years following my interview, I kept tabs on Ric’s career as he would release four more solo albums, produce countless bands, and then in the biggest surprise of all he reformed The Cars in 2011 and released the Top Ten hit album, Move Like This.

In 2012, Ocasek published the book he had discussed with me 20 years earlier. Lyrics and Prose brought together all of his lyrics recorded with The Cars and on his solo efforts, as well as his own prose, poetry, photographs and artwork. https://www.amazon.com/Lyrics-Prose-Ric-Ocasek/dp/0399163700.

Most recently Ocasek had once again produced Weezer, as well as The Cribs, and now he has left the music world an emptier place. His name is not often mentioned with the greats in rock history, although few have matched his success or have been as uniquely original. Hopefully one day rock fans and critics will soon realize that he belongs in the uppermost echelon of our most prized musical artists. Thanks Ric for everything.