Here's a story that has always stuck around in my family: When my daughter, Zoe Mabel, was 2 years old, we were pulling out of the Stop & Shop on Newport Ave in Quincy, MA., when a song came on the radio:
“ I don’t mind you coming here
and wasting all my time…”
“Hey Zoe! Who is this?” I asked the little girl strapped in her car seat.
Her face betrayed no sense of labor as she listened thoughtfully to the melody, and when that telltale synth hook splayed itself across the sharp, rhythmic guitar chug, the computation was complete.
“The Cars!” she answered correctly.
That’s right. Our kid could recognize The Cars on the radio six months before she could even go pee-pee on the potty. And while I’ve found so many more reasons to be proud of her in the nearly two decades since, the Cars anecdote is one of the favorites in our family’s nascent oral history. Probably because it says so much about what matters to us.
Ric Ocasek died this weekend. The news was accompanied by a statement from his sons on The Cars’ Instagram feed in which they released a doodle he’d made the day he died. Apparently he was a prolific doodler, a glorious revelation in the middle of what is otherwise terrible news. The doodle said, “Keep on laughin’. It is what it is.” I don’t know where to put all that information yet but I have some tangential thoughts.
I discovered the Cars initially through the cover of the band's debut album, before I’d ever heard a note of the actual music. My friend Margaret’s older sister had a stack of LP’s leaning against the living room stereo that I’d often glance at casually as a passerby does a sidewalk newsstand. One day, The Cars was facing out of the stack and I was transfixed, staring at the happy lady with shiny red lips behind the wheel every time I went over. I was drawn in and repelled by it at the same time; she looked like a bad girl from another place, and I wanted to be a nun and never leave Dorchester. I was afraid to ask Margaret to play The Cars for me, so I made up an 11-year-old’s fantasy version of what the music would sound like. Being a fan of The Captain & Tennille and Pink Floyd's “Another Brick In The Wall” at the time, I was not even close.
Soon after, I started listening to WBCN and its rival station WCOZ (Kickass Rock n’ Roll!) and finally found out what I was missing. My mom was pretty strict about what albums I could own so I basically didn’t own any until well into my teens. However, I was able to cobble together a very decent Cars collection by hovering next to the stereo speakers with my tape recorder, switching between stations and waiting for the DJ to announce the song I was waiting for so I could press the record and play buttons.
Shake It Up came out in 1981 and just typing those words makes my palms sweat. So many nervous glances across the gymnasium dance floor. So much wobbly-kneed excitement walking past my crush playing basketball down Walsh Park in Dorchester. So much making out. There are few bands whose songs are as seared into my psyche as The Cars are to my adolescent horniness.
To me, The Cars were one of the biggest bands in the world and I loved them, a general opinion shared by anyone with ears and a brain. It wasn’t until I wound up traveling around in a band of my own that I realized how much of a link people made specifically between The Cars and Boston. My band Letters To Cleo, being from Boston, was asked about The Cars a lot and we happily embraced any and all connections people wanted to draw.
In 1995, Letters To Cleo was recording at Oceanway in Los Angeles when Ric Ocasek stopped short in our studio doorway. “Are you Letters To Cleo?” he asked, and after we briefly ascended, we wound up talking to him for a bit. At that moment he was having a triumphant second act as Weezer’s collaborator/producer on their monster debut. He took his new success in stride. Unlike my comically bad guess about the sound of The Cars, Ric Ocasek the guy was exactly what I thought he’d be: kind, generous, humble, knowledgeable, tall.
A year or so later we were asked to record “Dangerous Type” for a film called The Craft. It was a terrifying prospect on a few levels, but for me as a singer, trying to somehow do justice to a song like that, translating from Ric’s disembodied baritone surrealism through my white alternagirl soprano, the challenge was to make something that didn’t sound like a novelty. There was something about this assignment that made us all care more than we usually did, even about our own compositions. The Cars’ legendary keyboard player Greg Hawkes accepted the invitation to join us in the studio and play on the track. Much to our happy surprise, the song turned out so well that we made a video for it with Chris Applebaum. It’s easily the best video of our career.
With Ric’s death, I’m reminded of all these delicious, transforming moments in my life that this man and his music had a hand in, both directly and indirectly. I also feel lucky that I live in a time where a freakishly tall and skinny mysterious oddball with a weird voice was once the sexiest rock star on Earth. Thank you x 1000 Ric Ocasek.
