One of the most persistent misconceptions about MTV is that the network, in its 1980s heyday as Americans’ universal radio station, rewarded musicians for their great looks, rather than their musical abilities. Men, in particular, could thrive on MTV if they didn’t look like models but carried off a kind of comic affability. Prime examples include Huey Lewis, Phil Collins, Men at Work, and Ric Ocasek, the Cars’ singer, songwriter, and dominant force.

Ocasek was evasive about his exact age, probably because he was older than most of his peers. He’d toiled away in several bands, in Cleveland and then Boston, including a Crosby, Stills & Nash–ish folk trio called Milkwood, learning from each commercial disappointment. In the Cars, he and bassist Ben Orr, his Milkwood bandmate, remade themselves as cool new wave rockers. Ocasek was already 34 years old when the group released its self-titled debut in 1978, and a creaky 37 when MTV came online in August 1981. Incredibly, Neil Young and Eric Clapton are both younger than Ocasek.

Ocasek was the unlikeliest of video stars, and not for his age alone. At six-foot-four, he was comically thin, with an elongated neck; he was also one of two Cars members who wore hairpieces. More importantly, he was an aesthetic sophisticate whose music melded the simplicity of Buddy Holly with the stark deadpan of the Velvet Underground, and who adored avant-garde music and performance art. When video directors turned him into a piece of video Pop art, he embraced it.

The Cars were already FM radio stars when they released a fourth album, Shake It Up, a few months after MTV’s debut. The videos for that record followed drummer David Robinson’s art direction for the album covers: striped black-and-white shirts and lipstick-red convertible interiors, pretty girls, and lots of tossed, permed hair (“Shake It Up”), or skinny ties and aloof lip-synching in front of staticky TV sets (“Since You’re Gone”). Both videos were directed by Paul Justman, who was on the brink of his first feature, Rock 'n' Roll Hotel, which starred novice actors Judd Nelson and Matthew Penn and was crowned “The Best Worst Movie You’ve Never Seen” many years later by an alternative weekly paper.

When the Cars returned three years later with the album Heartbeat City, MTV was no longer a startup network seen in only a few tertiary markets but a cultural juggernaut, capable of launching or spiking careers. Lots of ’70s holdovers hated videos, refused to play along, and quickly faded from the spotlight. Orr, who often sang lead vocals and had a pin-up pout, seemed like a likely video star, but that spot mostly went to Ocasek, who worked a deadpan comic angle.

In “You Might Think,” director Jeff Stein, who’d made the Who documentary The Kids Are Alright as well as Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” video, used a beauty-and-the-beast theme, and invoked images from B movies, including The Incredible Shrinking Man and Glen or Glenda. Ocasek even carries a winsome blonde woman to the top of the Empire State Building, à la King Kong. In one of the era’s defining images, Stein places Ocasek’s antic, twitching head on top of the body of a fly. In an interview for a book I cowrote, I Want My MTV, a 2011 chronicle of the network’s first 10 years, Jeff Stein called it “the first cartoon with real people,” and noted that it was the first music video in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

“Ric has this kind of quirky persona,” Stein went on. “The Cars were never known for their riveting live performances, and I thought that if they made fun of themselves or their own image, it would take the wind out of that reputation.”

When the video was finished, Ocasek told Elektra Records executive Robin Sloane that he hated it. “He thought the video made fun of the way he looked,” Sloane explained. “But that video completely changed their image. It took a band that was not visually dynamic and made them incredibly visually dynamic.” “You Might Think” also won video of the year at MTV’s first Video Music Awards in September 1984.

“Ric is just so unusual looking,” Cars drummer David Robinson told me. “I can’t think of anyone who’s looked like him since. He’s interested in films and he thought about the way he was going to come across.”

A few months later, Tim Pope, an accomplished British surrealist who’d worked a lot with the Cure, directed “Magic,” in which Ocasek amazes a crowd of acolytes by walking on water in a swimming pool. (The set location was the Hilton family estate in Beverly Hills, when Paris Hilton was about three.) “The band doesn’t show up until the guitar solo,” Robinson grumbled. “My own mother saw the video and said I wasn’t in it. I had to freeze the video and say, ‘Look, that’s me.’”

The next single from Heartbeat City was “Drive,” a sentimental-seeming ballad that under the surface is about distance and cruelty. Actor Timothy Hutton had just finished filming Daniel with Sidney Lumet when he decided directing a music video might be a fun challenge. A Cars fan, he met with the band and pitched them his idea for the song.

“I said, ‘I see this desolate place where a person is navigating their life and everywhere they turn, someone who appeared real isn’t real anymore,’” Hutton recalled. “As I was talking, I said, ‘Maybe it really is like mannequins.’ That’s how the story came about.” (In the clip, the rest of the Cars appear only as mannequins, an unkind metaphor for how secondary band members were treated in videos.)

Hutton shot bassist Orr, who sings “Drive,” in still, somber scenes. He wanted to contrast that with scenes of Ocasek arguing with a woman who appears mentally unstable. He asked a casting director to call for “tall, exotic women who have something fierce” about them, and 18-year-old Czech model Paulina Porizkova auditioned.

Once Porizkova got the part, Hutton rented a suite at Le Parker Meridien hotel in midtown Manhattan so she and Ocasek could meet and feel comfortable together in front of a camera. When he called an end to their hotel-room rehearsal, both asked to keep rehearsing. “I felt something between them instantly,” Hutton said. “Little did I know they’d end up getting married.” (After 28 years of marriage, Ocasek and Porizkova announced their split in 2018.)

The next Cars video, “Hello Again,” was codirected by Andy Warhol, who created a meta-narrative about music videos and exploitation, and cast himself as a hapless bartender. He steered attention away from Ocasek and toward Orr, who plays tonsil hockey with a woman, and filled the screen with stars of New York City nightlife—notably Dianne Brill and John Sex—as well as a pre-stardom Gina Gershon. (There’s a topless version of the video, which MTV didn’t air.) “Warhol didn’t really talk to us,” Robinson recalled. “He did his little scene and then he was gone.”

Heartbeat City made the Cars huge video stars, but Ocasek’s prominence in the videos contributed to band tension—he and longtime pal Orr stopped speaking—and the band’s demise was near. By the time they returned in 1987 with Door to Door, MTV had moved on to heavy metal and was even playing some rap, and the Cars’ limelight decade was over.

Ocasek’s death this week was upsetting for many people who grew up on MTV because the videos created such an indelible image of the singer as a figure of gentle awkwardness—something like Jimmy Stewart, if he’d read Sartre and wore sunglasses.

“The better videos, like ‘You Might Think’ or ‘Drive,’ I look back on them and they’re better than I think,” David Robinson reflected. “But the bad ones look much worse now. I just tried to get through them with as much dignity intact as I could.”

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