Ric Ocasek, 1944 – 2019
[guest post by JVW]
When I was a teenaged boy growing up in my little Southwest town in the early 80s, you listened to one of two genres of music: country & western or rock & roll. The New Wave hadn’t quite made it to our corner of the world, apart from the handful of girls who had older sisters attending hip universities and were thus clued in to the Cure or the English Beat or other groups like that, and perhaps a few guys who wanted to hang out with those girls. As for the rest of us dudes, if it wasn’t Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin or Iron Maiden, then it had better be Johnny Cash or Alabama or George Strait. I confess that there wasn’t a whole lot of horizon-broadening going on in those formative years.
But for some reason even if you worshipped AC/DC or thought that Waylon & Willie was where it was at, it was perfectly acceptable to think that the Cars were a pretty cool group. For whatever reason, a bunch of small-town teenagers took to the quirky pop sound of these rather geeky guys, even if they did use synthesizers a little bit more than we thought necessary. Maybe we heard a little bit of heroic guitar playing from Elliot Easton, similar to what our idols like Tony Iommi and Jimmy Page were doing. Maybe we liked the weird and funny videos, especially the magnificent one for their big hit “You Might Think” which seemed to be in nonstop rotation on MTV (back when that station played music videos) for my entire freshman year. Maybe we just recall the scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High which made such great use of the band’s “Moving in Stereo” and therefore automatically loved the band by default. In any case, there was no shame in being a Cars fan, even if you were playing their cassette tape in your Sony Walkman in rotation with Ozzy, Bruce, or Dolly.
Until I saw his obituary earlier today, I had no idea that Cars guitarist and main lead singer Richard Theodore (“Ric”) Ocasek was 75 years old (six months younger than my mother) and that he and Cars bassist and occasional lead singer Benjamin Orr first started playing together in 1968, a year before I was born. They just seemed so perfectly Eighties to me that I can barely fathom that Ocasek actually predates the Baby Boomers and that by the time the band was at its commercial zenith he had reached middle age. The Cars came together as a band sometime in the bicentennial year of 1976, and they didn’t last beyond 1988, the year I graduated from high school and set out for college. They had one brief reunion in 2010-11 which produced a new album and a tour, though Orr’s death ten years earlier had left a large hole in the original lineup, and then once again went their separate ways. In a year where both the Rolling Stones and the Who have celebrated their 55-plus year anniversaries with massive world tours, the relative brevity of the Cars’ run is notable and perhaps in its own way poetic.
Ric Ocasek fronted one of the most memorable bands of the New Wave era with a catalog of catchy tunes, pretty much all of which are love songs which is ironic considering the band came off as so arch and emotionally detached. He married one of the most beautiful supermodels of the day, making him a role model for geeky boys going through that seemingly never-ending awkward phase. He had the good sense not to join the new model of the band after Orr died, showing respect for the Cars’ past and refusing to cash in for a quick buck. When he did get the original guys (minus Orr) back together, he did so the right way: by first recording a new album rather than flogging the reunion as an oldies act with a four-week residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. And whenever I hear his music to this day, a part of me is once again that fifteen-year-old kid with his whole life ahead of him. May he rest in peace.
You might have forgot
The journey ends
You tied your knots
And you made your friends
You left the scene
Without a trace
One hand on the ground
One hand in space
– JVW