The death of Ric Ocasek in September 2019 shocked fans of his seminal band The Cars.
Though you're probably familiar with all their hits, there's a lot you probably don't know
about the legendary group.
Here are a few quick facts to get you up to speed.
A complicated friendship
Perhaps because of his striking look - or because he sang most of the bands' songs - The
Cars and Ric Ocasek are often considered one and the same.
"Hi, I'm Ric Ocasek, and I turn confusion into a virtue."
But Benjamin Orr took on lead vocal duties on plenty of The Cars' songs - including classics
like "Just What I Needed," "Drive," and "Moving in Stereo."
"Greetings.
My name is Benjamin Orr.
I play bass and I'm one of the lead singers for The Cars.
And this is my face."
As you may know, "Moving in Stereo" features prominently in an iconic scene from Fast Times
at Ridgemont High, and it was also a clever musical cue in an episode of Stranger Things.
Casual listeners may not have realized that the band had two lead singers because their
voices are rather tough to distinguish from each other.
In 2011, Ocasek told Vanity Fair:
"I think our voices are similar because we spent so many years together even before the
Cars.
Every band I've ever been in had both of us."
Ocasek later told Rolling Stone,
"We were the best of friends forever."
Nevertheless, by the end of the Cars' last tour in the late '80s, Orr had taken to traveling
on his own bus - apart from the other band members, and rarely exchanging words with
Ocasek.
In Ocasek's own words,
"He was drinking a little much."
Ocasek also told Rolling Stone that tension mounted after Orr asked if he could write
Cars songs with his girlfriend.
Ocasek rejected the idea outright.
The former besties and musical partners grew estranged after the Cars split up in 1988.
Fortunately, they worked out their differences while taping material for a Cars DVD in the
late '90s. Orr died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, and Ocasek paid tribute with the song
"Silver."
The iconic "Drive" video
Fresh off his Academy Award-winning role in Ordinary People, actor Timothy Hutton wanted
to get into directing.
In 1984, the Cars' manager played him the group's album Heartbeat City.
Hutton was particularly taken with "Drive," a slick, romantic soft rock ballad that represented
a departure for the band.
Ric Ocasek let Hutton direct a video for the song.
In the book I Want My MTV, Hutton recalled:
"I called a casting director and said I needed an attractive, exotic woman who has something
fierce about her."
He hired model Paulina Porizkova - who was among the last women he saw while casting
the video.
As he explains it, he took Porizkova and Ocasek into a hotel room to rehearse the plot of
the video:
"[I asked them] to imagine they'd had a fight that was escalating."
They rehearsed with Hutton for an entire day, and when it was all over, Porizkova and Ocasek
wanted to keep going.
Sparks had obviously flown, although Porizkova later told Entertainment Weekly that she'd
already seen Ocasek on MTV, explaining that:
"[It was] love before first sight."
Ocasek was already married at the time, to his second wife.
In 1989, Ocasek and Porizkova got married, and they stayed together for nearly 30 years.
"Shake It Up" took forever
The Cars recorded plenty of sharp, tightly-crafted songs - but even though they're short and
sweet, those songs could reportedly take forever to make.
According to Cars drummer David Robinson, the band's 1981 hit "Shake It Up" stewed for
years before the group finally decided to record it.
In Frozen Fire: The Story of The Cars, he said:
"It never sounded good, We recorded it a couple of times in the studio and dumped it, and
we were going to try it one more time, and I was fighting everybody."
Robinson says he relented when the band decided to give it a total overhaul:
"We thought, let's start all over again, like we've never even heard it - completely change
every part - and we did."
But it doesn't sound like the song was one of Ric Ocasek's faves.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, he admitted:
"I've probably written some crap lyrics.
I'm not proud of the lyrics to 'Shake It Up.'"
Perhaps that's because the song includes lines like,
"Do the move with the quirky jerk."
and
"Make the night cats stop and stare."
"You Might Think" made waves
"You Might Think" is arguably the Cars' most memorable song, and that's probably because
of its unforgettable music video.
The Cars' rise to the top coincided with the early days of MTV, and the band was one of
the first acts to embrace the new medium.
The video's director Jeff Stein evidently had a tough time selling the band on his idea
for the video.
In I Want My MTV, he recalled:
"I met the Cars and told them, 'The band's in the medicine chest, and then on a bar of
soap, and Ric's a fly,' and one of them said: 'Why don't we all just play on a turd in the
toilet bowl?'
That was the prevailing attitude."
According to Elektra Records executive Robin Sloane, Ric Ocasek didn't like the video,
explaining that:
"He thought it made fun of the way he looked."
Of course, it all paid off in the end.
The video was the first one ever placed in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection…
and at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, "You Might Think" won Video of the Year,
somehow defeating Michael Jackson's iconic "Thriller."
The New Cars
As we mentioned, The Cars ultimately broke up in 1988.
"At some point, something kind of cracked.
Maybe it was around '87.
And then I didn't like it as much."
But there was an attempt to resurrect the band in the mid-2000s.
That's when a manager representing Greg Hawkes, Elliot Easton, and David Robinson approached
Ric Ocasek, proposing a Cars reunion on behalf of his clients.
Ocasek gave him a hard no, explaining to Rolling Stone,
"The s--- hit the fan.
Lawyers got involved.
It must have cost a ton of money in legal fees that I wasted, the Cars wasted, for f----ing
no reason."
So Easton and Hawkes hit the road in 2006 and 2007 as The New Cars.
Robinson didn't participate - he dropped out of the project early on - but rock legend
and producer Todd Rundgren and the Tubes drummer Prairie Prince agreed to join the project.
It didn't work out.
The New Cars' poorly-reviewed debut album It's Alive would also be their last album.
The real reunion
In the early 2010s, a real Cars reunion happened.
Ric Ocasek told Rolling Stone at the time,
"This was strictly 'F--k everything that happened before this.
This is a new thing.'
And it was great."
The Cars reconvened to record a new album of original material, Move Like This, which
generated a moderate hit single in "Sad Song."
The group even embarked on one last tour in the summer of 2011, performing in 11 theaters
and capping it off with a spot at Lollapalooza.
"There's a lot of people out there, and some will like us, and some won't, and that'll
be it."
Then, in 2018, the group entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In his induction speech.
Brandon Flowers of the Killers - a huge fan - said,
"We thank the Cars: Ric, Benjamin, David, Greg, and Elliot.
We are standing on the shoulders of giants.
This band means so much to me and millions of others."
That night would mark the last official Cars' gig: Ric Ocasek died on September 15th, 2019
at the age 75.
As people learned the sad news, many celebs fondly remembered the talented musician…
including talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who was fortunate enough to occasionally have
Ocasek as a guest on The Colbert Report:
"I'm gonna need someone who can use his brute animal magnetism to woo that lady zookeeper.
Ric Ocasek?"
"You bet I'm in, Stephen."
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