The Cars

The Cars’ first album was the best thing I ever borrowed from Mel’s sister Melissa. At first, I only liked the biggest hit, Just What I Needed, with its catchy, lurching beginning, its edgy synthesizer lines, the irresistibly cool, emotionally detached line that starts the song (I don’t mind you coming here and wasting all my time) and, especially, the way the drummer switches accents during the last verse. Coming out of the solo, he hits the snare on the second and fourth beats – the standard rock accents – during the first and third line of the last verse and then does a quick, jarring (but glorious) switch to the first and third beats for the second and fourth lines. I used to air-drum this song all the time in high school and my friend Allen would tease me relentlessly about how simple the drums were. He was a Rush fan himself and spent many hours learning to air-drum the incredibly arcane (and egregiously overblown) drumming of Neal Peart. I argued that the subtle, quirky, less-is-more approach of the Cars’ David Robinson was far funkier and cooler but he just laughed at me. After all, he was a child of the '70s – musically speaking – and the '70s were all about bigger and fatter – longer guitar solos, bigger drum kits, lower slung basses, more hair, wider pant legs, etc. My decade had yet to blossom – the music that really spoke to me was still a few years away from coming into its own, and the true principles of dry-production, minimalist funk were far off down the road. I like to feel that I’ve been vindicated over the years, but I’m sure Allen would still laugh at me.

Anyway, I loved Just What I Needed and I hated the rest of the album. It was so angular and quirky and wasn’t at all what rock was supposed to be about. Then I started liking Good Times Roll. Then Don’t Cha Stop. Then the wonder of side two suddenly became clear and I fell in love with the album. In retrospect, it seems that that album heralded the coming of new wave (or, in Portuguese, bossa nova), and opened up people’s ears to some of the radically different sounds and structures that popular music could take. The Cars were also able to bridge two previously hostile camps – the new wavers and the rockers, and showed both sides that they needn’t be enemies. They were voracious sonic experimenters, and the fact that they had three guitarists – two of whom swapped lead vocal duties (as well as a drummer, and a keyboard player) meant that they could each go pretty far out on textural tangents while still retaining a cohesive structure to a song.

(Another group that, years later, would also use their abundance of guitarists to their sonic advantage, jacking relatively simple song structures into outer space with their wild interlocked textures is Radiohead – although you’d be hard pressed to find somebody else who would willingly lump those two bands together. Of course, I also think Junior Brown and Jimi Hendrix are opposite sides of the same coin.)

Part of the magic of their sound was that they hooked up with an extremely meticulous producer who brought out their best: Roy Thomas Baker – perhaps best known for the operatic scale of his work with Queen. Obsessive to a fault, Baker would work and rework tracks to within an inch of their life, but all the work would prove itself in the final mix. There’s a story that the Cars (or, as my mom calls them, the Car Doors) went to London to record an album and one day Benjamin Orr, the bassist, went by himself to the studio to lay down some tracks. He returned late that night, after some twelve hours of work, and the band asked him how the recording went. He said they didn’t actually do any recording. What the hell did you do, they wanted to know. “Well,” he replied, “we started to get a good bass sound.”

The other really cool thing about the first Cars album is that the first three songs on it are each exactly 3:44. I always wondered if they did that on purpose – if they even could do that on purpose.

In spite of all their strengths, it must be said that the Cars have some of the worst lyrics ever sung (“I’m a flick fandango phoney”?) Fortunately, the vocal quality matches very well with the material, so I tend to just ignore the meaning of the lyrics (if, indeed, there is any) and just sing along.

Like some other groups, the Cars started off strong and got progressively worse with each album, until they were virtually unlistenable-to. Once they replaced the drummer with a machine and they smoothed out their sound, it was a downhill ride. There were occasional moments in their later albums – I really like Drive from Heartbeat City – but for the most part, I lost interest in them after Panorama, their third album. Sure, it was great that superdork Ric Ocasek managed to get it on with supermodel Paulina Porizkova, thereby instilling hope in dorks the world around, but by that point his music had lost a lot of its vitality (somebody once asked one of the members of Duran Duran why rock stars married supermodels and he replied, licking his balls, “because they can”).

But that first Cars album stands out as one of the ten best rock albums of all time. Depending on how charitable I’m feeling towards I’m in Touch with Your World, I would even classify The Cars as a perfect album.

Having said that, I must point out that It’s All I Can Do isn’t on the first album, it’s on the second, Candy-O. It’s a perfect example of the kind of intricate layering they were capable of – once you start listening to the individual guitar lines that make up the bulk of the song, the bewildering complexity of the interlocking parts reveals itself. It doesn’t sound like a complicated, quirky song, but scratch a little beneath the surface and it’s easy to get lost. Like listening to a Bach fugue, you can either hear the overall structure of the song, or you can listen to one of the many parts, but you can’t do both at the same time. The whole thing is propelled by David Robinson’s lurching, angular drumming, although, again, it sounds perfectly natural until you really start listening to where the accents are falling. And the keyboard part just kills me, especially in the last verse, where it starts low and then slowly creeps up in a beautiful, heartbreaking arc.

But, I must admit, there’s something else at work here, something that doesn’t really have anything to do with the song. Something that makes every listening of this track – and there have been hundreds – a bittersweet experience.

Her name is Jennifer.

Jennifer was a blond actress from Texas (take this as you will), who went to Interlochen and who was far too beautiful for her own good. Or anybody else’s. Shortly after I got involved with my first girlfriend, Tina, in my senior year, Jennifer took an aggressive fancy to me. She showered me with compliments, wrote me love letters, and generally made herself irresistible to me by making me feel irresistible to her. Although I adored and craved Jennifer’s attention, I stayed true to Tina. As the school year wound down and graduation approached, along with the inevitable end of relationships that accompanied a boarding school graduation, Tina and I started having trouble. One night, during the last week of school, Jennifer and I went for a walk down by the lake. Down by the lake where some of the most significant events of my early life occurred. Down by my lake. It was a beautiful night, she was a beautiful girl, my resolve left me, and we ended up kissing.

Flooded with guilt, I immediately confessed everything to Tina, and she forgave me, but the cracks had formed and, later in the summer, Tina and I drifted apart for good.

Meanwhile, I carried a torch for Jennifer. We wrote each other aching letters of desire. We made each other youthful promises. Over the years, we had a couple of frightening, exhilarating moments together – a Thanksgiving weekend back at high school (in the unfortunate company of her math teacher), a one-night visit to my college dorm, her graduation a year after mine. I burned for her for a couple of years and then, when I finally got to actually spend some time with her in New York City – alone at last, far away from school and parents and any other distractions – she plunged my torch into an ocean of ice.

She was the one I couldn’t have, the one who wanted the chase, but was uninterested in the catch. Or, as the Cars sing,