The Cars

Midway through the afternoon at Live Aid, on the thirteenth of July 1985, the screens at Wembley and at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium went to black and a montage about the Ethiopian famine came up. The music behind it was "Drive", by The Cars, sung by the bassist Benjamin Orr. David Bowie had seen that film a few days earlier, broke down in tears and gave up a song from his own set so that it could go into the programme. Bob Geldof would say afterwards that the tape was the turning point of the whole event. It is the biggest fact in the history of a band that is remembered for something else: for being the hit machine that dominated MTV's first years.

Wembley, and one song fewer in Bowie's set

Nobody from Live Aid had filmed the footage. It belonged to Canadian public television: the reporter Brian Stewart put the story together and the video editor Colin Dean cut it in Addis Ababa. The CBC crew handed it to Geldof with an awkward explanation: they had not been able to get it on CBS because the American network found it "too extreme" and would not show it, so they would rather give it to him. Geldof tells it that way in his memoir, Is That It?, and he showed it to Bowie and to the promoter Harvey Goldsmith.

Bowie wept. Goldsmith remembers him saying that this had to go into the show, that it was the most dramatic thing he had ever seen, and that for that he would accept being one song short. Exactly which song he sacrificed is not settled: the established version says it was "Five Years", although Thomas Dolby, who played with David Bowie that afternoon, remembers that the one that fell was "Fascination", because Bowie never stopped changing the set list in rehearsals.

The piece was screened in both stadiums and broadcast on television around the world, introduced by Bowie from Wembley. He explained it without any grandeur: the footage struck him as important, and the point was not to promote singles but to raise awareness of the situation. Geldof was more categorical: after that broadcast more money was pledged than at any other moment of the concert, and the donation phone lines collapsed. The Cars had nothing to do with the decision. They were in Philadelphia, and they played that same day at the JFK at five thirty-nine in the afternoon: "You Might Think", "Drive", "Just What I Needed" and "Heartbeat City".

What came afterwards they did decide themselves. "Drive" was reissued as a single in the United Kingdom and came back into the chart higher than on its original release: number four in August 1985, one place above the number five of 1984. The band gave away the income from that reissue —the income from the single's reissue, not the song's royalties for ever— and it came to almost one hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the Band Aid Trust. Ric Ocasek handed the cheque over in person to Midge Ure, a trustee of the fund, in London, in November 1986, taking advantage of a trip to promote his solo record This Side of Paradise.

Boston, 1976, and five names

The Cars formed in Boston in 1976 with five musicians who never changed: Ric Ocasek —Richard Theodore Otcasek, born in Baltimore in 1944— on rhythm guitar and lead vocals, author of almost the entire repertoire; Benjamin Orr —Benjamin Orzechowski, from Lakewood, Ohio— on bass and the other lead voice; Elliot Easton on lead guitar; Greg Hawkes on keyboards; and David Robinson on drums. Ocasek and Orr had been playing together since the early seventies, in Milkwood, in Richard and the Rabbits and in Cap'n Swing. Robinson came from The Modern Lovers and from DMZ, gave the group its name —at some point he had considered going into car design— and took charge of the entire visual side: covers, wardrobe, concept. His too was the idea for the cover of Candy-O, a woman stretched out on a Ferrari 365 GTC/4, which he got Alberto Vargas, the great pin-up illustrator of the twentieth century, to paint.

The first official concert was on the thirty-first of December 1976, at Pease Air Force Base, in New Hampshire. And before they had a label they already had a radio hit: the demo of "Just What I Needed" and "My Best Friend's Girl" got onto Boston stations in March 1977, on WCOZ and WBCN, through the DJ Maxanne Sartori, who played them in her weekday two-to-six-in-the-afternoon slot until they became one of the station's most requested songs. Ocasek told it without any embroidery: "Just What I Needed" was a hit before it was on a record. That local noise brought offers from Arista and from Elektra; they signed with Elektra, brought in by the A&R man George Daly.

The Cars was recorded in February 1978 at AIR Studios in London with Roy Thomas Baker and came out on the sixth of June that year. It reached number eighteen on the Billboard 200 and stayed there for one hundred and thirty-nine weeks, more than two and a half years on the chart; it was the fourth album of the year 1979 and ended up certified six times platinum, the best-selling in the catalogue. In 2024 it entered the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. What it was not, however much it sounds like one, is a collection of hit singles: "Just What I Needed" —sung by Orr, not Ocasek— stopped at number twenty-seven on the Hot 100, "My Best Friend's Girl" at thirty-five and "Good Times Roll" at forty-one. In the United Kingdom there was more luck, with "My Best Friend's Girl" at number three. The record became a classic through album radio and through those two and a half years on the chart, not through the positions of its songs. That debut also yields the only known crack in Ocasek's compositional monopoly: "Moving in Stereo" is credited to Ocasek and Greg Hawkes, Orr sings it, and it became massive not through radio but through Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in 1982, whose soundtrack album did not include it.

MTV, eighty thousand dollars and a Paintbox

The run was not uniform either. Candy-O, from June 1979, matched the best album position the group would ever reach, number three, and brought their first top twenty with "Let's Go", again with Orr at the microphone. Panorama, from August 1980, had the coolest reception and stopped at single platinum. Shake It Up, from November 1981, corrected course and gave them their first top five with the title song. The big jump came with Heartbeat City, recorded between July 1983 and January 1984 at Battery Studios in London and released on the twelfth of March that year: the first record not produced by Roy Thomas Baker, but by Robert John "Mutt" Lange with the band itself. Number three on the Billboard 200, four times platinum, and four consecutive singles on the Hot 100: "You Might Think" at seven, "Magic" at twelve, "Drive" at three and "Hello Again" at twenty.

"You Might Think" is the video that gave them a face. It was directed by Jeff Stein —the man behind The Kids Are Alright, The Who's documentary— with Alex Weil and Charlie Levi, founders of Charlex, an effects house that came out of advertising. It cost eighty thousand dollars, almost three times the average budget of a music video of the period, and it was a pioneer in the use of the Quantel Paintbox, the first tool that allowed work directly on the video screen. At the first MTV Video Music Awards, in 1984, it took the prize for Video of the Year ahead of "Thriller" by Michael Jackson, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper, "Every Breath You Take" by The Police and "Rockit" by Herbie Hancock; that night "Thriller" won three awards and did not win the big one. The video for "Drive" was directed by an actor, Timothy Hutton, fresh from his Oscar for Ordinary People, and the lead was a nineteen-year-old Czech model called Paulina Porizkova. Ocasek married her in 1989. Thirty years later she would be the one to find his body.

The twenty-three-year cold war

Door to Door, from August 1987, produced by Ocasek, stopped at number twenty-six on the Billboard 200 —their worst position since the debut— and is the only record of the classic era that did not get past Gold. Four months later, in February 1988, the band announced its break-up. The underlying reason was not artistic: the catalogue's songwriting royalties went almost exclusively to Ocasek, and that left the others outside that income. He said so himself to the New York Times in May 2011: with Orr he had a real cold war that lasted some twenty-three years, and he believed there was a lot of envy because he wrote the songs and got the attention. Twenty-three years back from 2011 lands exactly on 1988.

Each went his own way. Ocasek built a second career as a producer that had begun before the split and much further from pop than is usually said: Suicide in 1980, Bad Brains' Rock for Light in 1983, the three Weezer records he signed in 1994, 2001 and 2014, Bad Religion, Nada Surf, Guided by Voices, and two songs —only two— from No Doubt's Rock Steady. Orr put out a solo album, The Lace, in 1986, whose single "Stay the Night" reached number twenty-four on the Hot 100, higher than two of The Cars' first three singles. In the nineties there was an attempt at a reunion that went nowhere: it was driven by a manager of Hawkes, Easton and Robinson, Ocasek said no and, according to him, all hell broke loose and the lawyers got involved, with a lot of money spent on fees for nothing. There is no public lawsuit, judgment or settlement; the only thing documented is his version. In 1997 he settled the matter: he said never, and that could be relied on. The reunion under another name came later, in 2005, and was called The New Cars: Easton and Hawkes with Todd Rundgren on vocals, Kasim Sulton on bass and Prairie Prince on drums, one live record —It's Alive!, from May 2006— and touring until September 2007. Robinson was invited and declined amicably.

Orr did not live to see any of it. In May 2000 a mass was found in his pancreas at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta; the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer and the illness lasted five months. He went on playing live all summer with his band Big People. He died on the night of the third of October 2000, in Atlanta, at the age of fifty-three.

The other four came back in 2011 with Move Like This, number seven on the Billboard 200, and the bass was played by Greg Hawkes on an instrument that had belonged to Orr. On the fourteenth of April 2018, at the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, The Cars entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted by Brandon Flowers, of The Killers, who said they were the first band he fell in love with and that you never forget the first one; on bass was Scott Shriner, of Weezer, the group whose records Ocasek had produced. They played four songs, and it was the last time the band played with him. He did not die shortly afterwards, as is repeated: seventeen months passed. On the fifteenth of September 2019, Porizkova found him dead at his home in New York, at the age of seventy-five. The city's medical examiner ruled hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with pulmonary emphysema as a contributing condition, and manner of death natural; he was convalescing from surgery which, according to Porizkova, had been for lung cancer. Ocasek had signed a new will that disinherited her, alleging that she had abandoned him before the operation, and that also disinherited two of his six children. The litigation with the estate was resolved by settlement in 2021.

What to remember

The Cars did not begin at the top and did not have a career without potholes: it began with a demo that a Boston DJ put on the radio before the record existed, made a debut that took one hundred and thirty-nine weeks to turn into a classic without a single American top twenty single, hit its ceiling in 1984 with Heartbeat City and broke apart in 1988 over a royalty split that was never argued out loud. The five of 1976 were always the same five, and the voice on their two most remembered songs, "Just What I Needed" and "Drive", was not the songwriter's but the bassist's.

And there is one afternoon that makes all of that look small. On the thirteenth of July 1985, a song about someone who does not know how to look after themselves became, without the band asking for it or knowing about it, the soundtrack to a famine, and a musician who had nothing to do with it gave up a song from his own set so that the world would see it with that music over the top. When that slow keyboard of "Drive" sounds and Benjamin Orr's warm voice comes in, there is what The Cars really did: a song so exact that it ended up telling something nobody had written it for.

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Sources

The Cars was an American rock, new wave and power pop band formed in Boston in 1976, with a line-up that never changed: Ric Ocasek (Richard Theodore Otcasek, 23 March 1944, Baltimore; rhythm guitar, lead vocals and composer of almost the entire repertoire), Benjamin Orr (Benjamin Orzechowski, 8 September 1947, Lakewood, Ohio; bass and lead vocals), Elliot Easton (lead guitar), Greg Hawkes (keyboards) and David Robinson (drums and visual direction, author of the group's name). Earlier core: Milkwood, Richard and the Rabbits and Cap'n Swing; Robinson came from The Modern Lovers and DMZ. First official concert on 31 December 1976 at Pease Air Force Base, New Hampshire. The demo of "Just What I Needed" and "My Best Friend's Girl" played on WCOZ and WBCN in Boston from March 1977, in the 14:00 to 18:00 slot of the DJ Maxanne Sartori; signed by the A&R man George Daly for Elektra/Asylum after offers from Arista. "The Cars" (6 June 1978, Elektra, prod. Roy Thomas Baker, recorded in February 1978 at AIR Studios, London): no. 18 on the Billboard 200, 139 weeks on the chart, no. 4 on the 1979 year-end list, 6× platinum RIAA; added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress on 16 April 2024; no. 282 (2003) and no. 353 (2020) on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums. Debut singles on the Hot 100: "Just What I Needed" no. 27 (Orr on vocals; UK no. 17), "My Best Friend's Girl" no. 35 (UK no. 3), "Good Times Roll" no. 41. "Moving in Stereo" is credited to Ocasek and Greg Hawkes, is sung by Orr and became popular through "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982), whose soundtrack album did not include it. "Candy-O" (2 June 1979): no. 3, 4× platinum, cover by Alberto Vargas from an idea by David Robinson (Ferrari 365 GTC/4, model Candy Moore); "Let's Go" no. 14, their first top 20. "Panorama" (15 August 1980): no. 5, platinum. "Shake It Up" (6 November 1981): no. 9, 2× platinum; "Shake It Up" no. 4. "Heartbeat City" (12 March 1984, prod. Robert John "Mutt" Lange and The Cars, recorded between July 1983 and January 1984 at Battery Studios, London): no. 3, 4× platinum; "You Might Think" no. 7 and no. 1 Mainstream Rock, "Magic" no. 12, "Drive" no. 3 (Orr on vocals; UK no. 5 in 1984), "Hello Again" no. 20, "Why Can't I Have You" no. 33. The video for "You Might Think", directed by Jeff Stein with Alex Weil and Charlie Levi (Charlex), cost 80,000 dollars and was a pioneer in the use of the Quantel Paintbox; it won the first Video of the Year award at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1984, with five other nominations, ahead of "Thriller" (Michael Jackson), "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" (Cyndi Lauper), "Every Breath You Take" (The Police) and "Rockit" (Herbie Hancock). The video for "Drive" was directed by the actor Timothy Hutton and starred Paulina Porizkova, then 19; Ocasek and Porizkova married in 1989 and separated in 2017. Live Aid, 13 July 1985: the montage about the Ethiopian famine screened at Wembley and at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, with "Drive" behind it, was filmed by the Canadian CBC (report by Brian Stewart, edited by Colin Dean in Addis Ababa) and the CBC crew handed it to Bob Geldof telling him that CBS would not broadcast it because it found it "too extreme" ("we couldn't show it on CBS because it's too extreme", per Geldof's memoir "Is That It?", 1986); Geldof showed it to David Bowie and to the promoter Harvey Goldsmith; Bowie gave up a song from his set so that it would be broadcast (the established version points to "Five Years"; Thomas Dolby remembers "Fascination"). Geldof stated that after its broadcast more money was pledged than at any other moment of the concert and the phone lines collapsed. The Cars played that day at the JFK at 17:39 EDT with "You Might Think", "Drive", "Just What I Needed" and "Heartbeat City". The British reissue of the single "Drive" reached no. 4 in August 1985 and the band gave away its income —close to 160,000 pounds— to the Band Aid Trust; Ocasek handed the cheque over in person to the trustee Midge Ure in London in November 1986 (NME, 15 November 1986). "Door to Door" (25 August 1987, prod. Ocasek): no. 26, Gold. Break-up announced in February 1988. Ocasek to The New York Times (Andrew Goldman, "The Return of Ric Ocasek", 6 May 2011): "Ben and I had a real cold war that lasted about 23 years"; the catalogue's songwriting royalties went almost exclusively to Ocasek. The attempted reunion of the nineties ended, according to Ocasek himself (Rolling Stone, 2011), with lawyers and fees, with no public record of any lawsuit, judgment or settlement. The New Cars (2005-2007): Todd Rundgren, Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes, Kasim Sulton and Prairie Prince; live album "It's Alive!" (9 May 2006, Eleven Seven Music); David Robinson declined the invitation. Ocasek as producer: Suicide (1980, 1988, 1992), Romeo Void (1982), Bad Brains ("Rock for Light", 1983; "God of Love", 1995), Weezer (1994, 2001, 2014), Bad Religion (1996), Nada Surf (1996), Guided by Voices (1999) and two songs from No Doubt's "Rock Steady" (2001); he did not produce "Return of Saturn". Orr released "The Lace" (1986), with "Stay the Night" at no. 24 on the Hot 100. Benjamin Orr died on the night of 3 October 2000 in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of 53, of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed in May 2000 at Piedmont Hospital; he went on performing with his band Big People through the summer of 2000. "Move Like This" (10 May 2011, Hear Music/Concord): no. 7 on the Billboard 200, with Greg Hawkes on bass, using a bass that had been Orr's. The Cars were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 14 April 2018 at the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, inducted by Brandon Flowers (The Killers), with Scott Shriner (Weezer) on bass; they played "You Might Think", "My Best Friend's Girl", "Moving in Stereo" and "Just What I Needed", the band's last performance with Ocasek. Ric Ocasek was found dead by Paulina Porizkova on 15 September 2019 at his home in New York, at the age of 75; the city's medical examiner ruled hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with pulmonary emphysema as a contributing condition and manner of death natural; he was convalescing from surgery which, according to Porizkova, had been for lung cancer, an illness that does not appear as a cause in the ruling. Ocasek left a will that disinherited Porizkova and two of his six children; the litigation with the estate was resolved by settlement in 2021. There is no documentation of addiction in any member of the band. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, NME (15 November 1986 and Benjamin Orr's obituary), The New York Times, ABC News, UPI, NBC News, CBS News, Deadline, Rolling Stone, Variety, Louder, Loudwire, Ultimate Classic Rock, MusicRadar, Steve Pafford, Best Classic Bands, Setlist.fm, SecondHandSongs and Bob Geldof's memoir "Is That It?" (1986).