Excerpt: Liners from The Cars Anthology

During the late ’70s and early ’80s, most rock fans were split into two camps, with hardly any common ground. Either you listened to “punk” bands like The Clash, Talking Heads, and The Cars, or you were into “mainstream” bands like Aerosmith, Queen, and The Cars.

The Cars played their first gig at an air force base, and became a fixture at the clubs. But their initial success owed more to a studio session that happened a couple months after the first gig. Nine songs were cut in one day, including the future hit singles “Just What I Needed” and “My Best Friend’s Girl,” plus a pair of tunes, “Ta Ta Wayo Wayo” and “Leave Or Stay,” that wouldn’t get commercially recorded for another ten years. It’s a common theory that producer Roy Thomas Baker retooled The Cars’ material when these songs were recut for the first album, but the demos prove otherwise: Even without Baker’s production flourishes (heard mainly in the finished album’s ornate backing vocals), the arrangements were already fleshed out.

Those demos found their way to influential hometown deejay Maxanne Sartori, who put “Just What I Needed” and “My Best Friend’s Girl” into heavy rotation at WBCN. Unreleased demos by unestablished bands were even harder to get on the radio in 1977 than they are now, and when Cars songs started appearing on radio tip sheets next to Aerosmith and Elton John, with the word tape listed where the label name should be, it sent up a flag for A&R reps to make a beeline toward Boston.

Elektra and Arista both made serious plays for the band, with Arista head Clive Davis taking the band to dinner before a show at the Paradise. But Elektra won out, in part because Arista already had a new wave presence with Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed, and Elektra offered a shot at their own stylistic niche (“Here they had the Eagles and Jackson Browne, and along comes this crazy Boston band who wanted a black-and-white photo collage on their cover,” says Robinson). Once signed, the band was recording its debut album (with the photo collage compromised to the inside cover) within a year of its first gig.

The Cars was a fairly accurate representation of their live sets, and the band’s trademarks were all in place—with Easton’s rock-solid guitar bouncing off Hawkes’ exotic keyboard sounds, and with Orr usually singing the more romantic lyrics while Ocasek handled the more neurotic ones. Balancing the many upbeat tracks was the moody “Moving In Stereo,” the clearest example of Roxy Music’s influence. And the band’s love of technology was always evident; note Robinson’s use of Syndrums on the kickoff to “Good Times Roll.” “We’d always get the latest stuff from music stores and find some use for it, even if it would be obsolete in two months,” he says. “It reached the point where I’d have 10 or 12 foot switches to hit during a short set.”

Also notable was Ocasek’s sense of irony: Was “Good Times Roll” really a good time anthem, or something a little more sinister? How often does a love object get hit with a zinger like “You think you’re so illustrious, you call yourself intense”? And was “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” supposed to be a pledge of love or a subtle put-down? “There was definitely a little self-conscious irony in there,” says Hawkes, who usually cowrote one song per album. “We started out wanting to be electric and straight-ahead rock, and it turned into an artier kind of thing.”

The three opening tracks—“Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Just What I Needed”—all charted (in reverse order) as singles; and virtually every track got substantial FM airplay. “We never tried to make hits, ever,” Robinson insists. “We just knew we had something different that sounded good. I probably thought that none of them were hits at the time.” Still, optimism within the band was generally running high. “We used to joke that the first album should be called The Cars’ Greatest Hits,” says Easton. “We knew that a lot of great bands fall through the cracks. But we were getting enough feedback from people we respected to know that we were on the right track.”

In fact, the album wasn’t a hit right out of the box: “Just What I Needed” started out getting airplay in the Northeast, spreading gradually to Los Angeles and beyond. “That first year was one of those absolute experiences,” Easton says. “Every day we’d be going someplace we’d never been before. As a young musician, getting accepted as a peer was a pretty heady feeling. I think one thing we went through was common to a lot of people: You work your whole life to achieve something, then you achieve it and find out that you still have good days and bad days. So you start thinking, Is that all there is? After a while you calm down and get back to work.”

—Brett Milano

An expanded version of this essay appears in Rhino’s The Cars Anthology