After a 24-year absence, '80s synthpop darlings The Cars are back. The newly reunited group—featuring all the original band members minus bassist and vocalist Benjamin Orr, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2000—just wrapped a ten-date cross-country tour to coincide with the May 10 release of their seventh studio album, Move Like This, their first record since Ronald Reagan was in office. Move Like This, which debuted at #7 on the Billboard 200, is vintage Cars right down to the peppy beats, efficient vocals, tidy guitars and New-Wave handclaps. Rolling Stone says the album “has the sound of a band picking up a conversation in mid-sentence.”
News of a Cars reunion took many by surprise as fans had long since given up hope on the band. After all, when singer-songwriter-guitarist Ric Ocasek was asked in a 1997 interview about the possibility of the group getting back together—a decade after their last album Door to Door was released in 1987—he sounded pretty definite when he replied, "I'm saying never and you can count on that." The passing years supported that statement as the prospect of the Cars re-forming grew ever dimmer over time and ultimately seemed about as unlikely as, say, a Zeppelin tour. So what prompted Ocasek to return from oblivion and reunite with his ex-bandmates after nearly a quarter century? The songs, he says. Ocasek had written a few he was excited about and turned to the musicians he knew were best for the job. They jumped at the chance, and drummer David Robinson says would have at any time in the last 20 years.
The Cars is very much Ocasek’s baby. Robinson, guitarist Elliot Easton, and keyboardist Greg Hawkes all defer to him, and selflessly admit that the band’s raison d'être has always been to help Ocasek realize his vision as a songwriter. “Songwriting, in a profound way, is Ric’s instrument,” Easton says. "It's only natural that he would be the sun around which the other planets revolve.”
Ric Ocasek began playing guitar and writing songs when he was ten years old. After briefly attending college, he dropped out of school and moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in the early '70s. It was there he met Benjamin Orr, who was fronting the house band on a TV rock show called Upbeat. The two performed as a classic rock cover duo and began collaborating on their own material before they decided that Boston would be a better place to break into music. Ocasek and Orr made their way to Massachusetts where they met Hawkes, and later Easton, both of whom had studied at the Berklee School of Music.
On their way to forming The Cars, Ocasek and Orr went through several incarnations. They started out as a folk trio called Milkwood with Hawkes as session keyboardist. The three then formed the local club band Richard and the Rabbits. When Hawkes temporarily left the group, Ric and Ben carried on, playing coffeehouses in Cambridge as the acoustic duo simply called Ocasek and Orr. Next up was Cap’n Swing in 1974. Hawkes rejoined his old bandmates in Cap'n Swing, and with the addition of Easton on guitar, Ocasek had only to replace the group's drummer with Modern Lovers' skinsman David Robinson before all the pieces of the puzzle at last snapped into place.
Calling themselves The Cars, the band spent the winter of 1976-77 rehearsing in Ocasek's basement. When their demo of "Just What I Needed" caught the attention of a local DJ, it became a top-requested song in Boston. Based on the amount of airplay the song generated, The Cars were signed to Elektra Records. They recorded their self-titled debut album in just two weeks and released it in 1978. The Cars, with its chart singles "Just What I Needed," "My Best Friend's Girl," and "Good Times Roll," made an immediate success of the band.
Candy-O followed in 1979 and included the hits "Let's Go" and "It's All I Can Do." The Cars' third studio album, the more experimental Panorama, was released in 1980. It charted the Top 40 hit "Touch and Go," and was followed up by Shake It Up in 1981, with its singles "Shake It Up" and "Since You're Gone." The following year, The Cars went on hiatus to allow band members time to work on various solo projects.
The group returned to the charts three years later with their fifth studio album, Heartbeat City, which launched the hit singles "You Might Think," "Magic," "Hello Again," and the fatalistic ballad "Drive." Sung by Orr, "Drive" was an international hit. And then, after the release of Door to Door in 1987 with its Top 20 hits "Tonight She Comes" and "You Are the Girl," The Cars were suddenly history. With six studio albums—the first five of which went platinum or multi-platinum—five compilations, and twenty-four singles to their credit, the band called it quits in February 1988, at the height of their success, amid escalating internal tensions. Ocasek contends they did so at the right time. "I know that I didn't care," he says. "We left on a high point, and that's it." Band members moved onto solo careers and other pursuits, including Robinson, who opened up an art gallery in the seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, and Ocasek, who briefly held an A&R job at The Cars’ old label, Elektra Records. He went on to produce records for artists like No Doubt, Weezer, and Bad Religion.
Over the years, Hawkes, Easton and Robinson pressed for a Cars reunion, but Ocasek remained obstinate on the matter. Against his wishes, Hawkes and Easton eventually toured as the New Cars in 2006-07 with Todd Rundgren as frontman, Prairie Prince on drums, and Kasim Sulton on bass and keyboards. That project fizzled after only a couple years. But the band members don’t breech that subject much these days. Water under the bridge, all of it, as far as Ocasek’s concerned. The Cars have closed that particular chapter of their history and have moved on. They’ve new music to make and their only direction is forward.
Move Like This, so named by Ocasek as a take-off of the band's penchant for onstage immobility, was recorded last year in upstate New York and in Los Angeles by the surviving members of the group along with Gareth “Jacknife” Lee (U2, R.E.M.), who produced five tracks. Lee and Hawkes split the bass duties and play Orr’s guitar on the record. Ocasek, who often conceded the vocal spotlight to his friend's rich tenor, sang all 10 songs. Aside from the hole left in the band by Benjamin Orr's passing, the new material—songs such as "Hits Me," "Free" and "Blue Tip”—has much the same swagger, art-rock minimalism and sleek pop of The Cars’ early days and is reminiscent of their best work. "We were there for the songs," Ocasek says of the Cars' original hit streak. "This album carries that through.”
As for the future of the band, a reserved Ocasek remains cautiously optimistic. He tells Rolling Stone of The Cars' return, "It took on more life than I thought it would." Adds a more enthusiastic Hawkes, "We can make more recordings the same way we did this one. It was so easy, it was ridiculous."
