The topic at the moment is Songs We Like, with Van Halen's "Jump" the current focus of discussion. Perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, both Hawkes and Ocasek like it. "A good song is a good song," Ocasek shrugs by way of explanation. I agree, but add that not everybody hears things so fairly. To some people, "Jump" isn't a good song, it's a Van Halen song, and Van Halen shouldn't be too lavishly praised because, well....
"Because it's not cool?" Ocasek asks, with a tinge of sarcasm. "Who cares! I like anybody who does something good.
"There are a lot of elitists who feel that if you like what the masses like, it's uncool," he continues from behind his dark glasses. 'I think the best thing you could possibly be is uncool. When you get tired of fitting in, then you'll be what you are.
"Be what you are" is something of a Cars by-law. In the roughly six years since the band first burst forth from the Boston club scene with an eponymous debut album and two top-forty hits, "Just What I Needed" and "My Best Friend's Girl," the Cars have been a band in a category by itself. On the one hand, the Cars' songwriter, Rio Ocasek, wrote songs that were as self-conscious, alienated and emotionally distanced as anything washed ashore by rock's new wave. These were dressed up by his band mates- keyboardist Greg Hawkes, bassist Ben Orr, guitarist Elliot Easton and drummer David Robinson-in an array of blank rhythms, quirky textures and angular hooks. Yet on the other hand, this pointedly avant-pop approach was quickly embraced by fans and radio alike, and sold like hotcakes while other new wavers remained buried underground.
As a result, the band has been seen as the product of extremes. we've been written up a lot for having a duality," says Hawkes, the pop band on one side and the arty band' on the other.' Though it's true that the cars' singular sound can easily be broken into two separate parts, it would be a mistake to claim that the band's sound and success is simply a matter of formula. After all, there have been plenty of other bands that have exhibited similar characteristics with far less success, from the early days of Roxy Music to the current struggle of XTC.
You might even go so far as to wonder if the cars' avoidance of formula is part of the reason they've done so well. Ocasek does. During the Songs We Like symposium, I asked him what songs by other people he liked to play when he was starting out, and he answered, "I never did that. I've played maybe two covers in my life. Three. which I think is an advantage. I never really learned other people's songs, and never really learned those forms. I sometimes wonder if that's not the reason the stuff I do is not reminiscent of those things...
Still, there is a cars sound, and even if you can't categorize t or pinpoint its lineage, it's easy enough to identify. Hawkes: There are little specific things that are cars trademarks, like the clicky guitar eighths with a few quirky synthesizer lines around them and a fairly straight rock beat To me, that is the cars sound. Some of the vocal mannerisms seem like trace-mark touches, too. Even the way the background vocals are recorded, with a kind of multi-tracked sound so they're not way up front, but are still kind of thick."
A good description, and one which is instantly shattered upon hearing Heartbeat City, the latest Cars album. From me flanged smear given the opening vocals in 'Hello Again" to the warm blanket of synths wrapped around Ben Orr's croon in Drive ,"it's clear that this is not the strangeness with which we have become so familiar. Some, like 'Drive" and 'Why Can't I Have You," seem to have been softened for the mainstream market of housewives and Hot Hits; others, like "Magic" or It's Not The Night," sound like they've been beefed up to make the qualifying weight for AOR muscle-band fans. By the third or fourth listening, you can pick out many of the familiar devices, but only after you've realized where to look for them, because for the most part, Heartbeat City downplays individual quirks to go for a more unified, wholly integrated sound.
"It seems like a natural progression," says Hawkes of the difference between the stereotypical Cars sound and that of the new album. "Yeah, I think it was just the next logical step," agrees Ocasek. 'Those songs were the ones we did, and the way it worked out was the way it came out. There was definitely no attempt to do it in a different style."
But what's so natural and logical about an album that sounds so different? Why, the fact that it sounds different, of course. Consider the confusion over exactly where the band sits in the rock world. If the Cars were totally predictable, it would be much easier to slide them into a convenient pigeonhole. Therefore, once the band has established the basics of a sound-the clicking guitar and quirky synthesizer Hawkes describe-the next step would be to walk away from it, so that the audience is thrown off balance. Just as they were when they heard the first album.
You go through and you make all kinds of records," Ocasek says. This is the fifth Cars album; it should have a different sound than the fourth record. That's really the crux of the thing. It's not like any prior Cars album. It doesn't sound like one. With time, it's going to sound like a Cars record, because the vocals are the same. But in a sense, it's a change. And change is always good."
The way you change is also a consideration, of course, and the fact that the Cars hired a very mainstream producer, John "Mutt" Lange of AC/DC fame, is in its own way more surprising than if the band had turned in a hair-raisingly avant-garde effort. "It would be easy to make a record that nobody would like," Ocasek muses That's not very difficult. I could make a record for the critics, or I could make a record for 10,000 people The point is whether that's the real reason you're doing it.Besides, argues Hawkes, the seeming conservatism of Heartbreak City is just another swing of the band's internal pendulum. He explains. Up until this particular album, I've always felt proudest of Panorama. I think that was our most adventurous, as far as doing whatever we wanted. Not that we don't do what we want on the other records, but Panorama seemed to be the one that swung to the left the most. I guess this recoin is really just a swing in the other direction."
"We were using Mutt for pretty much the same reason, adds Ocasek We wanted a change. We could have produced it ourselves if we wanted to. But as a sound person, I really like Mutts sound. I thought that the combination of the sound he gets and what we do would mingle pretty nicely. Mutt's never done a Band like us; he's done a lot of heavy metal But I thought the two could mix.
Indeed they did, out not in the way one might have expected. Certainly there's a lot of Mutt Lange in the beefy crunch of Magic" and the crisp shifts in dynamics that spur It's Not The Night. Out that's largely a function of his way with guitar sounds, and there really isn't much guitar on the album, Strangely enough.' says Hawkes, 'part of that was working with Mutt i say strangely because you would expect that for a producer with his background there would be more guitar and less synthesizer But I think Mutt was really intrigued with working with Keyboards a lot. I think it was a way for him to do something different."
In making Heartbeat City, the operative phrase was "working with keyboards a lot." Among the many gadgets on hand at Battery Studios n London, where the album was recorded, was a Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, which the band decided to use on the new album. Why? "To learn about it," shrugs Ocasek. Because your parameters are widened by what you can do with it, soundwise and on almost any level of playing. Because it's here today and is there to be used if you want to use it. It's just another instrument. We just chose on this record to get very involved with it."
'Very involved" is an understatement. It took Greg Hawkes, Andy Topeka and David Robinson a month just to learn how to use the thing. And use it they did-" maybe between seventy and eighty percent of the keyboard parts are programmed on the computer" says Hawkes. "But you've got to realize that it might take eight hours of preparation on one part, programming it a certain way. Then maybe it sounds stiff, so you have to try programming it in a different way. You really do have to work with the typewriter as far as entering the various functions and parameters goes. It's not easy to change a sound, as with the twist of a knob-and I'm used to twisting knobs."
But once it's all in there, playing it back is just a matter of pushing a button, right? Nope. "It's kind of misleading to say that once you have it in the computer you can get it with one take," replies Hawkes. "Because you might spend literally hours playing around with the sound and all the other parameters before you actually turn on the tape."
Aside from making more work for Hawkes, the use of computers didn't really change the songs on Heartbreak City, lust the way they sounded. "The only thing I'm concerned about is the feel of everything," says Ocasek. "The sound is important as well, but you can try sounds and more sounds until you find exactly what you want. The real momentum is in your feel, as opposed to the technology part of it. Technology is just a byproduct, something that, if you want to use it, you can use it."
The process begins with Ocasek's writing. "The songs are written first, written for the most part on a cassette recorder or on an B-track. I put everything down live, and it usually takes me about a night to do one. But it obviously depends on the song.
'Then, to reproduce the song in a studio situation, it's just a matter of finding the basic elements of a song, and using that as a guideline. The arrangements are basically on the demo, and between Greg and myself and the band-whoever is in the rehearsal situation before recording-we work it out. We might move things around a little bit, embellish things more, because those are rough tapes. But the song is already there, so that one could refer to it all the time, as to what it will ultimately sort of sound like."
"Ric writes the songs, which generally consist of the basic structure, all lyrics and sometimes that's all it consists of," elaborates Hawkes Sometimes it consists of a complete arrangement, with all the keyboard melodies and background parts. On this particular record, most of the songs went through at least one or two complete changes.
"This is how it would happen: Mutt would suggest something, and I'll come up with my own little variation, and maybe Rip will be out in the other room hearing all this, and will come into the control room with another suggestion. There was a lot of playing around with arrangements on this one.
All that effort wasn't simply a matter of getting the right gloss finish on the album, however. It was to get the right sense o~ guts. "Mutt's a definite stickler for feel," says Ocasek. "He'd sit there with somebody for hours working on a part, and only looking for the feel. If he didn't hear the feel, it wasn't down on tape.
'Writing's different than recording. When I'd write it, the feel was all there Mutt would always refer to the demos and say, 'You've got to have the feel of this,' or, 'This doesn't have the feel of the demo-do it again.' That's the point of creativity, it's always trying to get that feel. Because the demos, when they've got it, just naturally work, whether they're out of time or not, no matter where they sit. They just work, because they're done quickly and at the point of inspiration, You have to marry the feel to the technology to get it right."
Unfortunately, that's much easier said than done, particularly when dealing with the level of automation the Fairlight CMI entails. People are fallible, and unlike computers, don't always land each note smack in the middle of the beat, That's what makes so much music feel human. That's also what makes programming for feel hell on the programmer,
"We spent quite a bit of time moving some of these parts around in literally milliseconds-a little ahead, a little behind the beat-until it felt right," reports Hawkes with what sounds like a mixture of weariness and pride. "That was really how small the units we were working in were. Sometimes, when we put down a part, if it read out mathematically correct, it did feel wrong. It would feel slow, or maybe there was a characteristic of the sound that would make the part feel late. So we would spend quite a lot of time advancing things in very small steps, or delaying them in very small steps, until the flow was right."
By now, perhaps you've noticed that, as with the way their music is perceived, there's something of a duality between the way Ocasek and Hawkes work, Ocasek with his quickly conceived demos and Hawkes with his patient piecework. One lauds his demos because "they just naturally work, whether they're out of time or not," the other argues that "I like working with drum machines better than working without 'em." Even their appearances seem poles apart, with Ocasek's lanky height forever draped in black to artistic effect while Hawkes remains an average-looking fellow dressed in neutral colors and possessed of the sort of demeanor generally reserved for math whizzes.
On the other hand, all that may be smoke, for Ocasek and Hawkes seem at times little more than the opposite sides of the same coin. Towards the end of the interview, Hawkes is summing up his sense of the band, following my suggestion that the secret of the Cars is that they are five musicians with an avant-garde sensibility but pop tastes.
"Yeah," he says, "we really, as a band, try not to take things too seriously. I think if you actually meet the people in the band, you get the sense of playfulness that certain writers don't seem to have found yet. Because they haven't seen that, they see the Cars as a very serious, very calculated, very thought-out enterprise. Which is really not the case. We're spontaneous, but structured at the same time."
Sort of humor with discipline?
Ocasek answers by tossing a paper airplane from across the room.
"That shows you what I mean," says Hawkes. "I'm sure he was planning that all day...."
Ric Ocasek is a Gibson guitar man, playing mostly a '55 Les Paul Jr or an SG. Occasionally, he'll switch to a Fender guitar, usually his pink Jazzmaster. All are sent through Marshall amps with a minimum of treatment.
At home, he uses a LinnDrum supplemented by 'a lot of cheap drum machines, which I love. I even have an old Hammond organ that has the 'Mersey Beat' on it." His keyboards are Prophet synthesizers, the Roland Jupiter B and the Memorymoog. He tapes. onto an 80M TEAC, through a Sound Workshops board with outboard processing gear that includes Roland Space Echoes, Even tide harmonizers, Marshall time modulators and the Lexicon 224 delay.
Elliot Easton own Scholz Rockmans.
Greg Hawkes Both Greg and Ric used the Fairlight CMI extensively on Heartbeat City, but also used the Roland Jupiter B and Vocoder, the Memorymoog, the Yamaha DX7 and DX9, the Mini-Korg, a Prophet 5 and a PPG 3.2 Wave synthesizer.
In the 2004 book "Rivers Edge" written by John D. Luerssen there is an actual chapter entitled The Cars. Although it is 99% about Ric and his dealings with the band during Weezer's Blue Album recording sessions It is chock full of quotes from Ric as well as accolades by Weezer's leader Rivers Cuomo about The Cars. Also provided is an interesting tidbit of what Ric knew about the the firing of original Weezer guitarist Jason Cropper and the adding of their present gutarist Brian Bell. After toying with the notion of self-producing their major-label debut -- which Geffen suits outright objected to -- the band selected Ric Ocasek, former frontman for the multi-platinum rock outfit the Cars. According to Rivers, "The record company was really pushing us to work with a producer, so we figured that if we had to have somebody in the studio with us, it might as well just be someone who writes good songs -- and the Cars' first record just rules. We sent Ric a tape and he called right back and said, 'You guys are great. I want to work with you.'"
"A day later, two days later, the record company called us up and said Ric's coming to your rehearsal today," Sharp recollected. "We were just like, 'Yeah, right, he's coming to our rehearsal.' But that day Pat saw him in a guitar store and he goes, 'Oh my god, maybe he is coming.' So he came to our rehearsal and hung out, and we were all pretty nervous. We'd never really dealt with anybody outside of the band at all."
"I got their demo from Todd Sullivan," Ocasek said over the phone in July 2003. "I had been in
During one practice, on August 6th, the band even finalized a cover of the Cars' 1978 smash single "Just What I Needed" in homage to their new producer. A few days later, Rivers, Pat, Matt and Jason flew to
"I had them in pre-production for at least a week, trimming it down," Ocasek recollected. "I wanted it to be a concise record that had a focal point. In pre-production they did Cars songs, which I thought was pretty cute."
"When we first met Ric, we were so freaked out by everything," remembered Matt Sharp. "We'd never met anyone famous. We were like, 'Oh my god, what's happening?' It was very hard to look at anybody eye-to-eye. But we milked him for all the Cars stories we could because we were all Cars fans." Cars albums released between 1978 and the band's demise in 1987 have sold a phenomenal 23 million copies so far in the
"I'd always admired the Cars and Ric Ocasek's songwriting and production skills," enthused Rivers. "I wasn't worried about him handling the band's heavier side. He'd produced Bad Brains and they're a lot heavier than us."
"We picked him . . . scratch that. I picked him because I liked and respected his songwriting," Rivers later said of Ocasek. "What we learned from him is actually kind of boring and technical. Before we met him, we always had our guitars on the rhythm pickup, which has a bassy, dull sound to it. That was the sound we liked at the time. But he convinced us to switch to the lead pickup, which is much brighter. I think when I wrote those songs originally, I was just sitting in the garage by myself and it sounded great when you're all by yourself, because it sounds heavy and bassy. But in the context of the full band, playing at Club Dump, that pickup just sounds really . . . dull. And he got us to brighten it up. It made a huge difference, I think, in the way we sound."
At Ocasek's urging, the band left the comforts of
Fifteen songs were tracked during Weezer's first New York practice session, but four songs -- "Lullaby for Wayne," "Getting Up and Leaving," "I Swear It's True," and an alternate version of "In the Garage" -- were eliminated as contenders for Weezer. A fifth tune from this session, "Mykel & Carli," would be attempted but abandoned only to be recorded the following year when it was relegated to B-side status. For the album, Ocasek and the band came to agreement on ten songs. They were: "My Name Is Jonas," "No One Else," "The World Has Turned and Left Me Here," "Buddy Holly," "Undone -- The Sweater Song," "Surf Wax America," "Say It Ain't So," "In the Garage," "Holiday" and "Only in Dreams."
The actual recording of Weezer's debut got underway at Electric Lady Studios in late August 1993. While in
"The plan was to do a quick record over the span of just three weeks or something," said Ocasek. "The real fun came when we started to record at Electric Lady. That's where the personalities developed and I got to see just how artistic Rivers really was. A lot of times we had little talks about which songs we should do. I remember at one point he was hesitant to do 'Buddy Holly' and I was like, 'Rivers, we can talk about it. Do it anyway, and if you don't like it when it's done, we won't use it. But I think you should try. You did write it and it is a great song.' He was up for doing almost anything. I had a good relationship with him, because I wouldn't make him do anything he didn't want to do. I was just sort of there to guide him."
So, what really went down? Rewind to September 1993 as producer Ocasek remembered the whole ordeal a little differently. "They weren't like a happy-go-lucky band anyway," said Ocasek, who has gone on to man the boards for the likes of No Doubt, Guided By Voices, and Bad Religion. "In the middle of that record he fired the guitar player," Ric divulged. "He called me when the record was finished, the day before we were supposed to start mixing, and said, 'Listen, I just fired the guitar player.' So I said, 'What are you gonna do now?' He's like, 'I want all of his parts off the record.'"
INTERVIEW Magazine , FEBRUARY 2000 ISSUE Interview by Evelyn McDonnell
Ric Ocasek was already a twenty-nine-year-old rock 'n' roll veteran when the 1978 eponymous debut by the Cars went multiplatinum. Six foot two and 150 pounds, the Baltimore native enjoyed a geek's fantasy revenge: He was an early MTV icon and married a model, Paulina Porizkova. Since the Cars crashed in 1988, Ocasek has released the occasional solo record and produced artists including Weezer, Bad Religion, and Guided By Voices.
EVELYN MCDONNELL: Does it seem like thirteen years ago that you were on the cover?
RIC OCASEK: It seems like five, maybe.
EM: Do you miss those days at all?
RO: I don't really, because I'm still involved in music. I don't miss the traveling every day. I don't miss the attention, either. It's nice for a good period of time, then it becomes overwhelming. The good thing about it is that you get a bigger worldview because, well, first you travel the world. And then you get a different perspective about people. Our success lasted quite a good span of time, twelve years of chaos. I like all that insanity. I still look for that.
EM: Not very many musicians make the transition to production. Why did you?
RO: It wasn't really a transition for me; it was just an extension of what I've done since 1980. I had a studio in Boston as early as the second record of the Cars, and I basically lived in the studio. I love the process of making records, of putting down the performances and melodies.
EM: Now you get to watch other bands go through the chaos and insanity.
Ro: Exactly. I feel very sorry for new bands because they don't have the same opportunity that we did. Now they have production companies that write albums and do the music, and the bands come in and sing. I don't even know if they're bands, really. Record companies used to sign a band and say, "Go and do your record, I hope it's cool, If it's not, we'll get it on the next one." Now it's like, "I don't even want to hear a tape unless you have five singles. And if you don't have the five singles, we'll get them for you."
EM: You worked on the upcoming album by Hanson. How much of your observations are based on that experience?
Ro: That was the most interfering that I've ever had. Of course it would be, because they're such a big band. And I didn't even mind. But when I was hired, the premise was, "Now we'd like the Hansons to do their great songs that they've written, and we'd also like them to play a lot on the record," which is different from what they did on the first. And then the A&R person who hired me got fired, and another guy came in and wanted to rehire everybody.
EM: How do you choose records to produce?
Ro: Every week I get about ten tapes from labels and bands, and I go through them and listen for something different and adventurous and good. It doesn't matter if it's signed, unsigned, big label, small label.
EM: You're producing a new record by Bran Van 3000 now. How is that going?
Ro: That's one of the favorite records I've ever done. Jamie Disalvio has a good circle of people. He'll get the Montreal Symphony Orchestra to do two songs and a Cuban flute player from Miami to do one.
EM: It sounds very different from Hanson.
Ro: Totally. The only similarity is the part that I like the least: the Pro Tools part, the computer part. Looking at a TV screen when you're doing music, that just doesn't fit with me. I'd rather have my hands on the faders. I'd rather not be looking at five vocals where one vocal is blue and another one is red and another one is yellow, and which one do you want, the yellow one or the green one. I don't want the yellow or the green one; I just want the one that sounds good.
EM: What's going on in music that excites you, that you think is an improvement since 1987?
Ro: Well, certainly the sound of music on a technical level is a hundredfold better. As far as general music goes, I don't think it's any better than the '50s, because any old Buddy Holly song is as good as any song today.
EM: With all the emphasis on celebrity and videos and charts, do you find that artists aren't paying attention to writing?
RO: Yeah, I do. Performers not only copy music, they copy the way people act. They copy the way people hold their hands, they copy the way people dance, they copy jumping up to the camera and looking into it. Every video is the same.
EM: Strangely enough, I turned on MTV this morning and they were playing the "You Might Think" video, because it's number 25 on their Top 100 Videos countdown.
RO: That won the first [MTV Music Video Award]. So I'm permanently attached to a fly [the video shows Ocasek's head on a fly's body]--people send me flies; I have fly pins. That's what I got out of the whole thing: I became a fly.
EM: You and Paulina have two small children. Do you find it hard to have energy for them?
Ro: No. I still have an incredible amount of energy. It's funny: Mentally you feel the same your whole life. You think when you're twenty or twenty-five that when you're forty-five, you're going to feel like a different person, more mature or something, but damn, I've found that I just don't think any differently. Maybe it's because I'm in this kind of business that I just keep going forward, but I don't think you change. And having kids makes me want to stay in touch. You have to help them along, so you want to just keep going.
You remember the saying don't believe everything you read. Well it certainly rings true with Internet Sites that don't have editors and fact checkers like newspapers, magazines and published books have.
Ric appears in this months issue of The Big Takeover Magazine and is interviewed by Jeff Elbel both about Nexterday and his job as head of Inverse.
record. The Cars collectivley as a group at the time didn't believe him but gained some confidence in themselves in at least thinking they had potential.
Ric was interviewed a few months ago by Canadian radio host Rudy Blair."I remember when the first Cars record hit Number One on the charts, I was driving on Sunset Boulevard with Ric Ocasek. We drove past a billboard for the Cars' record, and he said, "If someone had told me a year ago that I would be driving along Sunset Boulevard with Roy Thomas Baker looking up at a billboard of my record that is Number One, I wouldn't have believed him." Roy Thomas Baker also went on to describe why most tracks he did with the cars have a seemless stream to them.
"I love segues, because I like records to be continuous and it gives me a good excuse not to turn off the music and put on something else. They played the first three or four songs off of The Cars first album' in the beginning because the DJ's at the time kept missing the end of the songs. It worked out well."
