Remembering the Cars’ Ric Ocasek, Who Knew the Past But Saw the Future

Like all the best rock stars, Ric Ocasek seemed to be transported to our Earth from another dimension, one with sleeker, sexier sounds and a better sense of fashion. His self-styled alien moves, lanky profile, and laconic drawl made him a New Wave hero, but from the moment the Cars delivered their self-titled debut in 1978, the Boston group found a home in mainstream rock. Midwestern burnouts embraced the Cars as enthusiastically as urban hipsters did, the two seemingly opposed camps finding common ground in Ocasek’s classic pop songs. As odd and ominous as the band could sound, they always relied on strong melodies—a focus that helped turn “Just What I Needed,” “Shake It Up,” “Moving in Stereo,” “Good Times Roll,” and “Drive” into modern standards, and shifted the definition of power pop in the years to come. Ocasek died this week at the age of 75.

The singer’s trick was that he flipped the art-pop equation on its head. He copped Lou Reed’s flat vocal style, but where the Velvet Underground firmly grounded themselves within the world of high art, the Cars deliberately worked in a pop form. Hooks and harmonies propel their biggest hits and deepest cuts, but these songs were distinguished by ideas that existed on the outer edges of the mainstream. Airless, tight rhythms, smeary synths, jarring shards of guitar, monotone speak-singing: each was pioneered in the underground and ushered into the mainstream by the Cars via Ocasek, who made weirdness seem fun and infectious but no less strange.

During the Cars’ peak—beginning in 1978 with the release of their near-flawless first album and lasting through 1984, when they became one of the first breakout stars of MTV—the group never quite seemed to belong at home with any particular faction of rock’n’roll. From one angle, they were at the vanguard of New Wave, creating the polished, provocative sound and quirky image that coded them as geeky outsiders. From another angle, they were thoroughly embedded in the rock mainstream, working with Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker on their first four albums and becoming a Top 40 fixture from the moment they released their debut single, “Just What I Needed.” Besides 1980’s Panorama, a willful detour into dour synths, each of those first four Cars albums simultaneously salutes and satirizes the kind of rock’n’roll that fueled AM radio stations during the 1960s.

Like the Ramones, Ocasek fixated on old-fashioned pop songs, twisting shopworn themes and swiping song titles. “Bye Bye Love,” from the Cars’ debut, shared its name with a hit by the Everly Brothers, “Good Times Roll” nodded to the old R&B chestnut “Let the Good Times Roll,” and 1981’s Shake It Up closed with “Think It Over” and “Maybe Baby,” both titles stolen from Ocasek’s original idol, Buddy Holly. Naturally, all of these lifts were deliberate, but the wondrous thing about the Cars is how they never wore their influences as a badge of honor. They poached the best parts of the past like a shrewd thrift-store picker: very specifically, with a clear understanding of how they would serve a forward-thinking ensemble.

Taking a cue from Roxy Music, the artiest of the early-’70s glam rockers, the Cars used the past as a postmodern playground, absorbing the basics of song construction and arrangement as they shaped bubblegum and avant-rock alike into their own propulsive creation. Greg Hawkes’ careening keyboard evoked cheap teen rock’n’roll as much as it nodded to Elvis Costello; Elliot Easton had ferocious chops but consciously avoided guitar theatrics; and the rhythms of bassist Benjamin Orr and drummer David Robinson offered a funky update on the Velvets’ menacing throb. Taken together, these elements sounded shiny and new, particularly with Ocasek’s flattened affect accentuating a slight roboticism lurking in the music. A writer of cool efficiency and enormous wit, he honed his hooks so that they lodged into the subconscious upon first listen, but he kept the meaning elusive; the emotions were evident but the import was just beyond reach.

In this regard, the Cars were the opposite of the other power-pop bands that surfaced during the New Wave gold rush of the late ’70s. Though they shared cultural space and stages with groups like Badfinger and the Raspberries, who worshipped at the altar of the British Invasion sound, the Cars were futurists, not revivalists. Decades later, their combination of tightly-controlled rhythms, swaths of keyboards, and disconnected vocals has become shorthand for what sexy synth-rock should sound like. Even a band as fundamentally uncool as Fountains of Wayne found success winkingly appropriating a similar sound on “Stacy’s Mom,” whose video not only alluded to the notorious Phoebe Cates scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High set to the Cars’ “Moving in Stereo,” but featured a license plate that read “I <3 Ric.” Whenever a group wants to summon up the spirit of New Wave, they lean into cooly controlled power chords, analog synths, and affectless vocals of the Cars.

The thing is, Ocasek never indulged in this kind of revivalism. Once the Cars imploded in 1987 and it was clear that solo stardom wasn’t in the cards for him, Ocasek devoted himself to a career in production. He had been working the boards for a while, choosing projects that were stranger and riskier than his main gig, beginning with art-punk duo Suicide’s second album, Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev, in 1980. When the Cars were still one of the biggest acts in America, Ocasek worked with hardcore punk renegades Bad Brains; a dozen years later, he reunited them for 1995’s God of Love. By that point, Ocasek’s career as a producer was riding high off his first smash hit since the Cars: Weezer’s eponymous 1994 debut, commonly known as The Blue Album.

Led by the recovering teenage metalhead Rivers Cuomo, Weezer played heavier and louder than the Cars, but in a way they did something similar to Ocasek’s band: They never disguised their nerdiness, and they spun underground trends into the mainstream. Ocasek gave The Blue Album punch and polish, sounding simultaneously fresh and timeless. This was a skill he quickly brought to other alt-rockers, like Nada Surf, D Generation, and Possum Dixon, whose hooky collaborations with Ocasek helped open the door for the pop-punk of the new millennium.

Ocasek worked with a handful of stars in the wake of Weezer—notably, he teamed with No Doubt for part of 2001’s Rock Steady—but once he had earned fame as a producer, he spent a lot of his time producing artists who were on the fringes of the mainstream. He waived his production fee to produce Guided by Voices’ 1999 would-be arena-rock turn, Do the Collapse. He helmed This Island, the 2004 album where Kathleen Hanna’s Le Tigre project attempted to go pop. And he produced Talk to La Bomb, the vividly clever and colorful 2006 record from NYC hipsters Brazilian Girls. On each of these albums, Ocasek deployed his elegantly controlled aesthetic in a way that accentuated each act’s identity, a move that subtly revealed how the musicians who cribbed from the Cars missed the group’s secret. The Cars, and Ocasek himself, only looked toward the past so that they could move forward.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork