Thrash N' Bang!!!

Ric Ocasek

I’m sure all of you reading this, by now, know that Ric Ocasek, of The Cars, died this week.

And please check out what bostongroupienews.com wrote about him. I’m sure, you’ll agree with me, that it’s better than what I’ve written below.

I am and was a big fan of The Cars, or since they were from Boston were they really “The Cahhs?”

This first time I went to The Rat was in the summer of ’77. The Cars were being played on WBCN, the local, big FM rock station, and I wanted to see them. The Nervous Eaters opened up for them, another classic early Boston punk band and this was before their first record was out. I was aware, a little bit, of what the punk scene was- but after my first visit, The Rat became a regular haunt, one for me that lasted through the eighties.

The Cars are one of my favorite new wave bands of all time. I put them up there with Devo and Talking Heads and few others. I was always proud of them coming from our scene, as though, they were very commercial, but I felt they always had quality as well. And Ric was a big supporter of the more underground bands- inviting proto-electronic band Suicide not only on tour with them, but on their late night hosted prime time TV show (“Midnight Special”). And, of course, producing an album by the Bad Brains.

I ran into Ric twice in my life. Once at Wurlitzer Music Store on Newbury Street (at that time that was THE music store), shortly after the first album was released. I complimented him on the album and he was thankful but obviously, very shy. Several years later in the eighties, I was in a dirty book store/video place in the Combat Zone. I noticed him in there but I didn’t approach him, and this was after he was married to Paulina. How did I know it was him? Well, not too many guys are 6’6 and look like a praying mantis with an earring.

If you listen to the whole Cars catalog it wasn’t all cotton candy pop fluff, a lot of it was avant-garde, dissonant discordant music with questioning, existential lyrical content, that wasn’t the paint by numbers rules for hit songs. I’d describe Ric as Buddy Holly, still alive, scrambling to write songs on the Lower East Side of New York in the late seventies.

I liked their next two follow up albums, best- Candy-O and, most of all Panorama. But tonight, I’m thinking of their song “Since You’re Gone” and though that’s an obvious connection, it gets me thinking about how he was with his wife, Paulina, I think 28 years, and just separated a year ago. And she was the
one who found him dead.

I’d like to imagine that these words from that song were playing in his head shortly before his demise.

“Since you’re gone, the nights are getting strange. Since you’re gone, Well, nothing’s making sense. I stumble in the shade. Since you’re gone, I can’t help it. Everything’s a mess. Since you’re gone…The moonlight ain’t so great.”

Goodbye, Ric. Is it corny to say? Yeah, I guess it is… so it won’t say it. But maybe I still, will.

Your band was “Just What We Needed” in the lustful, drug fueled abandoned lifestyle of the eighties that we led at the time as we dangled, clutching, clueless onto a thread of life, driving wild into the mad night that we believed was freedom but did most of us in, while living on a shoestring budget while our musical beliefs, strange as it could and really – should be, happened to continue on and to flourish.

And like a misplaced fix, they blame it all on a lust for kicks.

And I don’t blame that notion. But I picture Ric, now, in some snarky, snazzy, animal skin suit jacket cascading away along Comm. Ave, Kenmore Square, when it used to have heart and feeling, not some developers hard on, heading towards the Charles River, over to Cambridge while he’s queuing up for a video shot.

And then he’s quietly fading away into the scenery, knowing his work has been completed and will live on.

(Slimedog)