RIP 2019: Ric Ocasek

Every late December I post names of people of significant achievement who died during the past year, especially those who don't always make the major media lists.  This time I thought I'd write a little more about a few figures that spark particular memories; whose deaths were more personal to me, even though I didn't know them personally.

When Ric Ocasek died, I was surprised to see that he was a few years older than me.  It wasn't only that he routinely claimed to be much younger, but that he didn't emerge as a rock star until the late 1970s and especially the 1980s, as the lead singer and chief songwriter of The Cars.  By the time the Cars broke up in 1988, Ocasek was 44.

This revelation adds extra delight, for it might be thought that by that time I was past the age of being engaged by pop music.  And there he was, making it.  In fact I was still listening and still making my own music, though I was admittedly in my last years of attending to the latest releases and hits.  My interest dwindled by the mid-1990s, except for following a few favorite artists, like Sting and Paul Simon, as my listening turned to other sources (African, Native American, the off-center work of Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass, etc.) and types (deepening my listening of jazz, pop music of earlier eras, and classical.)  But in the 80s and early 90s--particularly the first decade of MTV--I still kept up, and one of the bands I liked was the Cars.

Despite his exotic looks, Ocasek turns out to have a background I recognize, as he grew up in Baltimore and Cleveland.  He was apparently in Boston at the same time I was in the early and mid 1970s, though I don't recall noticing any of his bands then.  He might have been reading my music stories and reviews in the Boston Phoenix.  When he did break out with the Cars in the late 70s, I recognized his look from the popular J.Geils Band.  We used to see its members around Cambridge a lot.

I read one story on his death in which the writer--a southern California boy--identified the Cars literally with his teenage car culture.  Boston, where the band assembled, didn't really have a car culture.  What I associate with the Cars in my life is the last era in which the parties I went to would almost always include dancing.  I miss those days.

It was the last great pop era of dance, thanks to Michael Jackson and MTV videos. The Cars had that distinct New Age edge--their first albums had an art band feel-- but basically, their hit songs would have passed muster on American Bandstand of the 1950s, when the criteria was "It has a good beat.  You can dance to it."  In fact, it was hard not to dance to a Cars song.

The Cars string of hits was remarkable, and though they made 5 albums in their heyday, their Greatest Hits (first issued in 1985) contains everything I remember.  Some were songs he'd written years before, but once they broke into prominence, Ocasek rose to the occasion and gleefully constructed new sounds from familiar chord progressions and tunes in the pop/rock canon.   He was also capable of poignant ballads such as "Drive," and hybrids like "Heartbreak City," with its undercurrent of sadness.  Its these backbones that keeps these tunes alive, even as the then-cutting edge use of synthesizers can sound dated.

His lyrics however were unique.  He apparently had a background in poetry, particularly of the Beat era (at the band's Hall of Fame induction he named checked Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the now all but forgotten Richard Brautigan), and let his imagination take him through songs that alternately seemed straightforward and dangerously ambiguous.  He could sum up a chronological age and an era in a line like "you think you're in the movies/everything's so deep."



That line is from the Cars most celebrated hit, "You Might Think," immortalized especially by a groundbreaking video--it won MTV's first annual Video of the Year award-- that featured the model Paulina Porizkova, who Ocasek met shooting the video and subsequently married.

Ocasek made solo albums--I remember having one, which I liked--and produced music for a lot of other artists.  The surviving members of the Cars reunited for a performance at their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.  Ocasek died in September 2019.  May he rest in peace.  His music lives on.