Ric Ocasek (75) – The Cars – was born in Baltimore on March 23, 1944. His paternal side was of Czech descent. When he was 16 years old, his father moved the family back to the Otcasek hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, where his father worked as a systems analyst with NASA at the Lewis Research Center. Ocasek graduated from Maple Heights High School in 1963. He briefly attended Antioch College and Bowling Green State University, but dropped out to pursue a career in music.
Ocasek met future Cars bassist Benjamin Orr in Cleveland in 1965 after Ocasek saw Orr performing with his band the Grasshoppers on the Big 5 Show, a local musical variety program.
After performing in various bands in Columbus and Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ocasek and Orr relocated to Boston in the early 1970s. There they formed a Crosby, Stills and Nash-style folk rock band called Milkwood. They released one album, How’s the Weather, in early 1973 but it failed to chart. Future Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes played on Milkwood’s album. After Milkwood, Ocasek formed the group Richard and the Rabbits, which included Orr and Hawkes. Ocasek and Orr also performed as an acoustic duo during this period. Some of the songs they played became early Cars songs. Later, Ocasek and Orr teamed up with guitarist Elliot Easton in the band Cap’n Swing. Cap’n Swing soon came to the attention of WBCN disc jockey Maxanne Sartori, who began playing songs from their demo tape on her show. After Cap’n Swing was rejected by several record labels, Ocasek got rid of the bass player and drummer and decided to form a band that better fit his style of writing. Orr took over on bass and David Robinson, best known for his career with the Modern Lovers, became the drummer. Hawkes returned to play keyboards and the band became “the Cars” in late 1976 with their first official live gig on New Year’s Eve of that year.
The concept behind the band’s name was born out of a modern search for keywords.
“Shortly after I joined,” drummer David Robinson told the Wall Street Journal, “Ric wanted to change the band’s name,” because “Cap’n Swing sounded like the name of a bar band.” So, the musicians sat around and devised a list of possible band names. It was Robinson who mentioned the Cars, the entry that everybody seemed to like. “It was easy to remember and it wasn’t pegged to a specific decade or sound,” Robinson said. “The name was meaningless and conjured up nothing, which was perfect.” Furthermore, Ocasek liked the Cars because it fell at the beginning of the alphabet, which would earn the band good placement in record stores, and also that it was easy to spell.
1977 was the year of earning their stripes as they gigged all over the Northeast. The repeated return of their demo songs on local radio finally convinced record company Elektra to offer the band a contract that worked for both and resulted in a partnership that produced 6 platinum and/or golden albums, selling more than 23 million copies in the US alone.
In 1978, the Cars self-titled debut album reached nr. 18 on the Billboard 200 chart and three singles reached the top 40 – including “Just What I needed”, sung by Ben Orr, which became #4 in Billboard’s records of the year. Their next album Candy-O went to #3 in the Billboard 200 and successive singles hit high on the Hot 100. The band cut 4 more albums with Elektra in the next 8 years, 3 platinum and 1 gold, while over time the band members started going solo. One of the reasons for the band to ultimately break up in 1988 was Ric’s distaste for touring and being on the road. In his own words he said:
I guess you could blame it on me. I toured a lot in the early years when we were the Cars, the five of us. I saw the world. I’ve always been more of a songwriter than a performer. I produce and I love the studio. I’ve always not so much liked touring. That’s kind of the reason. Also, I didn’t want to do things like, “Hey, let’s do some casinos and some boats.” I didn’t want to get into that. That’s just a different reason to do it. That’s really just being mechanical and playing your songs for whatever it is.
Ric’s first solo project was the album Beatitude in January 1983, which features a more minimal and sparse interpretation of the Cars’ new wave rock sound. On some tracks Ocasek played all of the instruments. A more synthesizer-heavy follow-up, This Side of Paradise, was released in 1986; and featured Greg Hawkes, Elliot Easton and Benjamin Orr. Hit single, “Emotion in Motion” accompanied the album.
Now the strange thing is if you play the Cars’ records today in the 2020s…you’re shocked, too much old stuff you have to apologize for, you wonder why you once liked it, but not this music, it sounds as fresh as ’78, ’84, as a matter of fact it sounds even better. Radio always muffled the lyrics, now lyrics stand out and their wisdom and insight and humor stick out. But even better is that sound, an amalgamation of the old and new filtered through a hit record sensibility, the Cars didn’t want to stretch out and noodle, they wanted to get it right, in a compact fashion, anything unnecessary was excised.
The Cars disbanded in 1988, and Ocasek disappeared from the public eye for a couple of years. His 25 year close friendship with Benjamin Orr estranged until shortly before Orr’s death in 2000. His 17 year old marriage to second wife Suzanne ended, no doubt as the result of his growing relation with supermodel Paulina Porizkova, whom he married in August 1989. He resurfaced in 1990 with his own album, Fireball Zone. One track, “Rockaway”, enjoyed a brief stay on the charts, but his solo albums realized disappointing sales, especially compared to his success with the Cars. He subsequently released other solo works during the decade. In the 1990s and 2000s he was very active as producer, writer and occasional movie performer. For many years Ocasek also had a hobby of making drawings, photo collages, and mixed-media art works which, in 2009, were shown at a gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as an exhibition called “Teahead Scraps”.
In 2010, Ocasek reunited with the surviving original members of the Cars to record their first album in 24 years. The album, entitled Move Like This, was released on May 10, 2011. Not long after the album’s release and its 2 week supporting tour in May, with a final show at Lollapaloosa in August, the Cars resumed their hiatus, and reunited once again in April 2018 for a performance at the ceremony of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Ric Ocasek wasn’t friends with everybody, he wasn’t the life of the party, he suffered no fools, he spoke through his music, that was enough, it was less emotion than intellect, the tracks were all you got, the band members were not individual stars, all you got was this vision, unique in the landscape, direct and oftentimes ironic, it kept you guessing, but the music did not. His relationship carried this reservation, whether it’d be towards wives, partners or children. It must have been a lonely life, as possibly witnessed by the fact that he died alone during the night of September 15, 2019, to be found by his ex-wife, who later learned that she and her children with him had been written out of his last will.
Sometimes life seems just a cruel confirmation of misplacing arrogance for talent.
