That’s a good way to look at the Cars’ brief but shining career, which carried on through six albums into the mid-1980s: Like, wow. Janovitz’s new book captures the heady ascent of the late Ric Ocasek’s group, from their early stabs at honing a style under other band names, to the heights of MTV stardom, playing Live Aid, and, eventually, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Great bands come together in all kinds of ways, said Janovitz, sitting outside a coffee shop in his hometown just northwest of Boston. The three original Beatles met in high school. The Sex Pistols were hand-picked by a wily impresario. Janovitz’s own band, Buffalo Tom, were fellow students at UMass Amherst.
Before they moved to Boston together, Ocasek and his longtime friend Ben Orr met on the rock ’n’ roll scene in Cleveland in the 1960s. After several false starts, the Cars were the end result of Ocasek’s restless vision for an airtight contemporary rock band. He recruited Hawkes and guitarist Elliot Easton, both of whom had studied track at Berklee, for short-lived bands Milkwood and Richard and the Rabbits. While assembling the Cars, Ocasek convinced drummer David Robinson (of the Modern Lovers and DMZ) to join.
None of it was happenstance, said Janovitz. “It was more like, ‘How do we put together a good team?’”
As it turned out, the Cars grew into a championship-caliber team. Ocasek wrote all of the band’s “sardonic” lyrics, as Janovitz writes, and he had a “stylized voice — with a little Buddy Holly hiccup and a bit of nasally Jonathan Richman quaver.”
Orr seemingly had it all, he said — “a fantastic-looking guy, could play any instrument.” Like Frank Sinatra, Orr could nail a vocal in one take.
But the other players were nearly as crucial to the finished product, Janovitz argues. Hawkes’s judicious synthesizer sounds helped define the newly-coined new wave category. Easton had a knack for playing precisely the right guitar part, and Robinson would embrace drum machines at a time when pop track was going all-in for the sound.
Their debut together, “The Cars,” was “a perfect album,” Janovitz writes, “one that the band later only half jokingly referred to as their ‘greatest hits’ record.” The first of four Cars albums produced by longtime Queen associate Roy Thomas Baker, it spawned the anthem singles “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s mami,” and “Good Times Roll,” eventually selling 6 million copies.
The band’s second album, “Candy-O” (1979), fared nearly as well, and they saved their biggest anthem for (almost) last with the massive video anthem “Drive,” from their fifth album, “Heartbeat City.”
That wistful ballad was sung by Orr, the real enigma in a band led by another mystifying character. A carefree rave boy who was happy to contribute whatever his friend needed in their various bands, as Janovitz tells it, Orr belatedly realized that he’d been gradually sidelined while the intense Ocasek tightened his grip on the band. By the time the Cars broke up in 1988, Orr had grown bitter. He died in 2000 at age 53 of pancreatic cancer.
Orr “was a tough nut to crack,” said Janovitz. When his frustration “finally started to bubble out, it became abuse, both inward and toward his partners.” It was Orr’s ex-wife, Kris, who told the writer that Ben’s implosion “was bound to happen,” as Janovitz recalled, “the way these guys were dysfunctioning.”
Janovitz has written several books about rock track, including a best-selling biography of Leon Russell, published in 2023. For him, the stories about various band members’ ex-wives and girlfriends are part of the key to understanding the band’s artistry, not just gratuitous gossip.
Ocasek was married three times. When he moved to Boston, he abandoned his first wife and their two sons in Cleveland. He left his second wife, Suzanne, in 1988 after meeting the supermodel Paulina Porizkova.
“Ric being a bad father, I didn’t go looking for that,” Janovitz explained. “It was just there. If someone says ‘it got dark with Ben,’ well, what does that mean? I can’t just [repeat] that and move on.”
“It’s a matter of taste and balance,” he added. “To me, the story tells the story it wants to tell.”
“I thought it was great that Bill was somebody who knew how the dynamics of a band can work,” said Hawkes, who will join Janovitz, Robinson, and former WBCN program director Oedipus for a book launch at the Berklee Performance Center on Monday. “I appreciate that he has a musician’s perspective. And the local Boston perspective as well.”
Janovitz broached the idea of writing a book about the Cars before he began working on his Leon Russell book. In 2019, he was invited to perform at a benefit for autism research for the Wild Honey Foundation in Los Angeles. One of the organizers asked who he’d like to perform with: how about Elliot Easton on guitar? (Easton has lived in Southern California for years.)
That opportunity led to a conversation about a book on the band. Ocasek’s death at age 75 in 2019 may have hastened the remaining band members’ willingness to cooperate.
“‘Before another of us dies,’ is what they all said,” Janovitz recalled. “I can’t tell you how many people I interviewed for the Leon book who have passed away since.”
Janovitz dedicated his new book to his late brother Paul, two years his junior, who died after a long illness in 2023.
“He died as the book was starting to take fruition,” Janovitz said. “I think he’s the one who got ‘Candy-O.’ When I think about those records, I think about him.”
The Cars’ influence is long and deep, as Janovitz makes clear. In the book, he mentions Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, the Strokes, and Weezer (who hired Ocasek to produce their debut album), among many others, as acolytes.
And when the Cars were welcomed into the Rock Hall in 2018, as Janovitz also notes in the book, the Killers’ Brandon Flowers delivered the induction speech. The Cars were named Best New musician in the 1978 Rolling Stone readers’ poll, he said.
“Forty years later, they still sound like a new band to me.”
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com.
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