Bye Bye Love

from the LP The Cars, Elektra Records, 1978



For me, it doesn’t get much better than the Cars; I have always dug them, but they happen to be one of those special bands (i.e. the Dead, Steely Dan, Little Feat) which continue to reveal more secrets and greater depth the more you listen to them…and the older you get! Everyone enjoys the Cars’ music, from beer-bonged frat boys to nerdy electronics wizards, and many of their songs have become literal soundtracks to our lives due to incessant (yet, still welcomed) play on radio. It’s an uncommon thing when you have to wrestle over whether to classify a band as “classic rock” or “new wave”, and that seeming dichotomy is part of what makes the Cars such a fantastic fucking band. Main composer and sometimes-vocalist/rhythm guitarist Ric Ocasek was able to refine and adjust all his influences into this alchemical miracle, creating something altogether new but intrinsically familiar. Musically, the parts assembled themselves in good health: the sweeping grandeur of ’70s prog and arena rock compressed into short songs, the herky-jerky angles of CBGBs bands like Television and the Talking Heads, and the pop sensibility of T.Rex. Ocasek’s lyrics rank as some of the most skewed love songs ever put to paper, “…I can't feel this way much longer, expecting to survive, with all these hidden innuendoes just waiting to arrive; it's such a wavy midnight, and you slip into insane, electric angel rock and roller, I hear what you're playin'… substitution, mass confusion, clouds inside your head, involving all my energies until you visited; with your eyes of porcelain and of blue, they shock me into sense, you think you're so illustrious, you call yourself intense…” Perhaps the one element that links all Cars songs together is a ridiculously catchy and simplistic chorus that allows anyone with vocal chords to take part in the fun, “…it's an orangy sky, always it's some other guy, it's just a broken lullaby; bye bye love, bye bye love…” Although the band came together in Boston, Ocasek and primary vocalist/bassist Benjamin Orr (seriously, it is so difficult to tell their voices apart unless you listen closely) met in Cleveland and are both Ohio natives. I suppose it only makes sense that such a slick group would be one of the ugliest lots of rich bastards the world of rock has ever beheld, Ocasek looking like the anemic offspring of Pete Townsend, Nick Cave and a Mr. Potato Head, and the criminally underrated keyboard whiz Greg Hawkes looking like a cross between Martina Navratilova and Pat Benatar---the former of those two scoring the frosty Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova as a wife! If you’ve read my blogs to this point, you can probably already guess the biggest reason why I love these guys so much, that being the amazing synthesizer & keyboard work of the munchkin Hawkes; it is truly out of this world! Tonic for working class heroes and high-brow snobs alike, the music of the Cars is what rock-n-roll is all about for me.