The Cars That Ate Aerosmith!

The Cars That Ate AEROSMITH

Stephen Demorest

by

The Springfield Civic Center is one of those snazzy glass-and-concrete exhibition complexes plunked down in the middle of decaying industrial towns to encourage the natives not to leave. In the case of the worn-out capital of Massachusetts, that's a tall order, but you have to admire their municipal bravado. The place is so clean they even wax the cement floors. The red-blazered usherettes are squeakynice girls right out of Pretty Poison. A concessionaire discusses her recipe for veal parmigiana with a wizened old security guard who couldn't arrest a paper airplane. By a back stairwell, a teenage girl rent-a-cop complains about the unflattering fit of her grey uniform and hat. This is urban renewal with a small-town flavor.

The Kinks are headlining this 8,000seat concert, but much of the crowd has come to check out The Cars, the first Boston band since Aerosmith and (perhaps) Boston to make New England look cool. In two months, their debut album, The Cars, has sold over 300,000 copies and picked up airplay in every major market in America, particularly in the Northeast and San Francisco. Not infrequently, when the band play a new city, they're quickly booked for a return date just a few weeks later. The Cars are all revved up and drawing lots of attention.

They're a motley-looking crew, but their black-and-red color scheme lends

a certain distinction to the standard rock regalia like pipe-cleaner-thin Ric Ocasek's wrap-around shades and leopard-trimmed jacket. Oh well—you expect hot new bands to look more unfinished than they sound. And The Cars sound great. Their edge against all other novice bands is the ultra-polished production tone of their album, and here in Springfield their set captures the same depth and clarity of their soupedup avant-traditional rock. Biggest surprise onstage: bassist Benjamin Orr sings most of the lead vocals.

After the show I climb into a mist-green Caprice Classic rent-a-car for the ride back to Boston with Ocasek, drummer David Robinson, and tour manager Steve Berkowitz. The parking area is rimmed with a gaggle of girls calling out to the band, and I figure the latest local heroes must get plenty of affection on their own turf, but Robinson shrugs indifferently. "When you're from the home area, how exciting could it be? If we told them we were from England, they'd get more excited. It also depends who we're playing with—Cheap Trick draw loads

of nice-looking girls. Toledo had the best-looking girls, but they all said they came from Detroit."

Robinson has been a local celebrity for some years now, since he was the original drummer of the Modern Lovers,. the legendary minimalist band doomed to die by the eccentric and willful nature of singer/songwriter Jonathan Richman. (The two other original | Lovers Were Jerry Harrison, now of Talking Heads, and Ernie Brooks, 3 who's been playing with Elliott Mur~ phy.)

Despite the fame, though, David Robinson protests he had more experience than his fellow Cars "only on an amateur professionalism level. I made a couple of albums with the Modern Lovers, but they hardly played anywhere. I was with them when they started in-1971 for a couple of years, and then I quit and was in a band in L.A. called Pop for two years, and when I rejoined the Modern Lovers it was only a few months before they made their second album. Everything after that was Jonathan Richman's trip, which was why I quit the band the second time.

"I had a big drum set with two bass drums, and it kept getting smaller and smaller until he had me—I can't believe I did this, but I was trying to cooperate —he had me sitting on my stool over one little floor tom-tom with a towel over it, tapping on the side of it, and he's going This is too loud, David'."

Robinson sighs. "He has his own way of doing things, and he's best by himself because nobody can really deal with it. He's just a solo now, he fired his band. He says he's gonna play in 60-seat coffee houses."

It was Robinson, a conceptual artist who has won several awards, who came up with the name "The Cars" because it's so simple and lends itself to a wide variety of images. In fact, David (who designed one of the Modern Lovers album jackets) designed a cover for The Cars which was then rejected by Elektra, a rebuff which still grates on his artistic pride. (He says it was similar to the current inner sleeve.)

"Hey, check us out when we play Ethiopia!" Berkowitz calls by way of adieu to the sweeties of Springfield, and he guns us off into the night toward the Massachusetts Turnpike. Roadrunner, roadrunner, ,

Goin' faster miles an hour,

I'm in love with Massachusetts And the highway when it's late at night.

Tm in love with modern moonlight, Don't feel so alone with the radio

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on. *

Though The Cars are now Boston's finest, founder Ric Ocasek is originally from Baltimore. He spent the early part of the 70's roaming around the East Coast, publishing poetry, writing songs, and playing with various bands, many of them including Ben Orr, whom he's known eight years now. They were in New York for awhile, though they never performed there, and finally drifted up to Boston to stay.

"Boston'sprogressive," Ric explains. "It's got a good art scene, it's the old and new together. I like it a lot."

Ric and Ben teamed up with lefthanded guitarist Elliot Easton for awhile; found David Robinson, and finally added keyboardist Greg Hawkes, who used to play for Martin Mull and also composes avant-garde soundtracks for public TV. They rehearsed for a few weeks, and played their first gig on New Years', 1977, at Pease Air Force Base in New Hampshire. Nine months later, with what could serve as a model game-plan for aspiring bands, The Cars had won themselves a recording contract.

"We did a live two-track tape locally," Ocasek recalls, "and pulled out about four songs and gave them to the local radio stations, and they started playing them. It was getting tons of requests—'Just What I Needed' and 'You're All I've Got Tonight' were getting played on the main FM stations —and it got reported in the trade playlists. All of a sudden, the record companies noticed it and started coming to our shows—there were about eight of them interested."

"We have a friend, Maxanne Satori, who was a disc jockey," Robinson interjects, referring to the woman who also gave Aerosmith a boost at the right time. "She's really the one who started playing it. In fact, she's been the first to play stuff from every band I was ever in. I owe her a lot."

"We played a gig at Harvard," Ocasek continues "and Elektra and Arista came at the same time, and each of them didn't want the other one there, but there they were. It was crazy, like a fraternity rush—two limos with half the band in one and half in the other. We were up all that night going from hotel room to hotel room, and they wouldn't let us go home. We had both contracts and had to decide in one day, and Elektra beat out Arista by just a little bit, though the deals were the same. We figured Elektra didn't have any acts like us, and we thought we'd get a little more attention."

To produce the album, The Cars wanted someone who could really handle electronics. They tossed around the names of Chris Thomas (Pink Floyd), Tony Visconti (Bowie), John Lennon, and even Bjorn and Benny from Abba, before finally teaming with Roy Thomas Baker, who is best know for his work with Queen. The seemingly flawless LP was recorded at AIR Studios in London.

"It only took 12 days to record and 9 days to mix," says Ric. "We did one thing a day, and however it stood at the end of the day, that was it. That keeps spontaneity moving, it's real immediate. Man, am I hungry. I wish there was a Mr. Donut on this road like that one in New Hampshire."

Steve pulls us into a Howard Johnson, where the elderly civilians at the counter stare blankly away from these tall, thin, oddly-clothed creatures as we order coffee and ice cream just like regular human beings. A few ki^s drift over shyly for autographs, and I'm jolted back 20 years to the afternoon my family pulled into a HoJo in South Carolina, where I stumbled on Johnny & The Hurricanes—twirling on these same stools, wolfing cheeseburgers, and chatting up the waitress—and I realized even the immortals need to touch earth for a rest-room between adventures.

"The gigs have been real different," says Robinson once we're rolling again in the twilight safety of the fourwheeled wombr—the same indefinite lighting you find in a recording studio. "In some of the towns outside New England they didn't know who we were, and in other towns' they went crazy. One stupid thing that happened was opening for Dickey Betts in Chicago. The audience was ugly—

giving us the finger and yelling—they just wanted Brother Dickey. Then some jerk threw a glass at us, it hit the keyboard and fucked it all up, so we just stopped playing. We were almost done anyway."

"Ric was doing very well, too," chimes in road manager Berkowitz. "The more they screamed, the more intense he tried to stare at them through his sunglasses."

Nobody throws at them in the Northeast, though, where their drawing power was demonstrated dramatically this summer by a benefit they played for leukemia research., "They scheduled this outdoor thing in Shrewsbury* Mass, and we were going to headline," explains Berkowitz. "The radio station was putting it together themselves, and they'd sold out 7,000 tickets, and three days before the show the town said 'Forget it,' they didn't want that many people in Shrewsbury. So two days before the thing, they switched it to the Providence (Rhode Island) Civic Center which holds 12,000, and we sold the place out in two days. We were amazed."

Boston rock discussions inevitably dredge up stories about the most successful band in city history, Aerosmith, a group David Robinson has appreciated from his Modern Lovers days: "We'd just gotten a record deal from Warners, and they were the only musicians in Boston who didn't totally despise us and hate our guts. Sometimes they would be the only people in the audience, and they'd say 'Wow, you guys are so lucky, dp you think we'll ever get a record contract?' [Robinson begins to chuckle.] So I said 'Yeah, you guys are pretty good, you could probably get a record deal.' In fact, I told Columbia about them way before they signed them. When we were talking with them I said, 'Look, if you don't sign us and you got any brains, sign this band Aerosmith'."

"Yeah," joins in Berkowitz, adding his licks: "the last time I saw them, they were the opening act for a band I was in at the Starlight Lounge in Peabody. I was in the Alston All-Stars, and they were from Alston too, so we knew each other. They were so poor, in torn jeans and everything, the Ramones look like they copied from what Aerosmith looked like then. You know, a year and a half ago Aerosmith was the sixth largest entertainment draw in the world."

The car falls thoughtfully silent as this sinks in, and we hurtle through the darkness, suspended in the lulling hum of rushing wind and tires ...

Roadrunner, roadrunner,

I got the power of Massachusetts

when it's late at night.

I got the world, I got the turnpike, I got the power of the Boston sound. *

The Cars have got plenty of future. They have loads of unrecorded material, some of which they play in concert, and they're always learning new songs. Though they don't plan to record their next album until November or December, Ocasek says, "We could do the second album tonight if we had to."

All that remains for The Cars is to keep the accelerator on the floor. All that remains for me to ask is what kind of cars The Cars drive. But David Robinson smiles: "You can't own a car inside Boston. It's too crazy—it'll get crashed and wrecked."

•"Roodrunner" by Jonothan Richmon, © Modern Love Songs