What does being in the Cars mean to you?

Guitarist Elliot Easton takes a long pause and thinks hard before he responds. Then, slowly, deliberately, he says, “It means being part of an unusual collective chemistry that results in some very interesting sounds. And, it means being part of a very creative process which isn’t always fun, but is always rewarding.” The answer satisfies Easton, as he gets ready to leave his Manhattan hotel room and head for the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey, where he will pick up his guitars and offer a tantalizing array of leads to the eager audience.

Easton’s hard-earned reputation as a guitarist is an important part of his life, dating back to childhood practice sessions in Long Island. “I was always telling him, ‘Turn it down, Elliot!’ ” his mother admitted a few days earlier, when the Cars played— largely during a downpour—to an open air crowd at the Forest Hills, NY Tennis Stadium. There, Easton and I compared memories of long-ago concerts which reflected teenage dreams; my having seen the Beatles there in 1964, and Elliot, going to the notorious Jimi Hendrix/Monkees pairing a few years later. After he’d spent another decade working at his craft, Elliot became part of the Cars, and his contribution to their sound has never been denied or underestimated.

Which is why a thoughtless comment Ric Ocasek made to a magazine reporter disparaging Easton’s style and ability was so heartbreaking. The shock waves extended past the band, reaching anyone who’s known the Cars more than superficially. These guys are not nasty or snide towards one another, especially not in public. Why it should have happened now, with Heartbeat City neatly reestablishing the band’s Top 10 status as if they hadn’t been without a group LP for over two years, was a troubling mystery.

“1 didn’t know what hit me, let’s put it that way,” says Elliot, speaking carefully but glad of a chance to finally explain his side of things, then hopefully put the matter to rest. “I didn’t know what I did to deserve it. The main thing which concerned me was career damage, because I spent a long time developing a style on guitar and building a reputation and earning the respect of my peers, and then to have a falsehood printed...It’s important for people to know that when I’m stepping out for a solo, that comes from my fuckin’ heart, it’s not someone else’s invention—no way—or I wouldn’t be here.”

Stunned, Easton did the only thing he could do—asked Ric why he made the comment. ‘‘Because if that’s what he really thought of me, then I had some serious thinking to do. But,” Elliot says uneasily, since this is all very personal business. “Ric has assured me that he loves my guitar playing,” and Easton’s renewed selfconfidence is apparent throughout the band’s performances. Equally regretful that he blew off steam in the wrong direction in front of the wrong audience (for Ocasek, an occurrence so unlikely that in over six years of covering the Cars, I’ve never seen it happen), Ric is ready to clear the air. “Yes,” he admits, “it hurt him, but Elliot and I get along great, and he’s a phenomenal guitar player. I exaggerated the whole point in a moment of madness,” he sighs, edging around in a hard backed chair, just wanting the whole thing to be over and done with so the Cars can again tool across America as the efficient, sleek, beautifully designed machine they have constructed and maintained with pride.

“It was a bit hard to walk on that water.’’ -Ric Ocasek

It is possible that the Cars have been experiencing some new kind of growing pains—past pubertal rebellion but still ages away from a mid-life crisis. Between late 1981 ’s Shake It Up and this summer’s Heartbeat City, both Ocasek and Greg Hawkes released solo albums, and Elliot has recorded one which Elektra is issuing in October. Ben Orr also reportedly has an album in the works, and David Robinson has done a fair share of outside production, as, of course, has Ric. Additionally, various Cars have played on other artists’ albums, and they all kept an eye on whoever’s been recording at their studio, Synchro. But one undeniable strain on the Cars was their lengthy tenure spent in London last fall, where they recorded Heartbeat City, with power-rock specialist Mutt Lange producing.

The group arrived in Britain—their first trip over since the Cars’ only European tour, in 1978—mid-summer, and settled into a palatial house just steps off Kings Road. Ric and Elliot agree that the Cars’ anonymity in England worked to their advantage. “We all liked the idea of getting out of a familiar environment and going to London, soaking up all the energy, and getting away from all the people looking in on your sessions,” says Easton. Ric adds, “I could almost walk up and down Kings Road. The only people who knew me were Japanese.” While most of the Cars can successfully disguise themselves if they wish to avoid autograph hunters, Ocasek’s towering frame eliminates that possibility. Consequently, the fact that most Britons didn’t know, or care, who the Cars were came as a relief.

TURN TO PAGE 61

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21

However, when weeks dragged into months and the album still wasn’t complete, pleasure gave way to lethargy, anxiety and homesickness. “We didn’t know the album was gonna be a year-long process,” Elliot says wryly. Why? “We’re still asking ourselves that question!” According to Ric, Lange’s perfectionist style had the most to do with it.

Fortunately, the resulting record more than compensates for the mounting agitation it created among the band, as everyone yearned for it to be done. Heartbeat City, while a very accessible record, with love themes and simple phrases far outnumbering Ocasek’s forays into the poetic, reflects the band’s musical expertise and, for that matter, Mutt Lange’s painstaking production.

As Ocasek—his fingernails tinted a muted silver, adding to his general other-worldliness—randomly doodles with a thick black marker, he seems far more at ease living with this highly commercial record than he did with Shake It Up. In fact, “Shake It Up” is not even being performed on this show—surprising, since it had given the group one of their biggest hits two years ago. Not at all bothered by the acknowledgment of mass-market appeal, Ocasek believes, “there’s nothing wrong with appealing to a lot of people. It just depends on how you appeal to them, whether it’s fake, or it’s real. If it’s show business, it’s fake, or if it’s contrived and you think the songs are just borrowing too much from other people’s songs, or the lyrics are things which don’t sound like any thought was put into them. Basically, that’s commercial crap. At least, the Cars have their own sound, it’s different and it’s got its own twists. To me at least it has some sort of integrity, ‘cause I know where we’re coming from. Schlock pop with integrity,” he tosses off, making sure that the joke is received in the spirit he intends.

The Cars are performing much of Heartbeat City on their two-month-long tour, together with many of the obvious choices—“My Best Friend’s Girl,” Nust What I Needed,” “Candy-O,” “Touch and Go,” and a couple of surprises—in particular “Jimmy Jimmy” off Beatitude. Played live, its sparse structure and frenetic attitude stands in sharp contrast to Ric’s Cars songs, and the track’s inclusion in the show is enough emphasis on his solo work to Ocasek. After all, audiences leave the arenas to the strains of Greg’s “Jet Lag.” “As far as life goes with the Cars, that’s fine. But as for me going out with another band (to do solo material), forget it,” Ric flatly announces.

Judging from their two New York area dates, both early in the tour, more than two years absence from the road has spurred the Cars to achieve their most solid performances to date. Aided by a computer system, the sound is fullbodied and lavish. Harmonies, never the Cars’ strong suit in concert, come off without a hitch. Though Ric barely moves away from his vantage point off to one side, Ben and Elliot work directly to the audience, who respond with something close to mania. Also, the band has pulled out all the stops to create a stage set that would be at home in a futuristic sci-fi film. Multicolored wooden filaments reach high above Robinson’s drum kit and Hawkes’s monolithic bank ofkeyboards towards the arena’s ceiling. Smaller, lime green strands surround the drums, like Triffids who thrive on rock ’n’ roll. Most impressive, though, is a ferris wheel of TV sets, affectionately called the “video monster,” which rotates way above the two-level stage, flashing a variety of assorted images.

If the Cars previously had a casual friendliness with the video age, now visual imagery has become as important to their repertoire as Ocasek’s aura) landscapes. Guests at the concerts included young filmmaker Luis Aria, whose surrealistic work has gathered much support from the Cars, and actor Tim Hutton. Hutton had introduced the Cars on Saturday Night Live last spring, and since then, made his directorial debut with a haunting video for “Drive,” one of five songs on Heartbeat City for which videos have been created.

On Tim Hutton: “We’ve known Tim for a couple of years and he’s liked the Cars a lot. He came to see me and said, * “Drive,” 1 have to do “Drive,” I want you to read this script and see if we can do it.’ I thought, great, so we did do it. It was pretty cinematic,” says Ric, pleased with the haunting waxworks and dreamy quality.

On Andy Warhol (“Hello Again”): “Andy, I just called and asked if he would do it. I’d seen the TV show and I liked the way he used color and 8mm. It was the cheapest video we did. He wouldn’t even accept a big budget. He would only accept a small one.” Filmed in New York’s Be Bop Cafe, the video offers a glance into the night life which has often been a predominant theme in Ocasek’s songs.

And then, there is the video for “Magic,” directed by Tim Pope, which has raised more than a few eyebrows. With the rest of the band so recessed as to be almost invisible, Ocasek is depicted as some latter day faith healer, passing through throngs of the lame, the halt, the terminally hip. At one point, he even walks on water while the followers all tumble into the pool. To me, the references seemed disturbing, but Ric views it as just another curious example of Cars humor.

“It’s religious,” he deadpans, no hint of the game in his open expression. “It was a bit hard, too, to walk on that water. I thought I was going to fall in...” Mercifully, he soon switches gears and confesses, “That storyboard was Tim Pope’s idea. It seemed funny enough to me. I didn’t try to take myself seriously, to think that I could walk on water—or that people thought that I thought I could. That would be pure bullshit. It’s a laugh, like a pun,” he declares. Aspiring analysts will have sufficient opportunity to probe these and other fundamentals of Cars life when the band releases its first videocassette album in the fall. The package, in addition to several singles, includes some live tracks being recorded on the tour, plus “Shake It Up” and “Panorama.”

Though armchair shrinks contemplating the meaning of their videos were probably not the result which the Cars anticipated, they ought to be flattered that the vignettes posess sufficient depth to draw close examination. It’s just another pressure in what Elliot calls “the bumpy little highway” that denotes the Cars’ ever-growing history, and, Easton completes his thought, “which I wouldn’t trade for anything else.” Their odyssey has had ecstasies and agonies—the long awaited first success, the knee-jerk putdowns which followed it, the harsh truths about the musjc business that steadily came to light. Panorama should have been titled Paranoia, I venture, and Ocasek doesn’t disagree. Lately, there have been the challenges of blending solo aspirations with group obligations, and the good/bad displacement of Heartbeat City’s long recording process. They have, one could presume, been shaken up a bit too much.

“I think the band just needs a little time to recharge its collective battery,” says Elliot Easton. “We’ve had a rough year. Not that I’m complaining, because the record is doing wonderfully, but it’s just been a hard year on everybody. People have homes and families and loved ones, and it becomes difficult at times. 1 think when we have a chance to catch our breath, everything will heal,” says the guitarist with renewed optimism.

“I like the Cars as a band,” says Ric Ocasek, beginning to mentally move away from the confines of the small Meadowlands backstage room. Showtime is less than an hour away. “I like the people in it, and the way the songs come out, the way the records are made. I.just don’t want it to be my life. It’s a strong part of my life, a very valuable outlet. I just want to make solo records and produce, other people’s records, too. But I love the band, the whole thing of it. I certainly wouldn’t dismiss it.”

RIC OCASEK SHOWS GRACE UNDER PRESSURE...

What is your greatest goal?

No goals, hate goals, never goal oriented. How do you know who your real friends are?

They’re the people who like you when you’re either a nice guy, a mean guy, a fucked-up guy, a great guy. They’re the people who like you for what you are.

Do the Cars fit that 'category?

Sure. Everybody in the band would take me for what I am. Any good friend would take anyone as they are.

Why are you still in this business?

Because there is no other business for me. Because the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do was write songs and make records. I’ve never had any ambitions to do anything else, and I would do it whether it was coming out great or coming out terrible.

How do you feel about being famous?

It’s not bad, but I sort of miss the privacy. The rest of it’s OK.

What do you want out of life?

I just want to write the ultimate song, which I’ll never be able to do.

Are you living up to your own expectations?

Hopefully, not ever.

What do you like least about yourself?

(a laugh) My jaded attitude. Sometimes it gets me in a lot of trouble.

How do you deal with moments of despair?

1 thrive on it. I go deeply into it and try to get as much out of it as I can.

What does it take to make you happy?

(a long pause) To finish a song or to wake up with a more positive attitude than negative. What do you like least about doing interviews?

Being asked the same questions time after time, or thinking that an interviewer is on your side, only to find out that they’re really digging for the shit. How do you stop yourself from working?

I don’t.

☆ ☆ ☆

So, after all the ups and downs, what is the source of satisfaction which Ric Ocasek derives from being in the Cars? “Familiarity with it,” he responds. But hasn’t he heard of that old cliche, “familiarity breeds contempt”? Without missing a beat, Ocasek offers the biggest smile he’s displayed all evening and masterfully replies", “Oh.. .1 thought it was ‘content.’ ”