Many years ago I found a Best of The Cars cassette tape. At the time, about the only Cars song that got any airplay was Drive, which is a fine song in its own way, but not really indicative of the rest of the band’s output. Certainly it stuck out on the Best Of album to the extent that songs like Good Times Roll or My Best Friend’s Girl were a pleasant surprise to me.
These latter two are on this album, the rest of which is closer in musical tone to them, a very New Wave, synth-pop-rock affair where the songs plainly come from the same band but have enough pleasing variety to keep you coming back. My Best Friend’s Girl, for example, uses little phrases of Fifties rock and rockabilly to punctuate it; fitting since the lyrics, about seeing your ex-girlfriend going out with your best friend, is a very much a Fifties teen type subject.
Don’t Cha Stop is very bouncy and frenetic, probably the closest to Talking Heads, arguably The Cars’ nearest musical kin at this time – I can just picture David Byrne prancing all over the stage while singing this one. What makes The Cars sound, however, is a combination of tight beats from bassist (and one half of the writing duo) Ben Orr coupled with David Robinson on drums. Meanwhile Greg Hawkes ties in some nice synth and keyboards with guitarist Elliot Easton – Just What I Needed is a very good example of the two mixing together well. Singer and rhythm guitarist Ric Ocasek is the other half of the songwriting duo, him and Orr largely composing solo.
Robinson goes to town on the almost Eno-esque I’m In Touch With Your World, possibly teaming up with Hawes (both are credited with percussion) to provide a wide array of sound effects to punctuate the song. Mind you, if it was Eno, they’d be credited with “eloquent interjections” or “laughing guitar” or something like that.
I really liked this one. My one quibble is with the Queen-like over-dubbed chorus on Good Times Roll, which was a producer decision purely because he had a 40-track mixer to hand, it would seem. It undermines the crisp economy of the rest of the album which is delivered with wit and verve. Oddly, apart from the ones from this album, and Drive, I have no memory of the other tracks on the cassette I found. Which I have subsequently lost, so I hope it found its way to somebody else and allowed them to experience some good music.
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