OTR: The Cars - Complete Greatest Hits

[illusionofjoy]

Last Wednesday at Cannon Coffee's open mic, I saw one of the performers destroying a copy of The Cars' self-titled 1978 debut LP. There is a stack of vinyl at the coffee shop and usually a platter is spinning on the turntable there when there is no live music. It was towards the end of the evening and the vandal was thumbing through the stack of records, picking out The Cars from the mix of LPs. He slid the record out of its sleeve and methodically began bending the disc, giggling to himself as he did so. Once the record was rendered most certainly unplayable, he hung it up on a nail protruding from the wall, pointing his handiwork out to the owner of the establishment. He then went on to tape the LP sleeve below the violated vinyl, finishing his performance with a self-satisfied chuckle.

I have no idea what prompted this strange and destructive spectacle. Moments before, the perpetrator had been playing the piano at the front of the room. He followed that up by distracting from whoever was closing out the night to display what - that he is an utter douche bag? At this point, this is all I can remember about the guy; I found the whole scene sickening. If the proprietor of the venue had any opinion on the matter, he wasn't being forthcoming about it (a necessity, I'm certain, when one owns a business and wishes to keep customers). I, for one, would have liked to have made the individual in question painfully aware of was it felt like to get forcibly warped into a shape wherein he would be unable to perform.

And people wonder why I don't loan out items from my music collection.

The Cars' Complete Greatest Hits does what it says on the tin: this is a collection of 20 songs which charted on the Billboard Top 100 from 1978 through 1987 (had it cut off at the top 40, there would be three fewer songs on this set). Better yet, it is chronologically sequenced, giving the listener a point of reference for the evolution of the group. There's a reason Rhino is the master of the remaster...or reissue or whathaveyou.

The first six songs on this set are culled from The Cars, which is effectively two-thirds of the album. Although it didn't contain their highest charting singles, it does contain some of the group's best songs (with the exception of the misstep "Don't Cha Stop"). It is also a document to a budding new wave group at their creative peak - even with the aforementioned misstep, in it along with the rest of the disc reveals a willingness to experiment. If pressed to pick the best song from those six, I'd have to go with the slow burning "Moving In Stereo." Despite some panning effects which immediately date the track, it's an aural delight - and probably the closest The Cars ever got to flirting with Siouxsie & the Banshees. The best pop song, however, is "Just What I Needed."

The next three songs are from 1979's Candy-O. Thankfully, the title cut is absent - I don't particularly like that song very much. "Let's Go," "It's All I Can Do" and "Dangerous Type" remain classics on par with most of the debut.

Panorama, the group's 1980 LP only has one song representing it here: "Touch And Go." The song nearly sounds like it belongs on Tears For Fears' The Hurting, which would be released nearly three years later. In any case, "Touch And Go" was the only single released from Panorama, stalling out at number 37. The album itself has been slapped with the reputation of being "challenging."

1981's Shake It Up brought the band back to hitsville, though in my opinion the title cut and "Since You're Gone" are the only singles worth putting on repeat - and that latter song, in hindsight, seems like a mere blueprint for the much stronger "Drive."

And that brings us to Heartbeat City. Released in 1984, the singles from this LP took full advantage of the power MTV had given to that now ubiquitous marketing tool known as the music video (a piece of promo one must now visit YouTube in order to witness). It was through music videos on the VH1 programme "The Big 80s" that I became aware of The Cars in earnest - "You Might Think" and "Drive" were on constant rotation on that show (being two of the group's three top ten hits, naturally). Prior to that I'd heard of "Drive" via one of those TV offer commercials for music compilations one saw constantly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know the type - some guy who has obviously snorted cocaine before recording his voiceover tries to pump up the potential customer by saying, "relive the era" or "these are your memories" in between snippets of hit songs. I think it was Time-Life that was shilling this stuff. In any case, during one of these commercials "Drive" by The Cars rolled up on the screen as a snippet of the song began playing. I must have been eight or nine years old and I remember thinking, "'Drive' by The Cars? Is that like 'Popcorn' by Hot Butter?"

"Drive," of course is one of the best songs ever written by The Cars and a rare example of a song deserving to be in the top 10. It's a mid-tempo layer cake of synth pads which one could get lost in and never return. The actual performance may not be overly complicated, but the production is stunning - I want to engineer songs like that!

No less worthy of praise for production but certainly more cute is "You Might Think." The music video to it is a perfect 1980s time capsule, up there with A-ha's "Take On Me."

I admit, it does have a bit of a stalker theme to it which could be disturbing if it wasn't so goofy. I mean, for fuck's sake, Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes, Benjamin Orr and David Robinson are jamming out on a bar of soap while Ric Ocasek windmills his guitar in an alarm clock (among many other improbable things). How could you not love it? Incidentally, Phil Collins parodied the "fly" scene from "You Might Think" in his video for "Don't Lose My Number." Apparently Phil Collins wanted be like David Lee Roth, who bereft of his own ideas, simply parodied pieces from videos by superior musicians.

The music video for "Magic" wasn't nearly as good, but the song is a winner. It is also one of the few tracks where The Cars liberally used a distortion pedal on their guitars. It's a great, stupid, fun sing-along and I can't help but notice that The Sisters of Mercy stole its riff for "When You Don't See Me."

Unfortunately the hot streak of singles from Heartbeat City pretty much ends there. "Hello Again" sounds way too much like Steve Miller's "Abracadabra" (released in 1982, two years prior) for me to be comfortable with it. After the triple threat of "You Might Think," "Drive" and "Magic" it just sounds kind of weak...I can't get past its clichés, try as I might. Still, I may try and give it a few more listens and I should like to find the music video for it, which was apparently directed by Andy Warhol.

"Why Can't I Have You" is a passable heartbreak song, but it pales in comparison to "Drive." Interestingly, it sounds a lot like "In Too Deep" by Genesis, which would be released in 1986.

It was in 1985 that The Cars released their first hits compilation, simply titled Greatest Hits. "Tonight She Comes" along with a remix of "I'm Not The One" were the reasons given for those who already owned this material via the original four LPs to add this fifth one to their collection. "Tonight She Comes" is a good reason to buy the package if you don't have the other LPs, but "I'm Not The One" in any form isn't a good reason to buy a record.

Complete Greatest Hits ends on a somewhat down note as "You Are The Girl" was the last single released from the band's 1987 swan song Door To Door. Hindsight being perfect, this is the sound of a band disintegrating; the official breakup came in February of 1988.

After The Cars, Ric Ocasek was the member who remained the most involved in the music business. Wisely eschewing the The New Cars, he worked with a handful of side projects while putting out a solo album every few years. Most impressive though were the production credits he added to his resume which included Bad Religion, Guided By Voices, Nada Surf and Weezer.

Benjamin Orr didn't fare quite as well. Despite putting out a solo album and appearing as a guest with numerous other musicians (including former bandmate Ric Ocasek), his music career was cut short by his death of pancreatic cancer in October of 2000.

Elliot Easton and Greg Hawkes both put out solo albums after The Cars disbanded, however they got back together to form The New Cars with Todd Rundgren in 2006 (Ric Ocasek and David Robinson expressed no interest in the project).

Apparently The New Cars' sole album It's Alive sold fairly well, because Ocasek and Robinson joined Easton and Hawkes for a proper reunion LP. In May of 2011 Move Like This replaced Door To Door as The Cars' final album (to date). The tracklist for Complete Greatest Hits won't need to be updated though; according to Billboard Move Like This has never charted.