Ric Ocasek Wrote The Songs You Love

"Just What I needed and you also Might Think" and "My Best Companions Girl" and "Drive" and "Good Times Roll" — simply put, Ric Ocasek wrote the songs you love.


The New Wave pioneer — who co-founded seminal metal band The Cars in Boston in 1976 and produced albums for key acts in the second generation of artists — died Sunday (September 15) at age 75. While in his 40-year career, he wrote the songs I love, and the songs people I love also love. They're largely the same songs, like the ones above, and although even more: "Moving In Stereo" and "Lust for Kicks" and "Let's Go" and "Magic." I think I'll love them soon; that typically happens with Ocasek's songs.


Ocasek didn't sing all of the rockabilly, pop, and widescreen art rock songs he wrote; some days his Cars copilot Benjamin Orr took lead to lend a cooler, steelier vocal texture, like on "Just What I required and "Drive." Nevertheless as soon as Ocasek did sing his own words, he did so in a distinctive yelp that became one of the most crucial voices in a new class of rock music in the late 1970s and early '80s. You know it. You've sung along to it. His quick wail associated with best companions girl, that "she used to be mine," is a real mood-shifter. There really are times any time simply nothing else will do.


To younger fans, the vintage keyboard-infused power-pop fashion immortalized by The Cars may first make an impression indirectly, by means of the, mention, The Strokes's lovely stylistic homage "12:51." Then rock-radio DJs or streaming algorithms can do the rest, spinning "You're All I've Got Tonight" a number of times per day to let it burn into your soul. The Cars's hits, especially the unimpeachable run that kicks off their staggering 1978 self-titled debut, are classics, nevertheless not because DJs played (and continue to play) the hell out of these. It's quite in reverse around. They were place on Earth classics because Ocasek could write a song that you felt you already knew even as you heard it for the opening time.


The songbooks of both Ocasek and his contemporary Tom Petty are full of American standards, and that's exactly why both artists were staples of early MTV. As of 2018, they're both officially Rock and Roll Hame of Fame inductees as well. Like Petty, Ocasek could deploy a candy-coated melody over four familiar chords and make you feel like maybe you could've written it, also — like you never realized it can would be so simple, and that maybe it was. However around listen four or five, you'd realize you knew better. You couldn't write a song like "Gimme Some Slack" at all, and that's what makes it so great.


Looking closely at even the most commercial Cars hits like "Just What I needed perhaps their signature song, reveals the depth of both melody and arrangement chief among Ocasek's several musical gifts. That ticking. Those quick stabs. The big chorus soon after more skeletal verses. Every one of those is a bow on top.


Those gifts stretched into protection for other bands as well. Whenever an emerging California musical group called Weezer needed a studio ace to help capture their guitar-crunching power-pop in the early 1990s, Ocasek handled the work, helming the boards for their landmark debut, referred to because the Blue Album. They recruited him again to recapture that spark on 2001's Green Album and 2014's Everything Will Be Alright in the End. You could hear it.


While still in The Cars, Ocasek worked on records by punk icons Suicide and Bad Brains; right following the band's first breakup in 1988, he continued releasing solo music and producing for artists like No Doubt (the New Wave-y "Don't Let Me Down"), Nada Surf (their big-break alt-rock hit "Popular"), and Motion City Soundtrack (their third album, Even If It Kills Me). Even if he didn't write them, Ocasek still had his fingerprints all over exceedingly lovable songs. He knew what it took to create a tune sound irresistible.


In 1984, The Cars won the first-ever Video of the Year VMA for "You Might Think," a neon dream of daffy nevertheless dazzling computer graphics. The clip cost an announced $80,000 — nearly triple the usual music-video costs at the time — also it remains endearing as hell; it properly matches the song's sticky earnestness with now-primitive special effects like Ocasek's head on a buzzing bee, romancing young model Susan Gallagher. While the song is a buffet of power chords, reverb-drenched drums, and an ear worm of a keyboard tickle, it showcases another facet of Ocasek's songwriting appeal: his openness in the face of his more staid public persona.


"People tell me all of the time that I look forbidding or aloof," he told Rolling Stone in a sprawling 1980 cover story, thankfully since digitized. "That doesn't bother me much — I am fairly private, withdrawn and... Distant, I guess. Although, um, I think that's OK."


"You Might Think" boils down to the straightforward final two lines of the chorus: "You might think I'm crazy / Although all I want is you." With a legacy spanning an avalanche of music as open as that, what's not to love?