In 2011, David Fricke spoke to Ric Ocasek about the Cars' reunion, the height of the band's success, bassist-singer Benjamin Orr and more
,” he claims, “if it wasn’t for the Cars. Their sound is sleek and orchestral, and no one steps on anybody else’s toes.”
“We were the best of friends forever,” Ocasek says, his fondness tinged with regret. In their initial years together, “sometimes we played his songs. But dear Ben – I could never get into the lyrics. I almost didn’t want them part of the thing. Maybe it was the controlling,” he concedes. Robinson was a Boston-scene star even before he joined the Cars; he’d played with Jonathan Richman in the Modern Lovers. Although Robinson never attended college or art school, he was responsible for much of the Cars’ visual class, designing album covers and creating the group’s striking license-plate logo. Robinson gradually left music after the Cars broke up and, five years ago, opened Windemere, where he sells jewelry of his own design and paintings by local artists.
Ocasek is one of rock’s enduring puzzles, both deliberate and enigmatic in his music, manner and choices. Born Richard Otcasek in Baltimore, the son of a NASA systems analyst, he dropped the “t” in the mid-Seventies and has always been cagey, for the record, about his age. He admits to being older than 62 but not by much: “I’m somewhere around that area.”
Ocasek is also a fascinating mix of mystery and candor when it comes to his private life. Hawkes first met Ocasek at a session for Milkwood’s 1972 album – Hawkes played sax on it – and played with him in other bands on the way to the Cars. The two men were in a hotel elevator during a 1979 Cars tour when Ocasek mentioned that his son was coming to the show that night. Ocasek was then married to his second wife, Suzanne.
In the early Eighties, at the height of the Cars’ success, Ocasek lived on “12 cups of coffee and no sleep,” as he puts it. “It was all about the Cars. There was no domestic life. I was always sad for the children.” Ocasek reveals that one son by an earlier marriage is a recovered drug addict. “I’d always think, ‘Is it my fault? I could have gone different ways.'”
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