On August 15, 1980 The Cars released Panorama, their third and most underrated album. Within four weeks it would peak at #5 on the US album charts. despite a lukewarm reception by critics.
“I hardly saw a bad review of the first album, but the second one was a totally different story," said keyboardist Greg Hawkes in a Rolling Stone cover story that year. "And now, with Panorama, we’ve had reviews saying stuff like, ‘What happened to these guys?’ It’s as if we made one good record and then totally blew it.”
The US#37 "Touch And Go" is the only hit on the album. And even that was a surprise considering that it has 13 bars in 5/4 time before it launches into 18 bars of 4/4.
Rolling Stone described the album as “an out-and-out drag.” Far unkinder was the review from Deborah Frost of The Boston Phoenix, an early supporter of their hometown band:
“Certainly, some of their fans will think they’re really putting their necks on the line this time. Bullshit. If they are, it’s not because the music or ideas behind it are so brainy, but because this is a slapdash job.” Elsewhere, Frost concluded, “This year’s model is a lemon….”
Dr. Robert Christgau tried to diagnose Panorama in his B- review:
The problem's not immersion in formula. The problem's not exhaustion of formula. The problem's boredom with formula. This is longer, slower, and denser as well as older, with lyrics that skirt social commentary and music that essays textural pretension. Its peaks are "Touch and Go" and "Up and Down." Savor the rhythm of those phrases, Ric, and grow no more.
While Jon Pareles wrote:
“[These] new songs seem designed to separate Cars’ fans from the pop crowd: they use odd meters and desperate-sounding chords….The Cars’ audience may be loyal enough to follow them this far—who knows if that’s what the Cars want?”
One of the more interesting influences on the album is Suicide, the band whose second album was produced by Ric Ocasek.
“I think Alan Vega is one of the few real artists I’ve ever met—but he is sort of scary. I was petrified when I first met him, until I realized that he’s just this really gentle soul with a tough, Harlem-bred exterior. Actually, what he’s doing is more jazz and R+B than rock+ roll, though he’s instilled it with a punk-minimalist aesthetic. It’s monotonous, which I like, because monotony can be soothing. Except Alan’s lyrics really aren’t soothing at all.”
The pulsating deep cut "Shooting For You" sounds like it could have been a Suicide song. In fact, ega covers the song his 1985 album Just A Million Dreams.
Panorama is an album worth revisiting, especially if you joined the critics in dismissing it. This is the sound of a band fulfilling its promise to make an album that please themselves.
On June 13, 1979 The Cars released Candy-O, the follow-up to their self-titled platinum debut. With Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker at the controls, the Boston band delivered another quirky set of new wave tunes including "Let's Go", the first song by The Cars to hit the U.S. Top 20.
The entire album has a fresh feel and a sexy cover courtesy of pin-up artist Alberto Vargas. It's paced faster than the debut even if the songs aren't quite as good. (There's probably a good lesson in here by the way for rock bands.) I liked it at the time but I was also beginning to have my doubts about the band. Friends told me their New Haven concert wasn’t any good.
Most critics heaped praise with some reservations. The album did not score a place on 1979's Pazz and Jop Critics Poll, despite Robert Christgau of the Village Voice grading the album a B+:
Hooks are mechanical by nature, but the affectlessness of these deserves special mention; only listeners who consider "alienation is the craze" a great insight will find much meaning here. On the other hand, only listeners who demand meaning in all things will find this useless. Cold and thin, shiny and hypnotic, it's what they do best -- rock and roll that is definitively pop without a hint of cuteness. Which means that for them "alienation is the craze" may be a meaningful statement after all.
Tom Carson of Rolling Stone found fault in the album's sound:
It's almost inevitable that Candy-O, the Cars' second album, doesn't seem nearly as exciting as their first. The element of surprise is gone, and the band hasn't been able to come up with anything new to replace it. Candy-O is an elaborately constructed, lively, entertaining LP that's packed with good things. And it's got a wonderful title. But it's a little too disciplined, a shade too predictable. You never get the idea that these guys are going out on a limb, reaching for something dramatically beyond the safe borders of their proven appeal. Instead, there's a sense of relying on established devices, of shaping the songs to fit "the Cars sound," that's unusual in a group so young, and the record sounds familiar the first time you hear it. Candy-O is a good album that never remotely threatens to turn into a great one.
If anything, the Cars are even more facile musically than they were before, but that same facility makes Candy-O sound like glib product too much of the time. It doesn't feel urgent the way the first record did. On The Cars, the group found a perfect middle ground between the New Wave's revisionist spirit and the mass audience's growing conservatism. These guys didn't catch the spirit of the time so much as perform a neat balancing act between its contradictions. Wit and epic exuberance, not artsy trappings, made the Cars special, and they haven't given us nearly enough of those qualities here. What the band doesn't seem to realize is that all that tight-assed posturing is trite and ultimately tiresome. Rick Ocasek + Company are a more interesting, less gimmicky group in almost every way than Cheap Trick, but they've never done anything as humanly moving as "Surrender."
I don't dislike Candy-O -- after all, it sounds better than practically anything else on the radio -- and I still like the Cars. They're a good band. Their virtue is they're never anything less than that. Their limitation is they've yet to prove they're anything more.
On June 6, 1978 The Cars released their debut album.Thanks to a collection of songs that would make an enviable greatest hits compilation for any new wave band of that era, The Cars would sell millions of copies and spend 139 weeks on the charts.
These days I can't hear side two's one-two punch of "You're All I've Got Tonight/Bye Bye Love"" without remembering the Saturday night dances at my boarding school. What the hell was I doing out there on the dance floor? A tall, skinny teenager with a shaggy haircut and a big nose had no business trying to bust some moves. I still cringe just thinking about it. ( Bye bye love indeed)
It would have been so much better had I been a tall, skinny teen of mystery who stayed in my room on Saturday nights doing push ups and studying.
Kit Rachlis wrote this review for Rolling Stone:
The first sound you hear on "Just What I Needed," the single from the Cars' debut album, is the repeated thump of bass notes against the short, metallic slash of guitar. It's a magnificent noise: loud, elemental and relentless. But the Cars -- the best band to come out of Boston since J. Geils -- aren't interested in simply travelling the interstates of rock and roll. They'll go there for the rush, but they prefer the stop-and-go quirks of two lanes. Before "Just What I Needed" is over, guitarist Elliot Easton has burned rubber making a U-turn with his solo, and Greg Hawkes' synthesizer has double-clutched the melody. Leader Ric Ocasek once sang that he lived on "emotion and comic relief," and it's in this tension of opposites that he and his group find relief (comic or otherwise) between the desire for frontal assault and the preference for oblique strategies. This is the organizing principle behind not only the single but the entire LP, which is almost evenly divided between pop songs and pretentious attempts at art.
The pop songs are wonderful. (Besides "Just What I Needed," they include "My Best Friend's Girl" and "You're All I've Got Tonight.") Easy and eccentric at the same time, all are potential hits. The melodies whoosh out as if on casters, custom-built for the interlocked but constantly shifting blocks of rhythm, while Ocasek's lyrics explode in telegraphic bursts of images and attacks ("You always knew to wear it well/You look so fancy I can tell"). Neither Ocasek nor bassist Ben Orr have striking voices, but by playing off the former's distant, near-mechanical phrasing against the latter's sweet-and-low delivery, the band achieves real emotional flexibility.
As long as the Cars' avant-garde instincts are servicing their rock and roll impulses, the songs bristle and -- in their harsher, more angular moments ("Bye Bye Love," "Don't Cha Stop") -- bray. The album comes apart only when it becomes arty and falls prey to producer Roy Thomas Baker's lacquered sound and the group's own penchant for electronic effects. "I'm in Touch with Your World" and "Moving in Stereo" are the kind of songs that certify psychedelia's bad name. But these are the mistakes of a band that wants it both ways -- and who can blame rock and rollers for that?
From Robert Christgau writing for the Village Voice :
Ocasek writes catchy, hardheaded-to-coldhearted songs eased by wryly rhaphsodic touches, the playing is tight and tough, and it all sounds wonderful on the radio. But though on a cut-by-cut basis Roy Thomas Baker's production adds as much as it distracts, here's hoping the records get rawer. That accentuated detachment may feel like a Roxy Music move in the first flush of studio infatuation, but schlock it up a little and this band really could turn into an American Queen.
In 1977 a nine song demo tape by a local band called The Cars reached Boston radio stations WBCN and WCOZ. They played "Just What I Needed" and "My Best Friend's Girl", both of which became the station's most requested songs. That's all it took for Elektra to sign The Cars who would eventually sell six million copies of their 1978 debut album. If nothing else, this demo should make you appreciate producer Roy Thomas Baker.
The smartest thing The Cars did was wait a few years after Fountains of Wayne's had a hit with "Stacey's Mom", skip past the sound of their debut and go straight to Candy-O style synth pop on their new album.
To celebrate, here's a Ric Ocasek tune from that era that became a Top 40 hit for former Stories lead singer Ian Lloyd. You can hear The Cars provided backing vocals.
It's called "Slip Away".
Here's The Cars demo version:
After the Seattle born singer's power pop career with Stories (which included the hit "Brother Louie")ended, Lloyd provided tons of back up vocals to hit songs, including Foreigner's "Feels Like the First Time" and "Cold As Ice" as well as Billy Joel's "I Go to Extremes". In 2009 he won the Global Marijuana Music Award for best Rock song.
