Review: 'The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told'

The Cars were one of the few bands who arrived fully, 100% formed on their first album. The Cars was so confident, perfectly constructed, and jammed with iconic songs that I wrote that it might as well have been called "The Cars Greatest Hits" in my book 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute. I thought I was mildly clever for that.  Except, I wasn't the first person to make that observation (it was something the band themselves often said), as I learned while reading Bill Janovitz's much better book, The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told.

I also learned that the reason The Cars popped onto the pop scene with such stunning strength was that there was a ton of history and hard work leading up to that 1978 debut. Like fellow New Wave superstar Debbie Harry, Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr were no bouncing babies when their careers took off. Ocasek was well into his thirties. Orr had been playing music at the professional level since working in the house band on a Shindig-like show in Cleveland in the mid-sixties. Ocasek and Orr worked their ways through multiple bands—some hippie-ish, some more proggy—on their way to "Just What I Needed" and "My Best Friend's Girl". The lead up to their success was so rich with detail and experience that it accounts for some 120 pages of Janovitz's 460-page book, and it is fascinating.

When The Cars become stars, the storyline becomes a bit more rock-bio typical, as the guys enjoy phenomenal success, make some great records, make some mediocre ones, play some big festivals, marry-divorce-repeat, indulge in substances, develop animosities, break up, reunite, etc., but Janovitz tells it with the crispness and thoroughness of a proper rock journalist (he interviewed all three surviving members of the band, as well as insiders like Devo's Gerald Casale, who directed videos for The Cars; Ocasek's ex Paulina Porizkova; and Suicide's Martin Rev, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo, and Guided By Voices' Doug Gillard, both of whom were produced by Ocasek) and the insight that comes with a career as a musician (Janovitz was a member of nineties alt-rock group Buffalo Tom). He goes pretty deeply into the specifics of recording and composition to the point that Let the Stories Be Told kind of does double-duty as a proper band bio and a Revolution in the Head-type song analysis, at least for the first few albums. Plus his interview subjects are very lively, especially Porizkova and band-friend Bebe Beull. But its the enigmatic Ocasek and the self-destructive Orr, both profoundly self-contradictory characters in many ways, that make the latter half of this book dramatic and poignant.

I'd hardly call myself a Cars superfan (it's all about the two first albums for me, and I find "Drive" to be schmaltzy), but I devoured all 460 pages of Let the Stories Be Told in less than three days. Superfans will find it indispensable.