The Cars- Candy O- the late Ric Ocasek, Greg Hawkes

By the 1979 July 4th holiday, a scant fourteen months after The Cars’ debut album had surprised all but a handful of early adopters around their Boston assembly line, all eyes and ears were trained upon the quintet’s next model, Candy O. The consensus that The Cars‘ debut was one of the strongest first efforts in rock history was by then only beginning, a notion that has grown to Rolling Stone magazine ranking it at #16 on their Top 100 Debut Albums All-Time list.

In a pre-You Tube world, the act of staying home on a Saturday night just to catch The Cars perform on Saturday Night Live  was a testament to their unfolding appeal, and by filling the very same stage that had seen the Rolling Stones on the 1978 Fall season opener, it elevated The Cars to the winners circle by the time the Sunday paper was on your doorstep. On Candy O, Cars chief design engineer the late Ric Ocasek delivered a power plant firing on more than eight cylinders with the songs “Let’s Go”, the tasty mid-tempo melodies “Since I Held You” and “It’s All I Can Do”, the Marc Bolan/T.Rex infected “Dangerous Type”, “Got a Lot on My Head”, and the insistent camshaft darkness in the sophomore album’s title song.

Ocasek and Cars keyboard retro-innovator Greg Hawkes were my guests In the Studio in this classic rock interview for Candy O,  and now they and drivetrain drummer David Robinson, under-rated tasty lead guitarist Elliot Easton, and the late singer/bass player Benjamin Orr have been granted a reserved parking spot  in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sadly, Ric Ocasek succumbed to complications of heart disease, which is truly a loss to the world of music. –Redbeard