Ric Ocasek
Ric Ocasek’s hits with the Cars defined New Wave — but there was hurt beneath the sleek sound
His hits with the Cars defined New Wave — but there was hurt underneath.
In 1993, the members of Weezer traveled to New York to meet Ric Ocasek, who was slated to produce their debut album. “He was one of the most significant icons of our childhood,” says bassist Matt Sharp, who had grown up seeing Ocasek’s hits in rotation on MTV. “I can’t think of videos without thinking of him.”
Arriving at Ocasek’s Manhattan address, the bandmates found themselves entering a stately 1850s townhouse with 20-foot-high ceilings, an elevator, a pink pool table, and portraits of Ocasek done by Andy Warhol hanging on the walls. But that was nothing compared to the disorienting feeling of meeting the New Wave icon, who greeted them wearing one of his many elegant suit jackets — like he’d walked out of the video for “Magic” or “You Might Think.” “It would be easy to equate us with four Charlies in the Chocolate Factory,” Sharp recalls. “Ric seemed like he wasn’t of this Earth.”
It was an image well known to millions of people. With his pitch-black hair, pale complexion, and razor-thin frame, Ocasek, who died at 75 on September 15th, was one of the most recognizable figures of the Eighties. “I always said he looked like an upside-down exclamation mark,” says Paulina Porizkova, the Czech-born model who was married to Ocasek from 1989 until their separation in 2017.
His music fit his look: sleek yet moody, charming yet detached. As the main songwriter and guitarist and sometime lead singer of the Cars, Ocasek (pronounced “oh-cass-ek”) mainlined the jittery ebullience of Buddy Holly and the dark punk energy of Lou Reed into the Top 40, while spiking his sleek tunes with barbed lyrics: “I needed someone to bleed,” the Cars offered on 1978’s “Just What I Needed.”
“If the goal was to have great success making pop music with a sense of irony,” says Cars guitarist Elliot Easton, “then mission accomplished, right?”
Yet for all the joy he gave to music fans, Ocasek led a somewhat troubled life that included a difficult childhood, three marriages, and the collapse of the Cars, which Ocasek disbanded in 1988, walking away when he was at the height of his fame. “He was somebody who really wanted to be happy and really tried for happiness,” says Porizkova, “but underneath it all was a lot of pain. . . . His pop element was ‘please like me,’ and his dark lyrics were like the hurt little boy.”
Even Cars keyboardist Greg Hawkes, who met Ocasek in the early Seventies, says he never fully knew his onand-off bandmate. “In spite of being friends with him and a collaborator for years and years, he was also in certain aspects of his life extremely private,” Hawkes says. “There were a lot of things that were never discussed.”
born richard theodore otcasek in Baltimore on March 23rd, 1944, Ocasek grew up in the kind of home that can create an inwardly directed artist. “His mom drank a lot and his father was pretty cold to him,” says Porizkova. “His childhood was not a good one.” During his teen years, his family moved to Cleveland, where his dad worked as a computer analyst for NASA. After graduating high school, Ocasek enrolled in two Ohio colleges, without graduating, and eventually turned his attention to music. “I thought that was the thing to do,” he told Rolling Stone in 1979. “Sometimes I’d put together a band just to hear my songs.” In the early Sixties, he married his first wife, Constance Campbell; he was married to his second wife, Suzanne LaPointe, from 1971 until 1988.
On the Ohio rock scene, he met Ben Orr, who joined Ocasek’s band ID Nirvana. By the early Seventies, Ocasek had relocated to Massachusetts, where he persuaded Orr to move and join a Crosby, Stills and Nash-style trio he’d formed named Milkwood; the band put out one album, 1972’s How’s the Weather, more noteworthy for the soft-rock mustache Ocasek sports on its cover than for the music inside.
He and Orr started a series of new bands. But after Aerosmith’s managers harshly critiqued one of those acts, the Steely Dan-ish Cap’n Swing, Ocasek took charge and cleaned house; Hawkes (who had played on the Milkwood album) was recruited on keyboards, along with drummer David Robinson, formerly of groundbreaking proto-punk band the Modern Lovers. In late 1976, the Cars were ready to go.
Ocasek had finally found the right voice and image, even if Orr often sang lead. (Ocasek, then in his thirties, also shaved five years from his age.) “He developed that guitar style, those clicky eighth notes you can hear on ‘My Best Friend’s Girl,’ ” Hawkes says. “And his vocal style got quirkier. He developed that Buddy Holly hiccup phrasing.”
Soon a demo of “Just What I Needed” was getting played on Boston radio, leading to a deal with Elektra Records. Produced by Queen collaborator Roy Thomas Baker, who went on to work with the band on several more records, 1978’s The Cars went platinum six times and spawned the hit singles “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll.” Yet the Cars’ leader quickly began to chafe at the demands of stardom. Hawkes says Ocasek was embarrassed by the simplicity of later hits like “Shake It Up.” And as an audio control freak, he was never fond of playing live. “He was definitely not one of those ‘Hello, Cleveland!’ kind of guys,” says Easton. “Ric was much happier in the recording studio.”
In 1984, the Cars reached the peak of their success with their fifth LP, Heartbeat City, and its hits “You Might Think” and “Drive.” But the album’s nearly yearlong recording with pop-metal producer Robert “Mutt” Lange left Ocasek drained. Tensions within the band began to escalate when the Cars made their next record, 1987’s Door to Door. “Ben and Ric were not getting along,” Hawkes admits. “The recording sessions were basically unpleasant.”
Around that time, Easton stopped by Electric Lady, the Greenwich Village studio that was Ocasek’s favorite place to work. As the two listened to live Cars recordings, Ocasek dropped a bombshell. “He just kind of said, ‘You know, I think I’m going to leave the group,’ ” recalls Easton. “All the blood went to my feet.”
In 1989, Ocasek married Porizkova, whom he’d met years earlier on the set of the “Drive” video; their first son, Jonathan, arrived in 1993, and Oliver followed in 1998. The family settled into their New York townhouse, where Ocasek installed a studio in the basement. Tellingly, the door to his workspace was often propped open with the MTV “Moonman” statuette the Cars had won for Video of the Year in 1984. Recalls engineer Chris Shaw, “I’m sure he was grateful for the award, but it didn’t mean much.”
With the Cars over, Ocasek made several solo albums and devoted more time to producing and mentoring punk and alt-rock bands, including Weezer, Bad Religion, Guided by Voices, Le Tigre, Bad Brains, and Nada Surf. “He worked with people and changed their lives,” says Sharp. “It’s not an understatement to say that my life and all the lives of the guys in Weezer would be completely different without having that connection with Ric.”
Asked by RS in 1997 about a Cars reunion, Ocasek replied, “I have no interest. I’d rather paint, or write, or do anything else. It’s something that was already done, and those records are already locked away. . . . As a rule, I’d rather live in the future than the past.”
He was drawn back into the Cars’ world when Orr was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the two reconciled shortly before Orr’s death in 2000. “It really scared and hurt Ric,” Porizkova says. “He wrote that song about Ben, ‘Silver’ [on Ocasek’s 2005 solo album, Nexterday], but I think that was the only time I really heard him say how he felt about Ben.”
The surviving Cars eventually reconvened for a new album, 2011’s Move Like This, and Ocasek even agreed to do a brief tour. “Our boys never got to see him as a rock star,” says Porizkova. “And he wanted them to see what Dad did. It was really sweet.” But when some of the old band tensions resurfaced, Ocasek decided to limit the reunion tour to about a month. “It was hard to get him to agree to do even whatever we did,” says Hawkes. “We were just getting into the rhythm of it, and it was over.”
As Ocasek approached 70, his life and career seemed in a state of flux. He reunited with Weezer to produce 2014’s Everything Will Be Alright in the
End. But changes in the music business left him disillusioned (in 2003, he briefly took a job as an A&R executive at Elektra), and creative frustrations began to surface. In 2015, two years before the couple separated, Ocasek played Porizkova some of his last recordings — half a dozen new songs in which she felt he revealed more of himself. “It got me so excited,” she says. “It was entirely new and different. Still very him and very hooky, but it was like him taken to the extremes — the sweetness of his music with pretty dark lyrics.” Despite her encouragement, he couldn’t finish the album. “It’s not coming to me,” he told her.
In April 2018, Ocasek found himself playing with Hawkes, Easton, and Robinson one last time when the Cars were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “It’s funny, because after that night, I really had a sort of sense of finality about it,” says Hawkes. “I didn’t realize quite how final it really was.” Easton says the band did “a lot of healing” after its induction; he and Ocasek even began exchanging punny texts.
In early September this year, Ocasek underwent surgery (Porizkova declines to give details on the procedure). She and their two sons took turns tending to him as he recuperated at home. On the morning of September 15th, Porizkova peered into his bedroom to find him in his usual sleeping position: on his back, “one of his hands elegantly folded beneath his chin,” she says. About an hour later, she checked on him again. “I touched his cheek, and it was like touching marble,” she says. Realizing he had passed, she summoned family members (including sons from his previous marriages), who gathered around Ocasek’s bed to say goodbye before Porizkova called 911.
The New York medical examiner’s office attributed Ocasek’s death to natural causes related to heart disease, with emphysema listed as a factor. Porizkova says she remains “baffled” by the pronouncement because Ocasek gave up smoking 14 years ago and only suffered from a mild case of emphysema. She calls his death “a fucking shock.”
On the day of his New York funeral, Porizkova came across the lyrics Ocasek had written for “Soon,” a ballad on Move Like This that felt like a sequel to “Drive.” But reading them anew, she realized that buried in its pretty melody was a message to her: “I know what I put you through/The time will run away from us like time it will do.”
“I had never really paid attention to it,” she says. “It was a song he had written for me, and it was kind of a hard look into the future. I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’ It really got me.”