Big Hair and Plastic Grass

Just What I Needed: RIP, Ric Ocasek

(1978 photo by George Porcari)

It's kind of strange, considering how ubiquitous the Cars became on the AM and FM dials, that I somehow went the entire summer of 1978 without having any idea of what they actually sounded like. I saw the cover of their first album everywhere that summer — on billboards, in magazine ads, at Tower Records on Sunset Blvd — but both the cover image and the band's name were simply too generic to give me any real idea of what they were about. And even though Wikipedia now tells me that "Just What I Needed" was released as a single at the end of May '78, I swear I never heard it played on any of the AM stations (mostly KRLA and KHJ) I was glued to.

My first exposure to the song finally came that September, after I got back to Ann Arbor — during a junior high assembly, of all things. My fellow seventh graders and I had been herded into the gym to watch a performance by a guy calling himself "Crazy George," who in retrospect was kind of a cross between a motivational speaker and a watermelon-less Gallagher. Crazy George's first order of business that morning was to dribble a gigantic basketball (we're talking, like, five feet in diameter) up and down the basketball court as his cassette player blared out what sounded like the coolest song I'd ever heard. I turned to the girl next to me, and asked her if she knew what it was. "DUHHHH," she sneered, severely annoyed at having to be seen speaking to me in public. "It's 'Just What I Needed' by the Cars!"

Though that "DUHHHH" was clearly intended to sting, I was too busy connecting the dots in my head — and grooving to the song — to care. "So that's what The Cars sound like!" I thought, as I began mentally calculating when the next convergence of free time and my weekly allowance would enable me to stroll down to Discount Records and purchase a copy of the single. I remember very little else of Crazy George's performance, but I will never forget that moment.

The timing, as is so often the case with such musical epiphanies, was perfect. I would change schools four times between the ages of twelve and fifteen, but the transition from sixth grade to seventh was the toughest. I had gone from the liberal and progressive Burns Park Elementary, where the teachers seemed to actually care about their students — and where it was actually considered cool to be one of the smart kids — to Tappan Junior High School, a cold and indifferent institution where the teachers all seemed burned out and the jocks ruled the social roost. Tappan was less than a mile from Burns Park, but it seemed like an entirely different world, a dumbed-down linoleum jungle which I was woefully ill-prepared to deal with. While my more athletically-talented friends gravitated smoothly into the popular cliques, I found myself consigned to "brain" status, which basically meant that I had to keep my head down in class and in the hallways, or risk being the target of verbal (and occasionally physical) abuse from the popular kids. (To their credit, my now-popular Burns Park friends didn't disown me, and we still shared tables in the cafeteria and hung out on the weekends; on the other hand, they didn't exactly step in whenever one of their new pals decided to make fun of my adolescent croak, or my 80-pound weakling physique.)

As if the situation wasn't already alienating enough, I'd undergone an intensive musical self-education course during the summer that resulted in isolating me even further. I'd left Ann Arbor that June as just another AM radio kid who was heavy into the Bee Gees, ABBA and ELO; and while I still dug (and still dig) that stuff, the combination of KRLA's oldies-heavy programming and a screening of The Buddy Holly Story had opened up a whole new world of music to me while I was staying with my mom and aunt that summer. I returned to Ann Arbor that fall completely besotted with Buddy, the Beach Boys, the Four Seasons, Del Shannon and Elvis Presley, only to find that my schoolmates had all spent their summers deeply immersed in the Grease soundtrack. No school field trip would now be complete without everyone on the bus singing "You're the One That I Want" or "Greased Lightning" or some other shitty faux-Fifties song from the film; everyone except me, that is — I just sat there quietly and fumed, wondering how I'd ended up in this hell.

But when I heard "Just What I Needed" in the gym that morning, something immediately clicked for me. So much about the song sounded "state of the art" — the playful synthesizers, the detached lead vocal, the massed harmonies, the clockwork propulsiveness of the instruments — but there was also something about it that seemed to hearken directly back to the straightforward, guitar-driven pop of Buddy Holly and the early Beach Boys. I would learn much, much later that Cars leader Ric Ocasek — who wrote the song but did not sing it — had been a major Buddy Holly fan in his youth, but my ears and gut had already picked up on the connection. The song seemed smart, too; not that the lyrics were particularly complicated, but I perceived an unabashed intelligence behind their construction which was immediately appealing... and, amid the aggressively anti-intellectual atmosphere of my junior high, remarkably comforting.

In retrospect, I believe "Just What I Needed" was probably the first New Wave song I ever heard; it would be another month before I saw Devo perform on Saturday Night Live, and another couple of months after that before I heard Blondie's "Heart of Glass". I would go all-in on New Wave in 1979, but the Cars definitely opened that door for me. Still, as much as I loved "Just What I Needed," the Cars would never really become my band, in the way that Blondie or the Kinks or the Who or Graham Parker and the Rumour or Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band would all become in the next few years. I've always responded to emotion in music, that visceral sense of commitment, that palpable feeling of "I'm singing this song because I have to," and the Cars were way too emotionally distant to resonate with me on that level. But I always liked them, always admired their hook-filled mini-masterpieces, and always rooted for their success, even when Mutt Lange's over-production of Heartbeat City threatened to drain their music of its geeky charm.

Much has already been written in the last 24 hours about Ric Ocasek's brilliance as a songwriter, his innate ability to distill such edgy influences as the Velvets, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk and Suicide into something you could crank at a Midwestern keg party without risk of being beaten up, and his willingness to use his fame and fortune to lift up deserving but lesser-known artists. (Suicide, for instance, whom I'd never heard of until he talked them up in this 1980 Rolling Stone cover story.) That the Cars were a quintet of enormously talented (and enormously diverse) individuals is also well-known, so I won't bother going into that here. But one thing rarely mentioned about Ric Ocasek was his impeccable style.

Six-four, rail-thin, New Wave mulleted, cheeks pointed inward like he'd just finished sucking the juice from a particularly tart lime, Ric was one unique-looking dude, and definitely not your boiler-plate version of a Seventies rock star. But thanks in part to Cars drummer David Robinson, who also served as the band's stylist in their early years, Ric found a way to make that unique look work for him. I spent high school completely obsessed by his photo on the back of Candy-O, that combination of futuristic sunglasses, two-tone James Dean jacket (with padded shoulders?!?) and loosely-knotted black-and-silver necktie. Sometime in the early Eighties, I read an article on the Cars (I unfortunately forget the author or publication) that described them as an "Art Deco rock band," a description which I absolutely loved. It made perfect sense: Not only was the band's music sleek and shiny, with sumptuous curves and a limited-but-choice chromatic palette, but their look (especially Ric's) was similarly elegant. And, unlike most rockers of the day, you knew that Ric and the boys actually knew what "Art Deco" meant...

While I never wanted to look like Ric Ocasek (which, given my rounded Jewish-Italian features and considerably shorter height, would have been an impossibility to begin with), I was definitely inspired by his style. I spent countless teenage hours combing through Amvets and other Chicago-area thrift stores, trying in vain to find a tie that looked like Ric's on Candy-O, to no avail; but in doing so, I found a lot of other cool clothes, and developed my own sense of style in the process. Much as I loved and admired the Jam's mod revival look, Elvis Costello's Oxfam chic, and Bryan Ferry's tux jackets, it was Ric who showed me that you could blend fashion eras and design elements to create something of your own.

I only interviewed Ric once, about twenty years ago, when I was doing the liner notes for a Cars collection that Rhino put out. (Or may not have ever put out, since I can't find it on Discogs. They did pay me, though!) I really wanted to tell him how much "Just What I Needed" had comforted me during a lonely moment of my adolescence, or how much his unique sartorial blend gave me something to grab for (to quote one of his best solo tracks) when I was trying to figure out how I wanted to present myself to the world, but I kept it professional and Cars-centric. I did find, however, that he was incredibly friendly and kind, and also immensely self-effacing about the Cars' recorded legacy. At one point, when I asked whether it was he or bassist Ben Orr singing lead vocals on a particular song, he replied, "The songs with the good singing? That's always Ben."

And now both Ric and Ben are gone. But they were indeed just what I needed, just when I needed them. RIP, RIC

One Ticket to Paradise: R.I.P. Eddie Money

(Eddie Money live in Hawaii, 1979. Photo by Lawrence Movera)

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

That was my initial reaction when I heard a few months back that Eddie Money had Stage 4 esophageal cancer; and I had the same reaction this morning when my wife called to tell me the sad news that the Money Man had passed. I never met the man, but he felt like a friend; his rumpled, shambling figure has loomed large in my life for decades, and not just because he was the very willing subject of what may well be my favorite phone interview I've ever done, which I've attached for your reading pleasure below.

But before we get to that, here are two stories that revolve around my favorite Eddie track, "Think I'm In Love":

1) Back in 1990, my band Lava Sutra worked up a high-energy cover of the song, both because I'd recently had an convenience store epiphany about how awesome it (and he) truly was — see the introduction of the article below — and because every self-respectin' hard-rockin' indie/grunge band of the time was covering the MC5 and the Stooges. Make sense? Well, no... until you realize that we THOUGHT for some reason that Eddie was from Detroit. We believed we were making a snide comment about how fashionable it had become to drop names of these Motor City legends; in reality, we just ended up being more obtuse than we already were. We actually played a gig at a Wayne State dining hall where I announced, "Since we're in the Motor City, we'd like to do our tribute to Detroit!" And then we played "Think I'm in Love" while the students ignored us and ate their lunches. It was truly the most "Eddie Money" thing we ever did.

2) Twenty years later, my dear friends Eric and Rebecca tapped me to do a short DJ set at their wedding reception. Most of the 45s I brought were of the Sixties soul, psych and garage persuasion, with a little Seventies hard rock and power-pop thrown in, because I knew that's what the bride and groom would dig. But I closed my set with "Think I'm in Love," both because it matched the sentiments of the event, and because Eric and I had spent countless hours over the years cracking each other up with our Eddie Money impersonations — which usually involved Eric saying, "Heeeeey - Where's the Party?!?" while I did my best to imitate Eddie's various gurning facial expressions from the "Shakin'" video.

I fully expected that the song would clear the dance floor, but I didn't care; this was my (and Eddie's) way of putting an exclamation point on the night. I stepped down from the DJ both while the song was still playing; but before I could even reach the bottom step, I was enthusiastically accosted by Katie, my date for the wedding. "Did you just play this?" she inquired, beaming gorgeously. "I LOVE THIS SONG!!!" This was only our second date, but I knew right then and there that she was the one for me. We have been together ever since, and (of course) included "Think I'm in Love" in our 2014 wedding mix.

Thanks for everything, Eddie. I know your life and career had its ups and downs, but you just kept going — and you made a lot of people (me and my wife included) very happy in the process. "Can't Keep a Good Man Down," indeed.

(Oh yeah - click on the images below to read them more legibly!)

 

J.D.'s Revenge, Revisited

My mom, sister and I saw a LOT of movies together in the summer of '76, which was of course totally fine by me.

Even at the age of ten, I was already feeling the pronounced rumblings of what would turn out to be a lifelong fascination with film and film history. Not only was moviegoing a fun and cheap way to beat the L.A. summer heat, but just being able to see Hollywood movies in (or near) Hollywood was a real thrill for this Midwestern boy — it felt closer to The Source (not the Sunset Strip vegetarian restaurant, though of course it was close to that, too), like I was getting a baguette fresh from the baker instead of a pre-sliced, shrink-wrapped loaf from the shelf of the A&P.

I wasn't especially particular about what we saw, just as long as it wasn't a movie "for kids" (I hated being condescended to, even back then) or a foreign flick with sub-titles. If it looked cool, funny, exciting or featured a big-name star, that was lure enough for me — I just wanted to absorb as many movies as possible. And we weren't especially particular about where we saw them, either; that summer, we hit screenings everywhere from Century City's pristine multiplexes to crumbling Art Deco picture palaces like the Pantages and the Wiltern.

Wiltern photo by Anne Laskey, 1978.

We often traveled via public transportation on our moviegoing expeditions, so it was hard to time our arrival perfectly; often as not, we would arrive at the theater a good 30-45 minutes before our intended screening. And since the Wiltern was always showing double features, we would usually just walk in and catch the last reel of whatever was playing before our film. This was not always a sound decision  — the last twenty minutes of Food of the Gods, which perversely preceded (I think) The Gumball Rally, were fully responsible for instilling me with the fear of rats that, er, plagues me to this day. And then there was the time we went to see the Burt Reynolds flick Gator, but wound up catching the end of J.D.'s Revenge. I didn't understand what the hell was going on in it, at all — something about a cackling ghost appearing in a broken mirror, someone getting shot, and a bald man sobbing hysterically. It scared and saddened and confused me all at the same time, and made me wish we had just stayed in the lobby until after it had ended.

Last night, 43 years and change later, I decided to give J.D.'s Revenge another look. Directed by Arthur Marks (Friday Foster, The Monkey Hu$tle) the film has often been cited in books and articles I've read over the years about blaxploitation cinema — specifically those dealing with the horror sub-genre that gave us such classics as Blacula, Abby, and Sugar Hill, and it's been kicking around the bottom of my various streaming queues for a while now. But I only recently learned that J.D.'s Revenge was shot in New Orleans; and, having recently returned from an all-too-short vacation there, I was curious to see if the Crescent City of the mid-Seventies looked anything like I'd remembered from the brief visit my family made to New Orleana in the summer of '74.

On the latter score, J.D.'s Revenge definitely came through: the film features numerous shots of the French Quarter, including a Bourbon Street that's less chaotic but significantly sleazier than the present-day version, just as I'd first experienced it. (One of my most vivid memories from that 1974 trip is of watching horrified parents holding their hands over their children's eyes as they walked past one Bourbon Street strip club after another.) As a film, well... I found myself confused and a little upset by it all over again, albeit for somewhat different reasons than when I caught the end of it back in 1976.

The basic plot: An earnest and upstanding young law student named Ike (Glynn Turman) becomes possessed by the spirit of a zoot-suited hood (David McKnight), who seeks revenge on those who killed him and his sister back in 1942. It's a straightforward if improbable conceit, but it isn't helped by a convoluted screenplay (written by Jason Starkes, who later went on to co-write the basketball comedy The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh) or some strange casting choices — most notably, the great Louis Gossett, Jr. playing a sixty-something jackleg preacher. Gossett would have been about forty at the time of the filming, and an extremely vital and young-looking forty, at that; it seriously took me about two-thirds of the way through the movie to figure out that his character had been one of the people involved in J.D.'s death, because he looks like he would have still been in nursery school at the time.

The film features a fair amount of violence, some of which is cartoonish and played for laughs. But the scenes where J.D.'s spirit abuses and rapes Ike's wife (Joan Pringle) are downright nasty, and the footage of a cow getting disemboweled in a slaughterhouse (which is repeatedly shown as part of J.D.'s flashbacks) is both sad and deeply disgusting. All of which makes it hard to recommend J.D.'s Revenge to anyone other than devoted blaxploitation fans.

That said, Turman is truly excellent in this, really sinking his teeth into (and chewing up) the scenes where J.D. takes over Ike's body and personality. Though occasionally absurd — "You don't like yo' Daddy's CONK?!?" he glowers, when Ike's wife bums out on his new 1940s-style 'do — these are by far the most entertaining moments of the film, with J.D. coming off like a cross between Dave Chappelle in his "Time Haters" skit and a genuinely dangerous Rudy Ray Moore.

While I don't think I'd watch it again, I have to say I'm glad I revisited J.D.'s Revenge. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, but over the last few years I've found myself drawn back to a number of films I haven't seen since childhood — not out of nostalgia, per se, but rather to unlock long-forgotten memories of those days, as well as to try and better understand how my young brain perceived life and art, and why certain things stuck with me while others vanished almost instantly from my consciousness. Call it film therapy, I guess, though I don't think I'm ready to give Food of the Gods another shot.