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Ric Ocasek, Cars Singer Who Fused Pop and New Wave, Dead at 75

Ric Ocasek, the idiosyncratic singer and guitarist for the Cars and hit-making album producer, died on Sunday in his New York City apartment. He was 75. A rep for the NYPD confirmed the singer’s death to Rolling Stone.

At approximately 3 p.m. ET, police officers responded to a 911 call at Ocasek’s home at 140 E. 19th Street, the rep said. Officers discovered Ocasek unconscious and unresponsive. He was later pronounced dead at the scene, though no cause of death has been revealed. A rep for the New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Beginning with the Cars self-titled debut in 1978, Ocasek established himself as a stoic frontman with a sense of humor and melodrama on songs like “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight,” and “Good Times Roll.” As a member of the Cars, Ocasek helped kickstart the new-wave movement by pinning his disaffected vocals against herky-jerky rhythm guitar, dense keyboards and dancefloor-ready beats, and as one of the group’s lead vocalists, alongside bassist Benjamin Orr, he sang the hits “Shake It Up” and “You Might Think.” With the exception of only a couple of songs, Ocasek wrote every tune the Cars recorded. After the band broke up in 1988, Ocasek recorded as a solo artist and worked as a producer, helping sculpt blockbuster hits like Weezer’s Blue Album and Green Album and cult favorites like Bad Brains’ Rock for Light.

casek was born to a Polish Catholic family in Baltimore. His father was a computer systems analyst, and he was sent to a parochial elementary school, where he was kicked out in the fifth grade. He told Rolling Stone in a 1979 profile that he couldn’t remember why he’d been expelled, though he said he aspired to be what he called a “drake,” a tough kid. He fell in love with the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day” when he was 10, prompting his grandmother to give him a guitar, though he didn’t take to it immediately. He became a rebel in his teen years, running away for weeks at a time to the beach town of Ocean City, Maryland.

His family relocated to Cleveland when he was 16, and he decided to shape up and get good grades so he could attend a good college, but he ended up dropping out anyway and became interested again in guitar. This time it stuck, and he started writing tunes regularly. “After I started writing songs, I figured it would be good to start a band,” he told Rolling Stone. “Sometimes I’d put together a band just to hear my songs. If a person couldn’t play that well, there’d be fewer outside ideas to incorporate.” One of the musicians Ocasek drafted was Benjamin Orzechowski (later changing his last name to Orr); he helped record one of the demos.

Ocasek and Orr relocated to New York City, Woodstock and Ann Arbor, Michigan, singing Buddy Holly songs as a duo or playing hard rock so they could open for the MC5. Eventually, they settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts and formed a folk trio called Milkwood, releasing an album in 1972. They both struggled financially — Ocasek worked in clothing stores to keep his family fed — and eventually they met the musicians who would form the rest of the Cars and the group gelled in the winter of 1976. Ocasek wrote all the songs and acted as a benevolent dictator.

“The way it worked was, it would either be on a cassette, or Ric would pick up his guitar and perform the song for us,” Cars guitarist Elliott Easton told Rolling Stone. “We’d all watch his hands and listen to the lyrics and talk about it. We knew enough about music, so we just built the songs up. When there was a space for a hook or a line — or a sinker — we put it in.”

The Cars’ self-titled album, which Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker helmed, came out on June 6th, 1978 and became a Top 20 hit in the U.S. It was later certified sextuple platinum on the strength of the hits “Just What I Needed” (sung by Orr), “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll.” The record is also home to a couple of songs that became hits later, including “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” and (with some thanks due to it soundtracking a pivotal scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), “Moving in Stereo.”

Baby Hold On: Why Eddie Money Was the Patron Saint of Rock Uncool

As he himself would have admitted, Eddie Money was no one’s idea of a conventional rock star. His stage moves were always a little gawky and spasmodic, his borderline hoarse voice in need of a lozenge or two. Emerging during the punk era though never part of it, he preferred the stadium-friendly shout-along choruses of mainstream rock and adopted the suit-and-tie New Wave look while keeping his hair unfashionably long. He was even an NYPD cop — a career move that, while utterly honorable, didn’t jibe with the traditional, anti-establishment rock & roll handbook.

For decades, we’ve been taught that pop stars, especially rock stars, are supposed to embody a certain type of cool. But the accidental genius of Money, who died Friday of heart valve complications at 70, was that he almost never was. Throughout pretty much his entire career, he was rock’s endearing every-palooka, a clumsy, somewhat overwrought guy who was one of rock’s most relatable acts and, during a 45-year career, stumbled onto some of the most enduring radio hits of his era.

From the start, Money seemed out of step. His first album arrived in 1977, the same year that gave us the debuts of the Clash and Elvis Costello, yet Money preferred his rock & roll almost proudly, unabashedly generic. This was the dawn of what came to be known as corporate rock, and so many of Money’s early hits, like “Baby Hold On,” “Gimme Some Water” (“cause I shot a man on the Mexican border”?), and especially “Two Tickets to Paradise,” conformed to many of that genre’s trademarks: big, brawny guitars, a certain vacuum-sealed sound, the music-school guitar solo.

But riding over all of it was that husky, immediately recognizable voice. Money threw himself into songs the way he threw himself into stage shows: with a sloppy passion. Rock lyrics don’t get any more generic than those in the frisky “Think I’m in Love” or his first hit “Baby Hold On” — “the future is ours to see/when you hold on to me” — but Money sang them, and other songs, as if he believed fully in every single word and that his life depended on conveying them with as much intensity as he could.

This was also the era of the pillow-soft sound now called Yacht Rock, a fairly loathsome term dripping with ironic appreciation for the likes of Christopher Cross and Rupert Holmes. But again, Money was never quite right for that moment, either. Hardly a suave crooner, he stood in for every person who was all sputtery emotions, bereft of the polished or articulate gene. As seen repeatedly in his videos, he couldn’t quite pull off the glam-sultry look either, even when he was pretending to be a vampire (“Think I’m in Love”).

Five minutes of bleating desperation, “Take Me Home Tonight,” the 1986 hit that put him back on the charts after a dry spell, remains a wondrous record. As always, he sang it as if his world was falling apart and there was nothing he could do about it — a tension only released when Ronnie Spector emerged to pay homage to her Ronettes hit “Be My Baby” in what may have been the first “live sample” in pop, not cribbing from an old record but actually using the original singer to recreate the part.

That song inaugurated what was Money’s golden era. It’s hard to think of any other Seventies rocker who adapted so well to the sound of the following decade, but Money and his various producers and co-songwriters managed to modernize him while never forgetting his big, over-the-top emotions. “I Wanna Go Back” hit the rock-klutz paydirt, as did “We Should Be Sleeping.” There was nothing remotely subtle about any of those songs or their arrangements, but Money made you root for him, especially since so many of his songs amounted to confessions about how much he’d screwed up in one way or another. And while Money’s discography isn’t exactly filled with buried treasures, plenty of deep cuts are worthy revisiting: the punchy “Trinidad” (especially the live, acoustic version on his Unplug It In EP) and “Another Nice Day in L.A.,” co-written with original Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch.

Then there’s “Walk on Water,” which may well be his masterpiece. Again, it’s laden with every sonic bell and whistle from the Eighties: the amped-synth arrangement, the chanting “na-na-na-na” chorus, the extremely intrusive drums. But even as it elbows its way into the room or the radio, it’s an undeniably poignant song. When he hits the word “believe” in the chorus (“If I could walk on water/would you … believe in me … my love is so true!”), he sounds so desperate to save another failed relationship that you can’t help but side with him. Pop was growing increasingly mechanized, but Money, in his heartfelt, let-it-hang-out way, raged against the machine.