RIP: Ric Ocasek

[eDave]

Found dead in NY. 75

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[Why Not?]

Shitty.

[Chief Northman]

Damn.

He found someone to drive him home.
Great voice, great band. RIP Ric.

[siberian khatru]

Can’t believe he was that old.

We’re losing a lot of the great ones, with a lot more to come the next 5-10 years.

[Easy 6]

75, that’s probably a pretty good life for Rick... if there is a Cars song I don’t like, I’ve never heard it

RIP, Rick

[Simply Red]

Damn man

[displacedinMN]

that stinks. Great band.

[seclark]

Rip
Sec

[rabblerouser]

Damn.

He found someone to drive him home.
Great voice, great band. RIP Ric.

The vocals on "Drive" were sang by late bassist Benjamin Orr.

RIP to Ric.

[PHOG]

RIP

[redfan]

RIP
Legendary

[Rasputin]

Dang. RIP.

[stumppy]

Damn damn damn. RIP........Let the good times roll!

[stevieray]

Wore the eight tracks out in High School.

Eliot Easton is super underrated.

[patteeu]

That's weird. I had the Cars "You Might Think" in my head all day today. I haven't listened to the Cars in a long time and I don't think I've been exposed to this news (even subconsciously) yet. That's pretty coincidental.

[Al Bundy]

My favorite song by The Cars
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[Why Not?]

Kinda cool they just played The Cars heading into commercial on SNF

[TinyEvel]

The Cars were one of the great synth bands of the 80's. Really underrated band IMO

[PunkinDrublic]

The Cars were one of those bands that made writing catchy songs look easy. This one hurts. RIP.

[Chief Northman]

The vocals on "Drive" were sang by late bassist Benjamin Orr.

RIP to Ric.

Yeah, I know that.

[eDave]

The Cars were one of the great synth bands of the 80's. Really underrated band IMO

I wouldn't call them under rated.

[eDave]

Can’t believe he was that old.

We’re losing a lot of the great ones, with a lot more to come the next 5-10 years.

They come in 3's.

[TinyEvel]

I wouldn't call them under rated.

I do think thye are under appreciated. at least by the majority of people. I bet most of the general public thought of them as a one or two hit wonder (You might Think)

[Baby Lee]

Dude had a marriage that lasted, with a supermodel.

Respect.

[threebag]

RIP

[ChiTown]

Big Cars fan. Saw them 3 different times, once in Kemper Arena.

RIP

[FlorentinePogen]

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.. that sucks. RIP
Benjamin Orr died way too soon, as well.

[Deberg_1990]

RIP.

Super talented guy. Great band.

[RedRaider56]

Dude had a marriage that lasted, with a supermodel.

Respect.

No kidding.
RIP, Mr. Ocasek

[CrossCheck]

Kurtis Seaboldt

@KSeaboldt
·
13m


Ric Ocasek was a rock star for 15 years and THEN spent the next 28 years married to Paulina Porizkova. That’s a hell of a run.

[Pitt Gorilla]

So, uh, she’s single?

[srvy]

Dammit

RIP

[Beef Supreme]

I got my nuclear boots, and my drip dry gloves.

[Frazod]

That sucks. RIP

[IowaHawkeyeChief]

RIP, I wore that Cars cassette out, that i got from Columbia records, 13 for a penny, playing it on my Sony walkman...

[Dartgod]

Oh man, that sucks. We played that Candy-O cassette before school practically every morning before school my senior year.

RIP, Rick...

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[Bowser]

Oh man, damn. RIP

[Boon]

RIP Another rocker done gone.

[2bikemike]

Damn another one!

[MahiMike]

Damn another rocker dead? Damn 75? Crazy.

RIP

[KChiefs1]

RIP

The Cars were one of my favorite 70’s & early 80’s bands.

He got to bang s supermodel every night so he had a good life.

Just what I needed was my go to song.

[kc rush]

That sucks. RIP

[BucEyedPea]

Can’t believe he was that old.

Nor can I. Can't believe I missed this thread either.

RIP Rick. I had seen him walking down Newbury Street a few times in Boston in the past.

[T-post Tom]

RIP. Great lead. Great band. Great American band. (Lost my V card listening to "Let's Go"/Candy-O.)

[PunkinDrublic]

I do think thye are under appreciated. at least by the majority of people. I bet most of the general public thought of them as a one or two hit wonder (You might Think)

They were pretty pretty big already and then they got even more exposure from their videos when MTV went on the air.

[Bowser]

This is probably my favorite Cars song out of them all, and they have a ton I like (Phoebe Cates' boobs have nothing to do with me loving this song. I think.)

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[scho63]

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

First Eddie Money and Now Ric Ocasek! This sucks.....what a second 75 years old????

Who's next Fred Schneider of the B-52s? Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh or Bob Mothersbaugh of Devo? Peter Frampton? Ace Frehley of Kiss?

Stop with my 80's idols!

On a positive note, Paulina Porizkova is now a grieving widow.......:D

[patteeu]

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

First Eddie Money and Now Ric Ocasek! This sucks.....what a second 75 years old????

Who's next Fred Schneider of the B-52s? Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh or Bob Mothersbaugh of Devo? Peter Frampton? Ace Frehley of Kiss?

Stop with my 80's idols!

On a positive note, Paulina Porizkova is now a grieving widow.......:D

The Coming Death of Just About Every Rock Legend (https://theweek.com/articles/861750/coming-death-just-about-every-rock-legend)

Rock music isn't dead, but it's barely hanging on.

This is true in at least two senses.

Though popular music sales in general have plummeted since their peak around the turn of the millennium, certain genres continue to generate commercial excitement: pop, rap, hip-hop, country. But rock — amplified and often distorted electric guitars, bass, drums, melodic if frequently abrasive lead vocals, with songs usually penned exclusively by the members of the band — barely registers on the charts. There are still important rock musicians making music in a range of styles — Canada's Big Wreck excels at sophisticated progressive hard rock, for example, while the more subdued American band Dawes artfully expands on the soulful songwriting that thrived in California during the 1970s. But these groups often toil in relative obscurity, selling a few thousand records at a time, performing to modest-sized crowds in clubs and theaters.

But there's another sense in which rock is very nearly dead: Just about every rock legend you can think of is going to die within the next decade or so.

Yes, we've lost some already. On top of the icons who died horribly young decades ago — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon — there's the litany of legends felled by illness, drugs, and just plain old age in more recent years: George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty.

Those losses have been painful. But it's nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come. The grief and nostalgia will wash over us all. Yes, the Boomers left alive will take it hardest — these were their heroes and generational compatriots. But rock remained the biggest game in town through the 1990s, which implicates GenXers like myself, no less than plenty of millennials.

All of which means there's going to be an awful lot of mourning going on.

Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).

A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the … wear and tear to which they've subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not.

This will force us not only to endure their passing, but to confront our own mortality as well.

From the beginning, rock music has been an expression of defiance, an assertion of youthful vitality and excess and libido against the ravages of time and maturity. This impulse sometimes (frequently?) veered into foolishness. Think of the early rock anthem in which the singer proclaimed, "I hope I die before I get old." As a gesture, this was a quintessential statement of rock bravado, but I doubt very much its author (The Who's Pete Townshend) regrets having survived into old age.

It's one thing for a young musician to insist it's better to burn out than to fade away. But does this defiance commit the artist to a life of self-destruction, his authenticity tied to his active courting of annihilation? Only a delusional teenager convinced of his own invincibility, or a nihilist, could embrace such an ideal. For most rock stars, the bravado was an act, or it became one as the months stretched into years and then decades. The defiance tended to become sublimated into art, with the struggle against limits and constraints — the longing to break on through to the other side — merging with creative ambition to produce something of lasting worth. The rock star became another in our civilization's long line of geniuses raging against the dying of the light.

Rock music was always a popular art made and consumed by ordinary, imperfect people. The artists themselves were often self-taught, absorbing influences from anywhere and everywhere, blending styles in new ways, pushing against their limitations as musicians and singers, taking up and assimilating technological innovations as quickly as they appeared. Many aspired to art — in composition, record production, and performance — but to reach it they had to ascend up and out of the muck from which they started.

Before rock emerged from rhythm and blues in the late 1950s, and again since it began its long withdrawing roar in the late 1990s, the norm for popular music has been songwriting and record production conducted on the model of an assembly line. This is usually called the "Brill Building" approach to making music, named after the building in midtown Manhattan where leading music industry offices and studios were located in the pre-rock era. Professional songwriters toiled away in small cubicles, crafting future hits for singers who made records closely overseen by a team of producers and corporate drones. Today, something remarkably similar happens in pop and hip-hop, with song files zipping around the globe to a small number of highly successful songwriters and producers who add hooks and production flourishes in order to generate a team-built product that can only be described as pristine, if soulless, perfection.

This is music created by committee and consensus, actively seeking the largest possible audience as an end in itself. Rock (especially as practiced by the most creatively ambitious bands of the mid-1960s: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and the Beach Boys) shattered this way of doing things, and for a few decades, a new model of the rock auteur prevailed. As critic Steven Hyden recounts in his delightful book Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock, rock bands and individual rock stars were given an enormous amount of creative freedom, and the best of them used every bit of it. They wrote their own music and lyrics, crafted their own arrangements, experimented with wildly ambitious production techniques, and oversaw the design of their album covers, the launching of marketing campaigns, and the conjuring of increasingly theatrical and decadent concert tours.

This doesn't mean there was no corporate oversight or outside influence on rock musicians. Record companies and professional producers and engineers were usually at the helm, making sure to protect their reputations and investments. Yet to an astonishing degree, the artists got their way. Songs and albums were treated by all — the musicians themselves, but also the record companies, critics, and of course the fans — as Statements. For a time, the capitalist juggernaut made possible and sustained the creation of popular art that sometimes achieved a new form of human excellence. That it didn't last shouldn't keep us from appreciating how remarkable it was while it did.

Like all monumental acts of creativity, the artists were driven by an aspiration to transcend their own finitude, to create something of lasting value, something enduring that would live beyond those who created it. That striving for immortality expressed itself in so many ways — in the deafening volume and garish sensory overload of rock concerts, in the death-defying excess of the parties and the drugs, in the adulation of groupies eager to bed the demigods who adorned their bedroom walls, in the unabashed literary aspirations of the singer-songwriters, in mind-blowing experiments with song forms marked by seemingly inhuman rhythmic and harmonic complexity, in the orchestral sweep, ambition, and (yes) frequent pretension of concept albums and rock operas. All of it was a testament to the all-too-human longing to outlast the present — to live on past our finite days. To grasp and never let go of immortality.

It was all a lie, but it was a beautiful one. The rock stars' days are numbered. They are going to die, as will we all. No one gets out alive. When we mourn the passing of the legends and the tragic greatness of what they've left behind for us to enjoy in the time we have left, we will also be mourning for ourselves.

[Sweet Daddy Hate]

RIP

[Mennonite]

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

First Eddie Money and Now Ric Ocasek! This sucks.....what a second 75 years old????

Who's next Fred Schneider of the B-52s? Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh or Bob Mothersbaugh of Devo? Peter Frampton? Ace Frehley of Kiss?

Stop with my 80's idols!

On a positive note, Paulina Porizkova is now a grieving widow.......:D


Shit, i had no idea Eddie Money died.

[Easy 6]

Honestly didn’t think Ocasek was quite that old, was thinking more like 65... what a terrible weekend for music

[BlackHelicopters]

Grew up to the music. See you in Heaven.

[gblowfish]

The Cars first two albums came out while I was a rock DJ at Mizzou. Candy-O was a smash album with Vargas Girl art on the cover. You don't hear bands cover Cars tunes because the synth work is so elaborate and essential in re-creating the song. Ben Orr the bass player died from cancer almost 20 years ago. Ric helped produce other bands the last 20 years or so. He was by all accounts a super nice guy and one hell of a songwriter. RIP.

[Holladay]

This is probably my favorite Cars song out of them all, and they have a ton I like (Phoebe Cates' boobs have nothing to do with me loving this song. I think.)

Dang, you beat me to it:) I love the bass rif at 3:58.

I saw them at Kemper. One of the best concerts I'd seen. Nothing flashy, just GREAT music.

[scho63]

[i] Rock music isn't dead, but it's barely hanging on.

All of which means there's going to be an awful lot of mourning going on.

[b]Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).


Boy did that just kill my buzz.......:deevee:

[T-post Tom]

Boy did that just kill my buzz.......:deevee:

That makes two of us. :(

[Nzoner]

The Cars were one of the great synth bands of the 80's. Really underrated band IMO

I do think thye are under appreciated. at least by the majority of people. I bet most of the general public thought of them as a one or two hit wonder (You might Think)

Yes and they also think they're an 80's band :shake:

My favorite 70's Cars song and all time Cars song

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[Lzen]

RIP Rick. :( One of my favorite 80s bands.

[Nzoner]

RIP Rick. :( One of my favorite 80s bands.

:banghead:

[alpha_omega]

RIP

[Dartgod]

[i]The Coming Death of Just About Every Rock Legend (https://theweek.com/articles/861750/coming-death-just-about-every-rock-legend)

Rock music isn't dead, but it's barely hanging on.

All of which means there's going to be an awful lot of mourning going on.

Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).
So Ric Ocasek was the same age as Keith Richards. Think about that for a moment.

[siberian khatru]

So Ric Ocasek was the same age as Keith Richards. Think about that for a moment.

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[eDave]

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LOL

[Chief Pagan]

75, that’s probably a pretty good life for Rick... if there is a Cars song I don’t like, I’ve never heard it

RIP, Rick

I never cared for Drive. But my housemate and I played them a lot during college.

[BlackHelicopters]

Grew up dating and mating to the Cars.

[Halfcan]

Grew up dating and mating to the Cars.

This.. I sent off for a demo of the Cars 1st record and played it about a year before they were signed. Then I had them on 8 track, cassette, record, CD and now downloaded in a file.

Great songwriter. RIP

[Easy 6]

I never cared for Drive. But my housemate and I played them a lot during college.

That was the age of the ballad, everyone had one back then... loved the lyrics, a sad song that hits home during a breakup

[Tombstone RJ]

Bummer, the first concert I ever saw was the Cars. It's been a long time since Benjamin Orr died (the bass player and other frontman/singer) and now Ocasek is gone. Very sad indeed

[Tombstone RJ]

[i]The Coming Death of Just About Every Rock Legend (https://theweek.com/articles/861750/coming-death-just-about-every-rock-legend)

Rock music isn't dead, but it's barely hanging on.

This is true in at least two senses.


...Yes, we've lost some already. On top of the icons who died horribly young decades ago — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon — there's the litany of legends felled by illness, drugs, and just plain old age in more recent years: George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty.

Those losses have been painful. But it's nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come. The grief and nostalgia will wash over us all. Yes, the Boomers left alive will take it hardest — these were their heroes and generational compatriots. But rock remained the biggest game in town through the 1990s, which implicates GenXers like myself, no less than plenty of millennials.

All of which means there's going to be an awful lot of mourning going on.

Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (78 years old); Paul McCartney (77); Paul Simon (77) and Art Garfunkel (77); Carole King (77); Brian Wilson (77); Mick Jagger (76) and Keith Richards (75); Joni Mitchell (75); Jimmy Page (75) and Robert Plant (71); Ray Davies (75); Roger Daltrey (75) and Pete Townshend (74); Roger Waters (75) and David Gilmour (73); Rod Stewart (74); Eric Clapton (74); Debbie Harry (74); Neil Young (73); Van Morrison (73); Bryan Ferry (73); Elton John (72); Don Henley (72); James Taylor (71); Jackson Browne (70); Billy Joel (70); and Bruce Springsteen (69, but turning 70 next month).

A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the … blah, blah, blah...

He missed Ozzie Ozbourne and others who will soon pass

[Chief Pagan]

That was the age of the ballad, everyone had one back then... loved the lyrics, a sad song that hits home during a breakup

I don't mind ballads. But it was so out of style for them and then with a different vocalist. I prefer ballads where you can tell it's the same group.

But I don't want to go to negative on a remembrance thread. I listened to the original album and Candy O a ton.

[scho63]

So Ric Ocasek was the same age as Keith Richards. Think about that for a moment.

Keith Richards liver needs to go into the Smithsonian. :eek:

[Pitt Gorilla]

I never cared for Drive. But my housemate and I played them a lot during college.One of my all-time favorites.

[Frosty]

I had no idea until now that The Cars released two more albums after Heartbeat City, including one in 2011 with the original members (minus Orr, of course). For some reason, I thought Heartbeat City was their swan song.