The 2018 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were recently announced, and three of our core GLO classic rock bands earned the honor: The Cars, Bon Jovi and Dire Straits.
Bon Jovi won the fans’ online voting, so it was no surprise that the New Jersey pretty boys made it. Since the fan voting was created, the fans’ top vote-getter has ALWAYS gotten in. That list now includes: Rush, KISS, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Chicago and Journey, last year.
The Cars, meanwhile, finished fourth in the fan vote the fall, which didn’t portend well for the boys who were part of the new wave / snyth rock sound that helped push disco to its demise. With the exception of The J. Geils Band, who churned out tremendously upbeat party rock in the 70’s that no one apparently remembers but me, The Cars were my favorites of the 19 nominees. The were one of “my coming-of-age bands” growing up.
Ric Ocasek was not a pretty boy, yet he fronted the band and would marry (still is) a super model, Paulina Porizkova, giving musicians the unrealistic hope that they, too, could one day have fame, fortune and a super model on their arm. His over dramatic singing style was, to borrow from their lyric, “just what I needed,” during my hormonally charged years.
Ocasek and the band’s other lead singer, Benjamin Orr, met in the late 60’s and played together in bands in Ohio and Michigan before heading to Boston in the early 70’s. Orr died in 2000 of pancreatic cancer, but the rest of The Cars lineup will reunite to play at the induction ceremony on April 14. Orr’s emotional singing style and pipes are missed; he sang lead vocals oN many of my favorite Cars’ tunes.
The Cars may have set the bar too high with their first album, may have been hurt by its massive success when it was released in 1978. I don’t feel the band ever was better than on that LP. They were not the most engaging band to see live, with Ocasek, and Orr for that matter, not the excitable type like his fellow Boston area frontmen, Peter Wolf of J. Geils and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. But their live music sounded like their albums, shown below during their their Live Aid performance in the mid 80’s.
Their next three albums were still solid, producing hits like, “Let’s Go,” “It’s All I Can Do,” “Candy O,” “Dangerous Type,” “Touch and Go,” “Since You’re Gone,” “Shake It Up,” etc. But it was the debut disc that still sounds like a greatest hits album and still gets tremendous play on our station.
Cheers to Ric and the boys! And to Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits and the big-haired Jersey boys, Bon Jovi! They’ll be the headliners of the 33rd annual induction ceremony in April in Cleveland. HBO will air highlights of it later this spring.
Doc Watson
