First Daniel Johnston, then Eddie Money, and now RIc Ocasek. This one is the real bummer for me -- I was never a huge fan of Eddie Money ("Shakin'" was cool, I guess) and I found DJ pretty much unlistenable (sorry, guys) in addition to having serious issues with the way his mental illness intersected with the music business. But I've been a Cars fan since 1980, and I still listen to them on a regular basis. PANORAMA is one of my all-time favorite albums. So this is a real drag. Of course, living to 75 is pretty good, and he apparently went out of natural causes while asleep, so that's a good thing. Still... a major bummer.
Now I am compelled to tell the story of how I came to be a Cars fan. Plenty of people on my friends list have already heard this story -- in some cases, multiple times -- but now, as Devo once put it: "I know you've heard this all before / But now you're gonna hear some more."
In 1980, I was a dysfunctional 15-year old attending a very large school full of assholes (students, teachers, idiots in charge, etc.) and taking Geometry (which I hated with a passion not unlike the blazing of one thousand suns). It was there that I met The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Her name was C____ and she sat two seats in front of me. The Geometry teacher was King Lord God Bu-Fu of the Kingdom of Assholes, so I generally ignored him in favor of concocting lurid fantasies about what C____ might look like with her shirt off. (Pretty goddamn good, I suspected.)
Naturally, it eventually occurred to me that maybe I should ask her out. Just one problem: my chances of getting her attention (beyond saying "hello") were close to zero. i was not only a short, extremely uncool nerd with bad hair, big glasses, and a whole boatload of personal problems, but I had just relocated from Tennessee, where I had spent four years, the last two of which I attended a tiny private school. I was still getting used to the idea of not having to wear a suit and tie to school (which only made me look like a well-dressed monkey), and I was still wrapping my head around the sheer size of the school, which was a huge campus filled with vast buildings and nearly 2,000 students in attendance. And even at that age, I grasped that girls like C____ did not date nerds like me.
Still, because she *was* The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, I continued to desperately think of some way I could possibly impress her, to no avail. Then one day she came to class wearing a Cars t-shirt from the PANORAMA tour. A very tight t-shirt, I might add. When I picked my eyeballs up off the floor, I had a new plan: I would go to the store and buy that album and listen to it, and then the next time she wore that shirt, I could wow her with my knowledge of the band, and she would be so impressed that she would want to go home with me to listen to it and then Things Would Happen. (I was in complete fantasy land at this point, obviously.)
So I did indeed buy the album, and I listened to it, and a funny thing happened: it never did help me get in C____'s pants (she was too buy getting all dreamy about the captain of the football team anyway), but I fell in love with the album from the first listen. I had never heard anything like it before, but the album's abstract lyrics and anxiety-riddled paranoia suited me perfectly. I could relate to songs like "Panorama," "Misfit Kid," and "Down Boys" -- their lyrics might have been opaque, but they still mirrored the unhealthy paranoia of my daily life.
So while I never did succeed in my addled mission to connect with C____, I did end up becoming a fan of the band for life. I still listen to them. PANORAMA is still one of my favorite albums.
I have no idea what became of C_____.
