Ric Ocasek’s Double Life: Pop Stardom, Art Noise, and the Cars’ Legacy

Ric Ocasek was both there and not there. A man who managed to be everywhere—on radio, on MTV, in glossy spreads alongside his supermodel wife—and yet remain a cipher, staring out from behind impenetrable sunglasses. He was the tallest guy in the room (six-four, without the bouffant), but somehow also invisible, a kind of Warholian negative space in skinny ties.

Peter Aaron’s new biography, Moving in Stereo: Ric Ocasek, the Driving Force of the Cars (Backbeat Books), tries to pull the shades down just a bit. “Ric always seemed like a really interesting personality,” Aaron says. “He worked with challenging bands but also had massive pop success. There was always this mysterious air about him.”

Aaron, a Kingston-based music journalist and musician himself (and this magazine’s arts editor), first fell for the Cars as a teenager. “Those first couple of records were a big deal for me in high school,” he says. And then, like many of us, he spent the next four decades trying to figure out who, exactly, this lanky man in the sunglasses really was.

The Case of Ric Ocasek

Writing Moving in Stereo wasn’t just a matter of rifling through old clippings. As Aaron tells it, “Much of the time, gathering information for the book was like doing detective work. Ric was such a puzzling paradox. He was incredibly famous, but not very forthcoming in interviews. He covered his tracks really well.” There were no definitive books on Ocasek or the Cars, just surface-level press pieces churned out to promote the latest record. Even bandmates were often kept in the dark. Keyboardist Greg Hawkes, for example, recalled only discovering on an early tour that Ocasek had children from a previous marriage when he unexpectedly met Ric’s son. “When I mentioned the name of Ric’s first wife, Connie,” Aaron says, “Greg said, ‘I’ve never even heard that name before. Ric never mentioned it.’”

So Aaron went full gumshoe. He sat down with Hawkes and drummer David Robinson, and cast his net wider to Ocasek’s other orbits: Devo’s Gerald Casale, Suicide’s Martin Rev, the Bad Brains’ Daryl Jenifer, and guitarist Fuzzbee Morse, who contributed the book’s foreword. He tracked down legendary Boston DJs Maxanne Sartori and Oedipus, as well as Ocasek’s sister, Maureen Otcasek-Rohrs. And he reached back even further, to collaborators from pre-Cars projects and even the drummer of Ric’s very first Ohio band, a ’60s outfit called Id Nirvana. “It was an epic expedition,” Aaron says—fitting for a subject who seemed determined to remain a riddle.

Outsider Origins

Ocasek grew up in Baltimore and Cleveland, an awkward kid marked by strict Catholic schooling, a father he didn’t connect with, and a body that stretched upward faster than his social skills. “Being extraordinarily tall, he got picked on for that, and that made him socially awkward,” Aaron says. “He holed up in his room, read the Beats, built a darkroom in the basement, played with ham radios. He became an insular, introspective person.”

That interiority never really left him. Ocasek on stage was no Pete Townshend windmilling his way into the crowd. He stood planted, letting the music—and the sheen of the Cars’ chrome-finished sound—do the moving. Aloofness became part of the brand, an artful withholding.

Pop Surfaces, Dark Currents

The Cars’ eponymous 1978 debut seemed almost too perfect: “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” all delivered airtight hooks for FM radio. But Ocasek’s lyrics hinted at other registers. “You’ve got these big, epic, sing-along pop songs,” Aaron says, “but the words are strange, almost unsettling.”

“Good Times Roll” in particular lands like a satire of hedonism, though many happily sang along at keg parties. I ask Aaron if pop success was a compromise to Ocasek or a way of smuggling in his worldview? “I think both,” he replies. Aaron relates something Ocasek once told Daryl Jennifer of the Bad Brains, “You can make art or you can make money.” With the Cars, he managed both, slipping little pieces of Suicide and the Velvet Underground into the Top 40 like contraband.

The Ocasek–Orr Axis

Every double act needs its foil, and for Ocasek that was Benjamin Orr, the Cars’ cofounder and bassist. “Ben was technically a much better singer—super handsome too, which didn’t hurt,” Aaron says. “He was an extension of a certain side of Ric that Ric couldn’t get to on his own. Ric couldn’t do the torchy, sexy songs. Ben could.”

This division of labor gave the Cars their dual-edge appeal. Ocasek’s art-damaged voice handled the poppier numbers; Orr’s rich croon eased listeners into the stranger corners, like “Moving in Stereo,” a song that sounds like alienation getting its groove on. The balance worked until Orr’s death in 2000, which left Ocasek without his musical mirror.

The Studio as Sanctuary

Even at the height of the Cars’ fame, Ocasek was retreating into the studio, where he felt safest. “He saw the studio as another way of expressing himself creatively, a different type of canvas,” Aaron says. Producing became less a sideline than a second career.

He helped break Weezer with their 1994 Blue Album, protecting them from record-company meddling. He guided Bad Brains through their mid-’90s comeback. With art bands, he’d coax out a pop sensibility; with pop bands, he’d slip in some art noise. “That was his biggest skill,” Aaron says. “He could sneak experimentation into pop, and sneak pop into the avant-garde.”

Pop Art Marriage

In 1984, on the set of the “Drive” video, Ocasek met the 19-year-old Czech model Paulina Porizkova. They married five years later and became a tabloid-ready odd couple. Lazy journalists branded them “Beauty and the Beast,” but Aaron sees something more deliberate. “Ric was a huge Andy Warhol fan,” he says. “He saw celebrity itself as pop art. Paulina was the glamorous side, he was the quirky side. Together they could live as a kind of work of art.”

In the Cars, Orr was the photogenic one. In life, Porizkova played that role. Ocasek didn’t reject fame; he refracted it. He stood in the limelight and watched the party at the same time.

Left Turns and Shake-Ups

The Cars’ arc was anything but linear. Their eponymous debut was a perfect alloy of pop and art. Then came Panorama (1980), their left-field, Suicide-influenced detour. “It lost a lot of people,” Aaron admits. “But over time it’s been revealed as underrated and influential.” They followed with the sunny Shake It Up (1981), a return to chart form, and then their biggest seller, Heartbeat City (1984), produced with Mutt Lange.

“It was their most successful album by far,” Aaron says. “But to me, the least interesting.” Still, it yielded “Drive,” Orr’s signature ballad, which would soundtrack Live Aid and countless prom slow dances.

Even their Orr-less 2011 reunion album Move Like This had some spark, particularly the single “Blue Tip,” which Aaron insists is “as good as anything off the first couple records.”

Folk Roots and Beat Poetry

One surprise for Aaron was Ocasek’s early immersion in folk. Before the Cars, he and Orr played in Milkwood, a Crosby, Stills & Nash-style harmony trio. “When the Cars hit, you can hear that—the harmonies on the first couple records,” Aaron says. “But to equate the Cars with CSN isn’t something most people would do.”

Ocasek’s lyrics drew heavily from his teenage Beat obsessions, like this oddball verse from “My Best Friend’s Girl”: “You’ve got your nuclear boots / and your drip-dry glove.” Lines like these were less narrative than collage. “You could project what you wanted onto him,” Aaron says. “That’s part of the enduring power. He was enigmatic.”

Double Life

When asked to name a favorite Cars track, Aaron chooses “Double Life,” a moody cut from Candy-O. “It’s lulling but unsettling, futuristic and sci-fi,” he says. “It wraps up so many of Ric’s stock-in-trade moves.” The title also feels like a summation: Ocasek’s whole career was a double life—pop and art, presence and absence, intimacy and distance.

“He loved music and art, and it consumed him,” Aaron reflects. “That made him dysfunctional at times, but it also made him Ric Ocasek.”

Six years after Ocasek’s death, we’re still puzzling over the man in the shades, the geek who married the model, the pop craftsman who produced Bad Brains. Ocasek left behind a stereo double life—enigmatic, contradictory, but still moving.