Double Life

The Zoo Crew has got "Double Life" up on the turntable right now, the Ric Ocasek number from The Cars' second album, Candy-O, and if you are a Zoo Freak who came in for the handclaps on "Let's Go" and stayed for the colder corners of the record, this is the cut that rewards the wait. You can hear the whole show, commercial-free, over at THE ZOO, where the hippie and rock and roll biker DJs still treat an album side like a road trip instead of a playlist. Candy-O came out in June of 1979 on Elektra, recorded at Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles with Roy Thomas Baker back in the producer's chair after the debut. "Double Life" sits on side one, right after "It's All I Can Do" and right before the strange little bridge of "Shoo Be Doo," which then slides into the title track. Ocasek sang it. The rest of the band laid down a bed of "aah"s and that repeating line, "It's all gonna happen to you." It is not a party song. It is a night-drive song, and that is exactly why it belongs on this station.

The song almost did not make the album at all. Ocasek told interviewers that when one of his songs arrived at the band in barest cassette form, they sat around and talked about it, and if he got outvoted, they did not cut it. "Double Life" had already been dropped. That is worth sitting with for a minute. The Cars were not a dictatorship, even with Ocasek writing nearly everything. He said everybody in the band was open-minded enough to try the more radical stuff, but five people in a room meant things were not always as minimal as they could be. The track that nearly got left in the wastebasket is the one that later writers keep coming back to when they want to explain the man. In a 2025 conversation about the biography Moving in Stereo, the book's author picked "Double Life" as a favorite Cars track, calling it lulling but unsettling, futuristic and a little sci-fi, and said the title felt like a summation of Ocasek himself: pop and art, presence and absence, the guy in the shades who never quite let you all the way in.

The opening line is borrowed, and Ocasek never hid that. "It takes a fast car to lead a double life" comes from the first lines of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "Lost Parents." That is a Beat poet, not a Billboard co-writer, and it tells you what kind of lyricist was running the band. Elliot Easton, years later, said they were lucky to have a poet in the group, that Ric's lines always walked the darker side of the human experience, pop music with irony, and that you could still read them like poems. Easton also said Ocasek was one of the funniest people he had ever known, which is easy to forget when you are staring at the frozen face on the album sleeve. The cool on the record was a pose. The rehearsal room was not.

On the finished album the song cross-fades into "Shoo Be Doo," which then cross-fades into "Candy-O." Aside from living in related keys, those three pieces do not have much in common, and that was the point. The same trick had already worked on side two of the debut, where "You're All I've Got Tonight," "Bye Bye Love," "Moving in Stereo," and "All Mixed Up" ran together and tempted programmers into playing more than one song. Candy-O does it again on side one. If you are hearing "Double Life" on the radio and the next thing that arrives is that weird little "Shoo Be Doo" chant, do not touch the dial. The band built the exit ramp on purpose. Elektra released "Double Life" as the third single in December 1979, with "Candy-O" on the American B-side. "Let's Go" had already gone to number 14, the band's first Top 20 hit, and "It's All I Can Do" had scraped to number 41. "Double Life" did not chart. Billboard still called it a throbbing midtempo cut with the band's characteristic nonchalant vocals and taut instrumentation. Record World heard pulsating rhythm, choppy vocal phrasing, and a whining guitar solo that broke the robot spell. Easton's solo is short and fast, high-speed licks over a G-major bed, some of the phrases landing on F so the dominant seventh keeps its job. AllMusic later said the song embraces modern pop. The single mix that turned up on the anthology Just What I Needed runs about twelve seconds longer than the album version. A mime video of the band playing it was the 21st clip shown on MTV's first broadcast day, August 1, 1981. The song that missed the charts still got there early when the pictures started.

The album around it had its own stubborn streak. Elektra wanted to hold Candy-O back. Ocasek said the band told the label there was no way, because holding the record back meant holding the band back, and they were not going to sit around and be held. They also asked Baker to ease off the stacked harmonies that had felt a little slick on the first album. The sleeve was another coup. Drummer David Robinson, who shaped so much of the visual identity, helped land pin-up artist Alberto Vargas for the cover, the last painting Vargas completed. Easton has called Candy-O his favorite Cars album for that reason alone. Ocasek, asked once whether the O in the title stood for Ocasek or Orr, said it stood for obnoxious. He also said he never knew anyone named Candy-O. Benjamin Orr, who sang the title track, joked that Ric had never told him about her.

None of that cool arrives out of nowhere. Ocasek and Orr met in Cleveland in the mid-1960s after Ocasek caught Orr's band the Grasshoppers on a local television showcase, The Big 5 Show. They knocked around Columbus and Ann Arbor, then moved to Boston in the early 1970s and cut a folk-rock album as Milkwood, How's the Weather, on Paramount, which went nowhere. Greg Hawkes, a Berklee student, played saxophone on that record, then left to tour with Martin Mull. Ocasek and Orr worked day jobs in clothing stores, paid for demo time by doing carpentry for a studio owner, and played coffeehouses as a duo. In early 1976 they built Cap'n Swing with Easton on lead guitar. Boston loved them. The industry showcases did not. Maxanne Sartori at WBCN pointed them toward David Robinson, late of the Modern Lovers, and Robinson came in on drums, suggested the name The Cars, and pulled the look together. Hawkes came back on keyboards. A Harvard dining-hall gig and heavy local airplay on WBCN did what the failed showcases could not. The debut arrived in 1978 and stayed on the chart for well over two years. Candy-O, and "Double Life" with it, was the second lap, less slick on purpose, still full of that clipped, neon-lit distance.

The band's own house is still open. The official site at thecars.org carries the Candy-O expanded edition, with bonus mixes and liner notes that include a fresh talk with Easton, right alongside the Elektra Years box that puts Candy-O back in its 1979 sleeve. The official Facebook page lives at facebook.com/TheCars, where the band still posts archival clips, including the old "Shoo Be Doo" television performance that fans immediately wish would slam into "Candy-O." Instagram is instagram.com/thecars, and the official X account is x.com/thecarsband. If you want the long-running fan room, The Cars Forever Fan Club keeps the photo albums, the signed Candy-O eight-tracks, and the arguments about which side is better at facebook.com/groups/302364603899509. Leave the single on. The fast car in the first line is still out there, and the double life is the whole point of the song.