Double Trouble

Zoo Freaks, settle in and roll the windows down. The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Double Trouble," the Benjamin Orr vocal from The Cars' 1987 album Door to Door, and it still feels like a motorcycle idling in a neon alley. Written by Ric Ocasek, sung by Orr, and cut at Electric Lady Studios in New York during April and May of 1987, the track runs a little over four minutes and never got the single treatment. Radio went with "You Are the Girl," "Strap Me In," and "Coming Up You." The heavy one stayed in the album cut bin, which is exactly where a freeform station like THE ZOO likes to live.

Elliot Easton had a good line for what Door to Door was trying to be. In a 1987 interview he joked that, around the studio, they kept calling the record their Rubber Soul. Not because it sounded like the Beatles, but because it wandered. "Everything You Say" leaned country. There were lush ballads. And then there was "Double Trouble," which Easton called real heavy. You can hear it. Orr's bass sits up front, the guitars have more grit than the Heartbeat City gloss, and Greg Hawkes's keyboards stay in the passenger seat instead of driving the car. Ric told the Boston Globe that year he wanted the album more down-to-earth and less synthesized. He said he liked things in disorder more than order, and he had reservations about computer music. David Robinson played real drums in the room this time, after years of samples and sequencers doing a lot of the heavy lifting. For a band that had become the sleek face of new wave video, that was a left turn back toward the clubs.

The trouble in the title was not just a lyric. Door to Door was the last studio album with the original five, and the room was cold. Keyboardist Greg Hawkes later told Rolling Stone that Ben and Ric were not getting along, and that the sessions were basically unpleasant. He said, looking back, they should have brought in an outside producer to mediate. In another interview he admitted he could barely stand to hear the record, because all he heard was bad vibes. Joe Milliken, who wrote the Benjamin Orr biography Let's Go!, has said that by the end of the band the songwriting had become a dictatorship. Ric wrote nearly everything. He told Rolling Stone he had never been able to get into Ben's lyrics, and that he almost did not want those songs in the thing. Ben, for his part, was drifting. People close to the band have said he did not want to tour and would rather have stayed in Hawaii. The Door to Door tour got scrapped partway through. Not long after, at Electric Lady, Ric told Elliot he was leaving. No big meeting. No shouting match. Just the end of the line.

That makes Orr's vocal on "Double Trouble" hit a little different. He is the cool one, the voice on "Just What I Needed," "Let's Go," "Moving in Stereo," and "Drive," and here he is riding a song about trouble doubled over on itself, written by the man he was barely speaking to. Fans who found the album late still argue it is underrated. The singles did fine on rock radio. "You Are the Girl" reached number 17 on the Hot 100 and number 2 on the rock chart. "Strap Me In" hit number 4 rock. The album itself stalled at number 26, the lowest chart position of any Cars studio record, and within a year the band was done. It stayed done until the survivors regrouped for Move Like This in 2011, without Ben, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2000. Ric died in 2019. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally called them in 2018.

If you want the long road that led to that vocal, it starts in Cleveland, not Boston. Ric Ocasek, born Richard Otcasek in Baltimore in 1944, had moved to Ohio with his family. One night in 1965 he caught a local band called the Grasshoppers on a black-and-white variety program, The Big 5 Show. The singer was a kid named Benjamin Orzechowski, later Orr. They struck up a friendship. A few years on, both of them in Columbus, they started a band called ID Nirvana. From there it was Ann Arbor, then Boston in the early seventies, chasing a scene that still had room for a long-haired songwriter and a good-looking bass player who could sing. In Boston they formed Milkwood, a folk-rock outfit with a Crosby, Stills and Nash lean. Milkwood actually got a record out, How's the Weather, on Paramount in 1973. It did not chart, and the group fell apart. Ric and Ben kept going. Richard and the Rabbits came next, a name Jonathan Richman suggested, with Greg Hawkes on keys. Hawkes had already played saxophone on the Milkwood album and had studied at Berklee.

By early 1976 they were Cap'n Swing, a tougher pop-rock band, and they pulled in Berklee guitarist Elliot Easton. Easton has said the first time he heard them, at a Warner Brothers party for Foghat, he thought it was the first local Boston band he had ever heard doing its own music that strong, and he wanted in. Cap'n Swing got showcases and still could not land a deal. WBCN disc jockey Maxanne Sartori was already playing their demos. Ric cleared the deck, moved Ben to bass, and brought in David Robinson from the Modern Lovers on drums. Robinson named the band The Cars and had a lot to do with the look, the album art, and the sharp suits that did not match the hair. Hawkes came back. In 1977 a demo of "Just What I Needed" hit WBCN and became the most requested song in town before it was even on a record. Labels that had passed suddenly wanted to know who they were signed to. Elektra won. Roy Thomas Baker produced the debut at AIR Studios in London. The 1978 album stayed on the charts for 139 weeks. Ric wrote the songs alone, put the parts on tape, and the band learned them. He said he started The Cars to play music he wrote, the same way he had started every band before it.

That is the machine you are hearing underneath "Double Trouble." A Cleveland meeting on a local TV show, a string of failed bands, a Boston DJ who would not let a demo die, and two singers who split the wheel for a decade until the wheel came off. Door to Door even reached back to the club days for "Leave or Stay" and "Ta Ta Wayo Wayo," songs they used to open with at the Rat, re-cut in 1987 like it was yesterday. "Double Trouble" was the new bruise. Ocasek told the New York Times that year he never knew how a song would come out, that he read a lot of poetry, and that the pop songs had a twist. He said they were more twisted than he would ever be.

If you want the official trail, the band's home on the web is thecars.org, where the Elektra Years box still lists Door to Door right beside the debut, Candy-O, Panorama, Shake It Up, and Heartbeat City. They keep a verified page at Facebook, an official feed at Instagram, and the band account at X. Fans still gather in the Cars Forever Fan Club group, and the Orr story is carried at benorrbook.com. Spin it again, Freaks. Orr is on the mic, the guitars are mean, and the door is still open.