Gimme Some Slack

You are locked on The Zoo, the place where the deep cuts still get a full tank of gas and nobody cuts the guitar solo to make room for a commercial. This is The Cars, and the song is “Gimme Some Slack,” side one, track three of Panorama, the 1980 album that proved Boston’s coolest five-piece could take a hard left without losing the engine. If the debut and Candy-O were the records that put Ric Ocasek, Benjamin Orr, Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes, and David Robinson on every rock station in America, Panorama was the one that asked the audience to keep up. “Gimme Some Slack” is the track that still sounds like a handshake and a shove at the same time.

The Cars came together in Boston in 1976, but the real story starts a decade earlier in Ohio. Ocasek caught Benjamin Orr, then still Benjamin Orzechowski, on a Cleveland television show with the Grasshoppers, and the two of them spent years circling the same idea. They played in ID Nirvana and Leatherwood around Ohio State, then moved east and tried folk-rock as Milkwood before the songs got sharper and stranger. Elliot Easton, a Berklee-trained guitarist who could quote Chuck Berry and a modern art museum in the same solo, signed on. Greg Hawkes brought keyboards, saxophone, and the kind of arrangement sense that made a synthesizer feel like a third guitar. David Robinson, already a known name from the Modern Lovers, took the drum chair and, by most accounts, handed the band its name. Five players, two lead singers, one principal writer. By February 1978 they were at AIR Studios in London with Roy Thomas Baker, the producer who had put the gloss on Queen, cutting a debut that would eventually sell in the millions and sit on the album chart for more than two years. “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Good Times Roll,” “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight.” Candy-O followed in 1979 with “Let’s Go” and a Vargas cover that became as famous as the record. They could have kept printing that formula. They did not.

Panorama arrived on Elektra on August 15, 1980, again produced by Roy Thomas Baker, again written entirely by Ocasek. Sessions started at the Power Station in New York and stalled. Syncing two 24-track machines was giving them trouble, and the band and Baker packed up for Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, the same room where Candy-O had been cut. Engineer Ian Taylor ran the board. The album ran about forty minutes, hit number five on the Billboard album chart, and went platinum within two months. Critics heard a colder, more angular record than the first two, and they were not wrong. The title track opens like a machine with a pulse. “Touch and Go,” the first single, made it to number 37 with one of Easton’s most carefully built solos, the kind he has said he composed in a hotel room rather than improvised on the floor. “Don’t Tell Me No” followed as the second single, Benjamin Orr out front. “Gimme Some Slack” was the third, issued January 5, 1981, on Elektra with “Don’t Go to Pieces” on the flip, a non-album side co-written by Ocasek and Hawkes and sung by Orr. The A-side did not chart. On a station that still plays album sides, that is not a verdict. That is an invitation.

The song itself runs three minutes and thirty-two seconds, Ocasek on the lead vocal, rhythm guitar locked to Robinson’s drums, Orr’s bass pushing the pocket, Easton’s lead guitar cutting across the top. Hawkes is doing double duty, organ and saxophone, which is one reason the track never sits still in one genre. Writers at the time heard the Rolling Stones run through a Devo filter, a revved-up rhythm guitar that then refuses to give you an easy groove on the refrain. Ocasek biographer Peter Aaron later called the music propulsive, which is the polite word for a record that feels like it is leaning forward the whole way. The lyric is more grounded than a lot of Ocasek’s postcard surrealism. He traced it to an apartment building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he lived in the early 1970s, clothes hanging on the roof, dirt in the hallway, the everyday squeeze of a city that does not hand out extra room. His line on it was plain: he would think, gimme some slack, gimme some rope, please. There is also a wink buried in the words, a walk down to the end of Lonely Street, which any listener who grew up on Elvis will recognize as the address from “Heartbreak Hotel.” Survival, not romance. Jonathan Takiff at the Philadelphia Daily News put “Gimme Some Slack” and “Touch and Go” on the other side of the band from the lost-and-frantic new-wave love songs, a first-person survival manual dressed up as a rock single.

That is the Panorama bargain. The band has said there was no grand plan to expand the sound. Easton has described Ocasek walking in with a fresh batch of songs and a simple home demo, a short talk about tempo and key, and then the five of them building parts, counter-lines, intros, endings, and solos until a sketch became a record. Easton has also talked about sitting around for long stretches while other parts were worked out, then finally plugging in and playing like a man who had been waiting too long. Panorama is full of that tension. “Misfit Kid,” “Down Boys,” “You Wear Those Eyes,” “Running to You,” “Up and Down,” “Getting Through.” Some of it meets you at the door. Some of it makes you work. “Gimme Some Slack” is the handshake in the middle, the track a rock station can drop between a Stones side and a new-wave single and not apologize for either.

The rest of the story is the one rock radio already knows and still does not tell often enough. Six Elektra albums between 1978 and 1987, more than twenty-three million sold in the United States, thirteen Top 40 singles, and a video for “You Might Think” that took Video of the Year at the first MTV awards in 1984. Heartbeat City made them unavoidable. Door to Door closed the original run in 1987. The band split in 1988. Benjamin Orr, the voice on “Just What I Needed,” “Let’s Go,” “Moving in Stereo,” and “Drive,” died of pancreatic cancer on October 3, 2000. The surviving four reunited in 2010, Hawkes moving to bass, and released Move Like This in 2011 before going quiet again. In 2018 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally called them in. Brandon Flowers of the Killers gave the induction speech. They played, with Weezer’s Scott Shriner covering Orr’s bass and vocal parts. Ric Ocasek died on September 15, 2019. Robinson, Easton, and Hawkes are still the keepers of the name, and the catalog has kept moving through expanded editions and Rhino reissues, including a Panorama set that added the “Don’t Go to Pieces” B-side and unreleased pieces such as “Shooting for You.”

If you want the long version, the band’s own archive is at thecars.org, the official pages are on Facebook, Instagram, and X, and a detailed Panorama discography page lives at Connolly and Company. The Zoo is at thezoorocks.com, listener-supported, commercial-free, still built like the old album-rock stations that would play a non-charting single because the band and the side were worth it. “Gimme Some Slack” is three and a half minutes of that argument. Ocasek asking for room. Hawkes answering on organ and sax. Easton, Orr, and Robinson refusing to give the groove away cheap. Panorama, 1980. Elektra. The Cars. Turn it up.