Let's Go

She slides in on a handclap and a shout, and the whole room leans forward. “Let’s Go,” the door-kicker on The Cars’ second album, Candy-O, is three and a half minutes of cool that still feels like a starter’s pistol. Ric Ocasek wrote it. Benjamin Orr sang it. That split was the band’s secret engine from the first record on: the tall, deadpan songwriter in the shades handing the hooks to the bassist with the movie-star voice. Orr does not plead. He reports. She’s impossible, she knows it, and he is already in the car with the door open.

The clap-and-shout is not an accident. Ocasek lifted the cadence from the Routers’ 1962 instrumental “Let’s Go (Pony),” the old surf-party chant that used to bounce around high-school gyms. Greg Hawkes answers it with a bright Prophet-5 line, the Sync II lead preset or something very close to it, simple enough to whistle and sharp enough to cut through a car radio. Elliot Easton chops the rhythm guitar like a man who studied the Beatles and the Yardbirds and then filed the edges. David Robinson keeps the kit dry and forward. Roy Thomas Baker, the same producer who had stacked Queen’s harmonies into cathedrals, recorded the band at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood and left the parts clean. No fog. No extra syrup. The single landed on Elektra on June 12, 1979, with the non-album flip “That’s It,” another Orr vocal. In France and Brazil the B-side was the title track itself.

It was the first Cars single to crack the American top twenty. Billboard’s Hot 100 parked it at number 14 for two weeks; it entered at 80 in late June and stayed on the chart fifteen weeks. Canada took it to number 5, still the band’s best mark up there. Australia sent it to number 6, again their highest. The United Kingdom shrugged, number 51. Cash Box matched the American peak at 14. For a group that had spent 1978 teaching FM radio a new accent with “Just What I Needed” and “My Best Friend’s Girl,” this was the proof the accent would stick. Candy-O, released June 2, 1979, outran the debut and climbed to number 3 on the Billboard 200, number 4 in Canada, number 7 in Australia. It has since been certified four-times platinum in the States. Elektra had wanted to hold the record back. Ocasek told them if they held the album they held the band, and the band was not sitting still.

The sleeve is half the legend. Drummer David Robinson, the former Modern Lover who also served as the group’s art director, talked pin-up painter Alberto Vargas into one more girl. Vargas was in his eighties, retired, and had not taken a commission in years. Robinson got the painting anyway: a redhead sprawled across a red car, the kind of image that used to live on fighter-plane noses. The title was never a person. Asked if the O stood for Ocasek or Orr, Ric said it stood for obnoxious. The record’s other singles, “It’s All I Can Do” and “Double Life,” did not travel as far. “It’s All I Can Do” stalled at 41. The album’s deep side, “Dangerous Type,” “Lust for Kicks,” “Shoo Be Doo” sliding into the title song, is where the band showed it could get stranger without losing the pocket. Easton’s solo on “Candy-O” still sounds like someone opened a hangar door.

The five of them had come together in Boston in 1976, after years of separate apprenticeships. Ocasek and Orr had already shared bands, including Milkwood and Richard and the Rabbits, and a long friendship that went back to Cleveland. Hawkes, the multi-instrumentalist who could make a synthesizer wink, joined from the same circle. Easton, born Elliot Steinberg, brought a lead guitar that quoted rock and roll history without quoting it to death. Robinson arrived from the Modern Lovers with a visual sense as sharp as his snare. They played the Rat, they played the clubs, they got the Elektra deal, and in February 1978 they cut the debut at AIR Studios in London with Baker. That first album took a year to become a phenomenon. Candy-O did not wait. By the time “Let’s Go” was on every AOR station that still believed in a guitar and a chorus, the band had a look, a sound, and a rule: Ocasek wrote almost everything, Orr sang the ones that needed a human temperature, and nobody mugged for the camera.

Orr’s lead on “Let’s Go” is the temperature. The girl in the lyric likes the nightlife, turns the singer down, and keeps walking. Ocasek said he wrote in borrowed personalities, traits he noticed in people around him, rarely diary pages. The character here is a man being led by the nose and pretending he chose the route. Orr sells it without a crack in the voice. That cool is why the song survived the new-wave label and sat comfortably next to the harder stuff on the same dial. Alvin and the Chipmunks covered it in 1980 for Chipmunk Punk, which tells you how far the hook had traveled. Ernie Isley later recut it for Elektra’s fortieth-anniversary set Rubáiyát and funked the chassis without breaking it.

The run after Candy-O is the rest of the story, and it is a long one. Panorama in 1980 pulled the shades down. Shake It Up in 1981 handed rock radio the title song and “Since You’re Gone.” Heartbeat City in 1984, with Mutt Lange at the board, produced “You Might Think,” the clip that won the first MTV Video of the Year, and “Drive,” the ballad Orr sang that became the band’s biggest American hit at number 3. Door to Door in 1987 was the last album with the original five. They split in 1988. Orr died of pancreatic cancer in 2000. The survivors reunited in 2010, made Move Like This in 2011 without trying to replace him, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. Ocasek died in 2019. What remains is the catalog: more than twenty-three million albums sold in the United States, thirteen top-forty singles, and a way of building a record that later bands stole from and rarely matched.

“Let’s Go” is still the cleanest invitation they ever issued. Handclaps, a Prophet, Easton’s chording, Robinson’s dry kick, Orr out front, Ocasek in the architecture. It opens Candy-O the way a good set opens a night on the request line: no speech, no apology, just the downbeat. The expanded editions that have come out since, overseen in the studio years by Ocasek and art-directed by Robinson, keep the original painting and the original sequence. Side one still starts here.

The band’s own archive lives at thecars.org, with the Elektra-years history, the Hall of Fame note, and the expanded-edition trail. The official Facebook page is facebook.com/TheCars. Pictures and tour-era clips sit on Instagram @thecars. The official X account is @thecarsband. Fans still gather in the long-running Cars Forever circle at The Cars Forever Fan Club. And the station that still plays the deep cuts beside the handclap is THE ZOO, listener-supported, commercial-free, the old KZEW spirit with the album sides left intact. When the clap hits, you already know the next word. Let’s go.