Lust for Kicks

Flip the vinyl, drop the needle past the handclaps of "Let's Go," and side two of Candy-O still has a left-field number waiting in the three slot. "Lust for Kicks" is The Cars at their most deadpan and most wicked, a three-minute-and-fifty-two-second postcard from a couple who dress the part, lie for sport, and blame the whole mess on the title. Ric Ocasek wrote it, sang it, and played rhythm guitar on it. Benjamin Orr locked the bass. Elliot Easton cut the lead lines. Greg Hawkes stacked the keys, the percussion, and those little sax colors that make the chorus bounce. David Robinson kept the drums dry and the time mean. Roy Thomas Baker produced the session at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, with Geoff Workman engineering and George Tutko assisting, the same crew that had just given the band a number-three album on Elektra. It never went out as a single. It did not need to. Album-rock stations that actually played whole records knew where the good stuff lived.

The lyric is a catalog of cheap glamour. Plastic sneakers. A Roebuck purse, as in Sears, Roebuck, the department-store kind. A butane flicker. A dumb waiter. A cycle ride. He is a hit parader, she tells him lies, and they are crazy about each other like a misplaced fix. Ocasek had a gift for lines that sound tossed off and then stick in your head for forty years. The couple in the song are not tragic. They are bored, stylish, and slightly ridiculous, which is exactly the Boston new-wave pose The Cars perfected after the debut. On the first album some of the stacked harmonies had gotten slick. Ocasek later said they told Baker to ease off the multitracked backgrounds this time. "Lust for Kicks" is the proof. The voices sit closer to the track. The organ pattern from Hawkes is bouncy and a little sarcastic. Easton's guitar answers in short, precise bursts instead of a grand solo. Robinson, who also cooked up the album's cover concept, plays it straight so the joke can land.

Candy-O arrived in June 1979, Elektra 5E-507, eleven songs, about thirty-six minutes, and a pin-up cover painted by Alberto Vargas. The model on the sleeve happened to be named Candy Moore. Ocasek swore the title was not about her, not about himself, and not about Orr. Asked once if the O stood for Ocasek or Orr, he said it stood for obnoxious. The record still went to number three on the Billboard album chart and eventually checked in at quadruple platinum. "Let's Go," sung by Orr, was the hit. "It's All I Can Do" followed. "Double Life" got a single release too. Down on side two, after "Night Spots" and "You Can't Hold On Too Long," "Lust for Kicks" sat between the radio songs and the closer "Dangerous Type," which is where a freeform station earns its keep. A 2017 expanded edition later turned up a monitor mix of the track running past four minutes, a slightly looser pass at the same smirk.

The five men who made it had already done the hard part. The Cars formed in Boston in 1976 out of leftover bands and a shared allergy to bar-band clichés. Ocasek, born Richard Otcasek in Baltimore and raised in Cleveland, was the tall songwriter with the frozen stare and the notebook full of hooks. Orr, born Benjamin Orzechowski in Cleveland, was the other voice, warmer, lower, the one who could sell a ballad or a strut with the same cool. Easton, out of the Berklee orbit, was the guitarist who could quote Chuck Berry and then turn the phrase sideways. Hawkes handled the synthesizers that kept the band from sounding like just another guitar group. Robinson had drummed with Jonathan Richman in the Modern Lovers, named the band, and designed the logo that still looks like a chrome badge. Their self-titled debut in 1978, also with Baker, produced "Just What I Needed," "My Best Friend's Girl," and "Good Times Roll," and suddenly a Boston club act was on every FM dial that still believed in albums.

Candy-O was the pressure test. Could they do it again without repeating the first record note for note? They could. The guitars got a little angrier. The synths got dorkier on purpose. Songs like "Shoo Be Doo" and "Lust for Kicks" were studio creatures, harder to reproduce on a club stage than the debut's road-tested singles, and that was the point. Ocasek kept writing both kinds of songs, the ones Orr sang and the ones he kept. By Heartbeat City in 1984 the band was unavoidable, with "You Might Think," "Magic," and Orr's "Drive" running on radio and on the new video channel at the same time. They split after Door to Door in 1987. Orr died in 2000. Ocasek died in 2019. The surviving members, with Orr's parts handled carefully, put out Move Like This in 2011. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally called them in 2018. None of that changes the fact that a deep cut from 1979 still sounds like a private joke between the singer and the listener.

"Lust for Kicks" is the joke told clean. No lecture, no big chorus begging for a lighter, just a couple of characters in costume and a band that knew exactly how much space to leave around the punch line. If you came up on album rock, you already know the move: let the hit play, then stay for the song the program director skipped. That is the whole reason a station like THE ZOO still spins the catalog instead of the countdown. The band's own trail runs through the long-running archive at thecars.org, the official page on Facebook, the official feed on Instagram, and the official account on X. Plastic sneakers, a Roebuck purse, and a butane flicker. They blamed it all on the lust for kicks. The record never apologized, and it still does not have to.