Sad Song

The Zoo Crew has got a little machine-cool spinning on the turntable for the Zoo Freaks, and it is one of those records that sneaks up on you. The Cars put "Sad Song" out as the lead single from Move Like This, the album that landed in May 2011 on Hear Music after a twenty-four-year stretch with no new studio set from the band. Ric Ocasek wrote it, Jacknife Lee produced it, and the thing went to radio on the first of March that year. It climbed to number 33 on Billboard's Rock Songs chart and number 49 on the Canada Rock chart. Critics kept saying the same thing, and they were right: for a number called "Sad Song," it does not sound particularly sad. Exclaim! noted the cheery beat and the catchy mix of synths and guitars. Rolling Stone heard the opening salvo, that terse guitar strum against a machinelike snare and handclaps, and called it a note-perfect evocation of the old attack, almost a wink at themselves. Elliot Easton's riff has a little of "My Best Friend's Girl" in the bones. David Robinson's drums push it the way he pushed "Since You're Gone." Greg Hawkes lays a Heartbeat City wash over the top. Ocasek comes in with that same detached cool he used on "You Might Think."

Ocasek told Spinner UK that the song was a little topical. The lines run on heartache waiting to strike and too many screamers wearing a mask, which he called a sad scenario riding on happy music and a happy melody. He compared it to "Just What I Needed," one of those tunes that pulls you in before you notice the lyric is not exactly sunny. Maybe it was the media, he said, maybe it was the general ambiance of life. On the Concord side of the story, the band framed "Sad Song" and "Blue Tip" as coming out of Ocasek's interest in how the media shapes the way people think. He told them he used to say you write the same song all the time, but these felt different, more topical, a bit more poetic. Hawkes was plain about the job they gave themselves: they wanted a modern slant, and they tried hard to keep it from being only a nostalgia thing, which is hard when your whole history sits in the past.

The long road back is the real story under the chorus. Benjamin Orr, the bassist and the other voice, had died of pancreatic cancer in 2000. Move Like This is the only Cars album without him. Jacknife Lee filled in on bass. A one-minute clip of "Sad Song" and a sample of "Blue Tip" showed up on the band's Facebook page in October 2010, with a snippet of "Free" after that. The full "Sad Song" followed in March, the album on May 10, and then an eleven-city run through North American theaters, capped with a spot at Lollapalooza. Ocasek told Rolling Stone the reunion was strictly a new thing, that they were done with everything that had happened before, and that it was great. Ultimate Classic Rock heard an undercurrent of anxiety and loss under the propulsive wall, and noted that Orr's feathered background vocals were the one missing nest for that leaping chorus. "It's just a sad song and it won't take long" is the line that sticks, tough-minded and a little flippant, which was always Ocasek's way. "Free" was the other single, and the last Cars single released in their lifetime. It did not chart. A later Philippe Zdar mix of "Sad Song" turned up on the band's Moving in Stereo collection, which the official site still notes as a track from that 2011 album.

If you want the beginning of the artist, you have to go back to Cleveland and a kid named Richard Otcasek, later Ric Ocasek, who saw Benjamin Orzechowski, later Benjamin Orr, on a local television show with a band called the Grasshoppers. They fell in together, booked bands around Columbus and Ann Arbor, and tried a group called ID Nirvana near Ohio State. By the early 1970s they had moved to Boston, where the scene was thick and the breaks were thin. With guitarist Jas Goodkind they formed Milkwood, a folk-rock outfit in a Crosby, Stills and Nash vein, and put out one album, How's the Weather, on Paramount in 1973. It did not chart. Greg Hawkes, who would become the keyboard man, played saxophone on that record and met them there. After Milkwood came Richard and the Rabbits, with Orr and Hawkes in the mix, and an acoustic duo stretch where some of the early Cars songs started to show their shape.

The next stop was Cap'n Swing, with Elliot Easton on lead guitar. Easton had come through Berklee. WBCN disc jockey Maxanne Sartori started spinning their demo, but the labels passed. Ocasek decided the lineup did not fit the songs. He let the bass player and the drummer go, put Orr on bass, and brought in David Robinson, already known from the Modern Lovers, DMZ, and the Pop! Robinson suggested the name the Cars, and his eye for clothes had a lot to do with the look that followed. Hawkes came back on keys. By late 1976 the five were a band. The break that mattered was a demo of "Just What I Needed" landing at WBCN and WCOZ in early 1977. Listeners would not let it go, Elektra signed them, and Roy Thomas Baker produced the debut at AIR Studios in London. The Cars arrived in 1978 and stayed on the chart for well over two years, with "Just What I Needed," "My Best Friend's Girl," and "Good Times Roll" doing the heavy lifting. From there it was Candy-O, Panorama, Shake It Up, Heartbeat City, and Door to Door, then the long quiet, then this last ride.

That is the long arc the Zoo Crew likes to tell between records. A couple of guys from the Midwest knock around Boston for years, miss, miss again, then lock in a sound that is part power pop, part new wave, part cool detachment, and ride it until the friendships fray. They get one more album, without the singer who carried "Drive" and "Let's Go," and the first thing they hand the radio is a sad song that refuses to mope. The Zoo Freaks can hear the handclaps and the synths and decide for themselves whether the lyric wins. If you want the rest of the ride, the deep cuts, the backstories, and the freeform album rock that still treats a record like a record, pull up a chair with THE ZOO.

The band's own home on the web is thecars.org, where the archive still points at that Zdar mix of "Sad Song" from Move Like This. The official Facebook page is The Cars, the official Instagram is @thecars, and the official account on X is @thecarsband. Fans who keep the conversation going, sealed copies of Move Like This and all, gather in the Cars Forever Fan Club.