Shake It Up

The Zoo Crew is back on the boards at THE ZOO, and the record spinning for the Zoo Freaks right now is "Shake It Up" by The Cars, the title cut off the 1981 album of the same name. If you have ever stood in a bar when that keyboard line kicks in and felt your boots start tapping on their own, you already know why this one still gets the room moving. It is a clean, tight little dance-floor rocket, built by a band that never wasted a note, and it still sounds like somebody just opened the door on a party that was already underway.

Here is the part that always knocks the Freaks out when they hear it. That song did not come together in an afternoon and get tossed on a record. Ric Ocasek had the idea sitting around for years before the band ever cut a version they would keep. Drummer David Robinson has told the story more than once, and he does not dress it up. He said the tune had been kicking around and it never sounded good. They recorded it a couple of times in the studio and dumped it. When the band decided to try it one more time for the album, Robinson was fighting everybody. He did not want to cut it. Then they made a deal with themselves. Start over like they had never heard the song, change every part, and see what happened. When they put it back together, Robinson said, it was like a brand-new song. That is the version that went out into the world and climbed the charts in early 1982, landing at number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and number two on the rock tracks chart, with "Cruiser" riding the flip side. A song the drummer nearly talked the band out of became one of the biggest things they ever released.

Ocasek himself was never all that fond of the words. He said later, plain as day, that he was not proud of the lyrics to "Shake It Up." That is a funny confession from the man who wrote them, because the lines are pure Ocasek even when he was wincing at them. The opening borrows from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life," the old poem that starts with the lives of great men reminding us we can make our lives sublime. Then the song drops straight onto a dance floor, talking about dance moves, rock and roll hair, night cats, and doing the move with the quirky jerk. Bassist and co-singer Benjamin Orr heard something else in it. He said the song was about making a mark, about letting people know what you really mean, which puts a little weight under a record that sounds like pure good times. Ocasek treated words the way he treated a guitar part. He liked the way certain phrases sounded next to each other, and he was not losing sleep if a line did not explain itself. He had been around poetry long before the sunglasses and the Elektra deal. The Beat poets were in his head, and he once ran a little poetry magazine. Dropping a nineteenth-century line into a new wave party song was not an accident. It was just how his brain worked.

The timing of the record mattered too. The album before it, Panorama, had taken a left turn into colder, more art-rock territory, and some of the radio crowd had stepped back. Ocasek called "Shake It Up" the big return to pop. The band went back to the slick, precise, hook-first sound that had made the first two records feel like they were built for the dashboard. Greg Hawkes laid down those bloopy synthesizer lines that still sound like the room just got brighter. Elliot Easton kept the guitar parts sharp and short. Robinson locked the beat so tight you could set a watch by it. Orr and Ocasek split the singing the way they always had, two voices that sat close enough that a casual listener sometimes mixed them up, which Ocasek later chalked up to the years they had already spent in bands together. Roy Thomas Baker, the same producer who had shaped the early albums, was back in the chair. The sessions happened at Syncro Sound, the Boston studio the band had put together, and the album landed in November 1981. The title track was the one that opened the door.

The video did its own kind of work. It is a simple club scene, the band looking cool and a little removed while people dance around them, which fit the way The Cars played live. Ocasek was never the guy who wanted to prod a crowd. He said he did not think of himself as an entertainer, and he liked bands that barely moved. He called the stage show something closer to negative theater. They did not talk much to the audience. The music was supposed to do the talking. "Shake It Up" is the rare Cars single that feels like it is inviting you onto the floor anyway, even if the singer is standing still in wraparound shades. When MTV was still a new toy, that clip got heavy play, and a lot of people met the band through it.

If you want the long road that led to that record, it starts a long way from the dance floor. Ric Ocasek, born Richard Otcasek, and Benjamin Orr, born Benjamin Orzechowski, met in Cleveland in the late 1960s. Ocasek caught Orr on a local television show with a band called the Grasshoppers and thought he had never heard a better voice. Orr sang him Beatles songs on an acoustic guitar, and within a couple of days they were in a band together. They knocked around Columbus and Ann Arbor, then headed east to Boston in the early 1970s, chasing a scene that had room for oddballs. The first serious try was Milkwood, a folk-rock outfit with a Crosby, Stills and Nash lean, which cut one album, How's the Weather, in 1973 and went nowhere. Greg Hawkes, who had studied at Berklee, played saxophone on that record. After Milkwood came Richard and the Rabbits, a name Jonathan Richman suggested, with Hawkes on keys, and then an acoustic duo billed simply as Ocasek and Orr at the Idler coffeehouse in Cambridge.

The next step was Cap'n Swing, with Elliot Easton on lead guitar. They gigged around Boston and did not catch fire. A local disc jockey later summed the problem up without mercy. They were too old, too weird-looking, dressed wrong, not exciting live, and short on hit songs. The fix was a lineup change. David Robinson, already known from the Modern Lovers and DMZ, came in on drums after Ocasek sent him songs. Robinson had the fashion sense that shaped the band's look, and he is the one who suggested the name The Cars. Orr moved to bass. Hawkes came back on keyboards. The five of them played their first show under that name on New Year's Eve 1976 at an Air Force base in New Hampshire. It was not an obvious gang. They were not high school friends with the same record crates. They came from different corners of the country and brought different records with them, and somehow the pot came out tasting like one band.

The break was a Boston radio story, the kind of tale that still matters to anybody spinning records for a living. In early 1977 they got a demo of "Just What I Needed" to WBCN and WCOZ. Maxanne Sartori started playing it, listeners would not let it go, and the record companies came looking. Ocasek said they signed with Elektra because every artist he loved had been on that label. The debut album was cut in about twelve days in London in February 1978 with Roy Thomas Baker, and it stayed on the charts for well over two years. "My Best Friend's Girl," "Good Times Roll," "Just What I Needed," and the rest of that first record built the lane. Candy-O followed in 1979, Panorama in 1980, and then Shake It Up, the record that proved the pop muscle was still there. Heartbeat City in 1984 took them even bigger, Door to Door closed the first run in 1987, and a later reunion album, Move Like This, arrived in 2011 without Orr, who had died in 2000. Ocasek died in 2019. The band went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

If you want to dig further into the band and the album that gave us this song, the official home is thecars.org, where the Shake It Up expanded edition is still part of the story they tell. The band keeps an official page on Facebook, an official account on Instagram, and an official account on X. Fans gather in the The Cars Forever Fan Club group, and there is a long-running Benjamin Orr Remembered group for folks who want to talk about the other voice in the band. Spin it again if you want. The quirky jerk still works.