By Blake Maddux
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“The Cars book is going to be substantive,” author and Buffalo Tom singer Bill Janovitz told me in a 2024 Boston.com interview.
A little more than a year later, “The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told” (Hachette/Da Capo) is set for publication on Sept. 30. On the basis of the advance copy that I received, I am happy to report that Janovitz was not exaggerating or being deceptive.
Reading “The Cars” is like having conversation with a diligent rock and roll historian, habituated musician, and relatable fellow fan. Said conversation could begin with the simple request, “Tell me about The Cars,” and proceed with a 450-page answer that one never feels inclined to interrupt.
Janovitz, who has authored two books about The Rolling Stones and a best-selling biography of Leon Russell, expertly guides readers on the extraordinary journey of a quintet that emerged at the tail end of punk to become one of the biggest-selling new wave bands of the late ’70s and most indelible pop groups of the early MTV era. As a result, The Cars can be rightly included with Aerosmith and the J. Geils Band in a triumvirate that solidified Boston as a hub of popular, influential, and enduring rock music from 1970 onward.
In addition to the band’s history as a musical unit, Bill Janovitz meticulously details the personal lives of singer Ric Ocasek, singer/guitarist Benjamin Orr, keyboardist Greg Hawkes (who wrote the foreword), guitarist Elliot Easton, and its only Boston-area native, Woburn-born drummer David Robinson.
Janovitz kindly answered some questions from me about the book in advance his Sept. 29 appearance at Berklee Performance Center. Legendary Boston DJ Oedipus will host of the event, and Greg Hawkes and David Robinson will serve as interlocutors.
Bill Janovitz: No I didn’t. In one of my first meetings with Greg, who signed on to it pretty quickly once it became official that I was going to do it, he said, “let the stories be told.” And it was like a gift. But I know my agent was throwing different titles at me, and I might have had a different subtitle on my proposal.
The real question is, how did I go from The Cars to Leon Russell back to The Cars? I had met Elliot in LA at the Wild Honey Benefit, which is a benefit for autism research, and we just hit it off. I pitched Elliot on a Cars book and he loved the idea. He ran it up the flagpole, but Ric was still around and made the calls, and [he] didn’t want to do it. Then the Leon Russell book kind of fell in my lap. The estate was looking for somebody to do a book and they came to my agent and I loved the whole idea. So that was a couple of years, and in the interim Ric passed away so I ran it back up the flagpole.
Yeah, definitely. Almost everybody. I couldn’t get through to Ric’s kids too much. He had six kids with three different women. His first two kids were completely alienated and bitter. His oldest, Christopher, is all over Instagram calling his dad out. Paulina Porizkova’s [Ocaseck’s wife at the time his death in 2019] kids were happy to have her as the spokesperson. The middle ones I tried and didn’t hear back. Suzanne, his second wife, gave me a little bit but I could tell she didn’t really want to be involved, and I don’t really blame her.
The question that comes to mind is mainly, “Do you have any regrets about the way you treated people?” I would ask him how and why he compartmentalized his life and people in his life. That would be the most interesting thing to me.
He really did regret the way the relationship with Ben ended. He made an effort to reconcile in the ’90s. Ben’s ex-wife Judith Orr talked about how Ric would call and Ben was having none of it. They had a little bit of a reunion before Ben died [in 2000]. Paulina, Ric’s widow, gave me a lot of insight and things that he told her about his regrets.
He wanted it to seem like The Cars came out of nowhere, that they were this young new band. He was embarrassed by that other stuff, and I can see why. As far as I’m concerned it’s a pretty weak record. The songs are kind of half-ish, kind of hippie-ish, neither here nor there. Ben sounds fully formed on it, [guitarist] Jim Goodkind does a good job, but Ric’s voice sounds totally unconfident. So I completely understand it.
In the case of Ben’s singing, I think that it was more about who was best suited for the song. They operated like that all the way back to their earliest days in Ohio in the late ’60s. They recognized in each other the yin and the yang. Ben was naturally good-looking, had an amazing voice, and could play any instrument, pretty much. Ric was not a natural. He didn’t really even think of himself as a musician per se, but rather as a writer and an artist.  
You can’t find a rock star with less of an apparent ego than Greg. He was a real team player, as they all were. They all wanted to serve the songs. But Ric really recognized that The Cars would not be The Cars without Greg, first and foremost. Paulina said that Ric felt like he was just throwing Greg a bone here and there. From what I can tell, Greg deserved more songwriting credit than he actually accepted.
I think that Talking Heads is a very good analog. I think of them both in a very similar way. Elliot Easton told me that Talking Heads was just an art school band. Which they were, because they formed at RISD. But very quickly they got Jerry Harrison [Boston.com interview here], who had been in The Modern Lovers with David, so there are a lot of parallels there. Those bands weren’t similar musically, necessarily, but they both brought in avant-garde influences to a pop audience.
Boston plays a big role in the development of The Cars. The city brought Ric and Ben here as an affordable city with a big college population, venues to play, and a reputation for having a few good music scenes (pop, rock, folk, jazz, etc.). The first week, if not the first day he arrived in Cambridge, Ric saw the Modern Lovers — with Jonathan Richman, David Robinson on drums, [future Talking Head] Jerry Harrison on keys, and Ernie Brooks on bass — on the Cambridge Common. He would not actually meet David for roughly five or six more years.
Greg Hawkes and Elliot Easton came to town to attend Berklee. Maxanne Sartori came from Seattle to be a DJ at WBCN, a hugely influential FM station, where she helped break the band (after breaking Aerosmith) by playing The Cars’ first demo. The Rat was one place that supported new bands playing original music. Boston was early in embracing punk and new wave.
Not really. Elliot does play when asked. There’s a band called Chevy Metal, who he plays Cars songs with from time to time. But it’s not a regular thing as it has been with Greg. David barely plays at all, but he played with Eddie Japan once and played The Modern Lovers song “Roadrunner” with my band once. But he’s very involved in putting together reissues, so he’s a steward of their legacy in a lot of ways.
Janovitz will discuss “The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told” on Monday, Sept. 29, at 7 p.m. at Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Ave., Boston. Tickets are $51.50 including fees, and include a signed copy of the book. For more information, visit berklee.edu.
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