THE CARS

A comprehensive look at the New Wave band from Boston that charmed the world.

The 1980s had more than its share of one-hit wonders and bands now lost to obscurity, but the Cars have endured—“You Might Think,” “Drive,” and more are still radio and playlist staples. As Janovitz points out in his biography of the band, “It’s hard to imagine American popular music without them.” The group was a product of the friendship between Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr, who met in Columbus, Ohio, in 1968; the two moved to Boston and played in bands together before forming the Cars with Elliot Easton, Greg Hawkes, and David Robinson in 1976. The band’s rapid ascent began when Boston DJ Maxanne Sartori played “Just What I Needed” on her radio station, WBCN, which led to the band getting a record deal. A decade of highs and lows would follow, including four Top 10 hit singles and countless fights between Ocasek and his colleagues; Janovitz does a remarkably thorough job chronicling them on the basis of his interviews with the band’s three surviving members (Orr died in 2000, Ocasek in 2019) and those who knew the band. Much of the book necessarily centers on Ocasek, a complex and maddening figure: He could be sweet and charming, but he routinely belittled and ignored his bandmates, abandoned friends, and left his second wife for Paulina Porizkova, a model 21 years his junior. Janovitz dives deeply into the other members, however, and is careful not to paint Ocasek as a monster. His writing about the band’s music is wonderful—he is himself a Boston-area musician, the singer-songwriter for Buffalo Tom, and brings ample context to the Cars’ oeuvre. This is a superb rock biography, a must for anyone with even a passing interest in pop music.

You might think this is a perfect match between author and subject—and you’d be right.