Ric Ocasek, New Wave Rock Visionary and Cars Co-Founder, Is Dead

Ric Ocasek, New Wave Rock Visionary and Cars Co-Founder, Is Dead

Ric Ocasek performing with the Cars at Roseland Ballroom in New York, supporting the group’s final album, “Move Like This,” in 2011.CreditCreditChad Batka for The New York Times

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee updated classic sounds for a broader pop audience, making polished songs with sonic depth.

Ric Ocasek, the songwriter, rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the Cars, was found dead on Sunday afternoon at his townhouse in Manhattan, according to the New York Police Department. No
cause of death was available on Sunday night.

It is unclear what age Mr. Ocasek (pronounced oh-CASS-ek) was. According to some public records and previous articles, he was 70, other reporting suggests that he may have been 75.

From 1978 to 1988, Ocasek and the Cars merged a vision of romance, danger and nocturnal intrigue and the concision of new wave with the sonic depth and ingenuity of radio-friendly rock. The Cars managed to please both punk-rock fans and a far broader pop audience, reaching into rock history while devising fresh, lush extensions of it.

The Cars grew out of a friendship forged in the late 1960s in Ohio between Mr. Ocasek — born Richard Theodore Otcasek — and Benjamin Orr, who died in 2000. They worked together in multiple bands before moving to Boston and forming the Cars in the late 1970s with Elliot Easton on guitar, Greg Hawkes on keyboards and David Robinson on drums. It was the beginning of the punk era, but the Cars made their first albums with Queen’s producer, Roy Thomas Baker, creating songs that were terse and moody but impeccably polished.

In the Cars, Mr. Ocasek’s lead vocals mixed a gawky, yelping deadpan with hints of suppressed emotion, while his songs drew hooks from basic three-chord rockabilly and punk, from surf-rock, from emerging synth-pop, from echoes of the Beatles and glam-rock and from hints of the 1970s art-rock avant-garde. The five albums the Cars released from 1978 to 1984 each sold a million copies in the United States alone, with ubiquitous radio singles like “Just What I Needed” in 1978, “Shake It Up” in 1981, “You Might Think” in 1984 and “Drive” in 1984. Although Mr. Ocasek wrote them, “Just What I Needed” and “Drive” had lead vocals by Mr. Orr.

When the Cars were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, the group’s surviving members reunited, joined by Scott Shriner of Weezer on bass. In his induction speech, Brandon Flowers of the Killers described the band as “a slick machine with a 340 V8 under the hood that ran on synergy, experimentation and a redefined cool. They had it all: the looks, the hooks, Beat romance lyrics, killer choruses.”

Richard Theodore Otcasek was born in Baltimore. His father was a systems analyst for NASA. At the Cars’ Rock Hall induction, Mr. Ocasek credited his grandmother for getting him to sing as a child and buying him his first guitar at 14. The family moved to Cleveland when he was a teenager, and he briefly attended Antioch College and Bowling Green State University before dropping out and turning to music.

He met Mr. Orr in Ohio and, in various bands, they worked their way from the Midwest to the Boston area, where they started a folk-pop trio, Milkwood, that made one album in 1972 before dissolving. Mr. Ocasek and Mr. Orr continued to work together around Boston; the Cars’ lead guitarist, Mr. Easton, joined their mid-1970s band, Cap’n Swing, which got airplay on Boston’s rock radio station WBCN but went no further.


Reference : nytimes .com