Bill Janovitz was 12 years old when his friend’s older brother introduced him to the Cars. It was 1978 and their self-titled debut LP — featuring “Good Times Roll,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Just What I Needed,” and “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” — had just come out. “It was the first time I felt, ‘Oh, this is a band for me,’” Janovitz says. “I wasn’t just going back and buying old Stones or Skynyrd records. I felt like, ‘Here’s a band I can follow now.’”
He moved away from the Cars as a teenager in the Eighties when the glossy, processed sounds of MTV-era singles like “You Might Think” turned him off. He was also focused on creating his own music as the frontman of the cult alt-rock band Buffalo Tom. But Janovitz began a second career as an author of rock books a little over a decade ago. He released Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones in 2013, and a biography of Leon Russell that became a New York Times bestseller in 2023.
When it came time to think of a follow-up, he turned back to his favorite childhood band. It took several years of work to come to fruition — especially since Buffalo Tom remains active and Janovitz also has a third career as a real estate agent in the Boston area — but The Cars: Let the Stories Be Told hits bookstores on Sept. 30.
The book features brand-new interviews with surviving Cars members Elliot Easton (guitar), David Robinson (drums), and Greg Hawkes (keyboards), along with many other key figures from the band’s long history. (Ric Ocasek, the band’s primary songwriter and frequent lead singer, died in 2019; bassist Benjamin Orr died in 2000.) We hopped on a Zoom with Janovitz to learn how Let the Stories Be Told came together, what revelations he unearthed, his favorite under-appreciated Cars songs, why the band was so incredibly dysfunctional, and the possibility of unheard Cars music coming out one day. We also talked about the night in 2018 when he found himself playing one of his own songs with Pearl Jam during a sold-out show at Fenway Park.
What made you want to write this book?
I met Elliot Easton at a Kinks tribute concert [in 2019]. I was fortunate enough to be invited and Elliot played behind me. I sang “Stop Your Sobbing.” It’s was this weird rock & roll fantasy situation. Just before rehearsal, I introduced myself.
He’s just an open, warm guy. We just started conversing. And then afterwards, I sent him some of my previous books, including the last one about Leon Russell. We just started talking about music. He’s a real historian and reads everything I can think of on music. He’s such a passionate guy about it.
So one thing led to another, and I pitched this idea. I said, “What about doing a Cars book? There’s really nothing substantial about you guys and you’re a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band now.” They’d just gotten in at the time.
Where did it go from there?
Ric Ocasek was still around at that point, and he wasn’t thrilled with the idea, I think, of me doing it. I think he was open to an idea of doing a book, but true to form, he was very much a control freak. And I didn’t have much of a name, I think, for him.
Elliot said, “Well, Ric would never let me be the guy to choose the person to write the book.” So I got an early glimpse of it all. But then the Leon Russell book came out afterwards, and Elliot seemed to like that,
I eventually said, “Well, what about now, since Ric has passed away?” And I think Ric passing away left the three remaining members feeling a bit more comfortable about telling the full story of the band.
For a band this popular, it’s amazing there isn’t already a comprehensive book.
There’s been a couple of things. In their heyday, there was a book of photos with some great stuff in it. And there’s a book about Benjamin Orr. But yeah, I was surprised to learn that. So many bands of their stature or of lesser stature have books.
How much of their history did you know before starting work on the book?
I grew up in New York, but I moved to Boston when I was 16. So it’s hard to escape the Cars, J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, and the band Boston when you’re living in Boston, especially during those early Eighties years. I knew the broad contours of the band. I knew David Robinson was a guy that had been in the Modern Lovers. I knew a lot, but I didn’t really know the backgrounds so much of Elliot and Greg and Ben until I started digging.
I feel like many rock fans only really know the broad strokes. As a young fan, I thought that Ben only sang “Drive.” I had no clue he sang about half their hits until I dug in years later.
And as you read the book, you learn that some of that’s by design. I mean, Ric was very good about keeping his real age hidden. The funny thing about Ric and Ben is they were basically as old as Mick and Keith. They were older than Ronnie Wood. Ric was older than Steve Winwood and Neil Young. It was like, “Here’s this new New Wave band” in 1978, a time when people thought the Stones were too old to tour and make records.
And when you got into the MTV era, the focus really shifted to Ric. He really, with the help of [manager] Elliot Roberts, started to edge the others out. That’s a big thread throughout the book.
Do you think the fact they had so many hits wound up hurting them in the eyes of some critics?
Yeah. There’s the inevitable “build them up and tear them down.” It’s not as drastic as it is in the U.K., where they immediately faced backlash. It was like, “They are just repackaging the British thing.” And in America they were like, “What is this?” Some people liked it right away, but others were like, “Should I like this?” I think history just repeats itself. If you love something, you want to keep it underground. You don’t want it to get giant.
Also, when your first album is that perfect and that massive, what comes later often seems like a letdown.
Yeah. And the second album, Candy-O, is almost like a continuation. I often mix up whether certain songs are on the first album or the second one. They then they also did an about-face quite consciously on Candy-O with “Shoo Be Doo.” It’s an homage to the band Suicide. That was Ric consciously wanting to challenge the listeners.
What did you learn reporting the book that surprised you the most?
I didn’t know how controlling Ric was. And of course the relationship was the brotherly type, for good and bad. I guess I’m surprised at how dark it got for Ben. I wasn’t looking for that kind of thing. I wasn’t trying to write something salacious, and I don’t think I did. But there’s stuff that you sort of can’t ignore if you’re really reporting holistically and giving a big picture of the band. But I’m not surprised ever by learning how controlling somebody can be in a band, having been in a band for 30 years.
U2 made the decision from the very beginning to split the publishing money. It avoided a lot of the squabbles that consumed the Cars.
My band did the same thing. I don’t want to put us in the same conversation as these other giant bands, since we weren’t giant, but we could have been at some point, and we made that same decision early on.
I think that AC/DC, Van Halen, and R.E.M. made that same decision, though they may have changed later on. But those were a bunch of guys forming a band together. It was different in the Cars. This was Ric and Ben struggling for 10 years through different iterations and different sounds before forming the Cars. There was a real ambition behind them.
A lot of bands start up for the love of it and the art, and then find success maybe. This was more of a focused effort to become successful, but also trying to stay artistically interesting and relevant, pretty much, for their whole career. I think you can make that case for sure. But if you make a solo record, as Ric did, and it’s not as good as the Cars, then you know what the other guys are bringing to the table.
If you listen to the demo of “Drive” and the finished version, you can see how much his songs changed once they all got in the studio.
In that particular case, Mutt Lange changed up the beat and really produced it. David feels it was overproduced. I feel like the whole Heartbeat City is overproduced myself. It sounds too much like Pyromania, which I never loved. But I have a particular fondness for “Drive.” I think the song is great in any format, but I love the layered production on that.
The schism that developed between Ric and Ben is a very sad part of the story. In some ways, it feels like it was inevitable since Ric was the controlling songwriter and Ben was the golden-voiced singer.
Yeah. It was bound to happen. It’s not a surprise. Ben was such an easygoing person. Everything came naturally to him. His looks, his playing, he’d play any instrument with authority. He could sing. Everything was one take, two takes max. He was smooth, and he was really easygoing as a person and generous, maybe to a fault in some cases. He let things go for so long it was bound to eventually happen.
These guys had a brotherhood, but they didn’t talk about their feelings. These were guys that grew up in post-war America. They didn’t talk about it. There was avoidance.
Elliot Roberts was a great manager. You can look at what he did for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. But reading the book, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t right for the Cars. He wasn’t used to bands.
Yeah. Exactly. Anybody that I talked to that worked with him was like, “He didn’t understand bands. He’s a kind of one-guy-at-a-time person, or one-artist-at-a-time.” Joni, Neil, Bob [Dylan]… Even with Petty and the Heartbreakers.
In the Cars, the other members were going, “Hey, what are we? Chopped liver?” That is Elliot [Easton]’s quote. It’s like, “What the fuck are you doing here? Oh, they’re really moving Ric out to the front.” They didn’t even realize that they had a full share in the band and decision-making until it was too late.
The thing you always hear about the Cars is they were lifeless live. Do you think that’s been a bit exaggerated?
They say that was by design. I talk about this quite a bit in the book. If you saw them in the early days —before all the stage stuff, where it’s just them on a stage — you’d go, “This is a really compelling.” First of all, they sounded amazing. They sounded like a record, which is, depending on your taste, good or bad. With the Cars, I think that’s good.
And they would rock it up a bit. It was definitely rougher around the edges. The Live at the Agora in Cleveland record is fantastic, and so is the El Macombo [1978] bootleg. Once they started doing bigger shows, they had to create stage sets because they otherwise wouldn’t be interesting to people in the back.
They also decided early on that they were going to be anti-rock star. Punk rock had its own stance as well, but it also had its own theater. It was like, “We aren’t that, but we are this.” They gave an alternative theater to the whole thing. The Cars were like, “We’re going to be cool, detached. We’ve got this amazing, beautiful singer here. Every once in a while, the guitar player will come out and just do his solo, but then recede back into the shadows. We’re not going to talk to the audience.”
It seems like they missed a lot of big opportunities by taking long gaps between albums, and doing short tours at the peak of their popularity. They could have done a lot more considering all the success they had.
Oh yeah. And never mind if they had tended to their interpersonal relationships. They could have lasted much longer. The guys now say, “If we had just taken six months off and gone back out… If we had just done this.”
But Ric was an older guy. He was sort of done with it all. I think he was quite happy to just be a guy in the studio, and so was Greg. Very few of them really wanted to be out on the road. I mean, most bands don’t want to be on the road for too long anyway.
There wasn’t one bad album. I think even Panorama went platinum… But David really makes the point of, “We could have done more. It was really short-sighted on Ric’s part.” He blames Ric.
They have so many famous songs. But what are some lesser-known ones that fans should check out?
That’s a good question. Off the top of my head, I mean, I would say Panorama as an album. Most people know the first two records inside and out. I would say if they’ve gotten this far in the journey, Panorama is the one to check out. I knew “Touch and Go” from the radio, but I didn’t know the record until I started digging into the Cars. I can understand how it was off-putting to Cars fans at the time, but I’m like, “Oh, this is a fantastic record. It’s a real grower.”
I was a senior in high school when Heartbeat City came out. I was like, “This is not for me, but here’s this song ‘Drive…’” I associate it with other heart-tugging ballads from that year, like “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.” I associate them with prom. But the song “Magic” is a classic Cars song.
Was Paulina Porizkova, Ric’s widow, reluctant to talk?
No. It took a little bit of time for me to get through to her from her people. But I don’t know if she was reluctant at first. I felt like I really had to be persistent. But once I got her on the Zoom call, I was absolutely pleased at how generous she was with her time. There were no constraints.
She was very thoughtful and generous in sharing her insights and her personal struggles with Ric, but also what she gleaned from Ric, what he told her and what she picked up about Ric’s relationship with those guys in the Cars. But then how that evolved over time and how he appreciated them, or then might have resented them, but then re-appreciated them, and the emotional journeys that he went through. She was very open already in her own book about her relationship with Ric and her perception of herself.
She just spoke in these perfect epigrammatic paragraphs . She said to me, “I’m pretty dumb for thinking I was pretty smart,” or something like that.
Ben had everything he could have needed to be a big solo star. Why do you think that didn’t happen?
There’s a couple of prongs here. He was starting to go through his personal struggles with substances and emotional issues, which were obviously tied together. There was his satisfaction with being in the Cars and his role there, but he did want to start writing more. Ric was never going to let that happen, as Ric himself said. And he was certainly not going to let Ben write lyrics.
I talked to a publicist who was working with the Cars, and then specifically on Ben’s record for Elektra. And he was like, “They pulled the plug on it at some point.” And more than a few people think that Elektra pulled the plug from pressure from Ric and Elliot Roberts. I think it was like, “We got to bring this guy down a peg. Otherwise he might get too big.”
I don’t want to get too conspiratorial because I don’t have evidence of that, but I do have evidence that they said, “We don’t like this video, this last video. Record’s over.”
What’s your take on the 2011 reunion record?
I like it way more than Door to Door, which was their last record [in 1987]. They were falling apart by then. And they were out of ideas. That’s why Ric should have opened the door a bit more, certainly to Greg Hawkes. But he kind of dissed Greg. He took him off as the producer of the record. That’s a whole other story.
But the reunion record is really good. It sounds like a Cars record. It doesn’t sound like a Ric Ocasek solo record. And he had been making solo records up to that point. But David said to me they were reading fan comments on Facebook and someone said, “I miss Ben, but I miss Elliot more on this record.”
Elliot was unsparing in the book about his treatment by Ric on that, about his diminished role. Ric and Elliot had the most differences. There was a nine-year age gap. It was the oldest member and the younger member. And Elliot always felt like he was undervalued by Ric.
Do you think being a member of a long-running band yourself gave you unique insights into all this?
Again, my band was never near the level of this kind of band. And those sort of things do matter by degree. But being in a band means dealing with people, forming alliances, promotion. I understand how band chemistry forms. And not just for my own band. We were on the road for a solid 10-15 years, and we observed other bands. And for sure, being a band member, I bring a lot of insight.
Near the end of the book, you talk about the guys working on unreleased songs. Do you think there might be some sort of final Cars record using old Ric or even Ben tapes?
I don’t know if it’ll be in an album format or a CD or whatever. But I think these will come out. I just don’t know if there’s going to be a more comprehensive collection or a boxed set. I mean, they already sort of did that with their vinyl. But they’re going to come out in some way.
There doesn’t seem to be, honestly, a whole lot of force and focus and direction behind the Cars organization. That was one of my big surprises, since they’re this giant band. There’s been two major deals with Primary Wave. There’s the Ric Ocasek estate, all his rights, and then there was the subsequent deal with the remaining three members and then Ben’s estate. So that makes me think that there will be some new stuff coming out.
You’re in a band. You write books. And you’re a realtor. You basically have three full-time jobs.
I don’t know how many of them are full-time, but only one of them really pays the bills. And it’s not music, and it’s not writing books. When Buffalo Tom decided to take some time off and kids were coming, I had a full-blown identity crisis.
“If I’m not in this band that I’ve been doing since college, what am I, and who am I? And if that goes away, blah, blah, blah.” So that was when I was in my early thirties. But yeah, real estate has been great for me. It was like, “Oh, here’s this thing I could do. Here’s something I am interested in.” It’s America. Everybody gets their real estate license at some point. I have a nice specialty in mid-century modern, which keeps it interesting.
I was at the Fenway Park Pearl Jam show in 2018 when you came out and did “Taillights Fade” with them. What was that moment like for you?
I was sitting here at my table having a glass of wine. It was Labor Day weekend, and my daughter was going to go back to school at Skidmore in a couple of days. I got a text from one Ed Vedder saying, “Hey, Bill, what do you say to ‘Taillights Fade’ in center field at Fenway Park?”
I knew they were playing at Fenway, but I hadn’t yet made plans to go. I was like, “That sounds great to me.” And he said, “Are you nearby? And can you come down?” I’m like, “Right now?” And he’s like, “Yeah, they’re doing soundcheck.” It was the day before their first of two shows. And so I was like, “I can be.”
I’m maybe a half an hour drive into Fenway. So I rushed down there, and I get up onstage, and I have these ridiculous pictures of me showing the song to the other guys in the band. And I turned to [Pearl Jam/Soundgarden drummer] Matt Cameron, and I said, “I don’t know if you remember…” But he goes, “Yeah, we played with you at the Rat.”
We opened up for Soundgarden at the Rat, which was right around the corner. That was like 1987 or ’88 when we did that. I couldn’t believe that he remembered. The only word for it is the British word “chuffed.” I was chuffed by the whole frickin’ thing. I was like, “I’m at Fenway Park with Pearl Jam. And we’re doing my song. Oh, my God.”
