Lots of love and sadness for Ric Ocasek, especially for his work with The Cars. I was lucky enough to be in high school when those first two albums came out and they are still active on my playlist. In fact two good high school friends had a “Best Friends Girl” issue way back when and we still joke about it using that song.

Besides fronting The Cars, Ocasek produced 38 albums, some of which were The Cars of course, but a wide variety of others. Researching this post, I discovered he produced two Bad Brains albums, which I find amazing. Those are classic punk albums.

In the GBV world, Ocasek is known for producing Do The Collapse, which was Guided By Voices first foray into a highly produced rock album for a “big” label (Matador). Generally the album was well received and GBV fans have come around to the fact that it’s an album that wasn’t produced on a 4-track in the garage. The only issue that remains today is that Teenage FBI is probably over produced with a weird synthesizer effect that really isn’t needed oh and Hold on Hope was too much of a syrupy ballad. See video below.

Any way, Ric, you were your one weird looking dude who got to marry a super model and made or had a hand in a shit-ton of cool music. Plus you made me post about you instead of the the 50th anniversary of Abbey Road, which is my favorite album of all time. So good for you.