Just What I Needed

I bought the Cars' first album. It was one of the very few records that I played so very much that I had to buy a new one to replace it. In 1978, that was the sound of modern music. That was New Wave. That was rock and roll. With synthesizers. And guitars. And that voice.
The voice of Ric Ocasek.
Mister Ocasek was found dead in his Manhattan apartment this past Sunday. He was seventy-five. He was also one of the best pop songwriters of his generation. The reason I wore that first record out was because every one of the nine tracks was a hit. Eliot Easton, keyboardist for the band, used to refer to it as their "Greatest Hits Album." Their debut album.
Listening to those songs in 1978, I had no idea that I would ever relate to any of them. They all seemed so cool and detached. It was just two years later that I found myself playing a lead role in the real-life video for "My Best Friend's Girl." I was the best friend. The girl, in this scenario, became mine and I was the guy who took her away. I am pretty sure that time and the statute of  limitations would forgive me, but at the time it felt as if I were involved in something terribly grown up..."but she used to be mine."
This may still be true, but the fact that I ended up marrying another of that best friend's girlfriends may not speak too highly of me as anything but a model for pop song torment. Happy marriages have made the best of what may have been a more convoluted scenario. I feel the need to point that out because I never would have imagined myself playing the part of "the other man." And yet, here we are, forty years after the fact and everything seems to have worked out fine.
Which is the difference between life and a three minute pop song, I suppose. Ric Ocasek had plenty of life along with his cache of modern music. He even found himself a model girlfriend and a part in a John Waters movie. And along with his band, he created the sound of the 1980s. He stomped on the vinyl and the Terra, and he will be missed.
Aloha, Ric. You kept it goin' til the sun fell down.