Let's Go! by Joe Milliken

Author:Joe Milliken [Milliken, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-09-25T08:00:00+00:00

The Cars perform during their European tour, 1978.

Photo by Ebet Roberts

“I agreed to produce them on the spot,” Baker once told International Musician after seeing the band perform. “The songs were basically there; they just needed to be rearranged slightly. A chorus put in here, a verse taken out there, and the speed needed to be adjusted, but apart from that, they were already excellent.”

A six-week recording schedule was set up in Studio B of London’s Air Studios under the direction of producer Roy Thomas Baker, along with engineers the late Geoff Workman and Nigel Walker.

The recording sessions began in February 1978 and were completed in just twelve days, with another nine days taken for mixing. In fact, much of the recording time was consumed by recording the multiple-layered vocal tracks for which Baker is so well known.

“Roy had a forty-track recording machine back then [in the days of only twenty-four-track], so he had his own special machine,” Ocasek stated in the 2000 Turner Studio interview.

“I love segues,” Roy Thomas Baker told the Daily Events Book website in 2006. “I like records to be continuous. In the beginning, they [radio stations] played the first three or four songs off The Cars’ first album, because the disc jockeys kept missing the end of the songs. It worked out well.”

There was really no writing or rehearsing to be done in the studio because the band already knew the songs inside and out, with the only difference, of course, being the influence and direction of Baker in the studio.

“He took our three-part harmonies and multilayered them to sound much bigger. I think that was a bit of a Cars’ trademark after that,” Ocasek told Only Music in 1987.

The now-iconic album cover featured a close-up of the late Russian-born model, journalist, and musician Natalya Medvedeva, sitting in a classic car and behind a glowing steering wheel. The concept was developed by Elektra after David Robinson’s original cover idea was discouraged. However, David’s design was modified and used on the record’s inner sleeve.

Renowned award-winning photographer and creative director Elliot Gilbert has photographed musicians, athletes, stage, film, and television stars. Gilbert also photographed the front and back cover images for the debut album.

Elliot Gilbert: “Ben was a very good-looking guy, very kind and easy to be around, and a quiet person. He did not exhibit a ‘rock-and-roll’ persona at all. I got to spend an afternoon with him at Farmer’s Market, a well-known part of Los Angeles. The Cars were not stars yet, but it was still like being out with a friend, low-key, just two guys hanging out.

“Everywhere we went, though, young girls ‘circled’ him. He was very cool, he ignored all the groupies and concentrated on our time together. Just quiet talk, while these beautiful girls circled close by. I felt great hanging with him . . . it was like, ‘Yeah, I’m with him.’

“He hardly said anything during the shoot. He was very self-assured and left it to me to do what I wanted to do.

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