For the past several years, The Cars' frontman Ric Ocasek has been digging through his video archives to assemble The Cars Unlocked, a DVD that's part concert film and part kaleidoscopic look at what it was like to live and tour with one of the most distinctive power-pop bands of the '70s and '80s. Drawing on performances from multiple eras and some charmingly amateurish backstage footage, Ocasek has fleshed out the personality of a band best known for affectlessness. Ocasek recently spoke with The A.V. Club about the process of preparing the DVD, The Cars' philosophy, his second career as an in-demand producer, and his reaction to his bandmates' recent decision to record an album with Todd Rundgren under the Cars name.
The A.V. Club: Did you enjoy going back through all this archival material, seeing it again?
Ric Ocasek: Enjoy? [Laughs.] It was kind of interesting, because I hardly remembered what I had. Certainly some of the home movies, I hadn't seen for so long. The footage was taken from VHS and Betamax. I remember buying our first camera on the road, when they first came out.
AVC: There's actually one scene on the DVD where you show somebody reading the manual to learn how to operate the camera.
RO: Yeah, like, "White balance? What's that?" [Laughs.] It's funny how bad the quality is. You see all the light trails and things they don't even have anymore. You couldn't get a light trail on a new camera if you tried. But our lighting designer, he'd follow us around, and he really didn't know what he was shooting, and we didn't know what he was shooting. So I didn't know what I was going to find. It took me quite a long time, on and off for a few years between producing other people, just to log everything. So it was kind of fun for me, and also enlightening to go back and look at all that stuff.
AVC: How so?
RO: The performances, I thought, stood up pretty well. There were a lot of performances to pick from, like 10 or 12 takes of the same song, but on some, the quality of the video was really terrible, or the quality of the sound not so good. A lot of them were just tapes for us to look at after a show. And considering it was all from two-track, I didn't really have anything to mix from. But I kind of didn't want it to be too slick anyway.
AVC: That's sort of the aesthetic of your videos from back then, too.
RO: It dates everything in kind of a cool way. That's the way things looked, and that's the way things looked when you videotaped them. I kind of like that aspect of it.
AVC: Did you find, looking at the backstage bits especially, that you remembered much?
RO: It was kind of a big haze. But I thought that people should see what we did to keep from getting bored on the road, and I also tried to edit it in a way that wasn't too serious. I think bands, when they're on the road, they keep their sanity by developing an internal sense of humor. I don't know if this comes across on the DVD, but I do think this footage comes from a time when The Cars were having some fun. As time went on, I could see the whole band changing in a way.
Also, I felt this flowed in a way that was slightly chronological, but not too much biography. I didn't want it to be too biographical. I thought this was a little more artful.
AVC: Did the other members of The Cars help you with the DVD at all?
RO: No, I have to say they didn't, really. It was pretty much all my thing. Although David Robinson, the drummer, designed the package. And I'd send him rough tapes of things, and he'd make comments. I didn't really want to make it a democratic type of thing. It's my vision of what we did that I wanted to portray.
AVC: As far as you know, they're not opposed to it, though?
RO: No, no. Everybody's seen it. Everybody likes it, as far as I know.
AVC: Any lingering hard feelings over the Rundgren affair?
RO: I don't know, you know? Why make trouble? That will stand or fall on its own. People can decide for themselves.
AVC: Was there anything in your old performances that you look at now and wish you'd done differently, like the stage design, or your costumes, or your hairstyles?
RO: No, there's really nothing I regret. Because the performances were usually consistently, as far as we were concerned, pretty good. The band was actually pretty competent. We were a band that kind of did just stand there, and that's the way we wanted it to be. I didn't feel like gymnastics were part of The Cars. I certainly philosophically didn't want to prod the audience to react to anything. To me, it was more like negative theater. We didn't really talk to the audience. I didn't see that being a part of this band. And some people liked that. Bands do it now and don't get criticized for it. The Killers don't move much. Different kinds of bands do different things. Some people dance and run around and yell and try to get audience reactions, and some bands kind of play their music.
I thought the set designs were cool. The same person did all of our set designs. He was a performance artist from San Francisco who was the type of guy who would wear trash bags to the concert, and staple pieces of steak to them. So no, I didn't really care what people liked. It was kind of a funny thing, I guess, the way we looked. I guess it was new wave. [Laughs.] First we were punk, you know? That's what they said. Then we were new wave. I think we were too soft to be punk. Plus, we weren't too punky. It's funny how you get that label. We used to joke about that a lot.
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