Then, “One day we were diddling with something and I exploded and I said, ‘Fuck this – I want to play some guitar! Put the title track up!’ And I plugged my guitar in and then was like a maniac – I played the whole thing from beginning to end. We would hammer it out like that and keep tweaking it to make it as good as it could be at that point.” The Cars Panorama, Elektra 1980Įaston recalls that laying down his guitar parts came quite late in the Panorama recording process, leaving him at loose ends for weeks at a time. “From there, we all used our creative abilities to come up with parts and counterpoint melodies and intros and endings and solos – all the little bits that make a demo of a song into a record, which are two very different things. “We’d sit down and Ric would sing the song to us or play a very simple demo of the song that he’d made at home, and we might have a little talk about what direction the song might be good to go in, tempo, key, the very basic things,” Easton says. That was a high point.”Īs with every other Cars album, Ocasek was the band’s main songwriter for Panorama, but Easton says it was always a very collaborative effort to turn his concepts into fully realized songs. I composed it – it wasn’t something I improvised off the top of my head. “I think there’s moments on the record that are some of my finer moments,” Easton continues, pointing to his work on “Touch and Go,” in particular. Anything that I thought I could do better, I would do better. So when the record’s finally released, it’s pretty airtight. “That’s how much care and attention to detail I put into what I do. VIDEO: The Cars perform “Touch and Go” on ABC FridaysĮven if Panorama was not as much of an instant smash as the band’s previous albums, Easton still firmly stands behind it and says he wouldn’t change anything about it even if he could, because “I was – and am – so painstaking in what I do that if I would record a part, if there was some tiny thing about it that was bugging me, I could hardly even get to sleep that night, waiting to get back into the studio the next morning to fix it,” he says. “Ric, as a poet and lyricist, I think always explored the darker side of human existence, and I think that comes through on Panorama ,” he says, though he adds, “There were always pop songs and brighter songs on every record.” On Panorama, one example of that type of track is the single “Touch and Go,” which did end up charting. Ric would bring in a batch of his newest songs and I guess that was where his head was at then, writing that way.” Then, Easton says, he and the rest of the band members would “do our best to take them off a piece of paper and make records out of them, and that’s just how that one came out.”Įaston does have one theory about why Panorama was perceived differently, though. “It was not like we said, ‘We’re going to try to expand our sound’ or anything,” Easton says.
But The Cars lead guitarist Elliot Easton, calling from his Los Angeles home recently, says that the band didn’t do this deliberately.
But when the band released their third album, Panorama, in 1980, critics and fans initially seemed confused, deeming the album more edgy and experimental than its predecessors. Singles from those albums – “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Good Times Roll,” “Let’s Go” and more – dominated radio waves across the U.S. By the end of the 1970s, The Cars had become immensely popular thanks to two hit albums, their 1978 self-titled debut and its 1979 follow-up, Candy-O.
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