(The set location was the Hilton family estate in Beverly Hills, when Paris Hilton was about three.) “The band doesn’t show up until the guitar solo,” Robinson grumbled. He’s interested in films and he thought about the way he was going to come across.”Ī few months later, Tim Pope, an accomplished British surrealist who’d worked a lot with the Cure, directed “Magic,” in which Ocasek amazes a crowd of acolytes by walking on water in a swimming pool. “I can’t think of anyone who’s looked like him since. “Ric is just so unusual looking,” Cars drummer David Robinson told me. In an interview for a book I cowrote, I Want My MTV, a 2011 chronicle of the network’s first 10 years, Jeff Stein called it “the first cartoon with real people,” and noted that it was the first music video in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In one of the era’s defining images, Stein places Ocasek’s antic, twitching head on top of the body of a fly. Ocasek even carries a winsome blonde woman to the top of the Empire State Building, à la King Kong. In “You Might Think,” director Jeff Stein, who’d made the Who documentary The Kids Are Alright as well as Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” video, used a beauty-and-the-beast theme, and invoked images from B movies, including The Incredible Shrinking Man and Glen or Glenda. Orr, who often sang lead vocals and had a pin-up pout, seemed like a likely video star, but that spot mostly went to Ocasek, who worked a deadpan comic angle. Lots of ’70s holdovers hated videos, refused to play along, and quickly faded from the spotlight. When the Cars returned three years later with the album Heartbeat City, MTV was no longer a startup network seen in only a few tertiary markets but a cultural juggernaut, capable of launching or spiking careers. When video directors turned him into a piece of video Pop art, he embraced it. More importantly, he was an aesthetic sophisticate whose music melded the simplicity of Buddy Holly with the stark deadpan of the Velvet Underground, and who adored avant-garde music and performance art. At six-foot-four, he was comically thin, with an elongated neck he was also one of two Cars members who wore hairpieces. Ocasek was the unlikeliest of video stars, and not for his age alone. Incredibly, Neil Young and Eric Clapton are both younger than Ocasek. Ocasek was already 34 years old when the group released its self-titled debut in 1978, and a creaky 37 when MTV came online in August 1981. In the Cars, he and bassist Ben Orr, his Milkwood bandmate, remade themselves as cool new wave rockers. He’d toiled away in several bands, in Cleveland and then Boston, including a Crosby, Stills & Nash–ish folk trio called Milkwood, learning from each commercial disappointment. Ocasek was evasive about his exact age, probably because he was older than most of his peers. Prime examples include Huey Lewis, Phil Collins, Men at Work, and Ric Ocasek, the Cars’ singer, songwriter, and dominant force. Men, in particular, could thrive on MTV if they didn’t look like models but carried off a kind of comic affability. One of the most persistent misconceptions about MTV is that the network, in its 1980s heyday as Americans’ universal radio station, rewarded musicians for their great looks, rather than their musical abilities.
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