February 2005

CARS TRIBUTE - JUST WHAT WE NEEDED
By Brett Milano
The Boston Phoenix

Trends may come and trends may go, but reunion rumors never go out of style. So it was that word started spreading that last week's Cars tribute show at T.T. the Bear's Place - which tied in with the release of the tribute album Substitution Mass Confusion (Not Lame) - just might see all four surviving Cars on the same stage, or at least in the same audience. According to Boston Pop Underground promoter Andrea Kremer, keyboardist Greg Hawkes and drummer David Robinson had agreed to show, and guitarist Elliot Easton and frontman Ric Ocasek had at least asked through their representatives to be guest-listed. (The show, like the album, was a benefit for a cancer foundation set up in memory of the Cars' late bassist/singer Ben Orr.)

As it turned out, the night's weather made the reunion even more unlikely, and the one Car in the house was Hawkes, who spent most of the evening chatting good-naturedly with the many diehard fans in the audience. He took the stage only on the New York band Spiraling's cover of "Just What I Needed" - not a very keyboard-intensive song, but one that allowed him to play one of his most famous riffs, apparently on the same well-traveled synth.

Only four Cars songs got played during the show, which featured two local and two out-of-town bands doing their tracks from the tribute album. (Spiraling also did "Bye Bye Love," and though Bleu didn't do any Cars in his own set, he sang "Let's Go" with Boston's The Cautions and "You Might Think" with Chapel Hill band the Argument.) But the night wound up attesting to the Cars' long-term influence. Although the four bands didn't sound much like one another, they all hovered in that gray area between rock energy and cool sophistication that the Cars called home. Bleu's current band is easily the most polished and arena-ready he's had, and his new material masters the Cars trick of being quirky and commercial at once.

The surprise of the night was Spiraling, who did elaborate pop songs with loud energy and well-crafted melodies. In fact, their songs' tricky arrangements and changes suggested that they're a prog band at heart, especially with the frontman's intense stare and his manning of two keyboards at once. And sure enough, that frontman, Tom Brislin, turned out to be a latter-day member of Yes: he was the keyboardist who played on their 2001 orchestrated tour and got displaced when Rick Wakeman came back. But Spiraling seem a likely band to put some fashion sense and underground appeal into art rock - just the way the Cars did in their prime.


- by Brett Milano