The return of Ric

Ocasek shakes it up on Troublizing

by Matt Ashare

Ric Ocasek has to have one of the most instantly recognizable heads of rock-and-roll hair to have ever come out of Boston. Which makes it easy as hell to pick him out of the modest crowd of latte-sipping slackers gathered for a late-afternoon caffeine fix at the Other Side Café, on the other side of the same Newbury Street Ocasek used to stroll back in the days before Tower Records and Gap Kids. He's the guy with the oversized black mop-top sitting in the corner, picking at a fruit-and-cheese plate and holding court as various members of the local rock press drop by for chats about Troublizing, his first release since signing a joint record and production deal with Columbia last year.

Actually, the new album -- which comes out this Tuesday, with production and guitar work by Smashing Pumpkins frontguy Billy Corgan, as well as the backing of a band featuring Hole bassist Melissa Auf der Maur, Bad Religion guitarist Brian Baker, Nada Surf drummer Ira Elliot, and his former Cars buddy Greg Hawkes on keyboards -- is much more than that. It's really Ocasek's first solo album set in the alternative '90s, a decade that's seen him get more notice for producing bands like Weezer, D-Generation, and Bad Religion than for either of two largely ignored discs for Reprise -- '91's Fireball Zone and '95's Quick Change World.

"Those two albums were my most struggling, not sure of what I was doing records," he admits with a casual shrug that suggests the former Cars hitmaker has already worked through those issues in therapy. "Maybe it was just the wrong time in my life. I don't know what all the reasons are, but I took time off and produced a lot. I figured that the next time I made a record, I'd have a clearer view of the future."

The future, oddly enough, has turned out to be a lot more like the new-wave past Ocasek came out of than anyone could have predicted even just a few years ago. Synthesized dance music, in the form of what's been dubbed "electronica," is in again, and it's mixing with guitar rock in a way that seems to be picking up where the postpunk pop of groups like the Cars and Blondie left off. What's more, Ocasek's stock as an influential artist has been rising, both through his association with successful '90s artists like Weezer and Hole, for whom he produced a cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Gold Dust Woman," and through tacit endorsements from Smashing Pumpkins, who covered the Cars hit "You're All I've Got Tonight," and even Boston's Letters to Cleo, who left their stamp on the Cars classic "Dangerous Type." Indeed, though the story of '90s rock is generally told from the perspective of mainstream audiences finally opening their ears to the rough sounds of the underground, Ocasek's situation suggests an alternate version of that cultural drama. Maybe alterna-rock's success has as much, if not more, to do with underground artists' opening their music up to mainstream influences like the Cars?

"They say there is no avant-garde, it's just that people are a little slow," Ocasek riffs before pausing to consider his response. "Well, I was a little surprised, when bands started asking me to produce their records, that they'd actually heard of the Cars. Courtney [Love] told me that Kurt [Cobain] used to listen to our stuff all the time at home. The Chili Peppers once told me that Rock for Light [the 1983 Bad Brains disc Ocasek produced] was one of their favorite albums ever. And I hadn't worked with Billy [Corgan] before, but I'd been to see him play, and every time he'd come to New York he'd come over to my place there and we'd mess around in the basement."

Before turning part of Troublizing over to Corgan, Ocasek had already recorded his own demos, put together a band for the sessions ("I just mentally kept a note of all the people I'd worked with producing other bands who I thought would be good together when I made a record"), and done some work on the disc at Cambridge's Fort Apache studio with producers Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie. Those initial sessions yielded some of the disc's basic rhythm tracks. The rest of the album was recorded in NYC with Ocasek and Corgan co-producing.

"My original idea was to have different artists produce different tracks on it because I'm a producer myself, and I didn't want another real producer type. But I ended up doing half the record myself and asking Billy if he'd like to do a couple of tunes, you know, just take them under his wing and do what he felt like. As an artist I'm always curious about what somebody else would do with a song. I really liked what he did with that version of `You're All I've Got Tonight,' the way he stripped it down and made it into a cool thing. So I thought if he could strip `You're All I've Got Tonight' down, then maybe he could do the same with some of my new tunes."

Actually, beefing up might be a better way to describe Corgan's influence on Troublizing. Guitarist Brian Baker, who was thrashing away rebelliously in the seminal straight-edge DC hardcore band Minor Threat back when Ocasek was letting the good times roll with the Cars (who ever thought those two worlds would ever meet?), might also be responsible for the disc's more aggressive guitar tone. Either way, Troublizing opens with a short blast of feedback followed by the thick churn and chug of heavily overdriven guitars zeroing in on the kind of streamlined melody Ocasek perfected on 1978's indispensable debut, The Cars. With the combined lure of Hawkes's space-age synth lines and Ocasek's patented pinched deadpan vocal pulling a gleaming hook to the surface on the chorus, that opening tune, "The Next Right Moment," splits the difference between the cool precision of the Cars and the intensity of Smashing Pumpkins. Call it "Don't Cha Stop" with bigger amps, maybe a tad less catchy, but a lot more propulsive. And though it won't replace The Cars in anyone's record collection, it'll fit right in next door.

Like his hair, Ocasek's songwriting hasn't changed much since the days of "My Best Friend's Girl" and "Good Times Roll." Strip away the sleek, modern production of any Cars hits and you're left with three-, maybe four-chord tunes that come straight out of the tradition of "Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby" -- filtered, of course, through the ironic lens of Warholian pop art and the skewed rock basics of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. You can be sure that when Ocasek titles a song "Not Shocked," he's going to sing the words "not shocked" at least 10 or 12 times -- probably during the tune's chorus, which indeed he does on Troublizing. But that doesn't mean he won't inject a little deadpan absurdity into the mix with lines like "You got the weary number/Pick up the party line/You give the bad cucumber/Oh, you're never going to fall behind."

"I have a sense of humor about life, which I feel you must carry around with you," admits Ocasek when I ask him about his lyrics and the generally upbeat if somewhat ironic tone of his songs, from the oldies "Good Times Roll" and "Shake It Up" through new tunes "The Next Right Moment" and "Here We Go." "There's going to be some combination of words in my songs that is going to be a little bit uplifting or, well, you're certainly going to have to laugh a bit. I definitely wouldn't say that I'm jovial. I don't come into a crowded room and start being a loudmouth. But I think that some things are so tragic that they've just got to be funny in some way."

Maybe that's why the only real clunker on Troublizing is "Society Trance," an eerie spoken-word number that seems to take itself too seriously for its own good. "Lovers and outsiders divorced from the uncaring world/They're sometimes viewed as heroes . . . Absorbed and tormented by loneliness, the inability to communicate," is a fair sampling of its melodramatic prose. Sounds like something angst-ridden Billy Corgan might scribble down in one of his notebooks. Which has to make you wonder, how does an artist who seems as self-aware and, well, comfortable with his own discomfort as Ocasek find a common ground with someone as humorlessly tormented as Corgan?

"Yeah, well, Billy's still mad at the world," admits Ocasek. "He's in the middle of the full-force star treatment, and maybe he's not sure what to with the bombardment of information. I was a wiser-ass when I was with the Cars and we were catapulted to that level. I didn't take it quite so seriously because I knew there would be an up and a down and I didn't want to end up like some people who fall so far down because they believe their own legend. I just thought, `Okay, I'm the same person as I was when I started, I'm just ready to do another record now, please.' Things do seem to have gotten worse. Things are maybe more tragic now, or at least the kids seem to be getting more tragic.

"But there's this Zen saying I always like to remember: `The house burned down and now I can see the moon.' "

Let the good times roll . . .