The Cars – Just What I Needed

Growing up in Cape Breton, punk rock was more a rumour than something we could actually experience. Other than the bits offered up on “90 Minutes With A Bullet”, CBC Radio’s weekly pop music show, it simply wasn’t to be found on local airwaves. I can’t say I was all that broken up by it – those Wednesday night dribs and drabs from the CBC made it clear that, for the 1978 version of me, punk was more something I thought I should like than something I actually did like. Even punk’s housebroken cousin, new wave, wasn’t much of a force in Canadian radio: nothing on this list of RPM’s top 100 songs of the year even remotely qualifies. (That definitely changed the following year.)

The closest thing we had to new wave in 1978 was The Cars’ “Just What I Needed”, but it was more than enough. It wasn’t much of a hit, peaking at #38 nationally, and I don’t recall it doing markedly better in my neighbourhood. But it made it onto CJCB radio at least often enough for me to hear it, and one listen was all it took for me to want the 45. It quickly became – and this is impressive considering everything else happening in pop music that year – one of my most frequently played songs. I would get together with my friend Kirk to play records, and this was the song that would have us bouncing around my living room, in an approximation of what we thought punks might be doing, crashing into furniture and each other, caught up in the energy of the song.

Written by the band’s primary lead singer, Ric Ocasek, I always thought he was singing it, which in retrospect just seems dumb. I learned only a few years ago that the singer was in fact Benjamin Orr, who I knew had sung 1984’s “Drive” but also – and I learned this just now – their 1979 hit “Let’s Go”. Ocasek’s influences in writing the tune included The Velvet Underground and bubblegum band Ohio Express, which makes it kind of odd that he was so defensive about artists being influenced by his song. He accused Fountains of Wayne of sampling it in “Stacy’s Mom”, and forced the destruction of the entire first print run of Car Seat Headrest’s “Teens of Denial” (one of my favourite albums of 2016) after revoking (not without a decent reason, to be clear) his permission to use the song. Ric was a very intense guy when it came to defending his intellectual property. Or maybe it was just part of his prickly personality: his last will and testament disinherited his wife and two of his children.

Of course, it’s only sort of new wave: a better way to describe it is as sneering power pop. The opening guitar stretch (a direct theft, in possibly the most bizarre lift ever, from Ohio Express’ “Yummy Yummy Yummy”) draws you in, simple but pulsating, then amping up by adding just one rich double-pump beat where there had been a single. The opening verse is underlain with straightforward guitar and drum, with the guitar getting more forceful at the end and the bridge between verses taken over by a chilly siren-like synth. The obligatory guitar solo comes at the midpoint of the song, and it serves nicely as a bridge rather than, as is too often the case, dull filler that just delays the song’s proper end from arriving on time. The second half of the song more or less repeats the first, with very little difference, but it never feels like it’s going on too long. This is a begrudging love song (“I don’t mind you comin’ here / And wastin’ all my time”), but “I needed someone to bleed” in the chorus certainly complicates that calculus. When Orr sings “So bleed me” near the end, you can detect that sneer underneath, but I wonder, too, if maybe it’s a shift in power, and the cool narrator now finds himself having let his pursuer get too close.

This has long been a favourite of mine, and Spotify will back me up: it has been consistently among my five most listened to tracks every year since at least 2019. It’s the clear star of my “songs I never skip” list, which includes such delights as Fountains of Wayne’s “Maureen”, Jonathan Coulton’s “Ikea”, “All to Myself” by Marianas Trench and Brand New’s “Jude Law and A Semester Abroad”. It’s a song that was made to be sung along to by hopped up males – the shouting of the title by the backing singers in the chorus works for even the least vocally gifted in a crowd. Something of that vibe can be seen when The Strokes played it live, with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker seeming like a guy at karaoke night being confronted with a song he does not know. Orr and Ocasek are both gone, but they and their band mates left us with at least one immortal tune. There are some other top acts who’ve covered it live – including Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Killers and Eric Church – and every time that opening starts up there is a howl of recognition from the audience. My enduring love for the song may mean I’m in a rut, but I have a lot of company there.