Greg’s outlook dovetailed perfectly with the band’s approach. “When the Cars first got together,” he said, “I think there was a fairly conscious effort to keep things on a simple and to-the-point basis. We just wanted to play as a unit, so we realized that the songs were really the main focal point, rather than any particular musicianship behind them.”
Greg advised Keyboard readers to listen to the flow of the song when trying to contribute a synth part. “I try to think more in terms of composition than in terms of licks, or how a line fits in with a song,” he said. “Although, you can’t tell someone to think compositionally, because it just may not be in their nature to do that. I almost never think in terms of soloing behind the lyrics, or anything like that.”
When Jim Aikin caught up with the new wave master three years later for our Dec. ’83 issue, he found Greg to have grown even more as a musician as well as a synth glutton. Even in the middle of recording Heartbeat City, which solidified the band’s position as a world-class hit factory with attitude, Greg found time to record a solo album, Niagra Falls.
When Jim asked about upcoming solo projects, Greg said his future was with the Cars. “I could never imagine doing anything else,” he said. “I still like to hear even the old songs — they hold up pretty well — but I wonder what I’ll think of them 25 years from now.”
Wonder no more, Cars fans, as Greg answers this question himself on this very page. After a 17-year hiatus, the Cars are re-forming as the New Cars, featuring Greg on keys (that’s him in the center of the photo), original guitarist Elliott Easton (to the left of Greg), Tubes drummer Prairie Prince (far left), and bassist Kasim Sulton (far right). Original singer and songwriter Ric Ocasek and drummer David Robinson have opted not to join, but gave their blessing to the project. To fill Ric’s formidable shoes, Greg and Elliot tapped the inimitable Todd Rundgren (second from right). The new partnership has already coalesced and yielded three new songs, all collaborations, which will appear on a forthcoming CD.
“I have to admit, Todd was always one of my own personal keyboard heroes,” Greg said to us just prior to press time. “He’s contributed the lyrics to our new songs. ‘More’ is one that Todd had written on his own, with this project in mind. On the chorus, the keyboards are his, and on the verse, it’s more me, but we collaborated on all the keyboard parts.”
On the road, the bulk of the set list will contain familiar Cars hits, so most of Greg’s signature sounds will come from the original instruments themselves. “I’m taking the first synth I ever got, my miniKorg,” he says. “It’s the ‘Just What I Needed’ synth, the one that I used extensively on the first couple Cars records. I’ll take a Roland Jupiter-8 too, which has all the sounds from the Heartbeat City era. And I just got the new Ronald Juno-D and the microKorg, which has the vocoder built-in, and I’ve always liked having a vocoder around. I also have a Mac and a copy of [Propellerhead] Reason. So one train of thought is to try to cover as many of the Jupiter-8 sounds in reason as I can, since it’s big and old; I have three of them, so I have a backup or two.”
Though he’s gung-ho to get going with the New Cars, it’s never easy to get a new project off the ground. “There’s a bit of a re-acquainting process with the synths,” he says. “It’s been a while since I played keyboards in a band; I have to get used to that state of being again, even though it’s fun!” And how about those older Cars tunes — has Greg answered his own question about how he feels about them? “I know I’m repeating myself,” he says, “but I think those songs still hold up pretty well!”