The Cars — The Cars

Okay. True confessions time: I never owned this album before. Despite being a freshman in college when this was released, despite being the target audience for anything new wave (or at least I would be before long), despite actually liking this album quite a bit – I never bought a copy. Neither did my roommate Danny. And the reason, to be honest, was Cocaine Kurtz.

In our freshman year, our dorm at Syracuse was a mix of freshmen, sophomores and even some upper classes (like a lot of schools, SU required you to live in university housing for the first two years). The room we ended up in was on a wing that I think was otherwise entirely older students, and it was great having them around us. In those days, decorating your room door was absolutely vital. For one thing, you HAD to have a whiteboard mounted on it, so that people could leave you messages. That’s because, dear children, even if you arranged to have a telephone in your room (not everyone did, and that first year we did not), there was no voicemail, no one had answering machines, and the only way to leave someone a message was to walk to their room and write it on their whiteboard. This was how the world worked. This was how we decided where to meet up, how we found out where people had gone, how we arranged our entire social lives: messages on whiteboards. (It must be said: whiteboard were pretty damn new at the time. The dry erase marker wasn’t invented until 1975; until then, such boards had to be washed clean with water.)

Also on our doors, just as important, were our names. In order to be socially acceptable, you had to replace the name tag provided by your resident advisor as quickly as possible. Ours, following my normal obsession with overdoing everything, was done in some leftover presstype I had brought with me, and just said CJ & Dan. (I had the presstype, so my name went first, duh.) Others mostly had their actual names drawn in some decorative fashion, or a nickname of some sorts. Down the hall, a door or two, Merry Reymond, I recall, went by “Mairzy Doats.” (Somewhere in my collection, by completely coincidence, is a record she once owned that I bought from Desert Shore. Can’t think of which one it was, at the moment.) And one door over from her, proclaimed by a door label that one cannot imagine a university countenancing today, was “Cocaine Kurtz.” His actual first name? I’m sure I knew it then, but I have no memory of it now, and that’s fine; I’m not here to out anyone’s recreational or even occupational drug use from the 1970s.

Cocaine Kurtz owned The Cars’ first album. Cocaine Kurtz played The Cars’ first album. In a cinderblock dorm that was really pretty damn soundproof, Cocaine Kurtz frequently, perhaps always, had his door open, playing The Cars’ first album into the hallway. We knew it back and forth, note to note. Anytime we walked into the hallway, went to the bathroom, went down to answer the phone, there was The Cars.

Now, I’m sure he must have played other music. And I’m not faulting him, or complaining. I happened to really like that album, and if I didn’t want to hear it, all I needed to do was stay in my room. But I say this by way of explaining why I never needed to buy The Cars – it was always on, I heard it all the time, and I knew every song. Add to that the expansive amount of airplay they got, how much they were out there in the culture as a kind of “acceptable” New Wave that rockers were somehow allowed to like, and I heard it a LOT.

So, I never bought it. Even in later years when I hadn’t heard it in ages and acknowledged that I might kinda like to hear it again. Then a few months ago a friend was distributing her parents’ record collection, this was available, and I decided this avoidance had gone on long enough. Played it, very much liked it, put it aside, and I probably won’t play it very often. It’s very good, but damn, I have heard it. It still sounds fresh, but man, it really does launch me right back to 235 Day Hall, an impossibly long 44 years ago.