(editor’s note – this show was originally scheduled for August 19)
The Motels and the Cars sound off at SPAC
by Kyle Hughes, Bennington Banner, September 9, 1980
The Saratoga Performing Arts Center never has had much to offer as a rock music venue except accessibility. The place is unhospitable, and the hugely amplified sound is generally atrocious. There’s also little to do there beside sit in your seat or sprawl on the lawn — where you can hardly see the stage — and wait for the show to begin. The Philadelphia Orchestra is at home here; rock ‘n’ roll isn’t.
But I went over last Thursday night to see the Cars, anyway, along with 20,414 other people. It was my first encounter with a huge rock concert in some time, and I came away with mixed feelings — not about the Cars, particularly, but about the general rip-off that goes on at these huge concerts.
In essence, the music is distorted because it’s played too loudly, and, in the theater, you must either sit down passively or stand up passively: there’s no alternative. The seething crowd on the lawn, the hassles at the gate, the exploding firecrackers, and the violent creeps fill out the unsavory picture.
For the Cars’ opening act Thursday, the Motels, a Los Angeles band that sounds good on record, the combination was nearly a disaster. The music was so metallically loud and distorted that it seemed like you had your head in a bucket that was being kicked around to the accompaniment of an incredible cacophony. The group, despite their sonic attack, also seemed woefully inadequate to occupy the stage. It hurt, and the Motels came off looking like a bunch of unmitigated posers.
They aren’t all that bad, I think, judging from what you hear of them on the radio; they also are said to have put on a good show at J.B. Scott’s a while back. At SPAC, perhaps, the Motels weren’t allowed to have a sound check or never played in a big hall before. They deserved better than what they got, although the crowd inside ate it up.
After a long interval, the Cars came out and played. Drummer David Robinson and keyboard player Greg Hawkes were out first, laying down a synthesized beat that turned into “Shoo Bee Doo,” the song that precedes “Candy-O” on the Cars’ second record. Guitarist/singer/group mastermind Ric Ocasek hopped out from the wings and sang, and the show was on.
The Cars showcased material from all three of their LPs, playing the unique disassembled, stripped down, and reassembled high-tech pop that has been highly influential since the Boston-based group’s debut album in 1978. But the whole thing was finally rather matter-of-fact, missing whatever it is that makes rock so dynamic and interesting.
That something certainly isn’t missing on the Cars’ first two records. The Cars’ first album is a classic of sorts, and “Candy-O” has its share of good moments. But somehow watching and listening to the Cars at SPAC Thursday was somewhat uninvolving. It was loud and showy, but it wasn’t very provocative, like a Hollywood spectacle movie. I kept comparing it to the pleasure of listening to a tape of the first album on a car stereo; the concert suffered in comparison. That’s probably the wrong way to look at it, but at the time it seemed an inevitable comparison.
The Cars’ percussive and textured sound is at home in the recording studio, where sound upon sound can be piled on until a rich, driving song results. Nearly any one of their tunes shows this. Live, however, at least at the cavernous Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the final result tends to be muddled and uninspired. But it still managed to get a rise out of listeners in a display of appreciation that is predictable at SPAC: the audience sits down through most of the show and then stands up at the end to clap for an encore.
Perhaps this bland response is conditioned by the situation at SPAC, where rock music is blatantly sold as a product with the aim of taking the center, which normally features moderately attended classical music concerts and ballet, out of the red and into the black. It would be naive to believe otherwise, and that’s why I think these rock music pseudoevents cheat the audience. The link between the listener and performer, so vital to rock ‘n’ roll, is severed and the music is eviscerated: it becomes an act as nourishing as TV watching, and as authentic as shopping.
This isn’t to fault the Cars any more than it is to point the finger at any musician on the rock circuit who has reached the level of the Cars’ success. I like the Cars, and the show Thursday hasn’t changed my opinion. But it was missing something, spontaneity perhaps, and I don’t think I was alone in noticing it. It was a miniature spectacle of thoughtless consumption — like a musical shopping mall — and that was dispiriting.
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