More so than the guitar solo in “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” or “Substitution / mass confusion / clouds inside your head!” in “Bye Bye Love” or the messing with the beat in “Moving in Stereo,” the entirety of “All Mixed Up” just slays me. With Ben Orr and David Robinson is such perfect lockstep that you barely notice that they’re fucking around with the beat, “Moving in Stereo” glides with such effortless technological cool – even 35 years later – that you might not even realize that it’s basically one riff repeated over and over and over and over again.īut what a great riff! If that’s the reason that Greg Hawkes gets a songwriting credit, totally worth it.Īnd, finally, “All Mixed Up”, which sealed the deal for me. And how are we moving into the future, you might ask? Why, in stereo! “Bye Bye Love” ends the same way it started – a jumble of drums and guitars – but also leaves us with a lone synthesizer announcing that we are moving into the future, for that is where we all shall live. Also negating any kind of reason you might want to bring to a song that steals its title from The Everly Brothers: Ocasek’s high harmonies on the big chorus.
The passion with which Benjamin Orr sings this the second time around totally negates that it just might be utter nonsense. But when the the “ahhhhhhhhhhh ahhhhhhhhhhhs” kick in just before the chorus it’s also pop song nirvana, as is the moment between when it ends and “Bye Bye Love” begins as a jumble of drums and guitars.īlink and you’ll miss that an entirely new song has started, until you realize that the tempo has dropped and the riff has gotten somewhat Beatlesque and and the lyrics somewhat surreal: With its phased-out drum opening, “love the one you’re with” lyrics and two long Elliott Easton guitar solos, “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight” is probably the single most conventionally “rock” song on the whole record. And because I think of the four songs that comprise it as one single suite – a la Abbey Road or Dark Side of the Moon – I’m going to write about them all together. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: side two of The Cars is one of the greatest artistic achievements of Western Civilization. So just as my post for “ Just What I Needed” was a stand-in for the triptych of singles that introduced The Cars as the great singles band they would be throughout their entire career, “All Mixed Up” will be a stand-in for the songs on the second side that made The Cars the only great album they made in that career.
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