New Cars get hit machine in gear
By Doug Miller

For many fans of new wave pioneers the Cars, the emergence of The New Cars after 17 years was just what they needed. The hundreds of fans, friends and industry members who were lucky enough to watch the debut show of The New Cars were happy to let the good times roll again.

The recent, exclusive performance at CenterStaging in Burbank, Calif., was a long-overdue, historic event, one preserved on high-definition video and available on CenterStaging's state-of-the-art Web site, rehearsals.com.

The New Cars are a souped-up supergroup version of the band that scored so many hits in the late 1970s and throughout the '80s.

Original members Greg Hawkes (keyboards) and Elliot Easton (guitar) are back in their familiar drivers' seats. Timeless innovator Todd Rundgren fills the role of lead singer, legend Kasim Sulton joins the band on bass and former Tubes drummer Prairie Prince rounds out the quintet, which will hit the road on this summer's Road Rage 2006 tour with Blondie.

The rehearsals.com performance was a sonic drive down Memory Lane, one filled with all the hits and new songs that take the old Cars formula and fuel-inject the personality of the new members.

"It sounds great," Easton said. "It sounds authentic, which is a big word with me. It sounds right. And we've written songs now, and we've recorded new tracks, and the band is evolving [into] an identity of its own.

"This is a great lineup. And it's a lineup that plans on making records of new music."

The band blazed through classic Cars tracks -- "Just What I Needed," "Let's Go," "You're All I Got Tonight," "You Might Think," "My Best Friend's Girl," "Drive," "Shake It Up," "Candy-O," "Bye Bye Love" and "Good Times Roll" -- and added a new song, "Not Tonight," into the mix during their hour-plus set.

"I'm excited to be performing these songs again," Hawkes said. "It's been a while, and obviously there's an altered lineup, which makes it fresher, in a way."

The biggest differences are in the vocals, with Rundgren handling most of them and Sulton filling in on "Drive." Several of the band members have said that Rundgren's voice falls somewhere in between the original Cars singers.

"It makes perfect sense," Sulton said. "It's working out better than anybody had expected. Everybody was like, 'Well, it could work, but maybe it won't.' And I think after the first night, everybody was like, 'Yeah, this is gonna be OK.' "

That seems to be the attitude about the whole project, especially now that the band has had time to rehearse and has recorded new material. More rehearsals are needed, of course, and founding member Hawkes said the group has accepted the fact that it's going to have to work at making its sound unique again.

"I don't think we're like slavishly trying to copy the arrangements that were on the albums, necessarily," Hawkes said. "We're using that as a starting point, I guess."

Rundgren agreed, saying the band will build confidence the more the players work together.

"There is an arc to it, I suppose," Rundgren said. "By the time we've gotten comfortable with the material and, in a sense, duplicating the old style, I imagine we're going to start to get antsy to put our own stamp on it.

"So people ought to realistically expect that they'll hear the songs that they're familiar with, and they'll be substantially the same arrangements, but I think that it won't sound exactly like the Cars they remember.

"As time goes on, we'll start doing, as I say, our own sort of hybridization, our own Prius, as it were -- our own hybrid car."

Check out The New Cars live rehearsal videos here