Do What You Can at Every Age

Nothing’s over until you say it’s over. Or your death from other causes.

I was startled to see how old songwriter and bandleader Ric Ocasek was when he died Sunday. Seventy-five is more than twice as many years as many entertainers live, and certainly more than most of us. 

What seemed even more out of place, though, was his age was more in line with the surviving Beatles and Rolling Stones, not someone who created and defined the New Wave sound of the late 1970s. Then the arithmetic hit me.

It was precisely 40 years ago at the time of this writing that The Cars’ first two albums were in everyone’s dorm room at the University of South Carolina, and played at least once all the way through at all the house parties I attended. If Ocasek was 75 when he died, that means he was 35 years old when he and his band were riding high on Candy-O. The recording for The Cars’ eponymously titled first album began in 1977, when Ocasek was 33. This means he and his band didn’t get their recording contract until he was 32 at youngest, if that.

This is yet another one of those deals in which you had to be there in that time frame to understand how significant this was. In the 1970s, by age 30, you were settled. You were married, in a good money-making career, or you were a loser. Your chance for a “late start,” Mr. Late Bloomer, was long past. This social convention persisted clear through the 1980s.

Moreover, if you were a musician, and you were 33 years old and still playing guitar and singing and bandleading without a recording contract, you’d better be leading one of your town’s best—and I mean best—cover bands available for school dances and weddings.

It no doubt helped that Ocasek and the rest of the band were the type of pale, unlined young men who looked far younger than they were, but it’s still no small thing that Ocasek could be even 28 years old and not running a cover band, but developing his own sound. 

For my money, Ric Ocasek and The Cars invented that brief shining moment in the late 1970s known as New Wave. To which I quickly add, no one else sounded like them (well, maybe Split Enz, bless them). Compounding the irony is that, for as pale and twee and Ocasek and company looked, they brought a necessary masculine energy back to music that was sorely missed in those days when disco dominated everything.

If you could only imagine what it was like hearing The Cars’ or Elvis Costello’s first albums in the pits of the Disco Era. In the middle of the desert, wishing for a death that never comes, and behold the dark-haired, nattily dressed skinny dudes — as opposed to the stringy-haired skinny dudes wearing nothing more than ratty jeans and the roll of socks they stuffed down ‘em — driving up in a beer truck, offering you a frosty cold bottle and a ride out.

Anyway, the point is, don’t think you’ve failed because you’re 20-something this or even 30-something that and you haven’t done whatever Big Thing you want to be remembered for yet. You have to keep pushing. Of course, there’s a meme for authors who didn’t publish until they were in their 50s and later, which is the club I’m in. Up and at ‘em, brothers and sisters. This might very well be the day. Or not. Doesn’t matter, so long as you’re here for it.