elliot easton interview

It’s got so many songs that people love and of course It’s one of the great debut albums by an American band where a band comes out pretty fully realized like Coming off like art-rock Beatles fronted by Buddy Holly, they delivered album after album of infectious pop music laced with a twisted, avant-garde sensibility, marrying mighty hooks, lush vocals, consummate musicality and forward thinking production into one package.We caught up with lead guitarist and founding member Elliot Easton for a peek under the hood into the history of The Cars — past, present and future.Benjamin (Orr, late Cars bass player/vocalist) would have really appreciated it, especially being from Cleveland I think he would have been very happy to go back because he’s very loved in Cleveland.

I’ve gotten some great feed-back from people saying how much they love the guitar, so I’m really proud about that!Gretsch Headline News wants to thank Elliot for all of the time he put into this lengthy interview and for creating an awesome new model for the Gretsch lineup and guitar players everywhere!

Once we made that first record it all happened so quickly.GHN: From all of The Cars recordings, what are some of your favorite moments?EE: Some of the solos, such as “Best Friend’s Girl” and “Touch and Go”, “Tonight She Comes” and many others. But the band was really successful right out of the gate.EE: It jumped to the national and world level. We all came from different parts of the country, and met in Boston, and all had different influences, and that’s really the secret to what made The Cars unique. There are lots of good ones and I tended to really hone them. Messages: 6,810. Can you tell us about that? But before it was The Cars it was a band with Ric(Ocasek) and Ben(Orr) and myself called Cap’n Swing. That’s just how those five people sounded playing together. I’m playing an awful lot of Gretsch guitars these days. That was the first stuff that caught my ear on the radio, and that was the stuff I played.GHN: When you first started playing, were you able to find a left handed guitar?EE: I just flipped the guitar over and played it upside downElliot Easton 1980 EE: For a little while I just left it the way it was. I did all the guitar parts for that record in a day and a half!EE: Sometimes when you get into the studio you find that something that may work well live doesn’t quite work in the studio. May 09, 2011.

I grew out of that Les Paul pretty fast and ended up trading somebody for a 335 that was left handed. Mostly, we knew what we wanted to do because we had been playing those songs for nearly a year.GHN: How did the release of that record affect you?EE: Being inside the eye of the hurricane was alien to us but the record exploded. I’m just really loving it.

There was a snowstorm and we were playing in the student union or the student gym and there were like eight people. He played sax on some of the early Cars stuff. In the early days we’d rehearse many times a week and have all the time in the world for the group. It was pretty early days for Berklee and they almost didn’t take you seriously if you played a solid body guitar. We’d be in a hotel somewhere and while working on basic tracks, I’d take rough cassettes home to the room with me. That’s really the reason why I designed my Signature model G6128TEE.Elliot’s Signature Guitar EE: My signature model was an attempt to address some of the slightly more fragile features of the Classic Gretsch guitars. They convinced everybody to get together to do an interview to provide an extra treat for the DVD. I got it into my head that I wanted a Les Paul, and at that time a Gold Top Les Paul was $298.00 brand new with a case. They were name guys and they passed on Cap’n Swing and their criticism was that the band seemed too diverse, it was almost like Steely Dan but with long jams.EE: It was about 1976. Try Prime Cart.

All these things have a curve to them and everything was going up, up, up for us.Well, that’s what we’d used to joke, that we should rename it “The Cars Greatest Hits.” (laughs)  But that’s not really true as So what we’d usually do was record the basic track first, and then start right in on the backing vocals so we had a lot of empty tracks. I didn’t know any better, and then I came to a point where I realized it was holding me back. My roots are pretty deep and if anything it was more just a strange turn of events that I would end up in a sleek, modern band like The Cars, because my roots are in blues, country and folk. They had another bass player and another drummer and a different keyboard player from Greg(Hawkes). It’s an instrumental thing that I’ve been working on. A A Where was the album recorded? As soon as we started seeing some dough, I got a Gretsch guitar, and have been playing one ever since. It was one of those imports that just has the name of the importer, mine happened to say Howard on it. It was a gift certificate to Sam Ash Music in NY, and there were 5 guys in the band so we each got $100.00 to spend. I didn’t play one live with The Cars because I didn’t really know how to setup the old ones to stand up to the rigors of touring. After I got the Telecaster, I never bought a right handed guitar again. So we had been playing those songs for the better part of the year, and we banged that record out in like 12 days. I played I think it gave the solos more of a melodic contour and maybe a slight touch of sophistication that wouldn’t be there if I was just playing screaming rock licks in the key of the song. I was sick as a dog, I had some kind of intestinal thing, it was something I ate, and I did all of the guitar parts being sort of out of it and sick.But people still play that first album and it’s still on the radio. Joe Charupakorn.