There is a version of Captured that exists only in the memory of people who were in a specific arena on a specific night in 1980, and then there is this record, which is the next best thing — and some nights, depending on how the speakers are sitting, it might actually be better.
The Cars were already a phenomenon by the time they set up at the Forum in Los Angeles and the Civic Center in Providence for the shows that would become this double live album. Candy-O had just turned a year old. Panorama was still warm from the pressing plant. The band was at the precise moment when every night on the road had made them a tighter machine without yet making them a tired one. That window doesn’t stay open long.
What They Captured
Roy Thomas Baker produced the original studio albums with his wall-of-sound cathedral instincts, but Captured was handled by Ric Ocasek himself, working with engineer Michael Braunstein. The decision to let the live recordings breathe rather than bury them in post-production sweetening was the right call. You can hear the room. You can hear the space between Elliot Easton’s guitar and the back wall, the particular way David Robinson’s snare cracks in a venue that size.
Easton is the reason to own this record. His leads on “Candy-O” and “Let’s Go” have a looseness the studio versions politely declined to invite in. He trained at Berklee, went home, and decided to make Rickenbacker-clean guitar feel like a muscle car idling at a red light.
Greg Hawkes plays every keyboard imaginable — Oberheim, Minimoog, Farfisa, things with patch cables that look like a telephone switchboard — and manages to make all of it sound like the same instrument in the same band, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Live, he holds the sonics together the way a good bassist holds a groove: you notice more when it’s gone than when it’s there.
The Ocasek Problem
Ric Ocasek is, in person, six foot four and looks like a figure from an Edward Gorey drawing. He understood pop architecture the way very few people understood it — verse, pre-chorus, chorus as a series of emotional pressure changes rather than simply loud-quiet-loud. “Just What I Needed” sounds like it was built in a factory, and that is entirely the point. It was. He built the factory.
His voice live was never exactly warm. It was correct, which is different. He sang with the precise detachment of someone reading a telegram about something they care about enormously. On this record you can hear the crowd filling in the space his affect leaves open, which turns out to be a good trade.
Benjamin Orr handles “Let’s Go” and “Just What I Needed” and sounds genuinely, uncomplicatedly great — the foil Ocasek needed, the voice that had no ironic distance in it at all.
Captured came out in November 1981 on Elektra. It did not get reviewed the way it deserved. Live albums were still considered a contractual obligation in those years, a way to buy the band time while the next studio record came together. People who bought it anyway found something else: a document of a band executing a very specific idea of what rock and roll could sound like — clean, synthetic, cool, and somehow still physical — at the exact moment they had it fully worked out.
Put on “Panorama” late. Let Hawkes’s synthesizer fill the room before the guitars arrive. There’s a reason this one still holds up.