The Cars – The Cars

Some details on this guitar. It started off as a bone-stock sunburst 1974 Fender Jazzmaster, which Ric used on an early promo in that format for My Best Friend's Girl in 1977/early 1978. Sometime after the first album took off, it was sent off and repainted and returned to The Cars touring Europe sometime before the Musikladen gig.

Around 1980-1981, The Jazzmaster was fitted with a Gibson Harmonica or Ibanez Gilbitrar bridge, and possibly also refretted and fretboard leveled to fit with the new bridge. The anecdote provided below was right after this was done, and Ric used the Jazzmaster a lot on the Shake It Up era tunes, including the title track.

The guitar continued to be used and toured with Ric Ocasek through his career. It did get loaned out to one of the Schwartzman bros in Rooney for awhile for a gig at CBGB's in the early-mid 2000's, but it was eventually returned. Also, it seems Ric Ocasek let's people use this guitar in the studio when he's producing as pictures of it have turned up online being used in the studio.

From Musician Magazine 1982 when they had finished recording "Shake It Up" and were touring for it.

http://dailyeventsbookpagethree.blogspot.com/2007/04/cars-musician-magazine-shake-it-up-1982.html

Ocasek's guitar line-up is much simpler. His favorite guitar is an eight-year old Fender Jazzmaster, painted pink. "I used it on this record a lot, and I use it on every record, all the time," he said. But he didn't use it on the last tour. Instead, he took an old Fender Jaguar Easton found for him in a hock-shop. It cost $80. "I think it was just the idea of it being old and beat up," he said. "So I used that on the tour. I should have used the other one, because it sounds cleaner."

Despite his appreciation for the Telecaster, Easton’s eyes (and ears) soon wandered to Les Pauls. “I was a Mike Bloomfield freak, and that Les Paul tone on the Super Session album was just the greatest thing I ever heard,” he says. “My high school band won a countywide battle of the bands, and our prize was a $500 gift certificate to Sam Ash. There were five guys in the group, so we each got $100 to spend. For whatever reason, there were several left-handed Gibsons in the store at the time, and I settled on a Les Paul Deluxe. I sold my Telecaster for $150, so that was $250 with the winnings, and my mom made up the rest. That Les Paul cost $297 with the case out the door, and I regretted buying it almost immediately because you couldn’t do all the pedal-steel bends and stuff you could do on a Telecaster. I wanted a Fender again, but because I could only afford to have one guitar at a time, I just went back and forth like that for years.”

By the time the newly signed Cars traveled to England to record their 1978 self-titled debut album with producer Roy Thomas Baker, they were generating enough cash from their Boston area gigs for Easton to have assembled a three-guitar arsenal: a Martin D-35 acoustic, a 1977 Les Paul Standard that he had refinished in red, and a new Fender Telecaster fitted with a Bartolini Hi-A mini-humbucker in the neck position. Armed with those, a Morley Echo Volume pedal and Roland Chorus Ensemble, the guitarist cut all of his tracks, including the impeccably composed and executed solos to “Just What I Needed” and “My Best Friend’s Girl” in less than two days. “That record took 12 days to make in total,” Easton says. “It was our club set and we knew what we were going to do, so we just went in there and regurgitated our parts onto tape.”