If you listen to "classic rock" radio, The Cars are one of the few groups on my punk pages that you'll ever hear alongside Cream, Zeppelin, and Skynyrd. True, the Boston-based new wavers were among the slickest of their class (Queen's Roy Thomas Baker helmed their debut), but the power of their first two records cannot be denied. The Cars and Candy-O are chock full of cool tunes that proved to have very broad appeal. The follow-ups, Panorama and Shake It Up, fell relatively flat artistically and commercially, but Heartbeat City was a comeback on both fronts. Their last album, Door To Door, was inexplicably awful.

Rhino issued both a very good two-disc retrospective, Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology (though it's no substitute for the first two albums), and a deluxe edition of the debut featuring a CD's worth of demos and outtakes. The rest of the catalog has yet to be remastered, bur Rhino has issued the superb, 20-track Complete Greatest Hits, for the consumer on a stricter budget.

Numerous solo outings by the Cars' pit boss Ric Ocasek haven't yielded much to write home about, and albums by guitarist Benjamin Orr and keyboardist Greg Hawkes were even less remarkable. I am very fond, though, of Elliott Easton's Change No Change, a collaboration with Jules Shear; it was reissued briefly on CD along with tracks from a later, abortive Easton band project (now deleted and rather scarce).