Just What He Needed

Rockport

Dec 16

Rock & Roll Hall of Famer David Robinson savors his surprisingly quiet life in Rockport

**The Cars, circa 1978, from left: Ric Ocasek, Elliott Easton, Greg Hawkes, Benjamin Orr, and Robinson. (Photograph by** **Ebet Roberts**)

Punk rock’s nihilism began luring small crowds of extreme fans to dark, close East Coast clubs in the late 1960s. And again, shortly after, when the protons and electrons of sex- and rhythm-charged gospel and blues into rock ’n’ roll, superstars strutted across stadium stages representing millions of dollars in record sales. David Robinson was there for it all, a witness to punk’s intrinsic futility and rock’s intrinsic jackpot.

Robinson started this odyssey with a job at a Woburn record distributor. That led him first to the vanguard punk band The Modern Lovers (TML), and ultimately to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as drummer for The Cars. David Robinson has owned property in either in Gloucester or Rockport through much of this music history.

He grew up in a happy home — Mom, Dad, older sister, two younger brothers — in Woburn, Mass. As a child he was animated by three identifiable drives: earning money, an acute sensitivity to the physical world, and music. As young as five or six years old, Robinson collected wild sedums — “Hens and Chicks” — and sold them on the side of the road for five cents. He managed three paper routes. But he was also a kid consumed with the way the world looked, acutely aware of everything from the details of his clothing to the organization of a room.

“I was always evaluating how good or bad something was visually. Outside, inside. It could be a tree. I’d size up the quality of a tree as an artful thing or an emotional thing. I’d think, what did that tree say to me? Is it a good tree or a bad tree?”

Robinson thought about music a lot as a little kid. By the time he was 11, he had a transistor radio in bed with him, and would stay up waiting for a favorite song to play. If it came on at 1:00 am he would listen, and sleep the next day in school. By the time he was 14 he had saved up for a drum set. His parents were (and continued to be) accepting — if not supportive — of the percussion in the basement.

After an unsatisfying high school experience, Robinson moved into the first of the three real jobs he would ever hold.

“They cumulatively added up to two-and-a-half years,” he said. There was a short stint with a local oil burner company, followed the wholesale record distributor. The distributor opened a record store in Kenmore Square, and Robinson moved to Boston, where the Allman Brothers happened to be living for the summer and could be seen playing on the Cambridge Common. It was 1968. The Beatles released The White Album. The Vietnam War was the hot political issue, controversially overshadowing the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King was assassinated. That year, everything from biker gangs to renowned musicians would show up on the Cambridge Common.

**The Modern Lovers (from left): Robinson, Jerry Harrison (who would later join the Talking Heads), Ernie Brooks, and Jonathan Richman**

“That job gave me the opportunity to play records I liked, and to convince people to buy records I liked. A lot of times parents would come into the record store when they were visiting their kids at college. They would say, ‘we hear James Taylor is really good,’ and I would say, ‘No! No! Don’t buy that. She’s not going to like that!’ I remember really plugging the first Todd Rundgren record. But I didn’t keep that job too long, because I ran into Jonathan Richman.”

Richman was another local musician from Natick, Mass. When Robinson first saw him perform, Richman was fresh from New York City, where he had been sleeping on the couch of the Velvet Underground’s manager. A devout parishioner to Lou Reed’s vibe, Richman had opened for the Velvet Underground, but in1969 he returned to Boston and was playing solo gigs.

“I was completely amazed by him,” Robinson said. “I started telling my friends, ‘I saw this thing that was so incredible.’ So I would bring them to see him, and they would say, ‘What? You made us come to see this? This guy is so horrible!’ and I would say, ‘What?! Look at how amazing he is! Don’t you see it?’ I even remember saying if there was a band with three more guys like him it would be an incredible band.”

Then one day Richman walked into the record store.

“And I thought, ‘There’s that guy! I’m going to go over to him, and speak to him.’ So I look over his shoulder and see he’s writing out a little 3x5 card that says he’s starting a band and needs a drummer.”

They talked, and, without Richman ever hearing him play, Robinson becomes the drummer for The Modern Lovers. TML was not like anything anyone had heard before, unless you’d heard the Velvet Underground: sort of Beat-poet, rhymeless non-lyrics with a pounding, relentless rhythm. Robinson says Richman was equally plumbing the soul of 50s rockabilly and doo-wop, and the sentimental, romantic sound of Sam Cooke. This was the sound that Robinson had fallen for, that his friends thought was so horrible.

Their first gig was in the YMCA in Central Square, Cambridge. After the performance, two young women approached the band, almost in tears over the performance. But a man behind them, Robinson says, had different words: “You guys are the worst band I ever saw. I hated it so much that if I ever hear you play again I’ll kill you.”

“So, me and Jonathan looked at each other and were literally like, ‘Yes!’ This is exactly what we could have wished for. And that set the tone for our entire careers.”

“I was always evaluating how good or bad something was visually. Outside, inside. It could be a tree. I’d size up the quality of a tree as an artful thing or an emotional thing.”

Then one day Richman walked into the record store.

“So, me and Jonathan looked at each other and were literally like, ‘Yes!’ This is exactly what we could have wished for. And that set the tone for our entire careers.”

There was the trip to California, staying in Emmylou Harris’s house, playing miniature golf with Gram Parsons (and later getting word during a gig that Parsons died from an overdose), swimming in David Geffen’s pool while eating lunch. “A big thing for us was getting free food, so anytime we had to meet a record executive we said, ‘Could you meet us at this restaurant?’ Because we never had money for food.”

The band didn’t do drugs — in fact, they wrote anti-drug songs — but tragically, Robinson’s own girlfriend died from an overdose just after arriving from Los Angeles at the band’s short-term rented home in Massachusetts.

And then there was the battle to sign them, with the heads of Warner Brothers and A&M records courting the four young men, while the band held out. Ultimately they signed with Warner, but Richman’s unique personality and creative vision dominated the negotiations.

“He put so much faith in his own feelings about what mattered — he had a kind of obsessive integrity,” says Robinson — “that he was uncomfortable committing to the contract, even though he may not have even been clear what the contract meant.

“But what if we don’t believe in these lyrics anymore? What if we don’t want to play these songs?” Richman challenged Warner Brothers.

“Success and comfort bothered Jonathan. He thought you had to suffer,” Robinson said. The deal ultimately dissolved due to Jonathan’s principled questioning.

“We got everything we asked for,” Robinson said, “We got the money we asked for, the producer we asked for, but we still managed to screw it up.”

The Cars were named "Best New Artist" in the 1978 *Rolling Stone* Readers' Poll and won "Video of the Year" for "You Might Think" at the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984. Their debut album, *The Cars*, sold six million copies and appeared on the Billboard 200 album chart for 139 weeks.

The Modern Lovers incubated some of America’s greatest rock music: John Felice, an original TML guitarist and friend of Richman’s, went on to form The Real Kids. Jerry Harrison moved on to the Talking Heads, and David Robinson met Ric Ocasek and became drummer for The Cars. Richman ultimately moved on to world music, but continued as an enigmatic force, inspiring the biography, There’s Something About Jonathan: Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers. He also made a memorable cameo in the Ben Stiller/Cameron Diaz comedy There’s Something About Mary.

Robinson began hanging around Boston, playing in a band called DMZ. The Boston music scene was beginning to boil in those years. Telephone poles were plastered with homemade posters announcing new gigs. The Boston Phoenix printed multiple pages of club listings every week. British bands (like The Police and U2) considered Boston a critical first stop on their American tours. People were talking music, writing about music, dressing for music, and going out Thursday through Sunday nights to hear music. WBCN DJ Maxanne Sartori, a hardcore TML fan, introduced Ric Ocasek, who was then playing in a band called CapNSwing, to Robinson, but Robinson already knew him, because he often showed up at The Modern Lovers’ shows. “He was so tall you couldn’t miss him,” Robinson said.

Then, in 1976, The Cars were formed: Lead singer Ric Ocasek, joined by bassist and singer Benjamin Orr, lead guitarist Elliot Easton, keyboardist Greg Hawkes, and drummer David Robinson. Robinson knew right away that things were going to be different this time.

“I could see that commercially this was really going to be good. When you’re in bands, it’s like always something: the wrong combination of people, or the wrong combination of songs and people. But as soon as this band got into the studio and rehearsed, I could see clearly that we had something going on.”

Robinson pointed out the band was already in their late 20s and early 30s, older than a lot of the bands getting started in those years. “The right musicians were finally gathered, also we were older.” They’d already made a lot of the mistakes.

Soon after Sartori played a demo tape of “Just What I Needed” on WBCN, The Cars scored a record deal with Elektra.

“And in that course, so many unbelievable rock ’n’ roll things happened to us that — at the time we thought they were nothing — but looking back, I can’t even believe this all happened to me!”

“Everything took off super fast. We started to tour on the first album, The Cars, as second-billed,” but the venue marquees were quickly refaced when huge crowds started showing up for The Cars, not the top-billed groups. The band sold one million copies by the end of the year. In March, 1979, The Cars made it to number 18 on the Billboard 200 chart, and was ranked number 4 on Billboard’s Top Albums of the Year.

With Ben Orr’s hauntingly beautiful robotic-twanged new wave voice, Ocasek’s plaintive pop lyrics, and Robinson’s hard rock beat, The Cars drove straight into mainstream rock stardom. Then, in 1986, Robinson bought a house in Gloucester. A large house. The house consumed him.

“I bought this huge house. I did all the work myself. My friends in Boston didn’t come to see me for two years. Gloucester was way too far away from Boston. I wasn’t in the action anymore. So I got a whole bunch of new friends, and I became obsessed with restoring and fixing this house. I put years and years into it. It was stupid. A dumb thing to do. It ruined my social life.” With characteristic good nature, Robinson reflects, “If I have one big regret it was buying that house. But that’s how I learned to fix stuff.”

**The Cars (with Robinson, second from right) on a 1980 *Rolling Stone* cover.**

The Cars broke up in 1988, two years after Robinson moved to Gloucester, but regrets well played can sometimes become runes. Rockport, the quaint seaside artist colony, emerged as home and solace for the famous Rock drummer. Isolated from his Boston friends by the demands of his Gloucester house, Robinson started riding his bike to Rockport.

“I became friends with the people who owned the Country Store. I could see this was a better vibe for me. Then I started taking an interest in the history of the art colony here. I was friends with George Anderson, the painter, and his wife, Jean. I decided to open an art gallery.”

In 2003 he made Rockport home, opening Windemere Art & Antiques. Later, inspired by a piece of jewelry the actress Cher created for a friend, Robinson began designing women’s bracelets and necklaces.

Off the island, history was having its way with The Cars. In 2000, just before Benjamin Orr died of pancreatic cancer, Ocasek, who had once insisted there would never be a Cars reunion, assembled the band for a last interview and performance. The remaining Cars reunited again in 2010 to record Move Like This.

“Twenty-three years had passed since we worked on an album,” Robinson said. “So much had changed. They don’t use tape anymore. Everything’s computerized. When I walked into the control room and met everybody, there’s the producer and two engineers, and all three of them are sitting at little tray tables with computers.”

For the Move Like This tour Robinson used all electric drums. “Before, I used a mixture of electronic drums and real drums. I really helped promote the idea of electronic drums, because we were always interested in whatever new gadget came out. I had drums back then that were called ‘triggered.’ We used tiny transistor radio speakers. It was a really crude way that you could hit the drum and have a computer make a noise. Now it’s super-sophisticated.”

Robinson says the touch is better on electric drums. They’re more sensitive, the sticks hit better. “The realism of the high hat cymbals would blow your mind.”

**The Cars (with Robinson, at left) in 2018 at their Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.**

In April 2018, The Cars were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The remaining members united once more to perform at the induction ceremony, their final performance before Ocasek died in September of cardiovascular disease.

Robinson had been planning to talk to Ocasek about another Cars album. “I was just hoping that we could make some songs. I always wanted him to do one song at a time. I always wanted him to do a James Bond movie — one great song every once in a while.” About Ocasek’s passing, Robinson said, “It really struck that there would be no more Cars music.”

• • •

At 70, Robinson has an ageless nature that comes with a creative spirit. That childhood sensitivity to visual experiences had always kept up with the music. Over the band’s career, Robinson designed a number of The Cars album covers. He still emits an essence of total engagement with the world that someone very young may have, still considering, still asking questions, still surprised, still listening to the music.

“When I listen to The Modern Lovers now, I’m astounded by our audacity. We played crazy stuff, a lot of it is funny. And loud.

“The Modern Lovers was so incredible,” Robinson says, “They go on and on. Every generation rediscovers them. The whole TML thing took about two-and-a half years. The things that we did — and didn’t — do were just remarkable.”

Robinson paused, and laughed as if he had just realized this. “In a lot of ways The Modern Lovers was way more interesting than The Cars. It was a much more groundbreaking and inspiring sort of story. The Cars is just a typical success story.”

From his seat with a view overlooking Sandy Bay, Robinson has seen a lot, but he doesn’t look back too much. His jewelry, artwork, and vintage ephemera fill his gallery. Other work hangs in the iArt Colony gallery. And he’s begun another renovation project — an 18th-century house in Rockport’s village center. Meanwhile, out in the world his music plays on, and David Robinson continues his creative journey.

Jason Grow is a Gloucester-based commercial photographer.