Songoftheday 10/8/13 - Who's gonna tell you when it's too late, who's gonna tell you things aren't so great...

The Cars - "Drive"
from the album Heartbeat City (1984)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #3 (three weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 14

Today's Song of the Day is by the Boston new wave band the Cars, whose fifth album Heartbeat City had already spun off their second top-10 single "You Might Think" along with a top-20 follow-up with "Magic", both with cutting-edge (at the time) music videos that ruled MTV. For their third release the group switched gears entirely, with a slow, spacey ballad toward a love that's on a road to ruin, sung not by normal lead vocalist and the song's writer Ric Ocasek but by bass player Benjamin Orr. Ric does star in the video, though, directed by actor Timothy Hutton (Ordinary People) and featuring model Paula Porizkova, who would go on to marry the singer five years down the road...

"Drive" became the Cars' highest-charting pop single in September of 1984, and also topped the adult-contemporary (easy-listening) format as well as reaching #9 on the rock radio list in Billboard. In England, the single made the top-5 twice, the second time fueled by the song's inclusion in a segment of Live Aid portraying hunger-starved Ethiopians (though not sure about the song reference). It also made the top 10 of almost every major music market around the world from Australia to Germany.

The song remains one of the best slow tracks of the decade, one that both kids and their parents could appreciate.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


Here's the band live with the song on the tour for the album..

...and again at Live Aid in 1985...

...and another live one from a bit later...

Also, the song has been covered by many acts, including Danish dance-pop act Los Umbrellos, who interpolated the chorus into their single of the same name..

New Zealand electronica act Strawpeople took their cover of the song to #7 on their country's pop chart in 2000...

German metalheads the Scorpions put "Drive" on their live acoustic album from 2001...

Reggae legacy act Ziggy Marley took on "Drive" for the Adam Sandler movie 50 First Dates in 2004...

Experimental rock group the Deftones also covered "Drive" in 2006 which ended up in the remake of The Stepfather...

Even Julio Iglesias recorded the song that same year...

Trip-hop group Olive's lead singer Ruth Ann also did an even more spacey version...

Finally, here's actor/singer/former Kylie squeeze Jason Donovan hawked his QVC album with the track...

Up tomorrow: the Purple One's nuts.