“I played the solo perfectly – and there was silence in the room. It was crickets. Everyone was looking down, I couldn’t believe it”: Elliot Easton on The Cars’ early years – and the guitar solo that moved him to tears of rage

“I played the solo perfectly – and there was silence in the room. It was crickets. Everyone was looking down, I couldn’t believe it”: Elliot Easton on The Cars’ early years – and the guitar solo that moved him to tears of rage

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Elliot Easton

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Even if you can’t remember the first time you heard The Cars – perhaps Just What I Need, My Best Friend’s Girl, Shake It Up or You Might Think – you probably remember how those songs made you feel. That’s the magic of their music; more specifically, the magic of Elliot Easton, whose slick licks and knack for pop melodies defined a generation of new wave-loving kids.

“If I recorded something and I had the feeling I could do better, I couldn’t even sleep that night,” he tells Guitar World. “I’d be dying to get back to the studio to fix whatever was bugging me.

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Elliot Easton

(Image credit: Getty Images)

I started trying to play some of the surf music in like ’61 – I was playing guitar before The Beatles came

(Image credit: Getty Images)

They said, ‘Your image is all over the place. One guy should be in the Velvet Underground, and your bass player should be in the Grateful Dead’

(Image credit: Getty Images)

I could really only afford one guitar… I sold the SG, went to New York and got a Gibson Les Paul Standard

(Image credit: Getty Images)

You’ve got your whole life to prepare for your first album, then for the second, you’ve got six months

(Image credit: Getty Images)

We joked that we should retitle our first album Greatest Hits since there are so many hits on that record!

(Image credit: Getty Images)

I found that if I could visualize the sound in my mind I would automatically go for the right gear

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Andrew Daly is an iced-coffee-addicted, oddball Telecaster-playing, alfredo pasta-loving journalist from Long Island, NY, who, in addition to being a contributing writer for Guitar World, scribes for Rock Candy, Bass Player, Total Guitar, and Classic Rock History. Andrew has interviewed favorites like Ace Frehley, Johnny Marr, Vito Bratta, Bruce Kulick, Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Rich Robinson, and Paul Stanley, while his all-time favorite (rhythm player), Keith Richards, continues to elude him.

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