Music Collecting Madness: The Cars

If you haven't read Music Collecting Addiction/MADNESS!, then you should probably read this before you go any further.

The Cars have been one of the most frustrating bands to collect for. How did I start? I usually enjoyed them whenever I heard them on the radio, but didn't really appreciate them until I went to a Cars "Hoot Night" back when I lived in Austin TX in 2000. A "Hoot Night" is where a bunch of local bands get together and pay tribute to a band. After attending the hoot night, I found their songs stuck in my head weeks afterward, which prompted me to buy Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology. It's a damn near perfect collection, with almost all the hits, a bunch of cool b-sides/demos, and it sounds great. The only problem is that it's missing "Bye Bye Love", which I would've gladly traded "Don't Cha Stop" for. "Bye Bye Love" is on Complete Greatest Hits (also released as Definitive), and if you just want a single CD career spanning collection, that's the way to go.

It wasn't too long ago when I had a whopping five copies of Heartbeat City. My first one was Steve Hoffman's remaster on Audio Fidelity, which was also the first Cars non-compilation album I bought. The second was an original copy, a "target" cd in fact, the kind of which the Hoffmanites cream over. I bought that for comparison purposes. Somewhere along the way I bought the original vinyl. Just over a year ago, I bought the Mobile Fidelity hybrid SACD, along with The Elektra Years: 1978-1987. I bought the latter more for Panorama and Door To Door, but more about those later. I recently sold the original CD and the Hoffman. (I may update this later with my opinion of the sound quality.)

I think the next CDs I bought after that Hoffman Heartbeat City were the Mobile Fidelity Gold CDs of Candy-O and Shake It Up. Those are fun and sound great, but those early albums were so well recorded that it would take effort to make them sound bad.

After that was the self-titled first album, for "Bye Bye Love". It was a compressed remaster that wasn't marked as such, but it still sounded good (see above paragraph). I bought the Mobile Fidelity hybrid SACD at the same time that I bought The Elektra Years and the Heartbeat City hybrid SACD. I've recently sold my old CD copy.

Panorama and Door To Door have been harder to find on CD. I bought Panorama on vinyl. I decided to buy The Elektra Years: 1978-1987 for Panorama and Door To Door on CD, and figured that the other albums would make adequate "car copies". I'm not too keen on the mastering of The Elektra Years, especially Panorama, even though I have no other CDs to compare it to other than the tracks that appeared on Just What I Needed. I remember being annoyed at the "drums" on the Door To Door remaster when I first listened to it in the car. I recently found an original Door To Door CD, and I do prefer it, but I went back and listened to the remaster in the car again, and didn't think it sounded that bad. Go figure. For what it's worth, Door To Door is a mediocre album, with the three best songs and demo versions of two tracks (dating back to 1977!) being included on Just What I Needed.

Not long after I bought The Elektra Years, and to my annoyance, they started releasing expanded editions of the albums, based on the same remasters that were on The Elektra Years. I don't feel the need for the extra stuff, and therefore don't need the expanded editions of most of the albums, but hearing the demo version of "Drive" tempted me for a second to buy the expanded version of Heartbeat City, until I found out that I could just buy a download of the track on its own. The only expanded edition I would bother buying is Panorama, just so I can ditch The Elektra Years. Or I may just search for an original CD, or hope that Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs releases a hybrid SACD of it in the near future.

I also have Greatest Hits on vinyl, I bought it at a friend's consignment shop back in 2005.

I don't own Move Like This, but I plan to get the CD eventually, even if it does score a rating of DR6 on the Dynamic Range Database. It's also supposed to be a better album than Door To Door.

WHEW!