Try to tap your foot to the verse of “Touch and Go” and you will lose the beat within seconds — and that is very much the point. Beneath Ric Ocasek’s cool, conversational vocal, the Cars are running two clocks at once: Benjamin Orr’s bass and David Robinson’s drums cycle in 5/4 while the voices, keyboards and guitars move in a conventional 4/4, the two patterns only locking arms when the chorus arrives to let everyone breathe. It is one of the most unlikely constructions ever to reach the American Top 40, and in the autumn of 1980 it became the highest-charting single from Panorama, the album on which the Cars deliberately swerved away from the sleek formula that had made them stars.
Panorama: The Difficult Third Album
By the summer of 1980, the Boston quintet had little left to prove commercially. Their self-titled debut (1978) and Candy-O (1979), both produced by Roy Thomas Baker, had established a sound that fused 1970s guitar rock with the new synthesizer pop — precise, quotable and enormously radio-friendly; the debut alone sold six million copies and spent 139 weeks on the Billboard 200. A third album in three years was expected to consolidate the formula, and Elektra’s investment was safe either way: the Cars were one of the most reliable hit machines in American rock. For the third album they kept Baker but changed the temperature. Panorama, released on August 15, 1980 by Elektra Records, marked a clear departure from the upbeat pop rock of its predecessors, embodying a more aggressive and experimental sound. Goldmine magazine would later sum the record up as a daring sonic left turn that led to avant-pop excellence.
The gamble worked commercially, up to a point. Panorama peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum by the RIAA, but it was not as commercially successful as the albums before or after it — the Cars would not make a less successful record until Door to Door in 1987. Sitting second in the track listing was “Touch and Go,” written and sung by Ocasek, and Elektra chose it as the album’s lead single. It was released on August 25, 1980, backed with “Down Boys,” the album version’s 4:55 trimmed to 3:41 for the single edit. On paper it was the most accessible thing on the record. In practice, it was a small rhythmic puzzle box.
Two Clocks at Once
The defining device of “Touch and Go” is polymeter — two different time signatures running simultaneously. In the verses, the bass and drums play in 5/4 while the vocals, keyboards and guitar play in 4/4, so the rhythm section seems to stumble forward in uneven strides while Ocasek floats serenely above it. Only in the chorus does the whole band settle into pure 4/4, and the release of tension is the song’s great payoff: a groove that has been lurching suddenly begins to swing. Contemporary reviewers heard the strangeness immediately. The Charlotte News critic Carrington Thompson noted an off-beat syncopation resembling reggae, while Billboard, reviewing the single in September 1980, observed that “after the jerky introduction a fluent slight ’50-ish melody takes over,” praised a “strangely appealing change in rhythm midway through the song” and singled out the bass playing. Record World called it an “oddly affecting rocker” with “arty vocals delivering an effective hook between sharp rhythm shifts.”
Not everyone was charmed — the Daily Record‘s Jim Bohen complained that “the verses are delivered in an odd herky-jerky meter, and only on the chorus do things begin to flow,” and the Saginaw News critic Nancy Kuharevicz heard the song as “a laugh at the whole urban cowboy syndrome” then clogging American radio. But the Los Angeles Times critic Steve Pond heard a triumph, describing the song as the album’s “centerpiece” and a “mesmerizing, completely effective electronic shuffle,” while Kim Terverbaugh in the Muncie Star felt it combined “the best qualities from the past three decades of rock.” AllMusic’s Greg Prato later agreed with the enthusiasts, calling “Touch and Go” a standout on Panorama that “merges off-time keyboard flourishes with some great textural guitar work by Elliot Easton.”
A Solo Written in a Hotel Room
That guitar work is the song’s second marvel. Music journalist Bill Janovitz has called Elliot Easton’s solo a “masterpiece,” and its construction matches the song’s split personality: it is played over music similar to the chorus, but with sections extended to give Easton extra measures over E minor, F major and G major chords, building an expansive, melodic statement that finally resolves to a C major seventh chord. The solo did not emerge from jamming in the studio. Easton worked it out alone, in his hotel room, while the band recorded other parts, and arrived with it already written on a cassette — no backing track, just the solo. The band’s first reaction, by Easton’s own account, was that it sounded too self-conscious; only after he played several takes and grew frustrated did they tell him, “Now it’s great, before it sounded like you were thinking too much.”
Easton has been plain about the method ever since: “That solo on ‘Touch And Go,’ I worked on in my hotel room while we worked on other parts. So, I came in with it already written and just recorded it.” Ocasek understood what the solo did for the record. “There’s a simplicity to the way it just hangs there,” he said, “sort of offering a human balance to the high-tech backing.” Easton, for his part, has described his philosophy in terms that fit this solo exactly: “If there’s any one trademark to my guitar style, it’s that I like to tell a short story in my breaks with an intro, a high point, and a resolution.” Against a rhythm section deliberately refusing to sit still, the solo’s patience is the point — one calm voice telling its story while the clocks disagree underneath.
“How Far Will You Go?”: The Words
For all its rhythmic trickery, “Touch and Go” is a relationship song, and a rueful one. Ocasek explained that it is “one of those songs about people having a difficult relationship and not understanding why they’re having problems, but they put up with the uncertainty anyway” — a song that asks, “How far will you go before you figure out what you will and you won’t accept in a relationship.” The Philadelphia Daily News critic Jonathan Takiff heard in the lyrics a “subtle, philosophical vision of first person survival.” AllMusic’s Donald Guarisco, reviewing the song itself, called it “a surprisingly straightforward ballad,” praising verses that “hypnotically ebb and flow,” a “constantly ascending pre-chorus bridge that builds tension” and a “gorgeous call-and-response chorus that releases that tension,” concluding that it was “a sleek tune perfect for the car radio.” The title phrase does the thematic work: everything in the song, words and rhythm alike, hovers between holding on and letting go.
Carousel Rock: The First Cars Videos
“Touch and Go” also marked the band’s entry into the video age. Along with “Panorama,” it was one of the Cars’ first music videos, and the band — admirers of the humor in the videos Chuck Statler had directed for Devo — hired Statler to direct both. His idea for “Touch and Go” was to place the band in the most incongruous setting available: an amusement park. The footage was shot on the carousel and other rides at Whalom Park in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, the five musicians deadpanning their performance while the fairground spun around them — a gentle visual equivalent of the song itself, all tilt and rotation, the band staying perfectly still at the center of something that would not stop moving.
Number 37 — and a Word from John Lennon
The single climbed to No. 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the autumn of 1980 and No. 38 on the Cash Box Top 100, doing considerably better in Canada, where it reached No. 16 on the RPM chart; it also charted in New Zealand (No. 42) and Australia (No. 62). It was the highest-charting American single from Panorama, and the album’s only real hit: the follow-up singles, “Don’t Tell Me No” (released November 10, 1980) and “Gimme Some Slack” (released January 5, 1981), both failed to chart at all — a measure of how far the rest of Panorama stood from the pop mainstream of that winter, and of how deftly “Touch and Go” had smuggled the album’s weirdness onto the radio inside a chorus anyone could hum. Yet the song refused to become a footnote. It has appeared on compilation after compilation — Greatest Hits, Complete Greatest Hits, Shake It Up & Other Hits and The Essentials among them — and apart from the Just What I Needed anthology, it is the only Panorama track those collections include, the record’s sole ambassador to posterity.
It also collected one extraordinary endorsement. In his final interview, given on December 8, 1980, John Lennon singled the song out for praise, comparing it to his own comeback single of that season. “I think the Cars’ ‘Touch and Go’ is right out of the fifties,” Lennon said, hearing in it the same recipe he had used on “(Just Like) Starting Over”: a fifties song made with an eighties approach. Coming from a man then consciously reviving the music of his youth, it was a precise and generous reading of what Ocasek had built.
Why It Still Matters
Robert Christgau counted “Touch and Go” among the peaks of Panorama, and in 2024 Classic Rock History ranked it the Cars’ eighth greatest song, noting that the verse’s robotic groove segues into a “sweet summer-like swinging groove” — “it sounded like two separate songs, which is probably why we liked it.” That doubleness is the essence of the Cars at their best: machine precision with a human pulse stumbling inside it, pop pleasure with an experiment hidden in the engine room. Panorama remains the band’s cult album, the left turn that puzzled 1980 and has been gaining admirers ever since — and “Touch and Go,” two clocks ticking against each other until the chorus sets them right, is still its most persuasive argument.