This Son Of A Car Drives Us To Glamour Camp

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post about a relatively obscure song/group. Often times it’s the little known classics that are among my favourites in a particular year. In 1989 I bought the vinyl 45 single ‘She Did It’ by an American artist called Glamour Camp. I remember hearing at the time that the lead singer was the son of former Cars member Ric Ocasek but really didn’t know any more than that.

‘She Did It’ wasn’t exactly a major hit, in fact it wasn’t even a minor hit. The only chart that it snuck into was the Australian Top 100, when during May 1989 it featured for a single week at #98 - again like one or two other songs featured on this blog so far, it probably charted the same week I bought it.

Turns out Glamour Camp was formed by Christopher Otcasek whose father is Ric Ocasek of the Cars - Ric dropping the letter ‘t’ for his professional name. Rounding out the group was a line-up including guitarist Eddie Martinez, bassist Mark Egan, keyboardist Alexander Laserenko and drummer/percussionist Jimmy Bralower. Glamour Camp scored a recording deal with EMI, arguably on the strength of Otcasek’s family connection and released ‘She Did It’ as the first single lifted from their self titled debut album. The song’s video gained a bit of airtime on MTV but neither it nor the Glamour Camp album sold well. The song itself was quite a solid guitar/synth driven rock song - though I remember thinking Otcasek’s vocals weren’t strong enough to suit such a power-pop style. Also, given that the album featured only eight tracks with a total running time of just over 30 minutes, there wasn’t much to entice record buyers if ‘She Did It’ was the only strong track on offer.

Otcasek dropped the Glamour Camp tag thereafter but did contribute a song to the #1 soundtrack album for 1990’s ‘Pretty Woman’. He performed a cover of the Iggy Pop hit ‘Real Wild Child (Wild One)’. After that Chris Otcasek ended his short and relatively anonymous association with pop music.

Apologies but I couldn’t even find a promo clip for the song on YouTube, so in lieu of that have a listen and a look at one my favourite Cars’ songs, featuring Ric Ocasek (see future post) on vocals.
And as a special bonus treat here’s the ‘dub remix’ version of the Cars’ ‘Hello Again’. - LINK REMOVED