Nearly 50 years after the release of “Just What I Needed,” The Cars‘ 1978 hit is being celebrated for the band’s guitarist Elliot Easton‘s excellent playing.
In May 2026, Rolling Stone published a ranking of “The 100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time,” which highlighted songs like “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC, Nirvana‘s “Heart-Shaped Box,” “Albatross” by Fleetwood Mac, The Kinks‘ “You Really Got Me,” and “Little Wing” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The publication ranked “Just What I Needed,” off the band’s first album, The Cars, at the list’s 75th spot.
Ultimate Classic Rock reported that Greg Hawkes, the keyboardist of The Cars, shared that he immediately thought the Ric Ocasek-penned track, which secured the number 27 Billboard Hot 100 spot in September 1978, had a certain uniqueness to it.
“I remember hearing ‘Just What I Needed,’ the first time I heard it, thinking, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool. It’s got something unique about it. It’s nice and concise, a fairly short pop song format.’ I still remember hearing that for the first time,” said Hawkes in a 2000 interview, as reported by Ultimate Classic Rock.
Elliot Easton Spoke About Recording Guitar Solos for The Cars Albums
Ultimate Classic Rock reported that Easton, now 72, discussed recording guitar solos for producer Roy Thomas Baker, who was behind the production for The Cars album, the band’s 1979 record, Candy-O, 1980’s Panorama, and Shake It Up, released in 1981, while speaking to the publication.
“He’s going for a very difficult thing to capture in a performance. For a guitar solo, what he’s going for are sort of contradictory things; he wanted absolute perfection, yet spontaneity,” said Easton during the Ultimate Classic Rock interview. “He wants to sound like you just walked in the room, took the guitar off the stand and ripped off a solo, but he wants it to be a perfect solo. You have to kind of put yourself in that mindset, because obviously I wasn’t improvising all those solos. I was writing them.”
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