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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260913T190000
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SUMMARY:Candy-O: The Premier Tribute to The Cars at Wolf Den
DESCRIPTION:Candy-O: The Premier Tribute to The Cars at Wolf Den brings the music of one of New England’s most important rock bands back to southeastern Connecticut on Sunday\, September 13\, with a free 7 p.m. performance at Mohegan Sun. \nThis isn’t the long-running California tribute band that also performs under the Candy-O name. The group coming to Wolf Den is a New England-based five-piece devoted to recreating The Cars’ recordings with the synthesizers\, guitar tones\, vocal arrangements\, and deliberate precision that made the originals instantly recognizable. \nCandy-O puts particular emphasis on The Cars’ first two albums\, 1978’s The Cars and 1979’s Candy-O\, but reaches across the band’s catalog for songs including Just What I Needed\, My Best Friend’s Girl\, Good Times Roll\, Let’s Go\, Shake It Up\, Magic\, You Might Think\, Drive\, Moving in Stereo and Tonight She Comes. \nCandy-O Is About the Sound\, Not the Costumes\nThere are two basic approaches to a tribute band. \nOne is impersonation. Find musicians who resemble the original members\, dress them appropriately and recreate the visual experience along with the music. \nCandy-O deliberately takes the other route. \nThe band says it gives a nod to the visual style of the late-’70s proto-new-wave period but doesn’t present itself as a costumed look-alike act. Its focus is on what it calls “hyper-accurate” analog tones and note-for-note performances. \nThat’s a particularly interesting challenge with The Cars. \nAt first listen\, many of their biggest songs seem almost impossibly simple. A synthesizer figure. A tight drumbeat. A few carefully placed guitar chords. Ric Ocasek or Benjamin Orr singing a melody without a lot of unnecessary decoration. \nBut those records were meticulously constructed. \nCandy-O’s lineup mirrors the five-piece structure that produced them: Steve Werner handles lead vocals and rhythm guitar\, Meg Browning plays bass and sings\, Gerry Giaimo handles lead guitar and vocals\, Dave Branning plays keyboards and sings\, and Mike Genovese is on drums. \nThat combination matters. The Cars’ identity depended as much on Greg Hawkes’ keyboards and Elliot Easton’s economical guitar work as it did on the singers standing out front. \nThe Cars Came Out of Boston\nFor a New England tribute band\, this isn’t imported nostalgia. \nThe Cars belong to the region’s music history. \nRic Ocasek and Benjamin Orr had spent years playing together before The Cars existed\, eventually settling in Boston and working through several musical configurations. Guitarist Elliot Easton joined them\, followed by keyboardist Greg Hawkes and drummer David Robinson\, who had played with Jonathan Richman’s Modern Lovers and Boston punk band DMZ. \nRobinson suggested the name. \nBy 1977\, The Cars were working the Boston club circuit and recording demos. Then something happened that seems particularly appropriate given the history of New England radio. \nWBCN started playing them. \nDJ Maxanne Sartori put the demo of Just What I Needed on the air\, and listeners responded. The song became heavily requested before The Cars even had a record contract. Elektra eventually signed the band. \nTheir self-titled debut arrived in June 1978. \nIt didn’t sound quite like the rock bands that came before it\, and it didn’t completely belong to the punk and new-wave underground developing around it either. \nThe Cars found the middle. \nA Debut Album That Barely Needed a Greatest-Hits Collection\nLook at the track list of The Cars today and it borders on ridiculous. \nSide one opens with Good Times Roll. \nThen comes My Best Friend’s Girl. \nThen Just What I Needed. \nAnd those aren’t the only songs that became rock-radio staples. You’re All I’ve Got Tonight\, Bye Bye Love and Moving in Stereo were on the same record. \nThe album eventually sold more than six million copies in the United States and remained on the Billboard album chart for 139 weeks. \nIt also established the formula Candy-O is trying to reproduce nearly half a century later. \nThe Cars took guitar rock\, power pop\, punk’s economy and increasingly prominent synthesizers and fit them together without allowing any one element to take over. \nOcasek’s songs had enormous hooks but often carried an emotional distance that kept them from becoming conventional pop. \nThe Rock & Roll Hall of Fame later described that combination as a meeting of new wave and classic rock that helped move underground sounds into the mainstream. \nThen Came Candy-O\nCandy-O takes its name from The Cars’ second album\, released in 1979. \nFollowing a debut that successful should have been a nearly impossible assignment. \nInstead\, Candy-O reached No. 3 on the Billboard album chart and eventually went quadruple Platinum in the United States. Let’s Go\, sung by Benjamin Orr\, became The Cars’ first single to reach the Billboard Top 15. \nIt’s also why the tribute band’s emphasis on those first two records makes sense. \nTogether\, The Cars and Candy-O contain a remarkable concentration of the band’s defining material: Good Times Roll\, My Best Friend’s Girl\, Just What I Needed\, Moving in Stereo\, You’re All I’ve Got Tonight\, Let’s Go\, It’s All I Can Do\, Candy-O and Dangerous Type. \nCandy-O lists all of them among the songs it performs. \nBut the Wolf Den show isn’t limited to 1978 and 1979. \nThe Cars Became an MTV Band Before MTV Bands Were Everywhere\nThe Cars continued evolving through Panorama in 1980 and Shake It Up in 1981\, but 1984’s Heartbeat City gave the group an entirely new wave of popularity. \nBy then\, MTV had changed how pop music was marketed. \nThe Cars were perfectly suited for it. \nYou Might Think became an early landmark of computer-assisted music video\, while Magic\, Hello Again and Drive helped turn Heartbeat City into one of the biggest albums of the band’s career. \nAnd Drive demonstrated something that can get lost when people remember The Cars primarily as Ric Ocasek’s band. \nOcasek wrote the song. \nBenjamin Orr sang it. \nThe two men shared lead-vocal duties throughout The Cars’ career\, and some of the group’s most recognizable recordings were Orr performances. In addition to Drive\, his lead vocals included Just What I Needed\, Let’s Go and Moving in Stereo. \nOrr’s smoother\, more melodic voice created a useful contrast with Ocasek’s unmistakably detached delivery. Years later\, Elliot Easton and Greg Hawkes both spoke about just how important Orr’s voice had been to the band’s sound. \nOrr died of pancreatic cancer in 2000. \nThey Were New Wave Without Really Fitting in New Wave\nTrying to put The Cars into one genre has always been difficult. \nThey arrived at roughly the same moment as punk and new wave\, used synthesizers extensively and looked unlike the denim-and-long-hair rock establishment of the early 1970s. \nBut they also wrote songs with the kind of hooks that worked on mainstream pop radio. \nThere was power pop in there. Art rock. Electronic music. Straight rock & roll. A little punk minimalism. \nGreg Hawkes once described The Cars as a “pop-art band\,” a description that may fit them better than most genre labels. \nThey could sound futuristic without abandoning guitars. \nThey could make extremely polished records without sanding away all their weirdness. \nAnd Ocasek understood the value of leaving space in a song. The Cars rarely sounded as though five musicians were fighting to prove how much they could play. \nThat’s part of what makes faithfully recreating the records more complicated than simply learning the chords. \nThe spaces count\, too. \nFrom Just What I Needed to Drive\nCandy-O’s published repertoire covers all six of The Cars’ original Elektra-era studio albums: The Cars\, Candy-O\, Panorama\, Shake It Up\, Heartbeat City and Door to Door. \nThe band lists: \nDrive\, Just What I Needed\, Let’s Go\, You Might Think\, My Best Friend’s Girl\, Magic\, Good Times Roll\, Hello Again\, Shake It Up\, Tonight She Comes\, Since You’re Gone\, It’s All I Can Do\, Bye Bye Love\, Moving in Stereo\, Dangerous Type and You’re All I’ve Got Tonight among the songs in its repertoire. \nThat’s a substantial portion of the music that ultimately carried The Cars into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018. \nOcasek\, Orr\, Easton\, Hawkes and Robinson were all inducted as members. The surviving Cars performed together at the ceremony\, with Brandon Flowers of The Killers doing the induction. \nOcasek died the following year. \nThat makes a Cars tribute different today than it would have been when all five members were still around. \nThere is no possibility of seeing the classic lineup again. \nThe records are the permanent version now. \nA Connecticut Band Playing Boston Music at Wolf Den\nCandy-O has already built a history with Wolf Den. \nThe band lists Mohegan Sun among the venues it has played\, alongside Connecticut rooms including the Bijou Theatre\, Kinsmen Brewing Co.\, Crystal Bees\, Small Batch Cellars\, New Britain Museum of American Art and Woodbury Brewing. \nSunday’s show runs from 7 to 8:30 p.m. \nLike other Wolf Den performances\, admission is free\, but seating is limited and available on a first-come\, first-served basis. The venue sits in the center of Mohegan Sun\, making this one of the easier ways to catch a full tribute show without buying a concert ticket. \nAnd The Cars may be particularly well matched to a 90-minute set. \nThere isn’t much need for filler. \nWhen a band’s first album alone gives you Good Times Roll\, My Best Friend’s Girl\, Just What I Needed\, You’re All I’ve Got Tonight\, Bye Bye Love and Moving in Stereo\, the problem isn’t finding enough songs to play. \nIt’s deciding what you can possibly leave out. \nDetails\nEvent: Candy-O: The Premier Tribute to The Cars at Wolf Den\nDate: Sunday\, September 13\, 2026\nTime: 7–8:30 p.m.\nPerformer: Candy-O\nMusic: Tribute to The Cars / new wave / rock / power pop\nBand: Steve Werner\, lead vocals and rhythm guitar; Meg Browning\, bass and vocals; Gerry Giaimo\, lead guitar and vocals; Dave Branning\, keyboards and vocals; Mike Genovese\, drums\nAdmission: Free\nVenue: Wolf Den at Mohegan Sun\nAddress: 1 Mohegan Sun Boulevard\, Uncasville\, CT 06382\nSeating: Limited; Wolf Den seating is first come\, first served\nAge: Wolf Den guests must be 21 or older unless accompanied by a parent\, legal guardian or spouse\nParking: Free parking is available at Mohegan Sun \n  \nFeatured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people\, location\, or activities shown.
URL:https://thectbeacon.com/event/candy-o-the-premier-tribute-to-the-cars-at-wolf-den/
LOCATION:Wolf Den\, 1 Mohegan Sun Blvs\, Uncasville\, CT\, 06382\, United States
CATEGORIES:Mohegan Sun
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