The Cars: The Bottom Line, New York

ONE THE face of it, one is forced to admit that the Cars, Boston’s latest pop machine, are an entirely unwelcome corruption of any new wave tenets still holding forth. Of course, at this point — the end of the dog days of summer ’78 — it doesn’t seem to matter much anyway. The mainstream pop audience must be reached for a rock musician to be successful, now as always, and this means that the sound must be cleaned up for radio play as well as in concert appearances. The recent concerts at Entermedia with the Stranglers and especially Talking Heads, point the way to the future: a live sound which can approximate that of an expensive home stereo unit. Not that the artist should slavishly try to reproduce his record note for note, but the live product must at least approach that level of quality. Which brings us to the Cars...