New Wave Outpost Forum

What years were The Cars albums first released on CD? I've been scouring the net, looking for the answer to this question, but I have yet to find a definitive answer.

The CDs themselves only give the copyright dates for the original vinyl releases, but no indication of when the CDs were actually released. Obviously The Cars self-titled debut was not released on CD in 1978, as CDs didn't exist in 1978! The others are similiarly vague on the subject. None of the major online music databases seem to have this information; they either have no date listed or just give the vinyl release date. I have contacted several Cars fansites, but the owners of these sites don't seem to know either.

I own copies of all of The Cars CDs and I believe I bought most of them in the late 1980s, but I have no recollection of exactly when or even if they were newly released at the time.

I'm pretty sure <I>Greatest Hits[/i] (1985) and <I>Door To Door[/i] (1987) were released on CD at the same time as the vinyl.

It's certainly possible that <I>Heartbeat City[/i] was released on CD in 1984, along with the vinyl. My own copy was manufactured in Japan (even though it's a US release) which is a hallmark of a very early CD. There were very few CDs pressed in the US in 1984. Most were pressed in Germany or Japan at that time.

Does anyone here know the answer to this? Anyone have connections at Elektra?

i responded to this on monday, but as the great "outpost silence" tragedy had begun, it didn't post. so here, in a nutshell, is what i wrote.

in october of 1990, all of the cars albums came out on cd: 6 studio and 1 greatest hits. it seems strange to think that they weren't available yet, but i can't imagine "door to door" being a big priority in digital format. why the first two or "heartbeat city" didn't make a late-80's cut is beyond me though, especially. "heartbeat". i remember back in the day seeing devo's "freedom of choice" on japanese cd (and i'm talking '84? '85?) and wondering who in the hell would buy such an expensive thing. perhaps the cartoony image translated well in japan, and so the compact disc release... the moody pop-wave of mssrs. ocasek and orr, maybe not so much. i don't remember discs for them at all. correct me if i'm wrong, new wave gurus. i DO know a catalog re-issue happened in '90 though.

You may well be right about them all being reissued in 1990, but I am almost certain that some if not all of them were available earlier than that.

In my inquiries to self-proclaimed Cars experts, they confirmed that they believed <I>Door To Door[/i] (1987) and <I>Greatest Hits[/i] (1985) were released at the same time as their vinyls, as was Benjamin Orr's <I>The Lace[/i] (1986). I also found one who claimed that <I>Shake It Up[/i] was released in late 1983, but I have found no one else to confirm this.

As I said above, my own copy of <I>Heartbeat City[/i] is a Japanese pressing, although it's a US release. This is quite common for CDs released earlier than 1985, as there were very few US CD manufacturing facilities at the time. You rarely see this on releases later than 1987. So it's possible it was released in 1984 with the vinyl or shortly there after.

I bought my first CD player in 1984, so I have a bunch of very early CDs. I have the first 4 CDs from the Thompson Twins, which were all released on CD before 1986. They are all Japanese or German pressings of US releases.

I did some scouring of a bunch of sites and this is what I came up with.

Heartbeat City was released in 1984

Candy-O & Panorama were released 07/07/1987.

The Cars - 1984

Here's the weblink where I got most of the info-
http://www.connollyco.com/discography/cars/index.html

Hope this is what you were looking for.

well, i'll be. it would make sense that were available, but i'm so old i don't remember anything, much less yesterday. the catalog re-issue is odd though, as nothing was remastered i bet. oh who knows.

I tried to post this earlier in the week...

The Cars - 8/23/83 (LP - 6/6/78)

Candy-O - 9/18/84 (LP - 6/12/79)

Panorama - 2/15/87 (LP - 8/15/80)

Shake It Up - 11/16/83 (LP - 11/9/81)

Hearbeat City - 6/19/84 (LP - 3/13/84)

Greatest Hits - 12/17/85 (LP - 10/15/85)

Door To Door - 8/11/87 (LP same day)

Just What I Needed: The Anthology - 10/27/95

The Cars (Deluxe Edition) - 4/23/99

The Complete Greatest Hits - 2/19/02

Benjamin Orr "The Lace" - 11/6/86 (LP 10/8/86)

Why would I ever have had any doubt that someone here would know?!?

Thanks everybody!!! [:D]