Richard Theodore Otcasek was born in Baltimore on March 23, 1944. His father was a systems analyst for NASA. At the Cars’ Hall of Fame induction, Mr. Ocasek credited his grandmother for getting him to sing as a child and buying him his first guitar at 14. The family moved to Cleveland when he was a teenager, and he briefly attended Antioch College and Bowling Green State University before dropping out and turning to music.

[How old was Ric Ocasek? Read more on how The Times determined his age.]

After he and Mr. Orr met in Ohio, the two, performing in various bands, worked their way to the Boston area, where they started a folk-pop trio, Milkwood; it made one album, in 1972, before dissolving. But Mr. Ocasek and Mr. Orr continued to work together around Boston. Mr. Easton, the lead guitarist, joined them in the mid-1970s, playing with their band Cap’n Swing, which got airplay on Boston’s rock radio station WBCN but went no further.

With Mr. Easton, Mr. Hawkes and Mr. Robinson — who had been the drummer for the Modern Lovers, local heroes in Boston — the Cars coalesced in 1976, working in Mr. Ocasek’s basement in Newton, Mass. They would start with Mr. Ocasek’s basic recordings of songs, Mr. Easton told Rolling Stone in 1978, and “we just built the songs up.”

“When there was a space for a hook or a line — or a sinker — we put it in,” he added.