Marshall Crenshaw - Too Many Hooks?

Marshall Crenshaw provided music that should have burned up the charts...in 1958 (or maybe even 1974- 50's RnR revival + Golden Age of Power Pop = instant success!)

What people need to realise is that catchy != instant fame, even in a world w/o marketing, videos or demographics. Crenshaw might have deserved a bit more fame in the indie community, but it's ridicolous to picture him busting up the charts in the era of Run-D.M.C. and Frankie Goes To Hollywood (which doesn't mean he wasn't any good- he was.)

God, there are a few truly killer moments though... (like the 'la la la la' breakdown in "Whenever You're On My Mind".

But you're right - some of the things I'm reading on him are patently ridiculous. This for instance, just from the album sticker, The New York Times is quoted with the almost random "If good reviews were gold records, Marshall Crensaw would be standing shoulder to shoulder with Nirvana and Janet Jackson."

The new MC cd is his best in years and years. Jaggedland should hopefully get him some new fans.

my friends live in his old apartment.

also, I saw him open for Joe Jackson in '82.

Saw his first live show with the new material a few weeks ago - so good.

a friend of mine went to a friend's 50th birthday party in connecticut the other year. it was a big bash, and he'd been told there would be a live band. so he got there and wandered out to this big tent that had been set up in the backyard and saw the band was setting up, and it was marshall crenshaw. i guess the guy who was turning 50 was a big marshall crenshaw fan, so his wife did a little web searching and discovered that she could hire marshall crenshaw for, i don't know, three grand or something. with a rhythm section and all. my friend said marshall was good, did an hour or so, didn't seem to care that he was playing to 60 people in a connecticut backyard or whatever.

anyway, while i'm here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4NfjEfKMs

I've been returning to the first two in a big way. Field Day was my favorite album in high school. The Seattle show Jaq mentions was very nice; I quite enjoyed playing percussion with my keys on a glass along w/everyone else in the room.

I remember liking the first 3 LPs just fine.

His best shot at getting rich woulda been more ppl covering his songs (as Bette Midler and Robert Gordon did).

Never heard Downtown. Comments?

I haven't heard it in a decade and a half. That's the T-Bone Burnette one, right? I remember it sounding like it.

I remember it being pretty good (and yeah I'm pretty sure it's T-Bone), it has "Blues is King" on it which is pretty majestic.

Caught the bug when I saw him open for Hall & Oates back in '84...kinda got lumped in with the "new wave" Detroit scene in the 80's, alongside the Romantics and Was (Not Was), but he was much more of a pop classicist...(I think he was from Ferndale, or maybe my memory just wants him to be from Ferndale)..."You're My Favorite Waste Of Time", one of the great b-sides...

I love the hell out of those demos he released right after the first record -- spec. "You're My Favorite Waste of Time."

This is Easy = a perfect comp.

this song has been stuck in repeat in my head for days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXo4vS-81a8

appropriate

I borrowed Good Evening from the radio station archives. Despite the collaborations, Diane Warren song (later to become the huge Carrie Underwood hit), and hired guns, it's one of his best.

yeah, i think you could interpret it as one of those songs that's (obliquely) about itself

hard to believe, but the distance between buddy holly and crenshaw's first LPs is significantly shorter than the distance between those LPs and today.

I shouldn't have written "despite." It's one of his best because he sings and plays the hell out of those tracks.

You must have been momentarily confusing it with Life's Too Short, which does indeed demonstrate a deep dip in quality.

Good Evening has that great Richard Thompson cover for one thing.

and "Radio Girl"! and "You Should've Been There," with that ominous bass line.

His work since he became his own cottage industry--What's in the Bag, Jaggedland, and his more recent recordings he put out as EPs--is really good, and for that matter I like all of #447 and a lot of 1996's Miracle of Science, which contains the absolutely stellar "Seven Miles an Hour," absolute power-pop perfection. I played Jaggedland one evening and then put on Alex Chilton's Man Called Destruction for contrast. Crenshaw won hands down--something like "Passing Through" from Jaggedland is just so measured, so musical, and so evocative. And "Someone Told Me" is a great example of a smart musician actually doing something with the blues form, unique. I don't think he like the term "power pop" very much and that's not really what he is, but whatever you want to call it, Field Day is as good as Radio City or Starting Over or Repercussion in the whatever-it-is-American-guitar-pop sweepstakes. His instrumentals are a gas. I respect him immensely.

I'll rep for the instrumental on Miracle of Science called "Theme from 'Flaregun'" I think.

Pretty much everything he put out with the exception of the one album I mentioned a few posts up is very high quality, although I haven't paid attention the last decade or so. So yeah, you guys otm.

My favorite is "You're my favorite waste of time" which is so relaxed and happy, has great harmonies and Robert pollard-like production

https://open.spotify.com/track/583nDURXpm8ghWofPWbViT

The chorus on Not For Me sounds like a bridge. Prettiest bridge ever.

I don't think he like the term "power pop" very much and that's not really what he is,

i wouldn't dare to venture a definition of "power pop," but i often think of it as fundamentally british invasion-oriented, and that stuff generally seems like just one (and not the most prominent) of crenshaw's reference points.

i think i may have unnecessarily negative associations with the term "power pop" b/c i've burned in my adolescence by too many forgettable albums that were characterized as such and championed by the likes of WXRT (chicago-area "adult album alternative" station), rolling stone, etc. stuff like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcRtlj8KXT4

er, i've BEEN burned

Know what you mean. For every band with skinny ties and jangly guitars that was supposed to be the greatest thing since Bread. Some of those acts more have had one good tune at most. But I can barely remember at this point. Dwight Twilley, was he any good? "I'm On Fire," did he have a tune with that name?

My favorite is "You're my favorite waste of time" which is so relaxed and happy, has great harmonies and Robert pollard-like production

"you're my favorite waste of time" is one of the greatest things ever put to record

this last

"you're my favorite waste of time" is one of the greatest things ever put to record

Speaking as a relique of Ye Olden Days of Top 40 Pop, that song "Whenever I Think About You" suffers immensely from its drum machine. Its sound apart from that is perhaps a bit muddy, but it seems quite happy at its base and carries its mid-60s twangy guitars proudly. That BANG-pause-BANG-pause-BANG drum track just wrecks that. Shoot the producer.

I would have said so as well, but as a one-time acolyte of ver dean aka Xgau, I realized that that album is so full of great songs and performances that I could overlook/learn not to mind/come to appreciate the seemingly inappropriate production.

dwight twilley is pretty damn good actually -- the twilley don't mind LP is a grower.

but i like the rootsier/rockabillier side of power pop better than the faux-british side represented by e.g. material issue

Wazzabout The Plimsouls/The Nerves/Peter Case etc.,

i wouldn't dare to venture a definition of "power pop," but i often think of it as fundamentally british invasion-oriented, and that stuff generally seems like just one (and not the most prominent) of crenshaw's reference points.

Pete Townshend supposedly coined the term when describing The Who's sound circa 1966, defining it as "Pop Music played with the energy/intensity of Rock'n'Roll", and while one can find easy problems with that description, it also feels like an apt take on the best of this music.

Reminds me that some people - including myself, once- think of a Power Chord as any chord being strummed by a windmilling Pete Townshend, when really it mostly means a chord with only roots and fifths to avoid beating due to heavy distortion and volume.

Not if you're Wally Bryson!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l24DFbedbJ0

Not if you're Wally Bryson!

Have you seen this book I just googled to, Tim, Shake Some Action: The Ultimate Power Pop Guide, by John M. Borack?

No, I would read that, though!

Too bad. Seems out of print and currently unavailable. You can look at it through Google Books though. Guess what the top two albums are.

I have it (though not accessible at the moment) - worth buying for a reasonable price.

Mostly worth buying to help discover new stuff, though many of the albums you haven't heard of are personal favorites of the author and obscure for a reason. Every power pop fan has stuff they like that is beyond the pale taste-wise but hits the spot somehow.

There's also another book of power pop albums and singles I picked up, lovingly prepared with A-B-C grades and short descriptions and done on a typewriter, but I can't remember the title or author. Helpful, I know...

So the reasons Marshall Crenshaw wouldn't like to be associated with the term Power Pop are maybe that
1) He feels that his songcraft and musicianship are more nuanced and draw upon a wider base and he doesn't want the stigma of "ghettoization"
2) He wants to distance himself from a perhaps to him distasteful component of his audience (cf. Robbie Fulks's "Roots Rock Weirdos")

I guess I'd assume that you are meaning more nuanced stylistically rather than using the word "nuance" to refer to complexity?

If it's style, I would have to wonder if it is really something more broad or if, on the other hand, it's merely its own "ghetto."

Crenshaw said this when I talked to him last year--he was no doubt tired of talking about it:

"I’ve always hated that term being used when someone discusses my music, but I hate to be thin-skinned about it. For some reason, it’s always annoyed me to be put into that sub-category. I don’t think it’s fair, and I reject the concept. My stuff is popular music, or it’s rock music, you know? There’s a lot of power pop, quote-unquote, that is made by American anglophiles, and I won’t wear that label."

When you get into the Sneetches or the Shazam, it loses me, the lack of meaningful content, the formalism of it all. That's what Crenshaw is talking about, maybe. Peter Holsapple and the dB's also transcend the Anglophile label, a great band and great songwriting from Holsapple (and Stamey). James OTM about the ur-power pop chord usually containing root and fifth. Folkies need not apply.

yeah the way power pop rhetoric revolves around perfection and purity, it ends up prioritizing form over.. the transcendent potential of pop/rock. despite power pop arguably being "about" recreating the ecstatic/euphoric transcendence of the beatles et al.

that's not quite right... most power pop just sounds restrained to me, it has a stilted-ness that i attribute to its rejection of certain formal/technical possibilities.. idk

marshall should change his last name to scrimshaw and exclusively record and perform sea shanties

Has anyone seen him him do his tribute to producer Tom Wilson? He's also making a doc about him, that's mentioned on the Tom Wilson thread that's on ILe.

Crenshaw talking a bit about the planned doc and Wilson

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/marshall-crenshaw-pays-homage-to-late-producer-tom-wilson/2016/08/10/b0ef4e00-5d85-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html

I don't think the dB's transcend power pop. I think they are not textbook power pop but I don't see how their deviation from it is ultimately more expansive.

And if Bryson is in any sense an archetypal power pop guitarist, I'm still disagreeing also with the root-fifth argument on power chords. He played thirds all the time.

I was commenting on the confusion between the correct definition of power chords and the incorrect one influenced perhaps by the term power pop and, as is often case, confusion may have increased instead of decreasing.

This guy is so fucking good. I will hear no complaints about the production on Field Day.

Yeah "whenever I think about you" dazzles

Could definitely use some more MC in my life right about now

hell, even MC could use more MC

Love that both he and fellow smarty pants cult songwriter Robert Forster were astute enough to cover Grant Hart's "2541."

Also love how MC screwed up the lyrics ("big windows, to lay in the sun") but rolled with it anyway...

Does he still use the wrong lyrics when he plays it live?

Had to ponder for a second to recall what the real lyric is. “Big windows, to LET in the sun,” no?

That's right, though I have to admit I had, for years, misheard "we had to keep the stove on all night long so the mice wouldn't freeze" as "so the PIPES wouldn't freeze"...

New album From the Hellhole coming out August 29.

This will be a CD and three-sided double vinyl LP on Yep Roc. The label says 11 of the 14 tracks are Crenshaw's new remixes of recordings originally issued on a series of limited-edition Record Store Day vinyl EP's released between 2012 and 2016. The other 3 are a demo of 1991’s “Walkin’ Around,” a previously unreleased version of the Bobby Fuller Four's “Never to Be Forgotten” and a cover of “Couldn’t I Just Tell You,” originally recorded for a 2022 Todd Rundgren tribute project.

I Don’t See You Laughing Now - (M. Crenshaw)
(They Long To) Be Close To You - (Bacharach-David) - Carpenters cover
Driving and Dreaming - (M. Crenshaw-D. Bern)
I Just Want To Celebrate - (N. Zesses-D. Fekaris) - Rare Earth cover
Move Now - (M. Crenshaw-D. Bern)
Made My Bed, Gonna Lie In It - (George Young) - Easybeats cover
Walkin’ Around - (M. Crenshaw)
No Time - (J. Lynne) - Move cover
Grab The Next Train - (M. Crenshaw-D. Bern)
Didn’t Want To Have To Do It - (John Sebastian) - Lovin' Spoonful cover
Stranger and Stranger - (M. Crenshaw)
Couldn’t I Just Tell You - (Todd Rundgren) - Todd Rundgren cover
Red Wine - (M. Crenshaw-D. Bern-J. Ruben)
Never To Be Forgotten - (B. Fuller-R. Fuller) - Bobby Fuller Four cover