my power pop addiction, no. 96 (168)

Like Kiss, the Sweet are hard but not heavy, crunchy but also tuneful and poppy. Their music is too big and loud, and their image and stage presence are too much of a spectacle, for them to be a power pop band. I guess the category should be something like hard pop, though there’s obviously a very fine and line separating hard pop from power pop, and there’s another fine one separating hard pop from hard rock, yet somehow the distinction between hard rock and power pop is pretty easy to make. When I was a kid, hard pop – everything from Alice Cooper to BTO to Foreigner - would get played on AM radio, whereas hard rock, with some exceptions, like Queen, was strictly the stuff of FM. It’s tempting to conclude that it’s not power pop if it received AM radio play, but then there’s songs like Todd Rundgren’s I Saw the Light and Badfinger’s Come and Get It, both of which are at least nominally power pop but also practically qualify as AM Gold. Maybe they’re the rare exceptions that prove the rule. Does anybody really care? …At the peak of my radio listening days, when I crossed over and back again easily between AM and FM, I loved Fox on the Run, and I seem to remember hearing it on both dials. I was developing an ear for music that was both hard and tuneful. In fact, listening to the Fox on the Run now I realize that the basic building blocks for my adult taste were already in place when I was seven years old, and although there have been some diversions and explorations along the way, including a good chunk of time in hescher land, my basic preferences haven’t really changed in 35 years. Now as then, I still close my eyes, tilt my face to the sky, and smile ecstatically when Brian Connolly sings the line, fox is on the run at the end of the chorus. But what puts the song over the top for me is the intricacy of the high harmonies. Intricate might not even be the right word for what’s going on. The harmonies are just plain weird, sounding like something you’d hear in an old horror flick. Campy is the word I’m looking for, I think. The Sweet actually made fairly common use of those campy harmonies in songs like Little Willy, Wig Wam Bam, Ballroom Blitz and Teenage Rampage. And, along with the melodies and compactness of the songs, it’s the peculiar harmonies that give the music a playfully childlike quality and keep the Sweet from slipping downward into hard rock...