my power pop addiction, no. 118 (190)

The Nazz, Todd Rundgren's first proving ground, played an early variant of power pop over the course of three albums that, while patchy and uneven, each have moments of crackling electricity. Tonight’s song, from Nazz Nazz, is a hot mess of church bells, gun-fire drums, trippy psychedelic flourishes, and disorienting time signature chicanery. But there’s also a highly melodic pop song lurking beneath the the song's harsh atmosphere of white noise and weirdness. It’s a little more involved and produced than I tend to like my pop, but its deceptively tuneful, and its overall vibe, which is somehow tight as a drum and slovenly at the same time, keeps me coming back for second and third helpings. Even at the dawn of his career, Rundgren was already making records that get to your head as much as they do your heart, often times without even seeming to try very hard…

my power pop addiction, no. 117 (189)

We will be out of commish for the next few days, but not before leaving you with a serious slice of early 70s Midwestern power pop. Blue Ash are somewhat unique in that their British Invasion template is often tempered by a hint of boogie, which is not typically a style associated with pop's lighter touch. I think it’d be fair to say that they owe as much to the Rolling Stones as they do to the Beatles. I haven’t really thought about the Stones for a long time and haven’t had a hankering for anything Stonesy in I dunno how long, the one exception being Blue Ash, whose pleasing melodies stick inside your consciousness no matter where your mood’s at. Enjoy it, and enjoy the weekend!

my power pop addiction, no. 116 (188)

Emitt Rhodes yesterday, Badfinger today. This must be the week of damaged lives and the first wave of Beatles simulacra. Badfinger were the first of the bands trying to sound like a band trying to sound like the Beatles, if that makes sense. The Byrds were obviously influenced by the Beatles on their first few albums, but they took the Beatles’ sound and made it their own by injecting folk into the mix, whereas with Badfinger (and with Emitt Rhodes as well, I suppose), the relationship to the Beatles was more purely mimetic. They took a lot of shit for this. My cursory survey of reviews archived on the internet revealed that critics tended to find the blatant imitation to be grating. Robert Christgau, for example, in his Consumer Guides review of Badfinger’s Straight Up, wrote that he was “forced to wonder whether [he] wouldn't like this record if it were by the Beatles. But without mentioning what the question says about the group, which is called Badfinger, the answer is that the Beatles couldn't have made this record. Except for ‘Day After Day’ and ‘Perfection,’ not one of these unabashedly tuneful tunes has any magic to it, which isn't simply a matter of cautious tempos and harmonies--it's a matter of magic.” My sense is that critics had yet to come to terms with the postmodern condition as the age of aesthetic simulation. And, to be fair, it would have been difficult to do so at that time as postmodernity was only beginning to assert itself unevenly in the culture at large. Things are very different today. It has long been the case now that it’s virtually impossible to talk about music, literature, fine art, cinema, etc. without reference to what/who it sounds, reads or looks like. So then the question becomes, if all art is now necessarily derivative and always already engaged in a chain of reference, is any of it any good? That’s a little heavier than what I feel capable of at the moment, so let’s bring it down a few notches: Are Badfinger any good? Do they fill you with inspiration and creative energy, or do they merely engender a kind of depressed fatigue in marking the start of a prolonged age of cultural exhaustion? In other words, how do you feel when you come to the realization that there’s no longer anything new under the sun?

my power pop addiction, no. 115 (187)

I must confess that I'm not a huge Emitt Rhodes acolyte, but there's a handful of his songs that put me in an intensely reflective mood, not necessarily in a bad way, though there's an undeniable undercurrent of tragedy in much of Rhodes' music. I think tonight's selection is the best song he ever did. It puts his gift for communicating sadness and loss on full display and is deceptively affecting at under three minutes long. The problem for me is that I really don't wish to be this sad any more than I have to, so that whenever the song pops up on my iPod I have to decide whether or not I'm really in the mood to go down its dark and lonely passage. In fact, the entire trajectory of the Emitt Rhodes story is quite frankly just too depressing for me. I recently viewed an Italian documentary about him and had trouble sitting through the whole thing, kind of in the same way I had trouble sitting through Mayor of the Sunset Strip, the documentary about Rodney Bingenheimer. There’s no question of Rhodes’ talent. His self-titled first solo album after his stint as the leader of the Merry-Go-Round was released more or less contemporaneously with, and compared favorably to Paul McCartney’s first solo album in 1970. But there's so many times when talent alone doesn’t cut it. Lots of other factors enter into the equation: Dumb luck, personal charisma, record company backing, and the emotional resilience the artist does or doesn't posseses in dealing with the ups and downs of the star making machine. What I took away from the documentary was that the lack of this resilience in the face of the machine destroyed Rhodes, turning him into a maladjusted man child. Think Brian Wilson only with no chart success to buoy him even just a little bit. Throw in an indifferent record company and you’ve got a perfect storm for a shattered pop life. There may be days now and again when I’m feeling ghoulish and the arc of the Rhodes narrative will hold some appeal for me. It speaks to that part of me that digs Sunset Boulevard, The Last Tycoon, and even Helter Skelter. But usually the thought of Rhodes makes me sad in a way I don’t want to be if I can avoid it. I hope that doesn’t make me sound callous. I recognize his magnificent talent, but the whole package – the feelings stirred up by his music, and knowing the way his life turned out – I find it all too difficult to enjoy in anything other than small and infrequent dosages…

my power pop addiction, no. 114 (186)

I recently paid $60 for the Orange Humble Band's much-sought-after record, Assorted Creams. In this economy - or ITE as the saying now goes - this may seem like the height of profligacy. I should be either hoarding every last cent or buying gold in anticipation of the apocalypse that's just around the corner, but I must say that the purchase was completely worth it. In times of darkness and confusion, it becomes so much more important to take solace in the things that put us in touch with the goodness life has to offer. And for me, Assorted Creams is one of those things. It’s certainly not a perfect album by any stretch of the imagination. There are a few songs that are way too long, and there are ones that rock a bit too hard and/or unimaginatively for my taste, but the good songs are some of the best I’ve heard in quite some time. …As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've always liked the idea of Let’s Active more than the reality, yet it seems that almost everything else Mitch Easter has been involved with, including the Orange Humble Band, is really worthwhile. Among the pop lifers joining Easter on Assorted Creams are Ken Stringfellow of the Posies and Daryl Mather from the Someloves. That’s some pretty serious pop pedigree if you ask me, the power pop equivalent of Baker, Bruce and Clapton...or not. Either way, when the Orange Humble Band keep things concise and focused, their layers upon layers of guitars create gorgeously melodic pop songs that improve with each successive listening session. So while sixty smakers is a lot to ask for a CD these days, it seems like fair market value for something that offers such soothing comfort in the midst of an increasingly uncomfortable world...

my power pop addiction, no. 113 (185)

The studio version of today's song is far superior to the one posted here, which is performed in a Spanish television studio sloppily, somewhat out of tune, and a little hard for my taste, but it's better than nothing. There are a few turns of phrase that really stay with me. 'Our eyes have met but we haven't had a chance to talk', 'I'm a fool if I let a chance like this go by', 'From the street I look up at your window, I can see your perfect silhouette', 'When I go to sleep tonight I'm gonna dream about you...' It's great pop life stuff, and when Mariani blends it with his great feel for guitar-driven melodies, there's almost nothing else I'd rather be playing, at maximum volume...

my power pop addiction, no. 112 (184)

Dom Mariani has become one of my all-time pop heroes. He understands the emotional component of it all, that pop is exactly the right vehicle for communicating the ecstasy and agony of romantic longing. Just listen to the intricacy of the guitar playing in tonight's song and you'll feel that pleasure/pain nexus quite viscerally. And there's something about his sunny Aussie accent that always stops me in my tracks. It's so distinct and perfectly suited to the emotional landscape he creates. I hear his beautifully melodic pop songs, tinged with piercing desire, and I think to myself, 'this stuff is so me.' He's completely attuned to the way I experience music. I feel like he's my long-lost Australian soul brother, the South Pacific's answer to Dwight Twilley or Richard Lloyd. I've admired the bands Mariani has been in for quite some time, from the Stems, to the Someloves, to DM3, but only recently have I come to recognize just how devoted he is to the dream and how much he embodies the pop life...

my power pop addiction, no. 111 (183)

I heard tonight's song for the first time in 1984 over the CBGB PA System at a hardcore matinee featuring the Meat Puppets and the Bad Brains. I was slowly coming out of my hescher phase and a whole new world of music was opening up for me. The Only Ones. Television. Richard Hell and the Voidoids... And then there was the more mainstream stuff like the Jam, the Pretenders, Bowie, the Psychedelic Furs... Another Girl, Another Planet straddles the line separating punk and power pop and to this day continues to pack quite a nice wallop. It's not quite hooky enough for me to want to hear it repeatedly, and I generally don't go in for stuff that's played so fast anymore, but the song is at once tuneful and angsty, which is not an easy combination to pull off. Angst and alienation in music are often achieved at the expense of melody, but not in this case. The song also has some very interesting psychedelic sound effects in its intro, the sort of thing you'd expect to hear on a record from the Thirteenth Floor Elevators or early Electric Prunes. It reminds me that even though punk represented a break from the 60s on a number of levels, it's decisive incursion into the popular consciousness, around 1976-77, was only several years removed from hippies and beads and peace and love. This historical proximity, if you will, meant that otherwise outdated motifs and styles occasionally crept into the new music unexpectedly and would make for interesting moments of continuity with the past...

my power pop addiction, no. 110 (182)

To be honest with you, I tried for about an hour to locate a photo of the Names on Google and the thing kept routing me to pictures of Don DeLillo. I didn't think they were that obscure, but I guess I was wrong. Why Can't it Be is a bit of a garage oddity. It's not particularly hooky but it has a certain something about it if you have patience and are willing to play it a few times in a row. It starts off sounding like a throwback to the Golden Age of Rock 'n Roll, but then the guitars pick up steam about half way through and inject some much needed muscle. Because the last thing this world will ever need is another Sha Na Na. So I don't know what you'll make of this one. Some people love and revere this song. Personally, I think it's a nice track to put in the middle of a compilation, but I don't need to hear it more than a few times every few years...

my power pop addiction, no. 109 (181)

It’s pretty much impossible not to fall in love with There She Goes the first time you hear it. It’s one of the greatest pop songs of all time, even if it reminds me of my gloomy days living in England during the first Gulf War. Back then, the records I listened to most often, all on store-bought cassette tapes, were a German edition Best of the Byrds collection, Big Star’s first two albums (one on each side of the tape), and the one and only release from the LAs. I guess that puts the latter in pretty good company, eh? Dunno why they insisted on spelling their name with a possessive apostrophe. Just a pet peeve of mine. I was introduced to the LAs via a new music radio program on a local BBC station in Cambridge that came on every weeknight called Jive Alive, hosted by Mick and Sarah Jane, two cool cats, very English sounding, no Americanization whatsoever, which I appreciated. …It always fascinates me when a band has one shimmering, transcendent moment and then is never heard from again. Such is the case with the LAs. I’ve read various bits and pieces on the internet about Lee Mavers, the band’s front man and principal songwriter, and learned that his career was derailed both by his impossible perfectionism and hard drugs. Apparently he’s crawled out of it since then and lives a reclusive life in a suburb of Liverpool. Good for him. He brought a little cheer into my life during an especially difficult time for me...

my power pop addiction, no. 108 (180)

There are worse things you could do than make a Spirit of ’66 Pet Sounds-Rubber Soul fusion album with bits of the Byrds and the Left Banke thrown in to give the music added sheen. I must confess, however, that there’s a not insignificant part of me that wants to reject Splitsville’s Pet Soul as just a little too clever for its own good, what with its nerdy-cool record collector pose. Perhaps I feel so much of my essence in the music that it makes me uncomfortable. But in the end, these guys are simply too damn talented and too good at what they do. Resistance is futile. They hit all their idols’ nuances in ways that are just right. The album is nothing less than a joyous celebration of the very peak of human civilization, replete with fulsome guitars and airy West Coast harmonies. I don’t even mind that there’s a song on the record called Caroline Knows. It helps that it’s a fantastic song that does honor to its progenitor. When the music is good, all other considerations go out the window for me. The whole thing is a bit show offy and over the top, no doubt, but I’ll bet you a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda you’ll be seduced by Pet Soul’s mimetic charms after one listen straight through. It won’t feel like the first time, and maybe not even the third or 25th or 100th, but demanding that it do so at this overripe point in the age of simulation would be setting the bar impossibly high. Let’s simply be grateful that there remain folks for whom this type of thing still matters. Every last one of them forestalls the fade into oblivion, the fate of the dinosaurs. If loving this shit is wrong, I don’t wanna be right…

my power pop addiction, no. 107 (179)

The values of the Reagan era have reasserted themselves in a big way over the past few weeks. It’s strange and quite dispiriting for those of us who had hoped Obama would be another FDR. It was naïve to think this, sure, but it’s painful nevertheless to watch as he triangulates in Clintonian fashion, especially since he doesn’t have Bill’s political chops and so his presidency, which started out with such high hopes, appears to be slipping through his hands, paving the way for some conservative nutter to win in 2012. But for the most part I don’t really like to mix my pop with politics. Pop is my escape from politics, or at least that’s what it’s become. Still, I find it difficult to stay completely blinkered to what’s going on, and the return to the 80s mindset dovetails nicely with my having turned my attention to the Go Gos. I really wanted to post Vacation, which is my favorite Go Gos tune and has a great video (remember the water skiing?), but it’s not postable, probably for some petty corporate reason. So tonight it’s Head over Heels instead, a song from the very peak of those days of exposed shoulders. It was a grim time for sure, but this doesn’t mean the song isn’t very catchy and won’t hang around in your mind all day long after you’ve heard it just once…

my power pop addiction, no. 106 (178)

I'm not gonna lie and say that the Go Gos are one of my favorite bands of all time, but they have eight or ten songs that fit in perfectly on any pop compilation I make for myself or friends. They really captured the spirit of the early 80s Hollywood scene, and this as much as anything else is the reason they remain interesting to me. When I was a teenager growing up in NYC, the Go Gos seemed so otherworldly to me. They represented something I had no familiarity with whatsoever, but it appealed to me, Los Angeles as a place of freewheeling decadence and sexy fun. It's not that far off from the way Fast Times at Ridgemont High affected me. Perhaps these kinds of things planted seeds in my brain that eventually made me so much more receptive to the place when I finally moved here... The only other thing I would say about the Go Gos is that Jane Wiedlin is a very good songwriter and has excellent pop instincts, even if her personality puts me off somewhat. She is the band's real talent in my opinion. And my understanding is that this eventually caused tensions as she received song writing royalties from which the others were excluded. Ah, the jealous games people play...

my power pop addiction, no. 105 (177)

I should be a bigger Bangles guy than I am, but I just don't think the songs are there. In the battle of the bands between the Bangles and the Go Gos, the Bangles seem like a much nicer group of girls, but the Go Gos have more talent. That's my opinion anyway. I like the idea of the Bangles - comely, cool, easygoing women committed to the pop life - more than the reality. Still, they have about four or five terrific songs, and they're children of Los Angeles, very much a part of the paisley underground story, along with Rain Parade, the Three O'Clock, Long Ryders, and Dream Syndicate, and for this they deserve recognition. Tonight's song, one of my favorite Bangles tunes, was originally performed by Katrina and the Waves, but the Bangles improve upon it greatly, giving the song added tunefulness and throwing in some pleasing backing vocals that make me think of the Mamas and the Papas. All the vocals for the song are actually quite lovely and make it a perfect track for you to enjoy with your morning cup of coffee on a overcast, Liverpudlian Saturday morning...