Book Excerpt: On The Road To Power Pop
GUEST POST: Justin Fielding
In 2019 I partnered with to curate, edit, and contribute to the essay collection Go All The Way (Rare Bird Books). We tapped indie filmmaker and lifelong power pop fan Justin Fielding to join the many other impressive writers participating. At the time, he was already four years into filming and editing a definitive documentary about this often overlooked music sub-genre. Fielding wrote about what he learned from the many interviews he conducted with power pop legends and notable fans.
That essay is top of mind because I recently got a sneak peek at the latest edit of the film and was really impressed. Power pop fans will no doubt be thrilled, but this documentary also serves as an easy entry point for rock music lovers who are unaware of power pop’s colorful history or have been reluctant to join its sometimes intimidating subculture. (Fielding generously offered to interview me for the film, but I declined in favor of Jeff Whalen speaking for our bands Tsar and The Brothers Steve.)
Check out Fielding’s essay and get ready for a labor-of-love power pop documentary that has taken a decade of diehard DIY dedication to complete—but be patient, there is no official release date as of this moment. It’s worth the wait, I promise.—S.W. Lauden
On The Road To Power Pop
By Justin Fielding
As an independent filmmaker with a lifelong love of Beatlesque music, I reached out to several of my favorite power pop artists for help brightening my ornery 2011 slacker comedy, Inventory. To my delight, many of the genre’s greats agreed to let me place their recordings in the film.
Some years later it occurred to me that, beyond using power pop music on a soundtrack, there should be a documentary that tells the story of this under-appreciated subspecies of rock and roll.
In 2015, I began traversing the US (and a bit of Canada) to interview dozens of power pop aficionados: musicians, writers, record executives, and promoters. Along the way to making the film (working title: The Power Pop Movie), I have interacted with many astute power pop fans on social media and interviewed a few notables among them as well.
Here I’m going to relate major themes I’ve observed across interviews with approximately 200 subject-area experts: insights, commonalities, and great debates. I began each interview with the foundational question: “What is power pop?” For musicians, this also connects to the questions of whether they’ve been called power pop and, if so, how they feel about being so labeled.
For all, it was the beginning of a discussion about power pop’s history and fortunes.
For the most part, people define power pop as music that stands on the shoulders of 1960s greats.
In particular, music from approximately 1970 on that bears telltale influences from the Beatles (first and foremost), along with The Beach Boys, Byrds, Kinks, and/or Who. A minority opinion is that power pop includes those forefathers themselves, and sometimes even their influences, such as Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, or the Everly Brothers.
This is but one of many matters on which there’s considerable divergence among the power pop cognoscenti. Variations on Judge Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” (re: defining pornography) are often articulated in trying to nail down precisely what power pop is.
“My idea for Raspberries was to form a band that had the power of The Who, the harmonies of The Beach Boys or The Beatles, and the melodies that were present in all these great songs of the sixties.… No one was doing that, and so my idea was to go completely against the trend.” —Eric Carmen, Raspberries (The Power Pop Movie interview)
When You Hear It
The elements of power pop most often cited in my interviews include:
Tunefulness (bright melodies and rich harmonies)
“Jangle” (such as the ringing tones of twelve-string Rickenbacker guitars)
Concision (tight songs with instrumentation “played to the song,” as opposed to jammy or flashy solos)
Lyrics that counterpoint happy-sounding music with yearning or melancholy
For some, power pop must—by definition—be powerful. It is typified by “two guitars, bass, and drums” and is often amped up more than in The Beatles’ day. However, many of the artists customarily deemed power pop practitioners write and record ballads, include keyboards at times, or otherwise don’t fit neatly into the “power” framework.
A common answer to this conundrum is that the power can come from the impact of a well-turned song and performance and not necessarily from aggressive playing.
“There’s always been a sharp contrast in power pop between the melody and the darkness of the lyrical content.” —Gary Klebe, Shoes (The Power Pop Movie interview)
What’s in a Name?
A number of the interviewees recalled reading The Who’s Pete Townshend’s coinage of the term “power pop” in a 1967 interview that appeared in New Musical Express in England and, stateside, in Hit Parader.
Scant years after Beatlemania, Townshend decried the fancification of rock music in that Summer of Love era. He likened The Who’s single “Pictures of Lily” to the earlier Beatles and Beach Boys sounds, while those bands had moved onto integrating classical and progressive elements and exotic instrumentation layered in via studio magic.
No matter that Townshend was about to embark on the elaborate rock operas Tommy, Lifehouse (which morphed into Who’s Next), and Quadrophenia. Or that he’d pioneered such forms in his mini rock opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away” a few months before.
That aesthetic divide exists in power pop to this day. Some power pop artists keep both feet planted in the early Beatles and Beach Boys ethos, while others are influenced by the whole gamut of their styles, being as inspired by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds as much as, if not more than, their formative tunes about dating, dancing, and driving.
It took a decade before Townshend’s coinage gained much currency. In 1977, the group Pezband was among the first to use “power pop” in its marketing. Around the same time, the publications Trouser Press and Bomp! began using it to categorize mid-to-late 1970s bands that kept 1960s musical values alive, if somewhat underground, during the heyday of disco and punk.
Artists who were gaining cult, if not bigger, popularity in the power pop boom of the latter half of the 1970s included Dwight Twilley, Shoes, 20/20, and Paul Collins’ The Beat. By most accounts, Cheap Trick—now members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—is the most sustainably successful group regularly described as power pop.
As the term became (relatively) established, similarly influenced artists from the earlier part of the decade were retroactively labeled “power pop.” These include Badfinger, Raspberries, Big Star, Emitt Rhodes, and Something/Anything? era Todd Rundgren.
“It’s quite possible that as soon as we were yesterday’s news, the very short attention span of the record company executive turned off to the idea of making those other bands the successes that they very well could have or should have been.”—Berton Averre, the Knack (The Power Pop Movie interview)
A New Hope
In 1979, power pop reached its commercial zenith. Capitol Records released LA-based band the Knack’s single “My Sharona” and album Get the Knack, and both topped the charts for weeks on end.
In the wake of this breakthrough for the genre, numerous other power pop bands were signed to major-label deals. Alas, the record industry’s enthusiasm for power pop was extremely short-lived.
A powerful reaction against the Knack’s meteoric success—termed by some as the “Knacklash”—and the growing commercial acceptance of the hipper, more dance-oriented New Wave and the emerging synth-fueled New Romantic sounds spelled a quick industry retrenchment from the earnest, retro-styled melodicism of power pop.
Artists who were signed when power pop momentarily looked to be the “Next Big Thing” were dropped by their labels almost immediately. A notable aspect of the Knacklash was that the band was held to account for photographs evocative of famous Beatles poses. This is just one of several backlashes against bands heralded as “the new Beatles.”
Years prior to the Knack’s emergence, this new-Beatles “curse” could be seen in the fate of Badfinger. Among the first and best-loved power pop bands, Badfinger was, for better and worse, widely seen as “Baby Beatles.” Their connections went well beyond stylistic, as they collaborated in numerous ways with Beatles members, and their first releases were on The Beatles’ own Apple Records.
It was of course flattering to be considered a protégé of, and even heir apparent to, the most adored rock band in history. But it was also a shadow from which it was near impossible to emerge intact. Badfinger wrote and recorded some of the most indelible power pop hits—songs that could have more than held their own on a Beatles album. But most any power pop fan will avow they didn’t receive the commercial and critical rewards that their extraordinary talents warranted.
Badfinger’s story took incredibly calamitous turns with two members taking their own lives. The tragic dimension of the effervescent-sounding genre of power pop has affected all too many of its artists, a topic covered perceptively and poignantly in Michael Chabon’s Tragic Magic essay.
Even where the outcomes haven’t been quite as devastating, power pop has been a challenging road for most of its practitioners. And for every Badfinger or Raspberries who garnered a handful of hits, there are dozens of worthy power pop bands that never cracked the charts, especially as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s and beyond.
In the years since, previously established and new artists have produced power pop music. The genre seemed to be getting a new lease in the early 1990s with glistening records by Matthew Sweet, Jellyfish, and The Posies, and small labels like Not Lame issued scads of power pop gems in the CD era. But grunge and other sounds won the day, and power pop again fell short of becoming a household name.
Every so often a hit that smacks of power pop, like Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom,” does break through. All along, power pop musicians toil away at making radio-friendly records…but radio has rarely reciprocated.
All this leads to the central mysteries of power pop:
How did the musical values that were so beloved and successful for The Beatles et al. fall out of fashion?
What’s not to like about shimmering songs with beautiful melodies and harmonies?
Why, in the face of continued commercial failure and cultural disregard, do artists continue to create power pop music?
The Power Pop Movie explores these questions in depth.
“When you get compared to The Beatles, that’s the kiss of death. Because if you’re not as big as The Beatles, you must not be any good.” —Bun E. Carlos, Cheap Trick (The Power Pop Movie interview)
Power Pop, Moi?
Music-industry people, many of whom personally love power pop, have termed the appellation a “kiss of death.” To them it confers negatives that outweigh the positive associations with the charms of 1960s-style pop and with a handful of ear-tickling hits from the genre itself.
Among the reasons some artists and labels hesitate to apply the term:
Association with catchy music that doesn’t catch on with the public. In fact, when power pop-oriented or power pop-adjacent artists gain marketplace success, by convention, they cease to be called power pop or perhaps commercially benefited by never being so categorized. See Tom Petty (Americana), REM (alternative), Oasis (Britpop), and several popular artists from the late 1970s who were marketed as New Wave or punk but could well have been classified as power pop.
Lack of edgy, macho cred. Some conflate power pop with cloying bubblegum music. And somehow following in the footsteps of The Beatles and The Beach Boys lacks the venerability of, say, following in the footsteps of Robert Johnson, Patsy Cline, Bob Dylan, or The Velvet Underground. A genre propagated by studying hook-laden records via headphones doesn’t have the cachet of those whose backstories are honky-tonk roadhouses and hipster dives.
Lack of recognition and infrastructure. Other specialty genres like blues and folk have clubs, record-store sections, and radio shows that cater to their fans, and even non-fans likely have some awareness of those genres’ existence. I’ve heard it said that the only people who have heard of power pop are the fans of power pop.
The artists I’ve interviewed are all across the spectrum on how they feel about being categorized as power pop. Some wear it proudly, some are ambivalent, and some would rather not be tagged with the label. Many of the first two stripes credit a small but loyal base of fans that reliably supports their new recordings and live performances. Some avow that it’s limiting to an artist to be pigeonholed by any label.
But the fact remains that being labeled as, say, a country, jazz, or heavy metal artist bestows financial and reputational benefits that largely don’t accrue to power pop musicians, and thus it’s more likely to be a hand-wringing decision whether to embrace power pop as a musical identity.
Take a Sad Song and Make It Better
Though power pop itself has largely been a commercial also-ran, many power pop musicians have had quite successful careers.
After writing and recording a few hits with power pop exemplars Raspberries, Eric Carmen went on to Platinum-level sales as a singer-songwriter. With their ears attuned to the virtues of classic pop playing and recording, power pop musicians are prized band mates, producers, and engineers for artists in more mainstream genres.
Also, power pop music punches way above its weight for song placements in movies, TV shows, and commercials. Freed of the need to be on trend, a power pop song slotted into visual media cuts through to an audience like perhaps no other style. It conveys exuberance, romance, or melancholy in a superbly listenable form.
For example, in the climactic scene of what may be TV’s most-admired show ever, Breaking Bad, the song that owns the moment is Badfinger’s “Baby Blue.” Decades after its release, it then zoomed to the top of the download charts. More recently, the band’s power pop classic “No Matter What” was featured in a national ad campaign for Comcast’s Xfinity cable service.
Raspberries’ “Go All The Way” was showcased in the feature film Guardians of the Galaxy. And the title songs from shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother would be aptly described as power pop, as would many songs featured in popular cartoons like SpongeBob SquarePants.
In this new world, where streaming and downloads rule—and where song placement in commercials is considered a legitimate gateway to popularity—several interviewees imagined how 1970s-era power pop would have benefited from today’s online tools that enable a specialized audience to find and acquire content directly from artists.
All By Myself
Power pop musicians were some of the earliest adopters of the DIY music-making culture that is prevalent in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the carefully crafted records coming out of Abbey Road and Gold Star Studios and enabled by increasingly affordable “sound on sound” recording equipment, many power pop artists were among the first to make “one man band” recordings.
At the dawn of the 1970s, as Paul McCartney was recording his solo debut at home in London, Emitt Rhodes was doing the same in Hawthorne, California—and many power pop fans would say the latter’s self-titled album was even better.
Throughout the 1970s, artists like Tom Marolda (The Toms) and Shoes created power pop masterpieces via home recording, while others availed themselves of bartered or inexpensive studio time garnered from their work at such establishments.
Who Are You?
One of the most consistent observations in talking with so many power pop musicians and fans is that they are an extraordinarily intelligent, articulate, and passionate lot. It takes a bit of a nerd, geek, or whatever affectionate/derisive term one chooses to describe those who avidly pursue a certain spark outside the mainstream.
Given that the seeds of power pop spread mostly by radio and records, its roots are less geographically based than other genres. That said, there are some hotspots worth noting.
The British Invasion (The Beatles and their UK peers and acolytes taking the US by storm in 1963 and soon after) was steeped in American R&B and “girl group” influences. Power pop is largely a US response to the British Invasion (with their aforementioned American contemporaries, The Beach Boys and The Byrds, also notable tributaries).
There are, though, a few UK-based bands commonly called power pop, as well as some in Sweden, Spain, Australia, and other countries. In America, the Midwest (home of Cheap Trick, Raspberries, Shoes, and many more) and Los Angeles (home of the Poptopia and International Pop Overthrow festivals) are among the richest veins of power pop. But significant power pop bands can and do emerge from any corner of the US and elsewhere.
The demographics of power pop artists and fans tend toward the white and male, but that’s by no means an absolute. I have been somewhat surprised by how many aren’t Baby Boomers who grew up listening to each new Beatles release as it came out.
Rather, a great many came of age just after The Beatles broke up, and their whole career was available for exploration via parents’ or siblings’ collections…but before it became trendy for a time to consider The Beatles passé.
One of the happiest findings in this journey has been the new blood that is keeping power pop alive and growing. A side effect of the new modes of music listening is that young people can readily explore, from their phones, whole discographies that once would have required years of record-store spelunking. And some of the obscure gems we felt alone in cherishing are now prized by a new generation of vinyl collectors.
Young musicians who self-identify as power pop are modernizing it, as they have decades of new influences to blend into the mix. To them, the commercial fortunes and what was unhip to someone else in the late 1970s is immaterial. It’s just gorgeous music that makes them smile and inspires them to create their own.
Justin Fielding is an independent filmmaker in Milton, Massachusetts, and a former magazine editor and 1970s record-store clerk who has put in 10,000 hours searching for power pop gems like anyone else who believes the British Invasion deserved to be an endless summer. Find out more about The Power Pop Movie.
About time. I did an interview with Justin for this film 10 bloody years ago! Oh well, better late than never I suppose.
Justin what a coincidence! I was just wearing the purple shirt you sent me and Chris asked if the doc was ever coming out. Same with The Incredible Flamin' Groovies Movie...another one we are waiting for.