Is It Power Pop?!
PART SEVEN: Jeff Whalen
This is a guest post series about power pop featuring some of my favorite music writers. We’ll be sharing a new installment every few weeks or so (while supplies last). Full series here.
Is It Power Pop?
By Jeff Whalen
A Chief Justice for the Supreme Court famously once said, “Power pop cannot be defined, but I know it when I see it.” He said, “It’s a feeling, dawg!” as he banged his hammer and you know what? He was right to bang his hammer. Because like the concepts of love or justice or obscenity, power pop can’t be defined, only recognized—it is a feeling, dawg.
One day when I was eight or nine or some shit, my dad showed up and swooped us from the grim Christianity/health food life we were bleaking our way through at my mom’s and stepdad’s and took us to Magic Mountain, the amusement park in Valencia, California, a half-hour north of LA.
Sunshine, sourballs, smog—smog so bad that by the afternoon my lungs felt full of thick liquid—the visit was a non-stop riot of root beer and primary colors and rides and video games. And French fries in a cup and cool, laughing and smoking teenagers in Van Halen t-shirts playing grab-ass by the arcade.
Magic Mountain wasn’t branded with Looney Tunes furries back then, but had these completely context-free trolls and a wizard wandering around entirely unexplained. Everything seemed Satanic and objectively oh-so-right at the same time.
Like a lot of kids raised in fundamentalist religions, I viewed the world of pop culture with wariness and fear, but also with keen jealousy.
Even in a pretty strict religious environment where you’re told not to look, you can’t help but see the bright flashes of the culture around you: kids at school talking about Saturday Night Live or doing memorized bits from Steve Martin records, the disco kids vs. the disco-sucks kids, Mattel Electronic Football II, CHiPs. I wanted into that world more than I would’ve admitted.
As we walked around Magic Mountain, we came across a rock and roll outfit playing in a small amphitheater. They were called ACROBAT and they were on trampolines. Except for the drummer, lol! But except for him, each dude had his own trampoline.
And did they jump around and do flips while they played? Brother, you better believe they jumped around and did flips while they played! One guy was in all red, one in all blue, one in all yellow. One guy in green. One guy with a mustache. Greatest fucking band of all time.
I remember ACROBAT playing an absolute humdinger of a song which I today can only figure was “I Only Want to Be with You,” Bay City Rollers version. Imagine late-‘70s musician-type guys with super-sweet, shoulder-length hair jumping on trampolines as the “I Only Want to Be with You” drums kick in, four-on-the-floor, 16-on-the-hat. Now the bassist—while jumping on a trampoline—starts with the “doon-doon, do doon-doon, do doon-doon, do doon-doon,” and then the guitarist—while jumping on a trampoline—gets going with that “beedle-ee dee dee-dee, beedle-ee dee dee-dee.”
Those feelings. Eat some sourballs in the sunshine. This is power pop.
“Magic” by Pilot
A world exists—a parallel pop world—in which pop feelings thrum with life; they thrive and pulsate. One cannot access this world freely, and we are at best offered only small glimpses of it seen through the prism of certain songs.
“Magic” is such a song. It’s magic, you know. Never believe it’s not so.
When I first became aware of the song in the 1990s, I tried to find a copy and eventually got one on a Rhino Have a Nice Day vol. 14 cassette. I had to hear it again and again, which caused a lot of rewinding anxiety lest I rewind too far and end up in “Wildfire” by Michael Murphey. I soon got the Have a Nice Decade CD boxset so I could listen to “Magic” on repeat, which I did for hours and sometimes days.
“Magic” is nearly impossible pop music and though every source says that Pilot is from Scotland, if somebody said they were Swedish, I’d believe it. Look at ‘em. And that accent—Swedish, right?
“Magic” is all feeling. When it comes to pop feelings, “Magic” is at once it and also about it. The handclaps, the falsetto la-las, the harmonized guitar solo, the double-tracked lead vocals—that dude’s voice was born to be double-tracked. The lyrics are vague yet exceedingly insistent: It’s magic because you know it is.
Never believe it’s not so.
“I Only Want to Be with You” by Bay City Rollers
Pretty much what I said earlier.
Sidely, Nick Lowe sang, “Gonna see the Rollers, got a ticket for the Bay City Rollers,” and he was probably being ironic, but maybe not? I mean, was Randy Newman being ironic in “The Story of a Rock and Roll Band?” Impossible to tell.
“Dancin’ Doctors” by The Freshies
Gotta have some reasonably obscure stuff in a power pop discush! I don’t know anything about “Dancin’ Doctors” or about The Freshies, all I know is I’ve been prone to fugue out with this song on repeat, yo!
It seems to be about a group of girls—the Saturday Girls—and these doctors they go dancing with on Saturday night. It’s got consumerism (“Saturday Girls spend Saturday day at the shops”) and conspiracy theories (“The doctors don′t dig it but the government rig it”) and some kind of point about shallowness or social jealousy or the callousness of the professional class in early-‘80s England, or something in that area.
The girls are deeply emotional and sentimental and perhaps irrational and immature, but they’re real people and they feel things. The doctors just dance their escapist dance of freedom and sadness.
“I Did the Wrong Thing” by The Toms
Look, I’m gonna be straight with you: he did the wrong thing. He did. And he’ll admit it, too. “It was a fool thing on my part,” he says regretfully. We never find out just what the “thing” was that he did, but it must’ve been a doozy. This whole deal has got him rethinking his approach and it wouldn’t surprise me if he learned a little bit about himself along the way.
It came out in the ‘70s, but it would've fit it well in the ‘60s around the Beatles Help! era. If it had come out in the ‘50s, people would've lost their minds! They would've crashed their Edsels, I bet!
Super bouncy, catchy as a son of a gun. Great floor-tom power pop to set on repeat.
“Looking for the Magic” by Dwight Twilley
I’m not some Dwight Twilley guy. If anything, I’m the guy at the party who says, “Dwight Twilley sucks! Ha ha ha!” You know that guy? That’s me! But I don’t really feel that way. Of course I don’t. Don’t be ridiculous.
But did you ever see the movie You’re Next? Hey, it’s a pretty good movie! They use “Looking for the Magic” on-repeat as a through-line in the picture, and it’s what won me over.
It’s got a prominent echo effect on the vocals and dude “sings to” the effect. It’s kind of the song’s thing. The echo is structurally load-bearing, similar-but-not-the-same as the way the vocal echo shapes the show on “Jump into the Fire” by Nilsson. The whole song pulses with it, and it’s cool, but you can’t help but wonder if guy maybe should’ve done the song a bit different? Kinda flesh it out more? As it is, the song rather vibrates in and vibrates out.
But that lack of resolution is part of what keeps me listening—I keep looking for the magic in my eyes, right? All my life I’ve been looking for the magic.
Jeff Whalen is a musician and librarian from Long Beach, California. He is the lead singer of the rock band Tsar. Tsar’s self-titled debut album is available on vinyl for the first time ever from Omnivore Recordings.
Previously On “Is It Power Pop?!”
Is It Power Pop?!
This is a guest post series about power pop featuring some of my favorite music writers. We’ll be sharing a new installment every week or two in January and February. Full series here.
When I experience a previously unheard power pop gem from the 60s or 70s—a song that is so relentlessly timeless—I have a surreal sense of a power pop multiverse where every great song of the last 75 years is being written at the same exact time—that a song written in 1974 is actually being written as I listen to it.
Somehow I'd never heard of The Freshies until now. ( grabs shovel...looks for a good rabbit hole spot )