My friends and I were never really punks.
We were born at the right time, but in the '70s it took some time for trends to get to us in the middle of the country. In the middle years of that decade, we were listening to REO Speedwagon and Foreigner. One of my friends was heavy into Chicago and Jethro Tull. Daryl Hall and John Oates' "Abandoned Luncheonette," with its (still) weird and crafty fusion of acoustic folk and Philly soul, was about as outré as our gang got.
I was an outlier among my friends — while still in high school I had a college radio show and wrote brief reviews of albums for promo copies for various publications. My friends rolled their eyes when I played Bowie's "Young Americans."
Disco might have been born on Valentine's Day in 1970, when a gay New Yorker named David Mancuso organized "Love Saves the Day," an underground dance party in his downtown loft at 647 Broadway, but it didn't arrive in our town until seven years later, when John Travolta as Tony Manero swaggered down 86th Street in Bensonhurst in his platform shoes in "Saturday Night Fever."
We'd heard of the Sex Pistols, but they weren't on Ark-La-Tex radio stations any more than Bruce Springsteen was in those days. A couple of my burnout druggie high school friends were into the Buzzcocks, but I don't think I got my first punk record until I picked up a copy of the Clash's second album, "Give 'Em Enough Rope," in the Austin, Texas, record shop Inner Sanctum in early 1979. (I remember I got a review copy of "London Calling" in early December of that year, and by that time I considered myself a world expert on the Clash. I reviewed it — for my college newspaper or for a Baton Rouge or New Orleans alternative newspaper. I'd like to find it someday. I was so very confident in my judgments then.)
But the Clash weren't that punk — at least not to my ears. Their politics were too cogent, too much in the folk populist tradition of Woody Guthrie. I suspected Joe Strummer wanted to be Bob Dylan, but (like a lot of us who were trying to say something with music) was leaning into his particular set of limitations. The Pistols were, if not genuine anarchists, performance artists. The Clash were making the kind of pop music their skills and consciences allowed them to make. To this day I'd fight for them, but they weren't true punks any more than we were.
The records I played more than any others in the last months of the '70s were the first three Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums, and I might argue for 1979's "Damn the Torpedoes" as my favorite-sounding record of all time. (I consider the fact I've never owned a 1963 Rickenbacker 625 12-string guitar like the one Petty's holding on the cover is a testament to my character.)
Despite his sometimes snarling vocal delivery, Petty was never punk either, though at the beginning of his career he and the Heartbreakers got lumped in with the movement. In 1978, writing for the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, Canadian critic Alan Neister wrote:
"In England, where they seem to pick up exciting new trends before we do, the Los Angeles-based Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have become so popular that Petty often gets mobbed by young nymphets on the street, is the subject of cover stories in the national music magazines, and headlines concert tours ...
"One stumbling block in Petty's drive to inevitable stardom (a feeling both he and I share) has been the burden of a punk-rocker label ... If Petty is indeed a punk, it is in classical '50s Elvis/James Dean chip-on-the-shoulder quick sneer style, not the over-hyped and choreographed sense of the Pistols, et al."
Petty was only a punk in the sense that the music he made with the Heartbreakers was steeped in the American garage rock tradition — but it had as much to do with the polished professionalism of the Byrds (his vocal resemblance to Roger McGuinn should not go unremarked upon) as the Shags (the band from Connecticut, not to be confused with any number of other bands called "the Shags").
Sure, there were genuine punk rockers, and some persist in their punk rock attitudes, but that wasn't my crowd. We were still listening to the Rolling Stones in the early '80s; I stuck with them through "Emotional Rescue." We somehow accommodated the idea that rock 'n' roll was both beautiful and nasty, a commercial ploy and a death cult for true believers. It was more than a way of entertaining ourselves, it was a cultural practice that went some distance in defining us. It was very silly stuff that we could take very seriously.
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I don't get many CDs or vinyl records in the mail anymore, and when I do it's because I've asked for them. Most record labels are happy to send critics digital downloads of their new product, and failing that they'll provide a stream or a password to a private Soundcloud account where you can listen to the latest project.
I've given away most of my records; my collection resides on a couple of four-terabyte hard drives that I rarely access because it's easier to use Spotify or Apple Music. (Physical media feels a little like cryptocurrency these days; it's got some value but I wouldn't accept it as collateral.) But I did ask for a copy of the 40th anniversary edition of "Marshall Crenshaw," the debut album from the Detroit singer-songwriter that cracked some things open for me in 1982.
The three biggest pop singles of 1982 were Olivia Newton-John's "Physical," followed by the theme song for "Rocky III," Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," and Joan Jett's faithful cover version of the Arrows' 1971 near-hit "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" (see arkansasonline.com/423roll/)
Shortly before the release of their fourth album, "Combat Rock," and the kickoff of their U.K. tour, Clash frontman Strummer vanished. (It was supposed to be a publicity stunt, with Strummer holing up in Texas for a few days with singer-songwriter Joe Ely, but instead Strummer went AWOL for real, heading to Paris instead of Austin, running a marathon and growing a Castro-like beard. Clash manager Bernie Rhodes had to hire a private detective to track him down, and the U.K. tour was postponed.)
Punk rock seemed moribund; synth-driven New Wave (as exemplified by A Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran (So Far Away)" and Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" ) was ascendant. The Eurythmics had three hit singles that year. Somewhere in Iowa, Ozzie Osbourne bit the head off a bat on stage. One British music magazine, Smash Hits, summed up the year by saying there were "no patterns" to pop in 1982.
When Crenshaw's debut record arrived on April 28, it sounded like a throwback to Buddy Holly and the first generation of rock 'n' rollers, but was also informed by the harmonic sense of the Beatles and a wised-up attitude that lyrically landed closer to a post-Dylan adult sensibility than the greasy kids stuff of '50s rock 'n' roll.
Holly's music had undergone a kind of quiet revival in the late '60s and early '70s, but with the release of the movie "The Buddy Holly Story" in 1978, he'd become one of the foundational figures of rock 'n' roll. (It probably helped that Gary Busey played him as a raw and twitchy proto-punk, with a neurotic side.)
Crenshaw, born in 1953, was at least three years older than everyone in the Sex Pistols, and had already made some impression on the culture at large. He'd played John Lennon in the (widely panned) Broadway show "Beatlemania," starting out as an understudy before joining the West Coast company and finally the national touring company. He wrote several of the songs that appear on the album while touring with "Beatlemania" and quit the show in February 1980, to concentrate on his own music and a career as a recording artist.
He put together a band with his brother Robert on drums and and former Desmond Child and Rouge bassist Chris Donato (real name Don Scalzo), and began playing clubs in and around New York like CBGB's, The Other End, Folk City, The Mudd Club and the Lone Star Café. A single he recorded for the indie label Shake, "Something's Gonna Happen," and rockabilly singer Robert Gordon's re-cover of "Someday, Someway," both became regional hits (see arkansasonline.com/423gordon/).
"Radio stations were playing both [records] simultaneously," Crenshaw told an interviewer in 2009. "Back in the day, it was kinda hard for me to get to know [Gordon], because he was just really hyper all the time. I was a little nervous around him. I saw him about 10 years ago, and he was in good spirits. I told him, 'Man, that was just huge what you did for me when you recorded those tunes.' And he just kinda says, 'Oh, shut up,' in a friendly way, you know. It was a big deal. I hung out at the sessions. It was a huge door that opened and helped me to get somewhere in New York."
Soon Crenshaw found himself with offers from RCA and Warner Bros. records. He chose Warner, partly because of its reputation for nurturing artists. He signed in November 1981, and a couple of days after New Year's went into studio A of Manhattan's famed Record Plant to record "Marshall Crenshaw."
And 41 years later, the record still sounds fresh and fizzy, a burst SweetTART of an album — a dozen rootsy pop songs that fly past in just over 34 minutes. (The longest song on the record, "Rockin' Around In N.Y.C.," clocks in at 3 minutes and 7 seconds. The 2023 release, by Yep Rock, adds seven previously unreleased cuts, including a couple of four-track early versions of songs from the album recorded in 1980 and 1981.)
Produced by Crenshaw and Richard Gotteher, a former Brill Building songwriter who was also instrumental in the careers of Blondie, Talking Heads, the Go-Gos and Madonna, the album relied mostly on the live in-studio performance of the three-piece, with a minimum of overdubs. (Mostly vocal harmonies and light percussion.)
Crenshaw sounded delighted to be singing these songs in his boyish tenor that belied his relative maturity. And though he'd later prove himself to be a formidable guitarist capable of Hendrix-style inversions, here he avoided any guitar pyrotechnics, choosing snappy, hooky riffs over extended soloing.
More than 40 years on, "Marshall Crenshaw" still feels effervescent; it bounces out of the speakers like a Jack Russell terrier puppy.
Crenshaw's version of "Someday, Someway" made No. 36 on the Billboard charts (it remains his only solo Billboard top 40 hit, see arkansasonline.com/423some/) but other songs from the album — especially "There She Goes Again" (arkansasonline.com/423there/), "Cynical Girl" (arkansasonline.com/423girl/), and "Mary Anne" — have acquired a kind of classic status, although they never charted.
Crenshaw would later express some dissatisfaction with the production — he'd wanted to produce the album by himself, but Warner insisted on Gotteher. Crenshaw ended up with a co-producing credit but later admitted that he spent most of his time talking to engineer Thom Panunzio about his days working with John Lennon.
"That band back then was really slick," he told Noel Murray of the Onion AV Club in 2013. "Almost too slick. I see the tapes of that now and I think, 'This is a little too polished, almost.' We just rehearsed all the time. We were just playing clubs in the city, but we would still get together twice a week and go over stuff, and I would really drill those guys: 'Here's how the bass drum goes, and put the cymbal crash here.' I was very specific all the time — probably too much so. Now I think it was too much."
That's the sort of criticism only a perfectionist could make — that the record is too perfect.
When it came along in 1982 it felt a little like a revival — there wasn't a lot of straightforward, guitar-oriented pop on the radio then, it sat just left of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in the cultural mix, sonically old school but with a hint of New Wave style with some of the energy of punk rock, though they certainly weren't punks in their polo shirts and sport coats. But they weren't quite preppie (not like the Talking Heads).
I've followed Crenshaw's career ever since I first dropped the needle on "Marshall Crenshaw," and while I admire his craftiness and sensibility — he's occasionally taken over lead vocals for the Smithereens, stepping in to replace the late great Pat DiNizio — I don't think he ever got back to the pop perfection that was that debut album.
He'd probably disagree, and he might be right. I know an artist's best work is rarely their most popular.
But "Marshall Crenshaw" came along at the right time in my life for me to make a fetish of it. It made me want to write songs like that — and made me realize I couldn't. I put it on and it blasts me back to a time when I was still unformed and susceptible to simple lyrics and earnest noise. "Marshall Crenshaw" reminded me I was never quite a punk.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com