Fixing a hole

When I was a teenager in the late '70s and early '80s, relying fairly heavily on FM radio for new music, there was a DJ who did the evening shift on a formerly kickass rock station in Cincinnati (WEBN, which was originally owned by the Wood family, then Randy Michaels started Jacor with the money, which merged with Clear Channel, and now it sucks), named Frank Johnson, who used to call Cheap Trick 'the Sears Beatles.'

I can't really tell you whether it was intended for mocking, irony, left-handed praise ... they were from around Chicago, where the Sears Tower is, and they never pretended the British Invasion wasn't an enormous influence on their songwriting and sound, so mocking or not, it was appropriate. It would have been an enormous lie (kind of like Tori Amos claiming she never heard Kate Bush when she started doing ... well, stuff that sounded exactly like Kate Bush). The only thing that monicker leaves out is the fact that Cheap Trick also were the 'Sears' Move/ELO, Kinks, Badfinger, occasionally Who, and once in a while, at least live, Rolling Stones. Rick Nielsen is a more adept songwriter than to, more than occasionally, be guilty of outright pastiche -- perhaps on the Move/ELO covers. Otherwise, he (and, on occasion, Zander and Petersson) did a creditable job of playing starlings and borrowing the things they wanted to buff up a more Midwestern U.S. version of the stuff, but being fairly original otherwise.

I think I've mentioned before that my older sister, who was 'of age' to really get into British Invasion first-wave stuff like the Stones, Kinks and Beatles, used to play 45s all the time; that I learned the lyrics to I Wanna Hold Your Hand when I was still wearing diapers. There also were singles like the Stones' Get Off My Cloud and Satisfaction, the Kinks' Well Respected Man, and some of the lesser lights like Gerry and the Pacemakers' Ferry Cross The Mersey and Gary Lewis and the Playboys' This Diamond Ring. I think my favorite Beatles single was We Can Work It Out -- I still love that one.

My foundation in popular music, therefore, was BI power pop and the stuff that borrowed from it, to various degrees, down the line. I first heard Cheap Trick when the single for Voices went on the jukebox at the little lunch dive across from my small town high school, circa '79 or '80. That was after '...At Budokan,' and I'll be honest -- there isn't much on 'Budokan' I prefer to the studio versions. I'd already been through this with Peter Frampton, my first passionate attachment to something my sister didn't listen to a decade before I discovered it. When I started buying Frampton's earlier solo albums -- and after my sister married, I discovered my brother-in-law also liked Frampton and loaned me cassette copies, after which I scraped together my allowance to buy vinyl copies for myself -- I realized that unless you'd been to a concert, often live albums lacked something. In retrospect, thirty years later, they're like wanking -- a pale version of the excitement of actually seeing the band, and only useful if you've already seen them live and can use the live album to invoke memories of the show. I've seen Cheap Trick several times since then, though, and I still don't like 'Budokan' much. I even got to see Frampton a couple of summers ago, after thirty years of liking a lot of his stuff, and '...Comes Alive' still doesn't hold a candle, for me, to the 'Something's Happening' studio album.

Frampton doesn't really count as British Invasion, I guess -- he was a hair too late (no pun intended) to pass for British Invasion, and most of the projects he was in, including solo ones, really borrowed more from American garage rock, southern boogie rock and blues than British stuff. It's kind of funny, actually -- The Small Faces did one of the most quintessentially British pop singles ever, Itchycoo Park, but Steve Marriott was all southern boogie/blues when he put together Humble Pie. Wait -- Lowell George did a lot of British Invasion derivative stuff when he was recording as Lowell George and The Factory, too. I wonder if it's a virus?

British Invasion bands also often were influenced by American blues, though there's a lot more Buddy Holly than B.B. King in the Beatles and the Kinks than there was in Humble Pie or anything Frampton did later. I think Frampton qualifies more as a mainstream rock guy, really, at least post-Pie. The Beatles pulled in other American popular music influences than simply blues, though -- hell, Ringo even sang a cover of Buck Owens's Act Naturally, and I understand George Harrison also liked American roots music, beyond what came through in Buddy Holly's work. Harrison might have been the tertiary songwriter for the Beatles, overshadowed by McCartney and Lennon in sheer volume if not necessarily quality, but his guitar playing on the stuff carried his influences through their songs, presumably, even when he didn't write them. There are lots of power pop songs with chicken-picked solos in their catalog, in other words.

My next great passion for BI influenced power pop was Todd Rundgren. I heard a retrospective of his work on FM radio one night around the summer of 1983 (probably on a local public radio station, since for some reason WEBN never played him after 1976, nor did its sterling competition in that era, 96-Rock, a much better station than WEBN ever will be again). It was around the time 'The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect' came out, and I got a quick primer in his stuff in about an hour. There is no thinner gloss to place over British Invasion pastiche than the one Nazz put on it -- though the Chad-and-Jeremyesque Gonna Cry Today belies the fact that they, too wanted something more than to simply be a Beatles cover band. The Nazz version of Hello It's Me didn't hold a candle to Todd's re-recording of it on 'Something ... Anything?' but did mark at least an effort to wander beyond cadging Beatles guitar riffs and vocal production. Todd has said he wrote it in half an hour on the bus while touring. I don't know if it's true, but his life is pretty strange -- I can't imagine he has a lot of motivation to make that kind of shit up.

Don't even make me talk about Meridian Leeward.

Todd broke away from that whole esthetic, largely, when he released 'A Wizard - A True Star!' around '74, though. There's some Beatlesque stuff on it, but frankly it compares as much with Zappa and California psychedelic pop and early American progressive rock as much as anything British. Reputedly, between 'S...A?' and 'AWATS!' Todd experimented with psychedelic drugs for the first time. Whether this is true or apocryphal, there obviously was a conscious choice on his part to move away from the whole British pop thing, and into more edgy (bombastic?) territory.

The first Utopia project album was all stuff built on this same foundation -- prog rock, I mean. Fantastic settings, long internal dialogues with spiritual figureheads, that sort of thing. It wasn't until the Utopia project with John "Willie" Wilcox, Kasim Sulton and Roger Powell that Todd waded back into the 'borrowing from British pop' vault, and even then the first album from this era, 1977's 'RA,' sounds marginally more influenced by British Invasion pop but still is a progresive-style concept album based on quasi-archaic themes and has long disquisitions on ... well, something other than love and the pedestrian difficulties and poignancies of modern life. Granted, Hiroshima is more of a mainstream rock song than prog, though the closing line, 'don't you ever forget ... don't you ever fucking forget,' guaranteed even it wasn't going to get airplay on mainstream stations. Utopia generally didn't seem to be about that, though, even later on.

The return to more traditional pop songwriting didn't really flash with Utopia until 'Oops! Wrong Planet,' a quasi-concept album that contained the uber Utopia song (covered repeatedly, usually badly, by at least a half-dozen different artists; most notably England Dan and John Ford Coley), Love Is The Answer. Love In Action is probably the most effective song on the album, to be honest, and it hews to the traditional verse-chorus BI-pop song structure, though there is a dual-lead solo between Todd on guitar and Roger Powell on his home-brewed nerd-tech keyboard that kills me every time I hear it. It isn't so much Beatlesque as Wingsesque, though I won't accuse Todd of McCartney pastiche by this point in time and in their respective careers. Todd was out on the boards before the Beatles broke up, and I'm guessing anything he picked up along the way also was picked up by McCartney through the same channels, neither could reasonably be accused of nicking off the other.

In both cases, it amounted to pulling in good musicians from the pool and using them effectively. As far as I'm concerned, the best of McCartney's post-Beatles work was done with Denny Laine; some of the stuff Todd did that I like best was with this particular formation of Utopia.

Utopia largely hung it up in the late-80s, though there were a few new post-album tracks -- one of my favorites, Monument (a solid revisit of More Light from 'POV'), popping up on the Passport 'Trivia' anthology, and some later tracks on a Rhino collection of 'POV' and 'Oblivion' (this second anthology also includes Monument).

This was kind of a sad time for me, music-wise -- power pop was morphing into hair metal, much of which really didn't cut it for me. The best bands from that era -- I'll probably write about it later -- weren't very Beatles-influenced unless they did it ironically. Generally speaking, because there had been a depression in the music biz in the '80s, if one band had a hit there were ten bands within a month playing pastiches of pastiches of the New York Dolls and/or old Iggy Pop (cf. Poison, Motley Crue, etc.). Little that was done was even innovative ripoff -- most of it was blandly overproduced, slick ripoffs of another hair metal band's last hit, an enormous clusterfuck of bad 120-beats-a-minute guitar pop, or else you were stuck with speed-metal and Metallica (whose work I have never liked, but who were, at least, more original than most of their peers about it). The comedy wing of the hair metal revolution was where I hung out, and I'll probably write about it sometime.

Needless to say, I was happy when Seattle bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden took over the radio, even if I was only peripherally a fan of 'grunge' itself. While it was far removed from the Beatles, and most 'grunge' bands played the guitar solo way down (something that still hasn't much recovered, sadly), played flashy musicianship way down, and concentrated on lyrics and song structure more. If I have to give up guitar solos, at least please write decent lyrics. Say what you will about Kurt Cobain, he was a good lyricist -- and by that I mean he seemed to genuinely enjoy playing with words, and playing words off each other. Aesthetically, grunge was largely a distillation of Sonic Youth dynamics into the 'barbaric yawp' of disaffected suburbia.

Before I come off sounding totally clueless, I realize Soundgarden -- and, for that matter, Queensryche -- don't fit the grunge label. Both bands had acrobatic and adept lead singers, were highly guitar-oriented, and generally hewed to the traditional verse-chorus-solo structure of, say, Graham Bonnet-era Rainbow. They exceeded hair metal by writing songs that actually were polished and 'about something,' or at least about something other than watching women in G-strings spin around a pole at a strip club. Black Hole Sun ... wow. Jet City Woman. There were some good things to say about hard rock in that era after all -- too much to say here.

After Seattle realigned mainstream rock music, there was a general schism into sub-genres. You had what was essentially a revival of 'frat-rock' or 'mullet-rock' with bands like Blink-182, Linkin' Park, anything that qualified as 'rap-rock' really ... a resurgence of Beach Boys and British influenced singer-songwriter stuff (I'm defining genres more by market appeal than actual sound, here) like Barenaked Ladies and Elliott Smith (anything that, in retrospect, qualifies as 'adult alternative') ... 'No Depression' or 'y'allternative' bands like the Jayhawks and Ryan Adams's old band Whiskeytown (often played on the same stations as the 'adult alternative' stuff) ... a small punk resurgence that pretty much seems to consist, now, of Green Day ... and puppy-eyed 'emo' which, to my ear, sounds pretty much like grunge with the 'loud' dynamic removed.

The late '80s and early '90s in Great Britain saw a sea change, as well. While Seattle was changing the esthetic here in the States, shoegazer bands like Jesus & Mary Chain and the Cocteau Twins accomplished much the same evolution with British pop -- which was to say, de-emphasized flashy performance and guitar solos in favor of a more textural affect. One Canadian band that started out heavily influenced by this movement, but evolved (or devolved, depending on your take on British Invasion bands and bands influenced by British Invasion bands) beyond it was Halifax, Nova Scotia's Sloan.

Sloan haven't been especially successful, in sales terms in the States, possibly because they weren't (aren't, as far as I know) ever really determined to be 'international rock stars' if it meant tailoring their work to the market rather than working at what they felt they did best. Whether it's because they were incapable of change -- and I find it hard to believe, comparing 'Smeared' with 'Between the Bridges' that their moderately successful longevity is due to anything but unwillingness to surf trends -- or stubborn, they have a niche market among Canadian pop fans and Yanks who like third-generation British Invasion-influence-influenced bands that, apparently, is at least lucrative enough to keep them making albums and touring occasionally.

What makes Sloan a treasure chest for power pop fans who don't mind a band's being derivative is that while they vary in the volume of quality work, the band consists of four independent songwriters with very different influences and tastes. Chris Murphy (generally the bassist, though he can mash up a creditable Keith Moon impersonation on the drums on occasion) and Jay Ferguson (not 'Thunder Island/used to be in Spirit' Jay Ferguson) pull most from invasion-era British pop, like Badfinger, the Kinks and the Beatles; Patrick Pentland's influences seem more guitar-oriented, though like most guitarists who 'came up' in the era of Kurt Cobain (and being the band's biggest My Bloody Valentine/shoegaze fan), he seems shy to solo much or often; and who the hell knows what all Andrew Scott (multi-instrumentalist, visual artist, atavist) draws on. Most of his songs are in the lengthy, noisy progressive vein that brings to my mind 'Mutiny Up My Sleeve' era Max Webster.

Life Of A Working Girl, for example, appears to be Chris Murphy's nod to/update of Wings' Another Day. The songs themselves are often wistful, thoughtful, occasionally outright melancholy and frequently seem to say, without saying it explicitly, 'born ten or fifteen years too late.' All in their mid-to-late 30s now, the songwriting has matured. The influences aren't any less obvious, though their nods are more circumspect -- one song from one of the earlier albums, I believe it's one of Pentland's, nicked a guitar riff straight out of Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion; another, who knows whose (some albums credit individual songwriters, others credit the band on all songs), uses the guitar stings from the Beatles' Getting Better. The songs these little steals appear in sound nothing like the songs they're cribbed from, really, but show a vocabulary of mainstream rock, British Invasion pop and other sources.

Which takes me back to what I said about Rick Nielsen -- like starlings, Sloan like to pick up shiny bits and weave them into something larger, or at least structurally more diverse.

Kind of makes me wonder if, ten years from now, some kids who liked Sloan will come along and their peers will think they invented those Badfinger riffs the band they're sending up took from Cheap Trick, who steeped them out of the originals. Probably.