How Power Pop Became A Rock & Roll Punchline!

On paper, it looked like a sure-fire license to print money: Write and play rock songs about love loaded with ear-worm melodies, soaring vocal harmonies, and safe-as-milk lyrics and the girls will beat a path to your door.

In execution, the musical results were no doubt stellar, but the music attracted only "fellers".

I mean, I can understand death metal appealing to a large swath of swarthy dudes, but power pop?

Truth be told, it didn't start out that way.

Greg Shaw at Bomp! Records had the good sense, and cash, to bankroll early singles by the likes of The Romantics, 20/20, and Shoes that crackled with the same brash, in-your-face intensity that made the Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch or The Damned' "New Rose" such game-changers./

Setting Bomp! apart from most indie labels was the fact that Shaw and an ever-changing roster of rock writers such as Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Ken Barnes and Greil Marcus cranked out issue after issue of eye-catching power "pop-a-ganda" via Bomp! magazine, covering melodic punk bands like the Ramones  and Runaways while almost single-handedly spearheading the insurgence of power pop on the west coast.

Shaw may have been the reigning cheerleader of power pop, but he wasn't just partial to L.A. bands, pulling the aforementioned Romantics and Shoes from Detroit and Zion, IL, respectively.

To Shaw, power pop was just as cutting edge as the Pistols or Ramones and had the same infectious energy and rebellion that had been fueling rock & roll from the start.

Major labels sensed a powder keg ready to explode and began snapping up as many power pop bands as they could. Bomp! acts were among the first to go with the Romantics inking with Nemporer/CBS, 20/20 agreeing to terms with Portrait/CBS, and Shoes joining the roster of Elektra Records.

Meanwhile, heavily-hyped L.A. act the Knack signed to Capitol Records. Upon the release of their Mike Chapman-produced debut album Get The Knack in June 1979, those who thought the band's popularity to be limited to Hollywood were humbled by the ferocity with which "My Sharona" attacked radio playlists.

All things considered, singer Doug Fieger's R-rated ode to a young girlfriend had all the immediacy and swagger of a #1 hit. When it actually landed at #1 mere weeks after its release, the song didn't just put the Knack on the map, it put "power pop" on the map as well.

Was "power pop" ready for its close-up, though?

L to R: Knack members Doug Fieger, Bruce Gary and Prescott Niles.

One has to ask because, at the height of the Knack's success, the band actually enacted a press blackout wherein they stopped talking to the press completely. You read that right, when any other band was eager to be interviewed and would take all the ink they could get, the Knack had essentially declared war on the press.

If this was meant to thwart biased press coverage of the band, it backfired spectacularly.

In fact, the blowback was such that it wound up hurting every other "power pop" band at the time just as the industry was preparing to throw its considerable weight behind the latest cool genre.

One such band was 20/20, whose self-titled CBS release had been enjoying positive press coverage and growing radio play. All action seemed to stop on a dime, though, at roughly the same time Rolling Stone began covering the infamous anti-Knack campaign in L.A. where "Knuke The Knack" t-shirts began out-selling the band's album.

Corporate reasoning being that if the Knack were going to be divas, so might be any other power pop band into whom a label might be investing millions on promotion. Overnight, the memo came down from above: "Power pop, boo hiss."

A&R teams convened in board rooms and began weeding out their power pop bands, most of whom had only issued a singe album. Those that weren't dropped were put on ice indefinitely.

Which makes the fact that, by 1981, CBS was still very much convinced that "power pop" could still happen. After all, their Columbia division had high hopes for Great Buildings (featuring future Rembrandts Danny Wilde and Phil Solem) while Portrait was putting out a second 20/20 record (Look Out!) .

Hadn't they gotten the memo?

Apparently, The Romantics had gotten someone to read it to them and promptly set about revamping their sound. The resulting album, 1981's Strictly Personal, was a gloriously loud and pink arena-rock experiment that was not without its merits, but it too died on the vine. As "behind it" as Nemporer may have been, the big boss (a.k.a., CBS Records) was having none of it.

Sadly, 20/20 and Great Buildings would soon be humming a similar tune when their stellar debut albums received a suspicious lack of promotion.

For 20/20's second album, Look Out!, the band scaled back the power pop stylings and tapped into the same vein that Velvet Underground had for their second album White Light/White Heat, albeit with a distinct L.A. mindset.

Tracks like "The Night I Heard A Scream", "Mobile Unit 245", and "Strange Side Of Love" blend stark themes of alienation, conflict, and suburban malaise with equally dark musical arrangements that recall Brian Wilson at the exact point where he chooses rock experimentation over "doo wah diddy". 

Great Buildings would cut a second record that also sought to add some piss & vinegar to their sound, but they were unceremoniously dropped before the completed album was released. For those of us who always wondered what that second album sounded like, re-issue label Wounded Bird released the long-buried second effort, Extra Epic Everything, in conjunction with the long-overdue release of Apart From The Crowd on CD in 2009-10.

Hearing the album almost thirty years after it was recorded, it is safe to say releasing it then would have done little to change the band's trajectory, or lack thereof.

Also, while the addition of keyboardist Mickey Mariano to the line-up is a tasty factoid for we Three O'Clock fans (he would go on to join these princes of the Paisley Underground after the Buildings crashed and burned), it was a poor fit that mired the band in the hokey past instead of the streamlined future, as proven by the band's choice of cover material (Neil Diamond's "Cherry Cherry").

Meanwhile, the Knack, who had enjoyed a wave of meteoric pre-MTV success the likes of which 99.9% of most bands would never see, were suddenly eager to distance themselves from their own musical past after ...But The Little Girls Understood failed to match Get The Knack's sales numbers commercial disappointment.

On Round Trip, a heroin-addicted Doug Fieger and band would somehow pull it all together to create an album that was every bit the equal to the sophisticated pop records made by 10cc or Steely Dan.

Whether the album flopped because neither 10cc nor Steely Dan were particularly hip by 1981 standards or because the "little girls" who once "understood" were just not the target audience for "Art War" and "Li'l Cal's Big Mistake" is open for debate, but there were few scenarios at the time that could have helped this album find the same mass audience that had greeted Get The Knack.

Meanwhile Chicago-area DIY recording pioneers Shoes quietly went about releasing not one, not two, but three albums for Elektra before the label politely admitted they hadn't the foggiest idea how to promote the band and quite literally paid them to go away.

Rather than blow the money in somebody else's studio and then go looking fior someone to release it,, the band sunk a substantial portion of their severance into Short Order Recorder, a top-flight DIY 16-track recording studio tucked away in the band's sleepy hometown of Zion, IL, and Black Vinyl records, an equally top-flight DIY record label capable of generating larger radio airplay and sales numbers than Elektra ever could.

The band's loss of major label status was a gain for hundreds, if not thousands, of rock & roll hopefuls who got to go "top-flight D.I.Y." at the band's Short Order Recorder over the years, among them Material Issue, whose Short Order demos produced by head Shoe Jeff Murphy wound up being released by Mercury Records as the band's first album International Pop Overthrow.

By 1983, though, they were still staring at their pink slip and wondering what the future held.

The only band that managed to survive the industry wide "power pop house-cleaning" was the Romantics, whose fourth effort In Heat did the near impossible by spawning two Top 40 hits "Talking In Your Sleep" and "One In A Million".

How did the Romantics manage to accomplish what so many others had tried to do, but failed?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that, unlike most of their power pop peers, these Motor City house rockers were given three chances to match the success of their debut instead of one.

The band took admirable swings for the fences on National Breakout and Strictly Personal, but each attempt at tweaking the formula set in stone on their first album was met with complete disinterest by the record-buying public.

In Heat saw the band embrace the four-on-the-floor rock stomp that had made their first album a near-hit, with enough arms left over to also embrace a sweet-ass bass line when they hear one. "Talking In Your Sleep" wasn't just a good song, it was a gift from the heavens, as it provided the band safe escape from the sinking ship that was "power pop" to V.I.P. treatment aboard the Good Ship MTV.

As for power pop, while its chart reign was comically brief, its influence could be seen in pivotal albums such as Nirvana's Nevermind, Weezer's self-titled debut, and Gin Blossoms New Miserable Experience, as well as the theme song to the TV show "Friends", which, would go on to become a chart-topping smash for the Rembrandts, featuring power pop exiles Danny Wilde and Phil Solem, formerly of Great Buildings.