Much like garage rock, power pop is one of the most fluid and hard to define genres in music. No one has yet to really define it. That may be because like punk and its early, forebear glam-rock, both of which have more slightly tangible boundaries, power pop is part of rock and roll’s third generation. That is to say it came of age in the seventies, a very confusing and musically messy decade.
The true genesis of Rock and Roll lies with Chuck Berry who is both rock’s Creator and Adam. Then came the girl groups, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, The Byrds and the American underground garage movement, and its British counterpart. And in the seventies came the great rupture and the subsequent untidy flowering of all rock’s subgenres.
That is all excruciatingly reductive, but it spells out rock’s explosive beginnings, the origins that would lead to the fracturing of rock’s still feral potency in the seventies. This feral potency did not register in all of rock and roll’s third-generation forms—there was showy prog-rock, trite country-rock, ham fisted traditional rock, and of course the late night thrill of disco. None of these genres were particularly feral or potent, but all were strong enough to elicit varying degrees of mass commercial appeal.
There were still of course seventies iconoclasts that were either an ill fit for genre classification or were just holdovers from the sixties—The Rolling Stones, Wings, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, the resilient Bob Dylan, John Lennon, David Bowie, the superstar Minimalists and the German Kraut-Rockers. But to me, the disco decade will historically be known for the rise of rock’s twin progeny—power pop and punk.
The feral potency first revealed itself as a conduit in the late sixties, most noticeably in the proto-punk groups, The Velvet Underground, the MC5 and The Stooges. All three of which were direct antecedents of punk’s first wave. This initial wave of proto-punk bands however, were not nearly as influential to the less aggressive power poppers that dotted the American and British landscapes as the seventies began to draw to a close. They looked mainly to the British beat groups who had begun crafting more muscular harmonic guitar pop—late-era Beatles, The Hollies, The Kinks and The Who (the latter two though came out of the box fairly muscular).
Punk has almost historically been described as a social movement but I find it more helpful to see it, like power pop, as a musical movement. This conflation occurs because of the historically fluid musical crosscurrent that ran between the United States and the UK. Punk, created and named in the States, had its zenith in Great Britain where it gained commercial traction, mainly because of economic and social volatility and the relative geographic compactness of the country. In the wide-open spaces of America, punk was like a fascinating urban abnormality—a fetish that could hold your gaze, but could never become the commercially viable product that it did in Britain.
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Article comments
1 - JC Mosquito
My Dear Mr. Price - a beautiful article, and you've scooped me by a couple of days! That's OK - there's lots to discuss here, and for sure we'll differ on some points (for instance, I see the 60's garage bands as the real punks, and the late 70's punks as the second generation), but you've drawn attention to a musical legacy often forgotten by the listenership at large.
Well, now it's back to the drawing board for me..... lesse, what are the chances someone on BC's gonna write about Dylan, or Springsteen, or... Uriah Heep.....?
2 - bryan price
I totally agree about the garage bands, but I think that sometimes people have a hard time wrapping their minds around that one.
In a way I think that the sixties garage bands were a kind of punk false start, they did not for the most part lead in to seventies punk, but they were very similar. Seventies punk seemed to be more about the stones, the stooges, the girl groups, and probably a good bit of the bigger sixties garage bands like The Remains, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Seeds, The Outsiders, The Shadows of Knight, the bands that actually charted.
thanks for the kind words.
b
3 - mtredstar7
Bryan -- a correction: Malcolm McLaren never managed the Dolls. I did. He wanted the gig but never would have gotten it because some members of the band would have never allowed it. They were never signed to him. As David once said, "when I'm in London Malcolm is my haberdasher."
Marty Thau
4 - bryan price
I must have bad information but on page 189 of the Legs Mcneil oral history of punk, "Please Kill Me" Malcolm McLaren is quoted as saying:
"Maybe about two years after the time they came to England, I started managing the dolls."
On the next page Terry Orks is quoted as saying:
"I knew I wated Television to play with the New York Dolls, and Malcolm McLaren had just signed on as their manager."
I guess they had it wrong.
5 - bryan price
There is a bit in the book where Bob Gruen says:
"Everyone refers to Malcolm as the manager of the New York Dolls, but it was really just the last few shows he organized. Because nobody else was doing anything for them."
So it seems as if he thought he was their manager, but in reality he was more of a de facto manager.
I did not mean to intimate that he was their founding manager, but after reading what I wrote, I can see how the reader would come away with that notion.
He obviously did not invent The Dolls like he did The Sex Pistols, but he clearly "handled" them, if only for a short time, before managing The Sex Pistols.
6 - bryan price
Also, in regards to #4: it is Terry Ork, not Orks. My finger slipped.
7 - mtredstar7
Bryan -- if "handling" them meant booking one show in NYC and a handful of shows in Florida -- that never happened -- then I guess he "handled" them. I "handled" the Dolls from June 1972 until 1975. Malcolm was involved for the grand total of 3 months. Re: Legs and Terry's comments -- your were correct in saying they got it wrong.
Marty Thau
8 - bryan price
Well I apolagize for the spread of any misinformation.
Again, the point that I was trying to make is that before he managed the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren was, lets say, involved with the New York Dolls. I was under the false impression, like a lot of people, that his involvement entailed management, but that is an obvious falsehood.
Thank you for setting the record straight.
9 - JC Mosquito
I caught the Dolls on TV s couple weeks back on PBS of all things. Don't know how they compared to the original line up, but they sure made a hell of a racket - beat that two chord coda on "Jet Boy" near to death - what a glorious noise.
10 - Henry Joseph Rychlicki
The New York Dolls Ride again!!!!
11 - John
I always considered Badfinger, Big Star, and The Raspberries to be the trinity of power pop. The few people I know who are down with this kind of sound feel the same way. The Groovies were good too, but had much less of impact.
12 - JC Mosquito
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Badfinger did much better commercially, I think. And I always thought of Badfinger as a mirror of the Beatles, much the same way as I saw Bad Company reflect Zeppelin - both signed to the bigger bands' label, and both with certain similarites in lineup and sound.
I had never heard of Big Star til Alex Chilton got a second chance at a career in the mid 80's. The Groovies were a cult fave and the Strawbs I heard once on a Ktel record. I guess they all had their fan base though, because they're still very muchu remembered. But these three bands, like the Velvet Underground many years earlier, I don't think they were generally well known while they were around.
13 - R.J. Fernandez
Re: The Holy Trinity of PP
I think Big Star, Badfinger, the Raspberries and the Flamin' Groovies are all excellent candidates. I also submit the hat trick: Cheap Trick, the Nerves, and the Ramones.
14 - bryan price
I love the nerves, but they didn't have enough output. If you put the Nerves, and their splinter-groups, the Beat and the Plimsouls all together though, then you've got something.
15 - R.J. Fernandez
Don't forget about Jack Lee! "Hanging on the Telephone" (due to it's subsequent hit-cover version by Blondie) did more for Power Pop, arguably, then any other song from the underground, jangly-guitar canon.
16 - Record Geek
For years I've heard that the Easybeats were the first power pop band ever and that "Friday On My Mind" was the first power pop song. Now on the interweb I find this fact to be nonexistant or unpopular!!! Anybody know when this change occurred?