A Name Before a Genre
Pete Townshend gave it a label before anyone had built the thing. In a May 1967 interview promoting the Who’s single Pictures of Lily, he said: “Power pop is what we play, what the Small Faces used to play, and the kind of pop the Beach Boys played in the days of Fun, Fun, Fun which I preferred.” The term drifted for a decade. What Townshend described, a collision of aggressive rhythm guitar and irresistible vocal melody, didn’t crystallize into a movement until the early 1970s, when a handful of bands tried to rescue the three-minute pop song from prog-rock excess and singer-songwriter introspection.
The formula sounds simple: Beatles harmonies, Who-level volume, Beach Boys sweetness, a backbeat that hits harder than any of those bands typically allowed. Push too far toward melody and you get soft rock. Push too far toward aggression and you lose the hooks. The bands that got it right became the most critically adored, commercially ignored artists of their era.
Cleveland, Memphis, and the 1972 Zeroes
Two bands defined the first wave, both arriving in 1972 from improbable places. The Raspberries formed in Cleveland in 1970, led by Eric Carmen, a classically trained pianist obsessed with the Beatles and the Beach Boys. Their self-titled debut came out in April 1972 on Capitol, packaged with a scratch-and-sniff sticker that smelled of raspberries (the label’s idea, applied to the cellophane). The band took the stage in matching suits and bouffant hairdos. Go All the Way, their signature single, sold over 1.3 million copies and reached number five on the Hot 100. Carmen said the inspiration was the Rolling Stones’ Let’s Spend the Night Together: he wanted an explicitly sexual lyric that teenagers would catch but censors couldn’t pin down.
In Memphis, something stranger was happening at Ardent Studios on National Street. Alex Chilton, who had sung lead on the Box Tops’ number-one hit The Letter in 1967 at age sixteen, was twenty-one and directionless by 1971. He drifted into Ardent, a studio run by engineer John Fry. Among the young musicians orbiting Fry’s operation was Chris Bell, a quiet guitarist, a University of Tennessee dropout who lived for the Beatles’ Revolver. With drummer Jody Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel, they formed Big Star, naming themselves after the grocery chain whose sign blinked at them from across the street.
They recorded #1 Record, released April 1972. Billboard said every cut could be a single. Then it vanished. Ardent was distributed through Stax, the soul label, and Stax had no idea what to do with a rock album. When Stax signed a deal with Columbia, Columbia swept existing inventory out of stores. #1 Record sold fewer than 10,000 copies. Bell quit in November 1972.
Chilton pressed on. Radio City (1974) contained September Gurls, later covered by the Bangles and cited by R.E.M. It sold roughly 4,000 copies. Bell recorded solo material at Ardent through the mid-1970s, including the towering I Am the Cosmos. On December 27, 1978, driving his Triumph TR7 home from a late-night session, he hit a telephone pole and died. He was twenty-seven.
The Welsh Catastrophe
Badfinger’s story runs parallel, with a darker ending. Pete Ham formed a band in Swansea, Wales, around 1961; by 1965 they were the Iveys, relocated to London. Beatles road manager Mal Evans heard their demos and brought them to Apple Records. McCartney wrote Come and Get It for them, recorded the demo himself playing every instrument, then auditioned each member to sing lead, settling on bassist Tom Evans. They renamed themselves Badfinger, after “Bad Finger Boogie,” a working title for With a Little Help from My Friends, coined because Lennon had injured a finger and was playing piano with only one.
Ham and Evans co-wrote Without You, buried on the 1970 album No Dice. Nilsson’s cover went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic; the song eventually accumulated over 180 cover versions. The royalties should have made them comfortable. Instead, manager Stan Polley seized total control of the group’s finances and vanished with everything. On April 24, 1975, Ham hanged himself in his garage. His note ended: “Stan Polley is a soulless bastard.” Eight years later, after a phone argument with bandmate Joey Molland reportedly about the Without You royalties, Evans hanged himself in his garden.
Budokan, the Knack, and Brief Commercial Life
Power pop briefly became profitable at decade’s end. Cheap Trick, from Rockford, Illinois (guitarist Rick Nielsen, drummer Bun E. Carlos, vocalist Robin Zander, bassist Tom Petersson), had released three albums to middling sales before Japan embraced them. On April 28 and 30, 1978, they recorded at the Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. The live album was meant for Japanese release only; when 30,000 import copies sold stateside through word of mouth, Epic issued it domestically. It peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and went triple platinum.
That same year, the Knack released Get the Knack and watched My Sharona hold number one on the Hot 100 for six weeks, Capitol’s fastest-selling debut single since the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand in 1964. The album moved a million copies in under two months. The backlash matched: a “Knuke the Knack” campaign emerged, and their second album cratered.
The 1990s: Revival Against Grunge
A generation raised on Big Star reissues began reclaiming power pop in the early 1990s. Matthew Sweet recorded Girlfriend in 1991 after his divorce, recruiting Richard Lloyd of Television and Robert Quine of the Voidoids as dueling guitarists. Their stinging interplay gave the album a tension pure pop lacked.
Teenage Fanclub, from Glasgow, released Bandwagonesque the same year on Creation Records. Spin voted it album of the year over Nirvana’s Nevermind, a choice that seemed perverse then and prescient later.
Jellyfish, from San Francisco, pushed toward maximalism. Drummer and vocalist Andy Sturmer played a stand-up kit at the front of the stage. Spilt Milk (1993) cost $300,000 and featured vocal arrangements dense enough to rival Queen, but sold poorly against grunge. Sturmer later wrote and produced for the Japanese duo Puffy AmiYumi.
Weezer’s self-titled debut in 1994 brought power pop to a mass audience again, fusing Cheap Trick hooks with distorted guitars and confessional lyrics; it sold over five million copies. Fountains of Wayne carried the torch into the 2000s, their 2003 single Stacy’s Mom designed to emulate the Cars. Every band that ever tried to write a perfect chorus over a loud guitar owes something to a grocery-store sign in Memphis and a scratch-and-sniff sticker from Cleveland.
Essential Listening
- Big Star – #1 Record (1972)
- Big Star – Radio City (1974)
- Raspberries – Raspberries (1972)
- Badfinger – Straight Up (1971)
- Todd Rundgren – Something/Anything? (1972)
- Cheap Trick – At Budokan (1978)
- The Knack – Get the Knack (1979)
- Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend (1991)
- Teenage Fanclub – Bandwagonesque (1991)
- Jellyfish – Spilt Milk (1993)
- Weezer – Weezer (Blue Album) (1994)
- Fountains of Wayne – Welcome Interstate Managers (2003)