It's Book Review and Face the Nation Time

This morning I found out that there was a tribute to Adam Schlesinger last night, featuring both big names, Courtney Love and Chris Carrabba, and personal favourites like Ben Kweller, Justin Pierre, and Matt Caws. I was surprised that I hadn't heard about this, but I don't know that I would have paid for a livestream anyways. This reminded me how bummed I was to hear that he had died early in the pandemic and led to reflect on the year and a bit that we've been living through COVID. 

Schlesinger's death was a weird one for me. I think it's totally normal for you to feel sad when a person you respect and admire dies, but it almost felt like I made too much of a big deal about it to myself, compulsively reading stories about him and the experiences of those close to him. I think that was probably the result of the stress and fear of COVID coming out of me in strange ways. I never really reacted strongly to any of the horror stories around public health or long-term care in Quebec, but then latched onto Schlesinger's death like crazy. In hindsight, those two things are probably related, right?

Sidenote: I can't remember if I said this during my in memoriam post, but there was one time that Duff and I were talking about our pie-in-the-sky producer picks for Beat Noir. I said Schlesinger and Duff reacted like that was the worst choice possible and didn't fit all. Him working on Sovereignties is a laughably weird fit, but I still stand by it? 

Anyways, a year later I'm still sad that he died as a result of this pandemic, especially as someone who was relatively young and still producing great music. When I think about him and Fountains of Wayne, I find myself still in awe of his talent as a songwriter. He was the first person related to my interests who died during the last year, and that sits as a strange post in my COVID experience. It having been a year since he died is a reminder of how long this has been going on and it's sad to think how bad things still are. Maybe it's nice to think about vaccines being readily available Canada now. I don't know. That's nice, but I also can't say I'm confident about things going back to normal like everyone else is. I still never really know how to feel about the pandemic and now the music and death of Adam Schlesinger is weirdly tied up in that. Strange feeling.

Okay, two things related to this:

One is that as part of the tribute, a reformed Tinted Windows performed. Tinted Windows was a super-group featuring Schlesinger on bass and as the principle songwriter (awesome), Bun. E. Carlos from Cheap Trick on drums (IMO the coolest CT member, also awesome), James Iha on guitar (not a huge Smashing Pumpkins fan, but he's undoubtedly the coolest member), and Taylor Hanson from... Hanson on vocals*. I was so excited to learn about this band because it was this joining of forces around this specific type of pop-rock that I absolutely love, but isn't for everyone. Sadly, the album didn't really stick with me, even though I REALLY wanted to like it. Apparently the band had discussed making another record, which I still would have absolutely listened to. It's sad that never happened.

*I can't say I'm a fan of Hanson's music, but I do have respect for them continuing to put out records this far into their career and being committed to pop-rock. Lifers.

I found it touching that this band reformed as a bass-less three-piece to perform for this night.

Second, I discovered that a tribute album to Schlesinger came out and I listened to that immediately. I think it really speaks to his preternatural talent to pair vocal harmonies with words and chords to hear the songs in so many ways. Maybe this is a nice thing I need.

Postscript: I just found that this compilation was released on my birthday last year. What a coincidence.

Shine On, Shine On, Shine On

Last night Adam Schlesinger, best known as the bassist and principal songwriter of the band Fountains of Wayne, died while being treated in the hospital for COVID-19. I am a huge Fountains of Wayne fan and am pretty saddened to hear this news. Though there have been many celebrities with cases of corona, and many more deaths all over the world from the virus, Schlesinger's made all of this a lot more real for me and hit me harder than I would have expected it to.

The first that I will say is that Fountains of Wayne are way more than the one song you know them for. They've suffered from the problem that plagues seemingly every one-hit-wonder in which their silliest and poppiest song (maybe not the case here, but we'll get there) is known by everyone out of the context of the band's catalogue. "Stacy's Mom" bangs, for sure, but it's not indicative of what Fountains of Wayne is like. They were such a smart and snarky band who wrote songs in a way that no other rock band does, with a layer of hooks and rock history layered throughout every song. Since I heard the new about Schlesinger's death, I've been listening to the band nonstop. I'd really recommend you doing the same. It's such a rewarding experience.

In my mid-twenties I got heavy into power-pop music, starting with Cheap Trick and then working my way through others from the 1970s and 80s. For some reason, this style of music immediately clicked with me and it felt like this was actually the genre that I had liked for my entire life. I realized that all of my favourite songs from a wide array of bands were just their power-pop songs. Something about the unabashedly sincere pop music played on electric guitar rang extremely true to me.

I can't tell you exactly when it happened, but upon hearing "Stacy's Mom" one day, I realized that it was just a blatant Cars pastiche (one of the prominent figures in my power-pop deep dive) and that was enough for me to check out the album the song had come from. Welcome Interstate Managers was not what I was expecting, but in the best way possible. As soon as "Mexican Wine" kicked into it opening guitar lead, I knew that this was the best case scenario in looking into this record and it was hitting all the notes that I was looking for in music at time.

Beyond the 3rd/4th hammer-on, that is. (When you're writing about Schlesinger, you gotta make pop music theory puns).



The best thing about the album was that it was way more intellectual than I thought it would be. Rather than the typical themes of young love and... *checks notes, no, that's it* the songs were all self-contained stories about different characters. This carried over to the sound as well, as each song was almost like a vignette of a slightly different genre, one country, one 80s, one surf-y, etc., all being covered with a power-pop varnish.

Oddly, the album seemed to focus on characters who were travelling salesmen or middle management, which also only furthered how distinct and realized it felt. At the time, I had recently watched the movie Cedar Rapids, in which Ed Helms plays a Midwestern insurance salesman who goes out and experiences the world for the first time by travelling to an insurance conference. I couldn't help but associate the two things, and Welcome Interstate Managers kind of seemed like Cedar Rapids: The Albums. Worlds were colliding!

But this is about Adam Schlesinger, not Fountains of Wayne, though I can't imagine that the band will continue now that he has died. Schlesinger was absolutely what set the band apart from their peers and huge reason they were so different from all of the other pop-rock bands. As a good bassist who was amazing at a singing harmonies he was already the dream band member for a frontperson, but it's crazy that he would bring fully formed songs to the table too. Michael Jordan doesn't win six titles without Scottie Pippen.

Watch this video and pay attention to how much singing the guy playing bass does. Now try to think about what the song would sound like without that.



I identified with him right away because he was what I aspired to be as a musician. I never really wanted to be the frontperson of a band and I was comfortable being one of the supporting musicians. Though I wasn't the face of the band I was in, I tried my best and wanted to be an active contributor, adding as much to the sound and strength of the group as I could. Did I do much beyond play bass? No, but like I said, what Schlesinger was able to do was what I aspired and hoped to do.

Even more impressive is that his music production didn't end with Fountains of Wayne. He also played in the shoegaze-y band ivy, played in the power-pop supergroup Tinted Windows (amazing name and Bun E. Carlos on drums!), and contributed songs upon songs upon songs to movies, TV shows, and other artists. Among those, the best-known one is probably this, absolutely the best song ever written for a film:



He was an incredible talent, an all-time bass player hero, and someone whose music significantly impacted the way I approach playing guitar and bass.

Following his death, Marc Maron posted an interview he had done with Schlesinger in 2012, in which he talked about his love of power pop and mentiong doing a Kinks cover as part of a tribute compilation. I can't think of a better way to eulogize him.

Don't Give Yourself Away

At some point around 2002, the internet, for me, became mainly a vehicle for consuming music. When my brother showed me how Napster worked, I was astounded and immediately started looking into to getting some stuff on there. That's not to say that file-sharing programs were an illuminating, game-changing resource I was waiting for to listen to music, because I never stopped going to the record store, but it did profoundly change the way that I thought about the internet and its use to me (that being songs and boobies).

I feel that this was common for many other people as it was for me, as now the proliferation of music on the internet is higher than it's ever been and it's just kind of always there. Another interesting thing that happened with this was the democratisation of genres. Musical genres were no longer decided by critics or writers, but instead by whoever was filling in the genre tag on Napster. As a result, genre became way more fluid and a lot of pretty different things were called the same thing. Also, a lot of bad punk covers were labelled as NOFX songs. Maybe this all spoke to parallels that artists already shared, or maybe that was forced by listeners. I'm not sure about that.

Now there's a lot of genres of music that a very amorphous. While "Black Metal" might mean one specific thing, "Hardcore" means a million things. Damaged by Black Flag, Suicide Season by Bring Me the Horizon, and I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone by Crime in Stereo all sound completely different, but are, for better or for worse, all described mainly as hardcore.

An instance of this that makes me smile is the genre "Power Pop", because I love almost all iterations of the genre and because it seems to be as many-sided as "Hardcore". It seems to mean rock/pop music played with guitars, which is an apt descriptor for all of the bands I'm about to go through, but can also mean a lot of different things

My introduction to power-pop was through poppy rock bands from the late 70's and early 80's. They were playing pop music in the then-general understanding of the word, just with more distortion, bigger amps, and fancier guitar solos. Whenever I think of the genre power-pop, I always think of one band first: Cheap Trick



Though Cheap Trick are my personal favourites in this genre, I feel like my placing of them at the top of the heap is by no means a popular opinion (people love to hate Cheap Trick, I've found!). So allow me to flex my critical knowledge and give you two other examples of what I feel is classic 70's power-pop:



I think it's really a shame that this band is only known for "My Sharona", because I think the rest of their album is way better than that song:



God, that is a fucking great song.

A big reason why I love this type of music is that I attach it to a very distinct aesthetic. I believe I have spoken about this before on IMU, but to me these are the songs of rebellion for a specific generation in the 70's and 80's. In teen sex comedies set in the 70's and 80's, the guys who are the wacky or "cool" minor characters listen to these bands. These bands are the soundtrack to Steven Hyde, Styles, and Kevin Pickford. Because the nostalgia of these characters and stories is so attractive to me, the music that is attached to them is equally attractive.

I'm going to pull back the curtain on my brain for a second and let you in on the fact that I try to evoke these types of characters in my "persona". They influences the way I dress and the way I act. I'm still "me", but part of "me" is that these characters dramatically influence my outer shell.

The tie between this music and that character type was solidified when "Gonna Raise Hell" by Cheap Trick, from Dream Police, played during an episode of Freaks and Geeks.

I fell face-first into this type of music and started to try and get as much as I could afterwards. One of the first things I wondered about was where "power-pop" went into the 80's and beyond.

My first answer was The Outfield. Despite having way, way less edge, the still presented the same idea. It was still very poppy guitar-based music, just with way shinier production and corny reverb on everything:



The Cars are interesting because they really count as an example of the stuff I was previously talking about, and their excellent Self-Titled came out in 1978, but they certainly morphed into something much poppier and "more studio" (please know what I mean by that) into the 80's. This is still a wonderful pop song, but not nearly as "rock" as the music on their first album.



I just came across a description of The Cars by the music critic Robert Palmer and it sums up the band better than I ever could:

"they have taken some important disparate contemporary trends- punk minimalism, the labyrinthine synthesizer and guitar textures of art rock, the 50's rockabilly revival and the melodious terseness of power pop- and mixed them into a personal and appealing blend."

That is why he is a professional music writer and I am writing for free on blogspot. It touches on everything I'm trying to say.

Another band who I came across while trying to find the direction of this rock music after 1982 was Fountains of Wayne, who to me are a cross between The Cars and Cheap Trick, just with their songs tied down to a different period, the late 90's and early 2000's, because of its production. Everyone is familiar with Fountains of Wayne because of the massive hit "Stacy's Mom", but most don't realize that the rest of that album is perfect power pop:



I guess relevant to me is also where this type of music crosses with my first love, punk music. This one was easy, because I was already way deep into ALL before getting anywhere near Cheap Trick. ALL is a weird band who wear a lot of different faces, but to not associate a song like this with power pop would be silly:



I'm not sure if everyone thinks of None More Black as a power pop (in the sense I have described)/punk band, but I do:



I find that now, when most people think of power pop, they think of a mostly-Ramones knock-off band and that seems weird to me because it is so far from my own personal definition of the genre. That's exactly what I was talking about at the start of this post though, that now the same word means a hell of a lot of different things in regards to music. I don't think I have a point beyond just saying "Look at all the different power pop things!", but I guess that's okay too.

I'm Groovin' On

There are quite few bands who the general populous has filed in their mind as "one-hit wonders", but I love dearly as a niche hidden gem that everyone missed out on. Whenever one of these bands is given a little bit of a rub, it makes me feel good to know that I'm not alone in realizing that there's more to a band than one song.

The AV Club writes a lot better than I do, so I'll direct you to a nice, short summation of what makes one of my favourite Fountains of Wayne songs so good:

Fountains of Wayne's power-pop gem "Radiation Vibe" found the silver lining in adversity