Powerpop: 10 of the best

1 Todd Rundgren - Couldn’t I Just Tell You

Powerpop, some say, began with Emitt Rhodes’s 1970 debut album or Badfinger’s Magic Christian Music (also 1970), but really those were more like late Beatles works. Powerpop may have drawn on the 60s – in fact, there is a school of thought that has the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Who and the Small Faces as original powerpoppers – but powerpop is really a 70s invention. It’s about young musicians missing the 60s but taking its sound in new directions. In its insistence on brevity, energy and melody, powerpop was not just an alternative to prog and the hippy troubadours, but a cousin to glam. And like glam, it has a claim to being one of the first postmodern genres.

This is largely a 70s list because powerpop is era-specific. You can re-create it outside the time from which it came, but it becomes something different. So you’ll read arguments in favour of 90s musicians such as the Rooks, Brad Jones and more, but they lack powerpop’s edge, which arises from the tension between the music and the audience’s expectations. They just weren’t meant to make music like this in the early 70s. That created problems for powerpop’s main players, as their commercial, catchy material failed to catch on, resulting in a preponderance of tortured artists and casualties.

Talking of glam, Todd Rundgren could easily feature in a 10 of the best list on glitter rock, just as he could be on a list of piano ballads, blue-eyed soul, proto-electronica, even prog. But he staked his claim to powerpop immortality with this track, which set the whole ball rolling (look out for 1972-73 and 1977-78, because they’re key periods within the overall powerpop time frame). If Something/Anything?, its parent double album, featured multiple styles, then Couldn’t I Just Tell You was a masterclass in compression, from the deceptively sweet acoustic intro and opening salvo – “Keep your head and everything will be cool/ You didn’t have to make me feel like a fool” – to the incandescent 15-second guitar solo, the breathtaking “drop” at 2min 36sec and the climactic eruption of guitars, bass and drums, of which Rundgren played and produced every last note.

2 The Raspberries – Go All the Way

Most lists of the greatest-ever powerpop tunes feature this at or near the top, usually duking it out with Couldn’t I Just Tell You or Big Star’s September Gurls. It’s got it all: Beach Boys harmonies, Beatles melody, Who power with a dash of Stones raunch (that title/lyric). A US top five hit in July 1972, Go All the Way was also one of the few powerpop success stories. The Raspberries are why many think of powerpop as a simple, sustained act of homage to a bygone era, probably because, unlike their peers, they wore matching suits, at least when they started.

But their music offered more than Fabs fetishism. It helped that they had at the helm the bouffant boy wonder, Eric Carmen, one of several powerpop dreamboats who looked like David Cassidy’s fucked-up older brothers – they could, in another universe, have been teen idols themselves. Carmen wrote a mean ballad, and indeed he became a sort of American Elton when he went solo in 1976 with All By Myself. But there’s nothing sappy about Go All The Way.

3 Stories - Darling

Powerpop is full of characters you will see described as geniuses: Rundgren, Carmen, Alex Chilton, Dwight Twilley. Michael Brown is another. He made his name as the songwriter with the Left Banke, the late-60s group who had hits with Walk Away Renee and Pretty Ballerina, both prime examples of baroque pop (a genre that shared many elements with powerpop). After a brief dalliance with a band called Montage he formed Stories, featuring the vocals of Ian Lloyd, whose lightly rasping voice posited him as an American Rod Stewart. Their two albums – Stories (1972) and About Us (1973) – were showcases for Brown’s idiosyncratic songcraft, which was florid and dramatic, as well as Eddie Kramer’s complex, quasi-prog production.

Stories’ one hit was a huge one; it was also an anomaly, and then some: Brother Louie, a cover of the Hot Chocolate tune that reached No 1 in the US. It’s a measure of the stretchiness of powerpop genre that it can accommodate even this blue-eyed funk-soul, and it felt like a major powerpop coup when, specially rerecorded by Ian Lloyd for the occasion, it featured during the title credits to Louis CK’s sitcom, one of the great TV opening sequences of modern times. Really, though, you should try that second album, and such florid and dramatic delights as Love Is in Motion, Please, Please and Hey France. Particularly appealing is Darling, a fever-pitch affair that starts at the climax and proceeds from there – imagine Led Zeppelin if they’d decided to be a chamber-pop group.

4 Big Star – September Gurls

“I’d never had an easy relationship with a woman that didn’t degenerate into some kind of deception or bad feeling,” Alex Chilton once said, neatly capturing the powerpop ethos of drama and dishevelled desperation. That powerpop has become synonymous with the grinning dorks of the “skinny-tie” scene is a joke. These were barbed love songs that often deconstructed or subverted pop-romance tropes. The spelling of “gurls” here is key: this is an askew take on female worship. “I loved you, well, never mind,” drawls Chilton in that disconcertingly high voice of his, followed by: “I’ve been crying, all the time.” If you want to find out what he’d been up to during the summer of 1973 when he wrote this song, read all about it in Holly George-Warren’s fascinating 2014 tome, A Man Called Destruction. And if you want to know why Big Star are rated as highly as the 60s gods who inspired them, check out 1974’s Radio City, their second album, from which this object lesson in warped dynamics and daisy-glazed harmonies is taken.

5 Dwight Twilley – Baby Let’s Cruise

Twilley is mostly remembered these days, especially in the US, for his debut hit, I’m On Fire, which reached No 16 in summer 1975, or for Girls, also No 16, from 1984. They’re fine, but what you really need to hear are his gorgeous first three albums – Sincerely (1976), Twilley Don’t Mind (1977) and Twilley (1978) – because they are jam-packed with wayward pop goodness, with askew productions and hard-to-categorise (but “ethereal rockabilly” comes close) compositions such as Sincerely, TV, Looking for the Magic, Out of My Hands and the dazed, dazzling Baby Let’s Cruise, on which he does an impression of a deranged teen heartthrob. On Spotify you can check out his re-creation of most of the Beatles’ White Album and another collection of Beatles covers in a Magical Mystery Tour-aping sleeve.

But as with Eric Carmen, there is more to him than an ability to faithfully re-create the music of his heroes. He was almost a 50s/60s über-hybrid for the 70s and beyond: he had an uncanny melodic sense, his voice was a Presleyish quaver, and the sonics were often heavy on the Sun Records reverb. Plus, he looked like Jim Morrison (he was rumoured to have been on the shortlist for the main role in Oliver Stone’s the Doors). Twilley could have been a contender, all right. Turns out, though, that his labelmate at Leon Russell’s Shelter was the one who made it big. Blond bloke. Funny teeth. What was his name again? Ah, yes …

6 Tom Petty - American Girl

Petty? Powerpop? Maybe, maybe not. But this song is powerpop in the highest degree. It’s a controversial choice, for sure, because Petty is synonymous with heartland rock and roots music in general, whereas powerpop is far beyond such earthy music sources. Powerpop eschews the simple in favour of the lushly ornate. Most of its main players – Michael Brown, Chilton, Rundgren – had one foot in pop’s avant-garde. But this one belongs here, no question.

You want confirmation that powerpop was 60s pop energised, amplified and enhanced? Look no further than this burst of glory, which takes Roger McGuinn’s Byrdsian jangles into the stratosphere. Name one Byrds track that has an equivalent whomp factor. See? This has the propulsion of a jet and by the guitar solo it actually achieves ascension. Rolling Stone ranked it 76th on the list of the 100 greatest guitar songs of all time. No way are there 75 better guitar songs than this.

7 Cheap Trick - I Want You to Want Me

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The Rockford, Illinois, band rocked harder – on Hot Love and He’s a Whore, to name but two – but this is their pop zenith. Cheap Trick were a brilliant idea made flesh: take two geeks (guitarist Rick Nielsen and drummer Bun E Carlos) and put them in a band with two sun-kissed Adonises (singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson). They had art prank written all over them, further giving the lie to the notion that powerpop was some kind of dumb 60s throwback. This was high-concept stuff. I Want You to Want Me was songwriter Nielsen’s attempt to rival the pop of the day – Abba, disco – only with plenty of hard rock wallop. Job done, sort of. There are heavier, more raucous versions of the track, notably on their breakthrough Cheap Trick at Budokan 1978 live set, but to really enjoy its candy flavours and sherbet zip you need the original version, from 1977’s In Color, an album that predates Nirvana’s plan to combine Beatles melody with Black Sabbath heaviness on Nevermind by a decade and a half.

8 Shoes – Boys Don’t Lie

Like Cheap Trick, Shoes came from Illinois – a town called Zion – and they had an idea of their own: to take bubblegum-sweet pop and bury it beneath several layers of distortion and snow-white fuzz, some eight years before the Jesus and Mary Chain had a similar notion. It was 1977 DIY pop minus the safety pins and nihilism. Shoes recorded the album Black Vinyl Shoes in singer-guitarist Jeff Murphy’s living room and pressed 1,000 copies on their own label, Black Vinyl Records. It was sold at local record stores and by mail order through Bomp! magazine, and licensed a year later to PVC Records. It got some attention, and earned the band a major label deal with Elektra. But as per most powerpop stories, they remained a cult attraction, adored by a few die-hards who could hear the future in their breathy-voiced, blissed-out blitzkriegs.

9 The Records – Starry Eyes

Powerpop was essentially an American response to the British Invasion, made by Anglophiles a couple of years too young to have been in bands the first time round. Which makes the Records an oddity – English kids in love with the US Brit fetishists. They were more likely to name drop Big Star and the Raspberries in interviews than the names of their 60s forebears. They were formed out of the ashes of the Kursaal Flyers, a pub rock group featuring drummer Will Birch, and emerged in 1978, around the same time as the Pleasers, the Knack et al. Their 1979 debut album Shades in Bed was produced by Robert John “Mutt” Lange and Tim Friese-Greene, but it didn’t quite do the business back home for Virgin. The single Starry Eyes, ironically, fared better in the US, where it reached No 56. No wonder: it had the charm, and the chime, of Petty’s American Girl, with an ascending guitar line, tight harmonies, a swooning chorus, and lyrics that seemed to evoke an infatuation with the love song itself.

10 The dB’s – Black and White

Spotify lets us down. The final track in this list, especially given the 70s remit, should have been (I Thought) You Wanted to Know, the 1978 single by Chris Stamey – the Alex Chilton disciple and former Sneakers wunderkind – recorded with Television guitarist Richard Lloyd. It encapsulated everything Stamey tried to do later with his band the dB’s and provided the perfect climax to the decade’s powerpop action. Still, this track, from 1981’s Stands for Decibels, the debut dB’s album, is a fabulous reminder of a music that was in itself partly nostalgic. But it looks forward as much as it looks back: to REM (fans of Big Star and the dB’s), to Teenage Fanclub and Posies, to late-80s/90s indie/college rock and alternative guitar music in general. With their sloppy aesthetic, pop concision and wired intensity, the dB’s marked the end of an era, and the start of another. Just don’t call it powerpop.