Power Pop for the people

You don’t really expect to set aside calendar space to write about the passing of Doug Feiger, lead singer/songwriter of The Knack. But when his passing comes within a month or so of Alex Chilton’s — leader of power pop pioneers Big Star who died last week of heart failure, age 59 — then you definitely pencil him in, too.

The Knack, oddly, were more famous and popular than the Memphis cult band Big Star, basically on the strength of breathy power pop confections like My Sharona (from the band’s 1979 debut, “Get The Knack,” a “Meet The Beatles!” pastiche). Boy, was this album big when it came out. You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing Good Girls Don’t, and other winking/leering odes to teenage lust sung by Feiger in a kind of pleading, hormone-oozing whimper. One got the feeling that Doug Feiger really did like the little girls. The band even named their second album “But The little Girls Understand” after a line from Willie Dixon’s Back Door Man. It bombed.

But maybe that’s because The Knack suffered an identity crisis. Their debut was chock-full of pounding anthems in the spirit of what was then called New Wave; their black and white photos echoed The Beatles, but featured the perm stylings and leather vest-look of post-Blondie New Wave. The music, though, was pure power pop: sharp blasts of guitar, catchy choruses, hard-core backbeat, all echoing the British Invasion attack of the mid-‘60s, usually in 4/4 time.

Though Feiger and The Knack soldiered on, they soon became a footnote in rock history, instantly recognizable for the pounding riff of My Sharona, and instantly forgettable… until their perennial anthem turned up in Reality Bites (Winona Ryder dancing to the song in a quickie-mart). Quentin Tarantino reportedly wanted to use the same song during the Ving Rhames hillbilly rape scene in Pulp Fiction (“It’s got a perfect butt-f*cking beat,” he told Rolling Stone at the time), but backed off because he had a thing about not using pop songs featured in other movie soundtracks.

Feiger no doubt enjoyed the career renaissance; The Knack carried on touring with new members up until the end, Valentine’s Day 2010, when the singer succumbed to brain lung cancer at age 55 after several years of battling both.

Alex Chilton, on the other hand, was a teen idol, or at least a popular 16-year-old singer with The Boxtops back in 1966, singing soul-influenced hits like The Letter and Cry Like a Baby. Eventually he wanted out, opting to team up in 1971 with Chris Bell, a moody pop songwriter who also hung around Stax Records in Memphis, and the rhythm section of Jody Stephens and Andy Hummel. (The band got their name from a local grocery store chain.) Their touchstone: British pop from the ‘60s, the spiraling sound of the Byrds and the Beach Boys, a bit of folk thrown in for good measure. Steeped in a love of harmonies, wall-sized guitar riffs and wormhole melodies, the self-proclaimed Anglophiles released “#1 Record” in 1972 — to critical acclaim, zero sales and worldwide indifference.

Just like The Velvet Underground, though, of whom Brian Eno claimed “only 1,000 people bought their first album, but every one of them started a band,” Big Star exerted an almost apostolic pull on generations of bands looking to go beyond “power pop.” The Replacements (who recorded a song called Alex Chilton for 1982’s “Pleased to Meet Me”) were huge fans, as were Scotland’s Teenage Fanclub, who rediscover Big Star’s sound on albums like “Bandwagonesque” and “A Catholic Education.” Bands like The Posies were such fans, they even joined up with Chilton on his 2005 Big Star resurrection, “In Space.” And of course, Cheap Trick (shameless disciples) recorded a version of Big Star’s In the Street for the opening credits to That ‘70s Show.

On his own, Chilton went on to produce classic records by The Cramps and work with the dBs and Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, besides touring sporadically and putting out a body of solo work that is, to say the least, idiosyncratic. “Like Flies on Sherbet” from 1979. for instance, is the kind of ramshackle album that Lester Bangs might have cooked up in his brain if it didn’t actually exist: a big, fat lo-fi middle finger to the record labels, the music biz, the whole star machinery. The punks loved it.

It’s a sign of how nonchalant Chilton’s career had become by the ‘80s that he worked as a dishwasher for a time in New Orleans and had to be evacuated from his home there in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit. But he continued with sporadic solo efforts and the occasional Big Star reunion tour up until the end.

But back in 1973, by the time Big Star was ready to record its sophomore effort, the band was already melting down. Band tensions led the volatile Chris Bell to quit (he died in a car crash in 1978, leaving behind the damaged solo relic, “I Am the Cosmos.”) Chilton picked up with his rhythm section and a handful of brilliant new songs, some co-written with Bell, others pointing to a newer, loose-limbed direction. Songs like “September Gurls” will live forever, not because Chilton so perfectly mixed Beach Boy harmonies and Byrds guitar chiming, but because the song simply plants a glazed smile on every pop fan’s face. Elsewhere, tunes like “Back of a Car” feature the kind of descending riff and zig-zag melodic changes that harked to Chilton’s increasingly quirky mental state. The rhythm section’s uneven lurches on tracks like “Mod Lang” and “O My Soul” hinted at dark times; but unlike the genuine breakdowns that bedeviled musicians like Syd Barrett and Skip Spence (whose “Oar” from 1968 is one chilling artifact of mental disintegration), Chilton kept one hand on the artistic rudder at all times, moving into Ardent Studios again in late 1974 to record “Sister Lovers,” the third Big Star release. It was shelved for several years, deemed unreleasable until bootlegs forced its issue.

This one has “crack-up” written all over it, with sparse songs spread out to infinity with minimal drum splashes and laconic guitar strums telegraphed in from outer space. And what songs: tracks like Kangaroo became a Jeff Buckley performance staple. Bands like This Mortal Coil interpreted two tracks from “Sister Lovers” for their dream-poppy “It’ll End in Tears” in 1984. Songs like Dream Lover and Big Black Car are beyond strung out; they are slackness personified, committed to vinyl.

Chilton was clearly glum to the bone about Big Star’s lack of commercial success, but producer Jim Dickinson allowed him to dance it out with his tortured, skeletal muse in the studio: the result, on eerie tracks like Holocaust, are as haunting as anything recorded by Elvis Presley in Sun Studios; cuts like Nightime, Blue Moon and O Dana are decorated with orchestral flourishes, but underneath the songs are ghostly structures wrapped in pain (“Get me out of here… I hate it here...” Chilton sings on Nightime, sounding like a suicide note).

Is this what power pop had become? “Sister Lovers” came out in 1978 in the thick of punk music. For most it was a hard album to love, an impossible album to sell, and equally impossible to ignore. And, of course, it went on to influence a thousand alternative bands and songwriters in decades to come. Like Dougie Feiger, Alex Chilton had had his taste of brief pop superstardom; the three Big Star albums, it turned out, were for the ages.

10 Power Pop classics

(as compiled by Wikipedia):

Badfinger, No Matter What (1970)

Todd Rundgren, Couldn’t I Just Tell You (1972)

The Raspberries, Go All The Way (1972)

Big Star, September Gurls (1974)

Cheap Trick, Surrender (1978)

The Cars, Just What I Needed (1978)

Buzzcocks, Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) (1978)

The Records, Starry Eyes (1979)

Nick Lowe, Cruel to Be Kind (1979)

The Knack, My Sharona (1979)