The Beat Patrol

Taken from a July 3, 1982 issue of Melody Maker comes this article about Marshall Crenshaw, who had just recently released his brilliant and timeless self-titled debut album…

The New York press insists Marshall Crenshaw looks like Buddy Holly but the cumulative effect of his appearance, his thin crooked smile, and the slight Oriental shape of his eyes actually suggests Neil Innes playing John Lennon in the Rutles. “Yeah,” Crenshaw chuckles to himself, “I’m a Ron Nasty clone.”

But Crenshaw is anything but nasty – his interview demeanor is more Joe College than Hard Rocker and he is definitely not a clone. Like the straight Fifties cut of his clothes, a natural unpretentious fit that is far removed from the nostalgic aping of rockabilly cultists, the 11 Crenshaw originals on Marshall Crenshaw (which just hit the US charts with the impact of a potential smash) are economic, authentic, even friendly evocations of pop gone by, recollections of Everly harmonies, Holly songhook curves, and Motown R&B classicism filtered through the white suburban garage band experience.

Songs like “Someday, Someway” with its cheery Hollydaze thrust, rich vocal harmony winners, “Girls…” and the sweet serenading “Mary Anne”, and the rousing “She Can’t Dance”, with its hot rhythmic Rockpile snap, sound that familiar, as if you’ve heard them all before but with slightly different words, melodies, titles, etc.

But you’ve never heard them like this. There is both a timelessness and timeliness to Marshall Crenshaw that marks it as a very Eighties expression of classic Fifties and Sixties songwriting values. The high-stepping call-to-party “Rockin’ Around NYC” recalls the goodtime teenage sunshine of the Beatles’ “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You”, but kicks with a bass-and-drum power (take a bow, Chris Donato and Marshall’s brother, Robert, respectively) that’s closer to atomic punk.

And while the Crenshaw trio – yes, just three people make all this joyous noise with Marshall on combo lead-rhythm guitar – cop the album’s one cover version “Soldier of Love” note-for-note off an old Beatles’ bootleg, they nevertheless color the soulful turns of this ’62 chestnut and the Beatles’ white doo-wop vocal arrangement with a desperate tension that Costello would admire.

“I appreciate that,” Crenshaw smiles somewhat bashfully, “because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. I’m trying honestly to reflect my interests, musically and otherwise. Actually, mostly musically because I don’t have too many other interests besides music. This is no oldies or power pop thing. I am interested besides music, so we end up reflecting a lot of different things.

“I’ve been listening to music all my life and I think one of the things I do better than anything else is listen. My long background playing and listening has prepared me for songwriting.

“You see, the bottom line for me is that in writing songs and playing I’m doing something that reflects my own interests in music. I’m very aware of what kind of terms people think in when they talk about pop music. That’s all nonsense, this business about the next big thing, what does this mean, how it relates to something else. The idea of taking it all seriously is repulsive to me.”

A precocious rock ‘n’ roll child, he claims he was but three or four years old when he first heard the records that set his course for life – Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be The Day”, “Party Dolly” by Buddy Knox, the Everly Brothers white Southern harmony brew on “Wake Up Little Susie”, the original “Black Slacks” by Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones.

His rock and R&B education continued with help from a very hip dad (“he used to listen to rock ‘n’ roll and R&B, very down-to-earth American stuff”) and a few older, wiser teenage cousins.

Growing up in the Detroit suburb of Berkley added Motown and that city’s free-swinging garage band scene to Crenshaw’s potent mix of influences.

“Smokey Robinson, Brian Wilson in a way, R&B on the radio in Detroit” – Crenshaw runs off an impromptu list – “the first Stooges album, which I think is one of the most profound rock ‘n’ roll records ever made.”

And Buddy Holly?

“I’d have to say real strong. No question. But it’s not just on me. He influenced, in turn, so many other things I’ve loved as well. Like the Beatles. Their early stuff was individually their own, ‘Please, Please Me’ and ‘She Loves You.’

But none of that stuff would exist without Buddy Holly. So my loving him during my childhood and while I was growing up, then continuing to listen to other rock music influenced by him – there was no way I could get away from him. His influence would compound as time went on.”

The result is the Holly you hear in Crenshaw’s songs and spartan guitar-rhythm-voice arrangements, but it’s not a plagiaristic echo of old Coral 78s.

What Crenshaw has picked up from the old master is a sense of harmonic economy, a clever manipulation that yields a clarion pop richness with only trio voicings, and a deft command of his various musical passions, the sum of parts that he makes whole in his songwriting, i.e. the stirring Motown major-minor turns and Tempts-cum-Beach Boys harmonies of “Girls.”

“That song isn’t real typical of what I do,” Crenshaw contends. “There are a lot of transitions in it. Most of my songs are narrowed down into one sort of statement, an execution of one idea. I think of each song as an entity in itself. Sometimes I’ll try to take old ideas I threw away earlier and work them into a new song, but most of the time it doesn’t work.

“I get the best results, bang!, right there on the spot, taking an idea and seeing it straight through. Like ‘Someday, Someway.’ That was one of the first ones I wrote once I started to get serious about songwriting. I knew exactly what kind of atmosphere I wanted, the exact emotion to project. I heard it in my head and the whole thing took five minutes to write down.”

But Crenshaw would not start seriously songwriting (by that meaning more than two embarrassingly naïve tunes a year) until late 1979. Instead, he spent the Seventies playing the most unlikely gigs imaginable.

He played bass in a backup band for a Hawaiian dancer. He made the pilgrimage to L.A. to peddle a four-song demo and fared so badly that he had to work his way home touring with a C&W band. Then there was Beatlemania.

In 1976, at depressingly low ebb, Crenshaw answered a classified ad in Rolling Stone soliciting Beatle look-and-soundalikes for “the incredible simulation” stage show with a perfect carbon copy tape of “I Should Have Known Better” (recorded at home with Robert on drums) and a photo of himself in his wire-rimmed glasses. To his complete surprise, he landed the John Lennon role in the “Beatlemania” road company.

Also to his complete surprise, he discovered that playing Beatles songs six days a week in Beatles costumes in front of hokey slide and film projections was not such a gas. “Beatlemania,” he confesses, a deeply injured Beatles fan, “was like a nine-to-five job and a rather unpleasant one at that.”

Moving to New York in 1978 changed his life, literally. Robert Crenshaw was already here when Marshall arrived, attending audio engineering school.

Inspired by the city’s cross-musical energy, he began writing in earnest and recording basement tapes with Robert. An ad for bass players in the Village Voice yielded Chris Donato, and an ad for Alan Betrock’s newly formed Shake Records in New York Rocker eventually yielded Crenshaw’s first record, the sterling 1981 12-inch “Something’s Gonna Happen/ She Can’t Dance”.

“I had made this tape in my living room,” Crenshaw explains, “a version of ‘Jungle Rock’ by Hank Mizell, a dance-rock version I thought of putting out as a record. So I called Alan up and dropped this tape off at his office. Later I got a call from him. What had actually happened was the cassette I’d given him had ‘Jungle Rock’ on one side it had some of my originals. He heard those and liked them a lot better.”

Luck was also with Crenshaw when he dropped off a demo of songs with producer Richard Gottehrer. Or to be more specific, he left them with the doorman at Gottehrer’s apartment building. Gottehrer liked the tape so much he cut three of Marshall’s songs (including “Someday, Someway”) with Robert Gordon and went on to co-produce Marshall Crenshaw.

Now Crenshaw has the New York and national music press at his feet and he admits somewhat sheepishly that he has never met an audience that didn’t like him.

“I get this question all the time from people outside New York City, about how it feels playing in New York and having to compete with all this outré stuff. And they don’t understand that’s what’s really cool about this place.

“Seeing that before I even got this band together, seeing how different musical things could work in this environment, that gave me something to work for. It gave me encouragement to do what I wanted to do and not be part of a particular scene or style. I knew I could follow my own instincts.

“No, we haven’t had any bad reactions at our shows, yet, which isn’t to say we never will. But there have been nights when I got off stage and through we were awful, like ‘what more could go wrong. I better go look for a job in a Laundromat.’ And they still loved it.”

Marshall Crenshaw smiles weakly, as if embarrassed by all this good fortune.

“Still, I never feels like it’s in the bag. I know we’ve always gotta work for it. So far, we’ve just been real lucky.”

David Fricke