Marshall Crenshaw: Rock & Roll Craftsman
by Bill Beuttler
"...I put the words and the melodies together / I AM MUSIC / and I Write the Songs..." He's just fooling around singing the Barry Manilow tune at the soundcheck for a gig at Chicago's Park West, but there aren't many people out there these days who put words and melodies together as skillfully as Marshall Crenshaw. His clever lyrics and irresistible hooks made the Bo Diddley / Duane Eddy / Buddy Holly - influenced 32-year-old guitarist/songwriter a hit with critics from the beginning: Robert Palmer lauded Crenshaw's "well-crafted, upbeat songs that one walks away humming" in the New York Times before his debut album had even been released; Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder praised his "attitude-free enthusiasm, incisive guitar work, and non-stop hit parade of self-penned show stoppers." But Crenshaw's would-be Top 40 fare never really caught on the way he'd hoped it would (Someday, Someway, from his first album, remains his lone Top 40 single to date). Undaunted, the suburban Detroit native continues cranking out rootsy rock & roll gems for himself and his hardcore coterie of admirers.
Crenshaw was bored with his role as John Lennon in Beatlemania in February 1980, so he decided to give songwriting a whirl. By August of that year, he was playing his songs at gigs around Manhattan with his drummer brother, Robert, and bassist Chris Donato. After singer Robert Gordon recorded three of his tunes, Crenshaw was signed my Warner Bros.; his first album, Marshall Crenshaw, was released in the spring of 1982. Field Day, which followed the next year (with brother Robert and Donato still Crenshaw's lone sidemen), drew a lukewarm response from critics and was largely ignored by the general public. Disappointed by the tepid response to his second album and exhausted from two years of touring, Crenshaw took a couple of years off before bringing out his third album, the recently released Downtown, and hitting the road again.
Crenshaw has added some spit and polish to his act since his trio's first national tour, as well as a pair of guitarists - Graham Maby and Tom Teeley. The band was in top form this night, keeping the joint rockin' right through its second encore with a mixture of old showstoppers (Cynical Girl, There She Goes Again, The Usual Thing), new should-be (but likely won't be) hit singles (Little Wild One, Yvonne), and covers (Big Joe Turner's Shake, Rattle and Roll, Ferlin Husky's Gone - "the number one country song from 1957"). We spoke with Crenshaw just before he slipped on his performance garb - black pants and jacket, yellow shirt, red string tie, bright red alligator-skin boots - and hit the stage. He walked in wearing faded blue jeans and carrying his guitar, which he picked at nervously thoroughout the interview, pausing at one point to demonstrate the guitar solo from the Kingsmen's Louie Louie (he gives the impression of never putting the instrument down).
Marshall Crenshaw: So this is for down beat? Imagine the prestige. I used to subscribe to down beat a long time ago, when I was in junior high school.
Bill Beuttler: Were you into jazz?
MC: A little bit. I don't know why I subscribed to it, probably to look at the pictures and the ads. John Sinclair was the Detroit correspondent. He later founded the White Panther Party in Ann Arbor, Michigan; he was like the Detroit area's answer to Abbie Hoffman. A cool guy - he was a big influence on me [laughs]. So, what have you got up your sleeve?
BB: First off, you write a lot of nice lyrics, but do you consider yourself primarily a musician or a songwriter?
MC: Well, literally I started out as a musician first and didn't really get seriously into songwriting until I decided I wanted to be a recording star.
BB: When was that?
MC: February of 1980. I always dabbled in it, always found that I could scamp together rock & roll songs. But I never really sat down and said "Alright, now I'm going to create a body of work."
BB: When did you first pick up a guitar?
MC: My brother Robert and I come from a musical family: my cousin is singing backup for Ronnie Milsap down in Nashville, and there's a lot of people in my family who sing in church. So I could always play music - I was a musically inclined child. But I didn't actually start playing until about 1963 - I heard Louie Louie by the Kingsmen and the guitar solo captivated me. I wanted to play that solo and I had a guitar around the house, so I started actually fooling around with it in earnest.
BB: You toured with Beatlemania just before going solo. What else did you do before you went out on your own?
MC: Strictly bar bands. I was in an oldies band for a long time, because about 1974 or '75 I couldn't stand another minute of the current hits - I hated every one of 'em. The only records I liked during the '70s were Al Green records. So I joined this oldies band, 'cause I had a really burning interest in Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent and I wanted to play that music and not even be bothered with anything else. Later I was in a country & western band, a lounge band. I went out to L.A., ran out of money, and had to take a job with this very weird band - three women and myself. I was with them for about six months, and we toured this funny circuit that goes through Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah - just little towns all through those states. That was the last thing I did before I got in Beatlemania. In fact, that's what drove me to it.
BB: You must like bands like NRBQ [two members of which performed on his most recent album].
MC: Oh yeah. That crowd - Los Lobos and the Blasters, who else can I put in a plug for? There's this guitar player buddy of mine, D. Clinton Thompson, down in Missouri; Mitch Easter, who's a great guitar player; all those guys who are using the same sort of raw materials as me. I approve of every single one of them.
BB: On Downtown you didn't just stick with the trio that you had on the first two albums. Why did you bring in the new instrumentalists - and why did you choose the guys you chose?
MC: The reason I didn't use the guys I've used in the past is that I took about a year off. I left show business for a while, because I was really spiritually and physically exhausted after two straight years of touring...
BB: Were you writing during the layoff?
MC: I was mostly singing and playing around the house, ruminating or whatever. So the band didn't do anything for a long time; we were kind of out-of-touch with one another. when we did go back in the studio I found that we weren't able to really click together. That's why I ended up working with people outside of my regular band. The reason I worked with the guys I did work with - about half of them were friends of mine, people that I'd wanted to work with for a while, and the other half of the guys were friends of T-Bone Burnett's (the album's producer). So it's kind of a mixture. We were really loose about it, we'd just sort of call whomever we felt like calling in. G.E. Smith wound up playing on the thing 'cause the morning we were gonna put the solos on Yvonne I ran into him in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel. And I had played a date with the guys in NRBQ the weekend before. They opened up for us, and I was watchin' 'em onstage and said, "They've gotta play on the record."
BB: The band you're touring with now is the original trio plus a couple of guitarists. How has that changed your band's sound - what were you aiming at and why did you bring them in?
MC: Hmm. I brought them in for a lot of reasons. One reason is because I don't think there's any way the three of us could have pulled off the tunes on my new album. I got way into vocal harmonies due to my current infatuation with Marvin Gaye. I've been really influenced by him lately, listenin' to a lot of his later stuff, like the albums I Want You and Let's Get It On. There's all these lush background vocals - really gorgeous-sounding. Anyway, I got into a lot of that, and the three of us never could've pulled it off, because we just had myself and Chris Donato singing in the group. But the new guys do a lot of singing. I also didn't feel like I was cutting it anymore as the only guitar player in the band. It just was never gonna work at all. There was too much pressure on me. All that we could ever really do onstage was just kind of stand there and sweat; I wanted things to be a little bit more loose.
BB: You don't have any keyboards in the band - is that an aesthetic decision on your part or is it just that you don't want to lug them around on the road?
MC: On this last album we had a guy [Mitchell Froom] come in who was a keyboard player, and he played on a lot of the songs. Mostly what he would do, he would use this instrument called an Emulator - one of those things where you program sounds into it and then you play them back on the keyboard. Ninety percent of the sounds he used were either my voice or guitar sounds. So I've used keyboards sparingly on records, but mostly I'm a fanatic for the sound of guitars. And that's really all I care to hear. It is definitely a matter of taste on my part: I'm obsessed with guitars.
BB: Your first two records went over mainly with the critics and your own following. Were you expecting to have some hot singles?
MC: Yeah. When I was putting the stuff together for the first album my role models were Hall & Oates, Abba, people like that.
BB: Are you disappointed because there wasn't a lot of Top 40 reaction?
MC: Well, I can't say that I'm disappointed, no. When things came down the way they did, I was just sort of mildly disappointed. But mostly I was really happy. We were well-received right from day one; we've never had a record come out that's been totally ignored. I was surprised and sort of confused by it because I really was going in that direction - just about every track on the record was conceived as a single. I was trying to write real compact little pop songs, but maybe they were too compact. Maybe I was 15 years too late with that sound. But that's what I was going for, and that's what I thought we would be - a singles band. We're not; we're a cult band.
BB: What do you think's going to happen with the new album?
MC: I don't know. The album went up and then down and now it's starting to inch its way up again. My father says he thinks it will be on the charts for about six months, just hang around for a long, long while. He's pretty smart, and I hope he's right.
BB: Are you planning on taking some more time off after this tour, or are you going to be back in the studio again?
MC: I'm just starting now to get some ideas together for songs for the next record. But it's very early, you know.
BB: Is it going to be the touring band?
MC: I think so. I think that we should make a record. This is a really good rock & roll band, the best I've ever been in and one of the best I've ever heard - I'm really, really pleased with the band.
BB: This has been a fairly extended tour for you - first opening for Howard Jones and now as the headliner. What's it been like?
MC: You ever see that movie [This Is] Spinal Tap? Remember the scene where they're trying to find their way onstage and they can't? The ass-end of that happened to us. We were playing at the Universal Amphitheater in L.A., and when we left the stage after the set we went the wrong way and we all got lost. We got stuck between these two very dense curtains, and there was no way to see where we were going. The audience was trying to get us back for an encore, but we couldn't find our way offstage so we could get back onstage. Spinal Tap, as you may or may not know, is actually reality - I mean that's what being a rock band is like.
BB: I understand that some country people are doing some of your songs now.
MC: Yeah, I've got a couple of covers out of Nashville. I've had a song covered by the Bellamy Brothers and two songs covered by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
BB: Do you think your style's close to country?
MC: It seems that way. It's hard for me to follow contemporary country music on a day-to-day basis, because I live in New York City and there's no outlet for country music there at all. There's a station there that calls itself a country station, but it's a piss-poor excuse for a country station. They play Anne Murray, Lee Greenwood, Tom Jones - the lowest, cheapest pop music that's out there right now. So I don't really know what country is, I mean today. I've heard Ricky Skaggs and the Judds, and I really love them. That's about all I know, but I've heard there's supposed to be some good people out there.
BB: It seems like your music is based on craftsmanship, whereas a lot of the pop stars with big singles rely on theatrics and gimmicks - like Madonna's belly button. Do you think you're going to be able to have a lot of hit singles without the theatrics? Or do you care?
MC: I can't really imagine. See, I don't really understand why we haven't had any hit singles.
Again, it doesn't keep me awake at night or anything like that, because we're doing alright. But I
don't see why we shouldn't. Every single we've put out I would stand by; we've never put out a bad
record. So wait and see. I'll cross my fingers. I'm really not going to stop doing this, you know. I'm
having a good time.