At one time I owned a 12-string acoustic guitar. It was German, a Framus, and it rang. I later got a 12-string electric guitar, used, and as best as I remember it was a Vox Tempest.Mine didn't have its whammy bar, which is probably just as well. You don't want to have to retune a 12-string after a couple of pulls on one. The Vox didn't ring. It chimed. I think I traded in an electric piano, which I was having trouble mastering, to get it.
Anyone who remembers the Byrds and the strumming and picked countermelodies of their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" knows the allure of an electric 12-string.
Don't know where it is now. When my hands went out, and then when my marriage went kaput, most of my guitars were sold, given away or ran off in the middle of the night.
The above is to introduce today's Music Friday, my beloved power pop, a style of rock which often employs the electric 12-string. For example, our first song, The Plimsouls A Million Miles Away. You can actually see what looks suspiciously like a 12-string in the stage scenes from the video. Note the New Wave video stylings. We're in the early 80s again.
Next is Ballad of El Goodo by Big Star. Formed by the late great Alex Chilton, the band has been getting more attention, unfortunately due to Chilton's death. This song shows another facet of power pop. Great harmonies. In place of a 12-string the lead guitar is chorused, thus giving the feel of a 12-string.
I particularly like Freedy Johnston's cover of the old sixties chestnut, Love Grows. You know, "Love grows where my Rosemary goes, and nobody knows like me." There is something about stripping down an old pop song so that the harmonies are exposed and the guitar isn't drowned in strings.
One of my favorite early power pop bands were The Raspberries. Their songs seemed to all be about driving around with girlfriends and parking and pleading with them why they should have sex. Their biggest hit was "Go All The Way" which was about, well, you know. Today's pick is I Wanna Be With You. Here's what Eric Carmen was moaning into the ear of every underage girl in America:
If we were older
We wouldn't have to be worried tonight
Baby oh, I wanna be with you
So bad, (yes, I wanna be with you)
Oh, darlin (oh, I wanna be with you)
Oh yeah (yeah, I wanna be with you)
Well tonight's (tonight) the night
We always knew it would feel so right
So come on baby, I just wanna be with you
Not quite so happy is Del Shannon's Drop Down And Get Me. Shannon was a popular act in the 1960s. I wrote about his unhappy ending here a few years ago. A real American tragedy. Knowing that a few years later Shannon blew out the back of his head in a suicide using a hunting rifle makes his words in this song even more poignant: "People tell me there must be a heaven. They could be right 'cause I know there's a hell." Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers backed him on this song.
One of my favorite Tom Petty songs with one of my favorite bits of lyrics is Even The Losers. "Well, it was nearly summer when we sat on your roof. Yeah, we smoked cigarettes and we stared at the moon." To me, that is the finest of poetry. It evokes being young and dumb and wanting to be in love, not unlike a love sonnet rewritten on a napkin in a strip mall somewhere in Florida in thirty years ago. The character in this song hasn't gotten as far as the character in the Raspberries song, and yet hasn't reached the deadend of despair that Del Shannon arrived at in his song.
My last power pop tune for the day is by a Bay Area group, Rogue Wave. Their new album, Permalight, has a song that knocked me out, We Will Make A Song Destroy. I have no idea what the hell the song means, but it rocks. And I love the huge snare hit right before the chorus. Boom! "We will make a song destroy!"
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