Marshall Crenshaw - The Wild, Exciting Sounds Of Marshall Crenshaw Extended Liner Notes

Marshall sat down with journalist Marc Allan to talk about his new live set, The Wild, Exciting Sounds Of Marshall Crenshaw.

DISC ONE:

MC: Back in the ‘80s (and before and after, I guess) there were a handful of syndicated radio programs, live-in-concert type radio programs on FM Rock stations, usually broadcast on Sunday nights.. Often, or mostly, whenever we did one of these things (and we did ‘em all) I’d go in after the fact and do some post-production: I’d “fix” things, and I’d be sitting with the engineer when the mix was done.. But I listened to the stuff on Disc One of this package, and didn’t hear that there was any post-production “fixing” done on it, and the way it’s mixed is not the way I would’ve mixed it. I didn’t listen and think, “Oh yeah, I know where this came from; I remember working on it”; it was all brand new to me. What I do know is that it’s US in 1983, and I love it. One thing that made me very happy about it was that there are some “Field Day” songs on there; “Field Day” is my ill-fated but legendary second album, and my own favorite of my major-label albums. I never heard any live recordings of tunes from that album, or at least not in a very long time, so I was really pleased to hear these nice versions, with these cool arrangements and everything, of some songs from that album. That put a big dumb grin on my face.. It was a happy surprise for me.

MC: To be honest, I started listening at first with a sense of trepidation, thinking “Oh man, here we go”. That’s funny, isn’t it? On the track listing I saw an Al Green song that we used to play; I was worried when I saw the title, thinking “This could be really weird”, but then I listened and thought, “Aww, I really like these kids”. My brother and I just worshipped all those Al Green/Willie Mitchell records, and we hit on one that we could do something with: I guess it was maybe THE one out of the whole batch that we could personalize, and come up with a version of that we could actually play. So I love that one- another nice surprise. 

MC: The whole thing intrigues me now- I wish I could know, for instance, what guitars I’m playing at these shows. Back then I had a Guild Thunderbird that I wish I still had, and a 1962 Gretsch that I still do have.. Anyway, whatever it is, I’m sounding really good- the whole band is- it sounds like kids having fun. It was such a cool band, with Chris Donato, me and Robert, and our brother John hitting the orchestra bells and the tambourine and whatever else he had up there; we were a trio and then he snuck up on stage with us one night and I let him stay.

MC: I really like the whole repertoire on Disc One, with the Elvis Presley tunes, and the Al Green tune, and our own stuff, especially the “Field Day” songs; there’s a song on Disc One called “Try”, one of my favorite songs that I ever wrote- I think it’s so beautiful.. Like I’ve been saying, the whole thing came at me as a surprise, and a nice surprise.

It was just day-to-day life for us at this time to get up onstage and play that music, and we’re really locked in.

MC: Songwriting always was a means to an end for me, to create a vehicle for a performance or to make a record. Fortunately I was great at it a lot of the time. I started to have a style as a songwriter- that came sort of late in life; I was past 25. And the whole thing of me being a Rock frontman, that was a late-stage career-path choice; I hadn’t been training all my life for that particular job. But all of a sudden everything came together in my mind, what I wanted the vibe of the music to be, etc. So I went down that road.

DISC TWO notes:

MC: The second disc is a random assortment of stuff- it’s me going through my archives, listening and thinking, “OK, that’s a great song that I still really love”, or “OK, I didn’t blow the guitar solo on that one”, or “I mostly sang in tune all the way through”, and making choices that way. I guess the core of it though, are the songs that I did with The Bottle Rockets, and they’re all from the same show- one from early 2014. About 8 or 9 years in a row (2011-19) I did shows every year with them. We had the same agent for a minute, or a couple years, and he suggested that we team up. I loved it right away; I was well aware of them, and had been a fan, from the start. 

In fact, we were about to tour together in 2021 but then the leader of the band decided to retire from show business! He had to stay home during the pandemic of course, but then decided that he really liked it there, which I actually understand; I’m not ready to opt for that myself yet, but... So me and The Bottle Rockets is a thing that is over now.. We just played so great together, I thought. 

I picked a handful of songs from a show that we happened to have a multi-track recording of; those are the core of Disc Two. And there’s also an instance of me doing a Bottle Rockets song, from before I ever knew that I’d play with them. I thought that would make a nice set-up for the tracks where it’s me and them.

Among the others on Disc Two are a couple of tunes from a solo show that I did at a performing-arts center in Talkeetna, Alaska- I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that name on anybody’s live album before..

I was up in Alaska with Dan Bern- it was his fifth or sixth time there, my first. We played in Anchorage of course, sold out this nice 3,000 seat performing-arts center, did about 5 shows altogether including Talkeetna. He and I had both worked on a film project just before we met each other in Alaska, a film called “Walk Hard- The Dewey Cox Story”. 

We almost got killed while we were there, on a commuter plane going back to Anchorage after playing at the Orpheum Theater on Kodiak Island. We got stuck at the airport all day from morning to night, couldn’t leave ‘cause the wind was too windy. Finally at about 11 PM we got up in the air, and we were just getting the crap knocked out of us the whole way. Have you heard of Senator Ted Stevens? He got killed in a little plane, just a couple years after retiring from the Senate, going back to Alaska. That really rang a bell with me when it happened; it reminded me of those moments up there in that little commuter plane when I knew for sure that we were done. But then we weren’t. After we landed we were walking down the hall at the Anchorage airport and Dan said, “I should’ve known better than to get on a small plane with you”, making a joke about the fact that I’d played Buddy Holly in “La Bamba”, right? Anyway, he and I got to be friends up in Alaska, and wrote a song together (along with Matthew Bair) just a few months later- “Live and Learn”, which is on Disc Two.

MC: I like that there’s some representation of songs of mine from this current Century on Disc Two; there’s also one from 1991, a favorite of mine called “Walking Around”- that track stands out for being very lo-fi, rough around the edges; it’s from a cassette. I opted to include it- I really enjoyed that band that I had right at that moment, with Mitch Easter, Angie Carlson playing the synth pad, Ron Pangborn on drums, trying to stay locked in with this silly loop that I asked him to play along with- Brad Jones on bass, really a stellar group, and we bonded nicely.

MC: “Something’s Gonna Happen”- that same song is on both discs?! Oops. Is that OK? It was not intentional, hahahaha. Senior moment, I guess.

It is actually a significant career-song for me, the A-side of the first record ever with my name on it, a 12-inch single on Alan Betrock’s Shake Records label, a NYC turntable hit, thanks to Meg Griffin at WNEW; she also broke Robert Gordon’s version of “Someday Someway” at pretty much the same time, which certainly added to the critical-mass thing that we were building in NY at the time. So, that song’s on both discs- why not?...

MC: I decided at one point, around 2012, that I didn’t want to make any more albums ever again, but I still wanted to make new recordings, so I tried to figure out how that could work, a different approach that would motivate me, inspire me. I wound up doing an EP every six months for three years running. “I Don’t See You Laughing Now”, was the title track of the first one. I wrote the lyrics for that one myself, after watching “Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room”- I decided to have the lyrics be a re-cap of the film. The whole “vinyl resurgence” thing was just starting at that point, and I was really delighted about it- each of the EPs was on 10-inch vinyl (and of course digital formats too). Starting with the third one, I co-wrote most of the songs with Dan Bern and, with his help, came up with a bunch of keeper songs of mine that I still play.

MC: As I said, the thing with me and The Bottle Rockets is a thing that’s over now, but that was a chance to get a nice, really high-level presentation of my stuff; it was a great live situation for me for a bunch of years. Somebody that was at any of those shows and loved it like we did can now have part of one night’s worth as a reminder. 

The good news is that I do have some shows coming up with the 3 guys who didn’t quit the band (laughs). I think that’ll be great.

MC: I want to say that I do love both Disc One and Disc Two. I put Disc Two together myself, but Disc One, as I said, is material that kinda landed in my lap, courtesy of the president of Sunset Blvd. Records. And I’m really fond of it, especially since it has “Field Day” tunes on it.