Marshall Crenshaw
Downtown
Warner Bros., 1985

When smartly dressed, bespectacled Detroit native Marshall Crenshaw showed up on the scene with his 1982 self-titled Warner Bros. debut, some thought America now had its own Elvis Costello, filtered through a retro sound machine that included the British Invasion, Buddy Holly (whom Crenshaw portrayed in the 1987 movie La Bamba) and Sun Studio of the rockabilly years.

Marshall Crenshaw was hailed as a pop masterpiece. The single “Someday, Someway” entered the Top 40, the only Marshall Crenshaw song to do so.

Ten months after his debut, Crenshaw released the highly anticipated Field Day. It included the same musical lineup as his debut record – brother Robert on drums and Chris Donato on bass – but producer Steve Lillywhite (Soiuxsie & The Banshees, XTC, Peter Gabriel, U2, etc) came on board with a denser and more aggressive sound (Robert Crenshaw’s drums sound positively explosive throughout). Today many record junkies consider Field Day to be Crenshaw’s masterpiece to date, but at the time it was a critical and commercial failure that threw him into a spiritual funk and still frustrates him to this day believes it is his finest work from that period of his still productive life.

Kiln House
Fleetwood Mac
1970, Warner Brothers/Reprise Records

Today everyone thinks of Fleetwood Mac as the multi-million selling California band that featured Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in the late 1970s.

Most people are surprised to learn that Fleetwood Mac began as an all male blues band in England in the 1960s, and that the Buckingham/Nicks lineup was just one of many versions that formed under the same name after 1970 when original member/guitarist/singer Peter Green left the band, a casualty of the ’60s.

The band name came from the always tight rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood on drums and John McVie, bass, but it was Green, like so many of the guitar heroes of the day a former John Mayall Bluesbreaker (Green replaced Eric Clapton), who was the star of early Fleetwood Mac. He’s the guy who wrote “Black Magic Woman” for Fleetwood Mac in 1968. Yes, the same song that was a radio hit for for Santana in 1970, in which Carlos Santana pays homage to Green’s moody stringbending.

Fleetwood Mac began 1969 by flying to Chicago and recording at Chess Records with Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Otis Spann and Honeyboy Edwards for a record called Fleetwood Mac In Chicago. The same year they released the rocking Then Play On, which included the future FM staple “Oh Well.” It was an obvious statement that Fleetwood Mac was growing beyond the blues.

And then in May 1970, Peter Green left the band. When the Americanized version of Fleetwood Mac was big in 1977, Green was tracked down by a BBC reporter. He was living with his father and digging graves at the local cemetery for pocket change. He told the BBC interviewer he was damaged by LSD, and that’s why he left the band. Asked what he would do if the now wildly popular Fleetwood Mac asked him to rejoin the band, Green held up his hands, displaying long, curled over fingernails, and saying he couldn’t play again because of the nails.

That same year the remaining members of Fleetwood Mac – the eponymous Fleetwood and McVie,  and Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwin on vocals and guitars – released Kiln House, a 35-minute, 10-song romp that was so very different from the heavier, moodier music of the Peter Green years. Kiln House was the name of a converted oast house the band was living in at the time (an oast house is for drying hops for brewing).

The record is concise and playful. Light but not lite. It makes you happy, and that happiness begins with the charming cover art by Christine McVie, John McVie’s wife and a musician in her own right who had a British hit – “I’d Rather Go Blind” – with the band Chicken Shack. By the time the band was living in Kiln House, Christine was already a musical collaborator, even though her vocals on the record are uncredited. She does get credit, however, as co-writer of the song “Station Man.”

While in Los Angeles during the Kiln House tour in 1971, Jeremy Spencer followed Green’s example by suddenly leaving Fleetwood Mac and joing the religious group The Children of God (now Family International). Kiln House was his last Fleetwood Mac album.

Jeremy went on to another phase of his life. You can find out more at jeremyspencer.com. But he never really left music, as proved by the 2006 release Precious Little, a beautiful display of his slide guitar and his talent for covering obscure gems (“Take and Give,” a Sun records b-side by Slim Rhodes, and “Please Don’t Stop” by all-but-forgotten teen idol Fabian). He recorded it in Norway with a group of simpatico Norwegians. Find it at blindpigrecords.com.

But Kiln House is what we want to know about here. An e-mail Q&A ensued.

JL: I believe Peter Green had left the group just months before Kiln House was made, just after the landmark Then Play On. What was the discussion among remaining members about the direction the group would take?

Jeremy Spencer: I remember sitting with Mick, Danny and Christine in a small side room off the practice studio that occupied what decades ago used to be the oast-drying place for the making of beer (specifically, hops), and mulling over our future. All we knew, Danny and I, was that we had some material to record: me some parodies and he a few what someone quipped as ‘la-la-la’ tunes, due to being stymied for lyrics.

JL: Was there a decision made to take the band in a different direction?

JS: Not really. As I said, Danny and I had some stuff that we wanted to record. It wasn’t a question of whether it was to be blues-based or not. As a musician, when you have material you are itching to record and have the privilege to disregard public acceptance, as Peter did with ‘Albatross’, or ‘Man of the World’ etc. (and we assumed we did), you don’t think in terms of ‘oh is this fitting in with our accepted format?’ At least, I don’t think it should be. That’s what gave The Beatles, for instance, so much variety. The freedom to do anything musically they felt in their bones.

Now, I for one had become uninspired with my contributions at that point. A parody, an old rock and roll song, an Elmore James-based blues and so on. I had been there and done that, and I had nothing original up my sleeve.

JL: Had there been any talk of ending it then or changing the name of the band?

JS: I don’t recall any such talk!

JL: Kiln House is a definite break from the blues-based Fleetwood Mac of the late 1960s. The sensibilities displayed – for example, the playfulness of the album opener "This Is the Rock" – suggest that a veil had been lifted on talents that had not really been tapped by the band before. Was that the case?

JS: I think so. Very much in Danny’s case. Mine, I am not so sure. Recording old-style blues, ‘50s music and parodies at that time was not necessarily regarded as untapped talent unless you were Frank Zappa. I am pleasantly surprised, however, that many people, young and old nowadays are appreciating my ‘untapped talents’! I have recently been recording with a 33-year-old Detroit guitarist, Brett Lucas, and he pushes me to record my obscure material and new instrumentals along with the ’50s stuff!

JL: Were fans and/or record execs surprised by the "new" Fleetwood Mac? Do you recall any reaction to the record upon its release?

JS: Phew! In England, quite a hostile reaction! England was, and still is, understandably Peter Green territory. It was no surprise to me at least, and by the time we took that ‘Kiln House show’ on the road, then incorporating Christine on keyboards and vocals, we soon learned that it wasn’t going to fly in our home country!

Surprisingly, though, when we played in the States for that mid-summer 1970 tour, we met an overwhelming response. Clifford Davis (the band’s manager) said at the time, that our Kiln House album was the biggest seller there that Fleetwood Mac had ever had. That, of course, pleased the WB record execs! Most audiences were unfamiliar with our recent past and were lapping up what we giving them there and then. That was encouraging up to a point for me, but I still felt dry and uninspired musically.

An odd similarity just came to mind. When the ‘star’ of the Moody Blues, Denny Laine, the amazing vocalist that he was, left them, did they suffer? For a while, yes, but eventually, no. The Moodies went on to be bigger than Denny ever was or has been since. Same thing happened with Fleetwood Mac. Despite the departure of Peter, Danny or me, they went on to be one of the biggest bands in rock history. Why I am getting into this right now, I don’t know, but maybe it’s of reflective interest to some!

JL: Your songs in particular, show a fondness for the Sun sound and rockabilly. Were those significant influences for you?

JS: Absolutely. Once I was in a position to purchase anything and everything I could in that genre, I buried myself in it, and the more obscure the better! That’s why for decades I had longed to record ‘Take and Give’ by Slim Rhodes – a Sun records b side, and I finally got to do so on Precious Little. I have always had a special fascination and love for the unknown recordings or songs that are dear to a performing artist’s heart, especially (which is usually the case) when they are overlooked by the general public. Buddy Holly’s music is a case in point.

JL: I've always taken "Your Blood on the Floor" on side one as a parody of an American country song, taking the stereotypical cheated-on male of country song to the extreme ("I shot my darling three times or more. The reason I'm going, there's blood on the floor."), complete with honky tonk piano and weeping guitar. How did people respond to that song?

JS: I don’t know for certain. Some people loved it and others … well, they seemed puzzled, I think. I loved and still love that old Country music from the ‘50s and early ‘60s, and in that hippie era, the only way you could perform ‘50s bop and doo-wop or country was to parody it, sad to say. Actually, people objected more to me recording Donnie Brooks’ ‘Mission Bell’!

The thing is, Jim, I did what I always did and do – musically – what I wanted. It wasn’t and isn’t a matter of ‘pleasing the fans’ and prostituting myself, nor is it a matter of being so-called selfish and not pleasing the ‘fans that put you where you are’, (which is arguable these days!) It just turns out that one day you and your music is ‘in’, and the next day it is ‘out’. You just have to know how to deal with it when it’s ‘out’.

When I first played Elmore James at 17 yrs old, it was curious to many who hollered for the Rolling Stones or Beach Boys or said I should save myself the trouble and use a whammy bar like Hank B. Marvin. Then blues became the in thing once Mayall and Clapton hit the scene.

Peter Green had the same ‘vision’– ‘if you don’t like it, there’s the door.’

JL: The next tune, "Hi Ho Silver" by Fats Waller and Ed Kirkeby, sounds like you got to do some Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano. Who came up with the idea to cover Mr. Waller?

JS: Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n Roll Trio in 1956! I based it on his recording of the song, originally called ‘Honey Hush.’ The guitar riff on his version was a slightly modified take on ‘The Train Kept a-Rollin’’ which was on the same Decca vinyl I heard it on. In hindsight, I would have preferred to have toughened up that riff as being the main drive behind it and kept it insistent and steady.

JL: Two of the 10 songs are credited to several band members, including the incredible "Station Man." How did "Station Man" come together between you, Danny Kirwan and John McVie?

JS: The McVie here is Christine. Danny wrote the tune and I believe it was in that very side room at Kiln House that the three of us came up with those lyrics.

JL: I've read that the second side opener, the Buddy Holly tribute "Buddy's Song" which is credited to Holly's mother, Ella Holley, was really written by you. Is that correct? If so, why credit Buddy's mother?

JS: I did not write it. Buddy’s mother wrote it by stringing together titles of her son’s songs. I first heard the tune by Bobby Vee in 1964, and I think he even recorded it at Norman Petty’s Clovis studio in New Mexico.

JL: Christine McVie is credited with the charming cover art, but I've come across several references that claim she also contributed unaccredited background vocals. I've listened and just can't find her. Did she sing on the record?

JS: Yes she did. She sang back-up vocals. Her voice was in a lower register, so you may have mistaken her for one of us males!

JL: Kiln House was your last stand with Fleetwood Mac before your life went in another direction. I've always thought of Kiln House as a joyous record. Do you have fond memories of it and the times?

JS: A joyous record? Hmmm. Well, that was a summation of many fans and critics in their opinion of the album (in the USA!). We weren’t consciously going in that direction, but I do believe outside ‘forces’, if you like, were steering us away from the brooding, negative darkness of previous endeavors. The hippie generation in 1970 USA was facing a terrible impasse. ‘Where do we go from here? Our utopia is a hookah pipe dream, and where are we?’

‘A generation lost in space’ as Don McLean said in response, ‘With no time left to start again.’

I personally had felt that the joy had gone out of our music. For me it wasn’t fun anymore, and viewing the progression of videos of us from that time shows us looking less and less happy. Playing music seemed to be becoming a chore and a labored expression of misery and musical artistic perfection. Hence, Pete and I bowed out, albeit for different reasons.

JL: Have you ever thought about what might have happened musically had you stayed with the band?

JS: At the time, I was perceiving a little of what could have been the direction should I have stayed with them. I was looking forward to doing more harmony vocal stuff. Maybe we would have gelled more, incorporated Christine’s creativity and all that, but I think in the end we would have all sat staring at each other with big fat question marks over our heads. For me, personal issues were overriding musical considerations.

JL: Anything people should know about Jeremy Spencer in the year 2010?

JS: I am recording 2 CD’s worth of material with a wonderful accomplished team of Detroit musicians, Brett Lucas (guitar), Todd Glass (drums), and James Simonson (bass), and I get to play piano and keyboards; something I have not done in a studio for almost 40 years! I hope to play this year with them in Europe, Canada (a very appreciative audience, by the way) and there in the States.

If you and any of your readers pray, please keep those hopes in them!

Failure, The Posies, Popllama Records, Seattle, 1988

By Jim Lundstrom

There are many tempting stories that tugged at the mind for this new column about great slabs of vinyl, but it seemed appropriate to begin with the fairy tale story of Failure, a record that launched the careers of young Bellingham, Wash., musicians Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow (aka The Posies).

Stringfellow was in Beijing, making an album with a Mongolian group, when we talked by telephone last month about the lovely piece of blue vinyl he and Auer made as The Posies in 1988.

That first recording by The Posies is one of the great stories of power pop: two kids decide to make a demo tape of their songs. The right people hear it. They’re signed to the label they had their eyes on from the start, form a real band, go on tour and continue to make music into the next century, including 17 years as sidemen to the late Alex Chilton in the reformed Big Star.

Failure is probably one of the smartest debut records ever to come around, especially when you consider it’s just two fresh kids writing, singing and producing themselves in a retro-pop style that was a huge departure from the overly produced music of the late 1980s. If you don’t know Failure, you should. Here’s what Ken Stringfellow had to say about it.

“Jon and I go back a ways. We met even before Jon was in high school and I was just starting high school. By the time we started on this album, which we began working on when I was in my second year of university and Jon was in his first year, we’d already been working together for a few years.

“Jon’s dad was a university professor by trade but a very good musician and had been involved in the hippie/folk scene around Bellingham, Wash., where we came from. Being a big hippie town, it was a big stop on the folk circuit.

“As Jon developed his musical skills, Jon and his dad embarked on a project together to build a small recording studio in their house. They had an 8-track analog tape machine, a small mixing console and some outboard gear. At this time, being the ’80s, which was the birth of a whole range of Japanese digital devices that were coming into their own. That modern stuff was making the ’60s stuff look terribly dated. They were able to get stuff that now is highly sought after, vintage audio gear that at the time was considered out of fashion and not cool any more. So they actually had some pretty cool stuff and just the right amount of stuff. Plenty for us to work with. We would spend our days in high school at Jon’s house making music and recording it, so Jon got to be a pretty good recording engineer when he was a young age. I started to learn a little bit. Jon was definitely way ahead.

“As time when on, we’d been in a few bands with different people with varying degrees of either fun or seriousness, but it seemed he and I had the most common goals. Our mission was to make great music. Some of our contemporaries – we were all kids – they were maybe not as realistic or grounded. As those people drifted away, we found ourselves looking to make the next step. We really got into developing our songwriting craft.

“Another thing you have to remember is that the ’80s was the age of production value, dance music and things like that were coming up and folky chord progression-based songs were also considered old-fashioned and out of favor at that time. It was hard to find people who were into just doing the basics like we were. We had an idea after we had written a few songs, we would do a decent recording and use that as a demo. That seemed pretty natural.

“We got together to start recording at the end of 1987 and the recordings were coming out pretty good. Jon was still living in Bellingham and attending university there, and I was attending university in Seattle. So I would commute up – take the Greyhound bus or sometimes Jon would drive down and pick me up. We did a lot of work over Christmas holiday of 1987-88. It turned out quite good. What we thought was going to be a demo, we went forward and turned it into what would be our first album.

“Looking backwards toward the ’60s was very uncool unless you did something totally kitsch. But generally the American music scene was kind of dominated by hard rock and metal. In 1987 the movement that would become Subpop was fledgling. The punk scene was happening, but it was all very underground. What you saw around you was Aerosmith or Motley Crue or Bryan Adams. This is what dominated the landscape. That isn’t where we were at. We were really into British music. It seemed to be more about songcraft than posing and showing off, although it sort of became about posing and showing off with good songs.

“At the time the band’s we were listening to were Squeeze, XTC, Elvis Costello. They were playful and clever. It was cool to be intellectual and brainy, as opposed to, in the States, everybody would tell you at that time if you want to make it big, you had to dumb it down. Not that we wanted to make it big, but people thought in those terms. We were referencing that. Even those bands were slightly retro in a way, but with souped up production. Very futuristic. We liked that very much. Not that we thought we would be making those kinds of records. We didn’t think we had the technical skill to pull off something like a Squeeze (“Ironing Tuesdays,” the last track on side one of Failure could have been a Squeeze song) or XTC album, which were very, very well produced. So we went for more of a ’60s vibe. We had an 8-track, a couple of microphones, some good instruments. We had some limitations and some strengths and tried to work the best we could with them.

“We just recorded everything we had. There are no extra tracks. There are a couple of things that predate Failure. Some demos we did the summer of 1987. But by the time we got around to the winter of ’87, we pretty much recorded everything we knew was the finished song, that was the 12. But it kind of played out nice. Twelve songs is a nice length for a record.

“Jon mixed it all in one night, if I remember correctly, and I think he mixed it all on headphones. There were sometimes some noise restrictions being that he still lived with his folks. I was away on vacation with my family in Hawaii when he mixed it. In that time, he played it for some of our friends who said, ‘This is a little better than a demo, actually. This is more like an album.’ We were like, yeah, maybe. Let’s do something with it.

“The first thing we did is quickly designed a cover. We had the Smiths idea of having a sort of person that isn’t one of us on the cover. We had a nice picture of a friend of ours, a girl named Gail that I was friends with in college, but when we printed it up, we were printing it in halftone, and it just didn’t look very nice. We abandoned the Smiths idea. At one point when they were messing around at the print shop, they put a square over her face, just for fun, and Jon said, hey, wait a second. That’s pretty funny. Let’s keep that.

“They were printed for free at the university print shop where Jon and I had friends. On a whim we decided to make cassettes. Dubbed some cassettes. Buying the first batch of cassettes – which was like 50 bucks – was our only investment because we recorded the album on used tape we had in the studio. The studio was free. The printing was free. Just the cassettes.

“In the meantime, we started to give these cassettes around. We gave one to Scott McCaughey. Scott was a hero of ours even back then with his band the Young Fresh Fellows. He was writing for Seattle’s free music paper, the Rocket, which is long gone but was a big deal back then. Straightaway he gave us this great review and that set things in motion.

“Serendipitously, through our supreme naiveté, we went to one of the local radio stations and gave them a copy of our tape. We made a quarter-inch reel-to-reel of a few songs and gave that to a commercial station in Seattle called KJET. We gave a cassette to the college radio at the University of Washington. And were startled to find a few days later when we turned on the radio, not only were we on the radio, we were on once an hour. It just kept going from there. For all of that summer, we released the cassette in March of 1988, well into the fall we were being played on the radio a whole bunch.

“This radio thing really took off. Meanwhile, Scott McCaughey also worked for Popllama label in Seattle that had released albums by Young Fresh Fellows and The Walkabouts and the Fastbacks. And other bands. Jon and my goal had been all along was to get on Popllama. We were totally into that label and the bands there. With this radio thing and Scott’s support and Conrad (Uno), who owned the label, was more than happy to put the record out. He’s a great guy. And really loved the band.

“We started playing as a band pretty much when we put the cassette out. We met the guys – Rick Roberts and Mick Musberger – and started playing live shows. All of this synergy started happening and things really took off for us in Seattle in a major way. By the end of the year in 1988, Popllama had released the album on LP format and we started getting pretty major airplay with college radio stations all over the country and some commercial radio stations, especially Live 105 in San Francisco, which was really big on the album. We started getting some pretty big national press and it went on from there and became a real record.

“I can’t remember who came up with the album title. Jon and I were very much on the same wavelength at that time. We were pretty much thinking with one brain at that point. So I’d say we both came up with the title. There was also a Smiths element to that. We went in with low expectations. That was our vibe. It made sense in the context of the fact that the predominant musical stuff was all about warrior glory of heavy metal. We were really trying to make it clear we were not part of the ’80s in that sense.

“Our vocals glued from those early days and that’s a major component of our music, how we sing together in this kind of Everly Brothers hard-to-imagine-one-without-the-other kind of way, which is cool. We tracked vocals individually. It’s pretty clear to hear that. The sound is kind of coming together at that point.

“When I sang the album, I still had my tonsils. I had my tonsils removed the summer of 1988, and I can hear that. My voice opened up quite a bit after the summer.

“The momentum was really strong. All the stuff we wanted to happen happened. We had another goal to play the Bumbershoot Festival, the big music and arts festival every Labor Day weekend in Seattle. We got that that year. Over the next year, our record got into the hands of a radio station in Minneapolis and a young lady DJing there fell in love with the record and gave it to her husband, Paul Westerberg. He fell in love with the record and pretty soon we were opening for The Replacements on a regular basis. Major labels came calling.

“1988-89 were really great. Just non-stop momentum. From there on it got really challenging. We’d been delivered a whole bunch of opportunities without a lot of experience on how to manage them. We had the raw ore but to actually refine it into gold, we didn’t quite have that know-how yet. We had some learning to do. The next couple years, 1990-91-92, we really spent in development, the development most bands do before they get their first record out. We didn’t really exist before our first record came out. Our first acoustic show was the summer of 1987. That’s also when we recorded the first track that ended up on Failure (the great “Believe in Something (Other Than Yourself)”). The next time we played a show was during the making of the album in December of 1987, and we played maybe one or two more acoustic shows before the album was out in 1988. We didn’t develop a fan base by touring. All that stuff we did afterwards. That’s when things got challenging and really quite difficult.

“I think our second album, Dear 23, it’s slightly confused as we were growing but not really sure. The growing would come after the second album and we really started to tour in earnest. Those early tours were very difficult. Long tours. Nobody there. Learning how to get along with each other, and also how to play live and put on a good show. All the kinds of stuff we had to learn, really, the hard way. But it paid off. The next album (Frosting on the Beater) was really good and we were really good live and had some synergy yet again.”

Look for a new Posies album and a national tour in the fall.