Welcome to PowerPop!

I love power pop. I'm a complete geek about it. Like all music geeks, I spent my adolescence locked in a room with a record player, listening to anything I could get my hands on, limited only by my small town and even smaller allowance. My four older brothers brought music into the house incessantly, but it was my oldest brother who was most responsible for shaping my musical tastes. He had all the Beatles' albums, and, though he'd never admit it, was a bit of a geek in his own right.

Exhibit A: A cassette tape, 45 minutes long, which included fifteen seconds of every Beatles song then available, in alphabetical order. Terrifyingly, his wife recently asked me if I thought it was possible to get these scraps from mp3s so he could have this on CD.

With role models like him, I never had a chance.

But I was born in 1966; The Beatles really weren't my generation. They were the air I breathed. No, I came of age just in time for the late 70's explosion of power pop. Cheap Trick, Shoes, The Knack, The Vapors, The Records, 20/20, The Undertones, The Beat (Paul Collins' Beat, not the British guys), Starjets... hell, I'd listen to anything. I harrassed record store clerks for posters, I picked up records just because they looked interesting. I discovered 20/20 and The Undertones because my public library had them in their collection. (I'd love to know how that happened!) Some of the bands were popular, some completely obscure. (I have an ice cream sundae for anyone else who owns Starjets, a Northern Irish band who later became The Adventures. Their sole album, as far as I know, is called God Bless Starjets)

Recently, I've been meeting a lot of folks in the blog world who share my obsessions. Guys (usually mostly guys, alas), this blog is for you.