In the annals of power pop, Paul Collins is up there with Dwight Twilley and Shoes, who both happen to appear on his new album. Collins’ work goes back to being a teenage member of the mid-1970s San Francisco band The Nerves, whose “Hanging on the Telephone” was recorded by Blondie. His own band The Beat caused its own commotion, at least before it got caught up in confusion over an English ska band with the same name.
Seeing no future (or income) from his music, Collins dropped out of music for a decade before returning with albums like 2004’s Flying High and the 2008 Ribbon of Gold. The new album, Stand Back and Take a Good Look, features work with power pop luminaries such as 20/20, Richard X. Heyman, and the aforementioned Shoes.
Its single “I’m the Only One for You,” recently designated Coolest Song in the World on Little Steven’s SiriusXM Underground Garage, features the late Dwight Twilley. We talked to Collins over the phone from New York, where the retrospective cover art of his new release was shot.
You must have captured one of the last performances of Dwight Twilley who had just just died in October.
He died shortly after [recording]—and it was a shock, and of course a bittersweet thing. I go way back with Dwight as far as being a fan of his. When I went to San Francisco in ’74–’75 and heard “I’m on Fire” I was like, “OK, that’s it, that’s what I want to do.” I heard “I’m on Fire” and I heard “Cadillac Walk” by Mink DeVille and I thought, there are people out there doing this music. And it’s damn cool. So I knew I was on the right track.
You’ve been at the forefront of the power pop movement—or do you even call it power pop?
Dwight called it power poop. In the beginning [the phrase] power pop was the curse of death. It kept this music off the radio, it kept this music from being accepted by a wider audience, it kept this music being relegated to the minor leagues by journalists and radio. I don’t know why, but it did. And I lived with that.
Then it flipped over in the beginning of the ‘90s, all the young kids came along with Bandcamp and they started citing power pop as their influence because they didn’t grow up with the curse. It hadn’t cost them their album deal, it hadn’t kept them off the radio, it hadn’t been something where record companies say we don’t sign this kind of music, or radio stations saying we don’t play this kind of music. They were like, “Power pop, we love it!” And then it became bigger than it ever was the first time around.
How do you think it is faring today?
I just watched the Grammys and there was not one mention of power pop. What does that tell you?
Well, you know what kind of music you wanted to do when you heard “I’m on Fire.” What kinds of songs were you listening to when you were growing up?
I was really lucky in the sense that I was born in ’56 and when I was 10 it was ’66 so I grew up listening to the golden era by anyone’s standard, which is everything from the late ’50s to ’69. I guess. When I was a kid in Long Island listening to WABC radio with Cousin Brucie and Harry Harrison, I was listening to the cream of the crop of international rock ’n’ roll.
I say international because it included the British Invasion, it included the West Coast sound, it included the Detroit sound, and that includes Mitch Ryder and Motown. And Nashville, and Johnny Cash, and Glen Campbell, and Burt Bacharach, and on and on and on. And the Buckinghams, and the New York sound and The Rascals, and The Beatles and The Monkees, and The Foundations, Jay and the Americans. So, that was my high school and college. And my PhD was The Nerves.
A lot of that music is East Coast. What made you go to San Francisco in the mid-’70s, where you found The Nerves?
Very simple—two things. One, my drum teacher. When I told him how difficult it was for me going to these auditions in New York for a rock ’n’ roll band, he said, “Listen kid, If you want to play rock ’n’ roll music, you’ve got to go out to the West Coast, that’s where it’s happening.”
And a friend of mine—she called me one day and said “Paul, I’m driving to California, you wanna come?” And I said yes. I guess the third reason was the age-old phrase “Go west young man.” And I had been all over the world with my family, but I had never been to California.
So you go to San Francisco, but isn’t early ’70s California doing psychedelic 20 minute guitar solos? Were you into that?
Not at all. When I got to San Francisco—and that’s the kind of fairy tale part of my life—on the third day I got there, I knew I had to get my act together fast. I literally got there on my own with $80 in my pocket. I was petrified. I didn’t really know anybody. I knew one girl I had known in Connecticut who let me sleep on her floor for a couple of days. And I knew I had to get something together ASAP or I was going to be screwed.
So I went to Don Wehr’s Music City, which was the coolest music store in town. And in those days, the way you get into a band is you go to a music store and look at the bulletin board and pray to god somebody’s got a want ad up for you. And they did. They had a 3×5 index card that said “Wanted: all-original drummer for all original band a la Beatles and the Stones.” And I took it down, because I didn’t want anyone to see it and I went across the street and called Jack Lee up, went to his house and the rest, as they say, was history.
And back then, all the other ads—all of them—were “Disco band, must have jumpsuit and transportation” or “Heavy metal jam band, must have Marshall stack,” this, that, all kinds of music that I was not looking to do. This was the only ad that came even close. It was just pure rock ’n’ roll luck that I got the needle in the haystack on my first try.
Did you have original music at that time?
Jack Lee did, yeah. He had me at his house and played me “Hanging on the Telephone” and literally blew my mind.
Was there an audience for what you were doing?
Absolutely not.
The Nerves had a handful of incredible shows, and the rest of it was an uphill battle. Our shows at Max’s [Kansas City in New York], we played three or four nights, and that was packed every night. We didn’t get paid, but it was packed every night, with basically some fans but a lot of musicians from other bands—the guys from Blondie were there, guys from Patti Smith were there, Television people were there, and just a lot of bands wanted to see who the hell we were. And there were maybe one or two other shows. But basically, it was an exercise of Prometheus pushing the ball up the mountain.
Why do you think The Nerves broke up?
It was very simple—we died like any plant or flower will die if you do not water it. It will die. And that’s why we died. We could not get any professional acceptance, or business acceptance at all, from anyone in our field—managers, producers, agents, record companies. We were so on the outside. And after we did our self-produced tour, which was a Herculean effort to pull that off, I think when we got back to LA, it was like OK, we did everything we could do. It just kind of caved in on itself.
Were things different when you began your band The Beat?
Things moved at an extremely accelerated pace, I mean zero to 60 overnight compared to what happened with The Nerves.
What was the reason for that?
Eddie Money. Eddie Money got me my deal, he got me signed to Columbia, he got me a producer, Bruce Botnick, and he got me his manager Bill Graham. And they all jumped on board, and it’s all because of him.
He dug your music?
He loved it. He spent a year telling anybody who would listen to him that I was one of the great new songwriters. He co-wrote with me on the first album, “Let Me Into Your Life,” I co-wrote a song with him, “Get a Move On.” And he just took me under his wing because he was a New Yorker and I was a New Yorker. And he made it happen. He just made it happen. And I am eternally grateful to him for that.
So what was it like putting out that first album in 1979?
My first album was like all the great first albums you hear about—it was a very special time, it was magic, there were stars flying all over the place, everybody was happy. We made all the right moves. We didn’t screw it up. So it’s a very special, magical time. It’s one thing that you spend the rest of your career trying to recreate but you never do. It’s like your first kiss. It’s very special. That was the first album. We didn’t really know what we were doing, we had no idea how tough life was going to be, and how tough life in the entertainment business was going to be, and what disappointments, and what heartaches might be in store for us.
Was changing the band’s name one of them? How did that all happen?
It was like a series of things. The album comes out, it’s great, we’re getting great press, we’re not really getting great airplay. Then the international department got a hold of it and absolutely fell in love with our album.
The UK had not released the album and they were dragging their heels. And at that time the UK didn’t give too much of a hoot about the young American bands. They were busy promoting their own music, and they had a lot of music to promote, so it’s understandable. So they hadn’t released my album, and so all of a sudden there’s another band, a ska band, called The Beat too. Now we got a problem. Their album is gonna come out and then somebody must have told them, “Well, wait a minute, we have a problem, there’s a band in America called The Beat too.” So I get a call in the middle of the night in Los Angeles from these lawyers in England who say we got a problem here and you got a couple of different options…
One, you can keep your name The Beat everywhere in the world except for England and call yourself the American Beat or whatever the hell you want to call yourself [there]. But you run the risk—and this is where they suckered me really bad—you run the risk that you’re going to confuse your audience, you’re going to have a hit record in Europe and it’s going to have a different name in England, and England is the tastemaker for all of Europe, so your record is going to be a success in England but it’s not going to have the same name as the rest of Europe, and that’s really going to screw you up. Now, I fell for that.
I decided to call it the Paul Collins’ Beat. And so I did. So then we had the real cock up—there were albums released all over Europe as The Beat, then they had to release new albums, pressed up with the same cover, with the Paul Collins’ Beat on it. It was just a frickin’ mess. And that’s why the second album is called Paul Collins’ Beat, The Kids are the Same.
And in the end, I should have just said look, go to hell. Call yourself The Beat in England, and I’m The Beat everywhere else in the world and go screw yourself. But I didn’t.
Well, you had to make The Beat there become The English Beat in the US because of you. That’s a big thing.
No, I didn’t take pride in it because I wasn’t out to do that. I just wanted to play my music. It was kind of a double whammy, because when we decided to use the Beat, I was like I hope I don’t get slammed by people saying “Who do you think you are, The Beatles?” That never came up, and I thought that was going to be the first thing: “Who the hell do these kids think they are? The Beat? Do they think they’re The Beatles?” And that never came up. Life has its own plans and you have to go along with it.
The Beat released a couple more albums in the 1980s. But wasn’t there a time when you didn’t play music at all?
It could have been as long as eight to 10 years, The ’90s was a total bust for me. I did a few things, but they were very small—maybe I played to 20 people in the whole decade because this music had literally fallen off the face of earth.
And around 9/11, I moved to Spain, and I opened up a bar, because I had to do something else to support myself. I needed to take a break because it had become so difficult trying to pursue a career playing this kind of music—I wasn’t getting anywhere and I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the songs I was writing or my delivery or anything. It just kind of felt like I was beating a dead horse. And at the time, I probably was.
And I remember I put guitar on the wall in my apartment in Madrid, and it sat there for a good two, three years, and one day I was looking at it and I swear to god I thought the guitar was saying to me, “Look you son of a bitch, you either take me down and play me or you throw me out, but don’t put me up here!” That’s when I started writing a lot of songs.
Even on the new record, you keep the songs to two minutes or less. What’s your ethos on that?
There’s something really incredibly cool about a song like “I’m the Only One for You,” which is like less than two minutes but when you play it, and listen to it, and work on it, and sing it, you don’t realize that you have gotten your business done in such a short amount of time but it doesn’t seem short. That is something. “Walking Out on Love” is like that—it’s a minute 35 seconds but damn if you feel that way when you play it.
What’s the future for the kind of music you do?
It’s a niche market. There’s a group of people who love this music dearly, and thank God for them. But it is what it is. It depends on where you are. I would say that it’s a worldwide niche market and you have to know your stuff when you play around the world so they’ll come out to see you. It’s not a no-brainer; it’s not a given. I’m not going to play places like Irving Plaza every night. It’s not going to happen.
Is your album on vinyl?
Yeah, it’s coming out on blue vinyl.
What are your earliest memories of vinyl?
My father had Hank Williams and Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Vol. 1. My mom had Ring of Fire, Johnny Cash. My first two records were Physical Graffiti by Zep and Are You Experienced by Jimi Hendrix. I can remember those. I had Introducing…The Beatles on Vee Jay. Loved that. Stuff like that.
Paul Collins’ Stand Back and Take a Good Look is in stores now on Jem Records.
