By Lee Valentine Smith – When Marshall Crenshaw recorded for the New York-based Razor & Tie label, vinyl just wasn’t popular. CDs were all the rage and his catalog of music for the company was released on that format.
But now, the beloved pop singer-songwriter – whose lauded body of work includes ten studio albums as well as a selection of EPs, compilations and live recordings – recently claimed ownership of the five albums he released on the Razor & Tie between ‘94 and 2003.
A couple of years ago, Crenshaw began to issue a series of revised editions of those albums, via his own Shiny-Tone label (with distribution by Megaforce) on vinyl, digtal and disc. The reissues are all planned to include new bonus tracks. The editions began with his ’96 release, Miracle of Science and continues with the recently revised look at his ‘99 offering #447.
The collection includes great Crenshaw classics, such as the self-effacing “Dime a Dozen Guy,” the uplifting “Tell Me All About It” and “T.M.D.” Recorded in his home studio and at Nashville’s Alex the Great emporium, the album features Crenshaw on vocals, guitar, bass, drums, percussion and various vintage keyboards – with a guest list that includes fellow craftsmen Brad Jones, Bill Lloyd, Greg Leisz, Andy York and David Sancious.
#447 includes two new recordings, “Will of the Wind” and “Santa Fe.” Those songs are included on a single with the album’s vinyl edition and as bonus tracks on the CD and the digital versions. Both songs echo Crenshaw’s admiration and friendship with veteran punk rocker Gregg Turner from the Angry Samoans.
This year, as he celebrates the 40th anniversary of his debut, an expanded release of the self-titled Warner Brothers album is scheduled for the deluxe reissue treatment in November through a new deal with Yep Roc Records.
We recently chatted with Crenshaw by phone from his home studio in New York state.
Hi Marshall. What are you up to today?
Well, I bought a drum set on eBay and I was setting that up. So I’m just putting my new but old drum set together. It’s an old set from the sixties and it’s a kind of an off-brand called Trixon. The thing was, they’re like an exact match for a drum set that my brother had when we were both kids so I just couldn’t resist. It was a pure nostalgia attack when I saw the pictures of it.
Are you planning to work the new old drum kit into a new project? Or is it just for you, to play around with?
Time will tell, but I have played the drums on a few of my records. I don’t want to say a lot of them, but some. I am a ‘wannabe drummer,’ you could say. So if I do anything at else, recording wise, and do the drums here at home I’ll use them. I don’t have any plans right this minute but mostly they’re just for fun. Let’s start with that.
I noticed on the credits of the #447 album that you played all the drums on that collection, right?
I did, yeah. That was the first one where I really could sit down behind a drum set and play it. And I’ve been kind of wood shedding, as they say, I’ve been playing for about a year at that point in time. And it was just a lot of fun, but before that I always played all the kind of extraneous percussion on the records and I have an album called Miracle of Science. That has some program drums on it that I did. I mean the drums, like I said, I’m a wannabe drummer, I guess a lifelong wannabe drummer.
Since we’re talking about #447, I want to ask you about this series of reissues you’ve been releasing. You mentioned Miracle of Science, and I think that was the first one in the series.
Yeah, it was, I did five albums for this New York label called Razor and Tie. That was when I finally kind of got out of the major label world, which was a good thing for me. They would usually say something nice when I turned the record in. In fact, they always would say nice things and while I was doing them I didn’t have anybody looking over my shoulder, which was great. So I did these albums for them and then about four years ago, I reclaimed all the rights to the recordings. I still wanted them to be out there in the world. So I made a licensing deal, to rerelease them.
That’s great. Did some cash have to change hands or is this a pure licensing deal and they’ll still own them? Or do you own them now?
I do. As of now, I have the rights to about half of my intellectual property. I actually got the US rights to the sound recordings I did for Warner Brothers a few years ago, and I can’t even believe that happened! But if you live long enough – and US copyright law being what it is – I got the stuff back.
As we both know, it usually costs a ton of money to secure masters from a label.
Yeah. But all I did was send them a notice. That’s all it took.
You’re lucky. Now what about the MCA stuff? Was it destroyed in the big fire?
Funny you mentioned that. Yeah, it did. I saw it on my Wikipedia page – you know, how anybody can go on and edit a Wikipedia page, right?
Oh yeah.
Somebody at the bottom of page said that I was one of the artists who had some master tapes destroyed via the Universal fire and I’m like, ‘Really? I didn’t know that!’ Then about a year ago I ran into the guy, a guy named Marty Scott, I can say his name. I don’t think he’ll get mad, but it was really sort of his deal through MCA. He had a label deal with MCA, Paradox / MCA, it was called. So I did one album for MCA, but it was really for Paradox. Anyway, I ran into Marty and I said, ‘Marty, you have safety copies of the tapes at home, right?’ He goes, ‘Well, no, I had to turn all the tapes in.’ So I said, ‘So you mean that the tapes of that album are now just fine particles of dust floating through outer space? Is that what you’re telling me?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m afraid so.’ So I felt sort of bad for half a minute, but as it happens that one isn’t really one of my favorite of my own albums. But the good news there is that I ran into Ed Stasium a little while after that, he produced the album. Ed told me that he has all the mixes on DAT tapes. So, there is a good source if somebody wanted to remaster the record. I’ve never really looked into whether I have the rights to that one or not. Maybe one of these days I will, but at least I know it’s not completely vanished off the face of the earth.
Now that you have the rights secured for a lot of these different things, you can look all the way back if you want.
That’s what I’ve been telling people I’m doing. I say that I’m curating my legacy. What a concept, huh? But I guess it’s time. Since I have all the stuff at my disposal, I still think it’s nice and it might as well be out – along with everything else that’s out there.
Since we’re looking back, last month was the 40th anniversary of your first album, the self-titled one.
That’s right, yeah. 40 years since that record was released. 40 years! I mean, I never could have imagined it at the time. What an unfathomable thing. Any gigs that I do this year, that’s what I’m going to say. The banner on the poster will say “40th anniversary.” 40 years in showbiz, what the heck?! But I’m still walking the earth and still playing in a rock band.
And you’re still playing some of those songs from the first album.
I am and I’m not complaining about it either. I don’t play them under duress. I actually still like to play that song “Someday, Someway” and all the other ones I play, I still really like them, which is nice. Because a lot of my songs have kind of lost their charm for me or I felt, looking back, that I never really got it right in the first place with some of them. But there are enough of them that I’ll stand by ‘em.
Every song on that record is good; it’s like a greatest hits collection in a way.
Yeah. Well that’s what a lot of people say and that’s really nice.
I hear Yep Roc is going to do a version of it soon. Is that still on the books?
Yeah! Thanks for reminding me – for our 40th anniversary, reissues of my first two albums are in the pipeline right now. The reissue of my first album actually has a release date of Record Store Day in November. I mean, it’ll be here before we know it, right? Time passes quickly at our age. Yep Roc is a really nice place for the stuff to land, I think. It’s a good record label. We worked hard on the package, too.
Are you including extra tracks and bonus material?
Yeah. Let me see – about half of the bonus tracks, have never seen the light of day before. I didn’t want to really load it up with a lot of bonus tracks because I want the focus to be on the album itself. But if you buy the vinyl when it first comes out, you’ll get a second 12-inch disc that has six or seven tracks on it. It’s a couple of outtakes from the album sessions. Then the second side of the bonus track disc is home recordings from when I was first writing the songs that wound up on that first album. I had this very crude recording rig at home that I used, it was a semi-pro reel to reel machine called the TEAC 3340. But my microphones and my outboard stuff was all just ten-dollar junk. I just had the will to make rock and roll records, so I had to make the situation work for me. They had their own certain kind of personality, those home recordings. They’re really good rock and roll tracks. So I found a few of them, three or four of them that hadn’t been put out before.
Very good. So this is like The 9 Volt Years stuff in a way.
But more of it, yeah. That’s right. When I say more of it, I mean like other stuff from the vault. So just from that archive. I did really love revisiting all that stuff and kind of recalling that particular time period, especially with the home recordings. My favorite phase of that whole thing to look back on was happening before we got our major label record deal when we were just starting out in New York. We didn’t really know what was going to happen. Then everything just blew up so nicely and it was really exciting. I have a real fondness for that time period, and I really like looking back on it.
You know, they say it takes your whole lifetime to do your first album and then you have to rush out the rest of them. In your case, you actually had to rush out your second one. Field Day had to come out fairly quickly, right?
Well, when you say ‘had to,’ that opens up a can of worms. Because I guess the fact that we did do a second album so quickly after our first, it was really kind of a bad business decision. But I will take the blame for that part of it. Somebody presented me with the idea of doing a second album less than a year after the first one. I just said, ‘Yeah, great. That’ll be fun. We know how to make records now. So let’s go.’ So I took on the challenge and chose a producer. I only talked to one producer and that was Steve Lillywhite. And he immediately said that he wanted to do it so off we went. I actually loved that album better than I love my first album, but that’s just my own personal taste. But yeah, the songs, I mean, some of them were partially finished when we started the album, but we did it the Brian Wilson / Holland-Dozier-Holland kind of way, where you make the backing tracks. Then the lyric writer goes away for a couple weeks and writes the songs on top of the backing tracks. I did it that way. Not with everything, there were a couple of pre-written songs, but a lot of it was just done on the fly. But I think it came out nicely. Maybe I could touch it up a little bit here and there with the lyrics, but I like that album quite a lot.
It’s a solid record. The only thing I don’t like about album is the cover.
(Laughs) You don’t like the cover?! I mean, I can say that, but yeah I agree with you. That’s one of the things, it was all kind of slapped together, really quickly. I remember having a conversation with my manager at the time. My wife and my brother and I, we went on vacation right after we finished the album. We went over to Czechoslovakia to visit my brother’s girlfriend who was working on a movie set. It was still a Soviet Bloc country at the time, so that was pretty interesting.
But anyway, we went on this vacation right after we finished the record. Then we came back – and my manager showed me the draft of album cover. I said, ‘What, are you kidding me? It’s terrible.’ And he said, ‘Well, if we change it, it’ll delay the release of the album by two weeks.’ And we had our touring schedule and all this stuff ready. I was just so dumb at the time that I accepted it.” But for the 40th anniversary edition of Field Day, we’ll fix the cover. We’re going to come up with a nice one. ‘Cause I don’t like that cover either. My head looks like a light bulb with glasses or something. People always say, ‘Oh, is that your high school you’re standing in front of?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not standing in front of anybody’s high school. I was in a studio.’ But that’s the only thing I don’t like about that album.
The first album’s cover was so good, you could have used it twice.
Well, we’ve got a little bit of a surprise for everybody because we used a different photograph from the same session just to be kind of offbeat about it. So the cover’s the same, but it’s a different shot. So when you look at it, you kind of do a little bit of a double take, I guess, when you first see it.
A big difference in your first two albums obviously is the producer. What was it like working with Richard versus working with Steve? Cause those are two very different guys.
Very different and also other utterly different situations. Basically with the first album, I mean, it’s a really long story, but I started the album with myself in the producer’s chair. After a while, I kind of felt I wasn’t really comfortable with the pressure of it. So I reached out to Richard Gottehrer cause I’d worked with him on a Robert Gordon album and I knew him. So it was just a matter of a distress call going out to somebody to come in and save my ass. And he was the one. It just so happened at the moment he had a number one album on the chart so the record label was fine with the whole thing. So we finished it. He had a particular method that he wanted to use, where you start off doing the drums and bass live and then six acoustic guitars on every track as a sort of a bed. And we did all that. Then on Field Day, we did what I had wanted to do on the first one, which is just to use one guitar on each track. Guitar, bass and drums – and you just make those instruments sound huge, right? That was what I was going for. The engineer by the way, was Scott Litt who really knew his stuff and knew all kinds of ways to make the whole thing work. It was just a great team and we were just all right on the same page with everything. So it was all different. There was a kind of a pressure situation with the first one. Then by the second one, there really was no pressure. We just really felt confident and went in and had fun. But I guess some people were taken aback by it, right? I mean, if you’re old enough to have been around back then, you might remember that there was a strange reaction to Field Day, which I didn’t get at the time and kind of scoff at now. When we finished that one, I remember sitting with my feet up on the console and just listening to the playback and thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve got the world in my back pocket.’ That’s how much I love that album.
And now here you are with that same kind of vibe going because you’re totally free to do whatever you want artistically.
That’s right. I mean, show business is very mercurial, a lot of ups and downs, but it did go pretty well, all things for considered. I mean, I really am kind of at the point – I mean, 40 years after my first album, I’m at some kind of point where it’s appropriate to look back and take stock.
And you’re still making great music.
Oh, well thanks. Yeah. I guess, maybe you’ve heard, the bonus tracks on #447. Is that what you’re talking about?
Absolutely.
I did those right at the very beginning of lockdown. So not that long ago, I guess. About two years now. But yeah, the last time I tried to do anything in the studio, I’m like, ‘Oh, I can still do this.’
It had been a while since you had recorded at that point, right? A few years I would think after the EP series, right?
Yeah. I had a project during 2013 through 2016, the series of EPs that were all home studio stuff. I did most everything myself and did it in the back of the barn outside, behind the house. But then, 2016 to 2020, I didn’t do any recording at all. So yeah, I did the bonus tracks for #447 and I think they came out pretty nicely. Then I did a track about six months ago for a Todd Rundgren tribute album. Somebody decided to do a tribute to the Something/Anything? album, you might know that that one.
Right, I heard you did “Couldn’t I Just Tell You.” That’s such a great song.
I did and it really is. I just loved that whole album, back when it came out. It was like a cult thing at first, people that knew about it, really knew about it. It was so beloved within a certain group of cultists. I guess over time the cult has grown but I felt like, when my friends and I were listening to it, it was almost a secret thing. ‘Cause it wasn’t a big mainstream hit or anything. But right at the very same time as that album, I was also really obsessed with Stevie Wonder’s album called Music of My Mind. That was the first kind of adult Stevie Wonder album, that he did with all the synthesizers and everything. It wasn’t until the next one that he really blew up with that particular incarnation of himself. So there were these two albums, the Stevie Wonder album and the Todd Rundgren album. At the time it felt kind of like knowing a secret to be into those two records. They were big, huge, significant records for me, both of those two. But yeah, I have been recording a little bit lately over the last couple of years and maybe I’ll get back into it some other time.
Did you miss songwriting while you were away from it? Did you miss being away from creating? Or are you one of those guys that just creates whenever you feel like it?
Well, I have this other project that’s been a real obsession for the past few years. It’s a documentary film that I’m making. It’s real hard to make a documentary film, but we’re on a nice forward going path with it and it’s a film about legendary record producer Tom Wilson. That’s the thing that’s really got most of my attention these days. It’s been great fun working on the album reissues and stuff, but those are easy. Just kind of fun times, but the movie is a lot of fun too, but it’s also a challenge. I just wonder what my life might be like after that’s all finished. What kind of life am I going to have when I’m not doing that anymore?
We’ll have to see. When do you think it will be ready to be released?
I tell people that we’re going to finish it this year. I said the same thing at the beginning of 2020, but then we had a pandemic. Oh, how about that? A pandemic. So that sort of messed it up. But now we’re back on track. We’ve been back now for about a year or so, so I really do believe that we can finish it during this year.
This is a good time for documentaries like that because I think people are hungry for this sort of thing. Now that binging and things like “Get Back” has pushed the envelope on viewers’ endurance, you could easily make a 12-hour Tom Wilson documentary.
Yeah, the Erich von Stroheim cut, right? No, it’s just going to be a regular feature-length thing but I mean, yeah, music documentaries are popular now. Like “Summer of Soul.” Did you see that one?
Oh, I love it. Yeah, I’ve seen it three times so far.
Me too! I would like to see an eight-hour version of that one. But anyway, I just became obsessed with this story of Tom Wilson. That such an essential American story somehow remains untold, makes no sense. I decided that somebody had to do it and it was odd that no one ever had. It just kind of fell in my lap in a way. It’s been seven years of thinking and gathering and content creating and- it’s going to be great. I’ve loved doing it and I’m going to miss it when it’s over.
I bet. It sounds like a true labor of love.
Yeah and it’s also a team effort at this point. I’m working with some good people, which is always cool. When you can connect with talented people who really lift you up, that’s another part of it that I like.
That’s what it’s all about. As you take stock of your legacy, what’s next?
I want to be able to physically continue, you know what I mean? That’s really it. I’ve got so much to learn and the only thing stopping me at this point is physical limitation – hearing loss and stuff like that. I just want to keep pushing before the clock runs out. I hate to strike that kind of a tone, but that’s really the answer, to just be able to keep doing it until I can’t do it anymore.
