Biography of Marshall Crenshaw

Singer, songwriter, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist and actor Marshall Crenshaw has built up an impressive body of work over the last 15 years, showing a fine craft for everything he approaches while stubbornly following his own creative muse to reach that end. To say that Crenshaw has had an interesting career so far would be putting it mildly. He's been in the movies, playing Buddy Holly in one of them and doing a right credible job of it. He's been in the road show version of Beatlemania, playing John Lennon and doing a right credible job of it. He's written some of the most eloquent missives ever to grace the letter columns of any number of music mags including this one. His songs have been plastered all over the soundtracks to several hit movies and covered by artists as diverse as Robert Gordon, Bette Midler, Kelly Willis, Marti Jones and the Gin Blossoms. He recently got a bunch of his like minded show business acquaintances together and put out a book on all the great and lousy rock & roll movies in existence called Hollywood Rock & Roll that should be required reading for lovers of the awesomely arcane in film history. He's contributed tracks to tribute albums honoring Merle Haggard (Tulare Dust) and Harry Nilsson (For The Love Of Harry), even taken a turn behind the board producing a group called the Thieves. He's put together comps of his own for record companies (most notably Hillbilly Music, Thank God! for the short lived Bug Music label) and has contributed chapters to books on vintage guitar collecting. Crenshaw is a true rock & roll renaissance man while still remaining the everyman. Detroit born and area raised, Marshall started in the time honored rock & roll food chain tradition of playing in different bands in high school, landing in his first professional combo, ASTIGAFA, an acronym for 'A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed For All,' cribbed from the back of the Sgt. Pepper album. Although nothing releasable came of this venture, it surely cemented the basic ingredients of his style that would surface full bloom at the dawn of his solo career. According to Crenshaw, "We bought some recording studio equipment out of the Trading Times. We paid like $2500 bucks, but we got a Scully 4 track, an Ampex two track, a couple of Neumann mikes, a couple of Altec condenser mikes and this console board with these Altec tube mike mixers. So I have tapes from when I was doing a lot of recording on this gear. I wasn't really writing much back then, but that was the machine that I really honed my overdubbing chops on. That band really didn't have a high profile in Detroit, but I was using that time, working alone, woodshedding, gathering information. Around 1973, I just stopped listening to the radio and just became immersed listening to old 45s from the 50s and early 60s. It seemed to me that there was more immediacy in those records than the stuff that was on the radio at that time (the 70s).More atmosphere, more style. Certainly one of the things that has stayed with me was the love of tape echo, that slapback kind of thing you heard on a lot of those records. I'd say 95% of the records I've made since then have slap echo on it. It lends this kinda spooky atmosphere that I really like." But just as his ears learned to love echoey mono '50s records, his songwriting influences went in an equally opposite direction: "One batch of stuff that I really feel that I was strongly influenced by was a lot of the R&B-pop kind of stuff that was around in the early 70s. I just love that romantic kind of R&B kind of sound, those chord changes in those tunes, all those major sevenths and minor sevenths, I always use those kind of chords in my songs." But Detroit was going nowhere as a musical hotbed by the late '70s so, after a road band stint that got him out to the West Coast and back, Marshall responded to an ad in Rolling Stone and auditioned (via a well constructed overdubbed demo) for the Broadway musical, Beatlemania. Hired as a John Lennon understudy, Crenshaw moved to New York City and quickly found himself in a heady creative and competitive situation. After serving a six month 'Beatle boot camp' training, he appeared with the show for six months in Hollywood and San Francisco, then finishing up his last six months with the production on the road. Though he found the show creatively stifling, it made him sit down and figure out what kind of music he wanted to do and eventually -- after buying a TEAC four track recorder -- started making demos whenever he was home. One of the first songs he came up with was "Girls," which later ended up on his debut album. It was a turning point for Crenshaw, because "it was really the first song that I wrote that sounded like a hit song to me.and it's a song I couldn't have written until I moved to New York." Soon Marshall was armed with both demos galore -- dropping them off to any show business connection that might listen -- and his younger brother playing drums in his trio, which was starting to plug into New York City's burgeoning new wave club scene. About that time Crenshaw hooked up with local scenester Alan Betrock, who had recently started his own label, Shake Records. It was Crenshaw's debut single of "Something's Gonna Happen" b/w "She Can't Dance" on Betrock's label that kicked up enough noise to bring major label interest a-knocking at his door. Signing with Warner Brothers in 1982, Marshall recorded five superbly crafted studio albums before parting ways seven years later to sign with MCA for one album, Life's Too Short. During this flurry of activity, Crenshaw also flexed his acting muscles, portraying a high school bandleader in Peggy Sue Got Married, Buddy Holly in La Bamba and a guest appearance on the Nickelodeon series Pete and Pete. Emerging from a three year hiatus, Marshall signed with the independent label Razor & Tie label, released a quirky but intriguing live album (Live.My Truck Is My Home) in 1994 and in 1996, released a new studio effort, Miracle of Science. When last asked by a reporter 'what was his game plan for the rest of the '90s,' Crenshaw merely smirked and replied, "More records, more gigs, more triumphs and more mistakes. I think that about sums it up, doesn't it?" ~ Cub Koda