The Toms
The Toms
1979, Black Sheep Records
Reissue: 2005, Not Lame Recordings
Over the decades, the genre that my proctologist and I like to call power pop has acquired all sorts of geeky baggage. It’s associated with music for nerds and sad sacks. It’s catchy hooks and ringing guitars for the terminally uncool.
Part of this is simply because power pop bands always went for the regular Joe look. Smiling guys in jeans and T-shirts. Suits with skinny ties are as wild as it gets. There’s nothing wrong with that, but on the surface these bands tend to look more dorky every decade.
Another part of it is because most young people don’t know what the hell power pop is. If you’re under 35 and have even heard the term, I’m impressed. It’s usually thrown around by crumbling music nerds like me, who still compare most guitar pop to Big Star and The Raspberries. The best power pop is timeless like all good music, but it’s a genre that all but requires you to reach for 50-year-old references.
The result of this is that power pop became the domain of outsiders, dweebs and old people and THAT’S OKAY (speaking as an outsider, a dweeb and an old person).
However, it didn’t used to be like that. If you listen to the vintage stuff made by ambitious young men and can imagine yourself back in 1979 (whether you were there or not), it becomes clear that power pop was a reflection of the dating scene. It was horned-up and virile. Its influences were The Beatles, The Beach Boys and talking to pretty girls.
Maybe it was far from innovative, but it had something to say, even if it was just “let’s go out on a date”, which counts.
It’s something that I can’t stop thinking about when I listen to this power pop punch-in-the-face by The Toms, an album that I would call definitive.
The Toms is two things that record dorks love.
1) It’s not only a masterpiece, but it’s a lost masterpiece. Today, it’s on Bandcamp and there are reissues on CD and vinyl and even cassette, but there was a good twenty years when this thing slipped clean through every crack it could. Its original label, Black Sheep Records, was a small one who had all the distribution power of my neighbors advertising their yard sale with flyers taped to utility poles. The few who did find it often loved it, but in the 1980s that only meant so much. Its reputation as a power pop essential grew in tiny drip-drops that collected over decades. If you’re just hearing this today, this music took a long, hard road to get to you, even as it explodes with youthful energy.
2) It’s not only a masterpiece, but it’s a one-man-band masterpiece. Who are The Toms? His name is Tom Marolda and he’s the whole show. Marolda writes, produces, sings and plays everything here. The story goes that he recorded about thirty-five songs in a single weekend in 1979 in order to take advantage of some open studio time when another act (The Smithereens recording demos, so goes the legend) canceled. From Paul McCartney, who got the one-man pop genius thing started with his first solo album, on up to the likes of Emitt Rhodes, Todd Rundgren and Roy Wood–and then in later decades, Jason Falkner, Richard X. Heyman, Grant Hart and Doug Gillard–pop creeps such as myself have a special respect for these types. We like the songwriter visionary alone with their melodies, instruments and recording equipment. It sounds like the way to hear a song in its purest form, from the auteur himself working to nail that sound in his head.
The Toms is as no-frills as it gets. Every sound serves the pop rush and nothing else.
It starts out DYING to be your new favorite album. “Let’s Be Friends Again” is a rocket-powered opener that locks you in for the good time ahead while the sentiment also sets the tone for everything that follows. Marolda sings here to his ex-girlfriend(s). The experiences scarred him and he still has things to say about what went wrong, BUT…. he’s also done hating. It’s bad for you. Who needs it? Let’s be friends again. Why the hell not? As this blasts through my speakers, I’m too busy bopping my head around and pretending to know the lyrics to argue.
From there, the album flies like a pinball between the whole range of emotions of a young guy just trying to find happiness. Sometimes he’s riding high, sometimes not. That’s how it goes. Sparks of optimism fly in the energy of it all.
Second track “You Must Have Crossed My Mind” is pure lovey-dovey, gooey stuff. It’s the millionth love song you’ve ever heard and one of the sweetest. Marolda slots it in exactly the right spot. There’s a lot of heartache coming up and it’s important that you know right off the bat that The Toms aren’t about moping. Corny love songs are cool here, too. Life is a corny love song sometimes. When you’re in love, you can look at a girl and think “Flowers need the rain as much as I need you” and believe it.
Things aren’t so sunny on “It’s Needless”, even as the snake charmer melody and humming background vocals carry you away. It also earns an extra point for use of the word “syncopated” in the chorus.
“Other Boys Do” is the nerdiest song here, but it addresses a common problem. Our hero furiously argues to a girl that he’s not like “the other boys”. He’s not going to do whatever she wants just so he can get into her pants. No, he has a different kind of respect for her. She either needs to appreciate that or he’s walking away. Is he telling the truth? I don’t know, nor does it matter. It’s an earnest emotion addressed at a breakneck pace. Male competition. It’s innate. It’s been there ever since one sperm beat all of the other sperm to the egg.
Next song, “The Door” has such a perfect little Beatles 1964 opener that I’m hooked already. It sweetens the heartache of the song, which is about a guy seeing his ex with another guy. He’s still not over it, but she sure is. The door is the door to your heart. She closes the door to you. You then close your own door to everyone else, but in time you open it. Because you have to, because that’s how life works.
“Wasn’t That Love in Your Eyes” finds a lovely melody in being cruelly lead on and what power pop song has a cooler drum break than “I Did the Wrong Thing”? It’s another break-up lament, but also one of Marolda’s best hip-shakers as it kicks off the second half.
That’s where you’ll find “Hook”, a break from the heartache that puts everything into perspective. If track 2, “You Must Have Crossed My Mind”, tells us about the soft, sentimental heart that beats beneath all of these songs, “Hook” reveals something else: the songwriter’s craft. You’re being played and you love it. That’s why you’re listening to pop songs at all. That’s why you’re here. Its opening lines: “This is the verse/ Consisting of words/ To get the song started”. Its chorus: “Repeat this hook line/ Over and over/ ‘Til you got it memorized”. It’s funny, as well as a great song in its own right.
More verses, words, and hook lines follow in “The Flame”, a particularly no-nonsense little firebomb about secret loves and mixed-up feelings. Marolda considers it a Rolling Stones tribute.
“Think About Me” deals with a long-gone old love that you can’t quite get over. If you’re still thinking about her though, maybe she’s still thinking about you.
“Better Than I Know Myself” tells us about the girl who passes through your life briefly. Maybe she literally walked right by you and that was it, but you can’t stop thinking about her. People have bought classified ads in newspapers in crazy hope of recovering these missed opportunities; Tom Marolda dealt with the feeling by writing a killer song about it.
The ending of the original album sneaks up on you. Man, this went by fast.
How does Marolda end it?
He doesn’t close out with a redemptive song about how it’s all going to be okay. Your heartaches will heal. True love will happen. Angels will sing.
Shit, we know all of that. Or at least we’ve heard it before.
So, instead Marolda changes the subject and leaves us with “The Bear”, a song that seems inspired by the old Marlboro Man ads. Tough guys out on the range. It looks cool in the ads, but it doesn’t sound cool to Marolda (“There’s no females in sight/ Just cows day and night”). Throw in more Beatles ’64 moves and you’ve got something here. It celebrates and undresses the pop song–and all in the service of fun. I’d even call it perfect.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.
If you have an original vinyl copy, that’s cool as hell, but the top dog release as far as I’m concerned is the 2005 double-CD on the sadly defunct power pop obsessed label Not Lame Recordings.
The first disc contains the original album along with seven bonus tracks, all from that same productive weekend in ’79 that birthed the LP. All are weirdly good. “I Can Go Now” is a glittering “finally over a break-up” song that soars like The Byrds. “I Cannot Spot You” is exactly the kind of help that your rubber soul needs after a hard day’s night.
More brilliance hits us on the second disc, titled Greatest Mrs.. It mostly samples Marolda’s activities in the 80s and 90s and it plays like a great lost album from the neon era. If Marolda’s influences on the original album are mid-60s Beatles, Greatest Mrs. plays like the work of a guy going through his own private Sgt. Pepper period. He bathes sweet melodies in oddball arrangements and expansive sounds. It’s mega-commercial at one moment and then crazy and arty in the next. I have fuzzy VHS dreams listening to this stuff.
“Not a Trace of a Heartache” (1981) is the great lost 80s hit that no one but me has ever heard. It’s a tension-filled hook monster that could have saved some one-hit-wonder’s career. “There Goes My Heart” (1985) is another gem that plays like something that got lost in the pockets of somebody’s oversized pastel pink blazer. “Outkast” (1991) is the most potent blast of hairspray blues I’ve heard since Hall & Oates. Meanwhile, Marolda gets wild in the nutty, keyboard-driven “Revolver Days” (1981) and then “Supersong” (1998) trips out on synthetic beats and samples.
I fucking love it.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.
In 2019, Marolda finally unloaded more songs–fourteen of them–from that same weekend in 1979 on an album called The 1979 Sessions (vinyl on Feel It Records, CD on Futureman).
Now, when I heard about this, my first thoughts were that there was NO FUCKING WAY that it would be any good. Surely, these songs would have come out by now in some form if they were worthwhile. We’re talkin’ sawdust here.
I bought it anyway. I was curious.
AND…. it was great. Fuck. Who knew? Man, I love rock music. The 1979 Sessions isn’t as tight as the original album, but its best moments are huge. In the service of carefully crafting that first LP, making sure that it had the perfect highs and lows and that every track bounced gracefully off of the ones around it, Marolda left off some brilliant tracks.
It’s downright unfair that I’ve lived my whole life not hearing the airtight pop of “Guilty as a Killer Wave”, “Uptown”, “That Could Change Tomorrow” and ‘Til the End of the Day” (not a Kinks cover; also, am I crazy or does it sound like Marolda brought in a girl singer for that one?)
My favorite song from it deserves its own paragraph.
“Angela Christmas”. Track 8 on The 1979 Sessions. My favorite Toms song. My current vote for the most perfect power pop song ever recorded. Jesus Christ, why did Marolda hold on to this beauty for so long? Name your five favorite guitar pop bands of 1965. “Angela Christmas” sounds like all of them colliding in unified praise of one girl with an unusual name. If I wrote this song, I’d be bragging about it everyday forever.
But Tom Marolda left it off the album and waited forty years to release it. Man, rock music is weird.
But I guess that’s why I’m here. I’m hooked on that weirdness.
Let it fly. Let it flow. Let the geeks and the dorks and the nerds have something to celebrate and hold close and call their own.