Marshall Crenshaw made the guitar album of his dreams. But critics panned its production, halting his rising career. Forty years later, Field Day is finally getting the respect it’s always deserved.
BY CHRISTOPHER SCAPELLITI
PLAYERS| MARSHALL CRENSHAW
“OF ALL MYWarner Bros. albums, it’s the one I love the most, without a doubt. And maybe that’s because I took so much shit for it.”
When Marshall Crenshaw set out to make Field Dayin early 1983, he was riding high on the success of his self-titled debut. Released the previous April, and recorded with his duo — bassist Chris Donato and Crenshaw’s brother, drummer Robert — Marshall Crenshawwas a sunny, power-pop confection, full of three-minute tunes whose styles recalled the artists that populated rock and roll’s late ’50s to early ’60s heyday, including Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins and the Beatles. The album showed Crenshaw to be a fine songwriter and singer, but it was his guitar skills that proved to be his unlikely strong suit for a pop artist in those days of synth-driven new wave bands. Chords, double-stops riffs and interstitial melodies were part and parcel of a Marshall Crenshaw guitar track, all of them woven together — with a healthy amount of slapback echo — to create something as ear-catching and fine as his plangent vocal lines. Remove the singing from a Crenshaw tune and you’ll have a guitar instrumental that’s every bit as enjoyable.
But one thing in particular bothered Crenshaw about his premiere album: the guitar sound. His producer, the former Brill Building songwriter Richard Gottehrer, had built each of its songs around layers of guitar tracks, including beds of as many as six acoustics that were pushed low in the mix to thicken the sound. It was a far cry from the full-blooded rock-trio rave-ups that had made Crenshaw’s band one to watch when they launched in New York City’s clubs just a year or so before. It irked him enough that he decided his next album would be different.
“The whole process with all those layers of acoustics, I didn’t really want to do it that way,” Crenshaw says. “But Richard was there — I’d asked him to be there — so I just went with it.
“But then when it came time to do Field Day, I just said, No, it’s not going to be that this time. It’s going to be this other thing that I wanted in the first place. Field Daywas a reaction on my part to the first album.”
And that reaction was explosive. From Field Day’s opening track, ��
