old article, but I just came across it...
Keene: Out of the Ether but Still on the Edge
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 16, 2006; WE10
Here's Wikipedia on Tommy Keene: "considered one of the 1980s' most critically acclaimed (and commercially ignored) singer/songwriters and a prime example of the musical genre of Power Pop."
A 2000 Phoenix New Times story on ex-Gin Blossom Dan Wilson's "Poppin' Wheelies" soundtrack (for a proposed animated series about a rock 'n' roll band in outer space) noted that half of its songs were written by Keene, "the patron saint of neglected and overlooked power-pop stars" and then provided a succinct summation of the Bethesda-bred musician's career.
"Keene . . . was touted early for stardom, releasing a pair of critically hailed EPs on the Dolphin imprint, then later two seminal albums for Geffen Records in the mid- and late '80s before disappearing from the public radar. He reemerged almost a decade later as a bona fide cult hero with the 1996 release of 'Ten Years After,' and continues to be an active presence on the pop periphery."
A decade, two studio albums, one live album and an odds-and-ends collection later, Tommy Keene is back with his 10th solo album, "Crashing the Ether," as well as "Blues and Boogie Shoes," a collaboration with the ubiquitous Robert Pollard released under the name the Keene Brothers.
And, yes, as Keene comes home to play Iota on Saturday, he's still on pop's periphery.
"I've hung in there," Keene said recently from Los Angeles, where he has lived since 1988. "I'm still doing it, I love it. Although I haven't made a lot of money, I feel I've attained an honorary status where people let me hang out.
"I'm a Cancer, so I think I'm really tenacious," he adds by way of explanation. "I will hold on to something for a long time. I won't let go. I entertain the idea all the time of 'God, how much longer can I keep doing this?' At the end of the day, I always want to go back in and make another record and try again and see if I can do it this time, see if I can crack it.
"Maybe this time it will be different."
"Crashing the Ether," recorded at Keene's house and featuring him multitracking all the instruments with longtime drummer John Richardson, is what folks have come to expect from Keene: sweetly reedy vocals atop sweeping melodies; dense, jangly guitar hooks and bracing harmonies; and an undercurrent of romantic melancholia. One review suggested it might remind listeners of 1986's "Songs From the Film," a landmark of American power pop.
Indeed, such tracks as the psychedelic-era flashback "I've Heard That Wind Blow Before," the ballad "Driving Down the Road in My Mind" and "Lives Become Lies" would sound great on the radio -- if only radio programmers had ears. Which might explain the album's title: Keene found the phrase in a book on hipster slang -- it means being played on the airwaves.
If only.
As for suggestions of same old, same old, Keene says he thinks his new album is "a bit of a step forward and lyrically a jump up. What I was trying to do was get beyond what people think would be a typical Tommy Keene record, as in power pop. There's always going to be a melodic element, always going to be a powerful rock element, but I tried to make it a little more sophisticated of a record. I don't know if I succeeded, but I succeeded in my own mind. I do think people have a certain stereotype image in their head when they think of me."
The album kicks off with Richardson's echoing drums on "Black & White New York." The drums are echoing because they were recorded in the foyer of Keene's house, where the ceiling skies to 20 feet.
"This is the first record I've done at home," Keene says. "You walk in this place, and there's a tall, really high ceiling in the entryway. As soon as I moved in the house, John said, 'Man, you've got to record the drums here.' And it sounded great. There's no reverb dialed in, it's all natural ambience."
Same with power pop: Keene came of age under the spell of the Beatles and the Who, the Raspberries and Badfinger, as well as Bethesda legends Grin, featuring guitar prodigy Nils Lofgren, "a major influence, especially on my guitar playing. Nils's brother Mike basically taught me how to play guitar," says Keene, who drummed in a trio called Blue Steel with the younger Lofgren while at Walter Johnson High School.
In 1977, while attending the University of Maryland (which he would finally graduate from a decade later), Keene switched to guitar and briefly led the Rage with songwriter Richard X. Heyman before joining new wave contenders the Razz. But Keene's writing and vocals didn't come to the fore until August 1981, when he debuted his own band at the Cellar Door, opening for some now long-forgotten Midwestern band.
"I still have the poster they put in the window," says Keene, who remembers his debut for another reason. "The first show I ever did as a lead singer, there was an A&R guy from Warner Bros. Records, and by the third song, I was looking up to the front door, feeling I had to throw up, and thinking, 'If I run up there, I can make it to the door and the street.'
"I got over it, but it was horrifying."
Maybe it was a premonition about life in the record business.
The same year, Keene released his he'd-prefer-it-be-forgotten debut, "Strange Alliance," though the album's bonus single, "Back to Zero," brought him his first national attention. Three years later came the "Places That Are Gone" EP, which topped that year's Village Voice critics poll and earned a four-star Rolling Stone review ("a critical link between the ringing glories of '60s rock melodists like the Beatles and Monkees and the more twisted renewal of guitar pop in the '80s").
In a Washington Post interview that year, Keene suggested he was getting impatient with other peoples' expectations of success. "What makes it worse is all these people saying, 'You're the next thing that's going to happen, the next one to be big.' Because if it doesn't happen in a sort of immediate time frame. . . . "
Sadly it didn't happen at all, even in the midst of a post-punk "jangle pop" movement that brought back the chiming guitars and pop melodies of the '60s.
In 1985, Keene was in the studio with Don Dixon and T Bone Burnett about the time the major label Geffen took an interest in him based on his earlier albums. Some of that material would appear on the Dolphin EP "Back Again (Try)," but Keene says Geffen squashed the material "because they didn't really have a hand in it." (At the time, Burnett was producing what would be breakthrough albums for Los Lobos and Marshall Crenshaw; Dixon for the Connells and Marti Jones.)
At the label's suggestion, Keene moved to Los Angeles. "In D.C., I was a little bit of a big fish in a small pond, and out here it was quite the opposite," he says. Unfortunately, that made it easier to be swallowed up. Geffen did hook Keene up with producer Geoff Emerick, George Martin's right-hand man as house engineer at Abbey Road Studios, and sent Keene's band to record at Martin's fabled AIR Studios on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
"That was such a strange episode," Keene recalls. "We got there, and it was overly extravagant for a band of our stature. It was a place where Paul McCartney would bring his 30-people entourage and place them in villas all over the island. It was an amazing setting to do a record."
Just not that one. An overproduced "Songs From the Film" received mixed reviews and turned out to be an expensive disaster. When sales didn't materialize immediately, the label lost interest, and Keene ended up releasing two more albums absent label support. Then he was gone -- from Emerick's memory as well. There's no mention of Keene in Emerick's recent memoir, "Here, There and Everywhere." As for AIR, it closed in 1989 after Hurricane Hugo devastated Montserrat.
In the '90s, Keene toured with Paul Westerberg and Velvet Crush while recording for various labels on his own. Having a reputation, even a mixed one, "it's easier to have people pick up your phone call," Keene says, "but in the end, whether they're going to follow through and actually put the record out, that's a different story. It's very frustrating because often they're fans and they want to be involved, but I guess it's kind of a gamble."
For instance, Keene started the new record in March 2004 and had it finished by January 2005. "I was shopping for a record deal, and that's taken a long time." Some of that time was spent touring with Pollard as guitarist and keyboardist. Their album was recorded alongside "Crashing the Ether." Keene did the basic tracks, with Pollard adding lyrics and vocals. The project was put on hold when Pollard decided to break up Guided by Voices and record a solo album, "From a Compound Eye," with Keene on guitar.
"Blues and Boogie Shoes" arrived recently, part of a trio of releases in the prolific Pollard's Fading Captain series, and it sounds like typically opaque Pollardian lyrics set atop typically power pop-ish Keene melodies. Keene will take a short break from his own tour to play two arena dates later this month with Pollard, mostly because singer Eddie Vedder saw Pollard play in Seattle and invited the band to open for Pearl Jam in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Which finally makes Keene an arena act.
Tommy Keene Appearing Saturday at Iota Sounds like: Power pop, not that there's anything wrong with that.
