The Nerves
One Way Ticket
(Alive, 2008)

If Debbie Harry’s declaration in “Hanging on the Telephone” that “I can’t control myself” has always struck you as a little too coolly delivered to be credible, you owe it to yourself to hear the song’s writer Jack Lee go totally apoplectic in the original version by the Nerves. Yes, like Gloria Jones or Big Mama Thornton, the Nerves are destined to be “the band that did the original version of” someone else’s signature tune—but they’re also recalled as the almost-legendary ur-trio that launched the careers of LA mainstays Paul Collins and Peter Case (of the even nearer miss the Plimsouls). The bare-bones anthology One Way Ticket scrapes together the band’s entire released output (four songs), plus unreleased singles, offshoots, live tracks, and demos—all told, 20 two-minute tracks revealing where power-pop came from and where it was going. And it reveals, in Lee, an unjustly forgotten missing link in American music history.

As its title implies, “One Way Ticket” is a song in the shadow of Alex Chilton: “Gimme a one-way ticket” replaces “Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane,” and the reckless romantic energy pays tribute to the Big Star founder’s early pop hit. The song, a Case joint, was recorded as a single but Case and Collins split from Lee before its release; its flipside is “Paper Dolls” by Lee, and features the guitarist doing some very pre-Peter Buck jangling to go along with his raspy vocals.

All three of the Nerves wrote songs and sang; “Hanging on the Telephone” was one of Lee’s two contributions to their self-titled 1976 EP. His “Give Me Some Time”, along with “When You Find Out” (Case) and “Working Too Hard” (Collins) are all in the same very British Invasion-influenced vein: Corny and straightforward relationship-driven lyrics, harmonies, chiming guitars, and rubbery, bluesy bass.

Each of the members gets a post-breakup number. “Walking Out on Love” is a sweet-natured Collins rave-up recorded with Case and a new guitarist, and “Thing of the Past” is an early, sweaty live Plimsouls track, but pay special attention to Lee’s “It’s Hot Outside.” Put it in an echo chamber and it could be a filler track on the Replacements’ Tim—say, “Dose of Thunder.” This isn’t surprising—nobody loved power-pop more than the band that gave the world “Alex Chilton.”

Speaking of which, the CD collection closes with three demos from “early ’76,” the earliest songs on the disc. The demos are very much in the Big Star mode, if far less polished: A Nuggets-style mix of bubblegum teen-pop and a fuzz that comes equally from psych-pop and the proto-punk raw power of live-in-the-garage Middle Americanness.

A number of live tracks from 1977, though, are rougher, sloppier, a little more unstable. Take the band out of LA—away from skinny-tie studio accessibility—and they’re a completely different act. In fact, they’re an act about exactly halfway between Big Star and the Replacements. Not coincidentally, almost all the live songs are Lee’s—he’s the hero of the anthology, despite having mostly dropped off the face of the earth until resurfacing on the nostalgia circuit very recently. Case and Collins, though, stayed in Los Angeles and kept the beat, only to see the Knack—even hookier, even more professional—burst through the door they’d knocked down with “My Sharona” in 1979. From there, trace power-pop into its eventual convergence, along with most other late-’70s/early-’80s genres, in new wave: The backup singers of Tommy Tutone chanting a phone number in 1982 and the Plimsouls’ “A Million Miles Away” on the Valley Girl soundtrack in 1983. While meanwhile, at the roots of the Mississippi, a bunch of teenagers who didn’t know nearly so many chords whaled away at their own doesn’t-know-its-own-strength power-pop.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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