This is Medium Rotation, a newsletter about the bands we used to play on my college radio station, 88.3 WSBU-FM, St. Bonaventure. Today, we’re looking back at Philadelphia power-pop band Free Energy, who are no longer together.
Probably the weirdest concert lineup I ever saw went like this: a magician whose name I can neither remember nor find online, a retro garage-pop band that enlisted LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy to produce its debut, a comedian who would soon become widely recognizable for his appearances on Louie, and Mates of State.
Mates of State were fun. They headlined the gig at the small downtown Rochester venue The Club at Water Street — not the beloved Water Street Music Hall, where Mighty Mighty Bosstones fans once caved in the floor, but the tiny club attached to it. I saw a girl I went to elementary school with utterly lose her shit to the Mates of State song “The Re-Arranger.” They also covered Death Cab’s “Technicolor Girls,” and it sounded great. It was June 16, 2010. The magician did some tricks. The comedian, Todd Barry, told some jokes.
I wasn’t there to see any of those performers, though. I came for a delightful yet short-lived, glam-infused power-pop band from Philly that reveled in slick yet shabby Thin Lizzy guitar reverence and songs about doing the damn thing and doing it tonight. They were called Free Energy. Their debut EP was called Free Energy. The first song on their debut EP was called “Free Energy.” You get it.
I didn’t have a car, so I convinced my friend Todd to drive me and stay for the gig. We’d made a similar arrangement a week earlier for a Surfer Blood/Pains Of Being Pure At Heart show at the German House and it worked out. He even bought a shirt. He wasn’t big on indie music or much music at all, but I played him some of the buzzy albums from that year and he liked them enough to spend $20 on a few small shows. That summer, there were few concerts I wanted to see more than Free Energy.
Why? They whipped ass. “Bang Pop” was a total smasher with an off-kilter rhythm track that bit “Wild Thing” and lyrics about being fucked up and having someone’s “cherry lips and long hair” pull you out of it. As a college student, that was relatable content. I first heard it hungover on a car trip back to St. Bonaventure from Ellicottville and it instantly hit. There was also the peppy and horn-oozing “Dream City,” which soundtracked a commercial for — extremely 2010 reference incoming — Flip Video cameras. Plus, James Murphy dug them enough to sign them to his label and produce their debut. As such, it sounded like the Big ‘70s Records he was known for tapping into with his main project, though it was less overtly reliant on homage than, say, “All I Want.” (There is a song on Free Energy’s first album called “All I Know,” but it sounds less like “Heroes” and more like “Starman” — or more accurately like The Black Keys’ Brothers with a string section.)
Free Energy sprang from the mind of a literal Spranger(s) — lead vocalist Paul Sprangers. To be exact, Free Energy rose from the ashes of his former band, the excellently named Hockey Night, which he played in with guitarist Paul Walls. Here’s where their tale gets spookily analogous to that of another classic rock-obsessed indie band I was heavily into at the time, The Hold Steady: Much like Craig and Tad from that crew — who I also saw at The Club at Water Street in 2010 — Sprangers and Wells started out in the snows of Replacements ancestral home Minnesota before their punkier first band went bust and they relocated to the east coast. The duo started writing riffs that channeled “Bob Seger making love to Christine McVie while Mick and Keith (Tattoo You-era) watch,” as Sprangers said in a 2009 interview. There’s not much shared DNA with The Hold Steady in that description, but spiritually it’s there in the unabashed veneration for album-oriented ‘70s and early ‘80s guitar sounds.
After making some demos, Sprangers and Wells got Murphy’s attention, and he signed them to DFA. They filled out with an actual band, christened themselves Free Energy, and started piling on the sugar. Too much sugar, in fact. “We tend to overdo stuff, like over-harmonize, add too many guitar harmonies or too many vocal harmonies and just kind of dilute stuff, make it to difficult to listen to,” Wells told Pitchfork at the time. Murphy brought the salt, tightened up their screws in the studio, and gave the band and indelible slickness that felt both warmly nostalgic and perfect for their brand of ear candy. This craftsmanship yielded two serious fucking barnburners, their self-titled 2009 EP and the following year’s Stuck On Nothing.
Every song glimmered like a single, and on WSBU, all ended up in regular rotation for years. Some made more sense than others. It makes me laugh now thinking about hearing the doomy ‘70s lite-metal energy of “Bad Stuff” or the sweeping last-call grandeur of “Wild Winds” on a gray afternoon drive to class; you’d be parked before either six-minute tune ended. Then again, the jangly rush of “Young Hearts” and neon explosion of “Light Love” were great complements to the trek, no matter the weather. (In Western New York, winter lasts about seven months. Stuck On Nothing was an aural SAD lamp.)
Despite the fact that “Free Energy” (the song) remains a perfect needle-drop for 4 p.m. on a Friday, the band didn’t really care about how they sounded on college radio sandwiched between Tokyo Police Club and Matt And Kim. Free Energy only had ears for the source material: “Just pretty much what they play on any corporate classic rock station every single day. We're trying to put ourselves against that and judge whether or not we're doing a good job,” Wells said.
They also gigged. They toured with Titus Andronicus and Hot Chip and eventually Weezer, which makes a lot of sense. As radio-ready as their sound was, it felt incomplete without an audience swaying and slugging beer (or seltzer). Their cowbell-aided anthems beckoned to be felt in person. At the Water Street show, I mouthed all the words to “Bang Pop” in the front row; when Sprangers’ eyes scanned across and saw me, he lit up with a huge grin and we sang to each other. It was exhilarating to feel how much it matters to be part of that transaction between artist and audience. Even for a guy who was told by a college professor that his “reputation for earnestness preceded” him, I’m veering into dangerously syrupy territory here. But it’s for good reason.
Here’s another scene. It’s 11 months later, nearly two years since Free Energy debuted their soundtrack to tank tops and greasy hair. I am sunburned in jean shorts and a Free Energy t-shirt. Free Energy is playing at St. Bonaventure, a herculean effort willed into existence by the power of college radio, the (limited) resources of a university-allotted budget, and a tour route that allowed the band a jaunt through the Southern Tier. Paul Sprangers is once again singing “Bang Pop” onstage, and I am once again singing along in the audience. He leaves the stage, passes through the sparse crowd of buzzed undergrads, and hands me the microphone. I am now amplified, singing the chorus of “Bang Pop” — “bang bang, pop pop, where does the moment stop?” — with a small group surrounding me, cheering, joining in with what they know. Thirty seconds pass, and my life is in caps lock. To borrow another line from “Bang Pop,” it was making me out of my mind.
After their set, the entire radio staff took a few group photos with the band. I got one with Paul, just the two of us, to crystallize that moment. We’re both scrawny with dark shaggy hair, buried under sunglasses. We look like brothers.
Not long after this spring 2011 concert, the computer holding all the music at WSBU crashed. Staffers had to build programming logs back up song by song in a painstakingly time-consuming process. That meant Stuck On Nothing didn’t play as regularly anymore, if at all. Since most of the folks involved in making Free Energy such a thing (including me) had graduated by the time their second album, Love Sign, dropped in 2013, I’m guessing a big single like “Electric Fever” didn’t get much airtime. That omission was unfortunately in keeping with the larger narrative of the Stuck On Nothing follow-up, which played out like the worst kind of cliché sophomore slump story you could imagine. I hate to give Pitchfork too much power here, but a 3.6 pan certainly doesn’t foster much excitement, even if The A.V. Club’s critical lens was more cautiously receptive: “The band doesn’t have pricey studio tools at its disposal. But it has plenty of meaty hooks.”
It also had John Agnello in the producer’s seat this time, a maestro known for his trusted, decades-spanning work in the indie-rock space. His top-line credits are Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth, but he’s had a hand in beloved releases by The Hold Steady (Boys And Girls In America, Stay Positive), Kurt Vile (Smoke Ring For My Halo, Wakin On A Pretty Daze), Hop Along (Painted Shut), and dozens more. Love Sign, as the story goes, did not become a favorite. It was even louder than its predecessors and opted for sprays of Day-Glo and a room vibe that somehow made the material feel miles away. Where “Bang Pop” looked you square in the eyes, the Love Sign version of “Girls Want Rock” tried to sing to the entire crowd at once, losing its urgency. “Free Energy” captured classic rock; “Dance All Night” sounded like an indie band inspired by classic rock, the kind of tune you would hear sandwiched between Tokyo Police Club and Matt And Kim. “One has to wonder if Free Energy’s move from DFA to self-releasing with producer John Agnello turned the band’s quirks into flaws,” went one review. “None of their mimicry mattered back then, but it seems to now.”
It’s tempting to say Agnello maximized the parts of Free Energy that Murphy opted to minimize — towers of guitar overdubs, overly glossy textures burying simple and effective song structures — but that would require a bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking too easy to get into eight years later. Still, there was an undeniable shift in the band’s approach to Love Sign that likely contributed to its tepid reception. Stuck On Nothing’s secret formula was Murphy treating the songs with light glam touches. Love Sign instead surged forward into the nebulous terrain of blown-out late ‘80s rock radio, not necessarily fertile ground for indie cred at the time. “We definitely look backwards and try to dig through what’s considered junk or cheesy music,” Sprangers said ahead of Love Sign’s release. To misquote Marty McFly, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet — but your parents are gonna love it.”
I maintain that the incandescent “Hangin” might’ve had a better chance a few years later, rubbing elbows with “Judy French” on playlists and riding the wave of Third Eye Blind-style power pop worming its way back into the sonic ecosystem. Maybe they would’ve gone full new wave for LP3, leaning all the way into INXS’ Kick (what Sprangers once called his biggest influence) and getting love in the wake of The 1975’s ascent. It would’ve been incredible and perfectly fitting to see Free Energy open for The Hold Steady at Brooklyn Bowl, a kind of all-you-can-rock boozy buffet. Instead, Free Energy toured the rest of 2013, went quiet for a bit, then split up. Sprangers is a filmmaker now. “Bang Pop” has 3 million Spotify streams, and Free Energy’s Soundcloud page boasts a late-period cover of Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” that puts their guitar harmonies to perfect use as a swan song.
When I think about Free Energy, I think about what happened after their St. Bonaventure show. After our group photos, some of us slipped into the basketball court at the Reilly Center to watch the drummer, Nick Shuminsky, play my friend Chris in a game of one-on-one. I don’t remember who won (neither does Chris), but it wasn’t about the final score or even the game. It was about fucking around and brushing off the to-do list a little longer to enjoy the moment. It was about doing the damn thing and doing it tonight. Before Jack Antonoff turned youth into an infinitely duplicable yawp to be shouted from pop-chart skyscrapers, Free Energy knew a cowbell chorus can be even louder: “We are young and still alive, and now the time is on our side.”
ABOVE VIDEO: Free Energy perform “Free Energy” at The Woods in Portland, Oregon on September 11, 2010. Thanks to KEXP for capturing it and preserving it.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
Here’s a list of references of what Free Energy was said to have sounded like: Thin Lizzy, “Stephen Malkmus fronting Thin Lizzy,” Tom Petty, Cheap Trick, The Cars, “Eddie Money produced by Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan,” Boston, T. Rex, “classic rock as interpreted by guys who heard those sounds second or third and not first,” The Doobie Brothers, ELO, “to be blasted down a greased-up Slip 'N Slide in a backyard on a hot summer day in the ‘80s,” “Spike Jones-style audio gags,” and more.
What they always sounded most like to me was John (Cougar) Mellencamp’s 1978 debut single “I Need A Lover.” Equal parts Stuck On Nothing and Love Sign.
I mentioned Flip Video cameras above and I feel it’s right to say I had one and I was a fan of the simplicity. Smartphones rendered them obsolete, but their disappearance took longer than you might remember. For proof, see this tUnE-yArDs performance at the 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival. (Look to the left of Merrill, near a man in a straw fedora.)
UNTIL NEXT TIME: You probably don’t need a metric for measuring just how much buzz Free Energy had earned by 2010 — but if you do, look no further. They played Letterman, earning a “yeah, yeah, yeah” from Dave himself. They crushed it.