With a sound inspired by the Beatles and Elvis Presley, he climbed the charts and drew critical praise in the 1970s and ’80s. But long-term stardom proved elusive.
Dwight Twilley, a singer and songwriter from Tulsa, Okla., who fused Merseybeat melodicism with a chugging rockabilly energy, earning critical praise if not stardom as a progenitor of what came to be called power pop, died on Oct. 18 in Tulsa. He was 72.
His wife, Jan Twilley, said the cause was a cerebral hemorrhage. Mr. Twilley had been hospitalized for several days after suffering a stroke while driving alone and crashing into a tree.
Heavily influenced by both the Beatles and Elvis Presley, Mr. Twilley made his mark in the mid-1970s with the Dwight Twilley Band, which he formed with a friend from his teens, the drummer and vocalist Phil Seymour. The band signed to Shelter Records, co-founded by a fellow Oklahoman, the musician and producer Leon Russell, in 1974, and released its first single, “I’m on Fire,” the next year.
A roadhouse rafter-shaker leavened with syrupy pop hooks, the song shot to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and drew critical praise. The San Francisco Chronicle was particularly extravagant, calling it “the best debut single by an American rock ’n’ roll band ever.”
But the band was unable to capitalize on the momentum, as the partnership behind Shelter dissolved, leading to lengthy delays on a follow-up single and album. The Dwight Twilley Band’s first album, “Sincerely,” finally came out in 1976 but fizzled commercially, rising no higher than No. 138 on the Billboard album chart.
Even so, critics were again effusive in their praise. In a review in Rolling Stone, Bud Scoppa called it “the best rock debut album of the year,” comparing the Dwight Twilley Band to the acclaimed band Big Star.
“Like Big Star, the Twilleys wrap themselves handsomely in ’60s filigree, with an emphasis on pre-psychedelic Beatles, adding some rockabilly echo for greater resonance,” Mr. Scoppa wrote. “They do it so well and with such personality that it seems nothing short of miraculous.”
The band’s second album, “Twilley Don’t Mind” (1977), offered still more hook-laden confections, along with guest vocals by Tom Petty. While it failed to spawn a hit like “I’m on Fire,” it did manage to climb to No. 70 on the Billboard chart.
The band found itself lumped in with what became known as the Tulsa sound, which included bluesy rockers like J.J. Cale and Elvin Bishop. The categorization made little sense to Mr. Twilley, who was best known as a pop craftsman.
“I think nobody at the time knew what the Tulsa sound was,” he said in an interview this year with the British music website Americana UK. “It was a big mystery, everyone was running around — where’s that Tulsa sound at? — and nobody knew.”
He was equally baffled when critics, responding to his knack for low-fi, high-energy pop, called him a father of new wave. “I’m new wave one day and power pop the other and rock ’n’ roll sometimes,” he said in a 2017 interview with the music writer Devorah Ostrov. “You know, whatever.”
He added, “It was a lot more fun when everybody was just trying to make great rock records.”
Mr. Twilley was born on June 6, 1951 in Tulsa. A music lover from an early age, he found inspiration for his future career by watching the Beatles’ storied first performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964.
“The songs were so great, the voices were great, they looked great and then they had all these chicks screaming at them,” he said in the Americana UK interview, “so I was like, that looks like a good job.” While in middle school, he formed a band called the Intruders.
Three years later, the Beatles figured into another pivotal moment. As a high school student at Thomas Edison Preparatory, he started talking with Phil Seymour, another music-loving teenager from his neighborhood, while waiting in line at a movie theater to see a screening of “A Hard Day’s Night.”
The two later went back to Mr. Twilley’s house to work on songs that Mr. Twilley had written. The two of them, with occasional contributions from a guitarist named Bill Pitcock IV, performed around Tulsa for several years, taking the name Oister. After a detour through Memphis, where the musicians brought a honky-tonk grit to their sound, they eventually landed in Los Angeles and signed with Shelter as the Dwight Twilley Band.
The band’s run turned out to be brief. Mr. Seymour left in 1978 and pursued a solo career. (He died of lymphoma in 1993.)
Mr. Twilley embarked on a long and prolific solo career. He released his first album under his own name, “Twilley,” in 1979.
His third album, “Jungle” (1984), rose to No. 39 and featured his other best-known song, the infectious “Girls.” Released as a single and buoyed by a racy locker-room video recalling the teenage comedy “Porky’s,” it climbed to No. 16 on the Hot 100, the same spot “I’m on Fire” had reached.
Mr. Twilley continued to release music for decades. His last studio album, “Always,” came out in 2014.
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Twilley seemed to take the ups and downs of his career in stride. “I was just a damn genius when I was young, and I just got stupider and stupider each year afterwards,” he told Americana UK.
Still, he added: “It was an adventure, you know, a kind of amazing adventure. You are a kid, and all the other musicians in the world are trying to make a record, a little disk with their name on it and their picture on the sleeve and things like that, and trying to get on the radio, and we were able to accomplish that.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
