"Send me home counting the chances I've had. I could fill up three digits,
but that's not what it means to be sad."
but that's not what it means to be sad."
While The Paisley Underground is commonly characterized as a bastion of neo-psychedelia (the moniker unfortunately promotes this), as a movement, it was actually diverse enough to include everything from cow-punk to Power-Pop. Another myth about The Paisley Underground is that it was primarily an L.A.-based phenomenon; in reality, many of the core bands in the movement had migrated south, in one form or another, from Davis, CA., which was home to its own vibrant music scene that functioned as something of a precursor to the more famous Paisley scene. Bands such as The Dream Syndicate, True West, Thin White Rope and Scott Miller's Game Theory all got their start, at least to some degree, in the Davis scene. Game Theory, whose sound was predicated more on seventies-style Power-Pop than the psychedelia embraced by many of their contemporaries, formed in Sacramento in 1982 and quickly found themselves playing the same clubs as the bands that would later foment the Paisley scene in L.A. By 1984, they had built up enough of a reputation to attract preeminent Jangle-Pop producer Mitch Easter (who had produced R.E.M.'s brilliant debut Murmur) to man the production booth for their first professionally recorded LP, Real Nighttime. While Miller and co. were clearly in thrall to Big Star and sixties-era Brit-Rock, on Real Nighttime, their brand of Power-Pop is anything but derivative, as it incorporates elements of New Wave such as keyboard textures, smart, often irreverent, lyrics and no lack of odd structural twists and turns. For example, on "24," what at first sounds like a straightforward piece of R.E.M.-style Jangle-Pop quickly turns in to a quirky hybrid of jangly guitars, cascading keyboards, and Miller's sweet lead vocals that occasionally sound Chilton-esque in their upper-register earnestness. Speaking of Alex Chilton, perhaps the album's true highlight is Game Theory's cover of "You Can't Have Me" from Big Star's 3rd. This has never been one of my favorite Big Star songs, but in the hands of Miller and co., it sounds both more developed and more raw. Brief though it is, it ranks with Kendra Smith's version of "Holocaust" from the Rainy Day album as among the best Big Star covers I've heard. Game Theory were one of the more melodically gifted bands of The Paisley Underground, and though they largely avoided overt neo-pyche elements in their sound, their unconventional approach to the Big Star Power-Pop template makes them yet another worthy Paisley (re)discovery.
