Paisley Underground Series, #22: The Dream Syndicate- Medicine Show (1984) / This Is Not the New Dream Syndicate Album...Live! (1984) MP3 & FLAC

"I got some John Coltrane on the stereo baby, make it feel all right. I got some fine wine in the freezer mama, I know what you like."

The Dream Syndicate's debut LP, The Days of Wine and Roses, is justly considered to be one of the best neo-psych albums released during the eighties, a dark, feedback-drenched love letter to The Velvet Underground and Television that quickly catapulted the band into the forefront of the emerging L.A. Paisley Underground scene only nine short months after they had come together in Davis, CA. As lead vocalist and guitarist Steve Wynn recalls, "It was an overnight thing. There was no dues paying. It was very weird and it screwed us up in some ways." One negative consequence of producing a masterpiece their first time out is that the band's later work has tended to languish in the long shadow of their formidable precursor. In the aftermath of their early brush with success, change settled in on The Dream Syndicate. First, their bassist and sometime vocalist Kendra Smith left to join boyfriend and ex-Rain Parade guitarist David Roback to work on his Rainy Day  project (she was replaced by former Al Green bassist David Provost). In addition, the band was signed by a major label, A&M Records, and thereafter quickly set to work, with former Blue Oyster Cult, Dictators, and Clash producer Sandy Pearlman, on what would become their most divisive and misunderstood record, Medicine Show. This album has tended to garner charges of being a major label sellout, and while it is certainly more polished than the band's debut (which is to be expected), it is anything but a play for mainstream success (unlike fellow Paisley Underground figureheads The Bangles). Rather, Medicine Show captures a young band finding their way as mature songwriters. Steve Wynn: "I'd written a lot of songs before Wine and Roses, but the storytelling, the larger scale, taking a frozen moment in time- it all started on this record." The band was also dealing with their meteoric rise from feeling fortunate if they got third billing at the L.A.-area clubs they were playing to suddenly being the headliner: "Defiance, fear, apprehension- they were all happening to us by then, and a lot of that came out on the record. It's in the songs, in the sound." By all reports, Pearlman drove the band hard, insisting on take after take until the performances reached a raw state of emotional honesty, an approach that served Wynn's dark, sometimes violent lyrical content well. The album's terrific opener, "Still Holding on to You," which has a faintly similar vibe to the debut album's "Tell Me When It's Over," sets the tone for the entire album with its tale of inconsolable loss and emotional desperation. While the band is still conjuring the ghosts of The Velvets here, there is a new-found confidence and a more open sound that lends the song a rootsy feel reminiscent of Neil Young. Medicine Show concludes with two epics: "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" and the stunning "Merrittville," which Wynn has described as "the Book of Job in eight minutes." The latter sounds something like The Church jamming with Crazy Horse, and is a heady reminder of just how misunderstood and criminally underrated this album is. Steve Wynn: "Karl [Precoda] wanted to make a big, panoramic rock record to justify our move to a major label and the plethora of attention we had received in the mere nine months that had passed since the release of The Days of Wine and Roses. I wanted to make a 'beautiful loser,' button-pushing, over-the-top emotional catharsis in the tradition of most of my all-time favorite records (i.e. Big Star 3rd, Tonight's the Night, Plastic Ono Band, etc.). We both got our way- and in ways that neither of us could have predicted. I think it was this improbable collision of desires and personality that gives Medicine Show its character."

Paisley Underground Series, #17: True West- Hollywood Holiday (1983) / Drifters (1984) MP3 & FLAC

"The rain it's fast and hard, pooling like quicksilver on the ground, ran for the shelter of a nearby door, and I watched the drops come down."

Along with bands such as The Dream Syndicate, Game Theory, and Thin White Rope, True West originally hailed from the small but very influential music scene that thrived in the college town of Davis, CA. during the late seventies and early eighties, and like those other bands, they ended up gravitating to the Paisley Underground scene based in L.A. in order to find a wider audience and a record deal. True West's sound was a fertile blend of psych-tinged roots-rock, Jangle-Pop, and a touch of the dark, spidery dual-guitar interplay of Television, a combination of influences that made them quite unique among the Paisley crowd. After a brilliant self-released EP (which would eventually be grouped with additional tracks and released as the even more brilliant Hollywood Holiday), the band was invited by EMI to record some demos with Tom Verlaine; however, the sessions didn't go well, and EMI passed on them. By the time True West finally released their first proper LP, the slightly less brilliant but still quite enjoyable Drifters, they were beginning to undergo personnel changes that would eventually rob the band of much of their momentum. Though a third album appeared a few years later, True West were never able to hit the significant heights of their earliest recordings again. Because these recordings remained out of print for more than twenty years, Hollywood Holiday is very much one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Paisley scene. While its production sounds a bit thin in places, the austerity serves True West's aesthetic well, as their later recordings tended to polish the dark, almost Post-Punk grime out of their sound, thus making them seem, at times, like just another Jangle-Pop band. A perfect example of what made True West so distinctive is their cover of "Lucifer Sam" from Pink Floyd's psychedelic masterpiece, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which manages to capture both the twisted whimsey of the original and to inject it with a little early-eighties paranoia courtesy of lead vocalist Gavin Blair, whose voice possesses none of the child-like naivete of Syd Barrett's. Coupled with the intertwining guitars of Russ Tolman and Richard McGrath, the song traverses new-found depths of acid-drenched darkness. "And Then the Rain," True West's signature song and easily one of the best things to come out of the Paisley scene, is a tense piece of Jangle-Pop melancholia that wallows beautifully in its doom-filled verses. My personal True West favorite is "Look Around," the lead track on Drifters, which features a killer Power-Pop-style hook and some memorable, inspired vocals from Blair. Although the phrase "lost classic" is used far too often by music reviewers, Hollywood Holiday and Drifters exemplify this notion. Eerily similar to the fate of Big Star ten years earlier, True West was as talented as any neo-psych band of the era, but commercial success would prove frustratingly elusive and, as is so often the case, an early demise soon followed.

Paisley Underground Series, #5: The Dream Syndicate- The Days of Wine and Roses (1982) MP3 & FLAC

"It's not fair to put you against all the years behind me."

One of the most enduring and darkly brilliant albums to emanate from the Paisley Underground scene, The Dream Syndicate's The Days of Wine and Roses takes up residence in the fertile and far too infrequently explored intersection between the darker side of late-sixties psych-rock and the brooding atmospherics of Post-Punk. Drawing on diverse influences such as The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, Television, Velvet Underground, Joy Division and The Clash, the original incarnation of The Dream Syndicate were very much a band out of time and place in the early-eighties; as such, their debut, full of Karl Precoda's striking feedback-drenched guitar-work coupled with Steve Wynn's deadpan vocals, was quite a contrast to the synth-heavy approach many Post-Punk bands were adopting at the time. The Days of Wine and Roses begins with one of the most memorable songs of the Paisley Underground: "Tell Me When It's Over," an anthemic piece of dark Jangle-Pop featuring some great guitar interplay between Wynn and Precoda and Wynn's vocal approximation of a young Lou Reed. Another standout is the insistently sprawling title track, a White Light / White Heat-style epic, which gives Precoda plenty of room to stretch out and coax some amazing sounds from his notoriously cheap guitar. Neo-Psychedelia doesn't come much finer than this- one of the truly essential Paisley Underground albums.

Paisley Underground Series, #4: Various Artists- Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop: May 24, 1987 (1994) MP3 & FLAC

"It's just the wasted years so close behind."

Although it is rarely mentioned, the thriving underground music scene in Athens, GA. during the late seventies and early eighties was, in many ways, a guiding inspiration for L.A.'s Paisley Underground. The Athens scene, much like the L.A. underground at the time, was comprised of an eclectic and closely-knit mix of groups, many of whom were instrumental in bringing, among other things, Jangle-Pop and Big Star-style Power-Pop back into vogue in America. One of the most influential of these bands was R.E.M., who had released what is arguably the holy grail of American alternative music, the timeless Murmur. Throughout the eighties, it was not unusual for bands from both scenes to find themselves billed together on tours, which is how Steve Wynn of Paisley Underground legends The Dream Syndicate and Peter Buck of R.E.M. struck up a friendship. One of the fruits of this artistic cross-pollination is Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop: May 24, 1987, an informal acoustic concert featuring Steve Wynn, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe from R.E.M., Natalie Merchant, and Kendra Smith from Opal. There are many gems to be had here, chief among them are R.E.M.'s contributions, which are early versions of songs that would appear on their soon-to-be released breakthrough album, Document. For example, "The One I Love" is presented as a gloomy acoustic 12-string dirge, while "Disturbance at the Heron House," here in acoustic form, provides Stipe plenty of aural space to work his esoteric magic. Steve Wynn's material seems a little more "off the cuff," but a true highlight is his collaboration with former band-mate Kendra Smith on "Too Little Too Late."  Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop: May 24, 1987 is by no means the place to start with any of these artists, but it does capture an interesting, and occasionally beautiful, moment in time. Wish I had been there (not sure why I wasn't since I was living in the area at the time).