{"id":2677,"date":"2025-01-01T18:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-01-01T23:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/?page_id=2677"},"modified":"2025-01-01T20:04:43","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T01:04:43","slug":"join-my-gang-the-mythical-scene","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/join-my-gang-the-mythical-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"join my gang: the mythical scene"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[This is Part 2 of “The Paisley Underground: The Mythic Scene and Los Angeles Legacy of the Neo Psychedelic 80s”]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first mention of a \u201cPaisley Underground\u201d is generally credited to Michael Quercio, bassist of The Three O\u2019Clock. In late 1982, he gave an inspired response to an L.A. Weekly<\/em> journalist\u2019s question about how his band, then called The Salvation Army, resembled kindred groups gigging around town:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So what do you call this new scene of you and the Bangs, and Rain Parade and the Dream Syndicate? At that time it was really just those four groups. And I said, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s the Paisley Underground.\u2019 I didn\u2019t think much of it \u2013 it was just an off-the-cuff remark. The piece came out and it wasn\u2019t until a couple of months later that other papers started picking up this name and started to write about the scene and call it that (quoted in Hann 2013).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Quercio\u2019s remark makes clear that the Paisley Underground has always been more media construction than on-the-ground happening. Early write-ups and reviews given to the four bands rarely invoked the term, perhaps in keeping with the single band-profile format that music publications and zines favored. Within a year\u2019s time, as these bands\u2019 visibility led to longer interviews (e.g., Barron 1985) and to urban-regional overviews (e.g., Coley 1983), music writers increasingly incorporated the term into their stories, often to the profiled musicians\u2019 bemusement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To the original four bands that Quercio cited \u2014 The Bangs\/The Bangles<\/strong>, The Dream Syndicate<\/strong>, Rain Parade<\/strong>, and The Salvation Army\/The Three O\u2019Clock<\/strong> \u2014 many accounts add a few others to the Paisley Underground\u2019s ranks for a wider-reaching history. First, The Long Ryders<\/strong> are included via frontman Sid Griffin\u2019s prior band The Unclaimed, whom Steve Wynn admired as \u201creally the one band in L.A. who\u2019d played unfiltered, unadulterated garage rock\u201d (quoted in Record Collector 2019) and briefly played in before forming the Dream Syndicate. Second, Green On Red<\/strong>, originally from Tucson, Arizona, moved into an L.A. apartment that became a favorite setting for conviviality and music-making among the small clique of musicians. Rain Parade guitarist Matt Piucci recalled,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We met the Dream Syndicate through a (Green on Red) barbecue. They had this place up in Hollywood. From there, we met the [Bangles\u2019] Peterson sisters \u2014 Ooh yeah! They were very sweet girls (quoted in PopMatters 2002).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Third, the northern California band True West<\/strong> is often added because of a common guitar-based attack and their prior incarnation with future Dream Syndicate members Steve Wynn and Kendra Smith as The Suspects<\/a> during the L.A.-born Wynn\u2019s spell at the University of California at Davis (Leviton 1984). Just as True West\u2019s inclusion upsets a tidy geographical coherence for the Paisley Underground, so too its early 80s chronology is complicated by the retrospective inclusion of Mazzy Star<\/strong>, the 1990s band formed by Rain Parade founder David Roback and Kendra Smith (following their interim spin-offs Clay Allison and Opal). In many accounts, Roback bookends the Paisley Underground story, forming the earliest L.A. residential connection in the beginning and keeping the flame of the Rain Parade\u2019s slow-burn psychedelia alive with Mazzy Star\u2019s commercial breakthrough in the end. \u201cI had grown up with David Roback, and we were both art majors at Berkeley,\u201d Susanna Hoffs has explained (quoted in Harris 2011). \u201cBut then the punk thing happened, and that led to the decision to kind of try and create music together.\u201d The style of Hoffs\u2019 pre-Bangs collaboration with David Roback is documented in their version of \u201cI\u2019ll Be Your Mirror\u201d<\/a> as found on the 1984 Rainy Day<\/em> LP. This compilation, which features covers of mostly 60s nuggets by different combinations of Paisley Underground musicians, received renewed attention following Roback\u2019s 2020 death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As a clique of eight interconnected bands, the Paisley Underground had a fairly brief run playing under the expansive (and, they would insist, never exclusive) umbrella of 60s pop and psychedelic rock styles. Its end was foreshadowed by the participants\u2019 awkward explanations to interviewers of the Paisley Underground tag. Three O\u2019Clock drummer Danny Benair had thought \u201cthe term was right on the button, with all the mods and the psychedelic kids\u201d back in 1982, but four years later, their local audience had sartorially moved on: \u201ceveryone looks like Madonna\u201d (quoted in Liveten 1986). Commensurate with their statements of artistic constraint from the Paisley Underground tag were the bands\u2019 leaps out of the L.A. underground. \u201cSuccess ended the scene \u2014 not a bad thing but a definite reality,\u201d Steve Wynn (2018) says. \u201cWe all had things to do and places to be. And eventually, our stylistic and aesthetic differences outgrew the things that bonded us together.\u201d The Bangles, soon to sell millions of records worldwide, and The Three O\u2019Clock moved toward bright 80s pop-rock via the unexpected support of Prince. Rain Parade, The Long Ryders, and Green On Red soaked in critical appreciation from Britain and Europe, where celebration of the groups\u2019 \u2018authentic\u2019 Americana presaged the next decade\u2019s interest in the alt-country movement (spearheaded by groups like Uncle Tupelo, Freakwater, and Geraldine Fibbers). The Dream Syndicate intersected with the American \u201cindie underground,\u201d wherein independent-label acts like R.E.M. and Black Flag consolidated a national infrastructure of college radio and nightclubs (Azzerad 2001), and evolved into a durable guitar-based unit over five LPs. By the end of the 1980s, all the original groups had broken up in a sequence of major label contracts, unfulfilled expectations, and public distraction by the next big things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Reddit forums and Facebook groups dedicated to the Paisley Underground illustrate how, beyond the canonical eight groups and miscellaneous offshoots, it\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess as to which groups are properly categorized by the term. Does the Paisley Underground include any early 80s L.A. band who professed a 60s influence, such as droning post-punks Leaving Trains (Magnet Magazine 2001) and mini-skirted garage rockers the Pandoras (Turner 1986)? Do Davis bands with psychedelic guitar showered in feedback (like desert rockers Thin White Rope) or reverb (the jangly Game Theory) get honorary inclusion (MasterClass 2022)? Where does the Paisley Underground end and the larger \u201croots revival\u201d that swept 80s clubs and college radio begin, particularly when The Long Ryders and Green On Red headed forcefully in that direction? This writer recalls seeing L.A. musicians and fans wearing Beatle boots and paisley shirts as late as 1987, but the historical record and media archives suggest that, although the Paisley Underground may be subsumed under a wider neo psychedelic turn in 80s underground rock, it isn\u2019t coterminous with the more geographically and temporally extensive latter movement. Reverent Nuggets\/Pebbles revivalists and 60s pop auteurs before, during, and after the Paisley Underground have come and gone \u2014 not least in Los Angeles, where around this time Bomp!<\/em> zine founder Greg Shaw set up the Voxx Records label and Cavern Club venue to showcase bands dedicated to 60s garage-rock purity (Stax 2007). Such connections to the original Paisley Underground groups are indirect, at best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Members of the Paisley Underground (and two friends in bottom right) at Catalina Island on July 4, 1982. Photo by Marji Mize-Banda.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, even though some founding members still mention \u201cthe scene\u201d when referring to their original comrades, the Paisley Underground can\u2019t be considered one if the concept of a scene designates an urban-regional milieu of cultural production, anchored in local institutions, that can sustain creative energies and economic activities as it takes in newcomers and lets old-timers exit (cf. Silver and Clark 2016). Granted, local venues like the Whisky a Go Go, the Cathay De Grande, Club 88 and Club Lingerie recur in the Paisley Underground story (e.g., Record Collector 2019); local gatekeepers like the Prince Valiant-coiffed Rodney Bingenheimer\u2019s radio show and L.A. music writers above- and under-ground gave the original bands important legs up. However, these institutions and actors were never exclusive to the Paisley Underground; they supported a larger L.A. scene, properly understood as composed of musicians working in an array of styles and embedded in urban-regional circuits of music venues, businesses, publications, and audiences. Other L.A.-based milieus (e.g., Green On Red\u2019s barbecue parties), organizations (Steve Wynn\u2019s DIY label Down There Records), and recordings (the Rainy Day<\/em> compilation) associated with the Paisley Underground were essentially invitation-only \u2014 private settings that effectively shut down once their caretakers moved on. Behind the myth of a scene, then, the Paisley Underground\u2019s first L.A. story is about a particular network<\/em> of musicians and affiliated organizations (Crossley 2015) that \u2014 unlike actual music scenes that coursed through Los Angeles: the 1960s Sunset Strip (Priore 2007), 70s country\/folk-rock (Hoskyns 2007), punk\u2019s mutations through the 1970s and early 80s (Spitz and Mullen 2001), glam metal of the 1980s Sunset Strip \u2014 never collectively expanded or historically endured beyond the mutual support and interpersonal efforts of its original participants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Next \u2013 mind gardens: psychedelic imagery and personal narratives…<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ROAD MAP TO THE PAISLEY UNDERGROUND:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n