The First Thing I Thought When I Was Offered
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The Popular Music Project: Listening Party at LACE Sept. 16, 2008 The Paisley Underground Notes by Alejandro Cohen The first thing I thought when I was offered to host the Paisley Underground listening party was: "What makes me qualified to do this?" after all, I was only 10 years old by the time the movement as it's known now was over. And even worse, I wasn't even born or raised in Los Angeles!!! Let alone the US. So again, what makes me qualified to do this presentation? I find it funny that someone like me, being a foreigner, originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, is doing a presentation about a local group of friends, colleagues and bandmates that at some point connected, played and wrote songs together at a special time and place in music history. But I guess it is not uncommon for a person to go to a foreign land and find something that locals take for granted fascinating, and appreciate how amazing that something is. My first exposure to what is called Paisley Underground was in 1996, when I first moved to Los Angeles. A friend of mine owned a record by Kendra Smith, The Guild of Temporal Adventurers. And although that record technically is not a Paisley Underground record, I found the sound so unique and at the same time so connected to everything I liked, that I made it a point to find out more about who was behind this. You have to remember that this was 1996. I didn't own a computer, and the Intemet was something that only a couple of people I knew had access to. So as you can imagine, it took a bit longer to find out all the connections and backgrounds. Then someone told me, "Oh, yes, they are part of that whole Paisley Underground scene." The term sounded even more intriguing, just like the first time I heard the name Velvet Underground. It sounded like an elusive group of people that created these mysterious and well-crafted songs that were just mind-blowing. Finally a couple of years later (post-Internet years) all the bands started popping up one way or another. I think first came Rain Parade through their CD reissues, then The Three O' Clock with Baroque Hoedown at a record store in Ventura, and it was just a matter of time until I found out about the rest of them all. The more I read about this time and place I realized that the Paisley Underground was never about being retro, revivalists, and even less about following any trends. I think in the end all these bands were original and created something new that influenced many bands that came afterwards. But after reading interviews, reviews, articles and just looking at pictures from that era, it's obvious to me that it was more about collaborating, and spending time with friends and in the process writing music that stood the test of time. I guess you can always ask Michael Quercio, who is here, to share some stories with us about that. So going back to what makes me qualified to do this presentation, I guess the answer is that I'm just a fan who absolutely loves this music, and find it so so so special and influential on a personal level, that I think it deserves to be featured and celebrated for what it really was. The Paisley Underground is a group of bands from Los Angeles, that shared certain aesthetic values and influences roughly between the years 1980 and 1985/86. The term was coined by our special guest Michael Quercio, from The Three O'Clock, as a joke during an interview, but maybe he can tell us more about that later. Among others, they were heavily influenced by the whole West Coast psychedelic scene of the 60's, like the Beach Boys, The Byrds, Love, and I don't know this for a fact, but I assume also more obscure bands such as The Millenium, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band and The Beatles. Another big influence you could hear in all these bands was The Velvet Underground, and from there it goes to punk and post-punk, not only from New York and the UK, but also from Los Angeles. Actually some members from L.A. punk bands would later join or form bands that were part of the Paisley Undergound scene. One example would be The Weirdos's drummer, Danny, who would later be part of The Three O'Clock. So the line sometimes can be blurry where one ends and the other one begins. During this period, there was a group of bands that were central to the Paisley Underground genre, movement or scene. Those bands were The Rain Parade, The Three O'Clock, The Dream Syndicate, The Bangs (that later would go on to become The Bangles), Green On Red, The Long Ryders, (to some also) Opal, and two collaborative projects, one called Rainy Day, and the other one called Danny and Dusty. There were also bands that were on the fringe of the movement, even geographically, considering many of them came from Davis, CA. Some of those are True West, The Things, Thin White Rope, Game Theory, Wednesday Week, Untold Fables and The Last, among others. The central bands of the movement went on to achieve relative commercial success, and actually as you know The Bangles went on to become huge. But regardless of the amount of records they sold, the amount of fans that went to their shows, or how much press or airplay their records received, the critical acclaim was always there, for all of them. During this period the music coming out of these bands, was new, futuristic in a sense, modern, and yet, it contained a resemblance to classic songs from the past, without being in the shadows of them. As I mentioned before, the bands that were part of the Paisley Underground movement, had a big influence on bands that came afterwards, such as REM, The Stone Roses, Biff Bang Pow! from Creation Records and many of the "alternative" bands that came afterwards. I can get lost in theorizing forever about indie guitar rock, and the sound that came from here went there and so on. But I don't know much about all those currents, and I don't think that is important, at least to me. What I do find important and fascinating is that after all these years, any kid that is getting into music that is outside of mainstream culture, at some point, inevitably she or he will come across these sounds, these songs, and these records, just like it happened to me. All these bands became stepping-stones to what we listen to today, and are as relevant today as they were 25 years ago. Thank you so much for coming and I hope you find this presentation enjoyable, informative and exciting. .