Rare Opals

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In the mail at the weekend, a pair of reissued Opal CDs that I didn’t expect to see any time soon, Happy Nightmare Baby (1987) and Early Recordings (1989). Opal were an American group who were active throughout the 1980s but they didn’t record very much, only releasing these two discs towards the end of their career. Both albums sank from sight in the early 1990s, and had been unavailable in any form when CD reissues were announced in late 2019 on guitarist David Roback’s own label, Salley Gardens. The reissues were withdrawn shortly before the release date, possibly as a result of Roback’s illness and subsequent death in February 2020. All of this is niche stuff but aficionados of the niche in question may like to know that I bought these new from an eBay (UK) seller for a fraction of the price you’ll pay at Discogs or elsewhere. (Here and here.) I’d seen reports that copies had been shipped before the cancellation was announced but hadn’t seen any on sale outside Discogs until last week. I’ve also seen suggestions that there might be bootlegs circulating but if these are boots then someone has managed to imitate the matrix numbers on the discs which I don’t think is an easy thing to do.

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Opal is a group you seldom see mentioned today but plenty of people know the name of Mazzy Star, the group that Opal became after the departure of singer Kendra Smith in the late 1980s. David Roback was the key member, the link between Mazzy Star and the neo-psychedelia of the Los Angeles Paisley Underground which gave rise to both Opal and Roback’s other outlet, the Rain Parade. The Paisley Underground was never as psychedelic as I hoped it might be, only the Rain Parade could be classed as a bona fide psych band, but the groups associated with this loose scene—The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate, The Three O’Clock, et al—were all preoccupied with the music of the late 1960s, and of the early 70s via Neil Young and Alex Chilton. Opal followed the trend, being less oneiric than Mazzy Star would be, more concerned with reviving older musical styles than creating something new. Early Recordings, a collection of singles, EPs and other songs, owes less to psychedelia than it does to late-60s balladeering: guitar and vocals, lots of reverb and minimal percussion and keyboards. Kendra Smith, formerly of The Dream Syndicate, sings almost all the songs on both albums. The origin of the Opal sound may be found in the cover versions on Rainy Day (1984), a one-off album that David Roback recorded with Kendra Smith plus members of The Bangles, Rain Parade and The Three O’Clock. Lou Reed’s I’ll Be Your Mirror is the early Opal sound in miniature, especially in the version by Nico and The Velvet Underground which Roback emulates with Susanna Hoffs.

Happy Nightmare Baby has a rather prosaic monochrome cover but this is where the psychedelic rock comes to the fore, with Roback breaking out the fuzz box and wah-wah pedal to fashion a heavier sound that would later be heard on Mazzy Star songs like Ghost Highway. I said that only the Rain Parade warranted the psych label but Happy Nightmare Baby certainly gets there on songs like Magick Power and the slow explosion of Soul Giver, the latter being the closest that Opal get to the Rain Parade’s finest moment, No Easy Way Down. There’s also a touch of glam in the opening number, Rocket Machine, which harks back to the T. Rex of Electric Warrior. Happy Nightmare Baby is a fiery debut—and Opal could be even heavier live—but it’s one of those albums that you’d expect would be surpassed by later releases, instead of which all we have is Early Recordings*. The two albums are dissimilar enough to almost be the work of different groups; together they suggest that David Roback spent most of the 1980s trying to orient his music in a way that honoured his influences while also accommodating all his favoured modes of expression, from fuzz squall to languid blues to nocturnal drift. The first Mazzy Star album, She Hangs Brightly, is the place where the influences and intentions fused to create something new. And Roback found his ideal singer in Hope Sandoval, of course. Kendra Smith is okay but her voice can get monotonous over a whole album, she lacks Hope Sandoval’s mystique and emotional range. Opal were good but you can’t imagine many people wanting to cover their songs the way people have done with Mazzy Star. But then without Opal there might never have been a Mazzy Star. Niche stuff this may be but it doesn’t deserve to be buried for another thirty years.


* Or almost all. There is another album, Early Recordings Volume 2, a collection of unreleased songs and covers. But this has never been given an official release.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Balloon parade
The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!
Strange Things Are Happening, 1988–1990

Weekend links 261

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Salome (2013) by Lucie Hardie.

Aickmanesque, “A list of films that possess the same strange ambiguities, disturbing illogicalities, grim mundanities, psychological unpleasantness, narrative open-endedness, Freudian oddness and genuine disturbing moments of horror as the short stories of Robert Aickman.” One of those films, Symptoms (1974), has been out of circulation for a long time but may be watched at YouTube.

• “If this was psychedelia, then it had more in common with the variety peddled by US bands like The Rain Parade, The Three O’Clock…and The Bangles…all of whom had been grouped into a movement known as The Paisley Underground.” Joseph Stannard looks back at Around The World In A Day by Prince And The Revolution.

• “…what I do is not magical realism. I do realistic magic.” Alejandro Jodorowsky talking to Ilan Stavans about writing and filmmaking. A substantial interview in which Jodorowsky isn’t forced to express himself solely in English.

[Angela] Carter thoroughly upset the bien pensants with her essay The Sadeian Woman (1978) where she argued that Sade “was unusual in his period for claiming rights of free sexuality for women and in installing women as beings of power in his imaginary worlds … I would like to think that he put pornography in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical to women.” She also makes the connection between Sade’s misanthropy, as she calls it, and his splitting of women’s bodies from “the mothering function”. McQueen seems to me to fascinate for similar reasons. Some of the pull he exerts on huge numbers of people arises from this side of his sensibility: there’s no hint of motherhood; he disliked the way that traditional décolletage revealed the breasts, and instead encased the whole female torso in coiled silver, mussel shells or razor clams—even glass.

Marina Warner on Alexander McQueen whose Savage Beauty exhibition is currently running at the V&A

• London’s American poster king: Graham Twemlow on E. McKnight Kauffer’s posters for the London Underground.

• At Celluloid Wicker Man: Electronic music and mental illness in cinema.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 154 by Moniek Darge.

#1 (1994), the first album by Skylab, has been reissued.

Vir·tu·al Ge·om·e·try

Tamborine (1985) by Prince And The Revolution | Indigo (1994) by Skylab | Metronomic Underground (1996) by Stereolab

Weekend links 160

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Collage by Jeneleen Floyd.

• “…slowly, block-by-block, pedestrians are starting to take back the streets.” Wayne Curtis on the hazards of being a pedestrian in a world of cars.

• Michael Hann looks back at LA’s Paisley Underground, and also talks to some of its key members.

Meighan O’Toole interviews JL Schnabel about her Blood Milk jewellery designs.

My central thesis is that camp was always a kind of signifying practice invented out of necessity (both for survival and for sheer creative pleasure) by “queer” (in the classic sense) outsiders – fags, drag queens, transsexuals, deviants, sexual renegades – and that it was always by its very nature deeply political and committed: Some people dedicated their entire lives to it! Sontag’s interpretation always seemed a bit dismissive to me somehow.

The seldom unprovocative Bruce LaBruce talking to Mark Allen about camp in the 21st century.

• Studiocanal launches an appeal to find the lost materials of The Wicker Man.

• At Flickr: Tales from a Parallel Universe and London’s Lost Music Venues.

Michael Wood tells us what we learn when we read Italo Calvino’s letters.

• Fragments of a Portrait: Francis Bacon and David Sylvester in 1966.

• An extract of a live session from Adrian Sherwood and Pinch.

• In Baba Yaga’s Hut: Amelia Glaser on Russian folk tales.

Buckminster Fuller Book Covers from the 1970s.

A Century of Proust.

The Real World (1982) by The Bangles | With A Cantaloupe Girlfriend (1982) by The Three O’Clock | Medicine Show (1984) by The Dream Syndicate | No Easy Way Down (live in Tokyo, 1984) by The Rain Parade

The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!

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25 O’Clock (1985). Andy Partridge’s great cover design.

The DUKES say it’s time…it’s time to visit the planet smile…it’s time the love bomb was dropped…it’s time to eat music…it’s time to kiss the sun…it’s time to drown yourself in SOUNDGASM and it’s time to dance through the mirror. The DUKES declare it’s 25 O’CLOCK.

It was twenty-five years today—April 1st, 1985—that Virgin Records released what was supposed to be a reissue of a lost psychedelic album from the late 1960s, 25 O’Clock by The Dukes of Stratosphear. The catalogue number was WOW 1 and the vinyl label was printed with the old black-and-white Virgin logo by Roger Dean even though Virgin Records wasn’t founded until 1972. No one was supposed to know that the album was really a pastiche project by XTC but I don’t recall anyone actually being fooled by this, all the reviews acknowledged XTC as the originators, and band members Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding were happy to give interviews enthusing about their musical obsessions. As well as being incredibly successful artistically the album was a surprising commercial success which led the bemused record label to ask for a sequel. Psonic Psunspot followed two years later, and the Dukes’ vibe infected XTC’s own work for a while, with their 1988 album, Oranges & Lemons, pitched somewhere between the pastiches and XTC’s more usual sound .

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Psonic Psunspot (1987). Design by Dave Dragon and Ken Ansell.

Continue reading “The Dukes declare it’s 25 O’Clock!”

New things for April III

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The results of the Figment album art competition have now been posted and you can see my choice of the winner on the left here. You can see the rest of the winners and read my comments on the Figment site. The winning design reminded me of the famous cover for the first King Crimson album, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), a painting by Barry Godber. Both have an arresting quality which make you wonder what it is that’s being witnessed beyond the picture frame.

King Crimson’s debut is one of the key moments when British music abandoned the silliness of psychedelia and got down to the serious business of becoming progressive rock. For some people this means it’s also the moment when rock music Went Wrong but I’ve no time for such Spartan sophistries; Robert Fripp rules. Digressions aside, I’ve not finished with the present psychedelic obsession (no, you don’t escape that easily), and the other piece of news today comes with an alert from Valis whose radio show of psychedelic music, Trip Inside This House, runs for two hours every Tuesday morning on KBHX, St Louis, from 5am to 7am. There’s archived shows on a blog of the same name and that site currently features an interview with Matt Piucci, ex of the fantastic Rain Parade, for my money the best of the Paisley Underground bands of the 1980s. If you haven’t yet heard their finest moment, No Easy Way Down, then your life is quite simply a hollow sham.