The Sound of the Underground is Paisley

jamesgeraghty
Jul 7
11 min read

The Paisley Underground sounds like a movement that might have been from the free love west coast of the 1960s - tune in, drop out, and all that. It wasn't, but it was another west coast thing, and very much rooted in some of those earlier sounds, especially the electro-folk guitar and garage rock sounds of bands like Love and the Byrds.

Where, What, Who & When

The movement centred on Los Angeles, and while its roots were back in sixties L.A., the soil was the recent wave of punk that had percolated around the state (apologies for the appalling earthy metaphors). Just like in the U.K., punk enabled young people to get up and form a band, however musical they may (or may not) be, vent a bit - and then those that made it through the first wave, started to take onboard those other, older influences and then branch out into a variety of newer subcultures.

You can see some of that punk evolution in the series on west coast punk I wrote last year, here, here and here.

So, we are in L.A., (and also up to Sacramento and Davis to the north) and it is the early 1980s. DIY punks along with more accomplished musicians formed new bands and took in some of those 60s vibes; Green On Red drew some influence from the Doors, the Long Ryders nodded to Gram Parsons and Buffalo Springfield, while the Three O’Clock cobbled together something out of the Bee Gees and the Monkees.

The scene became a riot of musical colour; the influence of 60’s psychedelic bands like the 13th Floor Elevators, mixed with a big dose of power-pop, but often with an undercurrent of harder edged garage and punk rock. There was plenty of Rickenbacker guitar sounds, vintage organs, and of course, a little of that retro, thrift shop fashion sense.

A Hated Phrase

The term Paisley Underground as a defining description for the scene seems to have come from an article in L.A. Weekly in late 1982, when Michael Querico of Three O’Clock made a comment about Lina Sedillo of Peer Group. A tape of Peer Group rehearsing included a song with a spoken middle section that was made up on the spot, and which included the line, “Words from the paisley underground”, apparently inspired by the red paisley dress Sedillo was wearing at the time.

And, a bit like the term ‘grunge’ a decade or so later, it was a phrase many of the bands sitting under its umbrella came to dislike.

The Key Players

The Dream Syndicate:

Steve Wynn and Kendra Smith had already been in one new wave band up in Davis, while still at UC-Davis - The Suspects. But in 1981, Wynn went back to L.A. and soon formed the Dream Syndicate with new acquaintance Karl Precoda, bringing in Smith and adding Dennis Duck on drums. He later recalled, “When I got back to L.A., the scene there was kind of weak. It was scattered, without any particular direction… There was an art rock scene, a hardcore scene, but there wasn’t that much screaming for you to get involved.” They debuted at Club Lingerie in Hollywood in February 82, and soon had an EP out on Wynn’s own Down There label. They were a bit of an improv band, taking cues from the Velvet Underground, Neil Young and Television.

The Dream Syndicate: Tell Me When It's Over (live at Bumbershoot, 2014, for KEXP)

While never especially commercially successful, they made critical waves from the off, with debut album The Days Of Wine And Roses garnering four and five star reviews. They got themselves some decent support slots, with the likes of U2 and R.E.M., but those hits never came and they broke up in 1989. Wynn would reform them in 2012, and they are still playing and recording, with four more albums under their belt since then.

The Dream Syndicate: Days Of Wine And Roses (audio only, it's 7 minutes, but worth it!)

Green On Red:

This is perhaps a bit more of a loose association to the scene, seeing as they were formed in Tucson, Arizona and only moved to L.A. later. But there was enough of that psychedelic sound in their music to draw the comparisons, although their location and a tendency towards country rock, also got them as one of the first to be labelled Desert Rock.

Having moved to L.A. in 1980, they quickly got a support slot with local punk legends X. At some point the band name changed from The Serfers to Green On Red (at the suggestion of Belinda Carlisle), their link to the scene also included the debut EP, Two Bibles, being released on Down There. Like Dream Syndicate, they also joined up wit Slash Records for their debut LP, Gravity Talks.

Green On Red: Cheap Wine (audio only)

After one more album there, they signed for major label Phonogram / Mercury. At this point, the drift into more country sounds meant they could, as critic Ira Robbins perhaps unkindly noted, “finally erase the group’s original misassociation with the dreaded paisley underground.” Their sound ensured that they were a key pioneer for the sound that would eventually become known as Alt-Country, which emerged later in the decade through acts like Steve Earle and Uncle Tupelo.

Green On Red: That's What Dreams (Were Made For) (fan made video)

The Long Ryders:

Right out of the Byrds / Gram Parsons mould, the Long Ryders were an ensemble of multi-instrumentalists, including Sid Griffin and Stephen McCarthy. Griffin was an implant from Kentucky and wanted a band that mixed “punchy and beautiful” vocals, with “bass and drums… as aggressive as a punk band.” Their paisley underground associations were gradually loosened, as McCarthy’s input grew and added more country flavour.

The Long Ryders: I Had A Dream (official music video)

Griffin saw the DIY advantages that punk had brought with it; he read an article on a Sex Pistols live gig, and how they couldn’t play that well but were great fun, “and I thought: I could do that!... So I got out there [to Pasadena]... I turned on the radio and I spun the dial from left to right, and I went across the spectrum; it was exactly what I thought California would be - Jackson Browne, Led Zeppelin. And when I got to the far right, this asthmatic voice said, ‘Hi, this is Rodney on the Roq… I’m gonna play all three Sex Pistols singles.’.. I was just blown away.”

The Long Ryders: Ivory Tower (video made by bassist Tom Stevens - this is the one with Gene Clark on backing vocals)

Like Green On Red, this country-punk crossover would have an impact on the Alt-Country scene that emerged later in the 80s. Their first full length LP, 1984’s Native Sons, even included Gene Clark from the Byrds providing guest vocals on one song. A decision in 1986 to provide music for a beer commercial caused backlash from fans and critics, but at the same time, as Griffin would later recall, “to this day, the only money the Long Ryders has ever seen is from that beer commercial.”

The Three O’Clock:

The Three O’Clock started out as Salvation Army, but the actual organisation made them change their name from that - and as 3pm was the time they generally started their rehearsals… They were an out and out power-pop band, and their early EPs and LPs were produced by Earle Mankey of Sparks.

The Three O'Clock: Jet Fighter (official music video)

They later signed with I.R.S. and had a few minor hits, had one record produced by Liverpool post-punk legend Ian Broudie, and even had what would be their last album, Vermillion, released via Prince’s Paisley Park Records.

The Three O'Clock: Her Head's Revolving (official music video)

Rain Parade:

Based around brothers Steven and David Roback, with Matt Piucci, Rain Parade actually started out as a friendship between Piucci and David Roback that formed at a small college in Minnesota. Moving to L.A., they announced themselves with the self-released single, What She Done To Your Mind, in 1982. The following year saw Emergency Third Rail Power Trip come out, something Jim DeRogatis would call “not only the best album from any Paisley Underground bands, it ranks with the best psychedelic rock efforts from any era.” There were plenty of Byrds influences in there, with strong melodies, droning guitars and odd bits of sitar and violin. By 1986, they were three albums in and already done.

Rain Parade: Carolyn's Song (audio only)

There have been comebacks since 2012 and new material, but illness and death, including founder David Roback in 2020, means the line up changed plenty, although Steven Roback and Piucci remain.

Rain Parade: What She's Done To Your Mind (live in San Francisco - decent fan shot video)

The Bangles:

The most successful of the paisley underground bands, and perhaps the most surprising inclusion to this list, given the tone of their later global hits, was of course The Bangles. Susanna Hoffs formed the band with sisters Vicki and Debbi Peterson - with Annette Zilinskas completing the lineup on bass. They were initially the Colours (in 1981), then the Bangs - which is when they became part of the paisley scene, with their 60’s influenced rock.

They signed with I.R.S. founder Miles Copeland’s Faulty Products, releasing the Bangles EP in 1982, including the lead song The Real World. They then discovered that the Bangs name was already registered to another band, and they became the Bangles. Piucci remembered seeing them play and realised they had what it would take to be a success. “They were basically the Go-Gos, but they could all sing, and it was much more 60s influenced.”

The Bangles: The Real World (promo clip - the only one with Zilinskas in)

Zilinskas left, to be replaced by ex-Runaway Michael Steele, and they recorded All Over The Place, embracing the power-pop sound and including their take on Going Down To Liverpool, written by Kimberley Rew of Katrina & The Waves.

The Bangles: Going Down To Liverpool (official music video, with bonus Star Trek content!)

The link of the scene with Prince reached its peak when he gave them a song originally intended for an all girl group he had founded called Apollonia 6. In the end the Bangles recorded Manic Monday, and the rest is history - a number two in the US and UK, where ironically it was only outsold by the song Kiss, by you guessed it, Prince.

The Scene Is Set

So, by the middle of 1982, all of the bands that would become known as the key players in the paisley underground, were up and running, and had released records and were playing live. They had also started to become aware of each other and were now mixing socially too.

Michael Querico remembered meeting Susanna Hoffs, “And they were all: ‘Oh my gosh, you guys are great!’ And I was: ‘Oh my God, you guys are great! Let’s do a show.’.. [Then] someone said the Dream Syndicate were playing and I had to go see them… Then we became fast friends and by June of 1982 we all took a trip to Catalina Island - the Dream Syndicate, the Bangs, some guys from the Rain Parade - we all went out there and just kind of camped out and bonded.”

Wynn also remembers this period; “We all found each other pretty quickly and we were all pretty excited because no one else was doing it and we were all fans of each other. It really was a scene, a movement, we all knew we were doing something cool, and we would do a lot to support each other, hang out with each other.”

The other thing that perhaps sets the paisley underground apart from other scenes, and especially the punk wave that it loosely followed on from; as Griffin noted, “most of us had pretty decent backgrounds, so there was no cultural or economic status that on a personal level had stung us so much that we wanted to bite back against society. ‘What are you rebelling against?’ ‘Er, nothing.’.. We were not brick throwing anarchistic punks.”

Piucci had this to say on the scene’s label; “It’s mildly accurate. It addresses proximity and similarity of musical influences and that’s fine. People need labels, people need simplification, and that stuck - and it was advantageous in that sense.”

Legacy

While it’s true that these bands, in the purest paisley underground sense, only held that scene together for a few years across the early to mid-80s; the legacy of that lasted well beyond that period, and extended well beyond the confines of California.

They had taken the 60s influences of psychedelia, power pop and garage rock, the more recent impact of punk, to create their own melodic versions. But from that came, as already noted, Alt-Country, but it would also feed into dream-pop (David Roback would go on to found Mazzy Star) . As Magnet magazine would state, “The music produced by these bands neatly replicated the drug’s [ecstasy] sought-after effects, creating for listeners a floating haze of vaguely shaped, dilated-pupil happiness that took flight as grooving, liquid sound.”

Mazzy Star’s success in the mid 90s, and their direct connection via David Roback, reminded everyone of the old paisley scene. You can also draw a direct ancestral line to other bands like Grandaddy and Mercury Rev, and the neo-psych of the Dandy Warhols.

As mentioned, Green On Red and the Long Ryders had added that country element to proceedings as they progressed, and this would pave the way for the likes of Uncle Tupelo, who also fused together folk and country with psychedelia and punk. Their 1990 debut No Depression was the first to get that Alt-Country label - and over the next decade or so, a ton more bands would follow in their wake, including Freakwater, Whiskeytown and Drive-By Truckers - but the path had been forged by the likes of the Ryders and Green On Red.

Paisley Prince

Prince might have been from Minneapolis and known for his fusion of funk, soul, pop, disco, R&B and quite a few other genres - but he was also rather taken with the Paisley Underground movement too.

Apparently the love of the scene began when he saw a video for the Bangles 1984 song, Hero Takes A Fall. Vicki Peterson recalled, “He saw that and was just intrigued with the band. And he started showing up at shows. We’d find out after we’d left the stage and before we did the encore: ‘Prince is here and he’d like to play with you!’””

The Bangles: Manic Monday (live at The House Of Blues, 2011 - that song that transitioned Paisley Underground into mainstream pop - a seriously great version of a great song)

While there were rumours that he was romantically interested in lead singer Susanna Hoffs, it was definitely more than that. He liked the music, and as mentioned before, offered the Bangles his Manic Monday song. Most of the bands on the scene were getting fairly good critical press, but none of them had done much commercially to this point; but for the Bangles at least, Prince’s intervention would change all that.

In fact, the song Paisley Park appears on Around The World In A Day, the 1985 follow up to his hugely successful Purple Rain LP. It also featured as the name of his new imprint label on Warner Bros. (which would be the musical home for him and many of his protogees for a decade or so). He liked the psychedelic elements coming out of that Californian sound, and wove that into his new record.

As well as the song and the record label, his ode to the paisley scene extended to his soon to be legendary Paisley Park Studios, situated on his Minnesotan estate. It included four studios, a huge sound stage and rehearsal room (not to mention the basketball court); and it would be used by many including Martika, Steve Miller, the Bee Gees, Madonna, R.E.M. and Stone Temple Pilots.

It wasn’t just the Bangles that caught his ear either. He saw the video for Her Head’s Revolving by the Three O’Clock and started listening to some of the other bands from the scene too. It wasn’t such a stretch for him, as he was known to be a fan of Arthur Lee and Love - a direct ancestor of this scene. Michael Quercio did get to have one meeting with Prince, noting that “he was a distant figure”. The Three O’Clock ended up being signed to the Paisley Park label, which was why he got an invite to Paisley Park (the estate). The psychedelia had somewhat leaked by this point though, and the one record they made for Paisley Park, Vermillion, was considered a disappointment, despite the donation of another Prince song, Neon Telephone.

The psychedelic phase didn’t last long though, and by Sign O’ The Times, he was back on a more regular ‘Prince’ track. But while it might be something of an outlier, Around The World In A Day did give us Raspberry Beret, and you could argue that we have the Paisley Underground to thank for that.