3 posts tagged “opal”
The Rain Parade, from their first album, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip (1983). The video's from 1984. Holy Toledo, those guys were good. Looks like they made the video after David Roback left, but he was still in the band when they recorded the album. Kendra Smith sings in the background on this. I have a notion that she played additional percussion too, but I'm not sure why I think that, so discount it.
Yes fans may have the patience to sit through what follows; others, skip ahead to the songs. Listen to both of them; they're very different.
In 1982, Kendra Smith was playing bass in the Dream Syndicate (the Steve Wynn (no relation to the mogul) and Karl Precoda outfit, not the LaMonte Young thing with John Cale in the 1960s) and David Roback was playing guitar in the Rain Parade with his brother Steven Roback. That whole crowd used to hang out in some cheap end of Hollywood, CA with Green on Red, the Bangles when they were a real band, and others. David and Kendra got together, and when she quit the Dream Syndicate and he got fired from the Rain Parade, they started a band with drummer Keith Mitchell which they called Clay Allison, which they also called Smith Roback Mitchell, and finally ended up calling Opal. Smith left Opal around 1988, and later made two fine solo records, one now forgotten and the other on 4AD. She left them sort of in the lurch, and suggested a friend of hers as a replacement singer, a lugubrious oxygen-thief named Hope Sandoval. They renamed themselves and sold a lot of records to other lugubrious oxygen-thieves (full disclosure: I own all three albums, and if they reunite for another I'll buy that one too). Those records did actually have some bright spots. Bright, but not great. What was great about Opal was the weird surreal edge they had, and Smith's voice. David Roback has always been exactly as good as his collaborators.
"Supernova" is from Happy Nightmare Baby, their one proper album. It seems to be out of print now; it was on SST, but they seem to have given up their Everything in Print Forever schtick. Bit of a bummer, but they are trying to run a business for God's sake. "Strange Delight" is from a posthumous retrospective called Early Recordings, that's been out of print since God knows when.
One of the great rock'n'roll catastrophes of the last thirty years is the inexplicably drooping career arc of Steven Roback, a leading light in the microscopic "Paisley Underground" LA scene in the early 1980s. They did get some hype, but not much, and very briefly. You may recall a beer commercial from that era featuring a band whose singer had a green/aqua-colored National/Valco/Glenwood res-o-glas "map guitar" (sooo cool); I only saw it once, but a guitar like that sticks in your mind. That was the Long Ryders, from the same crowd. They kinda sank without a trace, rightly unmourned, but the guy with the National, Sid Griffin, now has a career writing liner notes for Gram Parsons tribute albums.
Roback was in the legendary Rain Parade, of course, with his brother David. David ended up in Opal with Kendra Smith (ex-Dream Syndicate); Opal later degraded into Mazzy Star when Smith moved on.
After two great albums (Emergency Third Rail Power Trip and Explosions in the Glass Palace, in print on a majestic, indispensible two-fer with a bonus track), one very good one (Crashing Dream, out of print), and a semi-unreleased mess (Demolition; I've got it, don't bother (yeah, I paid a few bucks, but nothing like the three-figure outrages at that Amazon link)), Steven Roback formed a band called Viva Saturn with other ex-Rain Paraders (take that Trouser Press article with a grain of salt; they've got David Roback's departure mis-dated by several years). The RP's wonderful, mind-altering lead guitarist Matt Piucci dropped in now and again on the albums. He's all over this track.
So here's the title track from Viva Saturn's Soundmind (1991). Find the record if you can. It's great, glowing stuff, but it went nowhere, and two albums later their label wouldn't release them (Restless, rumored to have done the same to other bands). Why weren't these guys famous?
