Adam Nimoy: the Pete Best of the Paisley Underground

I don’t know if it’s psychedelic whimsy or what, but this band followed up their debut LP (Emergency) a year later not with another LP, but with a longish EP instead (Explosions). Maybe it’s just as well, because when it came to reissue time it meant there was no excuse not to bundle them together onto one CD. Still, it might have helped their career a bit to have put out an EP and then an album, as did True West. (Given all the fortune and fame that came to True West, it’d be best to forget I said that. Besides, TW’s first album was an expanded version of the EP; annoying since I’d bought it once already.) Perhaps--like Plasticland--they deliberately set out to erect as labyrinthine a discography as their 60s heroes, to make things that much more fun for future archaeologists. This of course bespeaks a certain hubris--they assumed they’d have a career long enough to accrue a pile of obscure EPs and B-sides. Not this time, junior. Rain Parade and True West both ended up issuing their demos, outtakes and live obscurities in posthumous ‘rarities’ albums. I’d dearly love to own Demolition and West Side Story, and somehow I know I never will.

A minor mystery--Adam Nimoy (son of Leonard) gets thank-yous on Rain Parade’s LPs, yet it’s unclear what it was he did for the band. Since I’d never heard of him opening doors for anyone else, it’d be nice to get the scoop--is there a Trekker who could tell me? Maybe they gave him a set of bongos, so he’d feel like he belonged. Maybe even onstage--it would have been a fitting tribute to the episode wherein Spock “jammed” a little bossa-nova blooz with a bunch of space-hippies (specifically with the one named “Adam”) en route to planet Eden. Maybe he even got to sit in on a session or two, only to have his bongo tracks lost in the final mix--Rain Parade’s personal Pete Best. [gonnnng! --Sorry.] I dunno, I’m just working on scenarios here. It is a documented fact that Leonard Nimoy made several LPs, and hipsters revel in the so-bad-it’s-goodness of them to this day (“Twinkle twinkle little Earth/How I wonder what you’re worth”). The idea that the impact of these LPs had endowed Nimoys Jr. and/or Sr. with clout in the music biz makes for the only kind of gum my mind lets me chew.

Why care about Rain Parade at all? Don’t be silly. You have no idea how much I resented having to come of age in the 80s, a time when almost everything happening on the radio filled me with revulsion, most of what was happening in the underground had nothing to say to me either, and if it did it was dying or dead by the time I even got to hear about it. Besides, so much of that “underground” stuff was merely test-marketing itself for the point which it would be the new mainstream: the louder someone screams about how they won’t be bought, the more likely they’re dancing as fast as they can to taunt Babylon into making an offer they won’t refuse. What was really going on in mid-80s pop was the “chaff” being separated from the “wheat.” And the “wheat” would go on to become...whitebread!

One thing I love about the Paisley Underground stuff is that it was far more offensive to the prevailing social mores than something like...oh say can you see, the Screaming Blue Messiahs? Yeah, I’ll go with that--had to think for a minute. I bear no grudge against them in particular, in fact I rather enjoyed them--but they’re as typical a bunch of assembly-line punks as one could possibly wish for. “Wow, look at the baldie, isn’t he outrageous? Maybe after the show he’ll let me pat him on the head for good luck!!” Everything the Screaming BMs were doing had already been done to death and had proven to be no threat to anyone. It was only marginally entertaining even--that stuff wasn’t even interesting as a schtick anymore. There are many words that could be used to describe a band that would put out a video like “I Wanna Be A Flintstone,” but dangerous is near the bottom of the list.

Bands like Rain Parade displayed far more integrity precisely because they weren’t talking ’bout a revolution. Even more laughable than the Screaming BMs were the Clash, especially at this point--they’d ditched Mick Jones, brought in two anonymous prosthetics and turned their rhetoric and amplifiers up to 11, as if without him it was going to be 1976 all over again! Political grandstanding by rock bands is just as much a fantasyland as anything coming out of Marilyn Manson--the fact is that people fuck everything up. They don’t listen. Unless they accept you as an authority figure there’s no use trying to do anything to change them. The Clash had spent considerable time and effort lecturing Americans about their government’s (admittedly deplorable) foreign policy. (When Reagan was re-elected, I personally enjoyed the fact that if nothing else you just knew the Clash would be in a pub somewhere crying in their beer.) (All of them except the junkie.) It’s not as if many Americans particularly noticed, and it’s a fact that nobody’s vote was changed in 1984 by anything the Clash ever had to say. Even if it had been heard, even after they had been shamed, the Reagan voters would have found in it one more reason to vote for him: exactly the same one Kurt Waldheim’s voters found, a few years later. (“Nobody tells us who to vote for--he may be a Nazi, but he’s our Nazi!”)

Rather than make a cartoon of yourself telling people what to do, about all you can realistically hope for is to provide a positive example and avoid making a big deal even of that. (The only time I ever tell you to do anything is when I say “buy this!,” and it doesn’t mean I literally expect you to!) The Paisley bands were as righteous as anything could hope to be in the 80s, by virtue of their conscious embrace of an aesthetic for which the über-society was frantically proclaiming zero tolerance and was rather desperate to see suppressed, buried...antiqued is the verb I guess I’m looking for. Paisley pop? We’re all grown up now, drugs are bad, don’t you know? Haven’t you been watching TV? And, gosh, look at the clothes they wear! I haven’t seen that stuff at the Gap yet. It looks like the things all the cool people leave on the rack at the thrift store. That’s kid stuff--why aren’t you listening to some nice, well-behaved popstar like Michael Jackson?

The (non-Paisley) “underground?” Whatever passed for an underground in the mid-80s--the misfit kid who worked at the supermarket, the one who cut his own hair with a pair of scissors (or more likely paid big bucks downtown to make it look that way) and tucked Zen Arcade into the Walkman when he got home? These people didn’t want to know from it either--they had pretty much the same 60s roots but they would never dare flaunt them, they weren’t nearly sophisticated enough to make the distinction between the Spirit of ’66 and the aberrations of Woodstock Nation.

The Deadheads were hipper--they did know the difference, some of them anyway, but their preferences were firmly with the latter. Even that’s a red herring--the Grateful Dead were as contemporary as any band working in the mid-80s, far more than most if you cared to look at their concert grosses. The average Deadhead didn’t give a shit about the 60s. Some of them were Reagan voters if they bothered at all. Most of them had boomer parents who were unwilling to discuss their glory days with any candor, and so the kids had only the prevailing cultural memories to draw upon. What they didn’t pick up from TV, they learned at the head shop. (Kinda like learning about sex on the streetcorner, isn’t it?) Their concept of the 60s came down to tie-dies, incense and bongwater--just as their Happy Days 50s consisted of leather jackets, cheeseburgers and cokes. All of them were far more concerned about scoring tickets for the summer tour than about anything that had happened before they were born, unless it was on a low-gen soundboard tape.

As for the critics? A lot of help they were! Reread the paragraph on the “underground.” They knew their rock history, but didn’t want to go to bat for something so declasse. So here was this Paisley scene that basically existed in a void, making perfectly lovely music that only I had a use for. And Rain Parade (along with True West) were the Paisley Underground in all its shimmering, exquisite luminescence. If you ignored them then, hear them now.

In all their catalogue (such as it was), there’s only one release to avoid, their last. I bought Trashing Dream...oops...Crashing Dream on cassette for a buck once and threw it in the garbage shortly thereafter. But those first two (Beyond the Sunset live in Japan also) stand among the very best of 80s psychedelia. I recall a review in Musician, predictably negative about the Paisley Underground scene (“file this under ‘time warp’”), but even that guy thought Rain Parade were for the ages. Check ’em out (only if you wanna!), one could do worse with $15, and one usually does.