Some forty years later, the music produced by the Paisley Underground retains an elusive magic. Born out of the passion and intensity of punk but alienated by the increasingly macho and formulaic structure of hardcore, a bunch of kids in and around LA looked back to the glory days of psychedelia and country music for inspiration, as well as the artier bands coming out of New York like Television. These groups pioneered a new kind of psychedelia for the 1980s, a merging of the trippier aspects of the Byrds’ jangling guitars with the street-smarts of the Velvet Underground. These groups would prove hugely influential on the development of indie and alternative music in the US and the UK, but struggles with major labels who came in to swallow up the promising young bands and an unsympathetic popular music climate would mean that most would never achieve the popularity or success they so clearly deserved. Of these bands, which included talents as diverse as the brilliant and noisy Dream Syndicate, alt-country pioneers The Long Ryders and Green On Red, and a pre-fame Bangles, arguably none shone brighter than Rain Parade. As Label 51 Recordings brings out their classic debut album Emergency Third Rail Power Trip as a deluxe reissue with an extra disc of bonus tracks 41 years after its initial release, now is a great time to reflect on their singular masterpiece and its inspiring legacy.
Rain Parade were initially formed in 1981 by college roommates Matt Piucci (guitar, vocals) and Dave Roback (guitar, vocals), with Dave’s brother Steve joining on bass and vocals soon afterwards. Will Glenn (keyboards, violin) and Eddie Kalwa (drums) completed the classic line up, and the band quickly recorded and released their debut single, the remarkably assured ‘What She’s Done To Your Mind’, on their own label. Their debut album Emergency Third Rail Power Trip was recorded shortly after, and released by indie label Enigma/Zippo. From the start, Rain Parade were perhaps cursed with an excess of talent – Matt Piucci and both the Roback brothers proved themselves talented and ambitious songwriters, which was simply too much for the band to contain. Dave Roback left the next year, forming Clay Allison with ex-Dream Syndicate bassists and singer Kendra Smith, eventually morphing into Opal, one of the other key Paisley Underground band. Opal disintegrated on the tour for their classic debut album Happy Nightmare Baby (1987), and Dave Roback recruited singer Hope Sandoval and formed Mazzy Star, a band whose critical and commercial success in the 1990s would eclipse their Paisley Underground origins. Dave would sadly pass away from cancer in 2020.
Rain Parade continued as a four-piece, releasing the mini-album Explosions in the Glass Palace (1984). This record showed that, if the new slimmed down Rain Parade was inevitably less intense than the initial line up, it was still capable of releasing brilliant psychedelic music that stood with the best of the genre. However, Kalwa left soon after its release, to be replaced by Mark Marcum. John Thoman joined on guitar and vocals to round out the new line up. Island Records soon came to call, and their next studio album Crashing Dream (1985) still had the songs but suffered from unsympathetic production. Their inertia stalled and Rain Parade disbanded in 1986, with the members going on to other musical projects until their surprise reformation in 2012, minus Glenn who sadly passed away from cancer in 2001. Their new album, 2023’s Last Rays of a Dying Sun, sees the return of the classic Rain Parade magic. But in many ways, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip remains their defining musical moment and most cherished musical legacy. Emergency Third Rail Power Trip in its initial incarnation was nine perfect tracks of delicate, melodic psychedelic rock. The album’s eccentric title comes from a sign Dave saw in a subway in San Francisco while high, and perfectly captures the band’s singular vision. It’s a record that wears its influences on its sleeve – it’s easy to see the lysergic chiming of the Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’, the fractured melodicism and harmonic inventiveness of Syd Barrett, the intelligent songwriting and warm guitars of Loaded-era Velvet Underground. But Rain Parade are original enough to elevate their material from mere pastiche of a bygone era. Piucci and Dave Roback’s twin guitars channel the sonic exploration of Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd as much as they echo Roger McGuinn. Steve Roback’s melodic basslines frequently wind up leading the songs, whilst Kalwa is a deft drummer capable of nuance and delicacy as well as surprising flashes of energy and noise. Glenn’s atmospheric keyboards and soaring violin tie the whole sound together, providing texture and melodic flights of fancy where needed. While it’s easy to hear where Rain Parade are coming from, they somehow wind up sounding like no one but themselves.
The album opens with Piucci and Dave’s ‘Talking in My Sleep’, a hypnogogic delight that’s the perfect introduction to Rain Parade’s dreamy world. A melodic bassline opens the records, before the drums and then the rest of the band come crashing in, generating a jangling psychedelic drone over which the gorgeous vocal harmonies intone:
I know I’m talking in my sleep
Sleeping in my dreams
Dreaming on my feet…
Rain Parade exist in this liminal world between sleep and waking, drifting in and out of dreams and visions as reality starts to dissolve around you. It’s beautiful, exhilarating, and a little bit terrifying. This atmosphere prevails over the next 40 minutes, over a variety of mood and tonal shifts as the band demonstrate the depth and breadth of their songwriting talents. There are sharp, catchy pop songs, like Piucci and Dave’s ‘What She’s Done to Your Mind’, that sound like hit singles from another, better reality. There are delicate, heartbreaking ballads like Dave’s ‘Caroline’s Song’. And there are towering psychedelic epics, like Steve and Dave’s ‘1 Hour ½ Ago’ and Puicci, Dave and Steve’s ‘Look at Merri’, in which the band stretch out, melodic verses giving way to delicate intertwined guitar, sitar and violin explorations. Later editions would append Piucci’s Velvets-esque rocker ‘Look Both Ways’, which closes out the first disc containing the original album in the current reissue.
Just as it’s easy to listen to Emergency Third Rail Power Trip and hear its influences, at this juncture in history the album’s own influence is clear, far more profound than its meagre sales at the time might suggest. Rain Parade’s mixture of classic psychedelia and country rock through a post-punk lens may have sounded curiously out of time on its release, but you can hear the same vibe in the dreamy jangle of early REM, whose music would shape alternative and indie rock for the next three decades, as well in the nascent alt-country scene with bands like Giant Sand who would pave the way for the likes of Wilco. Rain Parade were also curiously influential in the UK. Creation Records in particular had been trying to fuse 60s psychedelia with post-punk indie jangle to limited success, and Emergency Third Rail Power Trip in many ways beats the label at their own game. They certainly wouldn’t fuse those two elements together as successfully until the advent of the House Of Love in the late 80s. Creation greats such as Ride and My Bloody Valentine have cheerfully admitted to the influence of Rain Parade on their strikingly original sound.
Bringing Emergency Third Rail Power Trip properly back into print for a new generation of fans would be a service to music enough. But part of the appeal of this new reissue is the goodies on the second disc. Given the natural conflict that must arise from three young ambitious songwriters trying to make their mark combined with being a big noise in a small scene, it’s perhaps a miracle that the first line-up of Rain Parade lasted as long as they did. And while the other incarnations of the band have released good to great music, there still remains the frustration of imagining what they could have achieved if the Dave line up could have stayed together a bit longer instead of falling apart on that first tour. Much of the excitement about the reissue for the new fans lies in the bonus disc, which meticulously gathers together just about everything that exists from that line up, allowing us to both hear the development of the original group across demos and 4-track versions, and to hear live recordings the handful of songs the band never got round to recording before Dave’s departure. The sound for the latter is variable, as one might expect from bootleg tapes from forty years ago, but the band and producer Jim Hill have done a wonderful job cleaning up the material as best as possible, and frankly the interest of the material means it’s worth having in whatever quality available really.
The bonus disc starts off with the original single version of ‘What She’s Done To Your Mind’, which is rougher and less fleshed out than the later album version but retains the striking melodicism and harmonic inventiveness. Drummer Michael Murphy is less of a good fit than Kalwa, whose rhythmic flourishes shape so much of Emergency Third Rail Power Trip’s material, but otherwise all the pieces are in place. It’s already a great song, and it’s hard to see in retrospect why it didn’t do as well as, say, REM’s contemporaneous ‘Radio Free Europe’, which was an early indie and college radio hit. We then get the early 4-track versions of ‘This Can’t Be Today’, ‘I Look Around’ and ‘Look Both Ways’ which originally appeared on WarfRat Tales, a compilation released in 1983 that contained tracks by many embryonic Paisley Underground bands and musicians. By this time Murphy has been replaced by Brian Norris, who is a slightly better fit, and you can hear the band’s confidence growing, even if the limits of the 4-track only hint at their grander psychedelic visions. There’s an appealing rawness and immediacy to these recordings, the sounds of a great band in the process of discovering just how great they are.
We also get a tantalizing demo version of one of the album’s centrepieces, ‘Look At Merri’, which by comparing it to the final version you can hear the care and composition that went into Rain Parade’s melodic explorations. The switches in time signature are already in place, as are many of the arrangement ideas. The confidence of the band and the mastery of their material is clear to hear. From the same session is ‘What You’ve Done’, another melodic gem composed by both Roback brothers that formed part of their live set at the time but never made it onto the album. Its delicate melody, jangling guitars and subtle violin accents suggest it would have fit perfectly on the album had they decided to include it. There’s also a brief rehearsal run-through of a track called ‘Time Machine’, which doesn’t wind up anywhere but it’s still exciting to hear the band trying out these ideas. The remaining tracks are live recordings of the songs this line up of the band never got down in the studio. Piucci and Steve’s ‘Paper Girl’ is a breezy and melodic song driven by classic psychedelic keyboards and McGuinn-ish intertwining guitar lines. It’s easy to see how it could have become something special had the band ever properly recorded it. Dave’s ‘Speedway’ was a live favourite at the time, an instrumental Velvets-esque rocker with a stop-start rhythm powered by Kalwa’s typically deft drumming. There’s an intriguing cover of Syd Barrett’s ‘No Good Trying’, a clear signpost to one of Rain Parade’s key influences, with a fuller arrangement than the original and Glenn sounding almost John Cale-like on the violin. ‘Unexpected’ suffers from the roughest recording on the disc, but it’s a beautiful Piucci and Dave song that we would otherwise never have heard. Through the distorted tape you can make out the delicate keyboard, melodic guitar lines and wistful vocal harmonies, again suggesting it could have been another classic had the band gotten round to making a proper recording. All in all the extra dics doesn’t make up for there not being another album by the classic Rain Parade line up, but it's the best consolation prize fans could hope for.
Emergency Third Rail Power Trip stands alongside the Dream Syndicate’s classic debut album The Days Of Wine And Roses (1982) as the artistic highwater mark of the Paisley Underground, and one of the finest releases to come from American indie music during a tumultuous but productive decade. Given that The Days Of Wine And Roses got its lovingly curated deluxe reissue from Fire Records last year, it feels only fitting that we get the definitive edition of Rain Parade’s masterpiece this year. The album stands as testament to five brilliant musicians at the peak of their young powers, and a vindication of sticking to one’s artistic vision to produce a masterpiece outside of time. Now with the bonus material we finally have the full story of this wonderful and tempestuous line up of a great band, or as full as we’re likely to get in this reality. It’s a treat for the long-time fans and a perfect opportunity for those who haven’t yet experienced the magic of Rain Parade to find out what all the fuss is about.
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Main image by Srobak from wikicommons
