The Paisley Underground Redux

Adam Sobsey revisits the early-1980s Los Angeles indie-pop scene.

By Adam SobseyMarch 3, 2025

• Music

“WHEN I WAS 14,” Matt Piucci remembers, “my older brothers took me to see the Byrds—I don’t know why my parents let them do it. That was a literally life-changing experience. They did a 15-minute version of ‘Eight Miles High.’ And somebody next to us had these little green pills …”

Put on Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, the landmark 1983 debut (reissued late last year by Label 51) from the band Piucci co-founded, the Rain Parade, and you can hear the Byrds instantly: hypnotic melodies and dreamy harmonies sung in gauzy voices; enmeshed influences of the British Invasion, country folk, and Indian raga; Roger McGuinn–inflected guitar; trippy lyrics about kaleidoscopes and lucid dreaming—all of it updated for an alienated post-punk world: “What’s the point of looking back? / All you see is an empty track / Of lives you’ve lived / And things you tried to love.”

Emergency Third Rail Power Trip stands as one of the great psychedelic pop albums, up there with the Byrds, the Doors, the 13th Floor Elevators, and Jefferson Airplane. And it sounds as good as or better than any of them. The album was self-produced by the Rain Parade’s members—a bunch of rookies, barely out of college, who taught themselves how to use studio equipment through sheer labor and experiment—and delivered ready-made to their locally based Southern California indie label.

The early-1980s Los Angeles indie pop scene the Rain Parade helped define was dubbed the “Paisley Underground” by Michael Quercio, whose band the Three O’Clock worked its own neo-sixties territory, as did the Paisley Underground’s only breakthrough act, the Bangles. Quercio came up with the off-the-cuff moniker in an interview with a music journalist who had asked him to describe the burgeoning scene. “We all wanted to look sixties; we wore paisley shirts,” Quercio told me, by way of explanation. “And we liked the Velvet Underground.” It surprised him when the “Paisley Underground” label stuck, quickly seized on by the music press on both sides of the Atlantic.

It’s also a surprise because the Paisley Underground was more than merely a psychedelic revival, and it had little commerce with the contemporary musical fad of “power pop with skinny ties,” as Quercio put it, exemplified by the Knack, whose song “My Sharona” briefly took over the world in 1979. Piucci puts it concisely: “We were the children of punk,” he insists. His life-changing early Byrds encounter notwithstanding, Piucci’s “first inspiration that [he] could possibly do [music],” while growing up in the Northeast and upper Midwest, came from listening to the Downtown New York sounds of the 1970s: acts like Television, Patti Smith, and the Ramones, whose version of punk rock sounded to Piucci like “the Beach Boys on glue.”

Before founding the Three O’Clock, Quercio fronted an energetic punk-garage act called the Salvation Army, and the earliest sounds of the comparatively radio-ready Bangles had an aggressiveness suited to the name they originally went by, the Bangs. (One of the Bangles’ first live gigs, which Quercio helped them book, had them sharing a bill with Social Distortion.) Punk is much more obvious in the Paisley Underground’s second strain, so to speak: acts like the Dream Syndicate, Green on Red, and the Long Ryders, whose slashing, confrontational, often stripped-down recordings rippled with defiance, rank rock pungency, and rootsy earnestness—the Underground that dirtied up the Paisley.

The children of punk—but not themselves punk, which was already on its way out by the time it reached the West Coast at the tail end of the 1970s. When the Los Angeles act X released their country punk debut in 1980, the band already “seemed a little three years ago. […] Like, had Los Angeles been thinking the whole thing over all this time?” wrote Scott Miller, front man of the Paisley-adjacent Game Theory, a Bay Area art pop combo who shared an indie label with the Rain Parade. (X’s first four albums were produced, tellingly, by the Doors’ Ray Manzarek.) By the turn of the decade, punk had lost its everybody-mosh inclusiveness, and its anything-goes ethos had narrowed and decayed. “It got really weirdly male and jocky towards the end of the seventies and into the eighties, tired and a little bit fascist,” Piucci remembers. Testosterone-driven violence and brawl-aborted shows became a problem. For Paisley Underground bands, the landscape was unwelcoming. “We started playing in punk clubs, and we would be doing these waltz tempos with acoustic guitars,” Piucci says. “People were like, ‘What is this?’ We kind of thought we were punk because we were just so not what was happening.”

Quite a bit was happening, though, in that place and time. Punk’s expiring fire scattered plenty of embers. “Los Angeles in the 1980s had a very vibrant, eclectic, and original art and music scene,” Jean-Pierre Boccara told me in an email. Boccara, a Tunisian-born Italian who grew up in France, made his way to the United States with an art and film background and hoped to pursue those callings in L.A. “There was a very lively underground scene in Los Angeles without too many appropriate places to present [art],” he remembers. “I hadn’t planned to open anything, but out of the blue a friend told me of [an available] space and I thought it would be great to have my art studio and throw some parties with friends.” He soon opened Lhasa Club, which evolved to “present more and more music, performance art, poetry, art exhibits, dance, [and] film programs.” Lhasa was “progressive and avant-garde, but in a clean and well-managed environment instead of the usual dumps. [Lhasa] had a mod/soul/psychedelic/ska high-energy young crowd and lots of scooters. The Paisley crowd fit right in.”

Finding common ground at Lhasa, it wasn’t long before the Paisley crowd began to cohere into a bona fide scene. Quercio recalls a galvanizing overnight trip to Catalina Island over the July 4 weekend in 1982. Members of a few Paisley acts drove out there together (at just 19, Quercio was still so young that he didn’t have a car, and they had to pick him up at his mom’s house). A long walk with Dream Syndicate frontman Steve Wynn convinced Quercio that Wynn, whom he’d found “standoffish and kind of mean” (Wynn soon became notorious for his caustic onstage antics and mouthing off to and about rock journalists), was actually a nice guy. “We kind of bonded,” Quercio remembers. On that same trip—a trip without drugs, he insists, despite the psychedelic trappings of the Paisley bands’ music—one of Quercio’s bandmates finally worked up the nerve to act on the abiding crush he had on the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs; a romance bloomed.

After Catalina Island, regular backyard barbecues at the apartment complex of Green on Red’s bassist ensued. The individual bands’ disparate sounds notwithstanding, the musicians connected over their shared early career station, their fondness for traditional melody—everyone could agree on loving the Beatles—and nascent literary tendencies: the Bangles’ lyrics referenced T. S. Eliot; Green on Red’s invoked Faulkner; and Green on Red bandleader Dan Stuart, Wynn, and the Long Ryders’ Sid Griffin would go on to publish their own books. The Paisley Underground may have been populated by the children of punk, but they rebelled against the rebels who begat them.

Buzz was quick to form. Most of the Paisley acts soon signed with indie record labels working in the shadows of the L.A. titans, and the resulting clutch of debut albums included nearly all the genre’s classics: in addition to Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, there were the Dream Syndicate’s Days of Wine and Roses (1982), the Three O’Clock’s Sixteen Tambourines (1983), and the Bangles’ All Over the Place (1984). Major label deals almost inevitably followed for everyone involved—to the detriment of all but the Bangles: “the most disciplined, most professional” of the Paisley acts, Piucci says. The Bangles’ second album, Different Light (1985), yielded the mainstream megahits “Walk Like an Egyptian” and “Manic Monday,” neither of which they wrote. The latter was composed for them by Prince, who took a surprising shine to the Paisley Underground. He seems to have named his record label, Paisley Park, in homage, and his 1985 release Around the World in a Day borrowed liberally from psychedelia in both sound and look.

Prince signed the Three O’Clock to Paisley Park, with disastrous results. Their 1988 album Vermillion, for which Prince gifted the band with another of his songs (the misbegotten and forgettable “Neon Telephone”), bombed, effectively killing the band. They broke up in 1989, as did the Bangles, rife with internal tensions caused by overexposure, and the Dream Syndicate, done in by Wynn’s booze- and speed-fueled obstinacy. The Rain Parade and the Long Ryders, whose echoes of the past came too soon to help them capitalize on the nostalgia boom to come, had already disbanded.

The Paisley Underground’s quick dissolution was no surprise. “College radio” scenes of the 1980s could survive in places like Athens, Georgia, where R.E.M. built what Game Theory’s Scott Miller called “the last bulwark against total, lasting Madonna/Michael Jackson industry domination.” But Los Angeles offered no such insular refuge from the glare of the big time, and the pitiless demands of Reaganomics offered no viable toehold nationally. Miller lamented: “As drum machines and [Yamaha] DX7s blared, crooning emoters with mullets and rolled-up suit jacket sleeves”—looking at you, Michael Bolton—“paraded victoriously past countless sorry little rock combos at palpable risk of obsolescence,” including virtually the entire Paisley Underground. “By 1986, top ten acts, with their [digital] sampling technology and million-dollar video choreography”—i.e., what the big and bankrolled acts came to Hollywood to benefit from—“were absolutely not doing something you thought of as something you could do at home.”

Meanwhile, the toxic masculinity of L.A. punk transmuted into the even more toxic masculinity of L.A. hair metal, which “wore its misogyny with pride,” as Elisa Gabbert observes. Rap, aggressive and confrontational, was ascendant. Nothing as spacey as the Rain Parade, as twee as the Three O’Clock (whose leader was an out gay man), or as proto-alt-country as the heartland-loving Long Ryders stood a chance of surviving.

There were some notable successors, though. Piucci’s main collaborator in the Rain Parade, David Roback (whose brother Steve was also a member), quit the band after Emergency Third Rail Power Trip and started a new project with former Dream Syndicate bassist Kendra Smith. First calling themselves Clay Allison and then rebranding as Opal, their partnership was “one of those little islands of it seeming like the 1980s were still getting going in a good direction,” Miller wrote. Smith soon parted ways with Roback, though, drifting so far off anyone’s radar that she has since become a sort of legendary semi-ghost, very occasionally resurfacing to virtual awe among her remaining claque. After she left Opal, Roback asked Quercio to take over as vocalist; when that didn’t happen—Quercio briefly joined Miller in the final lineup of Game Theory at the turn of the 1990s—Roback teamed up with a young singer named Hope Sandoval, who had been a frequent attendee as a teenager at those backyard barbecues, often showing up with her mother’s tamales. As Mazzy Star, they scored one of the biggest indie hits of the early 1990s: the iconic, desert-romantic anthem “Fade into You,” which endures as a sort of latter-day “Hallelujah.”

In 1987, Jean-Pierre Boccara closed Lhasa Club, citing an impending spike in rent (also, “the landlord was an insane alcoholic who pulled a gun on me while drunk,” Boccara told me). Not long afterward, he opened another venue, Club Largo on Fairfax. “To adapt,” Boccara said, “I explored the concept of cabaret, acoustic more than electric music, more world music, and lots of spoken word.” Largo soon became the home for a next-generation cohort of bookish and wry melodicists like Aimee Mann and her husband Michael Penn, Fiona Apple, Grant-Lee Phillips, and the producer extraordinaire Jon Brion; the Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs eventually found her way there as well.

In many ways, the musicians of the Largo scene—which, unlike the Paisley Underground, no one was ever asked to blurt out a name for (Fiona Apple’s torchy homage is about as close as anybody got)—made good on their predecessors’ unfulfilled promise. Perhaps the Paisleys lacked only a little bit of age. Today, listening to their best work, it’s clear that they were kids, in both craft and attitude, trying to make grown-up music. Most of the Largo regulars had already matured by the early 1990s, and some were battle-scarred industry veterans—Mann’s post-’Til Tuesday conflicts with record executives were especially well publicized—before they settled into estimable second acts as indie pop forces, widely beloved by the music intelligentsia and critical community.

Time has deepened the Paisley Underground’s legacy and occasioned serial revivals. Green on Red and the Long Ryders anticipated 1990s alt-country and Uncle Tupelo by a decade, which renewed appreciation for what they had done in their heyday, and surely the so-called Elephant 6 collective that also thrived in the 1990s—Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, et al.—owed a debt to the second-wave psychedelia of Emergency Third Rail Power Trip. “I always felt we were out of time,” Piucci told me. “That record could’ve been recorded in the sixties, but it could have been recorded in the nineties too.” The Rain Parade have had periodic reunions of their own. They released their first album of new material in nearly four decades in 2023, and they have a new EP out as well. Many of the other Paisley acts have also gotten back together over the years; the Bangles’ 2003 LP Doll Revolution might be their best. Steve Wynn has had a fruitful post–Dream Syndicate career. Over the last several months, he has been on a mammoth tour spanning the United States and Europe, promoting both a new album and a memoir, the garrulous I Wouldn’t Say It If It Wasn’t True (2024), part of which serves as a valuable personal history of the Paisley Underground.

Perhaps they are still with us now because they never quite succeeded then. R.E.M.’s career was so triumphant, and the sound they pioneered so widely imitated, that no one ever needs to hear mossy Southern jangle pop ever again. The intense conflagration of grunge, which was in many ways simply a second coming of punk, just as quickly and thoroughly burned itself out. The Paisley Underground’s very lack of a unifying sound or style (most of them didn’t actually wear Paisley) may have kept its bands out of the mainstream, but it seems also to have protected them against the vulnerability to extinction that typifies a monoculture. And surely, so did this robust trait—in Piucci’s succinct phrasing: “I think people like melody.”