Shades of glory
The lost boys of the Paisley Underground get their day in the sun. By David Fricke.
True West ★★★★ Kaleidoscope Of Shadows: The Story So Far BRING OUT YOUR DEAD. CD
FOR A FEW hot minutes in the early ’80s, True West were the most psychedelic band in the American underground. Named after the Sam Shepard play, they came from those exact coordinates: Davis, California, a college town in the farm country north-east of San Francisco, forming in 1982 after a local student combo called the Suspects broke up after one peppy new wave single. Two members, guitarist Steve Wynn and singer (soon bassist) Kendra Smith, went to LA and started The Dream Syndicate. Two other Suspects, guitarist Russ Tolman and drummer Gavin Blair, debuted as True West with an indie 45 cover of Pink Floyd’s Lucifer Sam, then added guitarist Richard McGrath for a 1983 self-titled EP – co-produced by Wynn – that supercharged the delirium of ’67 London and the Bay Area ballrooms with post-punk tension and Television’s bitingtreble swordplay. Extra authenticity: the engineer played bass in rave-up legends Oxford Circle, a mid-’60s Davis, California band with future members of Blue Cheer.
The first disc alone in this 3-CD history makes a definitive case for True West’s acidrock sainthood, starting with that EP session and later ’83 recordings combined on a European mini-album, Hollywood Holiday.
Steps To The Door is an angst-ridden march flanked by a long wall of wasp-drone guitars. In I’m Not Here, Blair’s trance-like vocal is buffeted by a circular paroxysm of Acid Test percussion and whammy-bar seizure. True West were also rapidly evolving songwriters with a striking – and prophetic – line in modal hooks, urgent choruses and redwoodGothic foreboding. Look Around, And Then The Rain and Morning Light, all on 1984’s
Drifters, True West’s first full-length album, suggest Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds on the prowl in Marin County. Burn The Rain, a jagged diamond from an aborted ’83 session produced by Television’s Tom Verlaine, now sounds like an early starting gun for the ragged, stomping glories of My Morning Jacket and Howlin Rain.
But line-up turbulence and a losing hand at major-label poker ensured that everything on Kaleidoscope Of Shadows happened in just four years: an explosive arrival followed by startling fade as Tolman was gone before 1986’s Hand Of Fate, True West’s second and last LP. Made with guitar assistance from Green On Red’s Chuck Prophet and the Rain Parade’s Matt Piucci, it has jolts of fight and promise, but you can’t help wishing Falling Away and Just One Chance were around for Drifters and that someone had bothered to record the classic line-up live from the soundboard. The audience-fidelity tapes that close this set are mostly for fanatics (like me).
Strangely, if only for completion’s sake, the B-side of the 1982 single is missing. Mas Reficul was Lucifer Sam played backwards, a low-budget jape that underscored the nerve and dazzle to come. “We’ve had to work a lot harder to get noticed,” Tolman told me at the time, “because we come from the middle of the tomato fields.”