1984 Music: Rainy Day, Rainy Day

Release date: unknown (but 1984) 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. 

Rainy Day were a studio concoction put together for this album only by David Roback, who had just left the Rain Parade, and he is the sole common element across the album’s nine tracks. All the other musicians came from the Paisley Underground scene, discussed in a previous post, and all the songs are covers of tracks by artists who inspired those bands: from the 60s, Buffalo Springfield, The Who, Hendrix, Dylan, the Velvets, The Byrds and The Beach Boys; plus one slightly later song by Big Star. The tracks borrowed from The Byrds and The Beach Boys were their interpretations of folk songs (perhaps chosen by Roback here to avoid paying royalties on what was surely a low-budget recording). Several of the others were fairly obscure: both the Dylan track (‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’) and the Big Star had no official release in 1984. Oddly, both the Buffalo Springfield covers were of songs written by Neil Young, but originally sung by Richie Furay. 

Truth be told, it’s a patchy album, but it has some genuine high points: the Dylan cover and the version of the Velvets’ ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ have rich, emotional vocals by Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles, with sympathetic and unobtrusive backing, and the minimal version of Big Star’s ‘Holocaust’ with deadpan vocals by Kendra Smith (who'd just left The Dream Syndicate) looks forward to her work with Roback in Opal. This track made a big impression on me at the time, and I find it superior to the This Mortal Coil version (which I’ll discuss in a future post).

I said in my introductory post to this series that 1984 was perhaps the point at which I started to become aware of the history of pop music, and began to try to understand the music I liked in historical terms. This album was important for me in that regard – although I didn’t really start listening to Buffalo Springfield et al. until a few years later in the early 90s. And the album’s existence points to something essential about the Paisley Underground scene: that all these bands were obsessive music fans (Steve Wynn worked as a record-store clerk while recording The Dream Syndicate’s first album) – and so were the people who released their music. Syd Griffin of The Long Ryders tells this story of how they got the attention of their UK label: 

The cover of [our 1984 album] Native Sons is [a re-creation of] the rejected album Stampede by the Buffalo Springfield and they [The Long Ryders’ record label] immediately got it, being old record collector dogs. It took us forever to find a cabin like the one the Springfield used – it was way out in the desert, rusting apart. It was in the middle of nowhere, a real American west town that was dead. And they got such a kick that we knew the Buffalo Springfield Stampede cover that they thought: "This is a great record; these guys are obviously savvy – call them up." 

I’m not sure if Rainy Day garnered much review attention: I didn’t notice any coverage on my run-through of 1984 issues of NME and Melody Maker, but without knowing the precise release date it’s hard to be certain I didn’t miss something. In 1984 (or more likely 1985), I bought it just because I saw it in HMV, with a helpful sticker on the cover advertising the presence of musicians from Paisley Underground bands I already liked.