Thanks so much to Jeffrey Bright for the interview! I found a week or so ago that The Pleasures Pale had a Bandcamp and I was thrilled to find out that they had more songs other than the album they released in the 80s. An album I bought many years ago thanks to a recommendation by my friend Jessel. Now it was the opportunity to find out more about this superb Dayton, Ohio, band that sounded different to their American contemporaries and I was lucky enough that Jeffrey was up for it! So seat down, get a beer, and enjoy this interview!
++ Hi Jeffrey! Thanks so much for being up for this interview! How are you? Are you all still in touch? Still making music?
Hello, Roque. Of course! I’m thrilled to at long last have a chance to tell the Pleasures Pale story. Thanks for the opportunity. Considering I’m coming up on my sixth decade of trying to figure out life, I guess I’m doing OK. I’m still excited to climb out of bed each day and make something new. The mystery remains solidly and attractively unsolved.
I moved to San Francisco in 1988. Since then it seems, in some ways, I’ve lived several different lives. The last of those led me away from music. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve been back in touch with the other members of The Pleasures Pale. I was compelled to undertake what I would call a “musical archeology” project, and that led me to realize how fortunate I was to have shared roughly three years of very creative and prolific song making with them.
For better or worse, I’ve always been fairly compulsive. After 15 years of concentrated writing, rehearsing, performing and periodic recording, I needed a break. In 1999, I put my guitar in the case with sights on a brief hiatus to sort out practical and mental affairs after my father’s death. That hiatus is now going on 20 years — I haven’t performed since October 1999. But I have recently rediscovered the creative thread by digging up and restoring, and in some instances injecting new life into old recordings. So, that’s a long way of saying I’m not currently making new music, but I am back to making music — or maybe I should say adding life to music previously regarded as dead. As for the other core members of the band — Luis Lerma (bass), Mitchell Swann (guitar), Tim Payton Earick (drums) and Jeff Keating (drums) — some of them are still very active in making music in Dayton. Jeff Keating, drummer on the LP, passed away just a few years ago.
++ It was a surprise to find The Pleasures Pale on Bandcamp a few days ago. Then I found you had put together a Facebook page too. What triggered you to make your music available again?
I’d say it was curious mix of mid-life crisis and technological advancements that led me to resurrect The Pleasures Pale recordings. I suppose it’s not uncommon for those who create or make art of one form or other, if they live long enough and are hounded by certain contemplations, to wonder what the fate of those creations will be. The thought of all that effort — all of the trial and life experience that went into birthing the songs — wasting away like so much other pointless landfill, mummified in a pile of old shoeboxes and cassette shells, drove me to undertake an effort to recover, preserve and re-present that work. Plus, I’ve always thought, mostly because of my own failings to promote it properly, and because of my own shortcomings as a bandleader, especially the Pleasures Pale material, of all the music I made, should have reached a wider audience than it did. It deserves a far better fate than obscurity. Of course, I’m madly biased, but I’m convinced the songs are just as relevant now as they were 30 years ago, if not more so.
On the practical side, the explosion of digital technology has made it possible for faint voices in the wilderness to be heard. The independent music world is, at least for the time being, much more democratic. If only we’d have had the same tools in 1986. That thought is particularly heartbreaking for me… The distance and financial hurdles between rehearsal room and distribution then was far greater than now. Which means music shy of mainstream sensibilities, regardless of its value or artfulness, was vulnerable to suppression. Often, simply the inability to make a clean cassette dupe was enough of an impediment to keep the best ideas in the bedroom and the best new sounds from reaching receptive ears.
I’ve worn a few different hats in the cause of paying the rent. One constant, though, through my various career swings, has been a better than average aptitude for graphic design. Consequently, a familiarity with computers and the digital world eventually opened the door for me to undertake the task of building a digital archive of the music I had a hand in creating, in which the Pleasures Pale catalog is a rightfully significant component. I’m doing this not so much as a monument to myself, but as an exercise in publishing and design, and most importantly, as a tribute to the musicians with whom I had the fortuitous chance to collaborate. Also, it’s a way to finally make our music available to an audience that might find it of value. Pack rat and control freak that I am, the tapes ended up in my possession. So, I guess it’s now my calling now to do this job — to tell the tale.
++ Let’s go back in time, let’s go in chronological order. What are your first music memories? Do you remember what was your first instrument? How did you learn to play it? What sort of music did you listen at home while growing up?
I was born in a rural, predominantly agricultural county in southwest Ohio, in the last year of one of America’s most iconic decades — the 1950’s. My father was 19 with a greased up ducktail and a hot rod car — probably not the most responsible young man — and my mother was an innocent 17. I doubt they had little choice but to marry. My mom’s father, sensing the potential for teenage tragedy, bought a house trailer, sort of coral pink and silver thing, quintessential 50’s design, and planted it in his own backyard — and gave my parents a supervised start in adulthood.
This was in a very small town surrounded by farmland. Really it was nothing more than a 4-way stop where two rural routes intersected, with a collection of houses, a general store, a grain elevator and a barbershop. We lived there for the first four years of my life. I remember a small black and white TV setting on top of the refrigerator.
In 1963 we moved to a slightly bigger town, West Milton, and my parents bought a modest but tidy, ranch-style house in a new housing development. I grew up there in the 1960’s and 1970’s, a free-range kid in a bedroom community beyond the North Dayton suburbs surrounded by open, undeveloped fields — places where an active imagination can run wild. And I remember vividly the day Kennedy was assassinated, my young mother weeping over the ironing board.
My father worked in the tool and die industry — big in Dayton — and he worked with quite a few men from the south, mostly from Kentucky. I remember he belonged to the Columbia Record Club and would receive new records in the mail each month. Sometimes we’d get middle of road pop records — if he didn’t make a choice from their catalog — other times we’d receive country records, probably of recording artists he had heard at the shop where he worked, or on WONE, the area’s country station — George Jones and Buck Owens are in my earliest memories.
But also, and more prominently, I remember hearing Elvis Presley. Not the 1950’s dangerous Elvis, but the after-the-army faux-suave Elvis of the early 1960’s. It was a more polished, produced sound and the man was more styled up — best pompadour of his career! His voice command was incredible. I still have in my possession Elvis’ Golden Hits Volume 3 and it remains one of my favorite records — Little Sister, His Latest Flame, Now or Never, Stuck on You, Surrender, Feel So Bad, Fame and Fortune, etc. On that collection of singles the song styling draws on a variety international and domestic forms — aside from the typical country, blues and gospel, you get Latin, Spanish and Italian drama — a significantly expanded palette.
As it seems to work with our popular culture, that music is now dismissed as corny or smarmy, naïve and over-appropriated. It has been devoured by more cynical and harder-edged styles. Maybe that’s how it has to work to be what it is. However, whether I want to or not, I still love those songs and carry them with me — like maybe it works on a cellular, molecular level. It’s not so much the topical content of the songs, but the tone and the feel, the atmosphere, the richness in the presentation. My attraction to musical eclecticism, I’m sure, stemmed from obsessive overdosing on this record!
Add to that the entire era of 1960’s AM radio pop — WING was the big station in the Dayton area then — and you can draw a complex map of early musical influences. While I would say 50’s and 60’s pop and country crooners inform my singer’s ear, the music that seems to resonate most with me is early, flowery psychedelic pop sounds like Tommy James and the Shondells’ Crimson and Clover or Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man. I can never get enough tremolo.
Then there was the 1970’s and adolescence… A more awkward, shy teenager would have been hard to find. I consumed the usual corporate FM staples — Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Eagles, Boston, Frampton, blah, blah, blah and blah — I was a good little soldier. Despite my disquieting memories from the 70’s, that miserable decade did likely play a part in igniting an interest in lyric writing. I recall repeatedly listening to Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, trying to make out what in the hell he was saying. That was one of the first LPs I bought on my own decision. I have no idea now why I was attracted to that then. Maybe it was the Hieronymus Bosch cover, which I could stare at with a sense of dread as I listened. My first purchased record was a Stevie Wonder 7” in the early 70’s.
It wasn’t until college days that it occurred to me that I could possibly be involved as a player or participant in the songs I heard. Up to that point, music had meant a lot to me and had been a major ingredient my emotional life, a refuge and source of solace, or self-esteem booster when I needed it. But I had always thought of it as a kind of one-way street. My sister took piano lessons, but playing an instrument was not something that anyone in my family did with any degree of seriousness or intent.
I went to an engineering school between 1977 and 1982 in Flint, Michigan about 90 minutes drive west of Detroit. It was here I was exposed to and latched on to the highly creative music being produced in the British and American underground at the time. I had a chance to see more than a few life-altering-for-me performances in small, intimate venues — Gang of Four, Echo and the Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs, Talking Heads, U2’s first US tour, The Cramps, Stray Cats, New Order, OMD, and probably many more I can’t recall. About halfway through my engineering courses, I realized I was living a life I couldn’t fully endorse. I was the one student on campus that actually enjoyed literature classes. I remember at one point I submitted an essay on punk rock and post-punk music, elaborating on the importance and meaning of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Limited. To my surprise the professor encouraged me to keep writing. She didn’t say what had written was good, or had merit, but she did say I should push on with the effort. She sensed I was a fish out of water and needed re-direction. I took it to heart and that was probably my first tangible step in becoming a songwriter and singer.
Being from a socially insular, rural Christian background — though I would describe my immediate family as secular at the time — I was naturally cautious and decided to finish engineering school. This included working half of each year in the failing, post-industrial wastelands that were Dayton’s General Motors factories, and that experience informed a great deal of my songwriting in the early 1980’s — that and a tragically sad, ill-fated marriage.
So, my first musical instruments were the pen, my voice and growing collection of records to drive my imagination. Early efforts were rough — getting by more on spirit and stage histrionics than technique — but I gradually improved and eventually learned to strum a guitar well enough to begin composing songs in the late 1980’s.
++ Were you or any of the members involved in other bands before being in The Pleasures Pale?
At the time of our formation in late 1985, Luis Lerma was probably best known for playing bass in rockabilly bands. The one I can remember was Lucky Strikes. Tim Payton Earick was our original drummer. Both he and Mitchell Swann, I believe, were involved in the early days of the Bob Pollard Guided By Voices scene brewing in Dayton’s Northridge area. Our second drummer, Jeff Keating was locally famous for drumming in Dates XXX, a favorite local new wave act. I was secretly in love with Dates singer Sheri. I’m sure she liked girls better, though, and moved to San Francisco, or so I was told. I’ve been in San Francisco 30 years and haven’t run into her.
I first sang onstage in band called B Pictures. We formed in 1984, wrote a blizzard of songs — some I’m very proud of and have made available on Bandcamp — played a handful of shows in 1985, and split up later that year. The Pleasures Pale was my next effort.
++ Were you all originally from Dayton?
I think Louie’s family may have moved to Dayton from Texas or thereabouts when he was very young, but the rest of us were born and raised in southwest Ohio around Dayton. For all practical purposes, we were all Buckeyes.
++ How was your city at the time? Were there any bands that you liked? What were the good record stores? Or what about the pubs or venues to go check out up and coming bands?
As I mentioned, in the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s Dayton was generally in a state of degeneration. In the east and west sectors of the city and in the north and south suburbs, there were many factories in their final throes, some abandoned and rusting others hanging on but obviously headed toward shutdown. It really was the visible beginning to the end of Dayton’s post-war industrial heyday. There were bright spots, of course. The University of Dayton’s Brown Street area was lively; the Fifth Street Oregon Historical District was well on its way to becoming the center of the city’s nightlife; and there was definitely a robust underground music scene with enough bars, clubs and small halls to keep us busy. I think in some ways the city’s decay served as an apt foil for creativity. Against that backdrop our lives had sort of a tragic, romantic splendor, or at least you could see it that way, if you were so inclined.
Local bands that we rubbed shoulders and shared shows with included Guided By Voices, Figure 4, The Obvious, The Highwaymen and a perverse trio called Mom. Dementia Precox was also another top indie act in the area at the time, though I don’t think we ever were on the same bill.
Gilly’s was the top venue in Dayton and we all aspired to play there. It was really a jazz club, but once in while they would deign to allow a few of us noisier acts to access the stage. Canal Street Tavern was probably the most important club for young bands. It was here most of us were given our first show. My favorite was Sam’s on Fifth Street, just west of Main. It closed before I could play there, but because some of my earliest exposures to live music of a truly alternative variety — and to the fascinating, bohemian people involved in that scene — were in that establishment, it’s indelibly etched in my mind.
The Pleasures Pale also played Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky quite bit. Bogart’s was the top venue in that area for new, touring bands and we were fortunate to have a handful of shows there as opening act. Red Math was a very talented, artful Cincinnati band and we played a number of memorable shows with them at Bogart’s.
There were quite a few record shops in the metro Dayton area at the time, but very few stocked imports. The only one that I knew of was a small shop in the Kettering area, in the Urban Suburban Shopping Center — what a name! I think it was called Bullfrog Records, or something similar. The buyer, Nick Wiser, was also the music critic in one of the local papers and took a chance on stocking 12” vinyl singles, EPs and LPs from the happening UK labels at the time. I know I picked up some of the early Factory releases there and spent a good deal of time in that shop. Nick also, during my early efforts with B Pictures in early 1985, told me in so many words that I couldn’t sing, but that other avant-garde bands had succeeded without identifiable vocal melodies, so maybe I shouldn’t be deterred. My singing was pretty rough then, I had to agree. He was being very diplomatic, as I was a good customer.
There was also one small shop in Flint, Michigan that would stock imports and where I would shop when I was at college. It really was a challenge, and took an effort, to find retail outlets where the latest releases from other countries were sold. The vast majority of music sold and consumed in middle-America at the time, regardless of where its makers were from, was channeled through the major corporate labels. And that made it difficult for bands like The Pleasures Pale to make a dent.
++ When and how did the band start? How did you all meet? How was the recruiting process?
The Pleasures Pale came together organically. Louie worked at a record shop that was, in truth, in the business of selling marijuana paraphernalia — a head shop. I wasn’t a smoker, and didn’t need papers, pipes, screens or bongs, but I occasionally bought a record or two there and struck up a friendship with one of the counter clerks. That was Luis Lerma. At the time Louie was into Peter Hook’s bass playing with New Order and I was a Joy Division/New Order devotee. There weren’t many of us in Dayton with those tastes — or who even knew those bands existed — so we had the basis for a bond. I knew him first as a rockabilly figure and saw him play with Lucky Strikes at Sam’s. He was way cooler than me, and seemed to know just about anyone and everyone in the Dayton music underground. I was kind of a foundling, and pretty green, but we found common ground. Believe it or not, we both liked Jerry Lewis films, as well as the Brando, Clift, Dean films that defined so much of the 1950’s male rebel persona. We were both movie junkies. We studied TV Guide each week and were adept at programming a VCR to record the 2 am showing of blockbusters such as Artist’s and Models and Visitor to A Small Planet. These are the important things that can lead to the formation of a band!
In late 1985, after B Pictures ended, Louie brought together Mitch, Payton and myself for a few feel-out sessions. My marriage had dissolved in 1984 and I was left renting a sizeable, largely unfurnished house on Marcella Avenue in North Dayton. We could set up in the basement next to the furnace, washer and dryer and blast away until the police arrived, or go upstairs in the empty dining room and work acoustically. It was an ideal set up for songwriting and band development.
Louie and Payton were savagely good together. They locked in immediately. Mitch’s guitar playing was indescribably versatile — he had a wide-ranging comfort zone, and most importantly, had no interest in emulating the usual guitar heroes of the era. It’s important to know that we were not that many years removed from a period when, in places like Dayton, you simply could not get a club gig unless your band was playing cover songs and essentially being as imitative or conforming as possible. There was period when nightclubs essentially wanted bands to act as live FM radios. Mitch was more interested in The Police and Peter Gabriel’s latest pop than parroting Jimmy Page or whoever was the axe man in Lynyrd Skynyrd, but also had an ear for more subversive and adventurous acts such as The Dead Kennedys. Payton made no bones. He was a Keith Moon aficionado and could be expected to pound away furiously at all times. What I brought to the table, aside from the free rehearsal space, was a decidedly un-rock approach to lyrics, singing and stage manner. What I lacked in talent, I overcompensated for in annoying effort. If I couldn’t exactly sing like Presley, or, uh, Dean Martin — my first memories of attempting to sing in front of an audience, probably somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade, have me warbling through Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime with just the right quavering at the finish of each phrase — that didn’t matter. I was encouraged by the DIY spirit of the day. I mean could anyone really call singing the sounds that came out of Johnny Lydon’s mouth in PIL? I had a few things to say, and more than a few demons to exercise. And I had a pressing need to emote.
++ Were there any lineup changes?
We did play at least one show with Payton drumming. Then he left for one of his stints with Guided By Voices. Hardly missing a beat, literally, Louie pulled in Jeff Keating as replacement. Stylistically, Keato and Payton couldn’t have been farther apart. Payton played with a loose ferocity and Jeff took a tight, clean approach, and had a thing for swing time and dance beats. I liked them both. Louie and Jeff had played together in Dates XXX and had a longstanding rapport — they were constantly at each other’s throats, mostly in a good-natured way.
In spring of 1987, with recording finished on the LP, Keato left the band. The door revolved and Payton walked back in. Our songs continued to proliferate and take on complexity. Eventually, in the summer of 1987, we experimented with adding a second guitar and keyboard — Eric Olt and Louie’s brother Terry Lerma, respectively. We were a 6-piece when it all screeched to a halt.
++ What’s the story behind the name The Pleasures Pale?
Band names! What can be more fraught or critical for a young band than choosing a name? The name has to say something, and the late 1970’s and early 1980’s saw a band name bonanza like no other. I mean Beatles and Rolling Stones are iconic names, sure. T Rex is OK. The Velvet Underground is nearly unbeatable. But Sex Pistols, Killing Joke, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, The Teardrop Explodes, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Slits, Bauhaus — these were names worthy of sporting with a pin-on button, which was the same as risking your life in some areas of the country where loyalties to long hair rock ran deep. So, we, or I, anyway, felt pressure to deliver something monumental.
What really happened, though, was that we drew up a list of names, most of them utterly ridiculous and embarrassing. Finally, with our first show on the horizon, we grabbed a phrase from one of our early songs. On the LP the song is titled “Be.” Originally, it was known as “As Pleasures Pale.” Lately, I’ve come to call it “Be What You Are.” These things can be fluid. More precisely, about the band name, I wrote the following on my music archive blog:
Lyrically, “As Pleasures Pale” is as much a young writer and artist’s protest against the shovels full of fear-mongering and conformity-baiting being served up daily in early 80’s American mass media as it is a coming-of-age manifesto to stare down a steamrolling world where dread seemed to grow as if by photosynthesis — a world where nuclear apocalypse was not merely a vague threat. (I have to ask: Has anything changed?)
Though few other songs in our repertoire resembled “As Pleasures Pale / Be,” it was a defining set piece. Aside from delivering edgy, solid rock energy and a bit of macho street “cred” to live shows — and serving as counterpoint to a preponderance of sensitive-side-of-the-boy lyrics in other songs — the song also spawned a name. From the lyric, “Be what you are, you live today / Be what you will as pleasures pale,” came The Pleasures Pale. As a band handle, it was an odd but fitting alliteration that implied an attraction to certain (mis)adventures after dark, as well as a hint of romanticism amid a crumbling, end-of-industry rustbelt bleakness. It spoke of solace in the wasteland, and stolen joy in the bitterness of decline. In other words, if you’re going through hell, baby, paste on a wry smile and keep going.
If that’s too deep for rock and roll, on another level, the name had just enough 1960’s “the” band appeal to feel garage-y, and enough 1980’s post punk angst-y nuance to feel apropos for the times.
++ How was the creative process for you? Where did you usually practice?
Once I started writing lyrics and poetry — once my personal, internal floodgates opened in the early 1980’s — I found I had a font of emotional awareness to work with. I constantly scribbled phrases and would-be lyrics in notebooks, on note pads, on paper scraps, on napkins, on anything that was handy when the words appeared.
It’s been said writers should write about what they know. I was married in 1982 to an alluring but physically and psychologically fragile young woman. Both our lives were changing drastically when we met. Each offered the other a brilliant, brass-ring promise — a future where we both would become something we presently weren’t. And those two separate “somethings” were terribly incompatible. The relationship initially soared to a majestic crescendo then fell precipitously into an abyss. Neither of us was emotionally equipped to survive the situation together. The level of hurt and resentment became unbearable, events moved beyond melodrama to the brink of irreparable damage, and we wisely parted. Such an experience leaves a massive and dark hole in a person’s well being. It was, on my part, a failing beyond rationalization, and could have been entirely immobilizing. If you are at all self-aware, however, that hole becomes a deep reservoir of feeling. To write about it is to face it. To express the contents of that dark well is therapeutic. So, writing and rehearsing — creating something born out of love and conviction — in that same house of despair — was the essential element in the creative process for me — and in rescuing my life. It surely had an effect on how the music evolved as we built our songs and our sound within those walls and below ground in that basement space.
As you can imagine, these were not verbalized things. Mitch, Louie, Payton and then Keato each brought their own personalities and individual expressions of experience to the work, which I can only assume were as complex as mine, in some way or other. To answer, I could simply say we jammed in the basement of a two-story house in North Dayton until an instrumental song emerged and then I applied lyrics from my collected scraps and snippets of poetry — but that would severely shortchange the psychic character of the process and the quality of what resulted.
++ You were around in the late 80s and in the UK there was a great explosion of guitar pop bands, many which I’m sure influenced you. Do you think there was something similar in the US?
Very interesting question! I think we saw a little of that in the US with the likes of REM and maybe bands like Lets Active and the Athens, Georgia scene, but what rose to the surface on this side of the Atlantic didn’t really have the same flavor as what happened in the UK. By and large I think the American music press didn’t embrace guitar-centric music here unless it trended heavier toward album rock; or more abrasive toward punk, like The Replacements; or quirkier toward kitsch like the B-52s; or more rustic toward roots/Americana like Los Lobos; or toward a female flavor like the Bangles; or, plainly, unless it could unabashedly be called country. At the time, white guys making jangly pop music with guitars was a little too fey for big, burly, harder-faster, insecure America. America did and still does, to a great degree, mistrust European sophistication, including stylized displays of male emotion, especially when it appears to infiltrate American-made music.
I was attracted to music from the UK in that period, collected it, and was definitely influenced by it. To me, it came across as smarter, wiser, more worldly and aware. It appealed to me on an intellectual level. You know, obviously European culture is exponentially older than American culture. What makes The Velvet Undergound & Nico one of the very best rock or pop LPs every produced, to my thinking, is Nico’s doomed voice, saturated with the ancient tears and ennui of Europe, juxtaposed with the American impatience and reckless abandon in the psychotic-modern-city instrumentation of the Velvets. That tension is dynamic and propulsive. If American-made music in that period had too much glamorous European melancholy, it probably wasn’t going to go very far. Roxy Music might be an exception, but I’m not sure we can honestly call them an American band.
++ And who would you say were influences in the sound of the band?
Ah, that question…
Like any other collaborative creative work, The Pleasures Pale sound was the product of the musical influences of the individuals in sum. Each member brought his own tastes to the table and I don’t recall any being overtly censored. We never said “let’s sound like this” or “let’s not sound like that.” Decisions were generally made based on how much enthusiasm any given idea generated. It was totally organic and individually expressive. Ultimately, what we did was free from design — what came out was what came out. And, as I mentioned, musically, we were style hoppers, so you’ll hear a variety of genres in the playing. Reviewers often commented on our range of styles.
In his guitar playing, Mitch had a curious blend of country/bluegrass picking, including a unique rhythmic arpeggiation, like on Love Bites Back Sorely, and fast, funk-inspired rhythmic strumming. He could carry both rhythm and lead fills in his parts. Where those influences come from, it’s hard to say. To my ear, they come from exposure to a very wide range of styles. It’s very open-minded playing.
Louie was just a monster on bass. His vocabulary of American styles is very thorough and he was able to work that vocabulary into a forceful, relentless style — played on a fretless Fender Jazz, by the way, which gave his parts a unique sound, sometimes on the blue side of the notes. His playing also did more than hold down the rhythm. Both he and Mitch shared rhythm and lead duties, which I think is quite unusual. Though both were essentially playing rhythm parts, we had no need for a lead guitarist to fill out the sound, or compliment the vocal melody between phrasings. We had a few songs with traditional guitar solos, but those were rare.
And, as said before, drumming styles between Keato and Payton were so different, that we really sounded like a different band depending on which of the two was on the kit. By the end of summer in 1987, with second guitar and keyboards/organ in place, we were headed toward a completely different sound destination, versus where we started two years prior.
Of course, our sound was influenced by the sounds of the time, as well as the instruments we played and how we played them. It was said more than once that we were influenced by The Smiths, and perhaps too heavily at that. I also think there was a review or two that compared our sound to Simple Minds. I had a couple of the Simple Minds records, but didn’t really see the resemblance, other than maybe a kind of soaring, expansive quality a few of our songs, or parts of our songs, had. On the other hand, I’ll cop to a fondness for the work of Morrissey and Marr, and actually did have a brief correspondence with the former. I sent him an early demo tape and a letter saying I thought our songwriting situations and themes were similar, and that his descriptions of Manchester put me in mind of Dayton. I told him I found the music his band was making inspirational. He replied with an encouraging note, reciprocating appreciation and imploring us to “be lucky.” So, there is an undeniable connection there. However, I always felt, rather than being derivative, it was more that we were in allegiance to the same ideas The Smiths espoused — a very human kind of pop music about very human affairs, a sort of literate championing of the underdog. We had a similar manifesto.
But that thinking only extends to one quarter of the quartet. Mitch, Louie and Payton/Keato were their own masters and played only what they wanted to play. That I took a crooner’s approach to singing and an emotionally aware, literate style in my writing narrowed the field of comparators in the indie rock and pop arena of the day.
I will add that I bought the 12-string Rickenbacker Mitch played on No, Joy and My Town Has No Cafes, and a few other songs, just before our first songwriting dates. I had no talent for playing it, whereas obviously Mitch did! I hoped someday I would. That guitar is such a beautiful design object and has such a distinctive sound… So, I’m sure that put us that much closer to Smiths-ness for those wanting to see such things. It was a very sad day in 1987 when we learned that guitar had been stolen from our rehearsal space. I kept a good face, and received enough insurance money to replace it with a 12-string Guild, but losing that guitar was a brutal blow.
As I reflect on it, I wonder if the nuance surrounding your question now has as much importance as it did in the middle of the 1980’s? The question of influence and authenticity seemed to matter enormously then and it was somewhat of a thorny subject for The Pleasures Pale, and for me in particular. We were labeled anglophiles — which I’m not saying I wasn’t. But claiming that various reinterpretations of American music can somehow be assigned a nationality, and their quality be somehow judged on that basis, has always seemed intellectually lazy to me. I suppose that’s a topic for more in-depth examination. But in the end, I guess it does go to show that we are all — creators, critics and listeners alike — products of our own accumulated experience, and at the time I had a fairly encyclopedic grasp on the post-punk British scene. I have a hard time hearing the playing of anyone else in the band as particularly English, though.
++ How was the creative process for the band? I notice you wrote the lyrics and Mitchell and Luis the music? Was that the usual?
Occasionally, Mitch or Louie would have a verse-and-chorus composition sketched out and bring it to the band, however, the majority of the songs started simply with a short guitar riff or bass figure in rehearsal, often just a couple of bars. The band would then just start playing and let the chemistry take over. It was like magic. I was frequently amazed at how quickly the music came together.
Lyrics took a little longer. I’d have a notebook of ideas on hand and thumb through to find something appropriate. Then take a dive into the song, hunting for phrasing and melody. Often I would record the rehearsal on a boom box, then work out the full lyrics and melody between rehearsals. After two or three sessions, we’d have a song fully fleshed out. Most people know us by the material on the LP, but we were prolific songwriters. So many songs were worked up, played a few times and replaced in the set list by a new flavor. Creating the songs was so enjoyable and rewarding, and almost effortless, it seemed. There must be some endorphin release science involved. Why else would it be so satisfying?
++ Your self-released in 1987, just around a year after the band was formed. I was wondering if prior to the album recordings did you record any other songs? Demo tapes? I read there was a demo with Tim Payton Earick from Guided By Voices drumming? What songs were on it?
We had access to a 4-track cassette recorder and early on, in the fall of 1985, we started making crude recordings. We compiled a cassette demo called Daily Living Is a Herculean Art and sent that around to clubs. Though the contents of the demo changed as we evolved, it started with four songs that represent our earliest efforts and shaped our identity. Those featured Tim Payton Earick on drums and were: Lovely Lovely, Be What You Are (aka Be, aka As Pleasures Pale), An Upright Spine and Whipsaw (now Whipsaw Children). As mentioned, Payton was moonlighting from Guided By Voices at the time and was replaced by Jeff Keating around the end of the year or beginning of 1986. Consequently, we recorded a few more songs with Keato and put those on the demo, as well. Those were If It Wasn’t So Funny, But She Didn’t and Heavenly Dreams He Had (now retitled as How I Dreamt of You). Additionally, Mitch, Louie and I captured a few acoustic recordings that made it onto various versions of the demo. These included It Could Be Heaven and a song entitled Happy Love Ghosts. One of my big regrets is that we didn’t get a cleaner recording of this song. It’s one of my favorites — beautiful and eerie, and captures a slice of my time living alone in that big empty house. Which I swear was haunted. And that’s another story.
Six of these early demo songs have been rescued, revived and released on Bandcamp. I plan to eventually have the entire series of demos available in an album using the same Daily Living Is a Herculean Art title. There are a few more songs from the acoustic sessions that may eventually surface, as well. There was definitely buried treasure in the box housing those tapes!
++ The album was released on the Cincinnati label Heresy Records. Who were they? And how did you end up working with them?
Heresy was a label formed to release an LP by Cincinnati band Red Math. They were a New Romantic sort of outfit with a sultry brew of electronica and exotic instrumentation. Their music and their shows were very artfully presented. Steve Schulte was in the band and ran the label. We played with them in Cincinnati at Bogart’s and they played with us in Dayton at Gilly’s. Steve felt like having two bands on Heresy would strengthen both our odds of getting signed to a major label, which at the time was nearly every indie band’s aim. Independent labels were just starting to come into vogue and the majors were looking at the indie scene as a sort of developmental league for their rosters. Any band getting significant college radio play with an indie release was not out of line in thinking they could get potentially get scooped up by a major. The deal we had with Heresy was essentially for distribution only. We paid for our recording and manufacturing mostly from show proceeds. We played a lot and put our earnings into a recording fund. Everyone in the band had a reasonably steady job, so we could do that.
++ The album was released on vinyl but also on tape. Why was that? Were you cassette fans?
Remember, this was slightly before compact disc technology came into prominence. Vinyl was still king, but cassettes were the everyday reality. Not everyone had a turntable, but everyone had a Walkman or a boom box, or a cassette deck in his or her car — that is if they had yet updated from an 8-track player. I sometimes can’t believe I was actually alive in those prehistoric days! The degree to which technology has changed the music industry is almost beyond comprehension.
At any rate, it’s definitely not that we were cassette fans, it’s that every release had to have a portable format. What mp3s are today, cassettes were then. In all honesty, I can say that cassette tapes for the 1980s musician were a godsend as well as a total pain in the ass and an inescapable nightmare. That any cymbal hit was ever cleanly documented on 1/8-inch ferrous oxide tape is a miracle. It was an imperfect medium, but was really the only choice unless you could spring for a ¼-inch machine, or scored a contract and could get into a studio where the sexy 2-inch tape machines lived. The analog recording world was and still is amazingly arcane. Of course, we now realize just how sweet analog recordings sound when done properly.
++The album came with a poster. This poster looks like a promo poster and on it there’s a photo of a kid. Who was this kid? One of you perhaps? And why did you decide to include it with the record?
It might be one us. And it might not be one of us. (Wink, wink.) It hardly matters. It was a suggestion from someone who was helping us with promotion and booking at the time that we have a poster with a posed baby photo. It plays to the strength of innocence and naiveté, or at least the value of a perspective free from cynicism. We happened to like the way this little guy looked, with his bow tie and apparent eagerness to take on the world with measured enthusiasm. I bought into the idea and other guys didn’t object, at least not very loudly. Steve at Heresy liked it, as well, so we went with it.
An humorous aside about that poster: Not more than a couple of weeks after I relocated to San Francisco in 1988, I spied the poster tacked up inside the DJ booth at a club where all the indie bands in town wanted to perform. I thought, oh boy, it’s really going to work out for me here! Well, it took me nearly five years to get a gig at the Paradise Lounge.
++ And what about the cover art? Did you put that together? Where did that photo come from?
I was a free-lance graphic designer at the time, or on my way to being one, and had access to a Xerox machine, so I created visuals for the band. Or maybe I should say I just commandeered the job without really asking anyone else. I had strong ideas about how the music should be visually represented.
I loved the graphic sensibilities of the Blue Note jazz LP covers — the use of solid color fields with 1960s-era neo-grotesque type and monotone or duotone photography just really grabbed me. I was writing about very human things, human foibles and the power in facing those foibles, and I wanted somehow to show ordinariness as extraordinary. Working with photography was expensive and too involved for our street-level aesthetic and budget, though, so I found creative ways to use the Xerox machine in reproducing photographs.
Most of the images I used were found photos, or vernacular photos — in a moment of true serendipity, one day I stumbled on a shoebox of old family snapshots in a North Dayton alley. What a find! It was as if I had found a whole series of ordinary, but somehow compelling, narratives neatly compiled. If I didn’t use an image from that stash, I stole images that I liked from books, magazines or old record covers — images that I thought had some sort of value because of their iconic quality or their kitschy-ness — and manipulated them to a point where I felt they had taken on a different meaning. Combining those images with the Blue Note approach, just felt right. So, the LP graphics come from that line of thinking.
I meant the cover to be a mystery, and the package as a whole, both the visual and audio elements, to compose a kind of puzzle. If you have the record in hand, the answer to your question is there. The source image is fairly esoteric, but discoverable to an astute cultural sleuth. For what it’s worth, and for as long as I possibly can, I’ll attempt to maintain the secret!
I will, though, divulge that the overprinted, simplistic red lips were a nod to Andy Warhol and two of my favorite rock LP covers — Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers and the Velvet Undergound & Nico record, the banana cover. In case you can’t tell, if a band doesn’t have a unified graphic style in their releases, I have a hard time getting excited about them.
++ The songs were recorded at ReFraze Studio in Dayton. Was it your first ever experience in a studio? How was it? It took you many sessions to complete the recordings, right?
We had been in ReFraze once before, in March 1986, to do a quick recording of Lovely Lovely for a Wright State University radio benefit 7”. I think that record had two different bands on each side, though I can’t remember who they were and don’t seem to have a copy.
Because we didn’t have a lump sum budget, we had to go about recording the LP in piecemeal fashion. We started tracking in late May 1986 and, roughly 20 sessions later, paying as we progressed, completed mixing and mastered in February 1987. Gary King engineered the record and had a lot of patience with us. We were learning on the fly.
++ The album has so many fantastic songs. It is hard for me to pick some favourites, but perhaps I like the best “No, Joy” and “My Town Has No Cafés”. I was hoping, in a few sentences, if you could tell me the story behind them?
Certainly, those were two of our favorites, as well. Which is why we sequenced them A1 and A2! They were both very well received at live shows. No, Joy in particular seemed to really spark audiences. The song’s strength, aside from Mitch’s totally killer figure on the Rickenbacker, is that it comes from a poignant truth. Life, especially college years, can be turbulent. Relationships develop and then are ripped apart by distance and often because they simply don’t fit into future plans o one side or the other. Invariably someone gets hurt. The rock lexicon is full of love-’em-and-leave-’em songs, to the point of tedium. The theme is so much a part of the rock fabric that what is often outright and brutal misogyny becomes more like a kind of dull emotional wallpaper. No, Joy was an attempt to portray a bittersweet breakup with the male role going against stereotype, lamenting the eventuality of a doomed affair, sensitive to the emotional distress on both sides. In truth it was the first time I wasn’t the one being left behind, so it was new territory for me and I understood fully how demoralizing it could be on the other end. I could be embarrassed by the obvious pun in the title and refrain — names were not changed to protect the innocent — but the tale is based in truth, so I let it go.
My Town Has No Cafes is another true tale of pathos and dark comedy. Daytonians take it for granted that today you can wander down to the Oregon District, order a double shot caffé machiatto and commiserate with a friend or two in a comfortable stylish setting. Not so in the early 1980’s. At the time I had been exposed to enough of the world beyond the confluence of the Miami, Mad and Stillwater rivers to know what I was missing. The theme seemed like a humorous but apropos backdrop for a woe-is-me tale. I will confess to having wasted more than a few precious brain cells and Saturday nights walking that neighborhood’s well-loved street as it teemed with beautiful-enough-at-midnight revelers, alone and struggling to tamp down my self-pity, miserable with being too socially inept to participate. What else could I do but blame it all on Ohio, dead-end Dayton and the inability to find neither suitable company nor a satisfactory cup of European coffee?
Both of the songs feature Mitch playing distinctive lines on the 12-string and behave in a more modern rock manner, as compared to the rest of the record. Though No Cafes does have Keato’s odd, syncopated snare in the intro. Jeff wanted the big snare sound on No, Joy and we let him have it. There was likely some hilarious back and forth between him and Louie on that and the No Cafes intro.
If I remember correctly, when I brought Rickenbacker to rehearsal, I handed it to Mitch and within a few minutes out came the No, Joy progression. Amazing. I think it was one of the first things he played on that guitar. The band fell in immediately and we knew we had a good one. It was as if the guitar had the song in it all along. It just needed the right person to come along and let it out.
No Cafes was a different case, and there is funny note about that one. Mitch comes into rehearsal with the song pretty much worked out. He has verse and chorus parts. Louie and Keato find a groove in short order. I search out some lyrics and start on a melody. After a few times through, we’re all looking at each other with raised eyebrows and broad smiles. We know it’s a keeper. Then as we’re wrapping up Mitch looks to me and says something like: You know, where you’re singing the chorus? That was supposed to be the verse. We all laughed and never looked back. To collaborate you have to sometimes let go of your original vision. That he was willing to do that speaks to the chemistry we did have.
++ If you were to choose your favourite The Pleasures Pale’ song, which one would that be and why?
That’s almost unfair! Like asking a mother to chose among her children. But since you’re giving me this forum, I’ll do it.
I might say something different tomorrow, but today it’d come down to a wrestling match between Punishment Place and Most Precious Things. Both of which were recorded in late summer 1987 at ReFraze, but never given a final mix. I’m working on a remedy to that.
Both are sincere emotional pieces about the psychological shadows, or reverberations, that can linger after a relationship disintegrates. For me, these two songs represent the best of what The Pleasures Pale could do — by turns forceful and tender, tuneful, brave, and committed to making an emotional statement. They both have a certain grace and depth of spirit that I think supersedes the other work. I might give Punishment Place a slight edge, but only because it has a sly Elvis-in-Nashville quality that I can’t quite pin down. There’s something in there that puts me in mind of Kentucky Rain, a song that can bring me to tears anytime I hear it.
++ Sadly the album was released three months after you had already split. Why was that?
Sadly is right. And I wish I had a fireball excuse. But really it was series of small mishaps that stalled out our progress. And the failure to release the record in a timely manner surely played a large part in our undoing. I’ve probably blocked most of it out, but I seem to recall we had issues with the pressing plant, and with the jacket printing, and with cassette insert printing — with everything! And then it seemed to take forever to get the distribution deal in place with something called the Independent Label Alliance. As I said, we mastered in mid-February 1987. In November 1987 I finally received a batch of LPs to be sent out to college radio and press. In the meantime, in May, Jeff Keating quit. We quickly brought Payton back in, but in doing so had changed our sound enough that we almost felt like the LP was already obsolete — and it hadn’t even been manufactured and distributed. We actually started on a new set of recordings at ReFraze in late August of that year. When we finally got the record in hand and fully set up for release and distribution, it was too late. We had disbanded.
++ Did you appear in any compilations? Is the album your full discography?
We did appear on the previously mentioned WWSU 7” sampler in 1986, and in 1988 had one of the album cuts, It Could Be Heaven, I think, on a sampler cassette from the Independent Label Alliance. I don’t currently have copies of either and can’t remember who any of the other bands were on either compilation.
++ Was there ever interest by other music labels? Perhaps big ones?
There was. And that interest also played a pivotal role in our demise. In 1987, both Geffen and Capital Records A&R took an interest in what Heresy Records was up to. After reviewing a cassette of our still unmanufactured and unreleased LP, both labels expressed interest in The Pleasures Pale specifically. Capital wanted to see us live and requested a list of upcoming performances. We had to that point played mostly in Dayton, Cincinnati, Athens, Ohio and Lexington, as well as one-offs in Columbus, Detroit and Atlanta. Without advanced radio exposure, attendance was sparse at the latter three. Still we were starting to expand our geographical reach and were generally encouraged by the response from those we did play in front of. We were not necessarily the flavor of the day, but those that did latch on to what were doing had a passionate appreciation, and I think both Capital and Geffen could see that we might be of a flavor soon to arise.
After hearing from Capital, we ramped up our booking efforts and immediately secured gigs in Cleveland, Chicago and Memphis, and had queries in with numerous clubs and promoters throughout the greater region. Wheels were in motion.
On October 10, a Saturday in 1987, we drove six hours to Chicago, set up and played to essentially no one but ourselves and the bar staff at Club Stodola. Depressed and weary, we drove straight back to Dayton immediately after the show. Two days later, a Monday, we split up. A bright future was there on the horizon, but the cold reality of how much roadwork would be required to reach that point suddenly seemed insurmountable. There were members with family and employment commitments that would certainly have been in jeopardy had we continued on the path that appeared in front of us. And that was that. Finis. End of the line. October 12, 1987.
++ On your website there are three “unreleased” records, “Daily Living in Herculean Art”, “Half Bad” and “Twitch”. I was hoping if you could tell me a bit about each of them?
Daily Living Is a Herculean Art is a collection of recordings from demo and writing sessions in 1985 and early 1986, everything up to when we started studio work on the LP. It has preliminary versions of several songs on the LP, as well as a few other compositions that represent the genesis and early work of the band. Aside from Mitch, Louie and me, it has contributions from both Payton and Keato on drums. The material originated as stereo or 4-track cassette recordings and has been transferred to digital and variously restored, remixed, edited, or brought back to life in a way that conveys the original spirit or trajectory of the song. There are currently three singles, six songs total, from this collection on Bandcamp. I expect to have the full album available at some point in the not too distant future. Hopefully some form of physical media will follow. I’m looking into that possibility. For fans of the LP, the Daily Living recordings can be seen as a prequel of sorts.
Half Bad skips forward to where we were after the LP. With Payton back onboard as drummer in early summer of 1987, excited with how our new material was shaping up, we decided to expand our sound with second guitar and keyboards. In order to give the two new players a canvas to work with, we set up microphones and captured live renditions of drums, bass and guitar for our new material mixed down to either one or two tracks on cassette. This allowed me to overdub vocals and still have room for one or two additional tracks on a 4-track. By this point, I had vacated the house on Marcella and had moved to an apartment overlooking the river and downtown Dayton. The band was now renting rehearsal space in a warehouse building on East Third Street, a mostly deserted industrial sector of the city. The room was very live sounding and the band tracks turned out better than they had any right to, considering our lo-fi approach. The band was very tight and locked in at the time and the performances captured on tape show it. Mitch, Louie and Payton were excellent. I slapped on vocal overdubs and organ parts made it on to a couple of the songs. The second guitar parts were still in development.
Personally, the Half Bad sessions resulted in some of my favorite Pleasures Pale recordings — featuring the sort of confident, mojo-heavy playing you get when songs have just recently come together and there is a palpable excitement in the execution. With this material I feel like we were hitting our stride and coming to full term with our musical identity — edgier and thematically a bit deeper or more complex than the LP. And Payton’s drumming pushed the songs toward a different rhythmic feel, so there was a sense of newness within the band. Again, like the Daily Living material, Half Bad is a cassette rescue operation. I’ve restored it enough to present it in an archival state on my website at jeffreyalanbright.com. But the next year should see a few Bandcamp releases and potentially the full album’s worth of material. I’m extremely excited to get working on it.
Lastly, Twitch is where it all came to an abrupt stop. In August of 1987, impatient with the delays in getting the LP out, and having moved on musically from that material, we booked ourselves back into ReFraze so that when the LP did come out, we’d have an immediate follow up featuring our new line up. The plan was to do a 4-song EP. We completed tracking for Only the Rich, Not Fey, Most Precious Things and Punishment Place. We made it as far as completing all tracking and a mixing session for Only the Rich. What exists now on my website, is the finished mix of Only the Rich plus board mixes of the other three songs — essentially how they sounded when we finished the tracking sessions.
The exciting news here is that the 2-inch, 24-track tapes for the Twitch songs have been located and to-date three of the songs have been “saved.” This is, they’ve been transferred to digital format after applying restoration techniques to the tape. If all goes well in transferring the fourth song, we may be headed back to ReFraze in 2019 to complete the work started over 30 years ago. I’m cautiously optimistic this will get done.
++ And why were these tracks not released properly?
Daily Living Is a Herculean Art and Half Bad are not the sort of collections that would be released unless a band did break up — essentially demos and song sketches — though I personally often find those kinds of releases more fascinating and compelling than the higher budget projects they preceded. Had we continued into 1988, Twitch would have eventually been released as a four-song EP.
++ What about gigs? Did you play many? What was the farthest you played from your town?
We did stay busy with live shows in the Dayton-Cincinnati area. Give or take one or two that may have been cancelled, my calendars from 1985, 1986 and 1987 show that we had around 50 performance dates. The previously mentioned Atlanta show, in June 1986 at The Metroplex, was farthest from Dayton.
++ And what were the best gigs you remember? Any anecdotes you can share?
We shared several bills with Guided By Voices. Of course they went on to make a name for themselves, but we were on relatively equal footing then. Those shows were always memorable. We opened for Modern English at a venue called the Jockey Club in Covington, Kentucky, just over the river from Cincinnati. That was cool. And any gig we had at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, which was pretty much the most desirable hall to play in the entire region, was a winner. We filled a number of opening slots for touring bands and had more prominent billing on few other nights. But perhaps our most memorable performance was in 1987 — at a laundromat.
Sudsy’s was a washeteria near the University of Cincinnati campus that sometimes had live music. There was no stage per se. Bands would set up just inside the door in the entryway hall and listeners would look down from an surrounding elevated area where the washers and dryers were. Not exactly an ideal layout. But it was a Saturday night in September, school back in session, and we had been gaining momentum in Cincinnati, playing there more than in Dayton that summer. Despite the odd, laundry-as-coliseum setup, we decided to take the gig. Besides, we needed to work in Eric Olt on second guitar and Terry Lerma on organ. So, The Pleasures Pale big band version arrived, squeezed in, set up and let rip. We were a forceful, loud band at that point and we fairly well shook the place. But it was one of those nights where everyone was hitting on all cylinders, and somehow we managed to get a balanced sound in that odd space. Every song rolled out in harmonic perfection, and as the night went on the audience became more and more engrossed and enraptured. It wasn’t a huge crowd, but everyone there seemed to be in on a secret of some sort. Like we were all part of the same religious sect and these were our sacred hymns.
We played two sets, I think. To kick off the second, I read a passage from Candide, the philosopher Voltaire’s satirical novel — a totally arty and pretentious thing to do. For once — I’d tried this sort of thing before — it worked. The audience looked on in amusement and appeared to think it all made perfect sense. We proceeded to launch the set into orbit with material that was a mix of songs from LP and Half Bad, but mostly from Half Bad. By the time we reached the last song, one we had recently worked up titled One More Reason to Boycott TV — a groove-heavy blues about a drive to Graceland that ends in a fatal crash, and with the repeated refrain, “And now I know there’s one more reason / there’s one more reason / there’s one more reason to boycott TV” — the room was at fever pitch.
I can’t say how or why, but in that night I thought we had reached the summit of an artistic statement. The strangeness of the setting combined with a sense of weightlessness in performing, along with a dizzying communion with the audience produced a kind of catharsis. People who saw the show have remarked, years later, that it was one of the best musical performances they have witnessed. That’s not necessarily to say hurray for me or jolly for us, but to say moments like those are precisely what musicians and bands play for. Nights like those make the all sundry, degrading crap that young bands consistently deal with in playing small clubs worthwhile. And those nights don’t have to happen in the most prestigious or desirable theater, or in front of the largest audience of adoring fans. That moment can happen unexpectedly, and when it does, it’s a remarkable, unforgettable thing.
++ And were there any bad ones?
Oh, of course, there were absolutely horrific shows, notably the first one and the last one. For the first show, in November of 1985 at Canal Street Tavern in Dayton, I arranged for our set to be videotaped. I was so amped — not necessarily nervous, but wound tight and wanting to impress — that I downed a little too much liquid courage and basically laid an egg on stage, forgetting words, howling out of key and generally making a mess. I suppose it was entertaining for some. Payton thought it was hilarious. But I was crestfallen. I promptly destroyed the video evidence and we thereafter referred to that night as The Lesson.
And the last show, in Chicago, was nothing less than a spirit crusher. So much so it broke the band. As I detailed previously, it really was the dimly lit, unattended, inglorious final act. I suppose we performed well, but I also suspect an air of finality had subconsciously infected the entire trip.
++ When and why did The Pleasures Pale stop making music? Were you involved in any other bands afterwards?
I think it was the life circumstances that some of the players were in that ultimately brought our little enterprise to a halt. The situation was reaching a point where one way of life would have to be thrown over for another. Domestic comfort and safety would necessarily have to be replaced by a life less sure and less secure. And that’s no small thing. I was ratcheting up the intensity, preparing to push it as far as it would go, driven by the interest from Capital. That aggressiveness may have caused some personality differences and friction. Given a Mulligan, as Ahab might have done with the crew of the Pequod, I’d handle the situation differently. As I said, I feel like I could have been a better leader, read the room a little better, found a way, or formed a more sensible strategy. But wisdom is not something a young man typically possesses. An ascendant band needs lucky breaks at the right times. As it transpired, despite the imperative in a letter from northern England, we weren’t lucky.
After the curtain fell, I dove further into songwriting and by summer of 1988 had connected with two other Dayton musicians intent on starting a new project. In August 1988, my partner and now wife Clair and I and bassist Chris Troy Green loaded our vehicles and drove to San Francisco. Two months later, in October, guitarist Eric Schulz joined us. Between 1989 and 1993 we performed with drummer and Oakland native Christopher Fisher as Darke County and then as Myself a Living Torch, and eventually in a country-tinged project called Jeff Bright & the Sunshine Boys. My early influences finally overtook me!
By the end of my 15-year musical journey I was cranking out songs at a frantic pace and fronting an increasingly popular retro honky-tonk-western-swing outfit. It was tons of fun, and definitely a long, twisting odyssey from where it started. Troy eventually moved back to Dayton, but sadly passed away a few years ago. Eric reinvented himself as Harlan T Bobo and moved to Memphis and eventually on to France. Eric-now-Harlan is a musical genius and master showman. He currently releases material on Goner Records and has a rabid, if underground, following.
I’ve had the fortunate chance to create and perform with a handful of very talented players from the Dayton area. That much I could never regret.
++ What about the rest of the band, had they been in other bands afterwards?
I’m sure I can’t recite an accurate history, but I do know that Mitch, Louie, Payton and Terry Lerma eventually carried on after I left as something called Frankenstein’s Kind, which I thought was a brilliant name. Totally jealous of that one! Mitch is an excellent songwriter and singer. In the early days of The Pleasures Pale, a typical set might feature Mitch singing one or two of his own compositions. Payton has had various engagements drumming with Guided By Voices and currently performs in Dayton with The Tracers. Louie is irrepressible. He played bass in Kim Deal’s post-Pixies project, The Amps. He also played drums, I think, in a band called The Tasties. And his current project is a nod to his heritage — a mind-bending combination of luchador wrestling masks, zombie killing underworld heroes and sci-fi surf instrumentals. It goes by the name Team Void and Louie plays wicked guitar. There could be more I’m not aware of.
++ Has there ever been a reunion? Or talks of playing again together?
There had been little to no contact between myself and the other guys until the last few years when I began to revive our music. So, at this point, there has not been any sort of reunion. I’ll just say that, at least in my view, the immediate task would be to complete the rescue and preservation of the Twitch recordings then reunite to mix the songs — finish what we started. After that, who knows? That part of the Pleasures Pale story has yet to be written.
++ Did you get much attention from the radio? or TV? Were there any promo videos?
We did receive a tiny bit of college radio play shortly after the LP was finally released, more in Canada than the US, interestingly. But without touring to support the recording, interest dropped off relatively quickly.
It was the start of the MTV era and the interest for making a video was there, even if the means for an effort of sufficient quality wasn’t. I shot and edited a video for our song If It Wasn’t So Funny. But it was completely amateurish and of poor quality.
++ What about the press? Did they give you any attention?
We did a modest press mailing to promote the LP in November of 1987. Reviews were generally positive and of a similar flavor. Option Magazine was a respected and established voice on indie music at the time. Written by Brad Bradberry in the March/April 1988 issue, their review said that “though they fail to conquer any virgin territory musically, this a fine band nonetheless.” He went on to say, “From Talking Heads-styled new wave to the Smiths’ brand of introspective janglepop, as well as semi-acoustic Cramps adaptations and Echo & the Bunnymen tributes, they’re as imitative as they are diverse” and finished by saying it was my contribution “coupled with the tight combo arrangements and fine guitar work of by Swann, more than the songs themselves, that ultimately delivers this album past the hordes of derivative wannabes.” Other reviews were more favorable and others were less. The Option review summarizes the flavor of most.
++ What about from fanzines?
If there was much chatter about The Pleasures Pale in the ’zine sphere, it was never brought to my attention. My hunch is we were likely not quite snotty punk enough to make the grade there. However, Cleveland’s Alternative Press, a publication bridging the world of fanzines and more established magazines, reviewed our March 1986 set opening for Golden Palominos at Bogart’s in Cincinnati. The reviewer, Glenn Gambos, wrote: “Their music ranged from Presley-esque Fifties rockers to Simple Minds-ish wide, echoing songs. Although it seems like quite a range in styles, it somehow isn’t … they have taken both styles and made them their own. This is one of the best local bands I’ve seen in a long time.” We thought Mr. Gambos was very perceptive!
++ Looking back in retrospective, what would you say was the biggest highlight for the band?
We hit some high points during performances, for sure — quite a few of them — and, at least from my perspective, recording was a joy, and the process of creation was thoroughly rewarding. But because the LP didn’t hit until after we split up, because the journey did end so abruptly, because we weren’t lucky, I don’t think we made it to our biggest highlight. It was yet to come. And maybe it still is.
++ Aside from music, what other hobbies do you have?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a romantic — in the 19th Century sense. As did the romantics of that age, I have a strong affinity and boundless respect for the natural world. I’m attracted to wild, remote places and when I started my hiatus from music in 1999, in large part, the impetus was to redirect my creative energies into exploring that facet of myself. I’m not sure I would call it a hobby, but for the past two decades I’ve been deep into writing, photography and design projects that in one way or other revolve around that affinity and respect. Writing has remained a constant for me, but photography has been a more recent, semi-pro interest. Not long ago I started an Instagram page titled The Lyrical Eye to examine ways that my photography could connect to the music I made. The effort is still in its infancy, but can be seen at instragram.com/thelyricaleye.
++ Never been to Dayton, so if anyone reading this interview was to visit, what are the sights one shouldn’t miss? Or the traditional food or drinks that you love that I should try?
Thirty years ago I could have provided a list of Dayton’s attractions, rusted and decaying as they may be been. Today, for the intrepid visitor with an interest in Dayton’s late 20th Century underground music scene, I would recommend seeking out the locations of — and leave an offering to the gods of misfit music at — former nightspots such as Sam’s on west Fifth Street, the various locations of the Walnut Hills Bar, the Building Lounge on East Third Street, Brookwood Hall where a number of all-ages shows were staged, and offer baksheesh to the site of Canal Street Tavern, where proprietor and musician Mick Montgomery gave so many young bands their first show. Gilly’s Jazz Club is still stands and operates its historic location next to the Greyhound terminal, and the Fifth Street Oregon District remains the hub of nightlife. Oregon Express and Trolley Stop, both on Fifth Street were never really venues friendly to the counter culture, but they do now host a wider variety of music than in the past. Gem City Records, also on Fifth is a key piece in the history of the Dayton scene. It’s still going. And for anyone wanting to dive deep, ask around to connect with Reverend Cool. Jim Carter, schoolteacher by trade, was in many ways our lifeline to the broader American indie scene. Rev Cool hosted a Friday afternoon radio show on WWSU featuring new music, and was organizer and promoter-in-chief for many of era’s most memorable shows. If you were a touring band looking for a Dayton gig, the Rev was your contact.
Additionally, a Pleasures Pale tour would include a look at the house standing at 2623 Marcella Avenue in North Dayton, where so many of the Pale’s early songs were written and polished into form during basement rehearsals. The Daily Living demos were recorded here, as well. Most of the Half Bad and Twitch lyrics were written at in my apartment at East River Place on the north bank of the Miami River and the music developed in our rehearsal space at the warehouse building on East Third. ReFraze Studios, where the LP and Twitch material was recorded is still functioning at 2727 Gaylord Avenue in the Kettering neighborhood, south of the city center.
Cincinnati has Skyline Chili, and Dayton has, uh… Well, the city was founded by German, Irish, Italian and eastern European immigrants. During my Dayton days — or Dayton daze — there were still quite a few family owned restaurants from the city’s heyday still in operation. Today, unfortunately, like with much of middle America, most of those locally-flavored establishments have disappeared and corporate chains have swallowed up the dining economy. In Dayton, pizza chains Cassano’s and Marion’s are institutions and make regionally unique, square-cut, thin-crust pies. You’d have to try one of those.
Lastly, being young and poor — the country fell into recession in the late 1980s — inexpensive nourishment was essential. I’ll just say that I spent more than my fair share of time at the counter of the Frisch’s Big Boy that once operated a few miles north of the city on Main Street, not far from the Loews Ames movie theater and the dying Forest Park Plaza Shopping Center. Both Louie and I had a taste for the Swiss Miss sandwich.
++ Anything else you’d like to add?
I’d love to hop in a time machine and land back in Dayton in the summer of 1987. Maybe I could convince the hands of fate to allow The Pleasures Pale a second chance to carry on and reach their full potential. I think the music deserves it. In lieu of that, I’m dreaming of releasing our full catalog in an exquisitely packaged vinyl box set. Time will tell if that fantasy has a puncher’s chance — or if I’ll have to content myself with simply saying, “Joy, it was fine while it lasted.”
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Listen
The Pleasures Pale – No, Joy
