NEWS

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Naomi Peterson and SST

Joe Carducci, who worked at SST Records during it's prime, wrote this memoir of Naomi Peterson recently. He learned in May 2005 that she died back in 2003. If her name rings a bell, but you are having trouble placing it, she was the photographer for SST Records.

She took all those tiny photos I'd stare at in fanzines and album jackets when I was a teen. I'd try to discern something about the people who made this frayed and life-changing music; they all looked so ordinary. I remember hearing Zen Arcade, and staring at the crayon-scribbled silhouettes on the cover, and thinking these must be some tough looking guys. And then, a few weeks later, I saw my first Husker Du gig. The audience was all spikes and leather but the guys on stage couldn't be more ordinary. Or loud. Greg Norton's handlebar moustache was totally confounding. I felt like I was just catching up to this hardcore thing in 1984, and here I saw it was already mutating into something else.

Perfect Sound Forever did a nice history of the SST label, and the last page is a very good round-up of the lesser known bands. The writer mentions how good Slovenly were- I don't have any discs myself, but I do remember liking them. They're totally out of print now. The sound was out of place in the late-80s: a monotone Joy Division/Interpol vocalist, and icy guitars. But that's pretty up-to-date these days. They were five years too late or 15 years too early. They looked like hippies, and so did their album art; SST was a confounding batch of punks for sure.

The article Perfect Sound article fails to mention Lawndale, though. Lawndale was a witty instrumental band, surf oriented, but like Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet a few years later, they didn't stick to a retro sound. Sasquach Rock has a blending of Brubeck's "Take 5" with "Whole Lotta Love" that was a cool novelty track. An SST band that was five years too early. 'Coulda been contenders with the flamey-shirt greaser crowd of the 90s.

But my favorite lost SST band is Opal. Happy Nightmare Baby is a little classic of sleepy psych. Kendra Smith's vocals sound bored and sensual at the same time, rather like Trailer Bride's Melissa Swingle. The music is slack and dreamy too, but doesn't get melodramatic the way Mazzy Star tended to be; after Smith left the guitarist started Mazzy Star.

The T. Rex comparisons are obvious the first time you hear "Rocket Machine"

Opal - Rocket Machine

...it's those cellos, or fake cellos. But this song drags and sighs in a way that Marc Bolan never did. This song turns over, roused from an afternoon nap, and starts kissing you.

All three of these artists deserve to have their work available. Carducci sensed that SST was the Sun Records of its day. And twenty years after the fact, SST is still alive and as bizarre as Sun was in the Seventies. They seem to have become a Decline of Western Civ version of Rockabilly Orion, content to nurse the Black Flag and Minutemen legacy. Those bands' recordings are kept available; but you can't get them on iTunes or eMusic. And you can't get the back catalog at all. With so many of the folks involved lost, like Naomi Peterson, it might be hard to make all this music accessible again. It should be heard.

posted by bendy @ 1/08/2006 01:56:00 AM [permanent link]

UPDATE: here it is, Jan 14th, just a few days after I posted this, and SST is starting to put thier catalog up on eMusic. Way to go! Hope they can figure out how to do that back catalog.

said bendy, at 1/14/2006  

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