Paisley Underground

This isn't a sound, it's an address book. A dozen LA bands who shared bills, girlfriends, drummers and record collections, and who agreed that 1966 was more useful than 1977 — while keeping punk's volume and its DIY label economics.

Unlike most movements named from the outside, this one was a real community, and the participants still claim it.

The seed is 400 miles north: Davis, California, and the UC Davis student radio station, where Steve Wynn met Kendra Smith before they formed the Suspects and later the Dream Syndicate, and where Russ Tolman spun records before True West.

They carried it to LA, where hardcore and new wave owned the clubs and Lenny Kaye's Nuggets bands — the Standells, the Seeds, the Electric Prunes — were deeply unfashionable on the Strip.

A. Weekly interview — the exact setting is told several ways, Denny's on Sunset, the Pantry, a rehearsal ad-lib.

Frontier (Lisa Fancher), Slash and its Ruby imprint, Enigma, and Wynn's own Down There carried the records 1982–85. Majors came fast: Columbia took the Bangles, IRS took the Three O'Clock, and Prince's Paisley Park put out their Vermillion in 1988.

Who: Wynn, Karl Precoda and Kendra Smith; David and Steven Roback with Matt Piucci; Quercio and Louis Gutierrez; the Peterson sisters and Susanna Hoffs; Sid Griffin; Dan Stuart. Clubs were the Cathay de Grande, Club Lingerie, the Music Machine, the Anti-Club.

What: Rickenbackers and twelve-strings, Farfisa, three-part harmony, and a Velvets-length guitar fight at the end of side two. How a record gets in: it has to be made by somebody inside the circle, usually for under a few thousand dollars, with 60s records as the reference and punk as the delivery.

There was never one unified sound — several strands ran at once.