Opal - Hear The Wind Blow

It's a fine line between dreamy and narcoleptic.

Maybe it's the difference between Hope Seconal Sandoval and Kendra Smith's voices, but while I always found Opal's music beautiful and hypnotic, I thought Mazzy Star (essentially the same band with a different singer) were pretty dull.

Actually, truth be told, Opal's lone LP, Happy Nightmare Baby, was a little too "weird scenes inside the goldmine" for my taste. It has some good tracks to be sure, but much of it meanders. In my opinion, the band's really killer stuff can be found on the Early Recordings LP that was released by Rough Trade after they broke up. Some of the key tracks on the album had previously been released on singles and EPs, but they were all new to me when the LP was released in 1989.

I recently picked up a couple used Mazzy Star CDs (unlike Opal's albums, which are rarer than hen's teeth, Mazzy Star CDs can be found cheap). I thought I might find more about them to appreciate now. Not really. "Fade Into You" and "Five String Serenade" are nice enough, but I still find them hard to take on the whole. Something about their music brings the lingering stench of patchouli and incense to my mind. Those are smells I would prefer to forget. I could never stand those and other odors associated with hippies, which is one of many reasons I was never a Deadhead. That's just not my trip, man.

But for some reason, despite being concocted from the same essential ingredients, Opal are a different story for me. The lovely "Hear The Wind Blow" was covered to great effect by Dean & Britta, and was originally released as a bonus-track on the CD issue of Early Recordings. I have feeling there are a lot more potential "bonus-tracks" that could have been included. Hopefully on some future reissue they will be.

Opal - Happy Nightmare Baby

I've kind of danced around posting something by Opal, having featured a couple things by Kendra Smith, and a cover of "Fell From the Sun" by The Pale Saints. Despite a slender--and it has to be said, spotty--discography, Opal is a band that casts a long shadow due to the exceptionally high quality of their good material. Nothing by the band is in print at the moment.

David Roback (formerly of The Rain Parade) and Kendra Smith (formerly of The Dream Syndicate) and drummer Keith Mitchell formed Clay Allison and released the spectacular single "Fell From The Sun" in 1983. The band soon changed its name to Opal and released two EPs, before releasing their sole LP, Happy Nightmare Baby on the SST label in 1987. Rough Trade later compiled the contents of the single and EPs on the Early Recordings LP.

Happy Nightmare Baby is a somewhat uneven album compared to the uniformly excellent material the group released previous to it. The album kicks off with a nice T-Rex tribute, "Rocket Machine," but things quickly get a little too "weird scenes inside the goldmine" for my taste on the awful second track, "Magick Power." Lyrics like "I'm a vampire, so is she" may have some appeal to Anne Rice fans, but I find their conjunction with the Ray Manzarek styled organ playing extremely off-putting. With such a wretched second track the temptation to lift the needle from the groove before the third track even starts is strong.

It would be unfortunate to do that however, because despite the slightly too-evident Doors influence that pervades the album, most of the rest of it is quite good. Especially strong is the title tune, "Happy Nightmare Baby," a psychedelic update of the Appalachian murder ballad. The song brings to mind such traditional fare as "Knoxville Girl" with a woman tripping on LSD as the deranged protagonist.

Kendra Smith left the band and recommended Hope Sandoval as her replacement, and the band either broke up or changed its name to Mazzy Star depending on how you look at it. And just as David St. Hubbins once observed that there is "a fine line between stupid and clever," Mazzy Star proved there is a fine line between drowsy and narcoleptic.

All Tomorrow's Parties (In German)

German language appreciation week concludes with this version of "All Tomorrow's Parties" recorded by Kendra Smith with Steve Wynn back in 1981. German is such a natural choice for this song it makes you wonder why Lou Reed didn't think to have Nico sing an alternate version in German. German also comes naturally to Smith because she spent part of her childhood in Germany. This was recorded around the same time as the sessions for the first Dream Syndicate EP. It was probably a good idea not to release it at the time as the band was being obvious enough about its primary influence without actually covering them.

Kendra Smith

Kendra Smith is probably best known as a founding member of the Dream Syndicate and as the voice behind Opal. In 1992, five years after the release Opal's last album, a cryptically packaged 10" EP of mysteriously beautiful songs called Kendra Smith Presents The Guild of Temporal Adventurers seemed to magically appear and quickly disappear from a select few record stores. A better distributed full length on 4AD, the appropriately titled Five Ways of Disappearing, followed in 1995. Since that release, to my knowledge, there has been no new music from Kendra Smith, and that's a shame. It's also a shame that both Opal albums and this EP are out-of-print and difficult to find.

"Wheel of the Law" is one of my favorite songs from the 1992 EP. Jonah Corey sings on this cut with Kendra.