It's like those Chinese dishes where beef and chicken are stir-fried with lobster and shrimp, and the mind's gustatory processors can't quite figure out what the hell to do with the combined meat/seafood taste-- I can't think of any other era in music that allowed the "good band/bad producer" gene to flourish the way 80s "college rock" did. Cheap synths will always sound flat and dated in ways that not even the venerable Mellotron can match, and bad new-wave keyboard washes upstage the most earnest Velvets/Beatles/Byrds ripoffs. Like the old saw goes, it's all in the mix.
I bought those Let's Active reissues last summer and was appalled: "I used to listen to this unicorny shit? Ech." After similarly unsatisfying re-encounters with The Rain Parade, Three O'Clock, Thin White Rope, Vietnam Veterans, Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, early Screaming Trees, etc., I was ready to write the whole 80s neo-psych-cum-roots-rock movement off as a necessarily naive but ball-less forerunner of grunge, Terrastock, Elephant 6 and all the other genres and scenes of the 1990s in which bands figured out how to recreate-- a la Borges' Pierre Menard-- your basic psychedelic mindfuck.
So I wondered about my 2004 reaction to 28th Day, now reissued with almost three times as many songs as the original boasted. I loved their Russ Tolman-produced EP when it came out on Enigma in 1985-- it was the record to put on when you were suffering a gray bout of R.E.M. or Dream Syndicate oversaturation. The band, based in the dinky California college burg Chico, consisted of a teenage Barbara Manning, her boyfriend Cole Marquis, and inanely coifed drummer Mike Cloward, none of whom (with the exception of Babs on a rare release or two) have wowed me much with their output in the two decades since. Marquis, in particular, has seemed a lost cause-- his Downsiders most often remind me of The Hooters or The Call.
So what went wrong? For their youth, both Manning and Marquis tapped into a timeless source of guitar/bass/drums rock, and even by wizened/jaded 2004 standards, this stuff still sounds as beautiful and rich and satisfying as it ever did. Anthems of heartbreak, odes to inarticulatable sadness, paeans to the dead! Sandy Denny could have sung most of these tunes without breaking a Brit-folk sweat. "25 Pills" and "Pages Turn" have to be a couple of the stokedest West Coast jangle-pop songs ever written. And not enough praise can be given to "Lost", in which Barbara's perfect backing-vox lift Cole's preternaturally world-weary chorus to West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band heights of poesy. And "Holiday"! And that tripped-out live cover of George Harrison's "It's All Too Much"! Why doesn't Barbara write songs like this anymore? It's flawless: verse/chorus/verse, an unrepentant fansong to all the bands she's ever loved, yet simultaneously totally unique and itself.
Indeed, this is what it sounds like to be young, gifted and white-- or at least, how it sounded in 1985. From the sound of it, 28th Day were intent on being the proverbial Best Band in the World, writing and playing from the collegiate perspective that says desire and true grit are all you need. How American-- how naive to all the squalor and decrepitude down the line-- except that, for a split second, as this CD testifies, they really were the best band in the world.
