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- After The Sabbath (R.I.P?) ; All Ages ; Another Nickel (R.I.P.) ; Bachelor ; BangtheBore ; Beard (R.I.P.) ; Beyond The Implode (R.I.P.) ; Black Editions ; Black Time ; Blue Moment ; Bull ; Cocaine & Rhinestones ; Dancing ; DCB (R.I.P.) ; Did Not Chart ; Diskant (R.I.P.) ; DIYSFL ; Dreaming (R.I.P.?) ; Dusted in Exile ; Echoes & Dust ; Every GBV LP ; Flux ; Free ; Freq ; F-in' Record Reviews ; Garage Hangover ; Gramophone ; Grant ; Head Heritage ; Heathen Disco/Doug Mosurock ; Jonathan ; KBD ; Kulkarni ; Landline/Jay Babcock ; Lexicon Devil ; Lost Prom (R.I.P.?) ; LPCoverLover ; Midnight Mines ; Musique Machine ; Mutant Sounds (R.I.P.?) ; Nick Thunk :( ; Norman ; Peel ; Perfect Sound Forever ; Quietus ; Science ; Teleport City ; Terminal Escape ; Terrascope ; Tome ; Transistors ; Ubu ; Upset ; Vibes ; WFMU (R.I.P.) ; XRRF (occasionally resurrected). [If you know of any good rock-write still online, pls let me know.]
Other Place. // One Band. // Another Band. // Spooky Sounds. // MIXES. // Thanks for reading.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits
(Night School Records, 2013)
One of the most welcome surprises for me in 2013’s heavy calendar of comps and reissues was the emergence at the end of the year of ‘The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits’, which as far as I know marks the first time that more than a song or two from said lady have hit vinyl, or become generally available CD/mp3. Nice work, Night School Records, nice work!
Like most other interested parties I’d assume, I was first introduced to the music of The Space Lady via Irwin Chusid’s ‘Songs in the Key of Z’ compilation – not a collection I’d wholly commend to you either musically or ideologically, but The Space Lady’s unique readings of ‘I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’ and Peter Schilling’s novelty hit ‘Major Tom’ were definitely the tracks on there that stuck with me the most; beautiful and foreboding, heavily psychedelic arrangements of the songs, imaginatively rendered via cheap Casiotone and a haze of effects, and intoned with a plain, hesitant, yet oddly intoxicating female monotone.
A quick scan of the sleevenotes before the comp went back to the library informed me that The Space Lady was a former San Francisco street musician, a sci-fi fixated escapee from the late ‘60s Haight Ashbury apocalypse, and well, say no more really. A perennial mix tape favourite was born.
Barring obvious geniuses such as Moondog and Captain Beefheart, I would be extremely unlikely to get excited over the prospect of owning an LP collecting the works of most of the other artists included on the ‘..Key of Z’ comp, but unlike many of the uncomfortably damaged savants therein, The Space Lady’s contributions made for genuinely delightful listening that stretched beyond mere novelty value. Calming and introspective as their New Age origin demanded, yet fully cogent of the transformative power of verse/chorus pop music, they evoke the fading ghost of San Francisco’s gentle psychedelic idealism, returning to haunt a new, impoverished world of dimestore electronics, frail 30-something uncertainty and rhinestoned glam-rock bombast.
Key to The Space Lady’s musical identity I think is her history as a busker. Where so many other post-hippie drop-outs retreated into New Age synth abstraction or cultish Christian mysticism as the ‘70s comedown hit home, Susan Schneider’s trip was focused firmly on playing to the people: doing big, easy tunes that would be recognised by passersby, magnetising a few dimes from the throng SF’s commuting populus. For music that is so obviously birthed from a life-style of spaced out flower-child journeying, there is a heroic lack of self-indulgence to Schneider’s performances, and her desire to entertain is very much reflected in her repertoire, which in addition to Schilling and The ‘Prunes also encompasses ‘Born To Be Wild’, ‘Radar Love’, ‘Ballroom Blitz’, Steve Miller’s ‘Fly Like An Eagle’ and (best of all) ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’, all beautifully rewired via the stuttering drum machine and eerie cadences of Schneider’s own unique MO.
Less ‘cover versions’ in the rock band sense, these songs are more melodic skeletons around which Schneider can build her own sonic universe – an shaky pencil line linking the lost & lonely cloud-folk of Linda Perhacs to the shredded DIY electro-punk of The Screamers, via an unlikely trek through the fuzzier corners of America’s early ‘80s MOR radio-waves, with material carefully selected to combine popular appeal with opportunities for The Space Lady to stretch her musical expression into stranger and dreamier waters than FM rock/pop would conventionally allow, tripping out into the furthest depths her pedals would allow, whilst all the time singing of flying through the clouds, blasting through the heavens, blinking through into dreamland, in a more solemn and direct fashion than the composers of these songs may have originally anticipated.
Another aspect of The Space Lady showcased on her Greatest Hits though is that of her ‘originals’, several of which sit alongside the covers. Well, sort of, anyway. A key figure in The Space Lady’s mythology is that of the perfectly named Joel L. Dunsany (any relation?), Schneider’s former partner, who is now sadly no longer with us. The sole composer of the remaining three songs on the LP version of ‘Greatest Hits’, it was Dunsany who inadvertently inspired the ‘Space Lady’ concept in the first place, as is outlined in Schneider’s highly entertaining sleevenotes:
“Since we had destroyed our IDs, were living under an assumed surname, and were generally terrified of Joel being caught for draft evasion, life became a hand-to-mouth scramble for existence. With the idea of making big money as a rock star, Joel put together a one-man-band act of experimental music, running his guitar through an Echo-Plex and wearing a silly looking winged helmet he bought in a San Francisco costume shop. The helmet wouldn’t have been so bad I thought, if not for the red ball on top; and worse yet, Joel had the audacity to wire it up to a blinking bulb. Crowned with that embarrassing spectacle of a topper, he dubbed himself ‘Mount Helium Pegasus,’ and began looking for places to play.”
Unfortunately for us all, bookings for Mount Helium Pegasus were rarely forthcoming, and future classics like ‘Synthesize Me’ and ‘From The Womb To The Tomb’ were soon relegated to the box cupboard along with the winged helmet and the echoplex. The fugitive family still had to eat though, and after a further decade or so of scrapes, misadventures and Close Encounters, it was to that same cupboard that Susan Schneider returned, taking to the streets, humbly reinventing the remains of her husband’s rock star dreams armed with a Casio MT-40, a camera tripod and a brace of 9-V FX boxes that the hippies could only have dreamed of.
What resulted is a beautiful and engaging reinterpretation of popular music, consumer electronics and cosmic ideology, and a joyful listening experience that easily overcomes any patronising notion of ‘outsider art’. The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits is a self-evident classic of home-made psychedelic spirit that transcends any earth-bound genre conventions, flying free like a glowing beacon of maternal human warmth and gentle pop wonder through the dark of the cosmos. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION, to coin a phrase.
(I’m kinda on the fence as to whether or not it will be a good idea for Schneider to resurrect her Space Lady persona for a trip to the UK in support of this record in a few months, but it gains her some belated recognition for her music (and some dough), well, that’s all to the good, and if there’s a chance I can pass her a cheery word and get my LP signed, all the better. So see you there, I guess.)
Listen to The Space Lady doing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ here, and watch her perform ‘Major Tom’ here.
Read a recent interview with The Space Lady at The Quietus here.
Buy 'The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits' from Night School Records here.
Labels: album reviews, The Space Lady
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