The Kelley Deal 6000 - Go To The Sugar Altar... Plus

Happy Birthday to famed musicians and identical twins Kim and Kelley Deal, who were born on this date in Dayton, Ohio sixty years ago today. In honor of this day, I thought I might as well post the rest of Kelley Deal's output I currently have in my possession.

Both of the twins got into music during their teen years in Ohio, working up songs in the home studio they built in their parents' basement, and playing folk- and country-laced originals and covers in and around the Dayton area (with Kim on guitar and Kelley on drums). This went on for a couple of years until the mid-1980s, when Kim got married and moved to Boston; Kelley stayed in Dayton and started working as a technical analyst.  Kim found a job in the Massachusetts biochemical tech industry, and that was her main focus in life until one day in March 1986, she came across an unusual advertisement in the "Musicians Wanted" classified section of the old Boston Phoenix newspaper that read, "Band seeks woman bassist into Hüsker Dü and Peter, Paul and Mary..."  On a whim, Kim answered the ad (she later found that she was the only person who did) and met locals Charles Thompson and Joey Santiago, old college roommates who were thinking about forming a band.  The trio began jamming together, and that's how the band The Pixies were formed.

Even with Kim on board, the rudimentary Pixies were still without a drummer. Kim contacted her sister Kelley back in Ohio, and subsequently paid for her to fly out to Boston to audition behind the kit for the band. Although both Thompson (soon to be known as Black Francis) and Santiago approved, Kelley wasn't confident enough in her drumming to join up, and opted to move back to Ohio. Kim then recommended another drumming acquaintance, David Lovering, a friend of her husband's she met at their wedding reception the year before. Lovering signed on, and the group was complete.

In a post I published a decade ago, I briefly provided an overview of the formation of The Breeders in 1989, the result of the dissatisfaction Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly were feeling regarding their roles in their then-current bands (Donelly was a member of Throwing Muses). Kim asked Kelley to join the new group and assist with the recording of their debut album Pod, but Kelley was unable to participate because she couldn't arrange to take enough time off of her analyst job. However, after Donelly left the group, Kelley quit her job and joined her sister's band in 1992, assuming the lead guitarist role (although at the beginning, she had NO IDEA how to play the instrument).

Many moons ago, I related to you all the story of my initial encounters and brief long-distance semi-friendship with Kelley Deal during the mid-to-late 1990s. In that narrative, I related how she and The Breeders were riding on the crest of global commercial and critical success, in the midst of a triumphant world tour capitalizing on their hit album Last Splash.  It seemed to me at the time that everything was going right for the band; little did I know how much turmoil was occurring behind the scenes, and how much things were getting out of hand for Kelley. Demons already long present in her life began to take over, exacerbated by the long hours of life on constant tour. Taken from a 2002 feature article on the group from The Guardian newspaper:

The Breeders spent several months during 1993 and 1994 touring, and it was during this period that Kelley's long-standing addiction to heroin stopped being a secret and started being a problem. When the band returned home, the Deals immediately started work on the follow-up to Last Splash, but in autumn 1994 Kelley was arrested for possession, and by the beginning of 1995 she was in rehab in Minnesota.

As I mentioned in that earlier post, Kelley got busted by the feds when she received a half-pound brick of Black Tar heroin from her dealer at her home address.  The subsequent felony charges could have landed her in jail for an extended period.  But her family pulled together to support her, and saved her from the slammer - not that she appreciated it at the time (also from The Guardian):

Kelley insists that her family drove her to the rehabilitation centre themselves, and that meant that when her case came to court, she wasn't convicted. "I hated my family," she admits. "They were all against me, they didn't understand me. I didn't think I had a problem."

She was ordered to report to the famed Hazelton rehab center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she spent much of 1995 in a structured, isolated environment, getting treatment for her addiction. Kelley's time at the clinic also helped her find a up-to-then untapped wellspring of creativity and inspiration, and for the first time she began penning her own songs. At the completion of her program at Hazelton, Kelley was gradually eased back into society, moving into a halfway house in nearby St. Paul for further observation and treatment. While there, she met and befriended Jesse Colin Roff, a local guitarist and drummer also undergoing drug rehab, and (tentatively, at first) began sharing with him some of the songs that she wrote while at the center. Intrigued and inspired, the two began jamming together and collaborating, and Kelley began plotting a return to active recording.

The duo began gathering like-minded musicians, including David Shouse from The Grifters and Jimmy Flemion of The Frogs, and by early 1996 Kelley was confident enough in the abilities of herself and her band (christened The Kelley Deal 6000) to enter Minneapolis's Terrarium recording studio to work on a debut album. Go To The Sugar Altar was completed in a month, and issued in the late spring of 1996.

Go To The Sugar Altar, to me, is the sound of a band, and a musician, finding their/her feet. The songs (all written either by Kelley herself or in conjunction with various band members) cover a number of genres: straight-ahead rock, some punky thrashing, a dollop of blues and even a dash of country thrown in from time to time. A lot of these songs sound somewhat like glorified demos... but that may be due to the nature of the circumstance, with Kelley producing and funding the project herself from whatever limited funds she had at her disposal. With that being said, most of the songs are winners, and Kelley's voice is a treat; it has the same familiar sound as that of her sister, but unlike Kim, who tends to bury her voice somewhat in her recordings, Kelley's is out front the entire time, and has an appealing tone and growl. Some of my favorite songs off of this album include "Dammit" and "How About Hero":

 

Comparing the Deal sisters' immediate post-Last Splash releases of the time [after The Breeders went on forced hiatus in the wake of Kelley's drug problems, Kim assembled what was originally intended to be a "new Breeders", but instead evolved into The Amps, and released a so-so album (Pacer) in late 1995], I feel that Go To The Sugar Altar is the truer follow-up/continuation of the hit Breeders sound.

The band's debut album met with decent reviews, and the group hit the road that summer for shows all across the U.S., drumming up support for the disc.  I saw The Kelley Deal 6000 a couple of times that year, as I mentioned in my earlier post, and at every show took the opportunity to try to say "hello".  During their tour, the label released the Canyon EP, containing the lead cut from the album along with the non-album track "Get The Writing".  I picked up both over the course of that year.

After their extensive tour, the group returned to Minneapolis in the spring of 1997 to record their sophomore album Boom! Boom! Boom!  During these sessions, Kelley and Jesse Roff took a little time apart from the other band members to record a two-song side project, titled Carnivale, under the moniker Solid State 6000. This single didn't expand upon the sound ideas that ended up on the full band album, but serves as a superb companion piece.

These were the final releases by Kelley on her own. After the Boom! Boom! Boom! tour ended in early 1998, the group went on indefinite hiatus, and Kelley returned to the Breeders' fold, where she remains to this day.

It's been a quarter-century since the band's debut, and while they didn't last very long, The Kelley Deal 6000 and related projects shouldn't be relegated to just a long-ago memory, or regarded as a 'flash in the pan'.  Kelley definitely had some things to say, and it is to her credit that, in the wake of all that was going wrong for her at the time, she was bold enough and adventurous enough to step out on her own and present to the public what was on her mind at the time. I enjoyed this group very much while it lasted, and miss heading out to see them in the small clubs they played around the country during that time. And on a personal note, it was an honor and a privilege to have Kelley as my friend, even for so brief a time.

With that being said, for your listening pleasure, here are:

•  Go To The Sugar Altar, the debut album by The Kelley Deal 6000, released by Nice Records (Kelley's label) on June 4th, 1996; 
• The band's Canyon EP, released later that summer; and
• The Carnivale single, released by Solid State 6000 on the same label in mid-1997.

Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think.

Please use the email link below to contact me, and I will reply with the download link(s) ASAP:

The Kelley Deal 6000 - Go To The Sugar Altar: Send Email
The Kelley Deal 6000 - Canyon EP: Send Email
Solid State 6000 - Carnivale (single): Send Email

The Last Hard Men - The Last Hard Men

I heard about this band in early 1997, as I was finishing up my final year of grad school in Virginia. The movie Scream (directed by the great and recently departed Wes Craven - God rest his soul) had come out just before Christmas 1996, and was doing boffo box office across the country. I personally didn't go to see it; slasher films of that ilk were not and still are not quite my bag. But the presence of the film (which went on to gross more than $170 million worldwide and spawned three sequels) was everywhere during the winter of 1996-97, including the airwaves. The movie soundtrack album, featuring alternative and post-punk tunes by the likes of Moby, Nick Cave and Julee Cruise, had been released the week after the film opened, and while the album itself didn't chart, a number of the songs featured on it received some fairly significant airplay.

In the movie (semi-spoiler alert), after a number of teenagers are murdered, school is suspended while the authorities hunt for the killer or killers. Students gleefully leave the now-closed high school while Alice Cooper's classic "School's Out" plays as background music. For a song so prominently featured in the film, you would expect that it would be on the official soundtrack album, right? Wrong . . . instead, the original was replaced by a cover version done by The Last Hard Men, a short-lived alt-rock "supergroup" of sorts, instigated by former and current Breeders guitarist Kelley Deal.

According to Deal, the genesis of this band came from an article regarding hair metal bands she read in an issue of Spin magazine in early 1996. The article's low regard for and generally condescending, dismissive tone for this genre of music apparently pissed Kelley off:

". . . here they were making fun of these bands, but what were the interviewers wearing? Grunge flannel? Baggy pants? I was bothered that Spin made fun of style because everything is style, and it was done in a really mean way . . . It just didn't seem fair."

In response and reaction to Spin's article, Deal made an effort to seek out vocalist Sebastian Bach, who had just parted ways with his longtime band Skid Row; she considered him one of the best hair metal band singers out there. The two finally connected in New York City in the summer of 1996, backstage at a Kelley Deal 6000 gig, and made plans to record together later that fall.

The original idea was for Deal to recruit one additional alt-rock member for their one-off recording, and for Bach to get one of his metal friends to join in. For a while, there was talk that Motley Crue's Tommy Lee would be that member, but those plans fell through, and in the end Deal gathered the remaining group members from the alternative spectrum, namely Frogs guitarist Jimmy Flemion and former Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin (Chamberlin had been fired from the Pumpkins the year before, due to his involvement with the heroin-related death of keyboardist Jonathan Melvion in New York while the band was on tour; ironically, The Smashing Pumpkins finished the tour with new hires, Matt Walker on drums - and Jimmy Flemion's older brother Dennis on keyboards . . . so I'm sure the two Jimmys had much to talk about during their time together . . . )

Word of the formation, which had yet to be named, got out to certain quarters, and the producers of Scream quickly requested a song contribution from the group for the soundtrack. The four got together in a Minnesota studio in the fall of 1996, just to record their version of "School's Out". But the song and the session went so well that Deal extended the studio time, and in four days the group (now dubbed The Last Hard Men) hammered out an additional dozen or so songs.

And that was that; the members of The Last Hard Men immediately went their separate ways. Sebastian Bach started a solo world tour a month of so after the Minnesota sessions and took Jimmy Flemion along; a couple of Last Hard Men cuts were added to his set list. Deal went back on tour as well with her band, but the momentum behind The Kelley Deal 6000 was petering out, and it was only months later that the group went on permanent hiatus. Chamberlain reconciled with Smashing Pumpkins founder and front man Billy Corgan and was reinstated in the band in the fall of 1998. He continued his association with Corgan (in both the Pumpkins and Zwan) for the next decade.

As for the recordings, Kelley Deal began shopping the tapes around to various labels, but found little interest. Atlantic Records made mouth noises about a possible release at the end of 1997, but in the end they declined their option. Finally in 1998, Deal scraped together enough funds to press about a thousand copies of the album, and quietly released it under her own Nice Records label. Due to its limited availability, it was an extremely hard-to-find disc. But in 2001, a small independent producer out of Long Island negotiated to give the album a more widespread release under its own label.

I purchased this disc during a visit I made to DC in 2002, at Olsson's Books & Records' Georgetown store, shortly before that location permanently closed its doors (the remaining branches of this beloved and venerable independent bookstore chain shut down in 2008, a tremendous loss to Washington's cultural and retail presence). When I went into Olsson's at that time, I wasn't actually looking for this album; back then, you could count on the bookstore having unusual/hard-to-find music buried in its stacks, and I whenever I visited the store, I always took the time to thoroughly browse through their CD racks. As I mentioned above, I'd heard of this project years earlier, so when I came across the disc, I just had to pick it up.

To me, this is sort of a weird record. Musically, it's all over the map - some songs, like "Sleep", are straight out of the hair metal playbook; others sound like cuts left off of Kelley Deal 6000 albums ("The Last Hard Men"). There's acoustic pop ("When The Longing Goes Away"), punk ("Spider Love"), and alternative tunes ("Candy Comes") interspersed between band member interviews - there's even a cover of "I Enjoy Being A Girl" from Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1958 musical Flower Drum Song! I can't say that this disc holds together as a coherent album. But there are pieces and parts of it that are interesting and superb, which is I guess the best that you can hope for from a one-off band. I can't say that I highly recommend it . . . but I recommend you give it a listen nonetheless.

So here you are to hear for yourself - The Last Hard Men, the only release by the group of the same name, put out by Spitfire Records fourteen years ago today, on September 4th, 2001. Run it past your ears and, as always, let me know what you think.

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The Kelley Deal 6000 - Boom! Boom! Boom!

I first met Kelley Deal in 1995. I was in my final few months of living in Christchurch, New Zealand, when I read in the local music paper that the Breeders were headed to town on the Asia/Pacific leg of their world tour in support of their blockbuster album Last Splash. Being a Pixies fan, I idolized Kim Deal, so I was fully into the Breeders at that time. In fact, I went to their show (for the Pod tour) at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC just before I left for NZ. New records were always slow to get to New Zealand, so I had a friend mail me a copy of Last Splash the moment it came

out in the States. So I was practically the only person in town who had fully absorbed their new album by the time they made their swing through Christchurch. I was so jazzed about seeing them, that I took the morning off of work to rush down to the box office (in a converted theater in Cathedral Square, around the corner from Lochinvar's Irish Pub), arriving early for what I just KNEW would be a huge line for tickets to the show. However, when I arrived early that morning, there wasn't another soul in sight, and in the couple of hours that passed as I stood there, not a single other person joined the ticket line behind me. When the window opened, I quietly paid for tickets #0001 and #0002 (don't know why I bought two - my girlfriend at the time was not a fan, and I couldn't think of anyone else who might have wanted to go - I guess I wanted a souvenir) and left.

On the day of the show, a week or so later, I arrived extra-early, in order to get a good place in front of the stage, and (hopefully) to meet some of the band members and get some autographs, especially Kim's. As I approached the bar in the back of the place, I immediately recognized the Breeders' bassist, Josephine Wiggs, standing with one of the Deal twins, who I assumed to be Kim. I sidled up to them, trying to act all cool and nonchalant, and spouted off a "Hi Josephine! Hi Kim!" greeting. Of course, I was wrong - it wasn't Kim I was talking to, but Kelley. Anyway, she turned out to be as super-cool and nice as could be - I think that she was just happy to be talking to an American in the middle of New Zealand. We spoke for a long time before the show, talking about the tour and life on the road and all. She called her sister Kim over and introduced me to her, and just before they went on, the whole band signed my copy of Last Splash with the pen I brought. I stood in the front row the entire show (which was packed - I guess the line appeared AFTER I bought my tickets), and at the end of it, Kelley leaned over and handed me her guitar pick. Overall, it was a great night.

In the following months, I moved back to the U.S. from New Zealand, and the Breeders imploded, helped along by Kelley's problems with the law, related to her getting busted by the feds after receiving a half-pound of Black Tar heroin in the mail. I entered grad school, but still found time to see bands now and then. Kelley did a drug rehab stint, and started a new band, the Kelley Deal 6000. It seemed that everywhere I went for the next year of so (I traveled a lot during the second semester, interviewing for summer intern work), Kelley and her band were there as well, so I ended up seeing a lot of their early shows. DC: New York: Cambridge, MA - I went to all of those performances, and made a point of trying to say Hi to her at each one.

After grad school, I got a job with a company in Texas, and moved the the Dallas area. Sure enough, a month after I got there, the Kelley Deal 6000 came to town, to play a funky little bar in the Deep Ellum area. Of course, I went to the show, and got there early enough to speak with Kelley. I said hello to her, mentioned that I had first met her in New Zealand, and talked about all the other places I saw her band. She looked hard at me, and said "****** [my name], right? I REMEMBER you!" From then on, we became friends. We exchanged addresses that evening, and every once in a while I would hear from her from her home in Minnesota. She came to Dallas twice more in the first year I was there, and each time we hung out together before and after the show. The last time, I brought my girlfriend along, a big Breeders fan who didn't really believe that I knew Kelley Deal that well. Her doubts were extinguished upon our arrival at the club, where Kelley was standing outside the door. She looked up, shouted my name, and ran over to hug me. Later that night, during the encore of "I Wanna Be Your Dog", Kelley pulled me up on stage to sing backup with the rest of the band. It was a pretty cool night, to say the least, and my girlfriend was most impressed.

At that time, the band was touring on its second (and last) album, Boom! Boom! Boom!, released by New West Records in 1997. I've always considered this album superior to the band's

debut, Go To The Sugar Altar. The song structures and sequencing seem to be a lot more focused here, and the band even experiments with some different sounds and arrangements, as can be heard in songs such as the all-drum "Total War" and the warm but eerie "Scary". I would have loved to have seen what the Kelley Deal 6000 would have done on subsequent albums. But the band went on indefinite hiatus in 1998, and Kelley rejoined the Breeders in late 2002, where she remains.

Many years have passed now, and Kelley and I have long since been out of touch. It's doubtful that after all these years she even recalls my name or who I am; if she does has any recollection, it's probably just that of another fan getting into her face. Oh well. For a brief moment in my life, I was happy and proud to call someone as cool as Kelley Deal my friend, and I wish her the best in everything she does.

Here's the album:

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The Laurels - L

I saw these guys at TT The Bear's Place in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the summer of 1996. In between my grad school years in Virginia, I had a summer internship up in Cambridge with Polaroid Corporation. After a rough few years in the early 1990s, Polaroid was on a temporary financial upswing, so at the time it was a pretty solid place to work and consider for a long-term position after graduation (unfortunately, this feeling was short-lived - a couple of years later, the company began a financial death spiral that ended with bankruptcy and dismantling of most of the firm).

Anyway, like I said, it was a pretty good place to work for the summer, and a great place to live. I sublet an outstanding place from some Mexican guys who were attending MBA grad school at MIT and went home for the summer - it was a three-level townhouse, brand-spanking new with a garage underneath, and only two blocks from work. It was also within walking distance of MIT (a school that was cool enough to let me use their gym facilities for free during the summer - as opposed to Harvard Business School, who completely restricted all grad school facilities from anyone who wasn't an HBS student, including other Harvard students), and Central {thank you, tinpot!] Square, location of some great music clubs (including the aforementioned TT The Bears and the Middle East). I was incredibly lucky to get the place, and felt sorry for some of my fellow classmates who also had internships up in the Boston area, who were living like dogs in dank, dark basement hovels. I was living pretty large.

I saw some great bands in Cambridge and Boston that summer - the Cocteau Twins (on their final tour), the Sex Pistols reunion tour, etc. But the best show I saw that summer was at TT's, where Trona and the Laurels opened for the Kelley Deal 6000. I went there to see Kelley Deal, formerly of the Breeders (who I saw in Christchurch, New Zealand about 18 months earlier). But all three bands turned out to be great; I ended up buying all of their CDs for sale either that evening or shortly thereafter.

The Laurels were out of Rhode Island, and consisted essentially of Jeff Toste on bass (also principal songwriter) and a rotating cast on guitar (Ryan Lesser and Damen Champagna) and drums (Dare Matheson and Joe Propatier). Their lone album, "L", was released in 1996 on Thick Records out of Chicago. It's a shame these guys never made it, but its not for lack of effort. Several songs on this album (including "Cut You Down To Size", "Ruby", and "TV Whore") were produced by the legendary Steve Albini (who also helmed one of my favorite albums of all time, The Pixies' Doolittle). All in all, a pretty good effort - too bad they didn't make it.

Enjoy the link:

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