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