Paisley Underground
| Paisley Underground | |
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| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Early 1980s, California |
| Typical instruments | |
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| Timeline of alternative rock | |
Paisley Underground is a genre of alternative and psychedelic rock, based primarily in Los Angeles, which was at its most popular in the mid-1980s. Paisley Underground bands incorporated psychedelia, rich vocal harmonies and guitar interplay that merged folk influences and a post-punk style, owing a particular debt to 1960s–1970s groups such as Love and The Byrds, but more generally referencing a wide range of pop and garage rock.
The term "Paisley Underground" originated in late 1982, and took root with a comment made by Michael Quercio of the band The Three O'Clock, during an interview with the LA Weekly alternative newspaper. As the event was later reported:
Quercio was close friends with Lina Sedillo who was the bass player with local punk band Peer Group, who had played on the same bill as The Salvation Army on occasion. One evening Sedillo taped Peer Group rehearsing and one of the numbers contained an improvised spoken middle section. Sedillo was wearing a red paisley dress she had bought from a thrift store and his eyes fell on the bass player and out came the line "Words from the paisley underground." Sedillo noticed the phrase while playing the tape back the next day and immediately phoned up Quercio and repeated it to him. They ran a casual 60s music listening group together and thought it a cool name for them to use. When Quercio a few weeks later spontaneously dropped the phrase into an interview when asked to describe The Bangles, Rain Parade and The Three O'Clock sharing the same bill, the interviewer highlighted it in the article as a handy label for this group of bands. And so Quercio had unwittingly came up with the name of this new movement, the Paisley Underground.
The phrase later came to be "hated by the bands it described," though Steve Wynn acknowledged that it was both harmless and helpful to have a "banner" over the movement.
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