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David Roback with Opal’s Kendra Smith in 1983.
David Roback with Opal’s Kendra Smith in 1983. Photograph: Laura Levine/Corbis via Getty Images
David Roback with Opal’s Kendra Smith in 1983. Photograph: Laura Levine/Corbis via Getty Images

David Roback: hallucinatory guitarist still sending pop into a dream

This article is more than 4 years old
Alexis Petridis

The Mazzy Star, Opal and Rain Parade songwriter, who has died aged 61, had a subtle but profound influence, paving the way for the hazy sound of Lana Del Rey

To the outside world at least, the late David Roback was a wilfully mysterious figure. He appeared to hate talking about himself. The journalists who got him to submit to interviews tended to come away with a handful of non-committal monosyllables that didn’t seem worth the painful effort it had evidently taken to extract them from him: one compared the experience to “swallowing sand”.

But it seems safe to say that the one thing Roback didn’t expect was to end up an influence on 21st-century mainstream pop: the world of Nordic songwriting teams and superstar producers was in a different universe entirely to the LA post-punk Paisley Underground scene Roback had sprung from. And yet, at the time of his death, that’s precisely what Roback had unwittingly become.

He had started out as one of a number of west coast-based musicians who felt the best route out of punk was exploring the past: Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, the debut album by the band he had formed while at college in Minnesota, the Rain Parade, was clearly in thrall to the psychedelic era from its title down: it featured sitar, songs called things like Kaleidoscope and This Can’t Be Today and dreamily drugged-out textures spiked with lyrics that hinted at the scary, overwhelming side of the LSD experience. It was beautifully done, and sounded like less of a knowing pastiche than their paisley-shirted British equivalents.

It also contained the sighing ballad Carolyn’s Song, written by Roback, which sounded slightly apart from the rest of the album: bleaker, more sombre, driven by acoustic guitar, delicately arranged, the vocals wrapped in reverb. It was a style that the Rain Parade pursued again on Broken Horse, a track from the band’s subsequent EP, Explosions in the Glass Palace, the last release Roback appeared on before quitting the band.

The Rain Parade went on to sign to a major label, but were never quite the same after Roback’s departure. He’d worked with Dream Syndicate vocalist Kendra Smith on an album called Rainy Day, a collection of 60s covers by various Paisley Underground luminaries – if you want a hint of the direction Roback was heading in, Rainy Day’s stark version of the Buffalo Springfield’s Flying on the Ground is Wrong offers an intriguing signpost – and together they formed Opal. Their 1987 debut album, Happy Nightmare Baby, abandoned the acoustic style they had initially worked in for something heavier on distorted guitars and extended jamming, which Roback felt would work better live, but the subsequent compilation Early Recordings shows their original blueprint was perhaps more fruitful.

On Harriet Brown and Fell from the Sun, they stripped their sound back: acoustic guitar and simple bass and drums, lent a bluesy quality by Roback’s slide playing, everything, including Smith’s laconic vocals, drenched in echo until it felt oddly hallucinatory, as if you were viewing the song through a heat haze. When Smith quit Opal in the middle of a tour and Roback replaced her with Hope Sandoval – whose folk duo Going Home he had produced while still a member of the Rain Parade – it was this path they would pursue as Mazzy Star.

David Roback and Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. Photograph: Laura Levine/Corbis via Getty Images

Mazzy Star’s 1990 debut album, She Hangs Brightly, was a hugely impressive statement of intent, a full flowering of a sound that Roback had been working towards, albeit with occasional diversions, from the start. Sandoval was a more striking singer than Smith, her voice somehow managing to appear both emotive and oddly detached. The songs largely proceeded at a snail’s pace and were haunting, conjuring up a David Lynch-ish vision of LA as a sinister, eerie city. The lengthy title track was genuinely chilling: if, as was regularly suggested, there was a dreamlike quality to Mazzy Star, it seldom sounded like a terribly pleasant dream. Meanwhile, the album’s covers – of Memphis Minnie’s 1941 blues song I’m Sailin’, and Blue Flower, originally recorded by German avant garde band Slapp Happy – suggested a duo who’d transformed their catholic tastes into something entirely their own.

It was a sound they refined rather than developed over the subsequent released albums. So Tonight That I Might See (1994) was by some distance their most successful and may well be their best – it opened with the sublime Fade Into You – but in truth, their quality control never really dipped: they didn’t release much music, but what they did release was invariably of a high standard. Putting out albums and performing only sporadically didn’t do much for their commercial chances, ensuring they remained at cult level – you got the impression that wasn’t something they were overly concerned about – but added to the sense of inscrutability that surrounded them. Mazzy Star sounded like they existed in their own ambiguous world, somehow apart from whatever else was happening in music: becalmed but faintly disturbing, soporific but never boring, austere but hard not to succumb to.

They were also influential, most strikingly on Lana Del Rey: you could clearly detect their shadow – alongside that of Julee Cruise’s 1989 collaboration with David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, Floating Into the Night – on her breakthrough album Born to Die, a more explicit examination of the LA darkness that had always lurked somewhere in Mazzy Star’s sound. In turn, Del Rey went on to exert a vast influence of her own, which meant that one of the most reticent bands in recent history ended up becoming a part of latter-day pop’s musical DNA. It was a deeply unlikely state of affairs, and what David Roback made of it – if anything – remained a mystery: as usual, he wasn’t saying.

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