Edge Of Night

CD Digipak liner notes: In late 1987, popular Dayton indie group The Pleasures Pale disbanded. Fronted by singer/lyricist Jeffrey Bright, The Pale left an indelible mark on the burgeoning southwest Ohio scene, releasing one LP post breakup then evaporating into the ether of pop ephemera. In the aftermath, during a show at the now-defunct Canal Street Tavern, a young guitarist and composer approached Bright. Above the din, Eric Schulz introduced himself with a direct imperative: “I wanna be in your band.” What ensued was a songwriting partnership that would last into the mid-90s, spanning three different band names, even more genres, and a catalog of distinctive material. Bright and Schulz were joined in Dayton by bassist Chris “Troy” Green (previously appearing with avant-garde acts Dementia Precox and Mom). The three transplanted to San Francisco later in 1988. After spending the better part of a year acquainting themselves with their new home, developing a sound and auditioning drummers, the three began playing the city’s small club circuit, debuting as Darke County on September 9, 1989 at the deliciously funky Chi Chi Theater Club on Broadway in SF’s bawdy strip club corridor. San Pedro native David Rojas handled drumming for the band’s first half dozen dates. Finally, in March of 1990, Oakland native Christopher Fisher (teen skateboard sensation and one-third of 80’s punk outfit Impatient Youth) was added as permanent drummer. Thus began a musical relationship that would endure through the quartet’s various future incarnations. Darke County’s music was a landscape of tall tales and mysteries of the heart, a ghost-town brew of haunted longing and ironic nostalgia populated by tormented characters from the creases and folds of so many darkening American dreams. Fronted by Bright’s crooning and noir-tinged lyrics and Schulz’s eclectic arrangements, the band’s sound was an amalgam of mid-century American styles, sharing more DNA with cool jazz, old-time country, exotica, TV detective themes and Mancini film scores than with rock, but never straying too far from pop idioms of the day. Schulz’s composing chops were formidable, often outpacing the band’s ability to fully realize his fevered ideas. From 1988 to 1991, E-Bone, a nickname bestowed by flat mate Green, utilized all at his disposal — the band’s SOMA district rehearsal room filled with a menagerie of acoustic and electric instruments, and a 4-track recorder — to capture on cassette a cache of wildly imaginative compositional sketches, many of which were never fully developed — but thankfully survived the intervening years in their ferrous oxide tombs. Eventually, the band’s ever-evolving vision outgrew the initial, theatrical Darke County persona. Veering toward harder-edged, more lyrically pointed, surrealistic alt-rock, the outfit renamed itself Myself a Living Torch in August 1991 — a move not universally accepted among the band’s followers. As the decade ensued, the quartet’s individual paths diverged. In the 00s, Bright, Green and Fisher would, in varying degrees and ways, fade from the music stage. After leaving San Francisco in the mid-90s, Schulz would eventually resurface and flourish in Memphis, and later France, as Harlan T Bobo, whose impressive output can today be found on the Goner Records label. Much of the work from early days of the Bright-Schulz collaboration languished in obscurity for over 30 years. Now, as a project of the Jeffrey Alan Bright Music Archive, this uniquely rich material is being exhumed from cassette, restored using current digital techniques, in some cases complimented with further recording, and now presented here — at last receiving the exposure it justly deserves. Time has only rendered this mash-up of styles and forms more fascinating, poignant, and oddly brilliant — a trove of artifacts from the waning years of San Francisco’s once vital bohemia. As a collection, Edge of Night is fashioned around four full-band demos, recorded to 4-track cassette, featuring the Bright-Schulz-Green-Fisher ensemble: “Milky Way Baby” in two versions, “Super-Natural,” and the title track. Around these recordings — what were foundational pieces of the 1990-91 DarCo sound — is assembled a diverse constellation of aural intrigue and emotional titillation. Brief instrumental encounters and interludes occur as narrative twists between fully developed episodes, some completed only recently, in a tableau of restless intent — as if delineating a trial both aesthetic and psychological. The projected result is, as much as sound can be, cinematic in scope and effect. Taken as a whole, Edge of Night is at once a poetic odyssey “through the ring of fire” to a place where “the nightmares don’t scare you anymore,” and a voyeuristic peek inside the young adult psyche of late 20th Century America. As Bright, Schulz and Green journeyed from the relative white comfort of suburban Ohio across the country and across cultural divides to the recession-worn, multi-cultural, pre-internet California of the late 1980s, so too did their sensibilities. Accordingly, Edge of Night is a construct of multi-faceted desires, dread, fantasy, paranoia, and romantic fatalism — and eventually a perpendicular, if bleary-eyed, reckoning with life’s most consequential ultimatum. “Are we doomed from the start?” Perhaps the knowing, Edge of Night suggests, is the essential oil infusing art with force and meaning; the subconscious knowing that gives existence its value; the keys to resilience and survival when the darkest hours mount the clock. Edition of 100.