The Rain Parade: 'Sometimes you forget how important art can be'

Talking to The Yorkshire Post via video from the US, guitarist and singer Piucci says he and bassist and vocalist Roback didn’t stop working together when the band officially broke up in 1986. “We just didn’t call it Rain Parade,” he says. “In the 90s Steven had a band called Viva Saturn and I was heavily involved in that, and then in the 2000s I had a band called the Hellenes and he was involved in that as well.”

The main difference was in the tone of their respective songwriting. “Those bands were a little bit more expressionistic as opposed to impressionistic,” he says. “We weren’t as meticulous – I’m not saying whether that’s good or bad – about the way we constructed the songs.”

There was a geographical separation too. “Fifteen years ago Steven moved up to the Bay Area (in San Francisco), so we didn’t live in the same city. I moved out of Los Angeles in ’86 to Oakland.”

As Rain Parade, they have played sporadic shows since 2012 and released a live album, but it wasn’t until 2018 that they recorded three covers for a compilation album called 3x4, which featured fellow Paisley Underground bands The Bangles, the Dream Syndicate, and the Three O’Clock. “Good ideas tend to have many fathers and mothers,” says Piucci. “I don’t know whose idea it was originally, but it was a good one.”

What Roback calls their “first formal foray back into the studio as Rain Parade” came with the sessions for Last Rays of a Dying Sun – a belated successor to their 1985 album Crashing Dream. It was produced by Jim Hill, with whom Rain Parade had worked in 1984 on their classic mini album Explosions in the Glass Palace. “He’s perfect for us, he’s kind of like George Martin. He’s an excellent engineer and producer and he gets what we do and has a lot of great ideas,” says Piucci.

Roback acknowledges that that they were “mining some of the same influences” as on their early records, but says that Last Rays also reflects “everything that we had taken in since then – maybe lyrically there’s some evolution, maybe more perspective as time goes on”.

“That is true but also the world hasn’t changed that much,” says his bandmate. “We had Reagan and Thatcher in the 80s, some of the evil things that they perpetrated seem to be continuing. There were wars in the Middle East then and there are now. It seems to be that a lot of those issues are continuing. When the world is in a bad shape we seem to be doing well. The same guy who signed us in 1983 signed us (to his new label) last year.”

“We’re here to offer a ray of sunshine,” says Roback, smiling.

“It’s not all terrible,” agrees Piucci. “Like George Harrison says, things are getting better and worse, it’s the nature of things.”

With older siblings, both Piucci and Roback had absorbed The Beatles’ psychedelic music of The Beatles and Pink Floyd as well as The Byrds as they were growing up. “We like all the ‘B’ bands whether they were from LA or from Liverpool,” Piucci says. “I guess Pink Floyd doesn’t have a B in it, but Syd Barrett does. I think that was our initial connection with British bands, but there aren’t a lot of bands that do the Pink Floyd thing. I wouldn’t say we’ve left it behind, but everybody starts out trying to imitate things that they really admire. As my friend Billy Talbot says, no matter how hard you try to sound like them, it’s still you.”

“We were also voracious listeners to all types of music,” Roback interjects. “We consumed music from the entire rock history.”

“And not just rock,” Piucci says. “I don’t know how much Miles Davis that you hear in Rain Parade, but there’s a little bit of that in there if you listen, some of the weird string arrangements.”

“We actually started out exploring Merseybeat and early Stones-y rock and we kind of had our own accelerated journey through rock history as we learnt how to play,” says Roback.

“Where are we now, about 1973?” Piucci quips.

On tour, Piucci says they have been “inspired” by meeting people for whom their music is really important. “And it’s not just old people either,” he says. “When we played in Newcastle a year ago a kid in his early twenties came up to me and he started weeping talking about our band. His father liked our band, his father was killed, he would listen to our music and I was losing it. Sometimes you forget how important art can be. In our wildest dreams if we could be like Television was to us or The Byrds for somebody else, wow, that’s amazing and that’s kind of what keeps us going.

“I do think that it’s continguous. It’s not like we’re not Neil Young and we’ve made a Balinese reggae song or throat singing or something like that – not that I don’t love Neil, he’s a good guy – but we have the same instruments.

“The thing that is distinctive about Rain Parade is Steven has a very unusual bass style and the Gretch guitar that I use has a kind of unique sound. That combination of his bass playing and my Gretch and our collective songwriting, that’s what makes it Rain Parade. And I think this new record has that as well.”

Last month, Rain Parade reissued their debut album Emergency Third Rail Power Trip for Record Store Day, with a bonus EP of demos and live tracks. “We really wanted to document that time when Steven’s brother (David, who went on to form Opal and Mazzy Star) was still in our band,” says Piucci, adding that the reason that line-up didn’t last was because “it’s really hard to have three songwriters in a band – the Buffalo Springfield lasted, what, an album and a half – plus he wanted to do his own thing so he did, and that was cool”.

The new four-track EP Last Stop on the Underground will correspond with their UK dates. “We’ve never done a 10in before, it’s brand spanking new as of a few days ago,” Piucci reports. “It’s about 18 minutes of music​​​​​​​.”

Rain Parade play at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds on June 15. Last Stop on the Underground is out now. https://rainparadeofficial.com/