By way of introduction: Quasi is one of the best bands in existence today. According to me. So there! Sam Coomes is the primary singer and songwriter in Quasi, but the abilities of drummer/singer/songwriter Janet Weiss can not possibly be overestimated, because Quasi is a band. And so was the Donner Party.
Sam Coomes wrote and sang most of the Donner Party’s songs, but the feeling one gets from Complete Recordings 1987-1989 is that of walking into a room where three friends are hell-bent on passing the time together, with music, beer and fellowship being the necessary evils. Melanie Clarin’s inspired harmonizing and drumming (a new statue of her was recently unveiled outside Pacific Bell Park to belatedly recognize her invaluable contribution to the cultural life of San Francisco) was obviously essential to the proceedings, as were the angular instrumental and angry vocal change-ups (two or three per album) of bassist Reinhold Johnson. Meanwhile, Coomes, playing primarily guitar, seemingly felt comfortable bringing in whatever kind of sick, silly or heartfelt number he’d come up with that morning, without a thought of whether it was “hit material” or not. (It wasn’t.)
The Donner Party released two LPs during their day. Both are included in this two-disc set, as is the previously unreleased third album and eight songs from a 1989 live show at Berkeley Square. Much of the first album could be characterized as being fairly typical indie-rock of that era, but the Donner Party had much better songs than most (“Halo”, for instance), as well as bursts of transcendence (the dual-guitar freakout in “The Ghost”) and flashes of disturbing hilarity (“When You Die Your Eyes Pop Out”).
Album two kicked off with six seconds of off-kilter carnival keyboard, then the first line: “Everybody is so stupid.” First line of the next song: “Pestilence surrounds us as we go about our work.” More to come: “Try To Imagine A Terrible World”; the amazing “Boxfull Of Bones”; “You’d be better off if you just went ahead and died”; “Treepig’s gonna kill my ma”; “When I Was A Baby” (“my mother would poke at the hole in the back of my head where my brain was exposed”); and finally the unprintably inane and disgusting “Please Don’t Listen”, which is, well, really funny, and instrumentally brilliant.
The thing is, all these malevolent songs are not depressing; they’re actually a lot of fun in some unfortunate way. And the fact that pleasantly sincere carols such as “Up And Down” (from “Sesame Street”) are seemlessly woven into the tapestry makes it all the more effective and downright enjoyable from the perspective of this listener — who is, admittedly, not prone to shy away from deranged/vomitous/laughable/distressing images.
The never-released third album is a real find, bringing back the rocking elements of the first album in a cleaner sonic environment, but with enough of an experimental slant to have its own identity. Highlights include a fairly respectful but still somehow feedback-laden version of “Goodnight Irene”, the acoustic boogie (belying a doomy lyric) of “We Cannot Be Happy”, and the spectacularly heavy “Birthday Suit” (oh to rewrite history and have Jefferson Airplane performing this live at Winterland for Bless Its Pointed Little Head).
The live songs are surprising as well, not because the band rocks (and the cassette walkman quality is actually quite fine), but because the crowd is obviously very into it. Perhaps Donner Party was not so very unknown and unimportant as Coomes’ liner notes would have it: If a band in its “heyday” had friends and fans and family whooping it up at a club show, isn’t that all that really matters?
