What was the Paisley Underground?
The Paisley Underground was a musical movement that arose in the early 1980s, centered primarily among the Los Angeles underground music scene. In a way, the bands who were at the center of the Paisley Underground can be viewed as a bridge between the hard thrashing punk sound of bands like X and Fear, and the more mainstream bands that rose to prominence from the same musical scene like The Go-Gos. The bands who made up the Paisley Underground attempted to carve out a niche for themselves in the fertile L.A. music scene of that era by looking back a generation to the psychedelia and cult bands like The Doors and the Velvet Underground. Just as punk was, in many ways, an attempt to forge the unstripped and unvarnished sound of early rock and roll into a contemporary suit held together with the thread of the ambience of early 60s garage rock, so did these bands not want merely to copy the sounds of the earlier groups, but to inventively play with the fundamentals of their sound as a met
