Song Of The Day 9/7/2014: Spiral Starecase - "Judas To The Love We Knew"

Let's Go Sacramento!: As everyone in the blog Players' Club knows, I grew up in Sacramento, California. More specifically the suburbs of Orangevale and Citrus Heights. This was back in the days where our malls were brick-and-mortar structures and our television channels were about 85% white noise. We loved our UHF. Our primary economic indicators were state workers hitting the downtown Denny's (no longer there according to Google Maps), tourists who took a wrong turn at Vacaville and wood paneling sales. If you had a pool we'd be there in ten minutes. We had a sprawling drive-in movieplex off Highway 50. When I was a kid and we drove past it at night I tried to see what I could from the R-rated movies that were showing there. Life was idyllic, and by that I mean I was really anxious to move to San Francisco.

Sacramento's music scene was very easy to centralize when I lived there: the Cattle Club, some new wave dance club downtown where we could safely smoke cloves, and Cal Expo Amphitheater during the summer. There was also the Dixieland Jubilee during Memorial Day Weekend, which we teenagers used as cover for doing something else. Not many famous people came from Sacramento during that time, especially bands. That's changed a lot in the last twenty years with your Cakes and your Teslas and your Deftones. But there were just enough notable musicians from town to justify a week of marveling at how far Sacramento has come. I realize that sounds condescending. I'm going to leave it. But I acknowledge that.

Let's start off with Spiral Starecase (accounts differ as to whether there's a "The" at the top of their name), responsible for one standard of debonair '60s pop: "More Today Than Yesterday," the gold single featuring the vertiginously high vocals of Pat Upton. A pretty incontestable hit. It came from the album of the same name, which was both their big break and last hurrah. "Judas To The Love We Knew" is also from that album for those who like a theological edge to their breakups.