Deep Album Cuts Vol. 279: The Golden Palominos
Anton Fier, who died last week at the age of 66, was an enormously talented drummer who played on a an impressive range of revered and influential albums, including The Feelies' Crazy Rhythms, The Lounge Lizards' self-titled debut, Bob Mould's Workbook, John Zorn's Locus Solus, and Pere Ubu's Song of the Bailing Man. But Fier also led The Golden Palominos, which had released 9 albums with a rotating cast of collaborators since the early '80s. The band weren't exactly hitmakers -- their only charting single, "Alive And Living Now" featuring Michael Stipe, peaked at #14 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart in between Out Of Time hits. But they left behind a really fascinating and varied catalog that I wanted to show some love to.
The Golden Palominos deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Cookout
2. Buenos Aires
3. Clustering Train
4. Silver Bullet
5. I've Been The One
6. Something Becomes Nothing
7. Angels
8. Darklands
9. Lucky
10. Thunder Cries
11. Dying From The Inside Out
12. I'm Not Sorry
13. Touch You
14. Metal Eye
15. Never Gonna Change
Track 1 from The Golden Palominos (1983)
Tracks 2, 3 and 4 from Visions Of Excess (1985)
Tracks 5, 6 and 7 from Blast Of Silence (Axed My Baby For A Nickel (1986)
Tracks 8 and 9 from A Dead Horse (1989)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Drunk With Passion (1991)
Track 12 from This Is How It Feels (1993)
Track 13 from Pure (1994)
Track 14 from Dead Inside (1996)
Track 15 from A Good Country Milie with Kevn Kinney (2012)
The original iteration of The Golden Palominos that made the self-titled first album came out of the no wave scene, with Fier, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Arto Lindsay, Fred Frith and other New York avant jazz guys toying around with funk, noise, and hip hop. In fact, it was one of the first non-rap albums to feature turntable scratching as an instrument (incidentally, the self-titled album is on Spotify twice, and the one dated to 1983 with the original artwork has a weird glitch where a song from a whole other album, "Darklands," is erroneously on the track labeled "Cookout," but the 1997 reissue with a different cover has all the correct music).
On subsequent albums, The Golden Palominos kind of became an amorphous ensemble with Fier and Laswell the only consistent members, and the band's sound shifted many times, to country and rock in the mid-'80s to trancey downtempo dance music in the '90s. A lot of notable guest vocalists appeared on the band's albums, including, on this playlist, Michael Stipe on "Clustering Train," Bob Mould on "Dying From The Inside Out," and Jack Bruce on "Silver Bullet." And over the years the cast of players grew to include Bernie Worrell, Richard Thompson, Carla Bley, T-Bone Burnett, Sneaky Pete Kleinow and more. Matthew Sweet sang on "Something Becomes Nothing" five years before his career took off with Girlfriend. And Syd Straw sang on many tracks on my two favorite Golden Palominos albums, Blast of Silence and Visions of Excess, before launching a solo career.
I remember reading about the band in magazines a few times here and there in the '90s (most likely Alternative Press, possibly also Rolling Stone or Spin), long before I ever actually heard them, and I knew who Syd Straw was because she had a recurring role on one of my favorite shows, "The Adventures of Pete & Pete." But I didn't actually hear The Golden Palominos until the past few years, when streaming services have allowed me to check out a lot of music I read about growing up that I didn't find room for in my CD shopping budget. In an odd way, just the idea of The Golden Palominos was very influential on my band Western Blot (along with, to an extent, The Roots), the idea that a drummer could be a bandleader and the primary songwriter/producer of a band that has different sounds and different collaborators from album to album, just following that drummer's whims. So it was cool to dive into the albums and find musical things that resonated with me after being broadly inspired by the template of the band.
After Syd Straw went solo, Amanda Kramer became the primary lead vocalist for The Golden Palominos for two albums, and then Lori Carson for three albums. The Lori Carson era is so different from the early records, these kind of noir femme fatale narrative things over dusky trip hop and industrial beats. It's probably for the best that I didn't buy Pure after reading a review of it at the time, the '80s albums were a better gateway for me appreciating the band, though I love hearing how Fier's live drums dart around the drum machine track on stuff like "Touch You." Fier continued playing in different projects over the past couple decades, but the only new Golden Palominos album was a 2012 collaborative record with Drivin N Cryin frontman Kevn Kinney, sort of a move back towards the band's twangy '80s era. And that album opens with "Never Gonna Change," written by Jason Isbell, but the whole thing is pretty excellent.
When I heard Blast of Silence and thought it was so cool that the album opens and closes with Syd Straw singing two great early songs by one of my favorite bands, Little Feat, "I've Been The One" and "Brides Of Jesus." The Golden Palominos' covers, including Moby Grape, Nico, and The Numbers Band, feel like a glimpse at the proto-alternative canon as it was being formed, the '60s and '70s being seen through a new lens in the '80s and '90s. And the band's original songs kind of chart a course, too, through one musician putting his own spin on different genres and subcultures.
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