Peel sessions

Allen Clapp and the Orange Peels are back in San Francisco.

By John O'Neill

Here among the poppy-covered hills, where purplish shadows cast their tinge upon the eucalyptus aisles, where palm and cypress stand out upon the ocean cliffs, a new art springs to the bosom.

Willis Jefferson Polk

I don't know about art but I know what I like.

Lux Interior

POSTWAR CALIFORNIA &# 150; the slice of the West Coast pie best known to the rest of the globe – came with a soundtrack. Despite regional variants (appropriately reflected on the radio dial), it was ultimately the SoCal sound that the rest of the world would define as "California." Surf culture, hot rods, the warmth of the sun – all infused with a giddy hopefulness. While tribute is still paid to that era through a kitschy grab bag of car clubs, dance nights, surf bands, and grave-robbing revivalists, peninsula pop phenomenon the Orange Peels are out to prove that the "California sound" that marked the era is still a vital art form.

"We don't consider ourselves a San Francisco band, or a San Jose band or an L.A. band," says Peels frontal lobe and founder Allen Clapp from his home in Sunnyvale. "I think if anything, we want to identify with being a California band. We know what it's like to live here and to work here, and with our music we're saying that this is what it sounds like to live here, if that makes sense. It's the whole thing of living in the Bay Area, which is my favorite spot in the world. You have these beautiful hiking spots, and you can drive into the city and it's a completely different world. Being so close to all this other stuff affects the way you see things."

Raised on the radio

Since falling under the spell of AM radio and mid '60s-early '70s pop as a kid, Clapp has spent the better part of his adult life attempting to build on the framework of his heroes. He enlisted the help of high school buddy guitarist Larry Winther for after-school sessions, beginning a long-standing, on-again, off-again collaboration. "We'd get together and make hours and hours of tape, all of which were crap," Winther said. "It would take Allen 20 minutes to get the sound he wanted on the keyboards, then we'd play a bit, and he'd spend another 20 minutes getting the next sound. We never had good enough equipment to do what we wanted to, and we pretty much trashed Allen's songs 'cause we sucked."

Eventually Winther, looking to explore the more rocking side of the street, moved out of the neighborhood, and in the early '90s he formed the Mummies, one of the area's all-time great cult bands. Clapp headed back to his Redwood City bedroom and began making home recordings of his compositions. His first shot across the bow of the underground consciousness came in 1994 when his homemade demos were released as One Hundred Percent Chance of Rain, by Allen Clapp and His Orchestra, on the tiny Bus Stop label.

Recorded to four-track at the height of the indie lo-fi craze, Rain went on to win its share of praise (and has since been rereleased by Bus Stop). At the time, many listeners missed a critical aspect of the recording: the majority of CMJ Nation was relatively well funded; recording on the cheap was done as a frivolous goof, while Clapp was forced to do so by necessity. So while Rain was lumped in with the tongue-in-cheek triteness of his more popular contemporaries, it ultimately showed a serious pop songwriter forced to record songs that required a fuller sound to be effective.

The Mummies, after a successful campaign of kicking ass and making enemies, eventually decided that it was time to turn in their bandage. Though still spoken of with reverence among garage rock fans and record collector geeks, the joke had gone on long enough, and according to Winther "it was beginning to feel like work. There was really no place else to take it. The first tour of Europe was nice, but the second was like twice as many dates in the same amount of time. And we were never going to make money. I moved back to the area and called Allen up. I started playing with Allen and Jill [Pries, the lone holdover from the Orchestra sessions], and originally we had Mazz from the Mummies to play guitar."

Introducing the Orange Peels

After some fine-tuning, ex-Cerebral Corpse hotshot Bob Vickers was tapped as a fourth member, and, with interest from Chicago's Minty Fresh Records, Clapp reemerged with his new outfit, the Orange Peels. Their debut disc, Square, was released in 1997 and showed Clapp continuing his experimentation with updating the West Coast sound, this time with the muscle of a band of multi-instrumentalists. Drawing on influences as varied as Burt Bacharach, Carole King, Brian Wilson, and British Invasion rock, the Orange Peels got an extra boost from Winther's involvement with the writing process. Spaced-out surf guitar and spaghetti-style tremolo spiked Clapp's pure shots of aural sunshine. Recorded on a shoestring budget in a Minnesota studio and in Clapp's two-bedroom apartment, the album's pure melodies and charming atmosphere garnered two Bammie nominations in 1998.

"We were up against Third Eye Blind and Smash Mouth, and everybody had a video clip," Winther says. "When they got to us, it was a black-and-white promo picture that they moved around." Not enamored in the least with the concept of falling into the local club scene, the Orange Peels pulled a disappearing act. They returned to their day jobs and prepared for the next album and a three-year stretch of relative inactivity.

"You can be part of the crazy drama [the local scene] is, or you can make good music," Winther says. If Clapp is the brains behind the Orange Peels, then Winther is the balls – as well as playing the outfit's resident smartass. "When you're a pop band, you always get a bad rap. It was that way when I was in Washington, D.C., but there are always those people who like the music. We aren't into a scene. Frankly we could care less. When you think about it, it's not that important. We've got lives."

"It takes us about three years, and it's a good thing for us," Clapp adds, explaining the band's sluggish pace. "Some bands are capable of putting out a really good album every year, and some bands put out a great one every three years and still put out one every year anyway. If it takes us three years, it's worth it in the long run. We won't put a song on our album if we can't hear it on the radio. We just all kind of know if it's right when we're playing and we think, 'Oh yeah, I could hear that on the transistor radio.' "

Taking time

Working their way up the label ladder, they signed on with New York's spinART Records (home to Apples in Stereo, Creeper Lagoon, John Doe, Jason Faulkner, and the Wedding Present), which released their latest, So Far, this week. The road to the new album, another addition to an already impressive body of work, was as rocky as it was time-consuming. Winther packed his guitar and walked, and the band became a trio, before adding vet John Moreman (Jad Fair, Half Japanese, Neighbors), although it sometimes was still a trio because Vickers had a new baby to take care of. And – shortly before the master tapes were due in Japan – Winther made it a five-piece when he returned to rerecord some guitar parts. While this type of chair swapping might do most bands in, it gave the Peels four (of five, Pries plays only bass) members able to swap instruments – guitars, keyboards, and drums.

The band's sound was enhanced when Clapp took production seat and moved his studio out of his apartment bedroom to the house he now shares with Pries – designed appropriately enough by tract-housing visionary Joseph Eichler. A firm believer that anyone should be able to own a piece of the dream at an affordable price, Eichler took an early design of Frank Lloyd Wright – featuring such novelties as atriums, indoor-outdoor living, and radiant heat and emphasizing bold design – and built 11,000 single-family houses in northern California. The coincidence isn't lost on Clapp, who readily admits, "There's a crazy optimism about these places. Having windows for walls, making the outside the inside. It's a little sad. It's a past vision of what the future would look like that never came true. These guys thought they were going to change the world. I can identify. I don't think we can change the world with our music, but if we didn't try, there wouldn't be a point."

And the point of So Far isn't so far removed from the ideal that people like Eichler were daring to dream. It's a deeply personal album full of duel harmonies, wet reverb, juxtaposed guitar chords, and wonderfully unaltered blemishes; So Far has too many fine moments to contemplate all in one rush. In a period in which contemporary music is happy to shill a hit-doctor single while filling up the rest of an album with 72 minutes of abject garbage, the Orange Peels took great care in crafting an album – a great traditional pop album. There's no "twee" references to blowing snot bubbles and eating Twinkies in the rec room, nor the wink-and-nudge coyness and quirk that defines too much of what qualifies for modern guitar pop.

Instead the band trades strictly in timeless solid structure and lush harmony. While the lyrics are almost as insular as the band itself (the how-could-you-leave-me "Your So Clever" is an open letter to Winther to not split the band, and the lucky-guy vibe of "Mystery Lawn" is dedicated to Pries), the real ton of bricks comes with the realization that the unifying factor – and 4 of the 11 songs – aren't boy-loves-girl fodder but a conflicted Clapp struggling to come to grips with Silicon Valley and California today.

On the album's opener, "Back in San Francisco," he jumps out to give the city a quick kiss-off – "It's just no good to go back there crying / But don't discourage me from trying / I must have been confused by shallow smiles and hollow hellos / Back in San Francisco" – only to admit that he's lost without "his first / His last / His only." The thread continues as a secondary link on the title cut and comes on full again with the love/hate "Redwood City" – perhaps the finest ode ever devoted to living in a prosaic suburb. The terrific "Every Single Thing," the only remotely bitter tune, looks back at the broken promise of the postwar dream through the evaporation of AM radio.

"The West Coast Rain" – the final song and masterstroke – ties So Far together. With compressed drums and bass pushed out front in a budget tribute to Hal Blaine and the Wrecking Crew, the Orange Peels touch the Phil Specter wall of sound, classic surf structure, Beach Boys chamber pop, and the rich vocals that defined the later Cali sound.

The Orange Peels, taking the classic '60s pop tradition on its own terms, are writing another chapter – while exploring promises that the mythological California dream could never make good on. If Brian Wilson was indeed asking about the loss of innocence on "Caroline, No," the Orange Peels are providing an answer. Innocence isn't lost; it's just holding its breath and waiting for a second chance.

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