How Green Were My Pajamas
Music feature, 4/21/99
This is a somewhat poignant, yet ultimately optimistically tale about a man who tells somewhat poignant, yet ultimately optimistically tales, and the musicians who help turn his realities into dreams.
Jeff Kelly began recording with the band Green Pajamas some 15 years ago. Music had been Kelly’s calling since age 11, when he formed a group called the Electric Garbage Cans. Under the auspices of the tiny local label Green Monkey Records, Kelly, guitarist Joe Ross, and keyboardist Eric Lichter released a handful of 45s (the exquisite “Kim the Waitress”), cassettes (Summer of Lust), and LPs (Book of Hours) until 1990. Green Monkey entrepreneur Tom Dyer had taken a day job by then, as had the band members. Kelly spent the next several years working, starting a family, living a quite normal life, occasionally performing for friends and loved ones, and continuing to write and tape-record hauntingly beautiful ballads of desire and loss.
The real loss was the world’s. Kelly’s deceptively simple stories of unrequited crushes, everyday disappointments, nuns, vampires, and pleasant afternoon strolls never got the audience they deserved. Kelly had never really cared for the hassles and insanities of the music business, and Dyer could barely afford to get records out locally (though one Pajamas release was licensed to the influential L.A. label Bomp!).
Then, some five years after the band’s breakup, “Kim the Waitress” (which I’d described in its original recording as “seven minutes of ethereal innocence”) was simultaneously covered by Seattle band Sister Psychic and Chicago band Material Issue. Neither version was a national hit, but they raised enough interest in the Pajamas’ past work for the band to reunite. The Pennsylvania-based Get Hip label put out a best-of collection, Indian Winter; while new material was contracted to the Camera Obscura company in Australia. Unlike certain past import-only releases by American bands, the Green Pajamas CDs are priced competitively with domestic issues and are at least fairly decently available, at least on this site.
The first new Pajamas disc, Strung Behind the Sun, was great, but the newest one, All Clues Lead to Meagan’s Bed, just might be the last undiscovered classic of the decade.
The All Music Guide calls it “an hour of literate, articulate, and impeccably crafted songs,” and lists as influences everybody from the Beatles and the Move to King Crimson, Squeeze, George Harison, and even Pearls Before Swine. One could imagine at least twice as many bands the Pajamas sort of sound like, but it wouldn’t add up to the serene joy of Kelly’s understated, plaintive voice, meshing perfectly with the band’s mix of soft power-pop and “paisley underground” neo-psychedelia.
So just get this one. And tell everybody about it. If Kelly doesn’t want to try to be A Rock Star, that’s fine. But we can at least make his work a little better known. His particular melancholy could make a lot of people happy.
