The recent, and rather good, compilation This Can’t Be Today – American Psychedelia & The Paisley Underground 1977-1988 reminded me about a band who have operated way off the radar for their whole 40-year career. The Green Pajamas formed in the Paisley Underground year zero of 1984 and scored a US regional hit with Kim The Waitress, a lo-fi but oddly insistent song which probably failed to score wider airplay because it’s over 6 minutes long. The door which opened to allow Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, and others through, closed before The Green Pajamas could capitalise on the brief Paisley Underground “boom”.
From that first single, leader Jeff Kelly and fellow founder, bassist Joe Ross, built a catalogue of 22 albums which covered many of the best aspects of American music from the 80s to the 2010s. From the lo-fi sounds of first full length record Indian Winter to the country rock of Green Pajama Country in 2011 of which Graham Reid of Elsewhere magazine said “Bleak but poetic, suffused in death, drama, cigarette smoke and whisky, these songs are a very long way from Green Pajamas’ terrific psychedelic sounds, but Kelly’s lyrics and these gripping deliveries make you wonder what took them so long to get to what seems another – if very different – natural home“. Once you start listening to The Green Pajamas you realise that they held many of the elements which we call “americana” throughout their career. If current UK scene darlings Brown Horse haven’t heard Bitter Moon from 2006’s The Night Races Into Anna, I’d be surprised. Having said that, convergent evolution has been part of americana all along.
Where should the AUK reader start with The Green Pajamas? The Northern Gothic trilogy of albums will probably resonate most. The first song of Northern Gothic, In The Darkness comes across as a Seattle Cowboy Junkies, and while the psych influences crop up across the album, songs like Christine Crystalline will appeal to fans of bands like 16 Horsepower. A folk influence crept into songs like When Abigail Was 17 on the second Northern Gothic instalment, Box Of Secrets. Wild Pony on the same album has a Crazy Horse grind to it. The 10-year gap to Phantom Lake: Northern Gothic 3, released in 2018, led to something different, a more mature, often pensive album which Kelly describes as “a dark album… about obsession and sorrow and murder and too much whisky.” Band Member Laura Weller “introduced the idea of writing songs inspired by childhood“. Along with fourth songwriter Eric Lichter, the band produced a group of songs set in the Pacific Northwest of their early memories. By now, the power pop and psych sounds have shifted to something more atmospheric and emotionally charged.
For their earlier sound, 2003 compilation Through Glass Coloured Roses: The Best of the Green Pajamas is the place to start. Having listened for a while, and as a fan of Paisley Underground and power pop, 1999’s All Clues Lead To Meagan’s Bed is the album that I find myself drawn back to. In a 2023 interview with Psychedelic Baby Magazine, Kelly said: “I think I felt a little bit on fire by this point, all cylinders firing creatively. And we were having a blast! There was a new urgency and a lot of inspiration”.
The Green Pajamas were always a band that had more music than they could fit onto an album. The Night Races Into Anna scoops up unreleased material dating back to 1997, and the profusion of collections, as well as having them spread across a variety of labels and at least 3 Bandcamp pages, makes sorting out the albums to collect a bit baffling at times. According to current label Green Monkey Records, “Jeff Kelly has taken a break from releasing music with The Green Pajamas. He is putting out plenty of music under his own name”. But with a 2024 live album and other material still emerging from the vaults, the story of The Green Pajamas is far from over.
