is there a mazzy star life after davis roback's death

[hanwaker]

-i am sad
-- i am shocked
---i have never expected this

[Emma]

Very shocking news indeed! I can't believe it!


Mazzy Star’s David Roback Dead at 61

Mazzy Star co-founder David Roback, leader of L.A.'s ‘Paisley Underground,’ dies at 61

David Roback: hallucinatory guitarist still sending pop into a dream

Susanna Hoffs, Steve Wynn, Colin Meloy, J Mascis & more pay tribute to Mazzy Star’s David Roback

David Roback’s cause of death revealed; Opal reissues in the works

Mazzy Star’s David Roback Remembered by Bandmates and Friends

[Hermesacat]

Like hanwaker, I didn't expect this at all. I envisioned Mazzy Star going on "forever," or at least for much longer than the band did. But there can be no Mazzy Star without David., imo. The songwriting involved the two of them, and Hope would seem unlikely to hire a new guitar player and go on the road as "Mazzy Star." At least, I can't picture it. I believe David enjoyed playing live more than she did. So, without him, there will be less incentive to tour as Mazzy Star. It will be up to Colm & The Warm Inventions now to get Hope out on the road occasionally.

There may be some possibility we'll see release of previously unreleased tracks though. In a number of interviews. Hope & David have said they have lots of unreleased studio recordings they made. With luck, David's family and Hope will agree to release some of those.

A friend of David's posted on their FB page that David "died peacefully in Los Angeles." Also, someone knowledgable informed me David had been "ill for a long time." (they also told me some reports, including on Wikipedia [hello homeostasis?], are getting the date of death wrong, and that David died on Monday, Feb. 24) That may explain David passing out mid-song on stage in Mexico last year in March, 2019, which ended the set early. (I had earlier attributed it to being likely something benign instead, such as altitude sickness some people suffer in Mexico City). That Mexico NORML Fest set was Mazzy Star's last public performance. Also, someone who attended two of Mazzy Star's June, 2018 Sydney shows told me David appeared frail to him. It's hard to believe David Roback and Mazzy Star are no more.

Thanks Emma for posting links to obituaries/articles.

The first obituaries out didn't cite a cause of death. I hoped we'd learn the cause, and am glad a new NY Times obit quotes David's mother as saying the cause was "metastic cancer." What a horrible coincidence that cancer keeps hitting Mazzy Star band members: Will, Keith, and now David, all dead from cancer. I'll paste text of the NY Times article below as some readers here may be prevented from reading the article due to NY Times' paywall.
......................................................................................
David Roback, 61, a Founder of the Band Mazzy Star, Is Dead
By Daniel E. Slotnik, Feb. 26, 2020, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/arts ... PEPmJ_5oxU

The group, which he formed with Hope Sandoval, had a haunting, ethereal sound and a surprise hit with “Fade Into You.”

[David Roback of the band Mazzy Star in an undated photo]
“It doesn’t matter how well our records do,” he once said, because “we’re completely free.”

David Roback, the composer and guitarist for Mazzy Star, a soft-spoken, influential alternative rock group whose 1993 release “Fade Into You” became a hit despite the group’s stated indifference to commercial success, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 61.

His mother, Rosemary Roback, said the cause was metastatic cancer.

The music of Mazzy Star, which Mr. Roback formed with the singer Hope Sandoval in the late 1980s, combined his understated guitar playing with Ms. Sandoval’s haunting, enigmatic vocals. Contemporary pop artists like the xx have since embraced a similarly intimate aesthetic.

Mazzy Star released its first album, “She Hangs Brightly,” in 1990. Mr. Roback and Ms. Sandoval played with a shifting lineup of other musicians, including the drummer Keith Mitchell and the bassist Jill Emery.

According to Mr. Roback, mainstream success was not the point.

“It doesn’t matter how well our records do,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1990. “None of that matters, because we’re completely free.”

Critics lauded “She Hangs Brightly,” which found an audience among alternative rock fans but lacked a breakout hit. That came on Mazzy Star’s sophomore album, “So Tonight That I Might See” (1993), which Mike Boehm of The Los Angeles Times praised as “inward and deep” in a review.

“It seems to flow from the fragmentary consciousness of a mind falling toward sleep during the last sentient moments of an emotionally wearing day,” Mr. Boehm continued. “This is not the rock of the shake and strut, but of the murmur and sigh.”

The album opened with “Fade Into You,” an ethereal ballad that balanced gentle guitar and piano parts with Ms. Sandoval’s reverb-heavy chorus, “Fade into you/Strange you never knew.” The song became a mainstay on MTV and alternative rock radio stations and reached No. 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1994.

But Mazzy Star just shrugged at all the attention. The group released another album, “Among My Swan” in 1996, then seemed to go on hiatus. Their next, and last, album did not come out until 2013, when they released “Seasons of Your Day.”

“We never stopped writing or recording,” Mr. Roback told Rolling Stone that year. “We just stopped performing and releasing things.”

He added: “When I’m working on music with Hope, the person that’s foremost in my thoughts is Hope. We tend to get quite caught up in just the making of the music for ourselves.”

David Edward Roback was born in Los Angeles on April 4, 1958, to George and Rosemary (Hunter) Roback. His father was a doctor, his mother a registered nurse. He studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, and formed the band Rain Parade, which included his brother, Steven.

Rain Parade was one of several bands in what became known as the paisley underground, a revival of psychedelic rock in California in the early 1980s. Mr. Roback left the group after it released its first album, “Emergency Third Rail Power Trip” (1983).

In the mid-1980s he founded the group Opal with Kendra Smith, the bassist from Dream Syndicate, and the drummer Keith Mitchell. Opal, which featured Ms. Smith as lead singer and expanded on the paisley underground sound, released the album “Happy Nightmare Baby” in 1987.

That year, Ms. Smith left the band while it was on tour, and Ms. Sandoval replaced her. In time, their collaboration became Mazzy Star.

In addition to his mother, Mr. Roback is survived by his brother; his wife, Hedi (Raikamo) Roback; and a sister, Diane Roback.

Critics compared aspects of Mazzy Star’s sound to earlier groups, like the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and contemporaries like the Cowboy Junkies. Mr. Roback bristled at such comparisons.

“I’ve never even heard the Cowboy Junkies,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990, adding: “But then, I don’t listen to a lot of contemporary music. I kind of purposely try to avoid it because I don’t want to be influenced by it. I prefer the Rip Van Winkle approach to art.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

[MikeRMD]

Shocked and saddened though I may be I remain grateful for the musical legacy resulting from David’s efforts. I’m ~2 years older than he was and live platonically with a woman around my age. We live separate lives but I mentioned that I was a bit down about the loss and when I mentioned Mazzy Star she replied that was this a guy who died at 61 a day or two ago and I said yes. It turns out that the CBC Radio show ‘As It Happens’ had a segment Wed the 26th about David’s passing and had played music that she found enchanting and she was a bit astounded as to why she had never heard of them. I played her my favourite MS song and it turns out ‘Rhymes ...’ was one of the songs the CBC had played.
I’m also grateful to Emma for keeping this site going despite the lack of activity as I’m not on FB where I’m sure most of the activity takes place (this according to Hermesacat). I do poke my nose in on occasion and it was just happenstance that I did so tonight to learn the news. Whatever you think of Rush in my mind we lost two of the artists concerned more with their craft than their fame. Neil Peart’s forte was percussion and lyrics the latter of which was definitely not David’s (sorry folks but I cringe when I hear ‘Ghost Highway’ with lyrics by David). But boy oh boy could David evoke emotion with the music that he wrote. We have that to comfort us.

[Emma]

hanwaker,
I'm afraid this is the end of Mazzy Star.
As Hermesacat wrote, I can't see how Mazzy Star can continue without David Roback. David wrote almost all Mazzy Star's music and shaped Mazzy Star's sound with Hope Sandoval. His contribution to the band's music is huge and irreplaceable
Moreover, I can't imagine Hope willing to make music as Mazzy Star now that David's gone. Hopefully, she will keep on releasing her own music with the Warm Inventions and working on collaborations with other bands/artists.
I read David Roback was working on Opal's reissues at the time of his death. He might have also given instructions about Mazzy Star's unreleased studio tracks. I don't know.... For some reason, I have the feeling we'll never get to hear the unreleased material but who knows... Only time will tell us.

Hermesacat,
Thank you for posting the NY Times article and sharing information from sources close to the band.
"

Also, someone knowledgable informed me David had been "ill for a long time.

I wonder whether Mazzy Star's 2000-2012 hiatus was partly caused by David's illness.
I remember David mentioned cancer in one of the interviews Mazzy Star did for their 2013 reunion (Newsweek article in the 2013 Interviews thread).
When the journalist asked David what he did during the 2000-2012 hiatus, David remained evasive and just replied he wrote a song for the Norwegian Cancer Society. His collaboration with this cancer institute during the hiatus period might indicate he was already ill at that time.

Mike,
I'm glad you can find comfort in listening to Hope and David's emotional music.
I was so shocked at the news that I stopped playing my Mazzy Star records over the past few days.
I feared that hearing David play would make me even sadder. I feel better now and can listen to and enjoy my favorite MS tracks as I usually do.

[Emma]

Here's what Hope posted on the official FB page:


https://www.facebook.com/MazzyStarOfficial/


Laura Levine, who photographed David Roback's bands until the mid 90s, posted this picture of David Roback and Kendra Smith with the following comment on Instagram (@lauralevinepix):

"This is really difficult. We had our ups and downs over 38 years but my lifelong relationship with David Roback was precious. And intense. Also at times exasperating, transcendentally beautiful, and deeply complicated. But the through line of love never wavered. I’ve been trying to process the knowledge that he’s gone since I was contacted yesterday afternoon. Too many photos and memories spanning decades to know where to start. His astonishing talent as a guitarist/musician and the beautiful and deeply emotional music he and his collaborators created and shared with the world is a gift I’m so grateful for.
Together we did photo sessions for every one of his bands (plus a video, unreleased). I flew out to LA and house sat/dog sat for his parents. He lived in my loft for an entire summer when I was mostly out of town (which I forgot about until he reminded me a few years back). We made silly home movies. We had deep conversations. We fought. We laughed. We had periods of long silences followed by overseas phone calls that often went on for hours until one of us fell asleep. Good or bad, the connection ran deep. My apartment and later my loft was his home base in NY, and vice versa whenever I came to LA. My thoughts today are with his family and bandmates, especially his creative partners/collaborators Hope Sandoval and Kendra Smith.
For those interested in exploring further, I suggest starting with ”Fade Into You” or “Halah,” beautifully sung and written (lyrics) by Hope Sandoval, and listen to more of their band MAZZY STAR; then work your way through the many bands, collaborations and musical projects that preceded it: OPAL, CLAY ALLISON, RAIN PARADE, and the album RAINY DAY. (Many long out of print, but let’s hope someday they’ll be made available again). A morning photo of Kendra Smith and David Roback (then called Clay Allison) on my sofa/bed. Music and coffee a nice way to be awakened. I took this photo in 1983 when they came to play their only two shows in NYC."


Charlotte Marionneau from Le Volume Courbe has been a long-time friend of Hope Sandoval and David Roback. She posted the following picture and text on her Instagram account. (This capture/text was initially re-posted by Bob Beatty on the FB Hope Sandoval/Mazzy Star Fan Discussion Group.)



David Roback worked as a producer with singer-songwriter Beth Orton on her album "Central Reservation" (1999). Here's what Beth Orton posted on her FB page after David's passing:



David Roback co-wrote, arranged and produced songs with Aidan Connell and his band in the early 2010s.
Here's the post Aidan Connell wrote on his FB page last week:



Ken Salter, who used Mazzy Star's music for his art exhibition "The Garden of Strange Loops", posted the following picture/text for David on his FB page.
Thinking about David Roback and listening to his music. I know he enjoyed the images I created. So here is one for him. RIP, David.



Here's what Josh Yenne posted on the FB discussion group.

[Hermesacat]

Thanks Emma for finding and sharing postings by Beth Orton and other who knew David.
And thanks for reposting the Charlotte (Le Volume Courbe) and Laura Levine ones you found from my FB posts. Those are good ones (Bob Beatty is my FB name, and also happens to be my real name).

I have a little bit more follow up info re. David I newly learned from someone knowledgeable (thanks to FB & FB Messenger, I have some good sources). He had known he had cancer for some years, 3 or so years at least. Which means he was ill through the 2017, 2018, and 2019 Mazzy Star live shows, and for the preparation and release of the Still e.p. We know he collapsed onstage and passed out mid-song in Mexico City during Mazzy Star's last performance, March 2, 2019, which ended the set early. I had liked to think it was due to something temporary and non-serious such as altitude sickness which affects some people in Mexico, but now we know it could have been due to his serious illness.

Mike: You can find and hear that CBC As It Happens Feb. 26 segment online at CBC podcasts for As It Happens.
By chance, I happened to hear it as a radio broadcast first. It wasn't "Rhymes" they played, It was "Fade...", the only song they played. However, for the podcast version, they removed the copyrighted "Fade..." music and inserted a no doubt public domain track of guitar picking which was not David playing. Must be for legal reasons. You can also find a short NPR radio obituary from NPR's "Morning edition" show Feb. 26.Unlike CBC, NPR's archived version does include actual Mazzy music: "Fade..."

Seems hard to believe Mazzy Star is no more, but without David I don't see that there can be a Mazzy Star band. And I don't think The Warm Inventions are likely to do any Mazzy songs.

[Emma]

LA Times published an article based on the interviews of friends and bandmates remembering David Roback.

Susanna Hoffs and friends remember David Roback, who stayed creative, and enigmatic, to the end

Susanna Hoffs and friends remember David Roback, who stayed creative, and enigmatic, to the end
By RANDALL ROBERTS, STAFF WRITER
MARCH 6, 2020

In David Roback’s final days, most of those closest to the late Mazzy Star co-founder were unaware that he’d been living with cancer. Although the music that the Los Angeles-born artist made with that band and earlier groups Opal and the Rain Parade was adored by millions, the famously reclusive artist, who died at 61 on Feb. 24, maintained a distance through his final breath.

Behind the scenes, though, friends say that Roback was actively contemplating his legacy by working to ensure that the mesmerizing, delicately layered rock music he made over the decades with collaborators including Kendra Smith, Hope Sandoval and Susanna Hoffs would survive him. Most, though, didn’t know he was dying.

Long a resident of Norway and London with his wife, Hedi Raikamo, the couple had quietly resettled near where he grew up in Brentwood about five years ago. A masterful producer and guitarist, Roback spent his creative energy working on a new batch of Mazzy Star recordings while remastering and preparing the release of archival music by his former band Opal.

“David just never stopped creating music. That was what he did,” says Frank Gironda of Lookout Management, who represented Mazzy Star for 30 years.

In a statement posted to Mazzy Star’s Facebook page, Sandoval included a poem and wrote, “It’s been a few days since I lost my dear friend and I am devastated... Thank you all for the love. Hope.”

In Roback’s last missive to his lifelong friend Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles, they texted about the possibility of making available “Rainy Day,” Roback’s 1983 collaborative album of cover songs featuring Hoffs, Smith and others singing influential works by artists including Big Star, Bob Dylan and the Velvet Underground. Hoffs and Roback started their first band together, the Unconscious, in the late 1970s.

Recalling Roback during a recent conversation, Hoffs paused to search her phone for the message.

Her voice breaking, Hoffs recited his words: “I’m very proud of the music we made together,” he wrote, adding multiple exclamation points. Reading his message aloud regarding the possible “Rainy Day” reissue, she said Roback wrote that he was “very interested, especially if it’s under our name the Unconscious. I think we have enough audio-visual material to do something very cool.’” Roback closed the message with a series of balloon emojis.

The Hoffs and Roback families grew up a few blocks away from each other in Brentwood (both of their fathers were doctors). She and Roback went to the same grade school and attended arts camp together in high school; Hoffs’ older brother John was Roback’s age, and his best friend.

“There was a side to him that was very mysterious in certain ways, in terms of his public persona. But I knew him as a mischievous child and a friend,” Susanna says.

Roback met one of his earliest musical collaborators, Matt Piucci, while both were attending Carleton College in Minnesota. Each was looking for a new dorm mate. “I walk into this guy’s room and I see the huge Jimi Hendrix poster and the American flag and he’s playing the Doors. I’m like, ‘OK, we’re going to get along,’” Piucci says.

Both left Carleton before graduation. Roback eventually landed at University of California, Berkeley’s art school. Hoffs and her brother John were also in Berkeley. Soon Hoffs and Roback were living together in what she calls “this incredible apartment, a Victorian house that had been made into two separate units.” She described the setting as “a sort of think tank for our burgeoning idea of being artists.” Hoffs still has a box full of recordings they made together.

The romantic relationship didn’t last, and both returned to L.A. in the early ‘80s. Roback reconnected with Piucci. Not long after, they formed the Rain Parade with David’s younger brother Steven and started rehearsing. With bands including the Dream Syndicate, the Three O’Clock, the Bangles and Green on Red working the circuit, a new sound was spreading through Hollywood, one featuring jangly Rickenbacker guitars that rang like the Byrds but was propelled by the DIY spirit of punk. The scene was dubbed the paisley underground.

Roback was ambitious from the start. The first time he saw Hoffs’ pre-Bangles group the Colours was at a party in the Hollywood Hills. Piucci recalls the band being so good that Roback nearly broke down, and eventually turned the experience into the Rain Parade’s first single. “David lost it. He was crying,” Piucci says. “He couldn’t take that his friend was going to be more successful than him right off the bat. So he wrote ‘What She’s Done to Your Mind.’”

While recording and touring in support of the Rain Parade’s debut album, “Emergency Third Rail Power Trip,” which featured songs written or co-written by Piucci and both David and Steven Roback, Piucci had a series of realizations about his creative partners. “First, that David didn’t get along with his brother,” Piucci says. “And [that] having three songwriters in the band was going to be really hard.” Steven did not reply to a request for an interview.

Piucci kicked David out of the Rain Parade, and the pair’s relationship never recovered. “That dude was going to be a famous artist no matter what, if it killed him,” says Piucci. “That’s what he wanted and he wanted it desperately. And he got it. And when people do that, there’s usually some collateral damage. Let’s just leave it at that.”

Even before the split, Roback had been working on a passion project, “Rainy Day.” Recorded for the Rain Parade’s Llama Records imprint, the musical love letter to lesser-known songs of the 1960s and ‘70s featured contributions by musicians from the paisley underground scene.

Hoffs sang on the renditions of Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” and the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” She calls the experience of recording those formative songs “profound.”

Another featured singer on “Rainy Day” became Roback’s collaborator in Opal. Roback and Kendra Smith started a band after enlisting the late drummer Keith Mitchell and keyboard player Suki Ewers to record a set of singles, at first under the name Clay Allison.

Ewers had just moved south from Seattle when she answered a classified ad in LA Weekly. Identifying themselves as former members of the Rain Parade and Dream Syndicate, the musicians wrote that they were looking for a keyboard player. Ewers left a message on their answering machine.

“Literally the next day there was a knock on my door,” Ewers says. “It was Kendra.” Ewers remained a key member of Roback’s musical family up until his death, and played with him longer than anyone. She spent countless hours with him in the studio and on tour. (Smith declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Though Opal didn’t sell many records in its brief life, it got plenty of ink in taste-making fanzines including Forced Exposure, the Bob and Bucketful of Brains. It didn’t hurt that Opal’s label, SST Records, was gaining attention with bands including Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr.

Ewers kept playing with Roback after Smith left Opal during a 1987 U.S. tour, and remained a key instrumentalist after Sandoval joined Opal soon thereafter.

Renaming themselves Mazzy Star, Sandoval and Roback earned immediate acclaim upon the release of their 1990 debut, “She Hangs Brightly.” Capitol Records financed the duo’s follow-up platinum smash, “So Tonight That I Might See,” which generated a devoted fan base through its richly textured hits “Fade Into You” and “Blue Flower.” After a hiatus, Sandoval and Roback returned to their Mazzy Star project starting in the early ‘10s.

As a collaborator and producer, Roback was “particular about things in a certain way, but he was also really open,” Ewers says, adding that the musicians that Roback stuck with had an “intuitive connection, musically. With a lot of the stuff, how we would play together was more like being in a jazz band. You really had to be in tune.”

Ewers learned of Roback’s death while she was out of town. “I was shocked,” she says. They’d talked earlier in February and he seemed fine. They’d made plans to continue working on new Mazzy Star material in March.

Hoffs, too, was blindsided by Roback’s death, even if she’d noticed a physical change in her friend. Since Roback and his wife had returned to Los Angeles, Hoffs had seen him a number of times. During a trio of 2016 Bangles performances at the Whisky a Go Go, Roback watched the set from the side of the stage. He came to her brother’s 60th birthday party.

“I had a fleeting thought a couple of times when I would just be sitting there and he looked thin,” she says. “But I didn’t know. He didn’t want me to know.”

If Roback hid his illness from many of his friends and associates, behind the scenes he was actively working to ensure that his music would not be forgotten. Although the work that he and Sandoval made as Mazzy Star remains available, Roback’s earlier records with Opal and for “Rainy Day” has been out of print for decades. Opal’s only studio album, 1987’s “Happy Nightmare Baby,” as well as a collection of singles and extant recordings, is unavailable on streaming services, and used copies command high dollar.

The reissue producer Pat Thomas, who manages Smith, says that Roback reached out via email a few years ago to begin the process of reintroducing Opal to the world. “David, for reasons known only to him, has kept those Opal records out of print forever,” Thomas says. “He finally came to us and said, ‘I think I’m ready to do this.’ But in David’s special fashion, what might have taken someone else three or four months took several years.”

That time was spent remastering “Happy Nightmare Baby” and “Early Years.” Thomas communicated with Roback across the reissue process mostly through email. In February, Thomas finalized the details of the Opal reissues with Roback’s Lookout Management.

A few days later, he got a call from Gironda telling them that Roback had died. “Kendra and I both kind of went into shock, because we just had no idea. I think it was very private that he had cancer.” Thomas now believes that Roback strategically held back the Opal releases and that “he wanted these to come out, perhaps, after his passing.”

Gironda confirms that the Opal reissues are on the way, and hopes that they’ll be released “sometime this year.” He adds that Roback and Sandoval kept meticulous Mazzy Star archives, and that a bounty of music from across their musical lives is secure and lies in wait.

Sandoval alluded to posthumous releases during a 2015 interview with the British magazine Uncut: “Once our families inherit everything after we’re dead and gone, I’m sure people will hear everything.”

As of yet, there are no plans for a public memorial service. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knew himring David Roback.
______________________________________________________________________________


(edit: Matti Piucci, who was interviewed in this article, posted a message on his FB page stating that the LA Times journalist misquoted him and deliberately omitted all the nice things he said about David.)

[Emma]

The May 2020 issue of the magazine "Uncut" includes an article covering David Roback's career.
Many thanks to Hermesacat for sharing the article on the FB discussion group.
I'm reposting it below.
You can buy a digital copy of the Uncut issue at https://www.uncut.co.uk/digital-editions/

...............................................................................
Uncut mag, May, 2020

DAVID ROBACK | 1958-2020
California Dreaming

Uncut pays tribute to DAVID ROBACK as Michael Bonner investigates the life and music of this singular, uncompromising guitarist and the three bands he co-founded: The Rain Parade, Opal and Mazzy Star.

"He always wanted the art to speak for itself, so everything was shrouded in some kind ofmystery," says one collaborator.
"He was so true to that."

Speaking to Uncut in July 2013, David Roback considered the success of his 1993 release "Fade Into You" — a dusty, lilting ballad that had turned Mazzy Star, the band he co-founded, into reluctant international stars. The song even appeared, incongruously, in the violent science-fiction war movie Starship Troopers.

"It was quite a contradiction in a way," he admitted. "But it's interesting — you know, people play your music in a bar, it's not uncommon to hear your music in any context, or anybody else's music for that matter. You could be walking down the street or you could be at a funeral and somebody's driving by playing The Beach Boys. No, we didn't feel under a lot of pressure to follow it up. Pressure doesn't get to us. It's a very internal process that we're involved in. I wouldn't say we're disengaged - we're engaged in the stories of each individual song, it is its own world unto itself. But we're not so concerned about the outside world."

By this point, Roback had spent over 30 years pursuing his unique creative vision — a noir-ish, melancholic strand of American Gothic located somewhere between third-album Velvet Underground and The Doors Of "The End". It's a story that began in California in the late '70s and took in The Rain Parade's neo-psychedelia, Opal's dreamy psych-folk and Mazzy Star's slow-spun, reverb-heavy grooves. In a series of close-quartered, hermetic collaborations - including Susanna Hoffs, Kendra Smith and Hope Sandoval — the guitarist and songwriter's creativity pulsed quietly across six studio albums and a handful of other recordings before his death on February 24, aged 61. It's a slim catalogue but unique and hugely influential, helping shape the work of artists as diverse as Wilco and Lana Del Rey.

"David Roback was in three great bands — an amazing feat for one guitar player," J Mascis tells Uncut. "What beautiful music he made."

"David Roback seemed to hold dear the things I think are most valuable in art: mystery and patience," says Hiss Golden Messenger's MC Taylor. "The music that he created affected me on a cellular level despite my not knowing a thing about him. David's work is very important to me."

It was the endeavour of someone going completely their own way. No outside influence was allowed to corrupt it. The limelight was not something to be shunned so much as simply ignored. An intensely private person anyway, Roback often presented an impenetrable front when discussing his work. Attempts to decode the music were a grave mistake; that would have been to miss the point completely. But that enigmatic fog somehow felt critical to what Roback did. "David was very precise and thoughtful about everything that he did and also very private," says The Bangles' Susanna Hoffs, a friend since childhood. "He always wanted the art to speak for itself, so everythingwas shrouded in some kind Of mystery. He was so true to that."

David Edward Roback was born in Los Angeles on April 4, 1958, to George and Rosemary Roback. His father
was a surgeon, his mother a nurse. An artistic bent manifested itself early on; Hoffs recalls performing with Roback in a production of Hello, Dolly! at an arts camp. The Beatles were on the radio — but, perhaps more thrillingly, also Love and The Doors, whose darkly kaleidoscopic music spilled out ofthe midnight alleys and freeways of California itself. "I thought theywere speaking from a world I reallywanted to be part of," Roback told me.

"David and I were both attracted to things that were darkly beautiful," explains Hoffs. "LA had a glittery, sunny exterior, but there was something mysterious beneath it. And for us, it was about looking for the single rose growing through a crack in the pavement — or like the lyric in 'I'll Be Your Mirror', 'Let me be your eyes, a hand to your darkness, so you won't be afraid' — the idea that beautiful music and art could be an answer, a response — the light that contrasted
the dark."

Roback and Hoffs made their first serious attempts at creating music together while they were both students at the University Of California, Berkeley in the late '70s. "We lived in an old Victorian house that had been renovated and divided into units," says Hoffs. "We had a darkroom there; we were painting each Other, photographing each other, writing poetry, dreaming up our band. I remember, we recorded a very droney, very groovy version of' Little Honda' that we slowed down and drenched in reverb. That period was foundational to everything that followed, really. It was the template for a lot of the music that David made with Opal and Mazzy Star."

Roback's first official recordings, however, found him temporarily altering his course. In partnership with his brother, Steven, and Matt Piucci, Roback formed The Rain Parade. Piucci and Roback had been friends since Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota.

"My first impressions Of David? A really sharp guy, very charismatic — but never flamboyant says Piucci. "But, yeah, he had a presence. in '81 I moved to Los Angeles, and that's when the band started. We spent 13 months above his parents' garage, writing music and learning how to do it, before anyone even saw us. We were very thorough and prepared. We loved Star Trek, so we developed this idea that we were in a spaceship together."

The Rain Parade found themselves sharing both concert bills and artistic sensibilities (psychedelia, Nuggets, Big Star, the Velvet Underground) with a loose collection of bands on the fringes of the Los Angeles club scene during the early '80s.

"I went to see Rain Parade with my girlfriend at the time, and I interviewed them for Jetlag, a little fanzine in St Louis," Jeff Tweedy tells Uncut. "I'd never seen a band, up until that point, that could actually play very well! We were eating that stuff up — Dylan, The Byrds and soon — so the idea Of that music being incorporated into a scene that was below the radar or less at the time, those things made a lot of difference."

"I guess you could say that David was the artistic director and I was the musical director," says Piucci. "He was always going to be an artist - he took the picture of Sue Hoffs on the cover of our first single, 'What's She Done To Your Mind'. The name of our album, Emergency Third Rail Power Trip - that is an actual subway sign where I lived in Oakland. It means something terrible is happening on the trains, turn the power off. But it took David to see it and read it aloud for me to realise, 'Oh, we have to use it!'"

According to Piucci, the writing process on 1983's Emergency Third Rail Power Trip was "one hundred per cent a collaboration. We had three songwriters: David, myself and Steven. That's tough, man. I mean, how long did Buffalo Springfield last? About a year and a half?"

Amid the bittersweet harmonies, raga-ish guitar riffs, trippy organ washes and tumbling drum patterns of Emergency Third Rail Power Trip, "Carolyn's Song" — credited to Roback — pointed in another direction. A heavy-lidded ballad, where sorrowful sighs stand in for a conventional chorus, it finds Roback singing, "Are you lost? Are you sad? Did I leave you alone? / Do you think that they don't understand what it's like to feel all alone?"

Critically, "Carolyn's Song" feels aesthetically bound to 1984's Rainy Day, an album Of cover versions overseen by Roback. Kendra Smith. A stunning record in its own right, Rainy Day is also a bridging work, connecting Roback's love for '60s and '70s songcraft with the dreamy, reverb-heavy music he finessed with Opal and Mazzy Star. Featuring luminaries from The Rain Parade, The Bangles, The Dream Syndicate and The Three O'Clock, Rainy Day provided a focus for the Paisley Underground, but it was also important for kickstarting a conversation about a number of artists - Dylan, Neil Young, Big Star — who at that point during the mid-'80s were largely off the critical radar.

"We recorded at this cool little studio, Radio Tokyo, where The Bangles recorded our first single," says Susanna Hoffs, who sang the Velvets' "I'll Be Your Mirror" and Dylan's "I'll Keep It With Mine" on the album. "It was in a craftsman house in Venice. It was a $10 -an-hour studio. I remember there was a bottle of whiskey. Just swigging, going for it, just one take. It was very scrappy, but it felt very authentic, too."

In some respects, Rainy Day is an American equivalent to the This Mortal Coil covers project run by 4AD's Ivo Watts-Russell — both share a similar aesthetic and a love for then-overlooked '70s music that they subsequently helped to resuscitate. It comes full circle, much later, with the cover of "Carolyn's Song" on This Mortal Coil's 1991 album Blood.

Even before Roback left The Rain Parade in 1984, the wheels had already been set in motion for another musical project, Clay Allison, formed with former Dream Syndicate vocalist Kendra Smith. Smith had appeared on Emergency Third Rail Power Trip and was also among the contributors to Rainy Day: she and Roback delivered a sparse, folky take on Buffalo Springfield's "Flying On The Ground Is Wrong", which anticipates the work they recorded together in Clay Allison and, later, Opal.

While Opal brought into focus his taste for hallucinatory folk-blues — circling back to his early love Of The Doors, among other musical touchstones — it also found Roback assembling a group Of musicians who remained collaborators for the remainder ofhis career. Drummer Keith Mitchell - after Clay Allison, the band was briefly called Smith Roback Mitchell before settling on Opal — multi-instrumentalist Suki Ewers and Rain Parade keyboardist/violinist Will Glenn.

"Opal is an amazing band," says Pat Thomas, Kendra Smith's manager. "You have Kendra in this very ethereal, Sandy Denny role and then you've got David playing this fuzzy, Neil Young guitar and they're filtering it through the psychedelia of The Doors, but also adding traditional country and folk music."

Opal's Output is slender — two EPs, "Fell From The Sun" and "Northern Line", and an album, 1987's Happy Nightmare Baby — but they cover a lot of ground, progressing from folk-blues to a more spacious, introspective sound; moving from an acoustic to an electric state and integrating glam, psychedelia and hard rock.

In 1989, Opal recorded "If The Sun Don't Shine" an adaptation of "Jugband Blues" — for a Syd Barrett covers album. It's a rackety, stop-start number — with, unexpectedly, Roback On vocals — but it features a passage of highly individual ethereal slide guitar, a real Roback trademark.

"He was a great guitar player," says William Reid, whose band, The Jesus And Mary Chain, toured with Opal in 1987. "Jamming is not a big part of my guitar ethos, but I remember getting stoned and jamming with David for hours. We just seemed to fit together, musically. Opal were a bunch of weirdos, just like us."

By 1987, playing live had become difficult for Opal. Smith, especially, seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight. She left during the Mary Chain tour, where she was replaced by Hope Sandoval.

"Hope was a teenage fan," says Susanna Hoffs. "We would help her and her friend Sylvia sneak in — they were underage — to Bangles shows. It was a very small group of us who kind of gravitated to the same stuff."

"Hope and Kendra and I were friends," Roback told me in 2013. "When Kendra decided she didn't want to continue touring, I thought maybe it would be interesting if Hope played with us. Kendra thought that was a cool idea, so that's how that happened. We were performing a lot of Opal material and one day we just thought, 'Let's just start something completely new and different.' That was Mazzy Star."

Roback and Sandoval made a perfect partnership. "I met David and Hope one bright morning in LA, by the side of the pool at the Roosevelt Hotel," recalls Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis, who released the Opal and Mazzy Star debut albums. "They were sunglasses-cool Los Angelenos, mysterious and other worldly. Friendly but slightly distant, as though other realities were playing out in their heads. They never changed. I don't know what year it was and it didn't matter. Probably the year The Rolling Stones had released Aftermath in their parallel universe."

Mazzy Star's 1990 debut album, She Hangs Brightly, arrived fully formed — a perfect distillation of the sound Roback had been moving towards since his earliest recordings in Berkeley with Susanna Hoffs. The bespoke mood is precisely sustained throughout; bitter, blue country characterised by gently rolling rhythms and guitar reverb, all topped off by Sandoval's loping, murmured vocals.

"David was a deep thinker and patient worker who could expand his creative process wide," says engineer Dale Everingham, who worked with Roback on Opal and Mazy Star releases. "David and Mazzy Star produced many times more songs than you have heard for every record. David wanted to hear all his ideas in different styles. Acoustic, full band, rock and psychedelic. Most songs were done this way. Approximately 60 reels of 2", 24-track tape were used for each record. At 16 minutes per reel? You do the math."

The follow-up, 1993's So Tonight That I Might See, continued the soft-focus, slow-motion jams of its predecessor. It also featured the band's only hit single, "Fade Into You". If it can be considered a barometer of the song's success in the mainstream, "Fade Into You" has appeared in no less than five separate episodes of the CSI franchises.

"Mazzy Star were much more accessible than Opal and had potential to make it in the mainstream," says William Reid. "so Tonight That I Might See sold about 2 million copies, I think. Most musicians would be pretty happy with that. But I remember, amusingly, David was rather upset about that. I can understand why, because having a big record can push you into a different league. Some people don't want to be a pop star, don't want to have their photograph taken and do 10 interviews a week. David was like that."

Success only encouraged Roback and Sandoval to withdraw further. Roback's response to the band's raised profile was to insulate himself from the press — partly to avoid increased scrutiny, but also tacitly to encourage myth building around the band. Their sporadic touring and release patterns Only added to the sense of inscrutability that surrounded them.

"It was a very calculated effort," agrees Matt Piucci. "He worked on it. That was not the guy I met; he was much more open. He dropped that and adhered to the philosophy of, 'Oh, ifyou don't tell anybody anything, they make stuff up and that helps promote the mystery.'"

There was a further Mazzy Star album, Among My Swan in 1996, before the band embarked on a 17-year hiatus, emerging again in 2013 with Seasons Of Your Day. During this period, Sandoval kept arguably a higher profile than her creative partner, contributing vocals to songs by The Jesus And Mary Chain, The Chemical Brothers, Death In Vegas, Massive Attack and Bert Jansch, and running a successful second band, Hope Sandoval And The Warm Inventions, with My Bloody Valentine drummer, Colm Ó Cíosóig.

Roback, meanwhile, relocated to London and Norway, where he became involved with Norwegian artists and musicians and acted — as himself — in Olivier Assayas' film , Clean. He also contributed to Beth Orton's 1999 album, Central Reservation, and performed on Bert Jansch's The Black Swan in 2006.

"David was a mysterious spirit," says Orton. "I went to Oslo, to this massive warehouse studio. There was nothing there apart from his guitar amp. Then he projected onto this white wall an Elizabeth Cotten film of her playing guitar. I don't think we slept. We sat up all night watching the film and drinking red wine. He talked in poetic riddles. Beautiful and profound, unusual. I stole so many of his lines! 'Never cry more tears than you could hold in your hands'on 'Paris Train' is one."

Le Volume Courbe's Charlotte Marionneau also remembers recording at Oslo studio: "David had a huge collection Of Francoise Hardy 7"s. He's a huge fan and met her once. He used to collect radios as well. But it was a great studio. He was charismatic. I think Hope and him are quite similar in some ways; very private. But he was generous. When I signed my first deal with Honest Jon's, he came with me to sort out the deal as he knew about the business."

Meanwhile, Roback and Sandoval continued working on Mazzy Star material. "She would come to Norway, or we would work in London, or we'd work in California," he explained. "We never actually stopped recording and writing, so it was never really about getting back into it because we never really left it. How do I think Mazzy Star has evolved over the years? I don't really look at it that way. I think that the songs we were performing and writing when we first started are equally relevant to us now as they were then. Are we perfectionists? I think perfection in music is really a dull thing; the imperfections are what give it character. We like to get a live version we like. Live, things happen in the moment."

At the time of his death, David Roback was involved in several tantalising projects. In 2016, he began working on unreleased Opal material, remixing and overdubbing additional recordings onto five unreleased songs; these are now due for imminent release as part of an Opal reissue programme overseen by Pat Thomas [see panel]. According to Susanna Hoffs, her last conversations with Roback were about releasing their archive of early cassette recordings made while they were at Berkeley under the name The Unconscious — as well as making the Rainy Day album available on streaming platforms.

When talking about Roback, musicians tend to cluster around the same handful of observations. That he was a shy, private man; that he could be controlling of his music; that he didn't suffer fools. "People get an impression from his persona that developed post-Rain Parade that he was like this dictator, " says Matt Piucci. "The 'story' is that David was some kind of controlling Svengali, but it is kind of misogynistic and insulting to the three strong, talented women who sang with him — Sue, Kendra and Hope."

"David showed a generosity I didn't always understand," says Beth Orton. "I wanted to work with him as a guitarist, not necessarily as a producer. In the end, I played guitar on my own. He never added to them. What's particularly poignant to me is that I feel like he didn't want to impose on what I was doing. He wanted to empower me to be me, on my own, and believe that I was enough — which was a beautiful thing."

"I think David was quite a hard guy to know," says William Reid. "I got on really well with him when we were both drunk, because he'd let his guard down and tell you things and I would do the same. But generally, he was a guy who kept his cards very close to his chest. I appreciate that."

As with most things, Roback kept his creative life close — though, like the equally elusive Kevin Shields or Mark Hollis, it's possible to see Roback as an auteur, sustaining a very specific artistic vision across several decades. Speaking to me in 2013, Roback admitted Mazzy Star had "written and recorded many, many songs that we've yet to release, more than another album". Whether these songs are released, of course, is another matter. "With David, the body of work was so specific. There was a care and precision," says Susanna Hoffs. "My brother has all these old Super 8 movies — sort Of noir, black and white movies — of David and I as 17, 18-year-olds. I've always thought, growing up here as we did in this idyllic setting, knowing that there was something simmering under the surface, informed what we did to some extent. Even then, David was very focused on what mattered to him — he was very true to his vision. It just seems like it wasn't finished, you know?
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Happy Reissue Baby
Among the bittersweet revelations following David Roback's death was the news that Opal's long-out-of-print catalogue is being reissued by the In Grooves Music Group. Not only that, the Early Recordings album will be enhanced with five unreleased tracks: "Hear The Wind Blow", "I Called Erin", "Don't Stop The Train", "Sailing Boats" and an alternative version of "Empty Bottles". Here, Pat Thomas, Kendra Smith's manager, shines a light on what we can expect from "I've been managing Kendra for three years. Last year she released her first solo recording in almost 25 years, 'Moon Boat', in a movie called Leave No Trace.

"A few years ago, David finally decided he was going to reissue the Opal records. Early Recordings will be releæed with five unreleased bonus tracks; Happy Nightmare Baby will be exactly as it was. These five unreleased tracks are from the early years, what I call the more folky, country stuff.

"David moves very slowly. There was some direct contact between him and Kendra. When I asked to hear the bonus tracks, David personally sent those to Kendra. I would've loved to do liner notes or go through some vintage photos - but David is also, as we know, not eager to go down memory lane, so from a packaging standpoint, these aren't super-deluxe editions.

"The CDs have been manufactured and are sitting in a warehouse. We just need to finalise some of the nuances of the paperwork between David and Kendra and they will definitely be released. When David died I thought, 'Oh my God, they're never going to come out!' But I was happy to hear through David's management that he wanted them to come out for sure.

"There will be CD and digital releases first, then we'll follow them up with vinyl. The vinyl will not have those five extra tracks — they just won't fit on a single album and the label don't want to do a double."
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DAVID ROBACK: A BUYER'S GUIDE

THE RAIN PARADE
EMERGENCY THIRD RAIL POWER TRIP
ZIPPO, 1984
Making the Paisley Underground scene, The Rain Parade's debut outlined Roback's aesthetic: blurry, spiral ling songs recalling Love, The Byrds, The Doors. An Object lesson in psychedelic understatement. 8/1O

RAINY DAY
RAINY DAY
ROUGH TRADE, 1984
Roback and friends gather together for a set of covers (Big Star, Hendrix, Velvets. Young, Beach Boys...)- It's a knowing yet generous rewriting of rock's back pages. 7/10

OPAL
HAPPY NIGHTMARE BABY
ROUGHTRADE, 1987
Roback's finest moment — and Kendra Smith's, too, trading their acoustic Cohen/Barrett vibes for a livid, electrified set—piece, with the glitter-buzz Of prime—era T. Rex in their
hearts. 9/10

OPAL
EARLY RECORDINGS
ROUGHTRADE, 1989
Their first few singles, plus previously unreleased material — reflective, pel lucid folk rock and pop psych that at moments, like "Harriet Brown" , can be deeply moving. 9/10

MAZZY STAR
SHE HANGS BRIGHTLY
ROUGHTRADE, 1990
Joining up with Hope Sandoval, on She Hangs Brightly Roback lets more light and shade into the songs. The result is a lambent set of late- night ruminations. 8/10

MAZZY STAR
SO TONIGHT THAT I MIGHT SEE
CAPITOL, 1993
They really didn't put a foot wrong, but So Tonight that I Might See is Mazzy Star's consummate collection, and not just for "Fade Into You". This one's a snails-pace, deeply hermetic gem. 9/10

MAZZY STAR
AMONG MY SWAN
CAPlTOL,1996
So Tonight established a style: Among My Swan honed it by mining the psychodrama in more measured ways. This album - lighter, more acoustic — rewards deep listening. 7/10

MAZZY STAR
SEASONS OF YOUR DAY
RHYMES OF AN HOUR, 2013
Seventeen years later, Roback and Sandoval pick up the thread. Guests appear - Bert Jansch, Colm Cios6ig Of MBV — songs unfurl slowly, taking their time to say their piece. 8/10

-JON
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