The Return of The Ophelias

"The canker galls the infants of the spring,/Too oft before their buttons be disclosed."-William Shakespeare

Jan 27, 2023

The first time I heard the Ophelias was in 1986 on a late weekday night at KUSF when I was getting ready for my graveyard shift. I cannot remember who was the DJ….was it Jay Harding? Marty Brumbach? Marisa Vela? The Germ? or Linda Champagne? Regardless, a new San Francisco comp called The SF Unscene had been released within the year and the final track of the record was the Ophelia-fied folk tune Mr. Rabbit, which had already become a favorite of the station. The song was a missing link to San Francisco’s psychedelic Victorian past, complete with Alice-in-Wonderland imagery, led by a Mad Hatter of a lead singer Leslie Medford, Tulling a recorder as the song begins, a pied piper of sorts behind a tight Incredible-String-Band-gone-electric bass/drums/guitar set-up, jamming a crazed arrangement of the medieval nursery rhyme.

The mid-80s San Francisco music scene that really was an “Unscene” with multitudes of different styles of bands crammed on the same stages on different nights around clubland. The Ophelias stuck out with their Shakespearean infused glam/psych/underground rock. With a truly unique sound and a great live show, The Ophelias spent the eighties releasing artful record after artful record, eventually getting signed to Rough Trade, who had opened up shop in San Francisco. They played all the time in San Francisco, allowing a kid like myself the ability to see them regularly…becoming for me a very influential band in my primal music appreciation development. Their choice of covers alone: John’s Children’s nugget Midsummernight's Scene (penned by a pre-T Rex Marc Bolan), The Nervous Breakdown’s I Dig Your Mind, Skip Spence’s Lawrence of Euphoria…it was The Ophelias who turned me on to these songs and these artists for the first time (their version of the Kinks’ Wicked Annabella is great too, but I already knew that one). But ultimately, it was their ceaseless originality that got me—music with a true literary bent crafted into songs from a glam Faerieland o’ the modern middle-ages—music that sounded like nothing else I had heard before…and from my city (support your local bands). Bandleader, writer, multi-instrumentalist, showman and literature-freak (as was I) Leslie Medford transformed from song to song, taking on characters as if he was an actor at The Globe theater, sometimes soft and almost sweet, sometimes screamingly bombastic, holding Shakespeare in one hand, T-Rex in the other. And then there was the rest of the magic band, killer musicians one and all with the classic period consisting of Terry Von Blankers on bass (who I believe is the only member who was with Leslie throughout), David Immerglück (Monks of Doom) on guitar and Edward Benton on drums.

For my eighteenth birthday, I was invited to celebrate with two other friends who also had birthdays at around the same time, MCM & The Monster guitarist Gary Stilts, who was turning twenty-five, and ex-Zeros/Flying Color bassist Hector Penalosa, who was turning twenty-seven. They were throwing an over-the-top underground house party at their ramshackle Painted Lady on Webster Street in San Francisco. Housemate and overseer Craig “Big Daddy” Ranft had emptied out his large front room that opened up into the rest of the house, set up some drums and some amps, and invited a bunch of bands to play, including The Ophelias. The band crammed in the front room overlooking the street. Leslie was wearing all black (as usual), sidestepping ferociously as he sang the lyrics of Plaster of Paris that appears on the Ophelia’s record Oriental Head, seamlessly grabbing his trumpet after the chorus, planting his feet and blasting out the songs’ melody while his band screamed electric behind him. The Ophelias were playing my birthday party, and they were rocking the best set I had ever seen them do.

Years later, when Bill Bently and I were putting together the More Oar tribute record to Skip Spence, both of us knew that we needed The Ophelias’ cover of Lawrence of Euphoria. I had never had a personal connection with the band before and even though it was a quick one (they were happy to be a part of it) my child-self was wayyy into it.

And then they just disappeared. Never finding the kind of success that keeps many a a band in motion, they drifted away into obscurity. For years, not even the internet boasted good information on the Ophelias. And then a few years ago, I noticed that Leslie Medford had started posting Ophelias songs on social media with pictures, memories. That led to last year’s release of Bare Bodkin, a new record that featured unreleased Ophelias material from back in the day, as well as a curated group of songs that appeared on their past records. Medford sent me a copy and suddenly the signature sound of the Ophelias took life for me again. Since I truly think that The Ophelias story needs to be more out there, I connected with Leslie and asked him if I could interview him for this newsletter. Please enjoy what came from the interview! I would encourage you to go to your favorite streaming service and listen to some Ophelias recordings while you are reading below (maybe their record The Big O).

Shabbes…..

David Katznelson: For the uninitiated listener, how would you describe the music of the Ophelias?

Leslie Medford: I admire Peter Goddard’s one-sentence attempt to describe us in the Toronto Star: “The Ophelias are shapeshifters—now highwaymen of hearts a-riding, now Dickensian hardscrabble street urchin glam, now vaudeville goth merchants—in toto they are a rolling stoned royale with green apothecarnal shimmer and sheen.” But perhaps this is too oblique, though it does touch most of the bases.

The Ophelias “default position” is Adventurist British Hard Rock, 1960’s and 1970’s-styled, but with a Post-punk edge. Whereas “psychedelic” is usually used—by me and countless others—it’s a British psychedelia, not a West Coast one. Our drummer Edward Benton, always a down-to-brass-tacks kinda guy, would roll his eyes when critics used “psychedelic” or “art-rock” to describe The Ophelias. “It’s fucking rock ‘n’ roll, man!

DK: What was the music scene like in San Francisco in the mid-1980s? How did you see the band fitting in with it? What bands were your peers and what were your favorite clubs to play?

LM: Whereas I greatly enjoyed being in The Ophelias in San Francisco—and we were embraced by the underground at first in a way no other fledgling band in that place and time was. We had tremendous support from the important local college radio stations KUSF, KALX, KZSU and KFJC, and we had genuine fans among the club bookers, Ms (Cathy) Cohn1 of the I-Beam in particular.

There were a lot of bands and several of them were good! We played all the bay area clubs, with the I-Beam, Kennel Club (now the Independent) and Nightbreak (all these in the Haight) and the Berkeley Square, most frequently. Musically, there was no one like us, even remotely. I think you’d have to go back to the Sleepers to find an equivalently unusual top-notch bay area band—but in the end we were a fish out of water. We should have been someplace else, Europe being our natural and cultural homeland.

DK: How did the band end up getting signed to Rough Trade Records?

LM: Steve Connell (Rough Trade A&R) really liked our first album on Strange Weekend Records, and he recommended Managing Director Robin Hurley and CEO Geoff Travis check us out. They first signed us as distributor-only for our The Night Of Halloween EP of 1987, then shortly thereafter offered us a 3-album deal, the 3^rd album having a substantially larger advance than the first two, and the 3^rd being at their discretion, based on their satisfaction with us, and of course, sales figures. Among other things, it will always be a mystery to The Ophelias why Rough Trade did not release our stuff in Europe.

DK: Once the band broke up, you put it behind you, living in different corners of the world. What made you decide to open up the Ophelias chapter of your life again?

LM: I began to venture into computing around 2000 and I discovered MOJO magazine about that same time. Over the next ten years I began to see how The Ophelias were largely absent from the web, and that MOJO’s audience was totally our audience. I rather expected I’d open some issue and see us featured in Buried Treasure, or an article or something… I thought a new heyday could be just up ahead!

Still waiting on MOJO . . .

But realized, as the 30-year anniversary of the formation of The Ophelias approached [October 1984] it was necessary to act, that I personally had to become involved in “reminding” people that in our day we were one of the very best bands on the planet. I believe this to my soul. How could we be seemingly consigned to the scrapheap of history when so many lesser contemporaries were being featured in books and on dvds? I still don’t understand it. How can The Ophelias not be in books about 1980s rock music?

More people should hear The Ophelias. I’m afraid we didn’t play the game well in 1984-89 and we’ve slipped through the cracks despite making good records and kicking ass live. I’m trying to burnish our legacy now. Over these last several years I’ve re-explored and reconnected with my past musical endeavors and found them worthy. Not perfect, by no means unflawed, but in some cases better than I remembered. So I’m crowing and hoping for attention. Hey you!

I’m certain The Ophelias deserve a better fate. There are discerning rock people out there who will really like us, but it’s a matter of reaching them, particularly in Europe.

DK: Let’s talk Shakespeare: what was your gateway into his world? What is your current favorite play (OR SONNET) of his?

LM: I’m a Hamlet man, of course! So profound and ageless, and so ubiquitous - it is referenced in some way in almost every great literary work, and not just in the Western world. The questions it posits for young men and women have never lost an iota of relevance since it first appeared. I know several of the other plays quite well, and am at least somewhat familiar with all of them. I have a DVD collection of ten or so Hamlets, plus productions of Macbeth, The Tempest, Romeo & Juliet, A Midsummernight’s Dream, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, on and on, and give a special nod to the brilliant film version of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, probably my favorite cinematic “Shakespeare” of all!

I went to a high school where a few Shakespeare plays were part of the curriculum, but it was as a freshman at university that Shakespeare came alive for me on all sorts of levels. I soon had a passion for him, and it’s never abated. A breakthrough was provided me by the library listening lab – listening on headphones to a great recording of a play while reading along. I had three absolutely great, charismatic Shakespearean scholars as professors over my four years, and an extraordinary experience under an absolute genius director (now the longtime Dean of the Drama Department at UCLA) playing Ariel in The Tempest as a freshman, (Prospero was played by one of those professors) an experience which certainly changed my life. I had never acted before. I didn’t major in Shakespeare, let alone Drama, and I actually took as many courses on Dostoevsky, for instance, but Shakespeare for me is like other peoples’ James Bond.

DK: What are you reading these days? What is on your bookshelf?

LM: Many biographies, and history books, but I’ve been mostly reading the heavyweight novels these last few years. I read 55 books in 2021, and I don’t skip or skim. I’m on my 31st this year: E.T.A. Hoffman’s masterpiece The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. (I’m only on page 20 and Shakespeare, Hamlet, Ariel and Puck have already been referenced a half dozen times!) My only regret about dying is not getting through what I want to read and re-read. Though this list leaves out so many greats like Kafka, Mann, and Böll to name a quick three, I say my favorite authors are Austen, Dostoevsky, James, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Roth, Knausgård, and Willie the Shake. Since you ask, here are the last fourteen books I’ve read.

Vonnegut, Kurt The Sirens Of Titan [1959, 326 pgs] B+
Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Gambler [1866, trans. Jesse Coulson 1966, 143 pgs] A
Henry James The Portrait of a Lady [1881 (610 pgs)] A
Chekhov, Anton The Duel [1891, trans A. Dunnigan, 102 pgs] B
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Bobok [1873, trans. Jesse Coulson 1966, 18 pgs] C
Dostoevsky, Fyodor A Nasty Story [1862, trans. Jesse Coulson 1966, 56 pgs] B
Nabokov, Vladimir The Tragedy of Mister Morn [1923, trans. 2013 by T. Karshan & A. Tolstoy, 168 pgs] A
Bradbury, Ray The Martian Chronicles [1947-1950, 168 pgs] C-
Lake, Greg Lucky Man—The Autobiography [2017, 295 pgs] B
Knausgård, Karl Ove The Morning Star [2020, trans. 2021 by Martin Aitken, 666 pgs] A
Roth, Philip When She Was Good [1967 (276 pgs)] A-
Nabokov, Vladimir Mary [1926, trans. 1970 by Michael Glenny/VN, 117 pgs] A
Nabokov, Vladimir The Eye [1930, trans. 1965 by Dmitri Nabokov, 110 pgs] A
Eliot, George [Mary Ann Evans] Middlemarch—A Study of Provincial Life [1873, 630 pgs] A

DK: How did Bare Bodkin come about and how would you describe the concept behind it? How did it land on Bruce Licher’s legendary label?

LM: Within a few years of The Ophelias’ demise I began contemplating a one-CD, best-foot-forward type of compendium to be called Bare Bodkin, featuring The Ophelias strongest (to my mind) 15 studio recordings. I assembled a track listing, made a CDR, collected artwork and generally prepared a package concept I liked. In 2016 I began working with a tech-savvy fellow named Carl Salbacka to prepare Bare Bodkin as a video-album on YouTube, and it was released on 23 April 2017.

In 2019 my longtime friend and associate Jeffrey Clark was contemplating how best to re-release his Shiva Burlesque albums and his solo work, and he discussed with Bruce Licher the possibility of rebooting Independent Project Records with Jeffrey’s help, and this is what transpired, with The Ophelias Bare Bodkin to be included among the first set of releases. So Jeffrey Clark is responsible for Bare Bodkin getting this spectacular release on compact disc, and, in 2023, on vinyl—a double album at 45rpm in a gatefold package. Bruce has been most understanding and supportive of Bare Bodkin featuring the artwork I had always envisioned, and he has directed the construction of all the elements, contributing important design flourishes of his own. We are honored to be part of the IPR roster.

DK: I always loved the covers The Ophelias did. If the band was up and running, are there songs you would love to play? If so, which ones?

LM: I love this question! In a perfect world, with The Ophelias in our 38^th year and now boasting a line-up of me, von Blankers, Immerglück, James Juhn (HighHorse), James Wright (Blue Druids), Alain Lucchesi, Edward Benton, Carl Salbacka, and Sam Babbitt , we would have covered all the below and many more! These are just my choices.

Joy Division—A Means To An End – The Ophicial Ophelias Theme Song! That lyric! “A legacy so far removed, one day will be improved…”
Slade—My Life Is Natural - this obscure b-side is probably their best song ever! That lyric! “It’s gonna take another Christ, now!”
Aphrodite’s Child—Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – So Oafs!
The Nice—The Cry of Eugene
The Nice—Daddy, Where Do I Come From?
Psychic TV—Roman P.
Tubeway Army—Friends - So Ziggy! So Oafs!
Kinks—Don’t You Fret
Kinks—Who’ll Be the Next in Line? - sung in my best Johnny Cash impersonation!
Troggs—Hold Me (Come Now)
Troggs—I Can’t Control Myself
Big Bill Broonzy—Hey Hey Baby Hey
Rory Gallagher—Middle Name
Kevin Coyne—Room Full of Jewels
Julian Cope—Hanging Out and Hung Up on a Line
Screaming Lord Sutch—One For You Baby
Sky Saxon and The Seeds—And the gypsy plays his drum
Beatles—I’m So Tired/Don’t Pass Me By
When I last owned a trumpet (2003)2 I was practicing these final four everyday…
Genesis—Hairless Heart – trumpet takes lead on this instrumental.
Hugh Banton (The Long Hello)—Brain Seizure - incredible Baroque trumpet song!
King Crimson—Great Deceiver - my trumpet doubles guitar’s fast main riff
VdGG—Masks, my trumpet replaces Jaxxon’s sax

DK: What is the future of the Ophelias? Is it merely more excavation comps that you are throwing online somewhat regularly?

LM: Well, for the now it is excavation comps, and I do hope they will be released on compact disc at least, and vinyl if possible, as I think they are excellent musically and paramount to understanding The Ophelias. We were a different animal - a wild animal - in live performance, for one thing. But also, David Immerglück and I have discussed making a new Ophelias album. It might have happened by now if the pandemic hadn’t caused such havoc. It is certainly still a ways away. I have a helluva lot of songs from 1978-2004 which have yet to see the light of day. David is familiar with pretty much all of them because I’ve made him a series of CDRs of unreleased stuff, and he expresses a desire to help get them recorded and out there, which delights me of course. Some have been released on these excavation compilations, but many have not been, and obviously a band treatment – an Ophelias treatment – would alter and stretch them in various adventurous directions. Several would certainly be numbered among my very best, “Throat of a Goat” for instance. I hope to live to see the day!

Ophelia, Act 3 Scene 1

By William Shakespeare

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’ observ’d of all observers- quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck’d the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

OPHELIAS*HAIGHT ST FAIR*87

Leslie was also gracious enough to give me a few CDs to send to a few lucky Signal readers…please send me an e-mail if you are interested. First come, first serve