Mazzy Star played Coachella. They played this song as the final song. The nearest I can calculate, this was the first time I had seen them in… 18 years. I am racking my brain trying to remember if they toured for “Among My Swan,” but if they did, they didn’t play Boston.
Oh I have seen Hope once or twice since. Well, four or five Warm Inventions shows, and i saw her with the Jesus and Mary Chain a few years back reprising her duet on “Sometimes Always.” But.. Mazzy Star. It’s been ages.
I should probably have posted “Halah,” since Mazzy Star goes always back to High School, when my friend Renée first played them for me, and I loved it almost as much as I loved Renée. God, I think we may have first discovered them on 120 Minutes. When I got to Boston in September of 1990 it turned out that Mazzy Star was opening for the Cocteau Twins on the Heaven or Las Vegas tour, and I lucked out and got front row tickets. I, like every indie kid my age in america, fell in love with Hope Sandoval.
When So Tonight That I Might See came out a couple years later, I saw them a bunch with the Jesus and Mary Chain (including an awesome show in Providence where she got totally mad at her boyfriend, one of the Reid brothers, and stormed offstage without singing her part. Starcrossed lovers from the start, those two). but before that, they did a promotional show in-store at the Strawberry Records in Harvard Square. Five songs. Here is a picture I took at the show. But even better than that, I got to meet them. I got a free STTIMS poster, and had them all sign it.
Hope took a gold paint marker and drew angel wings on herself, and on her chest she put a heart. In the middle of the heart she wrote “I love you.” It’s one of my most prized possessions. It was hanging in my house on Howard St, and will be hanging again soon in our new house or my new office (TBD).
Hope’s aged, and once or twice since the Mazzy Star days I’ve seen a darker side of her as she yelled at soundmen. One hilarious time, Benjamin and I were at the Paradise in Boston and Hope said “if this glockenspiel isn’t mic’d right in five minutes, we are leaving.” It became a running joke of ours.
And Emma wasn’t impressed with them. Which is weird because didn’t every girl in America love “Fade Into you” once? The times have changed.
But I could still close my eyes and go back in time and feel a little bit of my teen angstlove for hope while standing in the California desert, and it was just mighty fine.
(Source: Spotify)
