I just checked my email mailboxes — HNY, BTW — and found that I joined the Ubu email communex in September 1996. So that's why I've got so many David Thomas and Pere Ubu albums!
This album was trailed and promoted heavily in those emails in the first half of 2000 (I'm impressed to see that they were offering free real audio streaming of the entire album, and selling it as MP3s back then). In one of them David Thomas explains "'Bay City' was the city invented by Raymond Chandler to represent everything corrupt & venal… in real life, of course, Santa Monica." For some reason I always gravitated more towards Dashiell Hammett (and, if you think the scope of The Wire's treatment of a city is original and innovative, read Red Harvest
But back to Bay City. It's a refracted, rather than direct, take on Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Not much narrative; no actual murder as far as I spotted. But fragments of tell-tale evidence, and several desperate, lonely characters spilling their regrets of failed relationships. Black coffee and rain feature almost ad nauseam. Here are the release notes.
The CD sounds fantastic. Like if Pere Ubu had been on ECM. The vocals, often recorded up very close, teeter between singing and speech. In fact, a couple of years later David Thomas did a handful of spoken word performances of a "theatrical 'work in progress'" called Surf's Up in Bay City, and one of these was at Amsterdam's Crossing Borders festival when I happened to be there.
When I last bought a new amplifier, about five years ago, I went along to Sevenoaks Hi-Fi on Gray's Inn Road to road test a few options. Still, in the 21st century, they proffered Dire Straits and The Eagles albums for me to try out the gear. I said I wouldn't be needing those, thank you, and got out my copy of Bay City.
Around the same time, I somehow ended up with a second copy of this CD. I forget how, but I gave it to Lucy. (I just asked her what she thought of it: she can't remember.) The thing about is, the first three or four songs give you the feel of the whole thing, and the rest of it feels a little unnecessary. If it had been an EP, I'd have been asking for more. At over 50 minutes, I rarely get to the end.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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