Primitons: Don’t Go Away, Collected Works

During their short existence, the Primitons were grouped into that mid-’80s sub-genre of “jangly Southern bands that sound like R.E.M.” This was unfair to both. Yes, they were from the South (with a capital SOUTH). Yes, there was that guitar jangle. And yes, they had even traveled to Mitch Easter’s Drive-In studio to record their debut EP. But there was also a fuzz-drenched roar to their sound that R.E.M. wouldn’t embrace until their fourth record. You could understand the words lead singer Mats Roden sang, and he wasn’t singing nonsense. Pete Buck always resisted the Byrds comparisons thrown at his band in its early years, claiming R.E.M. had more in common with the Velvet Underground, and he was right. Listen to the Primitons’ two lone releases and you can hear the inspirational promise of the Byrds’ psychedelic country-rock vision brought back to fruition in the middle of the synth-pop decade.

The Primitons came out of Birmingham, Alabama, a city with a music scene as vibrant as the much-mythologized Athens scene. While R.E.M. were playing their first shows, Roden and Leif Bondarenko, the creative duo at the heart of the Primitons, were already touring and recording with “Birmingham’s first new wave band” Jim Bob and the Leisure Suits. If it can be said of Athens’ Pylon or Love Tractor that the fickle winds of fate and fame ignored them unjustly, I’d offer that the same can be said, times two, of Birmingham’s Carnival Season. Then you might want to square that equation in the case of the Primitons.

One unusual element of the Primitons was that, along with Roden, Bondarenko and their revolving bass players (Brad Dorsett and Don Tinsley), they featured a non-performing member, songwriter Stephanie Truelove-Wright. A life-long friend of Roden’s, she was busy raising children in rural Alabama during the band’s heyday but would meet up with him, often at a roadside Shoney’s, to take his fragments of ideas and phrases and weave her own visions into them, creating gothic pastiches of symbol or story evoking elements of the Old Testament, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Rice and just plain whimsy (imagine the Pope coming to dinner, then flying off in his robes like a superhero). Truelove-Wright’s lyrics folded perfectly into the delicate bed of instrumentation the band created, even when, as on the full-length album, the guitar crunch hardened. Even at their hardest, an affinity for tent-revival-like harmony softened the impact and maintained the Primitons’ identity as a masterful pop band (possibly evidenced most strongly by their sublime take on the Left Banke’s “Something on My Mind”).

Arena Rock has collected the band’s entire recorded output on this cd: their self-titled EP, their album Happy All the Time and an extended single. Highlights of the collection include “City People”, a ballad of disconnected lovers, and “Stars”, a danceable nod to Alabama’s apocalyptic state motto, from the EP. The former contains the beautiful plaint of, “I want you in my skies like the man in the moon / But you keep moving from room to room” and an answering chorus of “And all the city people know.” What they know is never defined, but it is understood to be the kind of knowledge that will keep these lovers separate, one within the urban whir and the other left behind. From the album, I would nominate both “Don’t Go Away” and “You Are Learning” to the ever-expanding list of Should-have-been-hits of the 1980s, while the title song presents, perhaps, the most fulfilling realization of the band’s vision. It’s another tale of an outsider tossed by the whims of uncaring fate, who through every trial holds a song within her heart: “It keeps her happy all the time.” Isn’t that the point of great music?

Listeners who spent a significant portion of the 1980s “left of the dial” would do well to explore this collection. It’s a reminder of the great music being created during that time by hundreds of little bands in out of the way places that never got their shot at the mainstream. The Primitons, for too brief a period, were one of the best.