Songs From Suicide Bridge

About

You’ll find a Suicide Bridge in almost any big city you care to visit, but few are more impressive than the Colorado Street Bridge connecting Pasadena to Los Angele, which earned its nickname by being the scene of suicides in triple figure. It’s also the scene of a photo shoot in which singer-songwriters Eric Caboor and David Kauffman posed on the deserted structure, capturing an image that would eventually inform the spare, detached mood–and title–of their majestic debut album, 1984’s Songs From Suicide Bridge. Indeed, there’s a fatalistic quality to this LP that has much to do with its origin. Kauffman, from Madison, New Jersey, and Caboor, from Burbank, California, met in 1982 playing the coffee houses of Los Angele. Each was painfully used to playing to half-empty venue, which is a situation only half of the partnership would have been at peace with. “Dave had come to California to have a career in music,” Caboor say. “I don’t think it was quite the same for me. I was always kind of reluctant to go all out.” Every week, the pair met in a converted utility shed in the backyard of Caboor’s childhood home in Burbank to play each other the songs they wrote. They were never a duo in the conventional sense–rather, as Kauffman put it, “two loners who happened to join force.” After two frustrating years of trying and failing to catch a break in a music industry that was focused on new wave, pop, AOR–anything but the folk-rock the duo were offering–the pair conceded defeat. One of them suggested, half joking, that they should put all their darkest and least viable works together on one record, if only to spite the industry that had rejected them. The more they thought about it, the better an idea it seemed, and when they started to plot out a tracklist from their vast catalog of song, something unique and special begun taking shape. The opening track, “Kiss Another Day Goodbye,” in particular, set out the stall: “I don’t know how much longer/ I can feel the way I feel/ And never cry/ I don’t know how much longer/ I can kiss another day goodbye,” it say. .

via Last.fm

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