I’m poking around my music collection while I do some checking into PHP gallery scripts. I settled on Scarce‘s album Deadsexy. I first heard this band back when I was a Music Choice subscriber. Their single “Sideways” caught my ear, and it would’ve caught yours, too. The song is so damn erratic, lurching in so many directions, yet its so compelling.
Back when I paid $6 a month for a taste of new music, I’d hear lots of good songs. Occasionally, I’d buy a band’s CD. Frequently the rest of the songs sucked, but not this Deadsexy CD. Each song is different, each a flavor of its own.
While poking around the web for news of the band, I found out about the sad fate of Scarce, as told by one fan:
Scarce is the greatest live band I have ever seen. Back in the day of grunge, when bands would just get on stage wearing flannels and jeans, Scarce put on a show. Bassist Joyce Raskin would wear a formal dress and gallop all over the stage, while guitarist Chick Graning, in a tux or a silver suit, would look wild-eyed at the audience as if he was about to come out to attack us, then rip off an incredible slide guitar solo only to toss the slide aside at the last minute and resume the song. I saw them more than ten times, and everyone in Providence where I lived thought they would become huge rock stars. My band Salty Timmy even opened for them once. Then the accident happened.
Scarce was about to release their first major label album, Deadsexy, when one morning Chick didn’t show up for practice. He actually lived next door to me and Big John Lund that summer on East George Street in Providence, and when he didn’t answer the door Joyce freaked out and broke the door to his apartment down. Chick had experienced a brain hemorrhage and was rushed to the hospital. The single, “Honeysimple,” was pulled off radio after one play, and the album, which had come out in the U.K., was postponed over a year in the U.S. Chick spent the next year relearning how to walk, talk, and play his guitar.
They could have been huge, had fate not intervened. What a shame.
