In my previous write-up on A.R. Kane, I discussed some of the groups the duo had influenced, including a few notable Black musicians who followed their dive into the creation of dreamy rock music. The early 1990s was when some of their early followers would start up their own groups, at a time when shoegaze and dream pop were vying for press coverage and audience attention against the upstart genres of grunge in the US and Britpop in the UK. A more open embrace of pop songwriting and a lesser focus on experimentation in the latter two genres would see them win out. In the post-Nirvana explosion, many underground bands were being swept up by major labels looking for the next crossover success story. Unfortunately, if the process didn’t work out the way the label wanted it to, many of these groups would get unceremoniously kicked to the curb. Majesty Crush were one of those bands, and are perhaps one of the biggest “what-ifs” in alt rock history. They were shoegazers at heart, and paired dreamy and distorted riff-scapes with a heavy emphasis on rhythm bred from the blues and soul scenes of their hometown Detroit. They stood out even more with an enigmatic and expressive frontman who had a knack for writing dark and deranged, but undeniable catchy pop songs. If there was ever a shoegaze group that could have crossed over into the mainstream, and in the process prolonged the genre’s first wave, Majesty Crush were that group. In this piece, we’ll look at the rise and demise of one of indie rock’s most brilliant but ill-fated and short-lived bands.
Detroit had long been a hotbed for innovation in popular music and the development of music in Detroit ran parallel with the larger societal ongoings of the city. The Great Migration of Black people arriving from the Deep South to escape Jim Crow laws and find work in the auto manufacturing industry brought on the development of jazz and blues scenes in Detroit in the 30’s and 40’s. Detroit’s population peaked in 1950 at 1,849,568 and in the following decade, Detroit musicians factored significantly in the genesis of rock and roll, with Bill Haley and His Comets 1955 single “Rock Around The Clock” being the first rock song to hit the top spot on the Billboard charts.
Through the 60s, garage rock bands would emerge and groups like MC5 and The Stooges would lay the foundation for the birth of punk rock in the 70s. Simultaneously, Motown Records was releasing albums by some of the most popular musicians in the world, including Diana Ross, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and The Fourtops.
While Black people in the city had managed to escape the Jim Crow south, a racial hierarchy still existed in Detroit, with most city jobs, including police work, being done by whites. Racial redlining occurred and urban development was designed to prioritize sprawl and car commuting over high density neighbourhoods serviced by public transit, which led to the construction of highways that ran through low income neighbourhoods and destroyed many homes in the process.
Long-standing racial tension would boil over during the 1967 12th Street riot. The Michigan National Guard and US Army troops were sent in to combat protesters, and by its end 23 civilians had died and 2000 buildings were damaged, with many closing permanently or relocating. In 1974, the Supreme Court decision of Milliken vs. Bradley required the redistribution of white students more widely across the district to promote integration. However, the decision led to increased white flight to the suburbs.
In the 70s, auto manufacturers laid off thousands of employees and closed plants in the city. The loss of jobs and flight of affluent whites to the suburbs further eroded the tax base. There was a greater proportion of low income residents, property values dropped, and buildings and neighborhoods became abandoned as crime rates increased. By 1990, the racial composition of the city had completely flipped. In 1940, the population was 90 percent white, and in 1990 it was 75% Black and down to 1,027,974 total residents. Nonetheless, the city still gave birth to many burgeoning music scenes. In the mid to late 80s artists such as Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May and Eddie Fowlkes would kick-start the birth of techno music. At the same time, the local hip hop scene was starting to take shape and would later give rise to artists like J Dilla, Royce Da 5’9”, and Danny Brown.
As a mixed-race group with a sound grounded in the musical history of a dying city and meshed with a sense of dreamy escapism, Majesty Crush very much seemed like a product of their surroundings. From the UK, the sounds of shoegaze and dream pop had begun to make their way to the Motor City. Larry Hoffman, owner of the Play It Again record shop, made trips to London to bring over shoegaze records and played them on his Life According to Larry radio show. Music fans in the city began to take notice, and it wouldn’t be long before Detroit’s own spacey dream rock scene would start to coalesce with Majesty Crush at its forefront.
Majesty Crush was born from the ashes of Spahn Ranch, a post punk group that bassist Hobey Echlin and drummer Odell Nails III played in. Echlin had joined Spahn Ranch after the release of their 1987 album Thickly Settled and would meet David Stroughter when he was brought in as a guest vocalist. Echlin knew right away that David had something special, recalling:
“I first met David Stroughter in 1988. I was in Spahn Ranch, and Dave was a friend of our drummer Odell Nails. Dave came in to sing on an uncharacteristically dance-y track where we had the idea to use a drum machine and synths. “What would you do if two lions attacked me, tearing me up with their claws?” he sang. I was floored. He sounded like Marvin Gaye on “I Want You,” elevating our art-damaged post-punk song to romance and martyrdom in a single line.” (1)
The two then became roommates, and Stroughter introduced Echlin to bands like A.R. Kane and Xmal Deutschland. Guitarist Michael Segal was the record store clerk that sold him A.R. Kane’s 1988 album 69.
Once Spahn Ranch was no more, Echlin, Nails, Segal, and Stroughter formed Majesty Crush in 1990. Segal recalls:
“We began jamming in Stroughter’s basement in a duplex in Indian Village. We began with an attempt at New Order’s “Ceremony” and all loved playing together. And it went on from there. We practiced for a few months, had about 8 songs, and for our first gig opened for Mazzy Star at St. Andrews.” (2)
The band’s sound was driven by the strong rhythmic chemistry between the drumming of Nails and Echlin’s melodic basslines that weren’t afraid to travel high up the neck. Segal’s guitar playing was less about face-melting virtuosity and more about crafting evocative blooms of spacey textures. These big sounds of his guitar were especially impressive given how, as Echlin recalls, he tended to play with only three strings on his guitar, two of which were tuned to the same note. (3) Said Segal about the band’s sound:
“Our sound was conceived on the idea of drone and rhythm. We wanted to be pop but spacey and atmospheric (not yet a joke word). We had a mutual love of the 4AD and Factory labels. Also the heavy, dreamy rock from late ’80s UK seeped into our brains (Jesus And Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Spacemen 3, Loop, Galaxie 500 [USA]). But our difference was that we had a singer that didn’t want to be buried in the din. A dynamic frontman with no instrument put us a little outside what was termed then (and has stuck) as shoegaze.” (2)
David Stroughter was that dynamic frontman. He wrote fantastic pop songs with dark and deranged themes, telling stories of addiction, presidential assassination plots, and obsessions with woman actors, pornstars, and tennis players. What made these yarns most potent was their pairing with infectious hooks that perfectly suited Stroughter’s theatrical singing style. Echlin recalls the way Stroughter elevated the band:
“Our music was simple and spacey, but Dave’s lyrics and singing were deep and dark. It was Marvin Gaye singing Syd Barrett, full of longing, lust, and self-deprecation. Dave’s was an innocent mystery, utterly inspired, wistfully ephemeral, perfectly visceral, completely formed. He was our creative spark, our gift of fire.” (1)
From the beginning of their recordings, the band was ambitious in their intent to craft a sound that was distinctly theirs while taking inspiration from a wide variety of influences. In 1992, the band released their debut single “Sunny Pie.” In an interview on the Renaissance Soul podcast, Echlin explains that the song and its lead riff were an attempt to fuse the sampling of EPMD’s “So Whatcha Sayin” with the chiming bounce of Cocteau Twins’ “Iceblink Luck.” The song starts at a slow pace, with a spacious and meandering riff providing plenty of room for Stroughter to weave a tale of going to an adult bookstore and meeting an employee who took him home, dressed him in lingerie, and said the words and did the things that gave him a happiness he could not find before.
In addition to the single and the follow up 7-inch Purr released the same year, the band had been building momentum by playing gigs in Detroit and other cities in the Midwest, opening for acts like Curve, Royal Trux, and The Verve. At the time, the group was somewhat of an anomaly in the local scene. Although their strong emphasis on rhythm and Stroughter’s singing style were reminiscent of the Motown sound, their shoegazer tendencies were far removed from the local region. Having two Black musicians in a rock band was also still considered to be somewhat of a rarity for the time. Maybe Majesty Crush didn’t slot in neatly to the conventional characteristics of most bands in their time and place, but that’s what made them stand out and gave them the power to launch a new scene with the regional hit that appeared on their next release.
Later in 1992, Majesty Crush would release the Fan EP. The cover art is a picture of Julia Cole, a friend of the band, smiling in front of a derelict building. The image of lively beauty in a place of decay was a fitting representation of the darkness and bliss that equally permeated their sound and their position as an upstart group realizing their artistic potential in a city whose most prosperous days had long since passed.
On “No 1. Fan,” to a drum beat written by Joseph Lafata (friend of the band and member of industrial group Final Cut), a melodic bassline by Echlin, and the swooning guitars of Segal, Stroughter sings about a fan being so obsessed with a woman actor that he promises to assassinate the president to prove his love to her. It’s a depiction of the extremes of “stan” culture before fellow Detroit musician Eminem gave the celebrity obsessive their namesake, and the subject matter very much resembles John Hinckley’s 1981 attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan as a ploy to capture the attention of film star Jodie Foster. As creepy as the character portrayed by Stroughter might be, the passion that explodes from his voice as the song blooms into its final chorus and bridge gives it an anthemic charm. Echlin provides this description of the song’s creation:
“It started as me trying to play ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,’ and turned into our Marvin Gaye/Rakim Detroit cousin to Verve’s ‘Slide Away.’ [Dave] has a narrative intensity and vocal dexterity that uses every part of the music and lyrics to express Patricia Highsmith/John Hinkley delusion and wholeheartedness, but with an ease and earnestness that’s regrettably relevant to our school-shooting era/polarizing-president present, added to incel recognizability.” (4)
The song would provide another boost to the band’s growing buzz. It became a regional hit, getting airplay on local stations such as Windsor’s 89X. More people in the region who were into the same UK indie sounds realized that this music could be interpreted creatively on a local level and find a greater audience. A growing crop of Michigan based dream pop, space rock, and shoegaze bands emerged in the 90’s. Larry Hoffman started the Burnt Hair record label, and released records by artists and bands like Windy and Carl, Mahogany, Auburn Lull, and Alison’s Halo.
Majesty Crush’s output had so far been self-released on their own imprint Vulva Records, but after the EP they began weighing offers from several labels. Having a sound that was both eccentric and accessible, the band pondered whether to go major or sign with an independent label. They would eventually sign with Dali Records, a subsidiary of Elektra. Segal explains:
“Ideally, for the type of music we envisioned we made, we thought maybe 4AD or Creation in the UK would have been good. Or something more indie. Some factions of the band thought in terms of superstardom so a major deal wasn’t an evil thing.”
In the same interview, Segal was asked if they had any ambivalence about success in the first rush of alternative rock’s crossover to the mainstream, to which he responded:
“No we knew what was happening. The term I believe back then was “The Post-Nirvana Signing Frenzy.” We were into it. We knew we were odd being American and sounding British. And we had the bi-racial thing too. We felt unique, but smart enough to be what we wanted to be and appeal.” (2)
The band recorded at two studios, White Room and Tempermill, and then headed to Smart Studios, home of alt rock super producer Butch Vig, where the album was mixed by Vig’s drum tech Doug Olson. The mastering process was conducted by Howie Weinberg, who had mastered many landmark albums such as Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation (1988), Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet (1990), Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger (1991). Having invested in getting some of the highest renowned professionals in the business to work with the band, it seems that the label thought the group had the potential to find a larger audience that extended well beyond the limits of Michigan.
Love 15, the band’s only album, would be released on September 28, 1993. The album opens with the rushing intro of “Boyfriend,” with Nails wailing on the drums as Segal’s guitar blares. They then both pull back for a spacey riff to ring out as Dave recounts falling for a girl on the train, whose boyfriend he plans to torture and feed to animals so that he can be with her. These dark and desperate lyrical themes are all over the album, with Stroughter expressing fanatical longing for Uma Thurman, Italian porn star Cicciolina, and tennis player Monica Seles and on other songs, such as Horse and Brand, depicting the struggles of addiction.
Listening to Love 15 now, one can’t help but feel like a band with these instrumental chops and a larger than life frontman with instant memorably songwriting should have had a least one song made a big impact on alt rock radio stations. However, things did not turn out that way. Dali Records folded in 1993, just over a month after the album’s release.
The band took the death of the label hard. Segal remembers “We were in New York when we got the call about the label going out, and sat there in a friend’s loft — stunned.” (2)
Here they had spent all this time playing shows, opened for bigger bands, released independent records that were well-received, and then landed a record deal that offered plenty of money and the opportunity to work some of the industry’s leading producers and engineers. They invest plenty of time and energy into creating this artistic statement that was promised to make a splash, and suddenly everything is ripped out from underneath them. In an interview, Dave explains how emotionally wounding it was to have someone promise to open the horizons for you and then take it all away, while making no bones about exploiting you in the process. In a business built on systems of exploitation, the story of an upstart artist or band getting screwed over by a major record label is one that is heard time and time again.
While the fallout from the label left the band in a state of mourning, they continued recording and put out the Sans Muscles EP in 1994 on the independent Eternal Funk record label. Echlin described it as a move towards a rock n’ roll sound modeled after artists like Rage Against the Machine, U2, and Ted Nugent. The release featured “Seine”, which he considers to be their best song aside from No. 1 Fan. The song was a stylized account Dave’s mother, a German woman who aspired of becoming an actor. After she married a Black American G.I. and moved to America to raise her children, she had to give up on this dream and, despite her best intentions. couldn’t keep her children away from the trouble that they attracted. The song is as heartfelt as it is anthemic, with Segal’s guitar chords roaring alongside a smooth groove provided by Nails and Echlin before blooming into its short but soaring choruses.
It was during the creation of the EP that the band began to unravel. There was a lot of drinking and infighting. Stroughter had taken to picking up the guitar and by doing so made Segal less inclined to play his. At shows, Echlin recalls that Stroughter had started this habit where he sometimes wouldn’t participate, describing one gig where the band had started off the set by playing an instrumental-only version of “If JFA Were Still Together”, because David didn’t want to sing (3). Sans Muscles got its name as it signified the group moving on after the departure of Echlin, who would be replaced on bass by Craig Thornton. One more EP, titled PS I Love You, would follow in 1996, but by then the group had split up.
After the break up, the band members went their separate ways. Segal, who had done the artwork for Love 15, would do graphic design for the Ghostly record label. Nails would become a music lawyer and a frequent collaborator in Scott Cortez’s noise pop project Astrobrite. Echlin continued doing music journalism for the Metro Times, and joined electro-industrial group Final Cut.
Stroughter would begin writing about music for MTV and moved to Los Angeles to start a new project called PS I Love You. The 1999 single “Where the Fuck is Kevin Shields?”, written about the disappearance of My Bloody Valentine from the public eye and their lack of a follow-up to 1991’s Loveless, made a splash on UK radio when John Peel played it on his show. Through online forums, Stroughter became pals with members of UK shoegaze groups. Will Carruthers, the bassist of Spaceman 3 and Spiritualized, would head to LA to record a PS I Love You album with him.
Like many frontmen in the history of rock music, Stroughter was known as a wild and eccentric guy. He would sometimes come to gigs in crazy outfits, wearing a wetsuit or soccer goalie equipment on stage, and offstage, he loved to party. But behind the performance and partying, there was a darkness. He had a history of mental illness and, as a Black man, had some run-ins with racist white police officers. On one occasion, Stroughter was falsely accused of an armed robbery and spent a few days in a jail cell before the cops finally let him go. A week later, he showed up to jam with the band and wrote lyrics to “Penny For Love”, one of their most poppy and joyful songs. Through the performance and storytelling Dave could exorcise some of his demons, but the tension still lingered underneath.
While Dave was in LA trying to keep his music career going, the returns on it with had been diminishing. Echlin could tell that it’d been starting to wear on Stroughter, explaining, “His mental health wasn’t so much an issue as an understanding; he had long since come to be “Stroughter,” the larger-than-life protagonist of increasingly less funny stories. He had a wilder look in his eye the handful of times we got together in L.A., but I blamed that on a decade of distance from the insular reassurance of Detroit.” (1)
PS I Love You bandmate Jack Nelson noted, “His collaborators had to be willing to put blind faith into this shambolic raconteur whose indulgences were the stuff of lyrics and notoriety – a not uncommon path to stardom. That said, being ‘crazy’ in your twenties & thirties is a window of time that, when it closes without the bloom of success, is best taken as a sign to look ahead.” (5)
He would have a few more run-ins with the law, including a final one that would prove to be fatal. During a mental health episode in which he had been driving around and threatening a couple passersby with a hatchet, the cops had been called and a car chase ensued. One police officer pulled a pit maneuver, hitting the tail end of Stroughter’s vehicle and spinning it around and bringing it to a stop. The driver side doors of both vehicles were facing each other and David had gotten out and climbed onto the hood of the police car with the hatchet in his hand. The officer in the car and several other cops pointed their guns at Stroughter and ordered him to drop the hatchet. They then shot him several times and he was killed.
The police report attempts to rationalize the murder by explaining that the officers believed that the cop in the car was at risk of being harmed by Stroughter. Whether this is really the case is unclear, as the report does not indicate that Stroughter made any attempts to break the glass of the windshield to get to the officer. When you have six people pointing guns at one person with a hatchet, it’s clear who is at a greater risk of being in danger.
What makes David’s death more tragic is that at the time, he was on the waiting list to gain a placement in a halfway house to receive assistance with his mental health. He was 69th on the list of the time (3), but the circumstances of his death show the urgency with which he needed help. It’s a very telling but unfortunate truth that many municipal governments are unwilling to make harm reduction services accessible and available to people who need them most while simultaneously increasing police budgets year after year. These crises are responded to by police officers who too often cannot de-escalate the situation, and see using lethal force as a solution when, in reality, it is the most explicit demonstration of the state’s failure, or perhaps refusal, to keep people safe.
While David is one of the many Black men with mental illness to be killed by law enforcement, he should be remembered for far more than just his death. As a brilliant songwriter, musician, and showman, he brought a lot of beauty out of the challenging circumstances that he faced. Before his death, Stroughter had written a note to his sister in which he asked that if anything happened to him, his greatest wish was for his music to be heard (3).
In a touching remembrance piece written in the Metro Times, Echlin wrote:
“I’ll remember Dave as living in a world of pure imagination, even as it became more hostile. Dave took a lot from everyone around him, but he also gave a lot. You sang your blues, David. For a lot of reasons, but most all, as you sang over and over, for love. Thank you, brother. You’ve earned your peace. Shine on, you crazy, perfect diamond.” (1)
—-
It’s easy to look back on the history of Majesty Crush and come up with a lot of “what if” questions. What if the band, like their sound, had been based in the UK? Would their blend of distorted psychedelia with soul and strong pop leanings found a larger audience over there? Would it have prevented the downfall of shoegaze’s first wave because it proved that you didn’t have to abandon the Wall of Sound and pivot to Britpop or grunge to get played on the radio? What if the label hadn’t folded or they signed to an indie label instead? Would it have prolonged their career together?
We will never know. But what we do know is that Majesty Crush was a band like no other. With a flamboyant frontman, unique songwriting, and musicians that fused the local sounds of soul and R&B with the dreaminess that extended far beyond their locality, they broke down the distance between regional scenes and leading the construction of a new one in the process.
In late 2020, Third Man records put out the Southeast of Saturn compilation, made up of songs by bands that populated Detroit’s space rock, shoegaze, and dream pop-adjacent scene. It works both as a time capsule and an introduction to a scene that had a lot of creative and dreamy sounds to offer. Fittingly, the tracklist is kicked off by Majesty Crush’s No 1. Fan.
There isn’t much available on Majesty Crush on the internet, but here’s where you can go to hear their music and learn more about the band.
I Love You in Other Cities, a compilation released by Full Effect Records in 2007, is a great introduction to the band’s discography. It features songs from Love 15, their EPs, a demo version of No. 1 Fan and a live recording. It is available on streaming services and can be purchased here.
On Youtube, you can find the entirety of Love 15, a 1990 live performance, and an interview David did with Keith McKinnon of Klefsigns Television during the PS I Love You days.
Another great interview is the one Echlin did on the Renaissance Soul podcast. It isn’t a much of a traditional interview, but that works to its advantage. Host Kelly “K-Fresh” Frazier just lets Echlin talk and he has a lot to say about the band. It’s quite touching to hear how enthusiastic he gets recalling the group’s heyday and the deep level of admiration that he has for Stroughter as a person and artist.
References
- https://www.metrotimes.com/city-slang/archives/2017/02/06/david-stroughter-1966-2017-a-rememberance
- http://ferndaledad.blogspot.com/2005/10/majesty-crush-in-fullish.html
- http://freshisthepodcast.com/renaissance-soul-podcast-the-majesty-crush-episode-hobey-echlin
- https://floodmagazine.com/80829/detroit-90s-space-rock-revolution/?fbclid=IwAR3amXfnoirhejjGZvtvoSbL0J-JYsJsUeXgAq3VaXUPkMwrJdbM94f7HT0
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/juneteenth-tribute-david-stroughter-jack-nelson/