Barbara Manning - Biography
San Francisco’s Barbara Manning is the peripatetic wonder of 1990s indie rock, and if she never found larger fame, she certainly laid the groundwork for others, as she blithely leapt from band to band and moniker to moniker, always staying a few steps ahead of rote repetition, stale conformity, and the rigors of a mainstream career. Within her arch lyrics, breathe-deeply vocals, and acutely proficient guitar playing, Manning simply exuded a Bay Area disdain for commercialism, while setting the stage for cut-rate copycats to slink in and sell her charming innovations to the masses. So, yes, some size-zero hotties stole her aesthetic thunder and packaged it for wider consumption, but in her work with 28th Day, World of Pooh, the SF Seals, the Go-Luckys!, and various solo projects, Manning firmly established herself as one of the most diligently inventive singer-songwriters of her era. And if it needs to be spelled out in black-and-white, unequivocal terms: Liz Phair was a stone-cold Barbara Manning rip-off, who made a shallow attempt at mimicking Manning’s wit and verve, while adding her own puerile and lascivious baggage, as per the directives of music-industry handlers. Yet while Phair’s albums are weighted with anvils of jaded compromise and sexual manipulations, Manning’s early 90s efforts still resonate with a ferocious purity of vision that redeems the entire notion of the singer-songwriter as a solitary voice of insight, smarts, and wry humor. Besides, she’s obsessed with archaic, Pacific Coast League baseball. What’s not to like?
Manning’s earliest recordings were with 28th Day, and they displayed a keen skill for wordplay and some intuitive hooks within 80s-styled, guitar-centric jangle. The eponymous debut, 28th Day (1985 Enigma) remains a central component of Manning’s bewildering discography, with Cole Marquis on guitar and Michael Cloward on drums; the group disbanded in 1986. Manning then joined World of Pooh with Brandan Kearney, while simultaneously breaking out as a solo artist. The album Lately I Keep Scissors (1988 Di Di Music) is a brilliant bit of songsmithing, and the title track remains one of Manning’s most finely crafted gems. It was shortly followed by the single “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” (1990 Forced Exposure) and the tremendous EP, One Perfect Green Blanket (1991 Heyday Records), which indulged the entire baseball fetish, which, again, makes Manning quirkily unique among the female singer-songwriter hoard. It also offered some foreshadowing for her next project, SF Seals, named after the beloved and defunct ball club; a quartet, that group featured Michelle Cernuto on vocals and guitar, Melanie Clarin on drums, and Lincoln Allen on guitar. The Baseball Trilogy (1993 Matador) was a critical breakthrough, in which Manning’s personal idylls and internal nostalgias bumped heads with dark humor and sophisticated wordplay.
Manning found a perfect collaboration with Stuart Moxham from Young Marble Giants, in Barbara Manning Sings With The Original Artists (1993 Feel Good All Over), and had another prominent release with Matador, 1212 (1997 Matador). The suite “Evil Craves Attention/Our Son/10 x10” is compeling, engaging stuff, while her cover of Amon Duul’s “Marcus Leid” is an inspired reinvention. As her releases sprawled, Manning still demanded opportunities for experimentation and artistic cross-pollination, highlighted by several noisy collaborations with the cranky publisher of 80s ‘zine Bananafish, under the name Glands of External Secretion. In the 2000s, she forged ahead with yet another act, the energetic and electrified Go-Luckys, which made a variety of appearances, including the comp Do You Think That I'll Be Different When You're Through? (2001 Hausmusik) and the wildly entertaining Silver Monk Time - A Tribute To The Monks (2006 Play Loud! Productions). The latter isn’t a shabby way to encapsulate Barbara Manning’s entire career, actually. She’s an equal to that legendary garage band in every way: in her delightful idiosyncrasies, her persistence of vision, and her abject refusal to bow to convention. And again, you can’t go wrong with the baseball angle.