If you can deactivate the now-calcified preconceptions of ’90s nostalgia and push beyond the ear-perking noisy hooks that register at first as standard shoegaze moves, and get closer to the weird specifics and idiosyncratic details that live in all of their songs, it becomes easier to understand how Majesty Crush spent its existence on the perimeters of multiple scenes but belonged to none. Even thirty-some years later, there’s still no easy way to outline their tangled and confounding trajectory, or to make sense of how they teetered perpetually on the verge of a breakthrough that seemed promised but never arrived. This wasn’t a band that never caught a break, nor were they a bunch of stage-frightened introverts who would’ve made it if they’d just been a little more willing to play the game.
Majesty Crush was popular in its own right, enjoying local commercial alt-radio play and opening big shows for national bands right out of the gate. The band was signed to a subsidiary of a major label not terrifically long after starting out as one of many dreamy-eyed groups of the era that was self-releasing 7˝s with smudged art on handmade covers. With close listening, the various shades of rawness that emerge in the lyrics, the sound, and the band’s ever-simmering overall energy begin to offer clues as to why the world wasn’t quite ready in 1992. Not just a band from Detroit, Majesty Crush was distinctively a product of Detroit—one that mirrored their city’s complexity and singularity. The band created a form of dream pop that was charged and uncompromising at a time when many were succeeding on an international level for merely recycling sounds originated by bigger bands. Instead of a Midwestern assimilation of a shoegaze movement evolving in real time all around them, Majesty Crush was a far stranger, impossibly individualized blur of personalities, experiences, and perspectives informed by the independent music badlands of the early ’90s, which played out in the unlit, unregulated corners of the Motor City.
Through the second half of the ’80s, future Majesty Crush drummer Odell Nails III was with Spahn Ranch, the experimental post-punk out - fit he’d founded with Bradley Horowitz and Bob Sterner, the mercurial singer of local band Grief Factory. Open-string alternate guitar tunings and a percussion-heavy drum style (Nails played taped-together heads on his knees) topped with ecstatic choirboy vocals made Spahn Ranch out - liers even within Detroit’s more open-minded alt circles. They were already dabbling with other - worldly ambient textures which foreshadowed ideas that would be fully realized further down the road. The band recorded their 1987 debut album Thickly Settled as a trio before fan and admirer Hobey Echlin, who’d discovered the band as a college music journalist at University of Michigan, was asked by fellow student Horowitz to join on bass. Over the next few years, Spahn Ranch ran its course somewhat organically, recording a cassette-only release and opening shows for SWANS, Psychic TV, Sonic Youth and local heavies Laughing Hyenas, and, finally, experimenting with drum machines. That’s when they invited guest vocalist David Stroughter, a high school classmate of Nails who’d also been a roommate of Echlin’s after college, to a 1988 studio session for an uncharacteristically synth-based track.
As Echlin explained, “The first time we heard David sing, Spahn Ranch had studio time with Mike E. Clark, a friend of Sterner’s who worked with George Clinton. We were calling this ‘acid house’ track “Glass” and the idea was for David to do a back-up vocal. First thing out of his mouth: ‘What would you do if two lions attacked you / gnawing away at your bones?’ We were blown away.” And Nails agreed. “I knew right then and there I wanted to someday be in a band with him,” he said.
Stroughter and Nails were products of Southfield High, in the relatively progressive Detroit suburb of the same name, where, a generation prior, The Who had once performed at a school dance. Alongside Tommy Gardner, a nephew to Diana Ross, Stroughter and Nails were the coolest kids in school. “We formed the genesis of a crew of young Black kids in that area driven to pure joy by all the punk, hardcore, ska, mod, synthpop and post-punk sounds coming out of the US and UK music undergrounds,” Nails said.
Stroughter himself was a product of continental cross-culturalism. His father had met his mother as a US serviceman stationed in Germany. In fact, his dad and a buddy had married a pair of German sisters and relocated to Detroit, eventually settling in Southfield to raise their kids. Stroughter grew up between schools and family in Germany and the Detroit suburb that was home to Motown royalty and some of the city’s Black upper-middle class. He counted Arthur “T-boy” Ross, Diana’s younger brother and co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You,” as a friend and influence.
Echlin had grown up in the conservative Grosse Pointe suburb east of Detroit with a strong counter - culture streak. He attended the same high school as members of Negative Approach and Laughing Hyenas, sneaking out to see seminal shows by Bad Brains and Black Flag as well as local hard - core heroes like Necros and NA, where, more often than not, Nails was in attendance as well. Tellingly, he skipped his senior year homecoming to take his little brothers to see the Misfits’ infamous 1983 Halloween show in Detroit, during which the band basically broke up on stage. By 1990, Spahn Ranch was over and Nails was working in Detroit Public Television as a co-host of an ensemble teen show “Club Connect.” He and Stroughter moved together into a townhouse in Detroit’s architecturally-stunning Indian Village neighborhood, with the inspiration to start a new band. Echlin again signed on as bassist, and after preliminary jams with a technically proficient guitarist they deemed too conventional, they invited local record store clerk Michael Segal to join the fold.
Segal had likewise gone to Southfield High but was a few years older and an art school graduate who was not only an accomplished fine artist, but also the go-to expert at one of the Detroit area’s most important indie record stores, Play It Again Records, also in Southfield.
“Dave thought of Michael Segal—who had never even held a guitar in his life before, basically— because he worked at the tastemaking Play It Again Records, and had more knowledge of indie and alternative music coming out of the UK than anyone else we’d ever met,” Nails recalled. “He was a natural for us. We’d get to the ‘learning the guitar’ part later because, more importantly, Michael had the look and the attitude.”
At Play It Again, Segal had sold Stroughter A.R. Kane’s 1988 album 69 when he and Echlin were roommates. That record, Echlin said, actually became a massive influence. “The idea of, for lack of a better term, soulful noise, Black guys who were like 4AD-adjacent doing this blissedout, dubby, Jesus & Mary Chain thing resonated with us. There were huge bass lines and hooks, massive rhythms but also really delicate songs about relationships.”
Segal showed up to the first practice with a cheap Peavey guitar that had only three strings, tuned in a strange configuration of his own making: D flat, two A’s and a practice amp. It was instantly a perfect match, the final puzzle piece in a band of music obsessives who weren’t exactly musicians in any traditional sense.
Inspired in part by the emptiness of Detroit that surrounded them as the ’80s was spilling into a new decade, the band used their music to build a dreamscape of their own design from what felt at times like pervasive nothingness. Segal’s three-string guitar lines emanating wistful, spare melodies and drones, Nails’ dense, melodic beats and Echlin’s Joy Division-esque parts hammered out on a pawn shop bass formed a foundation for Stroughter’s psycho-sexual fantasy depictions that seethed and purred as if the world was ending in every breath. These were the primal elements that began Majesty Crush and set the tone of maximalist minimalism that would define their brief but prolific career.
The chemistry between the new bandmates was strong enough to outweigh their lack of music theory. Instead of mapping out new tunes as “verse/chorus/bridge,” the first Majesty Crush songs were organized, Echlin recalls laughingly, as “part/break/window.”
Even as the band constructed its solitary new world against Detroit’s backdrop of postindustrial decay, its inspirations had been beaming in from various distances. Everyone had grown up on Detroit radio, first the Motown-rich AM radio of their parents, then in one of the biggest FM markets in the country, with playlists that linked Pink Floyd and Bowie to Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop, and might include 999, Joe Jackson and the Clash alongside more conventional classic rock dinosaurs. Elsewhere on the dial was local legend The Electrifyin’ Mojo, an eccentric and spiritually tuned-in DJ whose overnight shows regularly found him reciting poetry over his own extended edits of Kraftwerk and Jimi Hendrix, segueing from Cybotron’s Detroit techno into the B-52’s, or taking birthday phone calls from Prince. This early radio education gave way to nights spent wrapping tin foil around antennas to catch transmissions of underground taste-making Canadian Broadcasting Company show Brave New Waves or rewatching VHS tapes of MTV’s 120 Minutes. By 1990, the heavy, dreamy UK rock acts of the late ’80s like Spacemen 3 and Jesus & Mary Chain had all seeped into the group’s collective consciousness. There was a shared fascination with labels like Factory and 4AD; Vaughn Oliver’s otherworldly handling of the latter’s Vaseline-lensed art direction became a particular area of fascination, as were the ensuing import labels that filled the Play It Again bins.
In the band’s formative months, Segal would supply tapes of the newest import vinyl—Verve’s Voyager 1 EP, Loop’s Prisma Uber Europa 12˝, Slowdive’s first singles compiled—that became a soundtrack for long, bleak drives to practice, while a collective love of Public Enemy and the early ’90s hip-hop and UK dance music they’d hear at clubs inspired a broader sense of what made a great song.
Their influences may have originated an ocean away, but their ambitions came from likeminded artistry close to home as well. Livonia, Michigan’s similarly-insular His Name Is Alive had been signed to 4AD in 1989, creating a single degree of separation between Majesty Crush and what was arguably their dream label. “We’d sent 4AD tapes of Spahn Ranch, and didn’t hear back, but it was kind of assuring that a ‘local’ band was on 4AD,” Echlin said. At the same time, an early show opening for His Name Is Alive revealed a volatile, tense dynamic that set Majesty Crush apart: Echlin and Stroughter got into a full-on fistfight backstage after the gig. The set foreshadowed the altercation with tense, drifting numbers—one song was called “Shut Up!” with Stroughter stalking the stage between bursts of vocals.
More material came together throughout 1990, the earliest led by Segal’s three-stringed guitar lines and a series of increasingly succinct jams. “Cicciolina” began, for Echlin’s part, as a very loose attempt at co-opting the swooping Gothic bassline of the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” though it would take on a far more driving, pronouncedly lusty character. Stroughter found a perfect muse in the Italian pornstar who was also a politician and in the middle of a messy divorce from pop artist Jeff Koons: a perfect pop culture trifecta. “Cicciolina is a star, sitting naked in my car,” Stroughter sang as Segal made his way up and down the neck of his guitar in a pendulous, perfect melody. Another three-string gem, “Feigned Sleep” was powered by a gentle but oddly-time bassline and Nails’ cavernous rhythm, with Segal following Stroughter’s intimate lyrics like an annotated dream: “Maybe we can go crazy, maybe we can go nuts.”
By now, Nails was playing a proper sit-down Pearl drum kit and Echlin had upgraded to a Rickenbacker 3001 bass switched lefty and played through a chorus pedal. As shoegaze went, Majesty Crush had an uncharacteristically well-developed rhythm section from Spahn Ranch, but Segal, most importantly for the evolving band’s sound, was now playing a six-string—a Stratocaster no less, with a simple but effective pedal ensemble that also defied shoegaze expectations: Boss Delay, Boss Tremolo and RAT distortion. That was it. No massive pedal board, just the essentials.
It’s telling that as the band was finding its simple yet multifaceted sound—post-punk, unashamed dream-pop and, most notably, a frontman-led take on shoegaze—that their first shows could not have been more diverse: opening for the languid Mazzy Star in August of 1991, followed within weeks by an in-store at Play It Again Records supporting local shoegaze kids Thirsty Forest Animals, and then opening for scuzz rock royalty Royal Trux in Ann Arbor at the Heidelberg, a venue in the upstairs of a German restaurant hosting the hardest and most extreme touring acts. This chimeric ability to get in front of various audiences and succeed, perhaps as much as a novelty as for their originality, speaks to the band’s Venn diagram presence, straddling scenes of lingering post-punk, burgeoning grunge, and UK alt-rock radio darlings making their first trips to the States.
By early ’91, Majesty Crush was a live band capable of a deep, noisy beauty fronted by Stroughter’s confrontational charisma and what was now a trademark stage move: thrusting his mic in front of Segal’s amp to create a swirling second guitar sound between verses. The band seemed to be everywhere at once, appearing as jagged pop eccentrics gigging with friends in more aggressive acts like Laughing Hyenas and WIG, or being tapped to open for touring bands like Chapterhouse, Jesus Jones, fIREHOSE, the Soup Dragons and Julian Cope. This randomseeming track record created an unlikely kinship with Detroit bands reaching their own headliner statuses, from country punkers Goober and the Peas to Madchester-by-way-of-the-Midwest group Charm Farm. At the same time, the Laughing Hyenas rhythm section had broken off to form the even noisier Mule—in that same Indian Village basement, creating what proved to be a career-spanning connection. The lack of any single scene led to such strange bedfellows. “That’s just how Detroit rolled in the early ’90s,” Nails explained. “There wasn’t enough national buzz on Detroit bands at the time for anyone to cop any attitude—everybody just wanted to do whatever it took to fill a room and get more asses in the proverbial seats. So if that meant playing a gig with bands outside the sweet spot of your individual taste, then so be it.”
Thirsty Forest Animals, who by now were college kids in Chicago, helped Majesty Crush to book some of its first out-of-town gigs—one opening slot at a time—at clubs like Exit and Metro, in support of Smashing Pumpkins-adjacent acts like Catherine, whose debut single was released in 1991.
Detractors saw the band’s prime gigs and exposure as a product of Echlin’s bylines as a music journalist for various Detroit alt-weeklies. Segal’s High Fidelity-esque role as the local record store dude certainly didn’t hurt, as his boss, Alan Kovan, included the band in his recommendations to customers and created a direct line to touring import bands hosting in-stores. Stroughter’s outsized presence after gigs made him an enigma, the hard-partying frontman in a wetsuit with a “Majesty Crush, Detroit” stencil (based on “Pink Floyd, London’’ from “Live at Pompeii”) who could converse in perfect German with Blixa Bargeld backstage at an Einstürzende Neubauten gig, then lead the charge to an after-party. Even Nails’ credibility from Spahn Ranch and his popularity as a scene OG certainly created an enhanced visibility for the band that connected with area promoters wanting to work with familiar faces.
If Majesty Crush was more successful, they were also arguably more original-sounding than their technically advanced contemporaries who were better at adapting to the alt-radio trends. Majesty Crush’s uniqueness may’ve been as much by default as design, but it pushed them to prove themselves that much harder.
Results came in early ’92 with the release of the band’s debut 7˝, “Sunny Pie” b/w “Cicciolina.” It was pressed in an edition of 500 copies on their own label, Vulva, named after a fictional all-Black female metal band dreamt up in a fanzine Segal had made. Recorded with Mike E. Clark—the same guy who recorded Stroughter’s Spahn Ranch vocal five years before—it was a perfunctory statement of the band’s growth and promise, with a sound that maxed out their imaginative, less-is-more bedroom set-up with hooks, flourishes and earworms.
On “Sunny Pie,” Segal had written a not-quite riff that gently came to life, inspiring a call and response with Echlin’s spirally-melodic bassline. Echlin described the song’s inspiration as an “attempt at combining the blissed-out buoyancy of Cocteau Twins’ ‘Iceblink Luck’ with the rubbery, looping quality of EPMD’s ‘So Wat Cha Sayin’.”
The result was something obviously neither, but instead a low-rent electric mediation on a guitar that sounded like sunlight reflecting off of ice at the height of winter, before it unexpectedly shattered into sputtering rhythms, with Nails tastefully adding snapping fills that peppered the subtle change between “part” and “break.” And then there were the lyrics…
“You worked in an X-rated bookstore,” Stroughter began in an elevated whisper. “I was a little surprised when I came for entertainment, that you were in the booth / waiting for my payment.”
A dynamic frontman with no instrument to tie him down, Stroughter had no interest in whimpering vague poetry from behind walls of reverb. His breathy-but-powerful vocals were speckled with flashes of soul, and his oversexed lyrics set him dramatically apart from an ocean of shoegaze singers mumbling about stars and shadows. From the very beginning, the characters of his songs were obsessives and fringe dwellers, and he depicted them as the stars of proudly subversive— or outright fucked-up—narratives. After all, “Sunny Pie” told the story of a protagonist falling in love with the clerk at an adult book store, finally finding true happiness from letting her dress him in her lingerie. “Even though I’d pout / those simple words you’d say / Sunny Pie.” The song ended on a drawn-out and more blunt riff with Stroughter talking over the insistent rhythm, just awakened from a dream—maybe a delusion: “For so long, I didn’t know where feelings came from / I didn’t know where happiness came from” he sang on the bridge, even if the band didn’t know to call it that yet.
“Cicciolina” was a more straightforward recording of what was by now a live highlight, with Stroughter again at his sexy beast best; a good amount of his singing was suggestive “Unnnnh”’s and a final, ominous acapella, “I’d die for you.” All 500 copies were hand-painted and featured a seahorse graphic with a power cord tail (Segal’s work, of course). Rounds of local press and public radio interest ensued, even a mention in Details magazine.
The band’s second single came from their unlikely popularity in the harder climes of the local scene. John Davies, then of local heavies Phünhögg, recorded the single with local hardcore producer Tim Pak. The result was like an evil twin of “Sunny Pie.” “Grow” was a walloping post-punk churner with Stooges guitar and Stroughter vowing to “get down on my four legs” for his partner, while “Purr” began as a somber shoegaze loomer, then ascended into a soaring rant: “I get the feeling you wanna come home with me / I get the feeling that you want to fucking poison my tea.”
The cover art was equally jarring: a black-andwhite photo of a friend of the band smiling, slightly blurred and topless, in front of one of Detroit’s ubiquitous abandoned buildings. Next to the Davies Productions logo: “VIOLENCE. NOISE. SEX. EXCITEMENT.” Stoughter was credited for “The Voices” and the words “I won’t beg anymore” hung at the top of the back cover as an ominous masthead.
“Grow” would be re-recorded later as a standout album cut while “Purr” was relegated to an interstitial, although the record as a whole encapsulated the dichotomous nature of the band’s entire creative oeuvre: Softness at odds with intensity, perversion in a power struggle with wistful tenderness, unmitigated horniness being expressed through some of the prettiest dream pop riffs Detroit ever produced, in a way that confused as much as it conveyed their evolving presence to a growing listenership.
By the spring of 1992, the band was at a creative peak, playing shows more and more to their own audience, culminating in a return to the studio with producer Mike E. Clark, who by now was best known as the man behind Insane Clown Posse’s beats. Working in a side-room of Tempermill Studios in Ferndale, Michigan, the result was the five-track Fan EP, once more on Vulva records and financed by Stroughter’s supportive parents.
Fan may have recycled the imagery of the Purr 7˝, but its songs were varied, different, even intimate. The single version of “Sunny Pie” made its CD debut, but the rest of the EP broke new territory, stylistically and even, in the title track’s case, historically, as “No. 1 Fan” made the playlist at alternative radio station 89X, broadcasting just across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario.
The band had graduated from the supportive local Homeboy Show, where DJ and fan Kellie Brown gave them late night airplay, to playing live on the radio at weekend 89X club nights at Detroit venues, all the way to regular rotation.
It was easy to hear why. “No. 1 Fan”’s mid-tempo pulse and woozy melodies made perfect sense for 89X, even though the deceptively light fuzz-pop single was about a stalker’s deadly obsession. The lyrics of “No. 1 Fan” concerned John Hinckley Jr.’s obsessive crush on Jodie Foster, which culminated in his 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, meant to win the actress’s attention. In 1992, a Red Hot Chili Peppers song about shooting heroin under a bridge, or a Jane’s Addiction cut advocating for shoplifting were common 89X fare. But an unknown Detroit band had come through with a flushed-face slow-burner with the refrain “I’d kill the president / for your love” that may have been the most subversive song on the dial that year.
The rest of Fan was just as strong. There was the uncharacteristically melancholy straightforwardness of “Worri,” Stroughter at his least affected: melancholy, anxious, melodic, vulnerable. “Horse” was wrought and roving, a nearly seven-minute song about watching friends succumb to addiction. It began with a restrained, tense verse: “There’s a cherub at the door / He seems to come for a little more / than just one look at you / There’s a rosy pallor that gives away a little more, than just your health…”, before bursting into Sonic Youth levels of noise and psychedelic vapor trails like the rush of a high coming down. Replete with a singalong chorus, “Penny For Love” was easily the poppiest thing the band ever came up with, despite being born of bleak circumstances. The story goes that Stroughter had been arrested as a suspect for an armed robbery in his neighborhood, and spent the weekend in jail before being cleared. At the first practice after his release, instead of penning an antipolice rager, he and the band wrote their perkiest, most straightforwardly melodic song— with, as was now Stroughter’s trademark, disturbingly impassioned lyrics:
“I’m saving all of my money, I’m saving my pennies, too / I’m saving all up for honey, cuz honey tastes so good / I’m giving all of my body, sometimes for less than a penny too / It’s not always for money, sometimes it feels so good.”
The lost, lovesick soul selling his body to be able to afford the services of a prostitute he’s in love with just added another layer of bizarre wonder to Stroughter’s Barrett-by-way-of-Prince lyrical capabilities.
By the end of ’92, Majesty Crush was filling out paperwork for becoming the proverbial Next Big Thing. The post-Nirvana feeding frenzy was on, and with a strong local draw of their own adding to an already impressive resume of stages shared with bigger acts bolstered by alt-radio airplay, Majesty Crush was ripe for the taking. While their ideal label might have been an indie superpower like 4AD or Creation, it was Elektra subsidiary Dali/ Chameleon that calling, with a free-range roster that included Lucinda Williams, the Queens of the Stone Age precursor band Kyuss and quasi-kindred UK shoegazers Bleach. A&R man Mark Gartenberg saw the band had checked all the boxes that an indie band-that-could could: a knack for pop accessibility plus a character-rich angularity that still appealed to the hipsters and the heads: Proof of concept at the retail and radio level.
With a modest production budget, the band made what proved to be their first and final proper studio album in the winter of ’92. They took a leap of faith in working with producers Michael and Andrew Nehra, brothers who had leveraged a major label experience with their late-‘80s band Second Self into building a vintage studio in downtown Detroit’s Capitol Park, steps away from Echlin’s loft apartment, which had served as the rehearsal space where “No. 1 Fan” was written. The White Room studio was anchored by a 24-track analog board that once belonged to the Doobie Brothers and was outfitted with Neve compressors and Telefunken mics.
Utilizing vintage gear and a more labored, nuanced multi-track recording approach, the band and the Nehras hoped, would elevate and expand Majesty Crush’s sound—which had outgrown shoegaze with more rhythmically ambitious songs—to a sound more timeless than timely. The results were hard won but substantial as the band, more accustomed to free-wheeling one-take overnight sessions with Mike E. Clark, were now tracking drum sounds to a click track at ten in the morning, with enough tracks for overdubs and more instruments. The first track, “Boyfriend,” had been recorded to test these new waters, but with its rushing intro and middle sections and confidently swaggering verses about a suitor going to any length to charm a woman and dispatch her boyfriend, it was the band’s most accomplished and best-sounding track to date. Leslie keyboard stabs, backing vocals and a perfect lead guitar line from Segal seemed to comment on Stroughter’s verses, alternately sweet (“I’m gonna jump I’m gonna dance I’m gonna jig til you smile”) and sadistic (“feed his head to the seals / and his tail to the whales”). It even made the case that he’d be a superior boyfriend for better anticipating her soup choices: “He’ll bring you minestrone / when you want egg drop.”
With more tracks, time and gear, “Cicciolina” was re-envisioned as a hard-charging banger far more dynamic than the 7˝ version, but it was an expansive reworking of an early three-string song, “Feigned Sleep,” that really paid off, as Stroughter’s voice swam through twinkly music box guitars and sinewy runs from Segal over Nails’ whale call waves of percussion-driven sweetness as he swooned about love, half-asleep. And “Horse,” which became the album closer, was a revelation with its multi-tracked backing vocal harmonies that built to a new, agonized outro that could just as easily be about suffering withdrawals that the album itself was ending.
For the album’s more straight-ahead tracks, the band returned to Tempermill, where they’d recorded with Mike E. Clark, and enlisted studio owner Dave Feeny. The result was more perfunctory recordings of tightly-concocted pop songs with trademark dark underpinnings. “Uma,” the album’s second track, was pop perfection, an uber-poppy ‘60s bass hook with Segal filling in the blanks with back-and-forth chords as Stroughter belted an ode to Uma Thurman. A punchier “No. 1 Fan” followed, tastefully fleshing-out the EP version to a higher fidelity that benefited from a deeper mix and a more visceral vocal take. “Brand” was Stroughter at his most honest, a lamentation about waking up “with my favorite brand”—of alcohol, tobacco, etc.—and falling asleep with the same, his vocal line staggering down a descending bass line before Nails signaled a tribal dirge of a breakdown that tinged the song’s pessimism with regret: “Wake up with a bottle / wake up with a girl / In my hand / In my hand.”
“Seles” found Stroughter turning his fixated lens on vocally expressive tennis star Monica Seles. “Tennis girl, grunts and grinds,” he began, before imagining a romance that peaked with a freefalling breakdown that turns “Roland Garros” —home of the French Open—into a harmonized sing-along. “Grow” was slowed from its 7˝ version to a more confident, lunging pace with Nails’ stopstart drums creating a more compelling cadence for Stroughter’s lusty back and forth.
“Penny for Love,” still a perfect pop song, was fuller sounding with a heightened production, especially in its rhythm section. Interludes “Purr,” “Pretty Head,” and “Skin,” inspired by My Bloody Valentine’s between-song sonics on Loveless, helped the band embrace the LP format with transitions and palate cleansers. The Love 15 title referred again to tennis and its peculiar scoring nomenclature.
Also in the budget was mixing at Butch Vig’s Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, by engineer Doug Olson, where Vig himself interrupted one morning session to preview his DAT tape of the just-finished Siamese Dream on the studio monitors. Mastering was done by Howie Weinberg, who was by now the alt-rock go-to for his resume that included Nevermind, Daydream Nation, Fear of a Black Planet, and many other unfathomably important records. Majesty Crush seemed poised for greatness. A mini-tour of dates supporting the UK’s Cranes followed. Nails remembers a performance opening an 89x radio festival in support of Peter Murphy that signaled the band’s emergence out of “local band” status. “We were playing at Chene Park, this riverfront amphitheater in Detroit, in front of thousands of people and realizing something is really happening with this. Like my parents should be here to see this! And you can always monitor how you’re doing by how certain venue staff and sound people treat you. We went from banging on the back door for them to let us load in with no soundcheck to ‘How can we help you? Anything you guys need?’ That’s when we knew things had changed perception-wise.”
Love 15 was released September 28, 1993, a beautiful swirl of frustrated desire and contradictory impulses that perfectly summarized Majesty Crush at the height of their powers. Local press outlets ran expectant features and enthusiastic cover stories. “Boyfriend” was added to 89X and other alt-rock stations like WCBR outside of Chicago, with solid college radio support throughout the country. Conference showcases that year included SXSW, CMJ and New Music Seminar, at the last of which Stroughter returned from a 2 AM set by kindred spirits (and future tour mates) Verve (pre-“The”) after drinking cooking sherry with Richard Ashcroft. Wide-eyed, he proclaimed the show “Rod Stewart meets God.” The future didn’t just seem, it was bright.
If only briefly. The band was mid-tour in New York a month later, playing a show at Brownie’s in the East Village the night Nirvana performed their MTV Unplugged. Also on the bill were Ween side-project Moistboys. The mostly industry crowd left before Majesty Crush’s set to catch the Nirvana taping uptown, a harsh lesson in the fickle nature of the major label world. And not the last. The next day, Majesty Crush’s A&R guy announced that Elektra had dissolved its partnership with Dali/Chameleon, leaving the label—which had been financed by Daniel Pritzker, founder of the band Sonia Dada and an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune—to fold. Kyuss was picked up by Elektra. Majesty Crush was not. The band pulled their van up to the label’s offices and were offered all the promo materials and advance CDs they could carry by outgoing staff—as well as a two-inch master tape of Love 15. “We went from label discussions about having Moby remix ‘Cicciolina’ to being homeless in the space of a week,” Nails recalled. Then there was the bum deal with a former manager of New York’s Quicksand, who stopped returning calls after promising a European tour that never materialized. The band spent December ’93 on a rough tour of the Midwest with the Quad Cities’ Tripmaster Monkey, concluding with an overnight drive to get home for Christmas Eve. “We felt more relieved than accomplished,” Echlin said. The band soldiered on through the first half of ’94, playing shows to dedicated fan bases in Lansing, Chicago, Detroit and Toledo. After a show at a Midwestern college opening for Belly, Tanya Donnelly told Echlin, “I think everyone in your band needs therapy.”
Live shows kept the band busy, but also gave them a chance to recalibrate their sound as they sprinkled new, harder songs into setlists supporting an album that no longer existed outside of their boxes of promo CDs. In Spring of 1994 they entered the Tempermill with Dave Feeny again, inspired if ungrounded, resulting in the Sans Muscles EP, so named because Echlin, whom Stroughter nicknamed “Muscles” for his weightlifting regimen, would leave the band before its release later that year.
The opener “Space Between Your Moles” made snow angels out of their shoegaze roots, a sauntering almost-waltz that built to a matching finale of falsetto vocal harmonies. The pleasantries ended there. The next song, “Seine,” was relentless and ripping. Echlin’s bass repeated a pounding two-note riff while Stroughter hissed a story of an actress in Paris giving up her career to be a mother, eventually jumping into the Seine River with her infant son. Segal’s guitar ripped up and down the neck as Nails kept a Bonham-sized beat. In the song’s final verse, David reveals the child survived and was in fact him, making his chorus-ending “I loved you mother / but you hardly ever came home” heartbreaking.
Stroughter’s subject matter was familiar, stylized and private, but his singing and lyrics seemed tinged with defeat. “Ghost of Fun,” which closed the EP, was a stylistic throwback, nostalgic for better times now gone.
The EP’s highlight, “If JFA Were Still Together,” however, was the band confronting their reality head-on. Stroughter lamented that a Phoenix punk band, Jodie Foster’s Army (a cheeky “No. 1 Fan” nod) had broken up, dissolving a “scene.” (Incidentally, the band had not, in fact, broken up). “Everybody says those kids are not the same / They just don’t stick together,” he sang, before its chiming chorus: “If JFA were still together / it’d be us against whoever.” Another 1-2 punch of a bassline with ringing guitar and keyboard stabs over Nails drumming like his life and band depended on it, the song concluded with an earnest, sing-along epilogue that seemed more wistful than anthemic.
Echlin said in retrospect that that was the point. “‘JFA’ was like this commentary on what could have been if we hadn’t lost our record deal. We would at least have had a chance.”
By now, Majesty Crush was headquartered in Hamtramck, a city within Detroit, where Stroughter now owned a house, and where P.W. Long of Mule was the upstairs tenant. The bands shared the basement practice space, but by summer, Stroughter was beginning to show signs of fatigue. He’d insisted on recording alternate lyrics for a version of “Penny for Love,” now titled “Windmill Friends,” and would increasingly voice his opinion of a setlist choice by refusing to sing while the band looked at each other and finished the songs as instrumentals.
By July of ’94, Echlin had quit. Sans Muscles was released later that summer and the band replaced Echlin with Craig Thornton, a longtime friend and supporter, on bass and landed a minitour opening for The Verve. By the end of the year, however, things were winding down. Showcases in Detroit and New York for label reps featured several new songs featuring Stroughter on guitar. But the new setlist came at the expense of their back catalog, and it seemed Majesty Crush was more and more Stroughter’s solo project. By ’95 the band had effectively broken up, but not before being named “Best Band” by the Detroit Music Awards, sponsored, ironically, by Echlin’s former employer, Metro Times.
Stroughter re-emerged with a solo project, P.S. I Love You, which debuted on Valentine’s Day 1996—with Echlin on drums. Stroughter seized the occasion for a posthumous release of Majesty Crush’s last incarnation’s live set, recorded during their showcase at Ferndale’s Magic Bag Theater a year prior. Featuring all new songs written after Echlin’s departure, its highlight was a song as telling as it was good: “Until I See You Again.”
Stroughter would continue as P.S. I Love You, penning the Stone Roses-namechecking and very anti-Oasis “Where the Fuck is Kevin Shields?” on 1999’s Liberty or Death album and releasing two more full-length CDs through the early 2000s, including one featuring Will Carruthers of Spacemen 3.
Nails played with Lansing band Astrobrite, led by recent Arizona transplant Scott Cortez, who also founded the ethereal loveliescrushing. Following his move to New York for law school and a career in music law, Nails also collaborated with both Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins and fellow ex-Michigan shoegaze alumni band Mahogany. Segal continued his art and graphic design career, notably designing the first record covers for Ann Arbor’s Ghostly International, an electronic music label run by and featuring DJs and artists who had grown up listening to Majesty Crush. Echlin followed a journalism career to New York and a yoga teaching career to Los Angeles.
By 2007, Stroughter had also landed in LA, having worked as an MTV News correspondent in Detroit, interviewing, among others, Liam Gallagher. He’d been diagnosed bi-polar schizophrenic at age 27, and though he was now making a living flipping cars he’d buy at auctions, such a nomadic existence limited his access to medication and professional help. On January 18, 2017, he passed as a result of a tragic police shooting. David Darnell Stroughter was 50.
The impact of Stroughter’s death was concussive and lingering. No one in the band had spoken to him in 10 years. A hand-written letter to his sister Stephanie, in which Stroughter asked her to be the custodian of his music, took on a bizarre and timely relevance over the course of a weekend in early 2019. It started with Dennis White, an early Majesty Crush supporter formerly of Charm Farm and now a Grammy-winning producer and remixer in LA, who asked Echlin if the surviving band members had their masters and if they’d thought about a re-release. The next day, Stephanie checked in with Echlin with her own idea to draft a message to Jack White’s Third Man Records in Detroit, inquiring about a Majesty Crush re-release. Then the next day, Echlin received a DM from a housewife in Duluth, Minnesota, with the subject line: “I think I have your master tapes” and a picture of the Smart Studios boxes Stroughter had taken from the Dali offices in New York fourteen years prior. He had left them with a roommate in LA in a closet, who, the message explained, had also recently passed, prompting his belongings—including the Love 15 masters—to be forwarded to his brother who was the Duluth woman’s husband. That Monday, Rich Hansen, a co-promoter of a Lansing Majesty Crush show back in the day, reached out to the surviving bandmates with an idea: Third Man Records had greenlit Hansen’s idea to compile Detroit area shoegaze and space rock bands. Majesty Crush topped the list. The question of the master tapes had been answered, although they were on an antiquated two-inch tape format from the early ’90s. Then, in a stroke of luck too perfect to ignore, Third Man announced it was opening its own mastering studio, complete with a two-inch tape machine. The engineer? Warren Defever, the man behind His Name is Alive, the band Majesty Crush played one of its earliest shows with. It all seemed, in its bittersweet way, fated.
“No. 1 Fan” led off Third Man’s 2020 Southeast of Saturn compilation, alongside tracks by Thirsty Forest Animals, Spectacle and Asha Vida, all of whom Majesty Crush helped promote and played with. The double LP also compiled Michigan bands they didn’t cross paths with, including Windy & Carl, Glider, Miss Bliss and Füxa. In fact, Southeast of Saturn confirmed that Majesty Crush had arguably helped launch a scene it remained a band apart from, with the fuzzy hooks of their entry on the comp standing in stark contrast to the droning zones and glacial spacing of the groups that followed shortly afterwards.
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When I was growing up in Michigan during the ’90s, Majesty Crush seemed like a lot of things that they weren’t. My friends and I listened to 89X religiously throughout our school years, catching a strong signal even 35 miles west of Detroit in the semi-rural parts of Ypsilanti where we lived. I remember hearing Majesty Crush on the radio, their name back-announced or connected to some of the bigger shows they played. This alone made them seem like they were a famous band already off in some untouchable stratosphere somewhere, probably hanging out with other rockstars on tour buses or maybe filming interviews for European television where they gave only snide, sarcastic answers for no detectable reason. At that point in both my teenage worldview and the pre-Internet landscape, any band with a song on the radio and people willing to pay money to see them play were all of the same echelon in my mind. Because they were based in Michigan, Majesty Crush seemed one of several configurations of older people who ran in circles not too far from me geographically, but who were doing things I’d never do and were cooler than I’d ever be.
By the time I graduated high school in 1994, left my parent’s house, and started playing shows with bands of my own, those early subconscious impressions had faded and now Majesty Crush seemed like they were another of the groups I’d begun crossing paths with in Detroit. In my memory, I’d seen them play several times at Zoot’s, a Victorian townhouse turned coffee shop/live venue in the city’s Cass Corridor that served as the metro area’s cultural core for independent music from about 1994 until 1998, and where bands like Blonde Redhead and Sleater-Kinney played some of their first Detroit shows. In my research for this piece, however, I was shocked to learn that while Stroughter lived there at some point and the band practiced there on occasion, Majesty Crush never actually played at Zoot’s and preceded that entire scene by a few years. Had I seen them open for someone and not realized it at the time? Or was their logo on a t-shirt still commonplace enough to make it feel like they were playing every weekend? Even though Majesty Crush had wound down by the time I showed up in earnest, their name still hung in the atmosphere and their presence loomed. It seemed like I should have seen them at least a dozen times, even if the reality was that it never happened once.
So many years removed from those times, it becomes easier to parse out what Majesty Crush was apart from the noisy buzzing of what they seemed like they were or the excited glow of what they could have been. They existed in a state of perpetual otherness fueled by contradictions and volatility, but with an inherent sweetness that showed through in even the most depraved lyrics or near-implosion. For a band so between scenes who struggled to find their place every step of the way, it’s a series of minor miracles that their parts, breaks, and windows congealed into songs, that those twisted and sublime songs made it onto stages and into studios, that decades later a long-forgotten box of master tapes found its way home, or that any of it happened at all. Nothing illuminates this more than the music itself. If anything, these songs haven’t so much aged as ripened: crackling with undiluted lust and obsession, but from a place so pure they read as more naive than sinister, carrying a bizarre innocence even as Stroughter sings of mutilating boyfriends and plotting assassinations. Also clearer now is the palpable grasp for understanding that silently underscores everything—a sense that the band is fully aware they’re swimming treacherous waters, but are doing so in hopes of finding shores of belonging or connection. For a short, glimmering window, Majesty Crush exploded euphorically outward from pockets of relative isolation. They created a world partitioned by confused beauty and private joys, but went to great lengths to remind us that the doors were always wide open and everyone was invited in.
-Fred Thomas, 2023
