The summer of 1987 saw The Pleasures Pale riding a wave of creativity. Original drummer Tim Payton Earick had returned to the band after Jeff Keating's departure in May. Propelled by their updated sound and growing number of compositions, singer Jeffrey Bright, guitarist Mitchell Swann, bassist Luis Lerma and now drummer Earick set out to add full time players on keys and second guitar. Lerma's brother Terry Lerma and his friend Eric Olt were lined up respectively to fill the new seats.

To document their current material and provide the two new players with homework, the band, now renting a rehearsal space at a warehouse on Dayton's East Third Street, captured a set of instrumental recordings on cassette tape. Though these quick-and-dirty demos were never fully completed with keyboard and second guitar, Bright did overdub vocals and one organ part did make it to tape. The band split only two months later and the masters have languished for nearly 30 years — until now.

Far from sonically pristine, but highlighted by rousing performances, the Third Street Sessions offer a wide, clear window into The Pleasures Pale at their peak, confident and pushing toward an exciting, more expansive sound with evermore complex and challenging lyrical themes.

From these Third Street Sessions, “Half Bad” — the collection’s titular piece — along with “What Will Never Be Sung” were the first to be tidied up for Bandcamp release (December 2018).

Now, to follow, are two songs handily demonstrating the Pale’s then-surging swagger, both brimming with confidence, brash attitude and savage urgency — “Not Fey” and its sidekick in identity roulette, “I Became a Teenage Hot Rod.”

Where “Half Bad” / “What Will Never Be Sung” relied on the band’s established motif of rueful, poetical sensitivity — both written and developed in 1986, over a year prior — the “Not Fey” / “Teenage Hot Rod” pairing can likely be seen as a effort, or at least a desire, by singer Jeffrey Bright and the collective to move beyond, or in some way subversively parallel to, any twee, limp-wristed connotations that may have been (and surely were) accumulating around the band at the time — a product of Bright’s lyric themes, eccentric appearance and stage mannerisms. While Dayton did have a fairly vibrant gay underground in the 1970s and 1980s, any slight, young adult male flaunting an effeminate style on the city’s streets after dark, and especially one throwing shade on established norms of masculinity from a rock music pulpit, could count on being a target of violence verbal and, if he wasn’t situationally aware, physical.

With this subcurrent of murky, alignment-seeking sexual association in play, what makes “Not Fey” / “Teenage Hot Rod” stand out is their combined use of an atypical-for-the-time musical approach. Bright and bassist Luis Lerma both were avid fans of mid-century American cinema, in particular the “JD” films of the 1950s, such as “Rebel without a Cause,” “Blackboard Jungle,” and in particular “The Wild One,” the 1954 vehicle that catapulted Marlon Brandon to icon status, and that has to a great degree informed all American (and British?) rebel culture since. In these overwrought spectacles, juvenile deliquents male, female and decidedly undecided exercise their confusions in tense, life-or-death melodrama while the middle-world of conformity crumbles around them, collapsing on false pillars. These films were inhabited with characters oscillating between frenzied intensity and fragile tenderness. And, pre-dating peak rock and roll, the musical scores were, on the whole, taught, brassy jazz, blaring, jarring, at times swinging, at times reflective, and effectively constructed to twist adult nerves into an ever tightening knot while simultaneously imbuing the films’ young stars with tragic glamour.

Opening with guitarist Swann’s four-alarm, 12-string guitar chords and the wail of vintage sirens, “Not Fey” swings hard for nearly four minutes astride Lerma’s killer bass figure and roughed-up tone. Earick’s scrambling drums keep an edgy presence, and Louie’s brother Terry punctuates the choruses with a memorable call-and-response phrase on Vox organ. (The one organ part that did make it to tape that summer.) And, while the meaning in Bright’s lyrics and delivery remain as elusive today as they were in the summer of 1987, it’s not difficult to picture a kind of identity mash-up gone tragic, a theater of angst where the tortured protagonist’s every impulse is amplified to the breaking point, where a crisis of personality is in desperate need of resolution — and ultimately, where a meager “paper cup” is sufficient to drown a lost, wobbling soul.

Then listen without break as the band launches headlong into the equally exigent “I Became a Teenage Hot Rod,” Bright’s small-town-Ohio, coming-of-age confessional. Here, Earick’s wild, syncopated drumming provides a platform for Lerma’s evocative bass work — fully infused with hopped-up, JD-beatnik flavor and in-your-face raspy tone. Swann’s swift, relentless playing in the verses and discordant jazz chording in the choruses, again on 12-string electric, drives the song in a headlong rush to a metaphorical finish line. With its horn flourishes and buzzing synth, “Teenage Hot Rod” makes for a humorous and slyly triumphant drag-strip drama, featuring the prototypical 90-pound weakling here turned greaser versus the quarterback-lawyer-to-be.

“Forget cheerleaders and their bras.” Forget the uptight world. “I gotta have something, gotta have it now…” After all, there’s always something to rebel against.

Pull on your boots. Don the jacket. And keep an eye on the asphalt horizon for more newly revived and high revving material from The Pleasures Pale's 1987 Third Street Sessions.