Skooshny: The LA Power Pop Trio Who Were "Too Late for the Byrds, Too Early for R.E.M."

There's a particular kind of band that haunts the margins of power pop history. Not the ones who got screwed by a major label after one brilliant album, and not the ones who were rediscovered on a blog in 2008 and duly canonized. The ones who were never really discovered at all, who recorded on borrowed time in borrowed studios, who split up just as the world was about to catch up, and whose records became worth more than they ever earned from making them. Skooshny are that band.

If you already know the name, you probably found them through the Minus Zero compilation that Bill Forsyth released in 1991, after learning that Skooshny's self-released 1978 EP was fetching collector prices across Europe. That comp gathered seventeen tracks of jangly, melodic, off-kilter folk-pop recorded between 1971 and 1981 by three LA misfits who never played a single live show. It was one of those records that didn't sell in huge numbers but changed the taste of everyone who heard it. Goldmine called them "pure and untouched." Bomp! had already compared songwriter Mark Breyer to "a young, fragile Brian Wilson" and the band's sound to "a folkier, more delicate Big Star."

Now Think Like A Key Music is giving that collection the treatment it deserves. The Recordings 1971–1981 (TLAK1239), due June 5, 2026, presents all seventeen original tracks newly remastered by Prof. Stoned, plus four bonus demos appearing on CD for the first time: early versions of "Malibu," "Masking The Moon," and "Dessert For Two," along with "One Wrong Move," a surviving basement recording from 1972 that captures the very first time Mark Breyer sang with a band on tape.

Three Guys, No Car, No Gigs

The basics: Mark Breyer (vocals, 12-string guitar), Bruce Wagner (guitars), and David Winogrond (drums) formed in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, growing out of a Chicago band called Brevity. Breyer and Winogrond had migrated west; Wagner was found via a music store bulletin board and showed up for a session in 1975 that turned into a permanent arrangement. None of them owned a car. In LA. In the '70s.

They never rehearsed in any traditional sense. Sessions were spontaneous, spread across basements, borrowed studios, and eventually the backyard four-track of a fellow recording student named Michael Penn, years before his own career took off. Penn played on several later tracks, contributing everything from Chamberlin to bosun's whistle. The approach was instinctive, the budgets nonexistent, and the results, as with the best power pop, sound effortless in a way that only comes from real craft.

David Winogrond started his own label, Alien Records, to put the music out. A four-song EP in 1978 and a single in 1979, both met with critical adoration and near-total commercial silence. The biggest obstacle, as Bomp!'s Greg Shaw told them, was that they weren't a live band. By 1982, as Breyer put it, the members had been "sidetracked by life." The tapes went into a closet.

"Trish De La Roe"

The lead single from the reissue is the perfect entry point. "Trish De La Roe" saunters out of the speakers like a ghost from a 1973 Laurel Canyon house party that nobody quite remembers attending, but everyone swears was legendary. It's a hazy, acoustic-strummed slice of melancholic folk-rock that feels instantly familiar, dripping with the kind of sun-baked, flared-denim nostalgia that usually takes decades of vinyl dust to accumulate. The vocal delivery has a beautifully world-weary ache to it, spinning a hazy yarn about lost souls and names in the sand over an understated, rootsy arrangement that is perfectly content to let the melody do the heavy lifting.

Recorded in 1975 on 8-track, the track was the very first Skooshny recording to feature Bruce Wagner. The working title was "Tic Douloureux" (a nervous facial tic) before Breyer renamed it after a TV actress who inspired the fantasy. It's exactly the sort of dusty, progressive-tinged reverie you'd hope to unearth on a forgotten B-side from a psych-folk act that almost made it big, leaving you smelling faint traces of patchouli and pondering the whereabouts of your own long-lost right-hand man.

Shiny, Bittersweet, and Real

Mark Breyer passed away in November 2023. His songs, as he once said, were "like diary entries to me." The Recordings 1971–1981 is dedicated to his memory, and it makes a quietly powerful case for a songwriter whose restless melodic instincts deserved a much bigger audience. Skooshny never had to live from their music, and therefore never had to make any compromises. You can hear that in every single song.

Tracklist

1. It Hides More Than It Tells
2. Cakewalk
3. The Ceiling To The Lies
4. Odd Piece In The Puzzle
5. The Only Food In Town
6. The Mood In Me
7. Fever Dreams
8. Trish De La Roe
9. Fool's Gold
10. Crossing Double Lines
11. You Bring Me Magic
12. Dessert For Two
13. Malibu
14. Riga
15. Masking The Moon
16. You Cracked My Code
17. Podmoskovnye Vechera
18. One Wrong Move (Demo) ★
19. Malibu (Demo) ★
20. Masking The Moon (Demo) ★
21. Dessert For Two (Demo) ★

★ Bonus tracks, appearing on CD for the first time.

Main Personnel: Mark Breyer (vocals, 12-string guitar), Bruce Wagner (guitars), David Winogrond (drums).

Catalog: TLAK1239 · Compilation produced by Roger Houdaille & David Winogrond · Remastered by Prof. Stoned

The Recordings 1971–1981 is available June 5, 2026 from Think Like A Key Music and all streaming platforms. The complete Brevity recordings, Home Is Where Your Dog Is, are also available on TLAK.