Paul B. Cutler

A longtime figure on the underground music scene in Los Angeles, Paul B. Cutler spent decades as a musician, songwriter, and producer before he belatedly launched his solo career in 2023. As a guitarist, his skills have been adaptable to hard-edged punk, proto-goth death rock, and one of college rock's most memorable guitar bands (the Dream Syndicate,) and as a producer, he's also shown he's fluent in psychedelia, roots music, and garage rock. Nearly all of these influences were audible in some way on Cutler's ambitious and stylistically diverse solo debut, 2023's Les Fleurs. Paul B. Cutler's musical career began in Arizona, where he had developed a passion for avant-garde music and art in his teens. He was won over to the energy and emotions of punk rock, and in 1977 he co-founded the Consumers, Phoenix, Arizona's first punk band. Their attempts to make their way into the city's rock clubs were met with confusion and anger, and they moved to Los Angeles in 1978 with the hope of finding a more receptive audience. The night before they left for L.A., they recorded 11 songs at a small Phoenix studio where a friend worked, and with the tapes under their arms, they looked for bookings in California. The Consumers fared better in California than in Arizona, but while Cutler made friends in the Los Angeles Free Music Society and the experimental group B People, their confrontational sound still proved to be a tough sell, and by the end of 1978, the Consumers broke up after guitarist Greg Jones moved back to Phoenix. Their Phoenix recordings were belatedly issued in 1995 on the album All My Friends Are Dead. After the breakup of the Consumers, Cutler opted to stay in Los Angeles, and in 1979 he co-founded .45 Grave, a band whose dark "death rock" sound anticipated the goth movement by several years. Featuring vocalist Dinah Cancer, .45 Grave would release a single (1981's Black Cross) and two albums (1983's studio set Sleep in Safety and the 1989 live disc Only the Good Die Young) during Cutler's tenure with the group, which ended in 1990. Cutler would also produce .45 Grave's recordings, and on the side, he and drummer Don Bolles (a former member of the Germs) performed in the jokey theatrical band Vox Pop, issuing a pair of singles in 1980 and 1982. Cutler would also produce and play bass on recordings by his friends B People, and in 1982, he would engineer the debut EP by the Dream Syndicate. Cutler would also produce Green on Red's 1985 breakthrough album Gas Food Lodging, as well as The Lost Weekend, which Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate and Dan Stuart of Green on Red cut together under the group name Danny & Dusty. Cutler's work with Wynn helped him land the spot as the Dream Syndicate's lead guitar player after the departure of founding guitarist Karl Precoda. Cutler would play on 1986's Out of the Grey (which he also co-produced) and 1988's Ghost Stories, as well as the incendiary 1898 concert disc Live at Raji's, before the Dream Syndicate broke up. Cutler primarily devoted himself to studio work after the Dream Syndicate folded, producing and engineering sessions for garage rockers the Droogs, cow-punk outfit Naked Prey, psychedelic revivalists Plasticland, and Greek retro-rockers the Last Drive, among others. He also performed with French experimental musician Jean-Pierre Bedoyan in his ensemble International Metal Supply. In the 2000s, Cutler eased back on his career in music, focusing on working in graphic design. He became an art director for Goldenvoice, the West Coast indie-leaning concert production company who created the annual Coachella Festival; Cutler devised the distinctive design of their annual posters and promotional materials. Cutler still wrote and recorded music in his spare time, and in 2023, he released his first-ever solo album, Les Fleurs, through In the Red Records. Drawn from sessions recorded over the space of nine years, Les Fleurs was a powerful and ambitious set that drew on the influences of punk, prog rock, hard rock, experimental music, goth, early electronic music, and film scores.
© Mark Deming /TiVo