The Paper Tulips

'90s "punk rock with pizzazz" from Long Beach, California

Image from Discogs

Going down the YouTube rabbit hole in 2024, I found The Paper Tulips.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cool kids found new music from other people. The record store clerk played something awesome in their store that you had to buy. Your friend’s older sister played you a weird record that blew your mind. Nowadays, algorithms can suck the life out of the human aspect of sharing music with other people, but algorithms can also facilitate encounters as part of a larger “find cool stuff strategy.”

I’d been reading old, digitized issues of Flipside zine on Archive.com, checking out the live concert reviews, then listening to the more obscure bands on YouTube. The early ’90s still brimmed with what I called “new old music,” and it was fun to discover it 30 years after the fact. Then in the YouTube sidebar, a video by Paper Tulips popped up, and it became my favorite new old band.

Founded in Long Beach in the late 1980s, Flipside released Paper Tulips’ first full album, Insects, in 1990. Flipside released most of their music during the band’s brief existence. The band sounded as fresh as ever. Songs were often short, powerful blasts of guitar. The bassist and guitarist traded vocal duties. On some songs, they sang together in an off-kilter way that reminds me of X, though more playful than pained.

The music wasn’t punk like Bad Religion or Circle Jerks. It was weirder, more angular and melodic. It often sounded post-punk. One YouTuber described it as “punk rock with pizzazz.” That nails it.

Their song “Head Shot” alone earns The Paper Tulips a place in the pantheon of the West Coast’s best underground bands. To me, it’s the perfect rock song: catchy, weird, and energetic.

The Paper Tulips had a rotating cast of drummers, but their bassist and guitarist were the band’s core, and they seemed to have fun doing it. The bassist-vocalist was named Toast, aka Toastacia Boyd. She cranked out some wicked baselines, driving these already driven songs forward. She also moved like a badass on stage. Their guitarist Gregory Kay ripped, too.

Turns out, Kay later played in one of my favorite ’90s surf bands, The Bomboras. In that band, he went by the moniker Lord Hunt. That meant he played on one of my favorite ’90s instrumentals, “Last Call,” and that I’d seen him play a show in Phoenix around 1996 and hadn’t known it. He’d briefly led his own spin-off instrumental band, Lord Hunt and the Missing Finks, who wore masks on stage. There wasn’t much information about them online, but that’s how life goes in these little underground musical communities.

After the Tulips, Toast had played drums in a ’90s surf revival band, too, called The Neptunes. But it all led back to Long Beach in the 1980s and early ’90s when Flipside Records was releasing some of the best music southern California had to offer, before big record labels started marketing underground music as “Alternative Music” to hungry paying kids who’d lived their lives above ground—and to us kids who’d always felt like freaks.

Not to insult basic punk rockers, but as countless ’80s and ’90s compilations show, there are a lot of punk bands that sound pretty similar. The Paper Tulips stand out. They sound unique. They have personality. You pick up on their weird collective identity immediately.

God, I love the archival jewels people post on YouTube.

Something else that makes Paper Tulips appealing to me is that they have a unique visual vocabulary. Watch the second Drummer Wanted video below. Whoever edited it did a stellar job. It looks great and syncs with the music well, but more importantly, it shows a band who had design taste as much as musical taste. I’m not sure how much say they had in the design of their album covers, but from the images to the fonts to the way colors and text interact on the covers, the band looks good, too, and I don’t mean their faces. Look at their Linoleum 45, from 1991. According to Discogs: “Issued inside a 16-page newsprint booklet designed by the band. Recorded on a Tascam 48 in downtown Long Beach and later mixed down at Huey Dee Studios in Atwater. 'This was mixed to DAT (why?) and mastered by Carol at K-Disc in Hollywood.”

The Paper Tulips had something unique going on at this particular place and time. It was happening. And then: It ended.

The Paper Tulips made the cover of the Flipside zine in Dec 1995/Jan ’96.

As one YouTuber said, Paper Tulips were “a l.a. trio that deserved a lot more airplay in their time…” In that spirit, here are some Paper Tulips favorite songs of mine:

Orbital, 1992

Here are tracks from their second full-length album.

“Cloudage”

“Another Car”

Baker’s Dozen, 1993

Their third full-length album.

“Wallow”

“Kisses Back”

“Portuguese Bend”

Insects, 1990

From their debut LP.

“Rooftop”

“Film M”

“Manufacture”

“Escalator”

Drummer Wanted

If I understand correctly, the band and friends shot Super 8 footage on tours, in their practice space The Shredding Room, and at various locations—the roof of an apartment in Long Beach, at the club Spaceland, etcetera. They assembled that footage into their own movie called Drummer Wanted. The theme is that a rotating cast of drummers plays with them. One is Phil Colon, from Anus the Menace, another fun LA band from this time. One is Max Eldson from the LA gothic post-punk band Spiderbaby, which I’ve come to love. Thankfully Toast posted the movie on YouTube in 2010. I reached out to her in 2024 and hope she’ll get back to me for an interview one day.

#5 Is missing in action, but here’s #6:

For your further enjoyment, here’s guitarist Grey Kay’s YouTube channel.

Here’s Toast’s YouTube channel.

And here’s the YouTube channel of the guy who produced the Tulips’ first record.

But the music—it’s all about the music.