When first wave L.A. synth band Grey Factor originally played around town, it was the junction of the 1970s and 1980s, an era when synths were more cumbersome and complicated than they are today and local audiences weren’t totally sold on electronic music.
Back then, Jeff Jacquin and Joey Cevetello, the core of the group, and their bandmates lugged analog gear into punk clubs. Sometimes, they brought their own soundboard as well. Cevetello carried pieces of paper with charts showing how all the knobs on the synthesizers should be arranged. Their stands were repurposed shelving units.
“I saw a photo of the Human League at one of their shows and they built these cages that they would play in with a screen in front of them because they would be playing with punk rock bands and getting bottled every show because it was not hardcore enough,” says Jacquin. “They were these gray, really cool, cubicle things. The whole idea was to try to get to that, but we didn’t have the money to get all these things together and build full cages, so let’s just go get some metallic gray shelving units and use that.”
If you’re curious as to how live electronic music sounded in 1980 L.A., Grey Factor released a collection of vintage recordings last fall called A Peak in the Signal: Live 1979-1980.
“Initially, I thought that the quality of them wasn’t good enough to even consider doing anything with them,” says Jacquin of the live recordings.
Until recently, Grey Factor was one of those you-had-to-be-there sort of L.A. bands. They played live and even turned up on the first episode of the seminal local music TV show New Wave Theatre alongside Suburban Lawns, but the music they recorded at the time wasn’t released until the early 2020s. (For more on Grey Factor’s backstory, read my 2023 interview with the band in the L.A. Daily News.)
Forty years later, audiences were ready for their minimal synth sound. The first pressing of Grey Factor: 1979 -1980 A.D. Complete Studio Recordings sold out fast. It soon turned up on Paste’s list of the 50 Greatest Synthpop Albums of All Time. Following the successful release of the studio recordings, a live album made sense. “Anyone who cares about this record at all, or cares about us, would understand that the quality of the live recordings of that time period is not going to be great,” says Jacquin, “but I think that there would still be a curiosity around it and a curiosity that it would be worth putting out.”
A Peak in the Signal gives Grey Factor’s new fans a taste of how they sounded some 45 years ago, when the band gigged around venues like Hong Kong Cafe, Madame Wong’s and Mom’s at California Institute of the Arts. In that one year, Grey Factor played approximately 20 shows, some of which were preserved on TEAC 1/4 inch tape. The six songs that that appear on A Peak in the Signal only exist as live recordings and they show the eclectic and experimental music that Grey Factor made in this short period. The first four tracks— side one if you have the album on vinyl— are raw, synthpop. “Everything” isn’t far removed from early OMD and “Won’t Have to See You” has a Fad Gadget-meets-Throbbing Gristle vibe. On the album’s second side, Grey Factor gets weird. “Inja” is a 13 minute and 22 second ambient piece that sounds like it was made inside a spaceship, while “Every Five Minutes” is, essentially, a proto-rave track. It’s wild and a really good addition to your collection if you’re into the more underground side of ‘80s synth music.
During the band’s original run, responses to Grey Factor’s shows varied. When they played Taft High School in Woodland Hills, Cevetello wrote in the album’s liner notes, they were greeted by graffiti that read, “Grey Factor sucks raw donkey dicks.”
Neither Cevetello nor Jacquin remembers exactly how they landed that gig. Both went to different high schools in the San Fernando Valley. “I think the other thing that appealed to us about it was Taft was the tony, higher-end high school and we thought, we want to go in there and mess with it,” recalls Cevetello.
The crowd was more receptive at CalArts, where they played a cover of the Little Anthony and the Imperials song “Goin’ Out of My Head.” Unfortunately, Grey Factor doesn’t have a recording of this.
“We rehearsed it for sure, so we must have recorded it. I don’t have a tape of it,” says Jacquin.
“It’s too bad because it was a really cool version of that song,” says Cevetello. “That was the first time anyone said anything positive about our music. It wasn’t our song, but I was like, I’ll take it, somebody liked it.”
Not included on A Peak in the Signal are the “in-betweens,” which were pre-recorded tracks of varying lengths that the band played while readjusting the knobs on the synthesizers in between live songs. Jacquin says those will be included on another release that’s in the works.
“The in-betweens I think are really interesting. They’re really fun and such a perfect mirror of the time,” says Jacquin. “There’s Nixon on there. There’s all sorts of stuff that was happening, or had just happened and still mattered, that nobody will give two shits about now, but there’s Kissinger and Nixon talking to each other, crazy shit like that, which is ridiculous now. Then, it was like, we’re just coming out of this nightmare experience.”
In early 2024, I saw Grey Factor for the first time. At Gold-Diggers, a small, East Hollywood venue with good sound for its size, they played a seamless set to a room full of fans who, like me, probably first heard their music sometime in the past few years.
“It’s so much easier,” says Cevetello of playing live now, “and, I have to say, a lot more fun.”
That’s not just a statement about technology. “To go back and learn music that you wrote as a teenager and play it live, it’s funny. It’s a totally different person. I had to go back and say, who is this guy?” Says Cevetello. “I enjoyed it so much more than I did then. Here’s the other kick, Jeff and I have known each other for 45 years. We’re still friends. How unusual and crazy is it that this came about, right?”
He continues, “And that people are listening to this music now, it’s kind of a hoot that I get up there and play a song that I wrote when I was 15 and people are there and they like it.”
Get A Peak in the Signal: Live 1979 – 1980 by Grey Factor
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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