Myself a Living Torch

Myself a Living Torch was an enigmatic American indie band active in San Francisco from 1991 to 1993 and featuring the Ohio-born songwriting talents of singer/lyricist Jeffrey Bright (previously of influential 1980’s jangle pop quartet, The Pleasures Pale) and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Eric Schulz (now Goner Records artist Harlan T Bobo). Bassist Chris “Troy” Green and drummer Christopher Fisher rounded out the lineup. Green, also from Ohio and now deceased, was known previously as a member of 1980’s avant-garde act Dementia Precox. Oakland native Fisher gained Bay Area recognition with early punk rockers Impatient Youth in addition to West Coast fame as a teenage skateboarding sensation.

Largely underground in the SF indie scene of the early 1990’s, MaLT’s lyric-driven compositions were by turns surreal, beautiful, and melancholic, but always provocative — focused on the shifting roles and meanings of love, sex and self in a culture ever intent on the commodification of those most essential facets of humanity. Literate enough for lasting relevance, tuneful enough for disposable pop, the band’s music could be dark, sometimes heavy, but always delivered with sly humor and a glimmer of hope. Their music lives on as a prescient commentary on the state of the young adult American psyche in the waning years of the 20th Century.

The incendiary name comes from a passage in French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s controversial modernist novel, Death on the Installment Plan.