The Space Lady: a cosmic answer to Daniel Johnston
The Summer of Love never left San Francisco for The Space Lady. She would occupy street corners, blessing passersby with her ethereal take on rock ‘n’ roll classics, gracing them with her accordion covers and gentle, lulling soprano tones. Bedecked in a space helmet and clad with flashing angel wings, her message was one of harmony that attempted to sustain the soulful beat of San Fran’s counterculture heart.
However, tragedy struck and blighted the street music’s message when her accordion was stolen by some unknown bastard. Not to be deterred, her voyage of peace continued when she decided to buy a battery-powered Casio keyboard and blast her tunes out to the world via an amp that was also battery-powered. This was a pivotal moment in the artistic output of The Space Lady.
The accordion is such an earthly instrument, and while theft should never be encouraged, fatefully, the thief on this occasion had forced a more fitting instrument upon Susan Dietrich Schneider. Now, her tones were as apt for her Space Lady moniker as her headwear. Her classic covers were suddenly imbued with a cosmic constitution that embodied the channelling of love from above that she was hoping to espouse in the streets.
Suddenly, The Electric Prunes classic ‘I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)’ sounded as though it was being received as a signal from Sputnik and transposed by a medium. Alongside these mystic incarnations of counterculture classics, The Space Lady hit upon an artistic purple patch when it came to her own original tracks, which she would scatter among her street sets.
This all made for a strange world underpinned by a simple will to perform. Her parents were both classical musicians, and there is no doubt that The Space Lady herself had chops. However, it is fascinating to hear this technical ability transmuted via a humble Casio keyboard. The songs are saturated with an embalming reverb as though you’re listening to the tracks underwater in the midst of a fever dream. And then you’re further tasked with imagining these being performed amid the bustle of busy streets.
Enough people on those streets were listening closely enough for The Space Lady to develop a cult fanbase. However, she refused to budge from the corners of the world. And any recordings were self-made on a cassette. Thus, it seemed as though she would disappear into the ether from whence her music came when she retired in 2000 to take care of her ageing parents and study nursing. Her musical career, which seemingly began in the late 1970s when The Space Lady was in her late 30s, was ostensibly over after over two decades of strangeness.
But in 2008, she met the musician and songwriter Eric Schneider, who performed under Eric Ian, and in the married life that soon followed, the pair jammed acoustically. Impressed by her skills, Schneider became curious about her past life as a so-called Space Lady and requested that she perform for him in her preferred electronic style. She assembled her old kit, which I’m assuming entailed new batteries alone, and he was gobsmacked by the subsequent wonder he witnessed.
He urged her to perform in venues for the first time. Encouraged by his enthusiasm, she figured the time might be right for her to tackle the stage for the first time. And in 2012, fresh from her dazzling performance of Stan Jones’ ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ before Schneider, she sent out an email to a mailing list of her 1000 fans to say, “The Space Lady is back!” What followed was a wave of genuine interest, and the charming story of Susan Dietrich Schneider wrapped up with a world tour with one section of the psyche still firmly afloat in the cosmic firmament.
