STANDS FOR GENIUS Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey
Jul 13, 2009
The two dB's mainmen, touring behind their new collaborative effort, pull it off - and then some.
BY FRED MILLS
So this is what it's actually like on the other side of the looking glass. I'm standing in the bar of one North Carolina's most revered rock clubs, hoisting a couple with... my rising third grader's art teacher?!? To borrow a somewhat condescending epithet being used of late to describe the kind of music that certain soft-treading music magazines (not naming names) cover, have I stepped into that alternate universe known as "dad rock"? Arggghh... WWJTD? What Would Jeff Tweedy Do?
I mean, I'm with Blurt mag, for chrissakes; I am assured by all of my fellow staffers that we are on the fucking cutting edge, maaan. Indie-rock, underground shit, slutty punk chicks, cult legends. What the hell is "dad rock," anyway?
Not so fast. I am a dad, after all, and I have it on good authority that most of the gentlemen in the headlining band tonight are dads, too. So if I, a dad, have come to rock, and if those guys, dads, are up there rocking, then it must be "dad rock," right?
But it's a weird feeling, confronting tentative evidence that the "dad rock" term just might have become operative in my own little universe while I was otherwise occupied keeping up appearances. The aging process is subtle and sneaky, and in my mind at least I've been stiff-arming it by frequenting noisy rock clubs where I'm elbow-to-elbow with tattooed/pierced punks, hirsuter-than-hirsute stoners and gibbering/guzzling record obsessives, not elementary school teachers charged with dropping literal science into my kid's sieve-like brain. For that matter, the aforementioned art teacher- a wonderful chap, incidentally, a gifted instructor much loved at the school - is a grandfather, although I'm pretty sure he's no older than me (the wife and I got started late). Still... he's here to rock himself, and since we've talked music before, I can state for the record that his tastes are pretty impeccable. It doesn't hurt his case to learn that he's been a fan of the headliners' music for some time now, either. (The dude is very cool, trust me.)
Plus, the moment the band takes the stage of Asheville, NC's Grey Eagle (June 10, 2009, if you're wondering) and strikes up the impossibly sunny, upbeat title track from their new album, the "D" word vanishes from my mind and I settle back for 90 minutes of pure, un-adult-erated sonic bliss that simultaneously takes me back to my early ‘80s salad days as a record collector and reinforces my current career path as a music journalist.
***
I'm getting ahead of things. First, there's opening act Jeffrey Dean Foster, who not so coincidentally has also been part of my personal soundtrack for a couple of decades. Foster used to be in one of the Tarheel State's Great Pop Hopes, the Right Profile, a part-jangly, part-twangy quartet - future Superchunk member Jon Wurster held down the drum kit, incidentally- that mustered several wonderful Mitch Easter/Don Dixon-produced recordings before imploding at the tail end of the ‘80s at the indifferent hands of Arista Records. Foster subsequently fronted the Carneys, followed by the Pinetops, before emerging as a full-fledged solo artist. Currently based in Winston-Salem, his 2005 album Million Star Hotel remains one of this decade's finest explorations of the pop idiom - yours truly, writing for Harp, cited "his classic rock-leaning arrangement skills and his instinct for rescuing poetic truths from life's crush," and to paraphrase one-time Presidential candidate Barack Obama, I still approve that message.
Tonight Foster's joined by Sara Bell (of Durham's great Regina Hexaphone, the multiinstrumentalist's CV also includes Dish, Shark Quest, Angels of Epistemology), who lends her piano, mandolin, acoustic guitar and vocal skills to the mix while looking positively elegant in her red dress and long dark hair. The duo opens with one of the standout tracks from Million Star Hotel, "Lily of the Highway," a yearning slice of strum ‘n' hum that I'm not embarrassed to admit broke my heart a few years ago with its meditation upon loving, leaving and letting go. "She was the lily of the highway," sings Foster, in his wistful upper tenor, as Bell softly caresses the melody line with her keyboard, "and she's free." It breaks my heart all over again.
Together, Foster and Bell create gentle hypnosis, from the reflective, Springsteenian "Corner of My Eye" (Bell adding lilting vocal harmony) and the mandolin/guitar powered "Break Her Heart" (alternately intense, cautionary, defiant and sorrowful, it's a portrait of lost love before the fact), to an airy, Pettyish version of the Pinetops' country-pop gem "So Lonesome I Could Fly" and an out-of-the-blue cover of the Ramones' "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" - here, recast for Bell's mandolin and Foster's acoustic guitar and revved down more than a few notches from the original, it's now a Laurel Canyon, and not a Bowery, anthem. An unexpectedly tender moment also arrives when Foster, at the piano, segues softly from one of his song into the Jackson 5's "I'll Be There," and it's neither maudlin nor heavy-handed, merely "just right."
Foster's songs have an elemental quality, the same quality that informs the Toms, the Bruces and other great American tunesmiths of our (my) generation. They're innately melodic, with handshake-familiar changes - lots of well-placed minor chords - that never wear out their welcome, plus evocative lyrics that are frequently narrative but with just the right degree of unspecificity to keep them universal, conveying adolescence, maturity, serendipity and reflection all at once. Go find him on the web; you won't be disappointed.
***
I buttonhole Peter Holsapple briefly before he's to perform and hand him a couple of issues of the new Blurt; he and musical partner Chris Stamey are profiled in it. Later, after the show, I'll get the two musicians to sign a CD for me (to my son; looks like we're in dad-rock territory again). Although I don't necessarily need a prop or an excuse to approach Peter, as we've known each other since the mid/late ‘70s when we both lived in Chapel Hill, prior to him getting the call from Stamey, who'd moved north to NYC after graduating from the University of North Carolina, to join the recently-kickstarted dB's. At this point in time most of you readers know the dB's story so I won't recount it here, and you can also find out more about the current Holsapple-Stamey summit by sniffing around on the web (or, for that matter, simply picking up a copy of Blurt). I'll just add that it's always great to run into Peter, and Chris too, as we all have overlapping, shared histories - which is something I will explain to my son tomorrow morning when I present him with the autographed CD.
You know that feeling you get when you're at a party or visiting a friend and a song comes on the stereo that's not only an old favorite of yours but one obviously loved by the other people in the room? Conversation doesn't necessarily stop, but small smiles are exchanged, maybe followed by nods of acknowledgment, toes begin softly tapping in time to the music, and a few hips sway unconsciously, too. That's what it's like watching Holsapple and Stamey at the Grey Eagle tonight. The turnout is, surprisingly, somewhat slim, but in my book, 100% audience enthusiasm will trump 50% paying attention, 50% yakking away at the bar any time, and every single person in attendance is clearly here to see the band, ensuring that each tune, whether taken from the recently-released hERE aND nOW (Bar/None) or plucked from deep within the dB's archives, gets warmly received. With a crack band - Gary Greene, from Cravin' Melon, on drums; Jeff Crawford, Roman Candle/Tomahawks, on upright bass; producer/engineer extraordinaire Wes Lachot on keyboards - intuitively backing the duo up, it's one of the more seamlessly-flowing evenings of music in recent memory.
Things kick off with title track "Here and Now," a soaring, almost jangly/powerpoppish number penned by Holsapple that kind of serves (in the tradition of Sgt. Pepper's titular cut) as their we're-gonna-play-these-songs-hope-you-enjoy-the-show salutation. What's interesting is how the two singers orient themselves: on opposite sides of a single condenser microphone set with a broad directional pattern, Everly Brothers-style, whereby the setup allows them plenty of physical space - they can each stand more than a foot away from the mic (no worries about guitar-strummin' arms getting in each other's way) - and maintain direct eye contact as well. This adds an unexpected element of intimacy to their vocals, and the mic's aural characteristics also make those harmonies uncommonly warm and moist, like a coalescing entity with a separate life of its own. They won't sing exclusively this way throughout the show, as each has his own separate mic, but when they do, it's magic.
A couple more hERE aND nOW songs follow, Stamey's "Santa Monica" (a romantic, David Crosbyesque dialogue highlighted by a concise-yet-intense guitar solo from Stamey) and Holsapple's jauntily whimsical ode to the a.m. pleasures of guzzling coffee and letting the significant other sleep in, "Early in the Morning." Then it's time to dip back to the pair's dB's days: "Nothing Is Wrong," from 1982's Repercussion, is done Everlys-mic style, and with Lachot's spectral keys, Crawford's empathetic basslines and Greene's delicate percussion fills, plus Stamey on subdued electric guitar and Holsapple contributing a solo on his acoustic, those soaring Holsapple-Stamey harmonies take on an almost choirlike feel. Knowing that these guys are longtime Big Star acolytes (and Chris Bell fans in particular), I can't help but thinking that if the original Big Star lineup had somehow lasted to the present day, this might be what they'd sound like.
Hold that thought. A few tunes later, Stamey steps to his mic to make an introduction, saying, "Most of these songs we've written, but every night we try to remember where we came from. This one's by the late great Chris Bell." And suddenly the room is aglow with Bell's post-Big Star solo gem, "I Am the Cosmos," a significant totem for both men, and particularly for Stamey, as he originally released the "Cosmos" 45 on his own indie label Car in the late ‘70s. This is holy music, I think to myself, closing my eyes and allowing Lachot's droning, pulsing keys, the reassuring hum of the acoustic guitars and those H&S harmonies wash over me.
What else? Well, they serve up the bulk of the new album, with highlights including: "Widescreen World," crowd-around-the-mic, uptempo fun which somehow gets me thinking about what a shotgun wedding between the Everlys and Katrina & the Waves might sound like ("Wake Up Little Sunshine"? "Walking on Susie"?); "Broken Record," lyrically wistful and baroque in feel thanks to Crawford's bowed bass; and "My Friend the Sun," the old ‘70s tune by UK art-rockers Family that serves as hERE aND nOW's opening track, here rousing and celebratory, with Holsapple playing an odd-looking axe fashioned from an oversized cigar box - it sounds like a cross between a mandolin and a ukulele, Holsapple additionally submitting some slide riffs. (Earlier today the song was the standout performance when the duo did a live acoustic radio session at nearby station WNCW-FM.)
They don't allow their 1991 Mavericks collaboration to go undocumented, either, with both that album's brilliant, soaring, chugging, heart-tugging "Angels" (a joint composition, incidentally) and Holsapple's subtly complex, elegiac "She Was the One" getting note-perfect renderings. For the encore - by which point a blind man would be hard-pressed to accurately guess how big the audience is, given the roar of approval the band is getting - it's "Song For Johnny Cash," from hERE aND nOW, bluesy and folky but with a piercing, angular Stamey guitar solo that has Jeff Foster leaning over and saying into my ear, awestruck, "He is the most in the moment guitar player I've ever seen." That's followed by... drum roll please... "Black and White"...
One of the first songs Holsapple wrote for the dB's after joining the band (it was their initial 45 waxing as a quartet and also wound up being the lead-off track on their '81 full-length debut, Stands for deciBels), "Black and White," here, is not the power-pop raveup of nearly three decades' prior. Jesus, has it been that long since we dB's fans spun the 45, and the album, over and over, pogoing around the room at new wave house parties? The passage of time and the deep-sinking of fond memories, combined with the ability of a songwriter to rearrange what's already a carved-in-stone classic song, has for tonight at least given us a new pop gem carrying a unique fresh heft. The reworked/remodeled "Black and White" is now a less-frantic (though equally insistent) rhythmic and chordal throb, more reliable and sturdy a composition in that sense, although it's not so much due to Holsapple and Stamey's skidding down and softening its thwack for their more acoustic-tenored band structure. Rather, it's a pair of guys who, with supreme confidence, know - just as Dylan, with his myriad reworkings of his own oeuvre, knows - that the tune's proven longevity won't allow it to fail no matter what the context.
And sure enough, in this easy-going, more folk-rocky and not-so-power-poppy take, there's an irresistible, delicious tension wrought between the familiar and the new. Over the years, from the initial early ‘80s run of the original dB's lineup through Holsapple and Stamey's periodic reconnections (did I mention there's a new dB's studio album in the works?), the pair is bound to have pulled out "Black and White" on plenty of occasions. It's obvious they still get juiced doing so.
As the song thrums its way to a satisfying close, I realize I'm grinning stupidly, ear-to-ear. Dad rock? Never crossed my mind. I feel like a teenager again.
***
Rewinding all the way back to that opening number, upon reflection I view "Here and Now" as also a metaphorical manifesto for Peter and Chris' long collaborative journey, one which stretches all the way back to junior high garage bands while growing up together in Winston-Salem. Sang Holsapple at the start of the concert, "Right here and now, we'll pull it off somehow, ‘cos we know how you can hear it here and now."
Yeah, we can hear it. And I'll go out on a limb and state for the record that the tune's literal lyric message - "if someone leaves this place tonight, and along the way home, sings a song, when they were here, they sang along with us" - was the operative one for the evening as well. I could swear I heard some folks humming happily to themselves as they were leaving the Grey Eagle...
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