Download: Baby Dee “Lilacs”

(from A Book Of Songs For Anne Marie out now on Drag City)

BABY DEE WITH SIMONE WHITE ON SAT., MAY 1, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 8 PM / $15 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM. BABY DEE’S A BOOK OF SONGS FOR ANNE MARIE IS OUT NOW ON DRAG CITY. VISIT BABY DEE AT BABYDEE.COM.

Download: Billy Bragg “O Freedom”

(from Mr. Love And Justice out now on Anti)

Billy Bragg has been mixing pop and politics and hoping to save the youth of America since he started out as ‘one-man Clash’ in 1977. After projects with Wilco and Woody Guthrie, he will present the U.S. premiere of his vocal version of Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ in Santa Monica. This interview by Dan Collins.

You were one of the first musicians I remember being outspoken about gay rights. The first time I heard your music was 1991—I was really young and I turned on MTV in Oklahoma and saw the video for ‘Sexuality,’ where you had that lyric ‘If you’re gay, I won’t turn you away.’ At the time I thought it was totally icky and gross…
Ha ha—it kind of is icky and gross, but in a nice way! You have to talk about these things, particularly back then when the first notions people had about HIV and AIDS was that you get it from talking to gay people. And it was an awful time when the disease first came to prominence. So that was a message I thought very strongly that I had to put out.
Do you think songs like that actually change people’s minds?
You’ve got to hope. What I’m basically trying to do is give people a different perspective, whether I’m writing a love song or a political song or a song that’s a bit of both. And you’ve got to hope that they will build on that perspective—that the perspective will challenge their own worldview enough to explore a little bit about what you’re talking about. Things that may initially sound a bit icky may years later make sense to them. That’s the way music has affected my life. The music hasn’t itself changed my life, but the ideas it’s given to me have led me to form my own opinions about things.
You seem equally at home writing about the personal and the political. Are there songs where you think you achieved both?
Yeah! There’s a song on my most recent album called ‘I Keep Faith.’ When I perform in front of an audience, I talk to the audience about my faith in their ability to change the world. I feel very strongly that singer/songwriters CAN’T change the world, and that ultimately the responsibility lies with the audience. And ‘I Keep Faith’ allows me to put that idea in front of the audience. But if my son comes to the concert, and while I’m saying this to the audience, he says to my wife—his mum—‘Mum, why doesn’t Dad just tell everybody this is about you?’ Then she has to say to him, ‘Well, it is about me, but it is also about what Dad is talking about. It’s about both of these things.’ I think the best political songs are also love songs, and the best love songs also have that urge to make a difference.
I was thinking about that after the death of Michael Jackson. The Minutemen had a song in the ’80s called ‘Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing.’
A great band! A great band! Much much missed!
Agreed! But in Michael Jackson’s mind, he probably thought of himself as a political songwriter. After all, he did ‘We Are the World’ and ‘Black or White.’
I have no problem with someone like Michael Jackson writing a political song, but they need to then come up with the actions to match that. People have to walk it like they talk it, and that’s the bottom line. Otherwise you’re just exploiting that situation for your own material gain. When I hear a political song, I always look for the actions that go along with that.
Your 2002 album, England, Half-English, is very powerful and one of my favorites. There is that sense of nationalism. But I wonder, isn’t there a danger in nationalism as well? Doesn’t it lead to tariffs and wars and hate?
The reason I made that album is because the far-right were beginning to pick up seats. And for all the worry that we have talking about nationalism, if we don’t talk about it, then we leave it to the fascists and the racists to define who does and who doesn’t belong. For better or for worse, the country I live in is called England. I was born here. I speak English. Why should I have to deny that just because a bunch of racist thugs have abused the name of the country? We need to take these things back, although as you said before, some people may—when they first hear it—find it a bit icky. I’m not joking! Some of my own fans initially didn’t feel comfortable with me talking about these things. But I spent time explaining where I was coming from—in fact, I wrote a book about it, ultimately.
In the United States, a lot of lefties like myself have big problems with the way we have treated African Americans and Native Americans and immigrants in the past. But we do have reverence for our founding fathers, despite their faults. Is there an era of English history where you look back like that?
Same era, really. It’s around that time that we chopped off the king’s head and began to have a different kind of idea about how our country should be governed. The period we refer to as the Civil War in the 1640s was actually a period of revolution. The sort of country the founding fathers were trying to live in, we were trying to create then—but it didn’t quite come off. There was a time when we were getting really near to having a proper democracy—200 years before we really achieved it. And that would be a good time to look back to be inspired. The army in the Civil War actually had a rank that was called ‘Agitator,’ which was someone who went out and agitated for change—for more democracy. That idea of the English Commonwealth—our Civil War was fought about the principal of bringing the King to account. Was the King above the law, or was the King within the law? And that idea of accountability is still a very important concept both in your country and my country.
Is there a way in the U.S. to embrace a leftist nationalism like that?
If you care about your country and want it to be a fairer country, if you share in Martin Luther King’s dream, if you want universal healthcare—you’re a patriot, as far as I’m concerned. Patriotism comes in many types. They’re not all defined by Pat Buchanan. I thought George Bush represented a small clique of people in the United States of America—I think Barack Obama represents a much wider slice of the American people. And there’s a nationalism in that.
Perhaps the problem in America is that we’ve watered down our folk-heroes. We’ve watered down Martin Luther King, we’ve watered down Helen Keller…
Woody Guthrie, we’ve watered down! There are extra verses to ‘This Land Is Your Land’ that they don’t teach you in school.
Have country, folk, and bluegrass musicians pushed aside their rebellious, progressive roots? I interviewed Earl Scruggs a few months back, and he really shied away from talking about his anti-war stance during the sixties.
Well, he wasn’t someone who chose playing bluegrass as a career option out of a career portfolio of things he could do. He was an ordinary working man who happened to play bluegrass, and it worked for him. He was trying to reflect his own experiences, and I have a lot of respect for people who try and do that.
Do you say that because the same thing is not true for you? You do seem to have a large portfolio of things you can do. I was pretty impressed that you’re doing this Beethoven thing in August.
Well, whether collaborating with Woody Guthrie, Wilco, or Beethoven and a symphony orchestra, it’s all the same sort of deal, really. It’s all about doing something that’s more interesting than just working the way you normally work.
You were lucky enough to record some of Woody Guthrie’s unreleased songs a decade ago with Wilco.
To write new music to some songs that he wrote. Because he—like me—doesn’t read music. He’s not musically trained. When he writes a song, he just writes the words and keeps the tune in his head. Which I do. If I died tomorrow, those tunes would be lost forever, but the words would still be there. And that’s what we got from Woody. We got complete lyrics to work with. I did a gig in 1992 in Central Park—an 80th birthday celebration for Woody Guthrie. His daughter Nora was there, and she saw something in the songs I sang and the way I performed them that reminded her of her father. And she began writing to me and sending me lyrics and asking me if I was interested in this project. And eventually, in the late nineties, it all came together rather wonderfully with Wilco.
Supposedly you guys had some creative friction during the making of that album.
We made a film of the whole process called Man in the Sand. And there is part of that film that reflects how Jeff Tweedy and I had differences of opinion about the production of the record. The basic deal was that whoever wrote the song would produce that song. And that was a pretty good deal, I thought. And that’s how we worked. But in the middle of the process, after we’d been in the studio working together really, really well, Wilco sent some mixes of my stuff that they suggested, and I just had to say, ‘Look guys, we have a deal. I’m not going to mix your stuff. I’d rather you didn’t mix my stuff.’ And that’s how we left it. The real proof of our working relationship is that when it came time to release Volume 2, they went back and recorded half a dozen new songs—at their own expense—which made that second album a much more Wilco-like album. If they really had a falling out with me or I had a falling out with them, they wouldn’t have made a contribution. I would work together with them tomorrow at the drop of the hat.
Maybe you can play both albums together at Coachella sometime.
It’s Woody’s Centenary in 2012, and if Nora Guthrie doesn’t manage to get us to play together, I think she’ll be very angry! Both me and Jeff, we do what Nora tells us to do because we’re part of the family now. I hope we can come together to do some shows.
Did you ever write ‘This Machine Kills Fascists’ on your guitar like Woody did?
When I was in a punk band, I wrote ‘This Guitar Says ‘Sorry.’’
What was it like playing folk to punk audiences?
When I started, it was still punk. It was just one guy with an electric guitar playing punk. It was only when I started coming to America that people compared me to Woody Guthrie. In England, everyone said I was a ‘one man Clash!’ I would still try to live up to that today!
When I created a Billy Bragg Pandora station, it came back and played a lot of Elvis Costello.
Elvis to me was the ultimate singer-songwriter, because it had a backbone to it. It had an edge to it. It wasn’t apologetic like so many of the others. It was hard-edged punk rock singer-songwriter. Elvis kind of makes it okay to get on stage with a symphony orchestra.
Or to play with Burt Bacharach! Or to grow a long beard!
I’m not sure I’ll be singing Burt anytime soon, but I will be singing Beethoven.
I’m looking forward to it. But why the Ninth Symphony?
Well, I was involved in an event to celebrate the reopening of a London concert venue called the Royal Festival Hall. It had been built in the fifties and they refurbished it. And as part of the reopening ceremonies, they were having a weekend of events which culminated in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth—the fourth movement, the final bit. ‘Ode to Joy.’ They asked me to write some lyrics for it. Fortunately, it happens to be one of my favorite pieces of classical music. So I duly wrote a new English-language lyric.
Can you give our audience just a little taste of one of the lyrics to your libretto to ‘Ode to Joy’?
The chorus is ‘Brother, Sister, stand together! Raise your voices now as one—though, by history divided, reconcile in unison.’
Do you think you have a unique gift for delivering lyrics like that un-ironically and unapologetically?
I really took my queue from the line in Beethoven’s original, which is ‘Alle menschen werden brüder…’ ‘All men become brothers.’’ When you see that that was the original intent of the lyrics, that verse to me is a very strong. My lyric is not a translation at all, but I took the original sentiment from Beethoven and Friedrich Schiller.
When you played Beethoven for the first time, you played for the Queen of England!
She came to the gig. I wasn’t playing for her. It was being performed, and she kind of came to the gig and sat in the royal box. And it was very funny, because when we were in a higher box on the other side of the theater, you could kind of see what she was doing. And when they were singing my lyrics, she was kind of following them with her finger in the program! And afterwards, she sent a footman down to ask if she could have a copy of the score signed by Mr. Bragg.
You weren’t tempted to yell at her? ‘Off with her head! Another revolution! I’m an agitator!’
No, I wasn’t really. To be perfectly honest with you, my mum was there! It’s not often you get to do something that impresses your mum in rock ‘n’ roll!

BILLY BRAGG PERFORMING BEETHOVEN’S NINTH WITH DWIGHT TRIBLE, BANDA PHILHARMONICA, SUZIE GLAZE, ERNEST TROOST, JUSTIN BISCHOF, THE BAKER + TARPAGA DANCE PROJECT AND MORE ON SAT., AUG. 29, AT THE BROAD STAGE, 1310 11TH ST., SANTA MONICA. 7 PM / $55-$100 / ALL AGES. BEETHOVENBRAGG.COM. BILLY BRAGG’S MR. LOVE AND JUSTICE IS OUT NOW ON ANTI-. VISIT BILLY BRAGG AT BILLYBRAGG.CO.UK OR MYSPACE.COM/BILLYBRAGG.

Download: The Mekons “Dickie, Chalkie And Nobby”

(from Natural out now on Touch And Go)

The Mekons lived Leeds but dreamed Texas and Tennessee and after finding their feet in first-wave punk songs like “Where Were You,” they left the world of Rough Trade for the open range. They are working on a new album tentatively called 100 Years and singer-guitarist-activist Jon Langford speaks as he takes his dog to the vet. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is it true that the son of Donald Rumsfeld is a really big Mekons fan?
Jon Langford (guitar/vocals): That’s a good question. It might be true, but he has not revealed himself to us. I never got to the bottom of that but I heard he was wandering around the clubs of Chicago with a Mekons t-shirt on. Donald Rumsfeld sort of wandered around Chicago as well. He was a congressman from here so he was occasionally spotted in sushi restaurants. And I know people who actually know him and I always wonder what I would do if I actually ran into him.
Do you think you could beat him up? Mekon vs. Rumsfeld?
He’s kind of like some sort of crazy cockroach. You’d probably keep treading on him and he’d just get up and run around.
Do you think that might be an effective way for art and music to provoke social change? By specifically targeting the hearts and minds of the children of the rich and powerful?
I’d like to think something of what we’ve been singing about for the last twenty years may have rubbed off on him—he’d probably want to wrestle his dad to the ground as well, you know? But you know what? I think I know about as much about that as you do. I don’t know. Our songs were never particularly aimed at the sons of the rich and famous.
Where were they aimed?
They weren’t really aimed at anyone. They were aimed at ourselves, I think. Most of the songs we made to sort of please ourselves or to exorcise things that are in ourselves. I think a lot of the Mekons songs are quite sad, which is interesting because we’re not necessarily sad people. I think what’s good about the Mekons is that there’s always been a kind of cushion—the fact that there are a lot of people and we all kind of share the duties. There’s never been one person with the whole burden. A lot of the people in the Mekons have been through quite a lot together. I wouldn’t even say our politics are necessarily the same or our life stories are the same but there’s definitely a shared instinctive feeling about the world. Obviously, or we wouldn’t be doing this project together so long.
What is the essential sadness in the Mekons discography?
Well, we don’t come together and act sad. We come together and have a good time. But the music that comes out is often very—I don’t know, maybe gallows humor? We always try to describe the world we live in and anyone with half a brain would find it pretty difficult to write happy songs all the time.
I’ve heard that they did a neurolinguistic study of various genres of music and that country music is overwhelmingly objectively the saddest type of music they found. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Have you ever heard the music from the Bahamas? There’s some traditional vocal and solo vocal stuff that’s mostly unaccompanied that I think is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. People who are poor and have crap lives will probably make sad music. I guess rich people who have lots of money and an easy life, they might be sad as well—but they probably don’t bother to write songs about their lives. Probably too busy spending their money.
In ‘Big Zombie,’ is the line ‘I’m just not human tonight’ a Chandler reference?
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s an L.A. song and we’ll be playing it. When we kind of started up again in the mid-’80s, we were very interested in Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. We were touring the States a lot and that was our reference for what we thought the States should be like. Dashiell Hammett was our version of San Francisco and Raymond Chandler was our version of L.A. Every time I walked into a room, I’d expect to find a body. Most of the time we didn’t.
What drew you to honky-tonks like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge when you came to America?
When we first came to the States we got obsessed about music and it was kind of like… most of the cowboy shops we went to seemed to be full of black people, Hispanic people, Asian people and English rock bands. So it was funny—just how you can literally claim a piece of this fantasy mythical America by buying a Stetson or a pair of cowboy boots and then going back home to Leeds and strutting around in your cowboy boots. They’d ask, ‘Where did you get those?’ and I’d say, ‘Aw, I got these in Chicago,’ you know? People would come ’round my house after the pub and I’d be playing Ernest Tubb and Merle Haggard, and these were all people who thought they wanted to go listen to acid-house or something. They thought we’d lost our minds.
There’s a quote from Ernest Tubb I wanted to ask you about. People would say, ‘Aw, Ernest, you’re so flat, anyone could sing the way you can. You just got lucky.’ And he would say, ‘Well, I sing that way on purpose. I want everyone who hears this to think that they could do it. I want them to feel that I’m no different from them.’
Is that from that Peter Guralnick book? Lost Highway? There’s another great quote in there where he says he’s singing for the boys back on the farm but he says by the end of his life the farm wasn’t even there anymore. But he wanted those farm boys to be able to sing his songs. Yeah, that’s a very Mekons-type thing. When I read that, I thought, ‘There is a connection between that and punk.’ It’s been said before that there was a connection between the Mekons and country music and I thought that was ludicrous, but as I listened to that stuff and really began to love it, it became more and more interesting to me. And then to have someone articulate it like that… We always meant the Mekons to be like ‘Anyone can do it.’ Anyone can pick up the guitar. There’s a quote from Mary Harron about the Mekons that kind of sums it up: ‘Rock ‘n’ roll is probably better played by people who can’t play it very well.’ She said the Mekons were the only people to base a band solely on that fact. It was kind of a jab as well as a compliment, but I think that’s true. That really struck a chord with me—I’ve always being drawn to music that was functional rather than virtuoso. Music that kind of has to be made because there was a need to make it.
Who are you thinking of?
Well, actually I was talking to Peter Hammill of Van der Graaf Generator who came to town the other night. I got to hang out with them and I was talking to them about what they were listening to on the bus and they were telling me about Olivier Messiaen who is an avant-garde composer who wrote something called The Quartet for the End of Time while he was in a P.O.W. camp or a concentration camp. As Hammill said, that was music that had to be made. It was a quartet because that’s what he had at the camp and they thought they were going to die, so they wrote this music. I’ve been listening to it and it’s like—you’ve got something as primitive as the Mekons when we first started and then you’ve got Ernest Tubb and reggae music that was there because it was on the street with a message that people could dance to. And then you’ve got Olivier Messiaen which is like music that couldn’t be kept in. It had to come out. It wasn’t anything to do with any commercial desires or all that. It’s just music that had to exist. There’s a lot of music like that and I find that I’m just drawn to it. It was actually great talking to those guys because they’re much older than me. To be sitting on a tour bus with a bunch of old guys drinking wine and talking about things you’ve never heard of—it was really, really cool. Peter Hammill said, ‘Yeah, that’s the secret, as long as you don’t pander.’ ‘No pandering allowed!’ he was shouting. ‘That’s the trouble with all this bloody music nowadays. It’s all just fucking pandering!’ And I thought that was pretty good. That’s what the Mekons do.
Steve Wynn said that it’s better to make a record that is just one person’s favorite in the entire world than to make a record that everyone thinks is just pretty good.
I totally, totally agree with that. I think that something happened to music when the idea was that everyone would like it. I think that’s completely unnatural. When we were on A&M, they told us that 25,000 records sales wasn’t very good and we were like, ‘That’s good enough for us!’ We’d feel very uncomfortable if more than 25,000 people bought our record. That’s more people than ever go to see any of the football teams I supported! But that was a failure. There’s a hierarchy in the music industry where you have all these people floundering around not making a living who are—to me— doing what they should do and doing a good job of it. And then you have these people who managed to hit on the magic formula—finding what it is that everybody wants and it’s all backwards. They should be punished for learning that secret. Paul McCartney should be taken out and punished.
What particular punishment would be appropriate for that?
A good lashing. No, I’m only joking, I’m only joking. Again, the structure of the industry is the problem. That’s what it’s geared to—it’s just not geared to having lots of different types of music for lots of different types of people to enjoy. It doesn’t recognize the fact that people are different—that not everybody wants to listen to the sort of crap that’s on the radio everyday. It’s very hard anywhere in this country when you listen to the radio to find stuff that’s worth listening to. I don’t think that makes me weird.
You said once that ‘society dehumanizes from the top down.’ I’m wondering if that reproduces within pop culture.
Yeah—most of the stuff that I’ve written and the paintings that I’ve made about country and western music, it was kind of about using that as a microcosm for the whole society. The trend is there and you can see it so obviously in what happened to country music. I think that goes through everything. And actually that quote, that’s not me—I didn’t say that. John Peel said that. I might have been quoting him because he said that about ‘God Save the Queen’ when that record came out and everyone was up in arms and he made that quote defending the record. He said it was a pretty simple record and that the message was society dehumanizes from the top down.
I have to commend your memory for quotes.
I know where I pinch all my best stuff from. You know, Peel was a Radio One DJ and to come out with something that profound was pretty powerful. To have somebody in the BBC defending the Sex Pistols when it looked like—when that record came out, you know… they could have been hung from lampposts and the majority of people in the country would have been really pleased. It was a very scary time for a little while.
Have you seen that kind of response to anything else in music?
Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer’ was kind of interesting as well. It brought up an interesting debate about whether he really wanted to kill a cop or talk about someone else. It brought up the debate about what you can write about. Why is a song always in the first person? People always think when you write a song that it’s you talking. I had that problem singing ‘Cocaine Blues’ which, you know, is a Johnny Cash song. Obviously I’m not someone who takes cocaine and kills people, but it’s still a great song. The history of those songs is old and ancient.
Someone once asked you if there was a light at the end of the tunnel and you said that now that you have kids, you’re going to hijack the train, turn it around and drive it back.
I just felt like a lot of people tell me to shut my mouth because I’m not from here. I’ve got that a number of times. Mostly in hate mail, especially when we were doing the anti-death penalty stuff. I really got some quite extraordinarily vicious and unpleasant stuff. But I just felt like having kids was definitely a galvanizing moment for me. It made me feel like this is when you have to get involved. I can’t just be like non-American anymore and just shrug my shoulders and go, ‘Oh yeah, they’re just all fucking crazy.’ Because I’m one of you now.
What kind of world do you want to build for your children?
We need to dismantle what was created over the last fifty years, really. The food industry for a start. It’s a fucking hideous Frankenstein that’s killing us all, you know? I really believe that. I don’t think I’m some kind of freak. I’m not some kind of hippie vegetarian. Not that there’s anything wrong with hippie vegetarians, to be honest. I was always prejudiced against people who had, like, strong views about things like that. Now it’s kind of like, ‘Fuck, things are really, seriously wrong.’
How do you avoid becoming discouraged?
I see a lot of people feel the same way. I see the election of Obama, which I thought was impossible, you know? I’m encouraged because it wasn’t just me sitting in my bedroom. Wow, that’s change. That’s real serious change. A lot of sort of naysaying cynics that I know were like, ‘Aw, it’s never going to happen in America. The only reason this happened is because he’s just the same as the other people.’ I don’t think he is, you know? I don’t think he can be. It’s got to change, you know?

THE MEKONS ON SUN., JULY 26, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 9:30 PM / $16 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM. AND ON MON., JULY 27, AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD., ECHO PARK. 8:30 PM / $12-$14 / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. VISIT THE MEKONS AT MEKONS.DE OR MYSPACE.COM/THEMEKONS.

Stream: Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey “Here And Now”

(from hERE aND nOW out now on Bar/None)

Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple were (legendarily) the only people in North Carolina who bought Big Star albums the very first time around, and they’d team up most famously for the power-pop band the dB’s. (Stamey would also release Chris Bell’s ‘I Am The Cosmos’ 45 and Holsapple would go on to play with R.E.M. and Hootie and the Blowfish!) They are now teamed up and touring as a band with no official name. This interview by Dan Collins.

Peter, you joined a band when you were eight?
Peter Holsapple (guitar/vocals): What?
Admittedly, this is from Wikipedia. But it says you were born in ’56 and joined a band in 1964.
Peter: That is true. I played in combos. But they weren’t professional. The first professional band I played in was when I was 12—when I earned money. We lived in a city with a lot of very active places for young people to play. They were the assembly halls for churches. On the weekends they’d get a PA and bands would play. That was kind of fun.
Did you ever cut a single?
Peter: No. Chris and Mitch [Easter] and I had a band that had an album in 1973 called Rittenhouse Square. It was not very good! It was what you’d expect out of 14- or 15-year-olds. We certainly listened to a lot of Yes, a lot of the Move. Things were funny and grind-y, but in retrospect it’s pretty naïve stuff.
Sounds like you met each other early in life.
Peter: Chris and Mitch were ahead of me in school. I do remember him standing in the parking lot of the school with an instrument case waiting for his parents to pick him up. His dad was a pediatrician in town—a lot of people went to Dr. Stamey! I saw him as a sort of inroads in a lot of ways. When I met him, he wasn’t playing music at all. He was learning to record, which I thought was very cool.
Yeah! And Chris, you produced Peter’s band Little Diesel in ’74.
Chris Stamey (guitar/vocals): We made it in an afternoon in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I’d moved the bed a little bit, and I had little tweed Fender amps nailed up to the wall and we made it on a four-track tape recorder. At the time I think they made 10 copies. They recorded it on an eight-track recorder, and by that I mean a little recorder that made 8-track cartridges. There were only literally a few copies made.
Do you have an 8-track you can send to me in the mail?
Peter: No! But a vinyl edition did come out a few years ago. It came out on Telstar records.
Chris: I was talking to Mitch about how we should find that, and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the master tape still!’ So we dug it out and I mixed it up a little better than I had back then, and it’s a really cool energetic record! Anybody who’s heard it loves it.
Peter: There were a breadth of covers that we were trying to tackle. We were doing Free and Spirit and Status Quo. We didn’t really ascribe to the Allman Brothers/Marshall Tucker stuff that was popular there at the time. We sort of rooted for the underdog. That’s probably why we were such huge Move fans. That’s probably why the first song off our new album is by a band called ‘Family,’ who we love very dearly. That’s a band that had really meant an awful lot to us.
Chris: The MC5 had just come to town and just really transformed the Winston rock scene.
Peter: I was in school in New Hampshire at prep school for a year, during which time I did get to play in bands with Bob Tench, who went on to be Tom Petty’s keyboard player. He was one of those guys who was very deeply into the MC5 and the Stooges. The first Mott the Hoople album came out, and we really absorbed that.
Did you see the revival tour the MC5 did a few years ago? Evan Dando and Mark Arm from Mudhoney were singing with them.
Chris: And Marshall Crenshaw playing with them too—I have to say, the night I saw them in Chapel Hill, it was not a huge success, but it was only one night on a tour. It was kind of dark, I guess you’d say—the energy. The singers were reading all the lyrics—it wasn’t totally all together.
Well, enough about the past—tell me about the sound on your new album.
Chris: Well, what’s refreshing about talking with you is that it does remind me of a sixties interview. It’s not the usual questions. But Peter and I think about this as a band that we have together that has its own identity, and we just don’t have a band name for it. We recorded Mavericks in 1992, and in some ways we see this as a continuation of that.
Why is that?
Chris: It makes a connection to I guess what used to be called ‘good guy’ radio, almost like sixties AM radio. My experience with Big Star, for example, was hearing them—they were a hit band in Winston/Salem, and they were on the radio with bands like the Grass Roots and the Seeds. It’s just that they weren’t anywhere else but my hometown. It just isn’t a Porsche—more of a Woody! A family station wagon.
If somebody was a dB’s fan who had never heard this album, what differences would they see between this album and your old stuff?
Peter: dB’s records and the duet records are such that they both have as their main contributors myself and Chris. But if they’re dB’s records, they’ve got Will on drums and Gene on bass and it’s a harder rocking and slightly more frenzied thing.
Chris: The way the dB’s bass player and drummer play together is kind of like you drop an electric blender in a bathtub, and yet it keeps running. It’s a very explosive combustible combination. And we use really good players and we have more drums on this record than we thought we would, but this is more about our guitars and our voices.
Peter: It is two different voices! Even though Chris and I are the main guys writing for both groups. You know, there’s only been one saxophone on a dB’s record—on a single maybe. And here we’ve got Branford Marsalis who played on a couple cuts on this album.
That’s a score!
Peter: Yeah, Bran is a great guy. For years I was the keyboard guy and utility guy for Hootie and the Blowfish, and Branford always came down for their charity golf tournament every year and played. A couple years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got these songs that would be really well served if you could find some time to come and play on it. It’s about New Orleans.’ He was like, ‘I’m busy, but let me know! We’ll make it happen.’ Both tracks were lifted incredibly by his presence.
Lou Reed, before he was in the Velvet Underground, cut a single with King Curtis as the session horn guy! But I think you just beat that. Do you want to gloat at Lou Reed for besting him?
Peter: Lou’s contribution is sacred! Even his bad records aren’t that bad. I have no opportunity to diss him, frankly.
A few years back you recorded an album called A Question of Temperature.
Chris: Peter and I just came up with that title, I recall. On a record with a lot of covers, to name it after a cover that we weren’t doing seemed, you know… it was originally called Vote, and it was done as an EP. We did too many things… it became the world’s longest EP! We put it out right before the election that John Kerry lost to try to encourage people to vote. It seems crazy in retrospect. It was then released as a regular record in January. It was never intended to be an album-album.
What songs did you cover?
Chris: We covered a song of mine called ‘Summer Sun.’ The Yardbirds, we did. We covered ‘Venus’ by Television.
Can I get a statement from you about the death of Sky Saxon?
Chris: He was a friend of Chilton’s. I never really met him. When I played with Alex, we used to do ‘I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ almost every night. Alex was a really big fan.
How did you meet Alex Chilton?
Chris: I was making a record with Terry Ork. He’d put out the first Television 45, and I’d just moved to New York. And he said that they were putting out a record by Alex Chilton, and he needed a band because he was going to come up for one day—to play Valentine’s Day in New York. And Alex called me up, and we talked, and he asked me what my sign was, and everything seemed to be okay. I was playing bass—I think Tina Weymouth almost got the call, but I ended up getting it. And Alex stayed for over a year, and we kept playing. He’d stay on my couch a lot, and we went up and recorded a lot, most of which never came out.
There was another celebrity death this month as well. You guys once had a song called ‘Neverland.’ Do you think Michael Jackson named his ranch after you?
Chris: I think that would be a stretch.
The dance music movement that came along in the mid-early eighties, with Michael and Prince and Sheila E.—did that eclipse the fame that bands like the dB’s might have earned?
Peter: It certainly didn’t help it get on the radio! But… the music was great. All the music was great. We felt that we weren’t particularly in competition with that.
Chris: I think that for most bands, the whole idea of making it big wasn’t around. Once MTV came along, and it went out into the world, people got the idea, ‘Yeah, let’s make it big!’ But that wasn’t why we were making music. We weren’t trying to win the lottery.
Peter: Even as well known as we are for our contributions to sort of ‘new wave’ with the dB’s, we had already been writing and recording well before that. We just happened to come along at the time. The dB’s didn’t even have an American label for many years.
Of the people who were your contemporaries, who would you say sounded like you?
Chris: I think the Soft Boys! I clearly thought Television had the right idea, but I think the Soft Boys would be the closest.
Peter: Without meaning to be left of center, it appears that we were left of center. My dear friend Mark Brian from Hootie & the Blowfish says things to me like, ‘You’re my favorite eccentric weird songwriter.’ And I listen to my songs, and I don’t think they’re all that eccentric and weird. They’re simple, they’re rock ‘n’ roll, they have verses, they have choruses and bridges. What’s so different? Same thing with a Michael Jackson record. They’re still set up approximately the same way. Yet there’s a world of difference between them. The thing that we’ve all had to learn over the years is that this is not about huge success. That would be wonderful! I’d love it if a song got used in a commercial that would take the load off of being an unemployed musician. If I could ever get my publishing straightened out, maybe I could do something! The great thing is that I’ve got a job that I love. I love to be a musician. I love the reaction of people when they like my songs. Maybe I’m just a ham, but I really do dig it a lot. It feels really good. I’m not really comfortable in the rest of the world. I am on stage, though. Music was just about the most important thing to me until my kids came along.
Can you get your kids involved in music?
Peter: I play at my son’s school. I was the kids’ entertainer at Borders in New Orleans for about five years. I started working on a kids record, but then I realized that practically every old semi-failed new waver had done a kids record! I don’t want to be in that number until I can do something really good. Dan Zanes does a great job! Robert Warren is great! Disney’s got the Imagination Movers—that’s just the shit! I love it! The kids love it! You want to make kids music so that parents don’t jump out the window.
Chris, you haven’t released any kids albums to my knowledge—but you released Chris Bell’s first single on your label, right?
Chris: Right! Again, that was through Alex. Alex told me about it. I was very proud to have done that, but it wasn’t anything very creative except to the extent that A&R is creative. He’d made it a while back. He’d done in a guy’s garage, in a shoe box in Memphis, and then moved to London and mixed it with Geoff Emerick at George Martin’s Air studios.
In the last couple decades, we haven’t heard a whole lot from you! Have you been recording and producing bands or selling crystal meth, or what?
Chris: I do an album or two a month—some mixing, some producing. I probably work on about fifteen records a year. I just did a band called Megafaun. I did Rosebuds, on Merge. The Old Ceremony. Luego, which hasn’t come out yet…
How about some L.A. bands?
Chris: I did a whole bunch of recordings with Patrick Park! I don’t think he qualifies as a ‘band,’ but if anybody qualifies as a one-man band, he can really do it. That would be the most recent thing. I lived there, working there with Scott Litt on a Flat Duo Jets record for a while at Ocean Way, which became Cello. I definitely put in time in California. In a lot of ways, I consider the span I spent with Peter Holsapple to be a California band. We really started in L.A. We live in North Carolina, but the spirit of our birth was really in the Santa Monica kind of thing.
I have the Sharp Cuts compilation you came out on in 1980 on Planet Records with ‘Soul Kiss.’ You’re on there with a lot of other L.A. bands. Did that record come about because of your association with people out here?
Chris: No, I think that would be prior to it. I think we just got a call about it. I do remember they accidentally put the wrong tape on there, which always bugged me. That was a joke mix! It never was supposed to be out like that.
If it makes you feel better, on the album sticker, they list Suburban Lawns twice and forgot to list the Alleycats.
Chris: It figures.
Besides just songs, did people constantly misspell the ‘dB’s’ name on albums and flyers and such?
Chris: I think we knew we were in for trouble. It was interesting to see how things change in translation. I kind of liked that it did change all the time, but I guess it was an uphill struggle.
Did people ever spell it ‘D-e-e-B-e-e-s’ like the Bee Gees?
Chris: I think we’ve had every kind of possible ramification. The embarrassing thing is that we never should have put the apostrophe in there to begin with. It was archaic even then. It’s pretty incorrect.
I was listening to your early discography, Chris, and I feel like you were playing a brand of power-pop that even now sounds a bit more youthful. I feel like other power-pop sounded a bit mannish, and yours sounds more teenaged—even maybe had a bit of a bubblegum feel.
Peter:We listened to everything—depending on what you feel is bubblegum. I was married to Susan Cowsill of the Cowsills, so I love the Partridge Family. I love the stuff that was on Buddah, the Kasenetz-Katz Orchestra and things like that. But I don’t love it anymore than I love Otis Redding or the Dave Clark Five or Big Star. I will admit to having listened to more than the lion’s share of AM radio. Anything that goes from about 1964-1974.
Did you have a hard time convincing your peers to appreciate something more gentle and delicate?
Chris: I always played with good musicians, and we just talk about how to play music. You know on iTunes, they have a little pull-down things for genre when you want to make an MP3? I actually think I do more ‘folk rock’ over ‘power pop.’
What folk rock bands inspired you?
Chris: I would say the Byrds would be the biggest.
Speaking of 8-tracks, you guys did a lot of cassette releases as the dB’s. You did one that came in an actual can! Wasn’t that expensive?
Chris: We didn’t get the bill, but I don’t think it was that expensive. Probably a big waste of chow mein noodles or something! Cans can’t really cost that much—otherwise, they wouldn’t put cheap food in them.
Did the people who bought them actually have to use a can opener to get the tape out?
Chris: Oh yeah!
Why did things end? Why did you shelve the dB’s?
Chris: I think it’s more of a mystery why things continue. I look at bands I like like Blind Faith where they last for five months and a few gigs. It seemed like it went on a long time.
And you guys are still working together as a duo, so it’s like this working relationship that was in the dB’s is still going.
Chris: It had started 11 years before that, really. It’s just that the dB’s got more press because there were press agents involved.
Peter, you had a huge bunch of press when you played with R.E.M.
Peter: I did play with R.E.M. We did a tour for Green, the first album they did on Warner Brothers, and we recorded Out of Time—I played the acoustic guitar on ‘Losing My Religion.’ And then we went to England, and we reached a point where it was ‘untenable’ to work together. Much as I love those guys and respect what they’ve done, it was time for me to move on. I joined the Continental Drifters for ten years, and was serving in the same capacity I had with R.E.M. in Hootie & the Blowfish, which was a great gig I had for thirteen years.
You were saying that the dude from the Blowfish thinks you write weird songs. For our readership the weirdest thing you’ve EVER done is play in Hootie & the Blowfish!
Peter: The guys in the band are remarkable people. They truly are! They worked very, very hard for their success. They did some things that were probably ill-advised—they rushed out a second record out because they were afraid their fans were sick of the first record! They were thinking of their fans, which I thought was really cool.
Yeah, but… Hootie and the Blowfish! Chris, were ever moments where you were like, ‘Peter is killing the brand?’
Chris: I can’t even think in that way! He had been doing flower deliveries in New Orleans before that happened. I can’t think of how many times he went to Vietnam with them. I think it was kind of fun!
Peter: I would certainly rather do this than not work! That’s probably the best job I ever had. I enjoyed playing the music—it was really comfortable music, and really comforting music. It was not like playing with Yes. But to get to back up a world-class singer like Darius Rucker for 13 years was a serious honor. I was able to rope him into a tribute to Sandy Denny—I was the music director for a show that was celebrating the work of Sandy Denny, in Brooklyn, and I asked him to sing ‘Black Waterside,’ and he just tore it up! We got him on the R.E.M. tribute show at Carnegie Hall, and he did ‘I Believe’ with Calexico. People are more inclined to hate Hootie & the Blowfish because they think they’ve heard Hootie & the Blowfish. But Hootie did five really good studio records. Every one of those records had songs that could have been hits on them. The shape of radio changed, and the band stuck with their style. It was tough to go from being nobody, to being a huge hit, to being a punch line. People just think it’s ‘Hold My Hand’ and Darius in a cowboy hat hawking Burger King.
What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever played?
Chris: They all seem so normal! With the Golden Palominos, we played the Montrose Jazz Festival. We were playing after the Herbie Hancock Quartet, with Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock. I think we played after Miles Davis, too.
Have you had any crazy stories recently where you two put out an album or did a show, and some rabid fans did something… rabid?
Chris: I usually hide after shows! You seem to be looking for fun, tabloid stuff, and you’re probably looking in the wrong direction. We come from a very Southern, polite tradition.
I was actually at the 99 Cent Store on York in Highland Park, and ran across the Chris Stamey and Friends’ Christmas album— for a buck! It wasn’t bad! Can you tell me how that came about?
Peter: I did ‘O Holy Night’ on the very first version of the Christmas album years ago. I love that stuff! I grew up in the Episcopal Church, singing in the choir. I love the popular stuff! The Beach Boys’ Christmas record, the Ventures Christmas record, the Phil Spector Christmas Gift for You, the Beatles 45. Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em! And the best part of Christmas albums is that they sell every year.
Chris: Gene Holder, who plays bass in the dB’s, always wanted to make a Christmas record, always thought that would be a fun thing to do. We were so impressed that even after I was no longer playing with the band, I wrote a song called ‘Christmas Time’ kinda with him in mind and got the other guys who had been in the dB’s to record it with me. And we put together other tracks based around that one song.
Who sings ‘Silver Bells?’ That was my favorite tune off the album.
That was Kirsten Lambert. She’s a friend of ours who lives here. That may be her only recorded effort, as far as I know.
That’s a tragedy! Tell her! If she ever goes on tour, I’ll give her an interview.
Chris: Okay—haha!

PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY ON FRI., JULY 17, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 8 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY’S hEAR aND nOW IS OUT NOW ON BAR/NONE. VISIT PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY AT HOLSAPPLESTAMEY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/HEREANDNOWPETERANDCHRIS.

The third installment of Arthur Sunday Evenings at McCabe’s brought out a diverse crowd of bearded stoners, record geeks, pregnant professors, unsuspecting folkies, the coolest 15-year-olds in L.A., and Robert Downey Jr. No kidding. The evening began with Headdress, whose otherwise hypnotic (some might say sleep-inducing) performance was marred by the distracting and presumably unintentional rattle of a snare drum vibrating throughout the set. One forty-something McCabe’s regular found the Texan duo “oppressive,” though she freely admitted she was accustomed to the more “geriatric” performers the legendary guitar shop has hosted. Well if Headdress wasn’t her cup of tea, she was probably pleasantly surprised by the next artist, Mariee Sioux, sometimes a part of new hippie group Brightblack Morning Light. And if gentle finger plucking and lilting melodies about wizards, magic, and animals in the forest sung by a demure, sugary-voiced maiden are your thing, you’ll want to check her out too. Finally up were the Shjips, and hip kids young and old stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the center aisle in anticipation of the rock. Ripley Johnson, giving heed to the uninitiated by offering free earplugs should anyone need them, came out looking like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle who dozed off listening to the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat and awoke a few decades later to Spacemen 3’s Sound of Confusion. But some other influences must have crept in during that epic nap because the raucous up-tempo opening number sounded almost like a cover of Devo’s “Gates of Steel.” Lest anyone fear a post-punk makeover, though, the Shjips soon floated into their signature meditative, psychedelic drone, laying out blistering guitar freakout solos over minimal electric keyboard, metronomic drumbeats, and bass lines repeated like a mantra. Johnson joked that the band adheres to the Ramones philosophy of playing short sets. But whereas  Joey and Co. might tear through 15 songs in 20 minutes, Ripley, Dusty, Omar, and Nash jammed out about 6 or so in a bit more than half an hour—leaving the audience still wanting more.

— Hane C. Lee