Although Chris Stamey is best known as being part of the original dB’s, the legendary jangle-pop combo from Winston Salem, N.C., that sprouted wings when they moved to NYC in the late ’70s, his solo work has always been equally fascinating. Soon after cutting Stands For deciBels and Repercussion, the seminal band’s longplayers tracked in the early ’80s, Stamey pulled up stakes and returned to churning out his own hackle-raising sound. He has resurfaced recently as part of a fertile duo with Peter Holsapple, but it’s albums like his current solo release, Lovesick Blues (Yep Roc), that keep his one-man trip smoldering like a late-October controlled burn in the N.C. tobacco fields while light rain begins to fall. Stamey will guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Stamey: I love old tube mics. But around 1985, I traded a fuzzbox for a Shure 58, the low-budget bar-standard microphone. It was beat-up—trashed really—and didn’t seem to sound great when I plugged it in; oh well. One day I was in a bind and, any port in a storm, I had to use it to hammer in a nail. So it was really beat up after that. It got wet at one point, the grill rusted. I’d keep it in my case but I never used it. A decade later, I was doing a complicated session with Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary’s original band. We ran out of mics, maxed out everything, and Ryan had told me he’d just be overdubbing the singing (this was early on) because everyone was playing so loudly. I gave him the destroyed 58 so he could guide the musicians and talk to the control room—it was all that was left. Then, at the end of the 10-hour full-band session, he said there was one song he just wanted to run down on acoustic guitar. He started playing, no time to give him a better one, the others chimed in, we cut maybe 12 more songs in a row, and that mic turned into one of the best-sounding mics I ever had. Vintage $10,000 tube microphones are great, but I learned then that, when it all comes down to it, a great singer makes a great mic. I still have it; haven’t hammered anything with it recently, though.
Video after the jump.
