There are many people who consider the first two albums by the dB’s to be just as influential as those revered early Velvet Underground releases. The singing/songwriting backbone of the dB’s was the tandem of Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, whose simpatico musical attraction was strong enough to fuel Mavericks, an excellent 1991 album by the duo. Eighteen years later, the longtime friends have released the equally stirring Here And Now. The pair has also begun recording again with the dB’s, including original bassist Gene Holder and drummer Will Rigby. Holsapple and Stamey are guest editing magnetmagazine.com all this week. Read our Q&A with them.
Chris: Peter Blegvad (which, as Andy Partridge once so winningly sung, rhymes with “egg bad”), is a curious kind of guy; there’s a glint stuck in his eye. He has a deep and abiding interest in life, both real and surreal. And he draws on the talents of a Renaissance man to follow his curiosity; calling him a poet, songwriter, composer and cartoonist only scratches the surface. I’ve been a musical cohort (and producer) of his in the past, one of many—the list of his musical connections is a six-degrees-of chart—but I bring him to your attention in his cartoonist guise. Peter is following a family path here: Erik Blegvad, his father, has illustrated more than 100 children’s books, including the classic Mud Pies And Other Recipes. Peter himself worked for Charles Schultz on backgrounds for Peanuts in his youth. In the ’90s, returning to London after a long tenure in New York, he started a weekly cartoon for the London Independent that featured a mostly eyeless baby named Leviathan. Each week, the infant would exemplify some aspect of Peter’s erudition and his fascination with the details of the human condition. These are now collected in The Book Of Leviathan. It’s not a chortle-and-flip good time (although there is much humor there); instead, they’ll come back to haunt you and perhaps will renew your curiosity about the whys and the wherefores of this life. And they’ll remind you that the curiosity you had as a child is still there, lurking and ready to heed your call, under your shellac of adolescence and adulthood.
