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: This out-of-print, copyright-1980 book was written, I suppose, for elementary-school kids as a way to show what a career as a rock musician might be like. (Or was it to frighten them off?) It aims to expose the nitty-gritty behind the myth. To show them that it’s not all backstage gourmet deli platters, champagne and spitting blood (the ’80s, remember). I imagine it was a companion piece to perhaps A Day In The Life Of A Goat Farmer and A Day In The Life Of A Nuclear Physicist. But I’ve read it so many times now that, for me, it has acquired the resonance of poetry. And the photos, by Roger Ruhlin, are practically scratch-and-sniff; they are so evocative of that time and yet so innocent. It follows an artist named Rich Moyers as he composes music, records it with his bell-bottomed band, approves a record cover, then plays a show in the evening in what appears to be a Church of the Holy Disco. The band is visually perfect in their own way; no one has ever looked more like a bassist than “Steve,” as he tunes his bass without the crutch of a tuner. Many lines, when combined with their photos, have become iconic around here, such as, “A little joking helps to ease the tension before the audience arrives,” and, “[He] sleeps until noon, gets up and has a cup of coffee at his piano.” And the fact that it is published by Troll Associates.
Video after the jump.
