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: Charles Ives‘ music is one of America’s great treasures. Mostly unknown in his lifetime and active as a composer for just a few decades at the start of the 1900s, he has now been recognized as both an innovator of modern musical techniques and as a great composer, of any era. (Full disclosure: on Repercussion, the second of the dB’s records, there is a shout-out to Ives. He was famous for incorporating musical “quotes” in his original works, and we put a phrase of one of his favorites, the hymn “Shall We Gather By The River?” after the line, “Ives was on the stereo,” into the second verse of our song “From A Window To A Screen.”) The story goes that his father taught the kids to sing in one key and play piano in a different key, at the same time, to build their characters up to a self-reliant, tough Yankee standard, and this pedagogical exercise started him down the road to polytonality and simultaneous disconnected streams. His childhood experience of hearing several marching bands playing different songs at once, overlapping in parades, also was an early kickstart for him. But his genius is not explained by these–we’ve all heard parades! Ives is most famous for his orchestral works, and a great live performance of “The Unanswered Question” or “Three Places in New England” is one of the most thrilling sonic experiences I know of, in any genre. But Ives wrote songs, too, 129 in all, mostly with piano accompaniment. Although these are in the classical tradition and have complicated, highly chromatic elements, they are not the usual operatic bravado pieces. Take “Ann Street,” for example (near where Ives worked, in downtown Manhattan, as an insurance salesman all his life). Here are the complete lyrics to this 50-second song:
[Shout.]
Broadway!
[Sing.]
Quaint name Ann Street.
Width of same, 10 feet.
Barnums mob Ann street,
Far from obsolete.
Narrow, yes Ann street,
But business, both feet.
[Shout.]
Nassau crosses Ann Street!
[Sing.]
Sun just hits Ann street,
Then it quits some greet!
Rather short, Ann Street.
And “The Cage” is another that clocks in at around a minute:
A leopard went around his cage
from one side back to the other side;
he stopped only when the keeper came around with meat;
A boy who had been there three hours
began to wonder, “Is life anything like that?”
Theo Bleckman has recently done interesting versions of some of these, but for the most part they are unknown outside classical circles. I’d love to hear some singers such as Sharon Van Etten or Django Haskins tackle some of this material, away from the operatic style. Or for a musically muscular band such as Megafaun to interpret them, much as they did the Harry Smith Anthology of American Music. I have always imagined Ives himself singing these at the piano, and smiling.
Video after the jump.
