“I guess my idea of southern rock, weirdly enough, is probably Derek & the Dominoes, which was led by an Englishman,” says Stamey with a laugh. “What I do like about that stuff is the jamming freedom, the same thing that I like to a greater extent about Television.
“The real tedious, drugged-out part I’m not that fond of. I saw, kind of by default, a million concerts by the Allman Brothers and Marshall Tucker and all that. Southern rock? Big Star’s southern rock. And Travels In The South? I wasn’t really thinking about the geographical south.”
Given his offhand reference to Eric “Derek” Clapton, perhaps it’s not quite as surprising that one of the creative sparks for Travels In The South came from an earlier, short-lived Clapton band: Blind Faith. The expanded reissue of the British supergroup’s sole album features a disc of instrumental improvisation — with the open-ended spirit Stamey hoped to inject into his own sessions. Not that he was about to go “jam band,” but the melodic motif of the linchpin track “Kierkegaard” returns later on the disc in the instrumental reprises “K Jam” and “Leap Of Faith”.
“Kierkegaard”, which ponders the existence of a supreme deity, conjures all sorts of associations that really shouldn’t fit together: an understated soul groove that suggests the early Hall & Oates of “She’s Gone”, a rapturous harmony chorus that evokes Brian Wilson’s ambition of a “Teenage Symphony To God”, a piano break that recalls Dave Brubeck. Yet somehow it all coalesces into the most satisfying five-and-a-half minutes of music we’re likely to hear this year.
“I was trying to have a friction between this heavenly sound and somebody questioning the existence of God,” Stamey says of the song. “I think of it like the angels singing, and it was easier for me to do it like the Beach Boys than as a Bach chorale. I wasn’t copying the Beach Boys just to copy, but the juxtaposition felt like the right thing for the content.”
“Content” is a key concept for Stamey, and the lack thereof is a main reason he lists for concentrating on producing rather than recording his own music for more than a decade. Too much of what he hears these days strikes him as more concerned with form than content, style over substance, and he didn’t want to contribute to that glut.
“I really felt like a lot of people were making records based on a sound or a fuzzbox or what they remembered hearing the Zombies growing up,” he says. “It’s kind of a tricky thing to describe, but I didn’t want to make a record that didn’t have something to say. And there was an extended period where I didn’t think I had much to say. I’d had a bunch of records where I talked about romantic [travails]. And then I married my wife, Dana, and found a lot of happiness, which makes it harder to write.
“So I did some demos with Whiskeytown and recordings with some other people and was encouraged by Scott Litt to try producing.” Litt produced the second dB’s album, Repercussions, later enjoyed a higher profile working with R.E.M., and launched the Modern Recording studio with Stamey in 1996.
“I got caught up in that, and it’s a whirlwind,” Stamey continues. “It’s very different than writing music, although there’s a part of the producer’s job that involves writing music, or arranging anyway. It’s got its own satisfaction, so I kept at it.”
Where so many fledgling rockers of the ’60s dreamed of performing before screaming fans, recording held greater fascination for Stamey from the start. He remembers getting his first tape recorder at the age of 5, playing constantly with it, making tapes of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” off the TV and playing them backwards. He loved the way tape smells.
As a kid in Chapel Hill and later a music student (composition and theory) at his native University of North Carolina, he found kindred spirits who would remain musical compatriots for much of his life. He teamed with Peter Holsapple in a band named Rittenhouse Square and with Mitch Easter in Sneakers. He aspired to the studio proficiency of Don Dixon, who was making his living in the studio while Stamey and Easter were just playing around. (Dixon and Easter would subsequently play pivotal production roles in the early music of R.E.M.)
“Mitch and I learned together,” Stamey remembers. “We had a four-track studio with a TEAC quarter-inch machine in a room with a bunch of amplifiers, and we made these things that we called albums. Don was really on another level, for a long time. He sang great, played bass great and was doing sessions at the one pro studio in North Carolina. Mitch and I pushed the knobs and got as crazy as we liked, but Don really knew how it should be done.”
One of the recordings Stamey and Easter made would have profound implications. Their self-produced, self-released, self-titled Sneakers debut in 1976 became an American DIY touchstone, one of the first records to circumvent the conventional channels of the recording industry. It sold some 3,000 copies and inspired countless bands to take their art into their own hands.
