“I had gotten the idea from a band down here, the Red Clay Ramblers, who’d put out their own Christmas album,” Stamey says. “I’d helped Don Dixon with the recording of it, then we went to New York and mastered it and the band put it out themselves. I learned you can do it; you just have to pay $500. You don’t have to go through some guy at a desk. Mitch and I had been through that, going to England and going to New York, trying to get a record deal through those guys at the desk.
“It was pretty early on to put out what was then called a ‘vanity record,’ and probably still should be called that,” he continues with a laugh. “We did it and Pere Ubu did it. Patti Smith had Piss Factory, but I think other people paid for that. You could pay for the pressings and take it to stores and leave it on consignment. There were these independent record stores that had maybe some singles from Britain and Pere Ubu and one or two more, like a really cool little club.
“And then, of course, the world went mad and everybody made a record.”
While the world was going mad and punk was on the verge of turning this “really cool little club” into an international media phenomenon, Stamey was plotting some big changes in his own life. Though he’d completed most of the course work for his music major at UNC, he was less interested in the academic conservatory than in the racket being generated by the indie, proto-punk New York rock scene. He decided to transfer his credits to NYU, where he could earn a degree in philosophy in one semester (which he did, hence “Kierkegaard”) while dual majoring at CBGB.
“In retrospect, the freedom around CBGB was great, but I kinda thought everybody up there would be like Television and Talking Heads, and in fact the Dead Boys were nothing like that,” he says. “Musically, the desire to break boundaries and do something new wasn’t the overwhelming impulse there that I was looking for. So it was a great adventure, but not necessarily a musical adventure.”
It was in New York, however, where Stamey fell under the spell of another son of the south — Alex Chilton, who’d transformed himself from the teenage singer of a string of hits for the Box Tops (“The Letter”, “Cry Like A Baby”) into a power-pop avatar through two highly regarded, hugely influential (though commercially negligible) albums as the leader of Big Star.
Recording in his native Memphis at Ardent Studios, Chilton and band sounded like the Beatles on steroids (perhaps laced with psilocybin), with material as concise and well-crafted as the guitar riffing was muscular. In an early ’70s era of self-consciously progressive rock, the poppier Big Star bucked the trends of what was happening in the music world at large and thumbed its nose at the stereotypes of southern rock. When Big Star disbanded (a studio reunion album is slated for this fall), Chilton embarked on an idiosyncratic solo career, making a series of albums that sounded as little like Big Star as Big Star had sounded like the Box Tops.
“Ork Records had put out a 45 by Alex called ‘Singer Not The Song’, and Alex came up to New York theoretically for one show on Valentine’s Day,” says Stamey. “And he just didn’t leave. In fact, he didn’t leave my apartment. We did one show under my name where I think Alex played the meat grinder, grinding up hamburger, but mainly we played as Alex Chilton & the Cossacks for about a year and a half.
“We recorded a bunch that year, even though the tapes were never released. Technically, Alex knows how to get exactly what he wants and is very clear about using the studio. Compared with the stuff I’d done with Don Dixon and Mitch Easter, people who were also really great, Alex knew how to warp things more, to get these really cool and exaggerated effects. And he had this real interesting world view. One thing he said was that ‘Good things come from the province.’ Meaning Memphis, in his case. And then the big capital cities are where people end up paying attention to things.”
If New York was the artistic capital where Stamey would make his mark, he never really left ‘the province’ behind. After starting his own Car Records in 1977 (releasing I Am The Cosmos by Chris Bell, Chilton’s former Big Star bandmate), he shifted from sideman with Chilton to concentrating more on his own music. Releasing a single as Chris Stamey & the dB’s, he recruited a rhythm section from his native Carolina, drummer Will Rigby and bassist Gene Holder, to join him in New York. They subsequently decided to expand into a four-piece, enlisting Stamey’s boyhood bandmate Peter Holsapple to share singing and songwriting.
“I had moved to Memphis after playing with Mitch Easter in the H-Bombs in Chapel Hill, but Memphis wasn’t really opening its loving arms toward me,” remembers Holsapple. “My escape was to go to the public library and read the Village Voice. Chris, Will and Gene had started the dB’s earlier that year, and I got charged up seeing their name listed at CBGB’s and Max’s.
“When Will called saying I should come to Manhattan and audition to play keyboards for the band, I bolted up there. We’d all grown up together and spoke the same musical language. In fact, Gene was the only one I’d never been in a band with.”
“The common denominator was that we were really, really good friends and we’d known each other such a long time,” says Chris. “And when Peter joined, he was just wonderful. We basically picked the best songs, and our songwriting styles offset each other in a good way.”
Like the two Big Star albums a decade earlier, the first two dB’s albums of the early 1980s remain hallmarks of inspired pop craftsmanship, providing a bridge to a new generation of southern rock embodied by the likes of R.E.M. Yet they were so out-of-synch with the prevailing trends of American music that both Stands For Decibels and Repercussion were initially released in Britain and distributed Stateside as imports. By the time the band signed with the American label Bearsville for 1984’s Like This, Stamey had bailed for a solo career, leaving Holsapple as the frontman.
