“As we kept recording, there were just more and more songs that couldn’t make it on the record,” Stamey explains. “Also, I was probably going completely insane, but I had this thing about hi-hats, that sound on the record. I didn’t want to hear that frequency. I didn’t want to hear drums anymore. Will’s great, he’s fantastic, and I couldn’t just say, ‘Will, I don’t want you to play on my songs.’ I knew Peter could do it [keep the band going], and it would be a really strong thing. And maybe I could have a strong thing on my own.”
“When Chris left, all of us felt a certain amount of relief tempered with disappointment,” Holsapple remembers. “While we’d never been overly competitive, an edge had developed in our relationship. Chris was pretty straight-and-narrow, very ambitious and very smart, while I was smoking lots of pot, drinking and carousing a lot, and really felt less like a leadership candidate than perhaps I should have. Although I did have plenty of songs to present to the band, as evinced by Like This and The Sound Of Music [1987’s follow-up], I certainly did not assume the mantle of leader of the band.”
Through the rest of the decade, Stamey explored a variety of different directions. He released a series of eclectic solo albums, recorded and toured with the Golden Palominos (drummer Anton Fier’s loose aggregation that included R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Cream’s Jack Bruce and P-Funk’s Bernie Worrell amid its cast of dozens), served as a sideman with Bob Mould and began producing other acts, starting in 1983 with Georgia indie-rock band Pylon.
After releasing Fireworks in 1991 and reuniting with Holsapple for the well-received Mavericks, he returned to his native North Carolina. He now lives (as he writes in the liner notes for Travels In The South) a mile from where he was born in Chapel Hill. He didn’t move back for musical reasons, though North Carolina music reaped quick dividends.
“I guess I moved back because of my future wife,” he says, before correcting himself. “Actually, there’s no ‘I guess’ about it. I really wasn’t thinking about my musical career, because if you look at my recording history you can see that I’ve almost never had a plan and no thought of a career.”
Yet his career moved in a different direction, as Stamey discovered what fertile soil Carolina had become for a new generation of musicians. Many of them were vaguely classified as “alternative country” (whatever that is), but most of them demonstrated the sort of commitment, craft and songwriting concision that had marked Stamey’s music since the days it had been mislabeled “power pop.”
“It may seem a little strange for me to be producing a bunch of country stuff,” he says. “Style or genre is one thing, but sometimes people just have something to say. Whiskeytown had something that was just incredibly immediate, and how could you not respond? Right away, I liked that Ryan felt like it was for real. And being a great singer never hurts.
“When I produce somebody, I try not to make them into me. I try to find out what they have to say and help them say it. Caitlin was particularly exciting because you just saw her open up like crazy. And Thad [Cockrell, probably the most country of the artists Stamey has produced] was just on fire to record.”
Perhaps because Stamey has been typecast as a guy on the alternative-indie fringe, major labels have seemed less comfortable with him than artists are. Though Tift Merritt and Whiskeytown each credit Stamey with playing a crucial role in shaping their demos, he didn’t end up handling their major-label debuts.
Says Adams, “Chris fought for Whiskeytown when we signed over to the major and begged them to take us as a band that should be left to make some music at home and not be toured too much…given a hall pass so we could wander while all those other bands fought for the highest scores on their SATs. That was a nice thing to do and an impossible dream, but he believed in us. We heard ya, Chris. They didn’t [the record company], but we heard ya.”
One of Stamey’s most intriguing assignments paired him with Alejandro Escovedo, more of a generational peer than most of the artists the 49-year-old producer has mentored. The two refugees from the punk ’70s shared many of the same values and reference points. Many have hailed the resulting A Man Under The Influence (released by Bloodshot in 2001) as the finest of Escovedo’s career.
Just as so many younger artists say how much they learned from Stamey, the producer says he found working with Alejandro to be a learning experience for him.
“I try to get on the wavelength of what the person has to say, and then get a band together and rehearse to go in to record,” says Stamey. “At the end of that process with Al, I thought we had a record, and he said, no, this isn’t right and that isn’t right.
“To me, these were pretty picky things. I mean, I don’t know that I even care about guitar solos at all. It took us a year later, but he was totally right, across the board. Even though the record had been 90% there, he wouldn’t let go until he got what he wanted.”
