Let’s Active at 40: Still wonderful

For the most part, I tried to avoid too many first-person indulgences in “Step It Up and Go,” with one big exception. I began Chapter 9 by recounting the first time I ever heard the band R.E.M., which remains one of the most all-time formative moments in the development of my musical cosmos.

As producer of R.E.M.’s early records, a time when they were in North Carolina quite a bit, Winston-Salem native Mitch Easter was very much at the center of that. And he cemented his place there even further with his own band, Let’s Active, marking that combo’s 40-year anniversary with a show Thursday night at The Ramkat in Winston-Salem.

It was a wonderful evening, with Mitch and a cast of friends revisiting long-ago Let’s Active songs from their days as a female-dominated trio. Hearing those songs in the air after so long felt like a trip back in time to being 23 years old all over again. Judging from the crowd response, I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt that way.

The organizers were kind enough to let me say a few words onstage during the pre-show speakers’ portion of the event, and I am proud to say I took up the least time of anyone (hey, I know my place!). The text is below.

A night to remember.

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Photo by Alanna Meltzer-Holderfield,

Place has always been an important part of music, especially rock & roll. But there have been times in the rock era when the community implied by that word, “place,” was less a physical location and more a state-of-mind network.

I’m thinking of towns like Austin, Minneapolis, Chapel Hill, Athens – and of course, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In the 1980s, it seemed like the best & brightest bands were coming from towns like that, off the beaten path and far from the music industry’s centers. And from Winston-Salem and beyond, those towns were like outposts on an underground-rock chitlin circuit that bands both old and new toured. I was in Austin back then and saw most of the notable bands of that generation come through. And when the Replacements, Guadalcanal Diary or Let’s Active came to play, everyone in town worth knowing was in the room, too. It was a great family to be part of.

Like a lot of people who were from outside North Carolina at that time, my introduction to Let’s Active came via R.E.M., whose 1983 full-length Murmur just floored me. Hearing that for the first time blew my mind and completely reset my musical compass. I wanted to know everything about it, including where it came from and who the producers were: Mitch Easter & Don Dixon. I quickly set about acquiring every record I could find that either of them had anything to do with.

I remember hearing Let’s Active’s Cypress in the fall of 1984, and it felt like a bulletin received from this wonderful & mysterious community out there. And I got to see Let’s Active on a bill with The dB’s in Austin, at a club called Steamboat, and it was a show that was every bit as great as I hoped it would be.

All these years later, Mitch is the last member of the original Let’s Active trio still with us. But the four Let’s Active records are still in the world, as great as ever, and Mitch is still weaving spells in that amazing studio of his.

As for me, I can’t wait to hear this music played live again. Thank you.

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Photo courtesy of Thomas Ivey.

Chris Stamey’s “Universe-Sized Arms,” from Ryan Adams

It’s not much of an overstatement to call Chris Stamey one of the great father figures to the music community around greater Chapel Hill, where the dB’s co-founder has toiled in the studio trenches with great honor for more than two decades. Chris was a key player in the early phases of the Whiskeytown saga, lending studio savvy at various junctures through the 1990s (including production of the great 1998 “lost” album, Forever Valentine). He also produced some spectacular post-Whiskeytown solo albums for Caitlin Cary.

More recently, Chris has served as producer, mentor and fixer for an entire generation of younger area artists, working with them on recordings and shows like the ongoing live performances of Big Star’s Third that he oversees. Brett Harris, Jeff Crawford, Skylar Gudasz and Django Haskins, among many others, have benefited greatly from the master’s assistance and guidance.

Somehow, Chris finds time to continue making records of his own, too. The latest is the aptly titled Euphoria (Yep Roc Records), a full-on rock record after the chamber-pop detour of 2013’s Lovesick Blues. Euphoria brings together a lot of the young guns from Stamey’s circle, alongside fellow North Carolina legends like Mitch Easter, figurehead of ’80s college-radio legends Let’s Active.

Of particular interest to Planet “Losering,” the album opens with a previously unheard song written by our man Ryan Adams, “Universe-Sized Arms.” Ryan wrote “Universe-Sized Arms” as a driving rocker, and Chris added a very cool orchestrated arrangement reminiscent of the old “James Bond” spy-movie soundtracks. Euphoria‘s other 12 tracks are quite fine as well, with Stamey’s usual surplus of melodic goodness plus a nifty bonus-track cover of the 1971 Tommy James hit “Draggin’ the Line” to boot.

Chris will unveil Euphoria with an album-release show Saturday night in Carrboro, and you can read a bit more about the record and details about the show here. I’m also delighted to be able to premiere the “Universe-Sized Arms” video below. Enjoy, y’all.

 

From past to present: 6 String Drag

Over the last year or so, Kenny Roby, Rob Keller, Scott Miller and Ray Duffey have taken tentative steps toward putting their long-gone band 6 String Drag back together as a serious ongoing concern. That’s a welcome development because the years have been kind to their brand of combustible country-soul. I saw 6 String Drag play a spectacular show in early 2014, which made it clear that they hadn’t lost a step from their mid-’90s prime alongside the Backsliders and Whiskeytown in the Triangle’s top twang troika.

Soon after that show, 6 String Drag went into Mitch Easter’s palatial Fidelitorium studio to record their first album since 1997. A bit more than a year later we have Roots Rock ‘n’ Roll; and my God, is it wonderful. Tight in all the right places and gloriously loose everywhere else, Roots Rock ‘n’ Roll feels like a 40-minute pass to be young again — but not in a creepy, grasping way. It’s the work of people whose spark, collectively as well as individually, has never gone out. You can read a bit more about the record here, and also a longer review here.

Given the vagaries of a music industry that stopped making sense years ago (if ever it did, really), I have small hope that Roots Rock ‘n’ Roll will do enough to set 6 String Drag up as a fulltime occupation for its principles. But the fact that it exists at all feels like a minor miracle that should be celebrated. The album release show happens Friday night at Kings in Raleigh; do not miss it.

(Photo credit: Rodney Boles)

Friends near and far, throwing rocks at the moon

For those of us who were in Raleigh during our town’s glory days as epicenter of mid-’90s alternative-country, this holiday season has been just like the old times of the “Losering” era. It seems like we’ve all been saying hello again, as well as goodbye for good.

December brought the end of the building that housed one of Ryan Adams’ favorite Whiskeytown-era watering holes, the Comet Lounge, which was finally torn down two years after the demolition of the adjacent Brewery nightclub. And New Year’s Eve brought the end of Sadlack’s, the Hillsborough Street sandwich shop/bar where Whiskeytown formed two decades ago, which is closing to make way for a hotel. I went to Kenny Roby’s show there last Saturday night to report this story about the end; and while I was there, a Sadlack’s regular who may or may not have been drunk got in my face to rant, because I apparently chose the wrong person to interview. On the whole, I’d say it was a very Sadlack’s interaction, along with the following response from an angry reader (reproduced here in all its sub-literate glory):

Sadlack’s not well written at all, lame and denigrating you so called journalistic hack, you must be a smart ass never traveled punk yankee go home…news and disturber another rag with paid articles written to favor their advertisers

Golly, guess he told me.

Come New Year’s Eve, the Backsliders presided over the end out on the back patio with a last-rites set that included a couple of new songs good enough to qualify as encouraging. But just like always, it was “Throwing Rocks at the Moon” that put a lump in my throat. Title track of a 1997 album that really should have launched the Backsliders to stardom (or at least beyond dayjobs), “Moon” is a pretty-much-perfect evocation of bittersweet goodbyes. I found myself thinking about Ryan, of course, who left Sadlack’s and Raleigh behind long ago; and also my old friend Peter Blackstock, for whom I wrote that first No Depression Whiskeytown story all those years ago — and who just left the Triangle to move back to Austin and take the rock-writer job at the American-Statesman. I really wish he could’ve been there, so I sent a silent toast in his direction

I’m also wishing Peter was gonna be here this weekend for Saturday’s reunion show by the third band from Raleigh’s alt-country kingpin troika, Kenny Roby’s 6 String Drag. Of course, the principles get a little twitchy about calling this a “reunion,” a word that carries the baggage of expectations. But no matter what they’re calling it, 6 String Drag’s four members have reconvened to record new music, which they’ll do later this month at Mitch Easter’s splendid Fidelitorium recording emporium over in Kernersville. I can’t wait to hear it. Meantime, here’s a preview of Saturday night’s show. Yes, of course, I’ll be there.