When the dB’s released their first two albums in the early ‘80s – 1981’s Stands for DeciBels and 1982’s RePercussion – on UK-based label Albion Records, the only way to secure a physical copy in the U.S. was through imports.
The album was produced with the late Alan Betrock, founder of the seminal post-punk publication New York Rocker. However, finding no U.S. record labels, Albion released it in several European countries as well as Japan and Australia.
“When the first album originally came out in 1981, it didn’t come out in the United States at all,” says drummer Will Rigby. “So, word of mouth was pretty much the only way it was going to get around because you had to buy an import copy and there was nobody giving them to [major] radio stations to play.”
For the band – which also features singer-songwriters and guitarists Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple as well as bass guitarist Gene Holder – it became evident that breaking into national radio or publications, especially in New York City, was a different animal from their native North Carolina. There were a lot more bands competing for attention. Fortunately, for the band, independent and college radio stations and publications stepped in and helped them grow their fanbase in a very grassroots, DIY fashion. They frequently performed at CBGB, Maxwell’s and other influential venues in New York.
“Basically, everything that we got was from college DJs and people on independent radio that played it for people and that was good,” says Holsapple. “We felt very fortunate that there were people that were reading New Musical Express and Trouser Press magazine that knew to kind of pick up on it.”
The band found the sledding a bit easier on future releases, albeit with slightly different lineups. In 2005 the original, classic lineup of the band reunited and released their latest album Falling Off the Sky in 2012.
On Friday, the band will reissue Stands for deciBels on vinyl in the U.S. for the first time via Chapel Hill-based label Propeller Sound Recordings. They also plan to reissue Repercussion sometime this fall and go on a short U.S. tour (dates are listed at the end of the article). The reissues come on the heels of the label’s vinyl archival release of the band’s early material called I Thought You Wanted to Know (1978 to 1981).
“It’s very nice to have it out on vinyl because a lot of the initial interest in the record was from college and independent DJs who brought their own import copies to the radio stations in 1981 and 1982,” says Holsapple. “So, this will be a nice treat to have it available.”
Stands for deciBels will also be available on CD and all digital platforms. The CD edition includes bonus track “Judy,” which didn’t appear on the original release but previously appeared on a late ’80s long out of print I.R.S. Records CD reissue.
Scummy Water Tower recently caught up with Holsapple and Rigby to discuss what it was like revisiting their early material.
The band premiered the music video last week for “Black and White.” What was it like getting to revisit that song in that manner?
Will Rigby: Well, it’s almost like an animation. Somebody put it together from a bunch of still photos, mostly there’s a little bit of old live video of us. You’ll see it’s kind of wacky. I mean, it is funny to hear these songs again so much later. It’s almost like a different lifetime.
That song seems to have a significant impact on kind of getting the ball rolling with the band.
Peter Holsapple: Well, it was released as a single in the United States on a label called Shake Records, which was Alan Betrock’s label. So that’s where it did get a certain amount of attention originally.
What inspired the song?
Holsapple: Oh gosh. Honestly, no. It’s 44 years old and I have no idea what I was thinking at the time. I’m sure it was some relationship that went sideways as so many of them did at that point.
I imagine that the song gave you increased confidence to keep making music.
Holsapple: Well, every next song does as long as you don’t run out of songs. I suppose that makes sense, right?
Yeah. Prior to Chris forming the band, he played with Alex Chilton and Richard Lloyd. It sounds like that collaboration played an important role in the early creation of the band.
Holsapple: Well, you realize of course, that we all grew up together in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Will and I go back to third grade when we were eight years old, so we’ve known each other for 165 years now, [laughs] and we also played in bands, and we played with each other, and we knew each other for forever. So, we had bands that recorded in North Carolina. We came to New York kind of fully formed and ready to go. Chris came up first to play with Alex Chilton and a group called The Erasers before that, but we found each other up there. I think Chris got Will and Gene to come up to do a couple of shows, and then it became obvious that it was going to be kind of a good band. And then I’d moved to Memphis, and they asked if I wanted to audition on keyboards, and so it all kind of fell together.
We came up together in the Winston-Salem, North Carolina music scene. We followed Chris up to New York, but we had all played in bands in North Carolina and we knew how to write songs and we knew how to arrange and so we came up kind of ready to go. And Chris, yes, Chris had played with Alex, and he didn’t really play with Richard Lloyd. Richard had a song that he sang on, which is the “I Thought You Wanted To Know” single, but it was mainly that he played with Alex and that was a big deal because we’d been early Big Star fans.
Rigby: And Television fans.
I imagine the shared backgrounds made it easier to sync up musically.
Rigby: Yeah, we have a lot in common musically. We definitely grew up listening to the same radio station and a lot of the same records, so we had kind of a language.
Going off that point, the band excelled thanks to having multiple singers and songwriters. Peter, you have a pretty conventional writing style compared to Chris who was more experimental in his writing.
Holsapple: I’m not as smart as Chris is.
How did having those contrasts most benefit the band most with the early material?
Holsapple: Well, when I joined the group, I joined as an accompanist on keyboards to Chris’s songs. It had been Chris Stamey and the dB’s originally, and I had been recording in Memphis for a few months and then I came up to New York and auditioned, as I said. And Chris encouraged us to work up a couple of the songs that I brought, and it seemed to work as a kind of counterpoint to what Chris was writing. So, I guess good cop, bad cop. I don’t know who’s the good cop and who’s the bad cop. Maybe Will can weigh in on that.
Rigby: Well, they each had a distinct style and method and all of us playing the songs together made it into more of one thing than two separate things.
I always find it fascinating with bands that have multiple songwriters as it seems to help to challenge them and keep them on their toes.
Holsapple: Well, I don’t think Chris and I ever saw any sort of competition. Certainly, we both were writing a lot of songs and that was just kind of a great thing I thought. So, I was really happy to be in a group with people that understood my songs as well as they did, and I was happy to be in a group that I could add something interesting to Chris’ songs.
Rigby: The only bad thing was there were too many songs. Chris had a group’s worth of songs and Peter’s got a group’s worth of songs. They shared one group. So, there was kind of an overload of songs. Good problem to have.
Pop and psychedelic rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s were big influences for everyone. How did those influences help the band find its own sonic identity?
Holsapple: That’s a tough one. I mean, I think we are all really good, careful listeners. We really like a lot of music besides Top 40 and psychedelic and things like that. I know Will has turned me on to a lot of great country music over the years and I don’t really listen to a lot of pop music at this point myself, but I just try. I think we all try to be open-minded. And when you are an open-minded listener, it can’t help but inform the kind of stuff you play.
It seems like you kind of took your influences and kind of put your own spin on them in a way.
Rigby: Well, you listen to a lot of music and then when you make your own, you’re necessarily influenced by what you know, but it’s not necessarily an imitation.
Was there a moment that you knew right away that the group’s chemistry was special?
Holsapple: It’s hard to say. I mean, I feel like what we did was what a lot of bands did, which is basically two guitars, bass and drums and 12 notes. So, it’s not going to be significantly different. I don’t think we tried to, that’s a tough one.
Rigby: Well, I don’t know about right away, but when you’re young and starting out and you’re in a band together, it’s kind of like one for all and all for one. There’s a us against the world type of feeling, I guess.
Holsapple: In some ways it’s more evident when you replace somebody in the band, especially if you’re four people that grew up speaking the same language with all the same influences being from the same town. I know when Chris left, and we went through a lot to try to find someone to be the fourth member of the dB’s and it took a while and they still had to deal with three people who talked the same language that grew up together. And I think that puts you at a disadvantage.
The band started working on music for Stands for deciBels towards the end of the ‘70s. It sounds like it was a very DIY effort with recording by yourselves for the most part in analog.
Rigby: Well, it was a pretty low budget effort, and it was recorded piecemeal because we’d record some and then we’d have to wait until some more money came in and then we could record a little more. And that just kept happening until we finally got to a place where we could think about putting it out. So, it took a while.
Holsapple: We had a nice setup with Chris’ Teac 2340 Tape Recorder, which was a four-track that he and Mitch Easter had learned how to operate years before. So, he and Chris and Gene were very good about getting sounds and we were able to do a lot of demos for songs. So, by the time we actually ended up getting in a recording studio, which was called Blue Rock down in [Manhattan’s] SoHo [district], we kind of knew how to do what we’re going to do and try to be efficient as we could, especially dealing with the start and stop of the money flow that Will was talking about.
With everyone being from North Carolina and then moving to New York, it seems like everyone enjoyed being outsiders.
Rigby: Well, speaking for myself, I was totally into the New York rock scene, what with the Ramones and Television and Blondie and Talking Heads and all those bands. So, I was pretty eager to go when I went and I was late to the party in terms of those bands because the initial explosion of that was like 75, 76. I got there in ’78, but I was totally into being a New Yorker when I got there. I was a New Yorker for years and years. I just happened to be from the south, and I guess there was a little bit of outsider feeling, but everybody in New York is from somewhere else. There’s not that many native New Yorkers, at least there weren’t in the music scene that I was in, we were in.
Holsapple: I was born in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, which was right outside of New York, moved to North Carolina when I was six with my family, but I always realized that I would want to go back to New York. I mean, when you grow up in North Carolina, you either go to Atlanta or you go to New York pretty much. And Atlanta looked like a dead end, frankly. I mean, New York just seemed that’s the land of the New York Times. That’s Broadway, that’s all sorts of great stuff going on. And I think when we moved up there, people found us kind of charming with our slight southern accents and manners and what have you. So, we weren’t punk rockers, we were kind of intelligent musicians from another part of the country, so that was kind of handy to have that in our back pocket.
What were a couple of your favorite moments recording the album?
Holsapple: Again, it’s been so long. I can’t really remember much about the process of recording, except that the studio is very, very dark, the control room, and often I would just fall asleep in the back.
Rigby: Most of my memories are of the mixing, which was fairly exciting because it’s not like it is now where it’s all automated, actually had hands moving faders up and down and twiddling knobs and punching stuff in and out while you were actually running the mix. So, that was a lot of fun. It was really exciting.
From what I’ve read, it sounds like Alan Betrock was pretty helpful with guiding the band through recording the first album.
Rigby: Yeah. He was almost like more of a spiritual advisor than a technical producer. He didn’t really get into the technical aspects of it. He was more like…well, for one thing, he was the guy that was finding the money to make the record. He was finding investors. But in terms of him being in the studio producing, he would be there some of the time, but he would say something like once a night. He didn’t really have that much to say.
The band also benefited from a few different guys that mixed the album – Scott Litt (at Power Station, NYC), Don Dixon (at Drive-In, NC), and Martin Rushent at Genetic Studios in England).
Holsapple: Yes, Dixon is an old friend that we watched his bands when we were growing up. Scott, we had worked with a little bit at the Power Station, the recording studio in New York. Martin Rushent was someone that we were sent to by the people at the original record label Albian Records in London. So, we went up to his studio Genetic Studios in England and he was great. He’s sorely missed.
The band is also planning to reissue the sophomore album Repercussion this fall. What can you tell us about those plans?
Rigby: Well, it’s a plan right now, but presumably it’ll happen. It seems like it’s happening. The album was also made in 1981, the same year that Stands for deciBels came out in 82. It came out a little bit in 81, but it’s also really old.
How do you think the band grew most from the first album to the second?
Holsapple: Well, I would say the biggest difference is that Repercussion was pretty much recorded all in one fell swoop, where Stands for deciBels, as Will had said, was kind of in fits and starts. So, it has a certain cohesion to it that I think is also having Scott [Litt] as the producer from top to bottom was a really good thing. He had a lot of input. So, I think that there are some songs that were older songs. A lot of them were written between when we started recording Stands for deciBels and Repercussion. So, there were some newer songs in there at the time.
I heard that band’s also planning to do some touring this fall
Rigby: A little bit. We’re going to do a few shows in the Northeast, a few shows in the Southeast and hopefully Chicago and Minneapolis, and we’ll see what more we do from there. We’re going to see how those go before we decide what to do, what else to do.
Imagine it’ll be exciting for the band to get back out on the road since it’s been a little while.
Holsapple: Yeah, I think the last show was 2016.
Rigby: Yeah. In 2016 we played a gig and that was just a benefit where we played a few songs. And the last time we did any real touring was in 2012 when the most recently recorded album came out Falling Off the Sky and we didn’t do a whole lot of touring then. It’d probably be about as much as we do this time. But we had a new album out then.
Holsapple: Now we got old albums
Rigby: Now we got an old one.
Are there any plans to record new music in the future?
Holsapple: Nothing on the books right now. I mean, if we do record it’ll be in the future.
Rigby: We have one thing that’s sort of recently recorded, but it dates from the time of Repercussion. It’s called “Depth of Field.” It’s a really old song, but it’s newly recorded and we’re trying to figure out what to do with that one.
Holsapple: It’s a beautiful song.
Rigby: Yeah, it’s a really good recording. It sounds like the dB’s. And we hope we can figure out what to do with it because I’d hate for it to go to waste.
I imagine you could always release it as a standalone single or put it on an EP or something.
Rigby: Yeah, we’ve thought about putting it on as a bonus track for Repercussion, but decided against it because it just sonically is really different.
Holsapple: And I think it’s a problem a lot of times when you just release a track because the amount of press that you can try to get is nobody wants to write about you twice in one year. So, if you’ve got a record coming out, they want to write about it, then you get another record coming out [they don’t want to cover that one]. Maybe it’s hard to get the press interested in putting a lot of column inches into your career. So, you have to be very careful about it.
The band has had a big impact on musicians over the years. How would you describe the band’s legacy? What do you hope the band’s legacy is, especially from the early years?
Holsapple: I really have a hard time thinking that we had much impact, honestly. I mean, impact is really judged by how widespread your songs were at the time, and I just don’t realistically think that all that many people ever really heard it. I mean, I’m hoping that this next go round will get us a few new fans and maybe some young people, but I just don’t think we had much impact, honestly.
There were some fans like Mike Mills.
Holsapple: They were doing the same thing at the same time as us.
I think I saw a quote about him mentioning about being a big fan.
Rigby: Yeah, that’s nice. We could have used about 3 million more of those,
Holsapple: Even 30,000 more of them.
Rigby: It’s nice to be remembered. I’m happy that it’s coming out and we’ll see what happens, but it’s nice that it’s worth it to somebody that wants to preserve it and put it out for a new generation of listeners, hopefully to discover, to be remembered.
You can follow the dB’s via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. You can order Stands for DeciBels on vinyl here.
The dB’s tour dates:
Sept 7: Hopscotch Festival. Raleigh, NC
Sept 13: Atlantis Washington, DC
Sept 14: Johnny Brenda’s. Philadelphia PA
Sept 15: White Eagle. Hoboken, NJ
Oct 11: Amsterdam Bar and Hall St. Paul, MN
Oct 12: Old Town School of Folk Music. Chicago, IL
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
