CHRIS STAMEY
Chris Stamey (born December 6, 1954 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. After a brief time playing with Alex Chilton, as well as Mitch Easter under the name Sneakers, Stamey formed The dB’s with Peter Holsapple. Stamey recorded and released two critically acclaimed albums with The dB’s, Stands for Decibels (1981) and Repercussion (1982), before leaving the band to pursue a solo career. (More from Wikipedia)
I don’t have to go any further than my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina to find a band that should have had a lot more success than they did: The dB’s. They were critical faves – Chris Stamey in particular is often cited as being among the best songwriters in his generation, and Peter Holsapple is no slouch himself in that regard – and the band was quite popular in England, but they are virtually unknown in their own country.
(January 2012)
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The I.R.S. Records album by the dB’s, The Sound of Music was a slick pop affair that came out in 1987. A lot of bands from the Carolinas were doing well nationally, and everyone expected that to be their breakthrough album. (Original member and ace songwriter Chris Stamey had left the band by then and was trying to establish a solo career). The above is actually the back cover of the album.
(January 2013)
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If anything, the proliferation of rock bands and new rock genres and subgenres has made the problem worse (if that is the right word). When the Sound Shop record store at our local Edgewater Mall went out of business several years ago, I went through the CD’s that were left over a week or so before they closed for good. They had been pretty well picked over, and nearly all of them did not ring even a little bell. I did pick up a few records, among them an anthology album by the Stone Roses and a get-out-the-vote collaboration by Chris Stamey and Yo La Tengo called V.O.T.E. (it has the same cover as Stamey’s album that came out at about the same time called A Question of Temperature). I knew Chris Stamey as a co-founder of the dB’s, while the store clerk knew the alternative rock band Yo La Tengo that he was playing with and also knew how good that particular record was.
(December 2015)
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Since I am down to a quarterly schedule rather than a monthly schedule, my annual list is a lot shorter, so I will try listing all of the people that I have discussed in some depth rather than just the Under Appreciated Rock Band and the Story of the Month. They are all punk rock bands of one kind or another this year (2015-2016), and the most recent post includes my overview of the early rap/hip hop scene that an old friend, George Konstantinow challenged me to write – probably so long ago that he might have forgotten.
December 2015 – 1990’s pop/punk band AMANDA JONES; Story of the Month on the early American singles by the Beatles; also, Rochelle Harper, Lisa Loeb, 3 Doors Down, Level with the Ground, Chris Stamey with Yo La Tengo, Meri Wilson, Bobby Brown, the Cruzados / the Plugz, Terence Trent d’Arby, An Emotional Fish, Bruce Hornsby and the Range, Hunters & Collectors, Looters, Shakespear’s Sister, Robert Tepper, Y Kant Tori Read / Tori Amos, Ugly Kid Joe, Paul Young, the Rolling Stones, Mandy Brix, the Joneses.
(Year 7 Review)
