Dec 15

The dB’s

THE dB’S
 
 
The dB’s  are an American jangle pop and power pop group who first came into prominence in the late 1970’s and 1980’s.  The band members are Peter Holsapple, Chris Stamey, Will Rigby, and Gene Holder.  While the members are all from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the group was formed in New York City in 1978.  In 2012, the band completed its first new studio album in 25 years and its first in 30 years with the original 1978 lineup.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 

Also, Peter Holsapple, who produced the first Certain General effort Holiday of Love, is a kindred soul with Phil Gammage – he is another Southern musician whose band, the dB’s had greater success in Europe than in the States. 

 
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In 1982, Certain General signed with the New York independent record label Labor Records and issued their first release, an EP called Holiday of Love.  The mini-album was produced by Peter Holsapple of the dB’s and mixed by Michael Gira of the experimental rock band Swans – “an interesting pairing if there ever was one”, said Nick West in a review for Bucketfull of Brains.  (I don’t know much about Swans, except for their startling 1988 cover of the Joy Division masterpiece, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”).  According to Wikipedia:  “Holiday [of Love] garnered rave reviews, among them a Trouser Press piece that cited the disc as being created ‘for all the teenage devils of the world’.” 

 

(March 2015)

 

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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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The English Wikipedia now has well over 5 million articles – there are also Wikipedias in nearly 300 other languages, with 10 of those having more than a million articles – and includes something on just about any musician or rock band that you can name. You can give it a try yourself – think of the most obscure band or rock artist that you know about, and chances are that they are in Wikipedia. As an indication of what is there, their category on “Rock music groups from North Carolina”, my home state, includes 19 alternative rock groups, 29 indie rock groups, 6 hardcore punk groups, 28 heavy metal musical groups, and 32 others (a total of 114). I don’t know the great majority of them myself, and only a handful could be considered at all well known among rock music fans, such as the dB’s, Nantucket, the Connells (they are from Raleigh, and I believe it was their drummer who lived in the same apartment building where our appraisal office was located for many years), Let’s Active, Corrosion of Conformity, Arrogance, and Fetchin Bones.
 
(Year 7 Review)
Last edited: March 22, 2021