Peter Holsapple (born February 19, 1956) formed, along with Chris Stamey, the singing, songwriting, and guitar-playing core of the dB’s, a jangle-pop band from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He became the band’s principal songwriter and singer after Stamey’s departure. The dB’s were at the forefront of the guitar bands from the southeast in the 1980s along with R.E.M., Let’s Active, etc. The dB’s never achieved the prominence of R.E.M. but were critically recognized and are still greatly appreciated today. (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.
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)
