THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

DEPARTMRNTS

The dB’s Stands For Decibels

NEW YORK—Memory without nostalgia. Love without idealism. Fun without escaping. The dB’s are pop with care. The dB’s come from. North Carolina, have been playing together for over a decade in various forms, formed the band in New York two and a half years ago, released their debut album Stands For deciBles on the English Albion Records this year, have just toured Europe, are having their follow-up platter produced by Roger Bechirian, are not a very good live band, sometimes sound like the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Hollies, smile a lot, understand politics and don’t like it, do covers of “Everlasting Love” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” know how to write melodies, are just a pop group like any other.

Chris Stamey is about five foot zilch i and he has an endearing though somewhat smirky smile. Guitarist, .vocalist and co-composer for the dB’s, he could—if he wanted— charm you right into the ground. What are the dB’s about?

“I think this group is very political in that we are trying to make people feel fully alive and fully awake as best we can. There’s a groove you snatch people into, then you keep sticking them with little pins while they’re in there so they aren’t dozing off during the groove. You can only do this for a couple of minutes because the tension doesn’t hold that long.” And...

“It’s more psychological politics than what you think of as democrats and socialists. Peter (Holsapple—the other composer and guitarist/organist) and I bring songs to the group and we’ll sort of try anything, and they stay or they don’t. We’re writers and the subject matter is what we choose to write about. Faulkner had his own little subject matters. You have the material at hand—I don’t want to talk about it!”

There are two other dB’s, Gene Holder on bass and Will Rigby on drums. They consider themselves a family. They make witty, melodic pop music. Music that blows their immediate contemporaries to smithereens, fun and funny and emotional. Tangled up in that there is so much heart it shows other, lesser bands up for the arrogant talentless wretches they are.

Gene: “Our music is not the kind that can be digested all at once. It’s something you really have to listen to, to take the whole thing in.”

Chris: “we are an unusual thing in that we’re a commercial band doing songs where money is not the biggest thing, is not the reason we’re playing.”

Pete: “We’ve learned how to starve pretty well!”

Chris: “We’re more into power!”

Will: “Let’s face it, we’re a weird band! We are. I don’t consider us to be like any other group.” \

Yes—maybe yes. They aren’t a very good live band. I’ve seen them a few times and it was a bit of a letdown. I wish they were better but they seem in some way stuck, the difference in size between Peter and Chris is annoying, the subtle touches all over the album get lost on stage, and they don’t seem to enjoy the experience or particularly care for their audience. It’s a shame but I think they’ll remain a studio wonder.

They recorded Stands For DeciBles in ’79. None of the American majors would release it. Surprised? You shouldn’t be; the majors have been depriving you of the best Yankee sounds for the past four years. Peter informs me, “We were very close to signing with A&M and we were very close to Chrysalis. It wasn’t going to happen fast. It was going to be a six-month wait because they fired everybody in the offices in every music company in America last summer; things were pretty bad. They made a lot of haphazard signings in the wake of the Knack.”

Chris: “They’re [the Knack] not even in the same ballpark as what we’re doing. We aren’t as sexually confused as they are!”

Pete: “You’re talking about money here and our purpose is not first and foremost money. We’re not going to be the Clash about it and donate it all. We need what we make to live on.”

Chris: “I was going to give my royalties on ‘Baby Talk’ to the equal rights amendment, but since there aren’t going to be any...”

The dB’s are homesick, they’re tired of Manhattan. They want to return to their roots, the local Winston-Salem scene where the bands can play “Brown Suger” ’til they’re blue in the face and still surprise with their own songs.

Gene: “If we could do what we want to do, be involved in the music industry the way we want to and work out of North Carolina, we’d do it and never set foot in New York.”

Will: “Yeah, I’ye been thinking that, it’s really cr$zy. Here we are, working our way back home in a funny sense. We’ve left the mother country and we’re out in the world, we’ll do all this work but somehow...”

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The dB’s are just’ another band trying to change the face of modern music. Forward-sideways-backa-step. They’re moving. I’m listening. You should be. Turn on. Drop out. Tune in. This is tomorrow, this is a pop band, give me those deciBles!

Iman Lababedi

Next Patient; Jimmy McNichol

LONDON—English snout doctors have discovered a previously unknown cause of sinus problems: tiddlywinks in the nose.

In an exploratory operation to discover the source of 23^yearold Ruth Clarke’s lifelong sinus problem, surgeons found a yellow plastic tiddlywink chip buried deep in nasal cavity # 4.

“My Mom says I used to stick beads in my nose,” recalled the nonplussed receptionist, “so it really isn’t much of a surprise.”

Tragically, not even hypnosis or generous snorts of truth serum have enabled the victim to remember if she won the game or not.

Rick Johnson

WHY IS CHRISTOPHER CROSS?

NEWS FLASH I To paraphrase the Vapors, many people today are turning Japanese', even though this doesn't seem to be the most American thing to do. Always the nonconformist, recent Grammy winner Christopher Cross has decided to turn Richard Nixon instead. Other noted performers have followed Cross's patriotic example, including Charlie Daniels who's turning Grover Cleveland, Jerry Gqrcia who's turning Abe Lincoln, Rick Nielsen who's turning Ike Eisenhower, and Elton John who's turning Mamie Eisenhower. All of these artists want to remind CREEM readers that they should buy American.

Uncle Floyd Overran By Boisterous Canadian Slugs

Ho-ho-ho, we’ve pulled a good one, thought Doug and I, watching the band start to look bilgey, but then we got lost in New Jersey. At night. And even worse, we finally arrived in Newark, which nobody in their

NEWARK,NJ-You ever hear about the bit in Stephen King’s scare^a-rama epic The Stand, where our hero runs breakneck through the Lincoln Tunnel, fleeing plague-stricken New York (so what else is new?) for the safety (so he thinks) of Joisey? And steps over crusty corpses long dropped in their tracks by the mean ol’ virus? Doug Bennett, the self-styled “Son of Spam” and I were regaling the rest of the Slugs (genus: bluesy popgroup, species: Vancouver) with the fact that, at this precise moment, their van was travelling through that same tunnel, with who knows what lurking on the other side. right mind would deliberately seek unless it was to shoot a guest spot on Uncle Floyd’s adult kiddie TV show.

The Slugs were trusting souls faced with the chaotic onslaught of Floyd and his frenzied crew, which features hairy guys like Jerry Garsweatta. Wouldn’t you know that Canada’s latest export fit right into the melee, lip-synching their hometown hit, “Too Bad” and a swingy tune called “Chinatown Calculation,” matching Floyd line for line with dialogue.

“So you call this album Cognac and Bologna,” queried the genial host. “No pepperoni?” “Nah, no tortoni, no pepperoni,” retorted Doug, a cunning blade concealed behind his mournful, insurance-salesman’s face. “White bread, that’s Canadian.” “Moosemeat!” yelled bass player Steve Bosley, who sported a vest with a slug on it. “Yeah, we eat mooseburgers up Canada way, ayup,” and on and on until Floyd’s camera crew, who’ve seen everything, were on the verge of hysterics.

Doug and the Slugs make the perfect cast of characters for a modern mad tea party. Doug is expressionless until his liquorgritted voice sends out a zinger, like when he told New York’s Bottom Line audience, “wow, you know where Canada is; I used to be able to have sex but my pecker froze...” “None of my jokes go over too well,” he mused in Floyd’s dressing room. “That’s the idea, I’m not a comedian, I’m a singer-songwriter. I have a little $80,000 garret in the mountains, where like John Denver I can go and write.” “The garret at the end of the Schtick,” keyboardist Simon ^Kendall punned unmercifully. § Simon is what you call a big | person-—you laugh loud when | he relates some tidbits of band ““history.

“Cognac and Bologna,” he declared. “That’s kind of an unusual name for an album. How did you get the idea for that? Well, it came to me in a blinding flash of light one afternoon as our popeyed leader hove into the horizon. He charged into a photo session, opened his briefcase, and there was a little Remy Martin and $5 worth of bologna. And it just struck me that this was the essence of the man and the essence of the band. ”

The Slugs carried on interviewing each other, saving me the trouble of asking the above and similar dumb questions, and thoughtfully provided CREEM’s thirsting-for-knowledge readership with the origins of their equally peculiar label, Ritdong Records (no, it’s not dirty.) “What does Ritdong stand for?” posed Bosley. “Ritdong is a guitar lick popularized in the late 60’s by Jimi Hendrix in such great songs as ‘Foxy Lady’ and later misused by every other guitar player in history since then.

“Y’see, we have words for all the little things we do that people like to term as music. The classic drum beat like bap-adit-de, bap-a-dit-de, and boomboom-thwack-chi-boomthwack, and bish-ta, bish-ta, flut-ta-da-flut-ta-da.” “And then there’s the other great guitar lick,” added Richard Baker, “which is my specialty, which goes nor-ni, nor-ni.” “We’d like you to meet Aimless and Shameless,” resounds Simon as he nudges Baker and John Burton, “our guitar section. The nabob of Nor-ni and the rajah of Rit-dong.” Drummer Wally Watson is obviously the smartest of the lot. He stays silent.

Try as they might, the Slugs, limpid after touring America for eight weeks in a van, could riot come, up with a suitable Canadian joke deserving of our letters page—a crushing blow for the northern minions. They did, however, contribute the following gem: “When does an American become an asshole? When he leaves the room.” If you ever get too Sluggish, guys, there’s always Ex-lax.

Toby Goldstein

FUNNY FACE STILL FUN TO DRINK!

Following the lead of worthy causes like Rock Against Racism, the No Nukes shows and the Concerts for Kampuchea, several rock stars—Joe "King" Carrasco, Eddie Tenpole and Bruce Springsteen & his E Street Band among them—have joined together to form Rock For Marty Feldman. “Hey, Marty's a real cool guy," says Bruce, "and we're real happy to be performing this service in his name. So what if he's got funny eyes? I never hear anyone poking fun at Freddie Mercury's teeth or Angus Young's kneecaps. After all, nobody's perfect!"

5 YEARS AGO

Thunder Road Revisited

When Brace Springsteen was asked by a Florida disc jockey “What’s it like to be the new Bob Dylan?,” gentle old Bruce retorted: “What’s it like to be punched in the face?”