LET’S ACTIVE’S EASTER PARADE

LET’S ACTIVE’S EASTER PARADE

FEATURES

Karen Schlosberg

North Carolina has one of the neater state mottos around: Esse Quam Videri, To Be Rather Than To Seem. You might apply that motto to one of the Tar Heel State’s brightest musical combos, Let’s Active, whose principals are songwriter/ singer/guitarist/producer Mitch Easter and bassist/singer Faye Hunter.

Easter, originally known for his knobtwisting with the likes of R.E.M., the Bongos, Pylon, the dBs and Beat Rodeo, has turned Let’s Active into a tight little vehicle for his distinctive, idiosyncratic pop songs, which are melodic, textured, haunting and nearly irresistible.

The EP afoot was the first waxing from the band (then a three-piece, with Easter, Hunter and drummer Sara Romweber, who left last fall “for the usual reasons”), released in the fall of ’83. It was a fairly light, pop-styled work that garnered a lot of progressive radio play, especially the songs “Every Word Means No” and “Room With A View.”

“The first record was actually a little bit deliberately light, because I wanted to do something that was understandable,” Easter says in his comfortable Southern drawl. “That record was really a demo tape that just got released. So I thought for a demo tape we’ve got to make this very commercial, really straight ahead and clear.”

“So we’d get signed,” bassist Hunter adds, laughing.

afoot wasn’t nearly as ear-catching, however, as the band’s debut full-length LP, Cypress, which was released last fall. Cypress is a deeply textured and atmospheric album, with an intricately woven sound of instruments and lyrics (which Easter affectionately calls “sludge”) which, while not perhaps having the chirpy pop attack of afoot, is ultimately more substantial. Songs like “Waters Part,” “Ring True,” “Ornamental,” “Lowdown,” “Crows On A Phone Line” and “Flags For Everything” are layered treasures that improve upon repeated listenings. It stands the test of time, and it was no surprise to see it placing high on many critics’ top 10 lists for 1984.

“I think it actually holds up with me, too,” Easter says. “When I got through with it, I didn’t know. It kind of seemed like it was held together with bailing wire. We had all these deadlines—like we had that English tour booked and stuff like that [opening for Echo and the Bunnymen]—we had to get finished by a certain time. So in some ways we felt like we just rushed it out, but I think it’s going to hold up as a groovy and slightly weird first album, and that’s OK.”

The unassuming Easter’s rise to critical fame (if not commercial success) has pretty much steadily happened over a period of about four years. Easter and Hunter, native North Carolinians, tried living in New York in 1979-80; Easter was in a couple of bands, but was employed mostly as a “professional van driver,” and Hunter worked in the accounting office at the Sotheby auction house, where she got to accept checks from famous people’s chauffeurs.

They returned to Winston-Salem in July 1980, and Easter set up a recording studio called Mitch’s Drive-In, quite appropriate since it was in his parents’ garage (Hey, kids, let’s build a studio and produce pop records!). Originally planning to tinker and record his own work, Easter found himself in the middle of a “groovy scene” down south of the Mason-Dixon line and soon had trouble booking studio time for himself.

Let’s Active was formed at the end of 1981 (although they weren’t signed to a label for two years), and a couple of weeks later played their first gig, opening for R.E.M. in Atlanta. R.E.M.’s manager picked the fledgling band’s name out of a list of possibilities handed to him; it was from an article about the twisting of American phrases that occurs when translated into Japanese.

‘“Let’s Active’ was on somebody’s shirt,” Easter says. “But we just liked the fact that it really couldn’t possibly mean anything.”

In addition to running into being misnamed everything from Less Active to Les Active (“...and His Jazz All-Stars,” Easter adds), the band has had an image misrepresentation problem that started with the video for “Every Word Means No.” Surrounded by little furry puppies, everyone looked oh-so adorable, cute and zany. Let’s Active has had to live that down ever since.

“That was all by accident,” Hunter says.

“Yeah, we said dogs, and they brought puppies,” agrees Easter. “We did have an idea that if all this stuff doesn’t pan out and we have to go metal to make some money, we could do ‘Every Word Means No 86,’ and we could have the same video but we could get Dobermans this time, and they could snarl and bite us. The proposed new sound we’ve been talking about is metalbilly.”

Let’s Active recently finished two seven-week-long tours of the States (with drummer Jay Peck and guitarist/ keyboardist Tim Lee filling out their sound), returning home for a little time off before starting preliminary work on a new album. Easter has also used the time off to do some production work for a couple of bands, the New York-based Riff Doctors and Alabama’s Primitons. Easter says he “kind of devoted April,” however, “to working on trying to be an artiste again,” and hopes to release a Let’s Active LP early in the fall. Though Easter warns that it’s really too early to tell what to expect, he typically has some ideas.

“In some ways I really want to have all these kind of Foreigner songs on there that are really just good pop hits, but whenever I sit down and play guitar what comes out is more like hippie art-rock or something,” Easter says, laughing, “because that’s so much easier to write. It’s a lot easier for me to write something that would have been on a Syd Barrett record than to write something that’d be on the new Foreigner record. So in a way it’s more of a challenge to write one of those really perfect kind of hits.”

What about metalbilly, that brave new world of bales of hay, huge amps and tractors backed up to the stage for use as smoke machines?

“I do kind of want to flirt with some metal guitars and stuff like that,” Easter says dryly, “but that stuff is kind of stupid in a way. We get on tour and we listen to lots of ZZ Top and things like that, and I really like it. While I’m on tour I think—Yeah! I want to write some stuff like that!—but then when it’s time to actually write, just the regular old grunge rock-out stuff doesn’t quite seem like enough, you know, and I end up making the songs a little frillier and fancier and it winds up not really being too metal.

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“A lot of rock music lyrics are halfway a joke. ”

-Mitch Easter

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 23

“I think that a lot of rock music lyrics are halfway a joke,” Easter continues with a smile. “I mean, you have to write a lot of couplets and sort of first-grade kind of stuff, because that works best in pop songs—looking back towards ‘Hound Dog’ as the.world’s standard for lyrics. I don’t think,” he adds, “that when you get over 21 you should start writing about, you know, ‘relationships’ in some sort of pop psychology way, ’cause that’s really gross. ‘Hound Dog’ is a million times better.”

At least Let’s Active seems to have (finally) outgrown their puppy stage, though. During their last show, in Chicago, Easter relates a conversation the band’s soundman heard. According to Easter, the band had been “really rocking” that night, and one fan turned to the other and said, “Yeah, it was good, but they’re just not the same...”

“Just sort of wistfully,” Easter says, “like we had lost our little fluffball origins.”

They were probably looking for puppies, it was noted.

“I think they were,” he agrees, “and I’m sorry they were disappointed a little bit, but in a way I think that means we probably had done what we needed to do. I think it just means we’ve gotten better, really. We used to be sort of like an old jalopy, and now we’re—not a sleek touring machine, but at least a functional family car,” he says, and laughs.