#peter holsapple

[jt1674]

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[dustedmagazine]

The Paranoid Style  —  Known Associates (Bar/None)

Photo by Tad Unreasonable

Queue up another razor sharp entry in the Paranoid Style catalog, as indie rock’s Dorothy Parker re-assembles her crack new-wave into pop punk band and sallies off to skewer pretension, complacency and lazy thinking.  Reviewing The Interrogator a year ago, Dusted’s Alex Johnson heard, “ZZ Top’s fuzzed-out sleaze; the wry, sneering energy of Supersuckers; Elvis Costello’s frothy take on Americana; even Liz Phair with quicker-to-hand, if shallower, retorts,” and that panoply of punk songwriter poets is as relevant here as ever. 

The targets are mostly personal, not political, concerning unsatisfactory men, oddball social encounters and the songwriter herself, one Elizabeth Nelson.  Here she is summing up a couple of decades in the R’N’R rat race, with ascerbic style: “Stared out a true believer/started out alone/once I caught the fever/I was a Great Dane with a bone/They told me I’d never make it/I told ‘em where to stick it/Tearing the ticket.” 

Nelson rattles off her lyrics like a livestock auctioneer, piling up evocative images and clever rhymes up faster than most people can absorb them.  Indeed, it’s often only in the neck snapping turn—the phrase that means one thing until it lurches in another direction—that you have time to appreciate the craft.  But once you see it, it’s all over the place, threaded right through these songs’ DNA. For instance,“Dog’s Breakfast” is particularly adept at matching a stop-starting rhythm to words studded with internal rhymes (the words themselves carry the rhythm), but this is a hallmark of Nelson’s art.  It’s complicated, contradictory and very specifically drawn.  You know exactly what kind of men she’s talking about in “Shark Eyes” and how they differ from the equally vivid crew in “Elegant Bachelors.” 

It is customary, when the lyrics are this sharp, not to expect too much from the music, but in this case, the sound is as good as the story.  Nelson once again enlists the dBs’ Peter Holsapple into her band, alongside the Mountain Goats’ William Matheny, Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Choo Choo La Rouge’s Jon Langmead and Timothy Bracy.  They make a very late-1970s/early 1980s  new-wave/college rock sound, with enough variation between songs to keep things entertaining.  Like the Hold Steady, the Paranoid Style sprays a continual stream of hyper-literate poetry against the backdrop of a kicking bar band.  Just cause it’s music for smart people doesn’t mean it can’t rip. 

Jennifer Kelly

[whatsthesound]

The dB’s, “Picture Sleeve” (2011)

Such pop perfection.... After a year of releases from three of the four dB’s (Peter, Chris and Will), it really makes me wish they’d make some more music all together (...or at the least, release some more of the recorded post-reunion material that hasn’t yet seen the light of day). 

[micks-music-blog]

R.E.M. - Losing My Religion [Out of Time, 1991]

[myvinylplaylist]

The dB's: Like This (1984)

Bearsville Records

[guessimdumb]

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The dB's - Nothing is Wrong (1982)

I consider Repercussion to be the best dB’s LP, and while I generally favor Chris Stamey’s songs, this Peter Holsapple song is absolutely wonderful.

I see love as something that Either works or it doesn't, it's as simple as that

[indieephemera]

Pages 1-4 of my hand-written, annotated playlist of songs played as part of The dB’s Orgy on Harvard radio station WHRB, spring 1989.

My archivist, completist tendencies are on full display here in this playlist I made of the dB’s and related songs played on-air during this multi-hour Orgy, and recorded by me onto a hodgepodge of cassette tapes. I feel like there there may be a couple more pages I’m missing (this program was loooong), but these were all I could find.

In high school I’d discovered WHRB—specifically its Record Hospital nighttime programming of indie, punk and other underground music—via the weekly playlists left by the doors of my record store haunts. On one such store visit, I grabbed a flyer advertising a “dB’s Orgy” to be broadcast on the station that month. I was already a fan of the dB’s, having bought their latest album, The Sound of Music, after hearing the song “Amplifier” on local alt-rock station WFNX. (And yes, that song isn’t on that album, but I couldn’t find a copy of Like This!)

So on the appointed date and time as per that flyer, I gathered a bunch of tapes that were either blank or partially-blank, tuned my dad’s good stereo in the living room to 95.3 FM, and hit “record” on the first of those tapes I’d popped in his cassette deck. Since it was a double-deck that automatically switched from one bay to the other at finish, I was able to record up to three whole hours at a time, which made the process a bit easier.

The entire program was a revelation: the length (at least 8 hours, IIRC), the breadth of music and artists part of the dB’s universe (Kimberly Rew of The Soft Boys!), and the depth of the DJ’s record collection. He had the obscure, 1972 LP by Rittenhouse Square, with Stamey, Holsapple and Mitch Easter playing kind of terrible rock music, but charmingly goofy at the same time. And I’m pretty sure this program was the first time I heard Pylon and Yo La Tengo, among others.

After many hours and cassettes of taping, I later took my scribbled notes and re-listened to the whole damn thing again—okay, with some fast-forwarding. I marked the songs that I wanted to include on my “compiled copy” of what I considered to be core material. I generally omitted songs that I either already had in some form or were from artists with a more tangential connection to the dB’s. (Sorry, Pylon.) The final product ended up on three, 90-minute Maxell XLII-S cassettes. So fancy.

The story would end there, were it not for a random thread in the online forum for former Record Hospital DJs of which, as a 1993-1996 DJ, I am a member. Someone posted that flyer, tagging the DJ responsible for that dB’s Orgy, and mentioning he wished he had a playlist. Well, hey, I can help! I posted the first page of my hand-written playlist as seen above, mentioning how big an influence it was on this college-radio-curious, teen indie music fan. A 30-year-overdue thank you, Henry Donahue.

[micki-steele-net]

The Continental Drifters at Raji's, Hollywood, circa August 1992. Photo courtesy of Peter Holsapple.

Michael Steele peformed with the Continental Drifters in Summer 1992. We have just added these details (courtesy of @banggothebangles to our site). Check them out here.