REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS
THE dB’S
I Thought You Wanted To Know (1979–81)
Winston-Salem’s lot: power-pop outliers’ secret prehistory.
By Jim Wirth
PROPELLER SOUND
IN the halcyon days of New York punk club CBGBs, there was a pinball machine located in the furthest corner away from the stage. In his memoir Spy In The House Of Loud: New York Songs And Stories, dB’s co-leader Chris Stamey remembers being drawn to that part of the room on the (frequent) occasions when the band on stage wasn’t quite as thrilling as legend would have you believe.
He wrote: “When a skilled player like Dee Dee Ramone nudged it just the right way, making all the lights go off at once, I would see that old pinball machine as a metaphor for what great rock records should do: trigger some kind of instant deep-brain response, bypassing the critical facilities, beyond analysis. Just neurons flashing all over the place… We wanted to shove the machinery. To make the lights flash off and on.”
JULIA GORTON
In their initial burst of creativity, The dB’s managed to do that spectacularly well, two indie singles and a pair of UK-released 1981 LPs – Stands For deciBels and Repercussion – representing a dizzying synthesis of Television, fellow Southerners Big Star and their British Invasion heroes The Move. However, beyond the most fanatical outposts of the worldwide record shop archipelago, the guitar-andvocals duo of Stamey and Peter Holsapple, bassist Gene Holder and drummer Will Rigby never gained much purchase, their lasting influence confined to fingerprints faintly discernible on the next generation of jangly US underground bands – REM, The Replacements, et al.