BURIED TREASURE
This month on rock obscuria’s MIA list, powerpop gold from no wave NY.
The dB’s Stands For Decibels
ALBION, 1981
ZOOMING MOJO from home in the southeastern US, Peter Holsapple scampers off screen to pull out the bizarre cassette edition of The dB’s’ debut LP. “It’s all rusty now, but it came in a bean tin,” he explains. “Inside there is a cassette and a dB’s sticker. Albion Records did a beautiful job. At the Virgin store on Oxford Street, they had a front window with these all stacked up.”
Recorded and conceived in New York by four schoolmates from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Stands For Decibels was released in Europe only in early 1981. Moody post-punk Britons were unmoved by this force-10-galepaced one-upping of Big Star’s #1 Record. However, with Stands For Decibels finally being lined up for a first vinyl release in the US, The dB’s can take comfort from the fact that their debut has lost none of its aggressively quirky freshness during its 43 years in the can.
“We were trying to be really smart and really good,” says drummer Will Rigby, mindful in retrospect that The dB’s might have found a larger audience had they managed to dumb it down a little. “In one way we were in that powerpop pigeonhole, but I like to think we had a little more going on than that. A lot more actually.”
Die-hard Anglophiles who swam against the tide of Southern rock in their hometown, Holsapple and Rigby were in the year below future bandmates Chris Stamey and bassist Gene Holder at RJ Reynolds High School, falling in and out of numerous bands together (including Rittenhouse Square, who put out a self-released album as far back as 1972).
Stamey was bewitched after hearing Big Star on a forward-thinking local radio station, and gradually moved into Alex Chilton’s orbit, moving up to New York to back the mercurial singer in the Cossacks, and falling in with Television guitarist Richard Lloyd. In 1978, he released the superb (I Thought) You Wanted To Know single on his own Car label as Chris Stamey And The dB’s, and sensing that something might be happening, invited his old schoolmates up to help out.
With Holder and Rigby establis
