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Peter Holsapple

PETER HOLSAPPLE

 
Peter Holsapple  (born February 19, 1956) formed, along with Chris Stamey, the singing, songwriting, and guitar-playing core of the dB’s, a jangle-pop band from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  He became the band’s principal songwriter and singer after Stamey’s departure.  The dB’s were at the forefront of the guitar bands from the southeast in the 1980s along with R.E.M., Let’s Active, etc.  The dB’s never achieved the prominence of R.E.M. but were critically recognized and are still greatly appreciated today.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
I don’t have to go any further than my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina to find a band that should have had a lot more success than they did:  The dB’s.  They were critical faves – Chris Stamey in particular is often cited as being among the best songwriters in his generation, and Peter Holsapple is no slouch himself in that regard – and the band was quite popular in England, but they are virtually unknown in their own country. 
 
(January 2012)
 
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The I.R.S. album by the dB’s, The Sound of Music was a slick pop affair that came out in 1987.  A lot of bands from the Carolinas were doing well nationally, and everyone expected that to be their breakthrough album.  The above is actually the back cover of the album; that’s Will Rigby on the left of course at the drumset, with Peter Holsapple (songwriter and guitarist), Gene Holder (bass guitar – I remember him from my schooldays also), and new member Jeff Beninato (guitar).  Fame didn’t happen for them though, although Peter Holsapple started playing a lot with R.E.M. for several years after that. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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Also, Peter Holsapple, who produced the first Certain General effort Holiday of Love, is a kindred soul with Phil Gammage – he is another Southern musician whose band, the dB’s had greater success in Europe than in the States. 

 

In 1982, Certain General signed with the New York independent record label Labor Records and issued their first release, an EP called Holiday of Love.  The mini-album was produced by Peter Holsapple of the dB’s and mixed by Michael Gira of the experimental rock band Swans – “an interesting pairing if there ever was one”, said Nick West in a review for Bucketfull of Brains.  (I don’t know much about Swans, except for their startling 1988 cover of the Joy Division masterpiece, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”).  According to Wikipedia:  “Holiday [of Love] garnered rave reviews, among them a Trouser Press piece that cited the disc as being created ‘for all the teenage devils of the world’.” 

 

(March 2015)