A Spy in the House of Loud: New York Songs and Stories

By Chris Stamey

The musician & producer reflects on New York City’s early punk rock scene, as well as the creation of some of his most famous albums in this memoir.

Popular music was in a creative upheaval in the late 1970s. As the singer-songwriter and producer Chris Stamey remembers, “the old guard had become bloated, cartoonish, and widely co-opted by a search for maximum corporate profits, and we wanted none of it.” In A Spy in the House of Loud, he takes us back to the auteur explosion happening in New York clubs such as the Bowery’s CBGB as Television, Talking Heads, R.E.M., and other innovative bands were rewriting the rules. Just twenty-two years old and newly arrived from North Carolina, Stamey immersed himself in the action, playing a year with Alex Chilton before forming the dB’s and recording the albums Stands for deciBels and Repercussion, which still have an enthusiastic following.

A Spy in the House of Loud vividly captures the energy that drove the music scene as arena rock gave way to punk and other new streams of electric music. Stamey tells engrossing backstories about creating in the recording studio, describing both the inspiration and the harmonic decisions behind many of his compositions, as well as providing insights into other people’s music and the process of songwriting. Photos, mixer-channel and track assignment notes, and other inside-the-studio materials illustrate the stories. Revealing another side of the CBGB era, which has been stereotyped as punk rock, safety pins, and provocation, A Spy in the House of Loud portrays a southern artist’s coming-of-age in New York’s frontier abandon as he searches for new ways to break the rules and make some noise.

“An endlessly fascinating odyssey through the worlds of Southern pop, New York City art punk, and American indie rock. Stamey’s stories capture you with same finely etched detail and emotional depth that have always marked his best songs. Both an engrossing personal memoir and an eye-opening peek into the creative process, this is a truly essential work of music lit.” —Bob Mehr, New York Times–bestselling author of Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements

 “Informed, eloquent, and daring, this book stands as a model of excellence for both music writing and memoir. Stamey moves effortlessly between analysis and reminiscence, history and personal revelation, shedding light on his own creative journey as well as the city—‘planet New York’—that provided a good deal of the inspiration for it. I simultaneously learned so much and was deeply moved.” —Anthony DeCurtis, author of Lou Reed: A Life 

“Where most musician autobiographies are fueled by backstage drama, this book focuses almost entirely on the creative process, a choice that not only proves to be compelling but helps turn Stamey’s personal journey into a necessary document of peak-era college rock, illustrating how it was a vibrant scene filled with unexpected cross pollination.” —Pitchfork

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781477316245

Book preview

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

Jessica Hopper, David Menconi, Oliver Wang, Editors

A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOUD

New York Songs and Stories

Chris Stamey

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright © 2018 by Chris Stamey

All rights reserved

First edition, 2018

Cover photograph © 2015 Carol Whaley; used by permission

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Stamey, Chris, author.

Title: A spy in the house of loud : New York songs and stories / Chris Stamey.

Other titles: American music series (Austin, Tex.)

Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2018. | Series: American music series | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017055297| ISBN 978-1-4773-1622-1 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1623-8 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1624-5 (nonlibrary e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Stamey, Chris. | Rock musicians—New York (State)—New York—Biography. | DB’s (Musical group)

Classification: LCC ML420.S81127 A32018 | DDC 781.66092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055297

doi:10.7560/316221

Contents

Preface: The Story behind the Painting

1. Don’t Stop to Think

2. I Love the Sound of the Traffic

3. In Our Wildest Dreams

4. Have You Seen the Last Elite?

Jukebox: Just Tryin’ to Tell a Vision

5. The More You Learn, the Less You Know

6. Pavement Slapping My Feet

7. Eyes Submerge Your Face

8. Caress and Spite

9. I Loved You, and You Did, Too

10. Exhilaration; or, Gorging a Neuronic Aperture

11. Just Like Yesterday

12. Who Will Baudelaire?

13. Cut It Hot, Cut It Up, Cut It Clean, Cut It Slow

Jukebox: The More You Look, the More You See

Jukebox: We’ve Got Your Sons’ Blood on Our Hands

14. Your Ballerina Curls

15. She Took the Soda Pop

16. Wine in Plastic Cups

17. The Distance That Surrounds Us

Jukebox: Don’t Push Me, ’Cause I’m Close to the Edge

18. The Air Is Full of Air

19. Like a Party Balloon on the Strand

Jukebox: Calling Out, in Transit

20. Never a Time

Jukebox: Backseat for a Bed

21. Anyone Who Had to Laugh

22. The Whole World’s Dirt

23. Newspapers Collect on the Street

24. I Want to Break Your Heart

25. All Around You Now the Stars Are Falling Down

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Appendix: A Listener’s Guide

Notes

Selected Discography

Preface

The Story behind the Painting

I RETURNED TO NEW YORK IN 2009, TO PLAY CARNEGIE Hall. I had first moved there from my native North Carolina in 1977, renting a room on Seventh Avenue, around the corner from the great concert hall, a perch from which I had watched as a small group of rabble-rousers at CBGB, a distant watering hole on the Bowery, transformed the rules of what was possible in handmade rock music. I had even waved a few flags in the revolution’s march, first with a critically lauded rock band called the dB’s and then as a solo recording artist and record producer. Now I was back for a benefit concert celebrating the music of R.E.M., a group of fellow Southerners and one of the most successful standard-bearers for that musical sea change.

Although I once knew every street corner and hotdog stand in Manhattan, I had left in 1992, and the city had shape-shifted several times since then. I had returned this time with my wife, Dana, and my daughter, Julia, and before the concert we went walking in search of familiar signposts, accompanied by our friends Amanda and Lydia Kavanagh and Amanda’s six-year-old daughter, Oona. We ended up at the bar of the Algonquin Hotel, the famed site of another insurrection led by influential malcontents: the Algonquin Round Table of Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Alexander Woollcott, et al.

The dB’s (left to right: Will Rigby, Peter Holsapple, Gene Holder, Chris Stamey) at Odessa Restaurant (New York City) in 1979; photo by Stephanie Chernikowski

You walk into the room there and immediately see its well-lubricated history depicted in Natalie Ascencios’s painting A Vicious Circle, which hangs on the far wall next to the kitchen. We had already told ten-year-old Julia about the meaning of its mise-en-scène; she walked over to examine it closer. Oona followed close behind. Julia whispered to her, "There’s a story behind this painting" and continued to study it. When she broke her gaze, she saw that little Oona was nowhere to be found. After a few frantic moments, the girl was discovered around the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, staring at the hung cutlery, to the amusement of the chef.

When asked why she was there, Oona replied, "But you said there was a story behind the painting! . . . I’m looking for it."

This is, first and foremost, my task here: to tell some of the stories behind my own hand-painted songs. Sometimes there will be a lot to say about a lyrical twist or melodic turn, a bit of backstory, specifics that perhaps add to or alter the enjoyment of the tunes. Sometimes I’ll include crosstalk, bleed-through, from other music, other’s stories, other rooms. Sometimes we’ll end up in the kitchen, staring at the knives surrounded by layers of ghosts, past raconteurs, and fellow travelers.

There is another, familiar story here, however: a coming-of-age migration from a hinterland to a cultural capital. When I was twenty-two and freshly arrived in Manhattan, I suddenly found myself in a band with singer Alex Chilton, and in just a few weeks we were being reviewed favorably in The New York Times. One day at rehearsal, I mentioned being surprised that the best and most innovative players around us all seemed to be from out of town. Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell had arrived from Delaware to be poets together and then formed the band Television. The leader of Talking Heads, David Byrne, had entered the fray from Maryland by way of Rhode Island. Chilton, who was himself from Tennessee, told me what he believed: "Listen, good things come from the provinces." This is not strictly true, but coming to the big city and holding up a flame against its lights has long been a rite of passage for artists of all sorts. So many of my friends and I, from the Southern exposure of North Carolina, made this voyage together in the late seventies and early eighties, just as Carolina-bred musical giants Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Max Roach, and Nina Simone had done in years before. We brought parts of our provinciality with us, some Tar Heel–adhesive determination and innocence, and in return absorbed equal parts of New York’s frontier abandon. Whether we stayed for only a short time or never left, we pilgrims in those heady, uncharted days were forever changed by this.

During my days in Manhattan, there were no cell phones with earbuds to blot out the city sounds (the Sony Walkman arrived in 1979 but wasn’t ubiquitous for another decade). We all shared the air. And music leaked in everywhere, from huge, swinging portable cassette blasters, club doorways, bodega radios—the whole city was a mix tape. It was a town of loud, then. Every thoroughfare could be an Electric Avenue, as Eddy Grant’s 1983 smash proclaimed. And the DJs in the clubs were curators more than creators, proud of getting the latest platter from London or Athens, Georgia, eager to turn you on to something new. To replicate this flavor of the era, and since all my songwriting in those years occurred in the context of this sonic smorgasbord, I’ve included some Jukebox sections, my chance to play DJ for you.

*   *   *

It’s funny how things turn out. I never meant this book to be any kind of memoir. It began solely as an annotated songbook, concise paragraphs attached to sheet music, words and melodies and chords suitable for parlor playing in the old way. But from the git-go, I pretty much failed at the concise part. The annotations grew and grew until, in the end, they took on a life of their own. Each chapter here is named after a line from the song that was originally its inspiration.

1

Don’t Stop to Think

ONE FRIDAY MORNING, MID-MAY 1975, I IMPULSIVELY drove from my creaky little rental cottage in the student ghetto of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to the Amtrak station in nearby Durham and got on a train to New York. I was following a crush, a young woman with whom I was sharing a rented house that summer. She had told me the night before that she was going to split for a few days, and in my teenage mind, I thought I would go, too. So I surprised her by showing up at the station, unasked but with ticket in hand. This plan, which had seemed romantically undeniable in the wee hours of the previous night, was quickly revealed as absolutely delusional in daylight, and we weren’t speaking by the time the train was rolling through Virginia. I think I had thirty dollars in my pocket, no friends in town, and no place to stay as the train arrived at Penn Station.

My old friend Sam Moss was a guitar dealer to the stars, so I called him from a payphone and offered him my only liquid asset at the time, a newly acquired vintage blond Telecaster, at a bargain price. He wired me the money, and that let me scrape by for a few days in Manhattan, until I could use the return ticket. It was a strangely delectable feeling, to be stranded in Manhattan, alone, with few resources and fewer plans. And I found I cherished it; I wanted to feel that way forever: wide open, walking into the unknown, constantly turning corners onto new streets where I was a stranger and every door could open into undreamed-of adventure.

I was already familiar with the town; I had visited it almost every summer since the start of high school, going there with Mitch Easter, a close friend since first grade and at this point a bandmate. We would stay with his dad in Greenwich Village, just south of Washington Square Park, for a week or two, trying to discover more about the burgeoning national music scene and hoping to find our own place in it. Sometimes we would drive up from our hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in a 1961 black Cadillac hearse filled with amps and drums, thinking that if we got asked to jam, at least we would be ready. (Do I need to say that this never happened?) Most of those amps in the hearse had originally come from the legendary Manny’s Music, and now we could hop a subway and gawk for hours at the store’s fabled walls, covered with oodles of black-and-white photos of just about every significant jazz and pop figure from 1935 on.

We even made the rounds of record labels on these trips, with reel-to-reel tapes of some of the original songs we had recorded, both in a Winston basement and at Crescent City Studios in nearby Greensboro. One early stop was at Morris Levy’s Roulette Records, where the A&R guy, who might have been the notorious Morris himself, listened briefly and then exclaimed, That’s not a hit! Wanna hear a hit? after which he dialed up Tommy James and the Shondells’ latest.¹ We momentarily intrigued Sire Record’s Seymour Stein with a song by Mitch called Gone Again—but then came the slightly more complicated bridge; You blew it there, he informed us, shaking his head. Seymour’s then-tiny label was home to the prog band Focus, who had the instrumental hit Hocus Pocus, and we, with our guitar-harmony acrobatics, felt some kinship there, so the rejection left us crestfallen. (Only a few years later, Sire stopped licensing European prog rock and became instead a champion of homegrown talent such as the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde.) On those summer trips, we saw the town become more dilapidated and dangerous each year, but no less compelling because of that.

That eventful May weekend, after stopping by Western Union to pick up the small amount of cash I got from the sale of the Telecaster, I ended up at a dive bar I had read about in Lisa Robinson’s Rock Scene magazine to see a double bill consisting of the Planets—a Who-influenced band run by an enthusiastic guitarist named Binky Philips—and Television, a band whose members, wearing cryptically tattered clothes, had appeared in the mag several times, even with no record label and no recorded evidence of their sound. (At this point, even their initial 45 was not yet available.) Since they had appeared in an actual magazine on actual newsstands, I expected the bar, whose awning trumpeted CBGB OMFUG (for Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers), to be overrun with fans. But it was empty: There was only a lanky dog, a grizzled barkeep, and three or four other spectators, tops, two of whom—singer-poet Patti Smith and, from the popular band Blue Öyster Cult, Allen Lanier—I recognized, also from Rock Scene’s pages. It was an early lesson in the disconnection between critics’ faves and actual popularity. I grabbed a chair in the corner and tried not to look the greenhorn.

I liked the Planets fine; their music wasn’t all that different from some of the Anglophile sounds coming out of North Carolina. They seemed like nice guys. But Television was a shock.

Careless of time, the band let the songs stretch out luxuriously to embrace telescoping guitar solos that sounded more like something from John Coltrane or Eric Dolphy than from Eric Clapton or Mike Bloomfield. The bassist, Fred Smith, plucked very simple lines that anchored the music, leaving the drummer as well as both guitarists free to react to one another. Tom Verlaine, the main singer, spat out the lyrics, which when intelligible seemed to be describing fugue states with images that didn’t pander to a lowest common denominator. And his guitar vocabulary was a revelation, drawing from elements of the postmodern classical music I was studying as a music composition student at the University of North Carolina. He employed complicated rhythmic constructs and asymmetrical phrases that flowed over the bars, as well as push-pull, violinlike vibrato, virtuoso hammer-ons, and behind-the-bridge extended techniques, but he never defaulted to standard bread-and-butter playing. He seemed not to know the clichés. When he bent strings, it was an anguished sound. When he set up fluttery sections, it evoked Debussy. Richard Lloyd, the other guitarist, had a more traditional, heroic guitar technique, deploying third-finger whole-step bends and familiar box shapes, but he was highly lyrical and able to develop long, dramatic lines over several minutes in a way that reminded me of the earlier Romantic composers—Tchaikovsky, for example, in his so-called Pathétique Symphony—and the Impressionist Ravel. He, like Tom, also avoided most clichéd faux heroics, but his playing counterbalanced Tom’s esoterica. Billy Ficca, the drummer, really listened to what was going on and had hair-trigger responses to the other players. He didn’t play in lockstep with the bass; his kick drum was more of a commentator in that jazzy way, and there was something of Elvin Jones in his top-kit rambles. His hi-hat, however, meshed with the tiny details of the chords’ rhythms in a way I hadn’t exactly heard before, except perhaps with Dave Mattacks, the drummer in the the British band Fairport Convention, who blended so well with their guitarist, Richard Thompson.

Perhaps most shocking, however, was that Television was really well rehearsed, at least instrumentally. This was hours of woodshedding on display. They could walk to the edge of calamity at the end of an improv section and then turn on a dime into a crystal-clear coda. By the midseventies, most popular mainstream bands had affected an intoxicated swagger and laid-back sloppiness that fit with their often boastful let’s party lyrics. The toastmaster was king; precision was not a priority. At times it seemed like the triumph of Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra’s pal, who always pretended to be smashed (and whose vocal affectations Elvis Presley had so admired and imitated). The New York Dolls, another Manhattan band championed by Rock Scene and considered by the press to be a radical alternative to mainstream rock, was really much the same beneath the slight shock of their lipstick and faux transgender dress. They were great fun, but no one ever accused them of being overrehearsed. And even the jammy, ever-present Allman Brothers, who were capable of fluid group-improv abstractions, always kept it comfortable and relaxed and then returned to the expected blues-growled lyrics. Television was not relaxed. They were all wound tight, ahead of the beat, not behind it, and the music was highly dramatic. It didn’t prostrate itself to reach you; you had to pay attention, or you would get lost. It was a bit like hearing Esperanto for the first time: Their language was similar to mine, there were regular fleeting moments of clarity, but it resisted easy comprehension. There was an otherness about it, and the singer seemed to be looking over the audience’s heads into another room, somewhere else, as he sang lines such as, I dig friction, Elevation don’t go to my head, How’d the snake get out of its skin? and I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo.

Television (left to right: Tom Verlaine, Fred Smith, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca); photo by GODLIS

I stayed for their second set, which went long into the night. Then I returned the next night to listen to two more.

The impact of that weekend changed my concept of what a rock band could be, and it also gradually changed my songwriting and guitar playing in general. I think I was already headed in a similar direction, under the influence of too many undergraduate philosophy classes and midnight cups of coffee, but it was catalytic to see Tom Verlaine and company displaying the courage to express a kind of existential angst more openly than I had yet dared. I wouldn’t make the move until more than a year later, but it was at this point that the city shifted from being a place where I would love to live to being the place where I felt I could belong.

*   *   *

On the Brink, a two-and-a-half-minute emphatic electric song I wrote for the Sneakers record that came out the following year, has a little bit of the desperation I had heard that weekend and that I had felt all that year; I was learning to stop imitating, to tell my own stories. Put the coffee into socket, got the look of a long night, as my song goes, is about right. Don’t stop to think, you’re on the brink—1975 was a year of insomnia.

2

I Love the Sound of the Traffic

IT WAS ALWAYS NEW YORK. MY LIFE BEFORE MANHATTAN seemed simply a coiling before the leap north. I had visited early and often. My dad, Charles Stamey, a farmer’s son who, against all odds, had ended up with an MD from Harvard and then built a thriving pediatric practice in Winston-Salem, regularly attended medical conferences there, and my whole family—my mother, Margaret; sister, Cindy; and brother, Kent—would all tag along. My parents didn’t fly, so in the late fifties and early sixties we would book a Pullman train car out of nearby Greensboro and sleep through the night in the bunks, rolling over the rails, only to wake in a fantastical terrain among skyscrapers and bleating horns. When one such trip coincided with the 1964 World’s Fair, we kids felt like we had spun the clock forward. It was the Unisphere; the Tent of Tomorrow; a boat ride through It’s a Small World; IBM’s enormous mainframe computer, which could use handwriting as input; GE’s Progressland; Ford’s Magic Skyway; GM’s Futurama. I was only nine years old, but I knew what I had seen. It was the future coming to greet us, and that future’s compass pointed always north.

I think it was on this expedition that, after no doubt much pleading on my part, my folks popped into F.A.O. Schwarz and bought me an early Christmas present: a bright orange portable reel-to-reel tape recorder—a toy, really, with three-inch clear plastic reels and big D-cell batteries for juice. Traveling home, I spent the night in the upper berth making its wheels go round, muttering secret messages into its tiny microphone, capturing the sounds of the tracks, until the batteries gave way. I thought I had found a way to stop and rewind time itself, the distinction between memory and the now blurring away into dreams along the course of that sleepy night.

Returning from New York City with a tape recorder; author archives

I had already declared my intentions as far as music went. At age five, I had found the page in the Childcraft encyclopedia that showed a conductor flailing his arms in front of an attentive orchestra. Pointing to it, I told my mom unequivocally that I was going to be a musician when I grew up. (At that point, though, I thought the conductor was giving visual cues for the pitches instead of setting the pace and giving entrance cues: I thought that the higher his hands went, the higher up the scale the players were supposed to play.)

It’s funny how life grabs you early. Winston-Salem, then with a population of just over 100,000, was in some ways a solidly blue-collar town. Its central employer was the tobacco giant R. J. Reynolds. But there were nicotine millionaires aplenty, as well as an excellent Baptist-affiliated college, Wake Forest. My best pal in kindergarten, an elite program held at the college that included French and math, was a faculty kid named Ben who was fascinated with theater, had a bedroom decorated with Marilyn Monroe pinups, and would make up elaborate, theatrical plots for us to act out involving spy costumes or superhero capes; as a drama critic for The New York Times, Ben Brantley has now been brilliantly describing Broadway and environs for decades.

Radio provided me one of my earliest indoctrinations into the mythos of New Amsterdam. Gordon Jenkins, later the more lush and sentimental of Sinatra’s arrangers and also the man responsible for Nat King Cole’s rich sound at Capitol Records, had in 1946 created a fully orchestrated radio play called Manhattan Tower, and the 1956 expanded version of this was broadcast many times over local radio when I was a child. Although the work is often cheesy and florid, it was absolutely captivating to listen to a plot unfold without any visual imagery—no stage, no choreography, just the dialogue, songs, and soaring orchestral commentary. I would sit, glued to the speakers, with my eyes closed and imagine what all these mysterious places might look like if I someday moved to that strange island.

Another defining early moment, for me along with much of young America, occurred when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. But my reaction was a bit atypical: As clear as day, I can recall standing on the walkway to my elementary school in third or fourth grade, talking to my best friend, Mitch. He was saying that he thought the four Brits were really interesting and exciting; even then a budding contrarian, I said something like, I dunno, it seemed silly to me—and years would pass before I lost at least part of my skepticism about the Fab Four.

In the time before the Summer of Love, before first folk rock and then psychedelic rock arrived, science was king. The astronauts were the heroes of the early sixties; the space race was on. While still in elementary school, I read every single book