The dB's Embrace Life as a Cult Act With New Album 'Falling Off the Sky'
Since Peter Holsapple got into rock 'n' roll, a passion he's parlayed into a 40-plus-year career, there have been a handful of records he's never lived without. He replaces them whenever they wear out, and sometimes, he stocks up on extra copies, snagging backups of, say, Big Star's Radio City and giving them out to deserving friends.
As a music fan, he's what you might call a missionary, and talking with Spinner about the return of the dB's -- the influential power-pop band he joined in 1978, led throughout the '80s and reunited five years ago -- he uses that very word.
The original four-man lineup is readying the release of Falling Off the Sky, its first album in 30 years, and while there won't be any crazy cross-country everyone-in-the-van touring, Holsapple, fellow singer and guitarist Chris Stamey, bassist Gene Holder and drummer Will Rigby are eager to bring their music to the people.
"We want to give this as much push as we possibly can, within reason," Holsapple, 56, says of the record. "We can't go out and sleep on people's floors and do $50 guarantee nights on a Tuesday, wherever, but we certainly want to play a bunch. We want people to come to the shows."
Certain people -- folks who don't need anyone to give them copies of Radio City, since they already have six of their own -- are sure to come out in droves. In the pantheon of famously non-famous, criminally overlooked power-pop bands, the dB's are perhaps second only to Big Star, Memphis legends who factor into their own story.
Big Star recorded three albums between 1971 and 1974, and after their breakup, main man Alex Chilton settled in New York City to start a solo career. Stamey moved up
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