#thedb's

Pages 1-4 of my hand-written, annotated playlist of songs played as part of The dB’s Orgy on Harvard radio station WHRB, spring 1989.

My archivist, completist tendencies are on full display here in this playlist I made of the dB’s and related songs played on-air during this multi-hour Orgy, and recorded by me onto a hodgepodge of cassette tapes. I feel like there there may be a couple more pages I’m missing (this program was loooong), but these were all I could find.

In high school I’d discovered WHRB—specifically its Record Hospital nighttime programming of indie, punk and other underground music—via the weekly playlists left by the doors of my record store haunts. On one such store visit, I grabbed a flyer advertising a “dB’s Orgy” to be broadcast on the station that month. I was already a fan of the dB’s, having bought their latest album, The Sound of Music, after hearing the song “Amplifier” on local alt-rock station WFNX. (And yes, that song isn’t on that album, but I couldn’t find a copy of Like This!)

So on the appointed date and time as per that flyer, I gathered a bunch of tapes that were either blank or partially-blank, tuned my dad’s good stereo in the living room to 95.3 FM, and hit “record” on the first of those tapes I’d popped in his cassette deck. Since it was a double-deck that automatically switched from one bay to the other at finish, I was able to record up to three whole hours at a time, which made the process a bit easier.

The entire program was a revelation: the length (at least 8 hours, IIRC), the breadth of music and artists part of the dB’s universe (Kimberly Rew of The Soft Boys!), and the depth of the DJ’s record collection. He had the obscure, 1972 LP by Rittenhouse Square, with Stamey, Holsapple and Mitch Easter playing kind of terrible rock music, but charmingly goofy at the same time. And I’m pretty sure this program was the first time I heard Pylon and Yo La Tengo, among others.

After many hours and cassettes of taping, I later took my scribbled notes and re-listened to the whole damn thing again—okay, with some fast-forwarding. I marked the songs that I wanted to include on my “compiled copy” of what I considered to be core material. I generally omitted songs that I either already had in some form or were from artists with a more tangential connection to the dB’s. (Sorry, Pylon.) The final product ended up on three, 90-minute Maxell XLII-S cassettes. So fancy.

Hand-written playlist for a mix tape of songs by The dB’s and related musical projects, compiled circa 1989.

My love for The dB’s has been well-established on this blog—most notably here and here—so my discovery of this playlist in an old notebook was no surprise. I am, however, scratching my head at the intended audience. Because this is no simple dB’s 101 mix. In fact, it contains a lot of rarities and early material I’d taped from that massive dB’s Orgy that WHRB had broadcast in the spring of 1989. So maybe it was a single tape version of that triple-tape Orgy “best of”?

Newspaper ad, clipped from The Boston Phoenix, for a concert with Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey at the Hatch Shell in Boston, MA on August 3, 1991.

My dB’s fandom had been stoked by that multi-hour Orgy on WHRB, yet I had no way to see the band—they had broken up! Then in 1991, Peter Holsapple returned, reunited with onetime bandmate Chris Stamey, now recording as a duo.

Their 1991 album Mavericks was a much gentler, mostly acoustic affair. As a fan of their frenetic, often twisted pop (I named my present-day radio show after one of their weirdest compositions), this was a minor disappointment. But to get a new set of Holsapple and Stamey songs was in and of itself a treat.

And so when I learned the duo would be coming to Boston to play a free concert not long after the release of that record, I started on my game plan. Tape recorder? Check. Autograph-ready copies of 7″es by each member’s relatively obscure pre-dB’s projects? Check.

Since Holsapple and Stamey were opening for Irish folk singer Maura O’Connell, I didn’t have to sit through any opening acts. It was a sunny, clear day in Boston, and I plopped down on a grassy spot on the lawn to enjoy the show, tape recorder capturing their acoustic set.

After their performance, I did seek both of them out to babble excited praise of their music and brandish my records—would they mind signing? Holsapple and Stamey each expressed surprise upon seeing copies of the Sneakers 7″ (1976) and Holsapple’s “Big Black Truck” single (”Wow, I can’t believe you have this!”). Then they each graciously signed their respective musical artifacts.

Set of three Maxell XLII-S cassettes onto which I’d dubbed a condensed version of The dB’s Orgy, Record Hospital programming broadcast on radio station WHRB, spring 1989.

I wrote all about this Orgy in yesterday’s post—here are the tapes!

While I didn’t really expend too much effort designing these, I did use a blue highlighter marker to color the spines of each cassette insert. And what you see here is my neatest handwriting. I even colored in each dot on the sleeves and tape labels to note “no noise reduction” was used.