Taken From Mojo Magazine
September,1997
Buried Treasure
The Great Albums That Time Forgot
One Hundred Percent Homage
The one man band that couldn't make up it's mind.
Let's Active
Big Plans For Everybody
In Little Ways/Talking To Myself/Writing The Book Of Last Pages/Last Chance Town/Won't Go Wrong/Badger/Fell/Still Dark Out/Whispered News/Reflecting Pool/Route 67
Currently Available As : The rights now lie with EMI in the UK.
Singles Extracted : In Little Ways
Recorded : Drive - In Studio,North Carolina,Summer 1985
Released : March 1986 / Chart Peak : None
Personnel : Mitch Easter ( vocals,electric and acoustic guitars,bass,piano,organ,synthesizers,drums,percussion) with occasional help from...Angie Carlson ( guitar,keyboards,drum samples,maraccas,backing vocals),Faye Hunter (bass),Eric Marshall (drums),Robb Ladd (drums)
TO AN R.E.M. fan in the second half of 1984,the long wait between Reckoning and Fables Of The Reconstruction seemed exceptionally hard to swallow.The thought of those Rickenbacker barren months stretching into the new year was enough to drive any to a bleakly letharggic re-read of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. Then,out of left field,came succour,stress alleviation and new purpose - all in one melodically exotic package called Let's Active.
Let's Active were a trio from North Caroline led by R.E.M.'s co - producer Mitch Easter.Easter,a high school contemporary of The dB's,had co - fronted The Sneakers in the late 70s.Now something of a power-pop veteran at 28,he had put together Let's Active with two women (bassist Faye Hunter and drummer Sara Romweber) and was now playing a deliciously femenized sort of psychedelic nerve - pop.Their first EP, Afoot (1983),was too stop - start and bitty,but the album Cypress (1984) was simply marvelous,high pitched harmonies,Easter's playful - mysterious melodies and string - bending guitar solos, and an all around exhuberant delivery.
As Easter understood it, Let's Active were really on the move; soon Will Sergeant invited them to tour Britain with Echo And The Bunnymen.But on the eve of the tour, Sara Romweber announced she was to leave at the end of it.And although the trio did play the Bunnymen dates, they couldn't find any copies of Cypress in UK record shops.
Hurt and disillusioned,Easter retreated to Drive - In, his 16 - track studio in North Carolina, to record the follow - up in the summer of 1985.He had no new songs, but what he did have have was an uncanny aptitude for any instrument he touched, a gaggle of homespun production ideas, and a do-it-yourself mentality born partly of necessity,partly of hero-worship.
"The old band with me, and the two girls was a New Wave band," he now reckons."We were just the herky-jerkiest, speeded up sounding little thing on earth. But a few years before that I'd been trying to emulate Shazzam by The Move. Of course, in the New Wave years nobody was supposed to have a past. But now my room was covered with posters of Todd Rundgren and Roy Wood.I was starting to think - in megalomaniac terms - I'll do this by myself."
Written and recorded in the summer of '85, Big Plans For Everybody was a solo album in all but name.Faye Hunter played bass on a couple of tunes, and a drummer helped out here and there, but for the most part Easter was the only musician. "I was really used to hitting 'record' and running over to the drumkit for the count-in," he remembers.
The results were fantastic. Although the hyperactivity of Cypress was not completely foresworn, it's primary colours were now augmented by new shades of maturity (maroon, apple-green and autumnal-brown) as Easter, confident that his small fan base could tolerate a mood swing or five, made Big Plans For Everybody a bittersweet tour de force. Rather than root the music in a specific era, he threw the lot in - psychedelia, British Invasion, glutinous acoustic semi folk, blues boogie, backwards guitar and early 80s synth. His unusual lyrics, composed seemingly of unrelated lines ("Happy is hard work" , "One of us is none of us"), charmed the pants off the listener.When all else failed, there'd be a quick "hey!" and into another audacious swizzle-stick guitar solo.
Last Chance Town (recorded entirely solo) doffed a cap to Cold Turkey - and this was intentional. But there were wonderful accidents, such as the exquisite ballad Badger ( which bore a slight similarity to The Air That I Breath) and In Little Ways (disco-fied rythms, little gasps of harmony vocals and mighty keyboard fanfares). Best of all was Still Dark Out - arguably Easter's finest six minutes - in which a wall of 12-strings twanged to the command of Easter as - Chris Squire on bass, giving it maximum Starship Trooper via a Fender Twin and a tremolo that made the knees throb.
"I guess the album was 100% homage," he says, "except that I'm not one of those guys that has a list made up in advance. I was never nostalgic about rock music; for me it all just co-exists."
Big Plans For Everybody was not a commercial success, and although a four-piece Let's Active appeared appeared on the Whistle Test performing Writing The Book Of Last Pages, there was no UK tour. They only made one more album (Every Dog Has His Day in 1988). Co-produced by Easter and John Leckie, it was excellent in places but didn't cause sufficient waves to deflect Easter from his now full-time job as a producer of Game Theory, Velvet Crush, Moose and others.
This las summer, however, Easter returned to writing and recording.While nothing is concrete,there may well, it seems, be another record on the horizon from this modest, highly respected figure, whose brand of record collection rock flatters any record collection that would have it.
David Cavanagh
