Let's Active
Heavy Karma
Since Nigel's marathon Mitch Easter inter view in issue 11 there
have been significant changes to Let's Active's composition and,
as Mitch tells a good tale or two, I think the time is ripe for
an update to the story. The following interview is a combination
of two interviews: one conducted by the welcome assistance of
Angie Carlson, who actually put the questions to Mitch on my
behalf and another by Fred Mills ( to whom I am indebted, both
for allowing me to use part of his interview and for providing
some of the photos hereabouts ). The interviews were conducted on
the 17th of April and 17th of March 1986 respectively.
B.O.B: There have been changes to Let's Active's line-up since
the 'Cypress' LP...
M.E: Yes, everybody except me was lost in a yachting accident, so
now it's just me and we have Eric Marshall playing drums, Angie
Carlson playing keyboards and, as of this moment, Mr. X on bass.
We haven't sorta picked a bass player but I'm going to say who it
is until we call him back and see if he still wants to do it.
B.O.B: How has this affected the band?
M.E: We can all wear each other's shoes now, I think we're all
about the same size! We sound like Let's Active still, because I
wrote the songs and it's got that sort of quality. It's got to
affect the band but we're still very recognizable, we don't sound
like Canned Heat or anything. Eric, the drummer, is from Winston-Salem
(Mitch's home town) but I never knew him before because he played
in these cover bands and metal bands and stuff that lived in a
parallel universe that never crossed with our's. He knows how to
play every Blue Öyster Cult song ever written and that's always
something that's going to come in handy! He's really a good
drummer, and he likes what we do. Angie Carlson, who's playing
guitar and keyboards now, is from Hibbing, Minnesota, and was a
rock journalist and has a grand history of playing in unpleasant
garage bands that didn't quite get off the ground but made a
valiant stab at it. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of, y'know,
things that Stevie Winwood did a long time ago - which is kinda
cool! The new band is more capable of going out and "doing
it" than previous versions. I think the original all-girl
version...
B.O.B: ...with you !!!
M.E: It's close enough to count as an all-girl band I think! We
were pretty charming and clunky - the definition of erratic. That
was a grand error but we've moved on to the present rock solid,
powerhouse, version that we have now. I think that people who
hear us now are pleased at how much we sound like the disc,
where, in the past, we might sound like the record or a three car
pile-up!
B.O.B: How did the U.S. tour with (Windbreaker) Tim Lee go?
M.E: That was just grand. It was just a temporary version of
Let's Active, the original two chicks and me version fell apart.
Before we went to England and toured with the Bunnymen we knew
that Sara Romweber was going to leave so we were faced with
putting a new band together real quick, so we came back and
called up Tim and Jay Peck to play with us, but both those guys
had their own thing so it wasn't a permanent thing. It was a fun
tour because it was the first time we'd done much head-lining in
the U.S. and it went really well.
B.O.B: Do you have any views to the fact that Bobby Sutliffe now
seems to have left the Windbreakers?
M.E: I think it's good. He and Tim had done a lot of stuff
together but they're probably not going in the same direction
anymore. Bobby is still at it and he's supposed to come here and
make a record this summer. He sent me a demo tape with really
superior songs so I hope this record will come out because I know
that whatever Bobby does will be great. I don't have any plans to
do anything with Tim but I'm sure he'll be putting out more
records, I haven't talked with him for a while.
B.O.B: What have you been doing production-wise over the last
twelve months, or have things been quieter because you're
concentrating on Let's Active?
M.E:I've done a fair bit of studio studio stuff in the last year
because we haven't toured much and our record release got delayed
- I did a lot of it back in the summer and finished it around New
Year. In the Fall of last year we did a Game Theory record. I did
a band fron North Carolina called NRG, a group called Not
Shakespeare and a group from Washington D.C. called Hyaa who are
some of my favs right now - a really weird art band, just guitar,
bass and drums and the singer's a woman - cool/weird songs,
they'll probably sell four records but I wish they'd sell a lot
because they're real neat. Don (Dixon) did a session with a band
called Waxing Poetics from Norfolk, Virginia, and the last three
days working on that Mike Mills came in to be sort of co-producer
and general "dude" - that was a pretty good session.
Right now I'm recording some stuff with a guy named Hege V and
the Bijous. Hege is actually George Hamilton the fifth - the son
of G.H. the fourth - anyway he's sort of a modern country guy,
good lyricist, good band - it should be a hot record when it
comes out. I'll probably work on a Chris Stamey record this
spring where I'm supposed to be a "session-cat" guitar
player, I also played some stuff for Marti Jones who's on A&M
records and was produced by Don Dixon. But I have been indeed
concentrating on the band when it made sense to do that. If the
band's got something to do the studio can just sit there til I
get back. In general I still see the studio as my hobby and the
band is torture that I inflict on myself, that I'll always put
first.
B.O.B: I heard that Gene Holder was playing with you?
M.E: We just did a bunch of shows with various past and present
dB's on bass. We did two shows with Chris Stamey and that was
pretty groovy, one of those was filmed for the IRS 'Cutting Edge'
programme on MTV. Then Chris went on tour with the Golden
Palominos so we continued with Gene Holder playing bass, which
was cool because he doesn't play bass with the dB's - he's now
their guitar player. That's what we,ve been doing until now.
During those shows we continued our tradition of doing covers
designed to offend the audience, like "Hush" - of
course it was the Deep Purple version which was a real rouser !
"Back Of A Car" by Big Star too ! We also tried to do
"Call Me Animal" by the MC5 but we were too winded at
the end of it so I don't know if we'll keep doing that one but it
sure is a good song !
B.O.B: Do you ever pull out really old stuff, "Bomb Scare"
, "Comet 65", still stand up and some of the early
Let's Active songs that don't pop up anymore...
M.E: I still like something like "Prying Eyes" that we
had at the very beginning and I just remembered tonight this song
called "Stuck On You" that we used to do that I
wouldn't mind digging up.
B.O.B: I've heard from various sources that you're very partial
to '70s heavy metal, Led Zep and Bad Company - has this affected
Let's Active? I can hear some "Kashmir" type keyboards
on the new record and "Route 67" is not too far removed
from "Hats Off To Harper" ...
M.E: Well, I do appreciate that type of stuff, it sounds good to
me. The equivalent "mega-music" of today is much worse.
The thing about Led Zeppelin is that they weren't really heavy
metal, they were loud and stuff but they were trying to be grand
and epic just like those Norse gods and it was great ! The
records hold up well. I think Jimmy Page wrote THE definitive set
of riffs, his catalog is right up there with anybody's. We like
Aerosmith too because they were really good songwriters. Today's
"metal" is just a bunch of crap really. O that "Still
Dark Out" song - I wanted to put some keyboards on it and I
played that line that I did thought sounded kinda like "Kashmir"
but so what, it sounded pretty cool. I never sat down with those
Zep records and thought the really trendy thing to do was to
bring that back, if it refers to those records then neato ! I
didn't set out to do it. The thing about "Hats Off To Harper"
is really high praise because that's one of the weirdest tracks
ever done; I hadn't thought about it til you mentioned it. I
wanted to do something with slide guitar so we made that up and
recorded it in the space of about thirty minutes or so and mixed
it the next day. A lot of people say it's their favorite so maybe
it's a hint of the direction we should go in. We did buy a lap
steel yesterday, so maybe mor "Hats Off..." songs in
the future !
B.O.B: The new record seems to have a harder sound than "Cypress",
perhaps it appears that way because of the lack of female leads?
M.E: It may be all that Howlin' Wolf I've absorbed over the last
year is starting to show in my voice, it gives it that Delta
blues sound that was latent but not coming out...I still
sometimes think the record could use more grind and rip and stuff.
"Cypress" is a slushy record, in the performances,
which has a certain sort of appeal but this record is a little
more together, a little more edgy.
B.O.B: What about the female thing...
M.E: Yeah,axed those chicks and I could really get down to some
ROCKIN' ! I don't think it has anything to do with that, those
women could really rock.
B.O.B: Which tracks do you consider the most successful on the
new record?
M.E: "Won't Go Wrong" has the right sound, it's also
the worst sounding thing on there because I actually started
recording the song on my Fostex X-15 four track cassette with a
drum machine and a guitar. It was really a demo and I started
getting fond of it so I copied the tape over to 16 track and
added some drums to it. I was still doing things like putting all
on one track so that I'd be forced to never use it on record - so
of course I did use it on the record ! It's recorded so
completely wrong by technical standards but it's got the feel so
we used it. It marks my world debut slide performance, "Route
67" was done a few months later. Another interesting story
about the record is "Writing The Book Of Last Pages"
had different words it was, sort of, about people who talk about
suicide all the time but don't intend to do it but if you
listened to it you might think it was a suicide song, we had it
re-mixed with Scott Litt who really liked the song and thought it
could be a hit but he realized what the words were about and
thought it would be "a bummer, man". Maybe he was
right, especially as now, in the States, there's this big "teen
suicide" thing and they're trying to discourage anything
that glamorizes it at all. This does NOT glamorize it, but
people are stupid so I changed the words, this was like thirty
minutes before we were going to mix it. I took the lyrics and
changed the key wordsso it's an incredibly positive, jolly sort
of song - not really ! But not about suicide anymore. Angie sings
the startlingly pure and angelic back-up harmonies on the chorus.
That was also last minute because we had to redo that too and she
stepped in like a real trooper and debuted in the studio that
night. "In Little Ways" is the most recent thing on the
record and is proposed as a single, it was written around
Christmas. We went down to this pawn shop in Wilmington, North
Carolina, and I bought a Hagstrom 12-string and was playing it
through a fuzz-box one night and came up with the little intro
riff which I thought was pretty good, kinda like Yes or something
- which was kinda funny so I thought I'd better use it ! We
talked IRS into thinking about it as a single, we did a video for
it last week with Bill Butt as the director - you may know him
for his work he's done with the Bunnymen, Green On Red, Hipsway
and Colourfield, stuff like that. We did it up at Pilot Mountain,
it was about three degrees when we were filming, it didn't occur
to us so we were wearing thin shirts and if you ever see the
video in colour you'll see that we're sorta' blue from the
frostbite that was setting in ! There's gonna be a twelve inch in
England with "In Little Ways" something from our "Afoot"
EP and two unreleased tracks which will be something for our
three fans in England to look for !
The LP will be out in the UK really soon, along with the 12"
and maybe a 7" too. We're going to do a U.S. tour in late
spring/early summer and I guess we'll tour England again before
too long....
B.O.B: YES, It's time for the North Carolina band invasion.
"Comboland" has paved the way, how did you react to the
acclaim that that package got?
M.E: It's great, because actually all the stuff (on the initial
tapes) was copied down here. Godfrey Cheshire brought in a big
pile of tapes and we made these master reels that it was all
done from. I thought, "Wow, this is a really cool project
!"and I sure didn't think it was any kind of thing that
would make any big splash really; but he managed to get results
out of it (TV shows on BBC TV's Whistle Test, MTV's Cutting Edge
plus a compilation album released by Making Waves in the UK .) My
part of it was just an afternoon copying all the stuff.
B.O.B: Are there any new records you've found particularly
stimulating?
M.E: We were at a club in Washington, we went to see Robyn
Hitchcock and before he came on they played a track by the
Butthole Surfers that was really one of the best things I've
heard all year, really fabulous groove, great bass, really good
burp, great spitting noises - it's got it all ! I have no idea
what it was called. Right up there with them is arecord we heard
the other night by a band called The Coolies, from Atlanta, who
have this dual sided Simon And Garfunkle single that has "Scarborough
Fair" and "Sounds Of Silence", like a Run DMC
version, just brilliant ! A real rough rhythm track, it's just
the best, you know. (Angie adds that she really likes Plasticland
too !) We also really appreciate The Nomads, they really have THE
SOUND. I don't know the new record but the old ones are the best
! I like The Church too, they're in a fog of their own but it's a
nice fog and an enjoyable one, the older stuff is maybe a little
sweller. It's the kind of stuff that will forever be called
"wimpy" but it's too bad it has to be called that
because, if you can sit down and pay attention to records like
that, they're really good. It's probably a bit passé to mention
now but the Dukes Of Stratosphere record was really fabulous. The
songwriting, the little clues, the engineering, everything was
there; sort of an in-joke and yet really enjoyable and I laughed
everytime I played it 'cos it was so great. It was the best and I
hope the new XTC record lives up to that ! Angie thinks that the
world would like to know about the new tape recorder purchase at
my little studio. I've got this 24-track machine, it was like the
world's last 16 track 2" studio. So I've added this 24 track
machine that came from the Power Station in New York. The "River"
album by Springsteen was recorded on it and the maintenance guys
at the studio felt certain that Bruce HAD leaned against it at
one point and was probably drinking a beer too ! There's just no
telling how much karma it absorbed then and it'll probably ooze
back out for years to come and have a beneficial effect on the
things I record in the future. Also, the "Sandanista"
record was done on it, it's a legendary piece of nuts and bolts.
I hope it can live up to my 16 track which was responsible for
the early Ted Nugent records, possibly "Cat Scratch Fever"
and some James Brown stuff ! I think the tradition of really
heavy karma is still on-going and intact, and revitalized in my
studio!!!
I hope you've enjoyed the latest installment of the continuing
Mitch Easter/Lets Active saga which I fully anticipate following
up in the future, you can be sure that Mr. Easter isn't going to
be twiddling his thumbs over the next few months. Reaction from
those that have heard the new album is very positive and I
suggest you grab a copy of "Big Plans For Everybody"
and judge for yourself.
Jon Storey & Fred Mills
