Just Another Day In The Life Of
Mitch Easter
By Karen Schoemer
From The BOB, Issue 35, Feb/Mar '89
Mitch Easter is staring at his food. He is sitting along with his girlfriend/bandmate Angie Carson, a publicist from I.R.S. and myself, at a patio table at the Fountain Plaza restaurant at Lincoln Plaza in Manhattan. We are surrounded by white bouffants, saggy necks, and thick wallets. Mitch's plate is dominated by an unnaturally sized and pigmented lettuce leaf that looks like a species of aquarium flora.
" Mitch would do a solo at three in the morning," Angie is saying, on the topic of the recording of Let's Active's latest album, Every Dog Has His Day. " He'd go out there and do it in one take and it would be just that one - it would be right, he doesn't really work 'em out."
"Anyway," says Mitch, not focusing his attention anywhere in particular, "we were gonna do this record with this guy John Leckie, and he asked us if we might want to record in England at some places where he was familiar with, and we said sure, 'cause you know, being tourists and all, it sounded kind of good. So he mentioned a couple different places, and it ended up being Rockfield (in Wales), which was fine with us, 'cause we knew about Rockfield."
"Before we did it we met Leckie and we said the Mitch is used to working by himself and we really didn't want to change arrangements," Angie explains, " we really didn't want creative direction but it would be nice to have another person in the studio."
"The good thing is, Leckie didn't have any problem with that," adds Mitch. "Some producers would be really offended if every note wasn't carrying their stamp somehow."
"He'd done the Dukes Of Stratosphere and stuff," Angie raves, " I mean he was a staff engineer at Abbey Road. He could tell these great stories about the time Syd would come in on the Dark Side Of The Moon sessions. We wanted a guy that had really been around, that we could look up to. He could tell us great stories, you know?"
Angie is, like really, enthusiastic. Before she joined Let's Active (sometime during a '85 U.S. club tour) she wrote about cool pop bands in fanzines. She seems to enjoy being on the other side of the tape recorder now. Angie is anxious to alleviate some of the burden Mitch feels as a result of being Mitch Easter: producer extraordinaire, champion of indie bands, frontman, king of the famous Drive-In studios in Winston-Salem, songwriter, unappreciated artiste of '80s art rock.
"People look at this band as Mitch's hobby," Angie grouses, "Because Mitch has been playing so long, people have looked at it as more of a stylized pop thing. They think, 'Oh, he's going for an effect, it's not that sincere." It is sincere. If we read one more interview where Mitch is this cute little guy--I mean, Mitch is a really cynical guy who's been doing this a long time. It's like, we're just sick of getting misrepresented."
The Let's Active crusade against misrepresentation actually began a couple years and when Mitch, tired of being seen as Mr. Nice Guy of unobtrusive Southern pop, took deliberate steps to tarnish his image. The band covered Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple in live shows, and on record the balance tipped away from quirky guitar pop melodies toward a heavier, more lethal rhythm section and metalesque power chords. This ideological insurrection was trumpeted by Musician magazine, which ran a five page story in their August '86 issue under the banner, "Let's Active's Mitch Easter Is Sick Of Being Cute And Jangly." The story, unfortunately, went a little too far to the other side, promoting Easter as a petulant malcontent who berated his audience for thinking, "the guitar was invented by Elvis Costello."
"We hated that article,"seethes Angie. "Absolutely hated it."
"I think what it is," Mitch begins tentatively, " is you don't want to stand there in some squeaky little voice saying, 'Take me seriously!' The fact that we were seen as bunch of really cheery twelve year olds on the first album was fine, because it was the first national public thing. Then about a year later that was starting to crumble around the edges, and it wasn't replaced with a very accurate or really very good view of us. I really think nobody got it. If we weren't going to young and chipper, then it was like, who knows what the hell they're trying to be?"
Easter found that covering "Dancing Days" wasn't the solution to all his problems. "What happened is that Big Plans For Everybody came out, and I thought it was a good record, and it just kinda' fell into the abyss. We toured and it was over with really fast, and then there was this giant gap where we couldn't do anything. We had the lineup of the band sounding really good, yet it was obvious our business was a mess. We couldn't get I.R.S. on the phone, we didn't know what was happening....."
"We were heartbroken about that record" says Angie. "There was a period where we didn't hear from I.R.S."--the publicist is fascinated--"and it started to not look that bad to be on Buttlick Records and put out weird colored vinyl things, you know? We stayed in Winston-Salem, our world became really small, and we just sort of stripped stuff away. We's been so disappointed with Big Plans because we thought it was really good and nothing happened to it."
"And then somehow," Mitch continues, "clouds parted enough to where all of a sudden we had a budget to make a record, and went and did it."
Mitch looks at his plate. I get the feeling things aren't rolling as fast as Mitch would like them to be. "When we get it rolling." he says, "it was like, 'Good, let's record ANYTHING!" It wasn't the nice thing of having this real linear career where it's time to do a record, you sit around, you go out in the woods and and think abut songs. Much more scattered then that." The band recorded demos at Drive-In, which they played for John Leckie before heading to Rockfield to begin actual production. Once in Wales, they got homesick.
"It wasn't comfortable, it wasn't familiar," Angie says. "We had to go over to this tiny town in Wales to this converted horse barn or whatever it is, and it was completely foreign. And it's like, okay, now be creative and spontaneous and rock really hard."
"It wasn't 100% comfortable being in a foreign country with a producer we didn't know," Mitch confirms.
"Sometimes in a session we just didn't know what to do."
I think the new album is a lot weirder than the last one, I tell Mitch.
For the first time in the conversation, he seems focused and enthusiastic.
"You think so?" he asks. "Most people think that it is a normal album, the mainstream sounding one, because it does have this overall standard rock sound to it. But there's stuff on there like that 'Terninate' song, that I NEVER would have put on a record, but Leckie wanted it."
Well, compare the instrumental "Orpheus In Hades Lounge" to "Route '67" on Big Plans,I say. "Route '67 is the twangy road song, while "Orpheus" is completely bizarre, all over the place.
"Leckie was the person to suggest we do an instrumental." Mitch says. "I'd had that bass line for years in my head, so we wrote that song on the spot in the studio, and it made us kind of fractured. I mean, the verse part, and that silly organ part were just kind of unalike. I think our curse, which is probably a good thing in the long run, is that we just don't seem to be really immediate. There's some built-in confusion factor in it. I don't know what it is. I'm looking for some combination of clarity and obscurity. If it could be one of those things like those early Pink Floyd records that you could play over and over and always be hearing new sounds, that's the greatest."
Karen Schoemer
A really cool picture taken at Drive-In studios during the recording of "Only Ghosts Remain" of Mitch(donning a snappy argyle sweater and can of Bud) and Bobby Sutliff accompanies this article."
