How The dB’s Reunion Rocked New Jersey
The ‘80s power pop heroes re-upped their rep at a Jersey City show
Make something extraordinary happen once and maybe it’s luck. Twice and you might call it magic. Make it happen again more than four decades later and it can’t be anything but artistry.
That’s what Peter Holsapple, Chris Stamey, Gene Holder and Will Rigby proved when they took the stage at Jersey City’s White Eagle Hall on September 15. In the early ‘80s, they pulled rabbits from hats on a regular basis as The dB’s, as singer/guitarists Stamey and Holsapple, bassist Holder and drummer Rigby mixed New Wave edge and pure pop inspiration at East coast hotspots like Maxwell’s and The Peppermint Lounge and on the albums Stands for deciBels and Repercussion.
This year, the NY-via-NC band’s cult classics — originally available only as UK imports and out of circulation in any format for years — have become part of a long-overdue reissue campaign. To celebrate, all four original dB’s decided to celebrate with a brief reunion tour.
With New York not included on the itinerary, the White Eagle Hall show had to serve the needs of all tri-state area dB’s lovers, and the hardy crowd that filled the club showed that the demand is still there. Naturally, the set was dominated by tunes from the first two albums. Remarkably, the band managed to invest the songs with the same effervescence and elan they had 40-plus years ago.
With Holsapple and Stamey alternating lead vocal duties, The dB’s blazed a fresh path to glory on the old tunes. Power-pop explosions like “Black and White,” “Neverland,” “I’m in Love” and “Big Brown Eyes,” and offbeat mini-masterpieces like “Cycles Per Second,” “Happenstance” and “Ask for Jill” leaped off the stage and seemed to create a vortex that swept up everybody within earshot and sent them into a giddy delirium. For a brief moment in time, the kind of indescribable buzz John Sebastian once sang about on The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic” was delivered—the promise of pop paradise and rock ‘n’ roll reverie was writ large if only for a while.
“Love Is for Lovers” and “(Lonely Is) As Lonely Does” from the band’s third album, Like This (which is celebrating its 40th anniversary), proved that even for the few years that The dB’s soldiered on without Stamey they were still serving up some powerful stuff.
The evening’s encore tunes provided a perfect snapshot of the ingredients at work in the band’s rarefied recipe. On one hand, “(I Thought) You Wanted to Know,” (an early, non-LP single written by Television’s Richard Lloyd) rewarded listeners with some of the most heavenly guitar jangle likely to come around in this lifetime. Soon after, the band’s finely honed wit went to work when they pulled out an unexpected cover of the Bob Dylan & The Band chestnut “This Wheel’s on Fire” sung by drummer Will Rigby and repeatedly punctuated by the bluesy, balls-out signature riff from “Black Night” by Deep Purple.
This tour may very well be the band’s last blast as a working unit. But it has already provided empirical evidence that the artistry and magic of The dB’s will resonate in perpetuity.
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