This summer guitar-pop avatars the dB’s released Falling off the Sky (Bar/None), not only their first album in 25 years but also the first in three decades with founding guitarist, singer, and songwriter Chris Stamey. The two classic LPs the band released in the early 80s, Stands for Decibels and Repercussion, would influence countless future groups with the sweet-and-sour push-pull between the classic melodies of coleader Peter Holsapple and the wobbly, off-kilter tunefulness of Stamey (the latter is a bit reminiscent of Alex Chilton, with whom Stamey played before launching the dB’s). After leaving the band in 1982, Stamey began an erratic solo career (his first album since 2005 is due early next year) and became a successful recording engineer; he founded a studio, Modern Recording, with dB’s and R.E.M. producer Scott Litt. In both arenas he’s distinguished himself with meticulousness unmarred by cold perfectionism.

Were you all playing there, or what’s going on?

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Even today there’s a great scene going on in North Carolina. A lot of the folks can read music, which is freeing because you can write parts, and a lot of the 20-year-old players around here seem to know everything that happened, for example, in Muscle Shoals. You mention a Gene Clark record, and they know it. There’s a guy named Jeff Crawford, who’s also played with Peter [Holsapple] and me a bunch and has produced me, and he’s doing great things. When we were growing up here, Don Dixon had started to produce, and of course Mitch Easter was doing really cool things, and there were a lot of great players—but we skipped a couple steps. We were in New York for years. It’s wonderful to be back in North Carolina and have it coming alive.

I know a lot of people who did move from the south—they were friends with Rick and Sue, Sue Garner and Rick Brown [both of Fish & Roses and Run On].

I would be interested in not overemphasizing the Big Star side of things; I don’t hear that so much on the dB’s records myself. I guess my feeling is that—I think about Eric Clapton. If you’d heard “I Shot the Sheriff,” you might think Clapton was a reggae artist. It was something he loved, and he had this huge hit. But the dB’s have catholic influences—I mean, we used to play “(Let’s Make It Real) Compared to What” for half an hour at shows. George Jones. There’s so many things we all loved. And I’m not trying to get on you at all.

I think that before, you always had to go through filters, you know—you had to go through A&R levels. And I was interning, or assisting Don Dixon on shows, and he recorded a traditional band down here who just took the tape and sent money to Nashville and they ended up with records. As crazy as it seems, that was kind of mind-blowing. We didn’t know that was legal, in a way, and so we thought, “We can do that.” And the Sneakers record was made with no filters. Well, Don Dixon produced it as best he could in the few hours we had. Nobody stopped us. And maybe today there are a couple—you know, I wish I wasn’t sick when I had done all the lead vocals, but that’s the way it goes.

My advice is don’t demo. Figure it out in a room but don’t record; that way you’re not fighting it. I think so much of what ends up being the problem with demo-itis is that when you’re in the studio, the tempo is a little off or the monitoring headphones are just not set up right. I think it’s not actually the sonics, but things that—if you’re really careful about what was good about those demos, you can do them again. Trying to think about the dB’s records, so many things were—I think we made the new record a little bit like I’ve read the Beatles made records. In that we brought in songs, we’d show them to each other, and we’d play them until they coalesced. There wasn’t preproduction.

Rick Rizzo

Tue 11/27, 9 PM, Hideout, $5