Easter Gets Active With Solo Album
Published: Jun 29, 2007
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Mitch Easter's career as a musician, producer and engineer stretches back 30 years to the seminal power pop band Sneakers.
But it wasn't until this year that he released an album under his own name ("Dynamico," which came out in March).
And if he'd had his way, that would have waited a little longer.
"It's not exactly what I had in mind," Easter says by telephone from his North Carolina home. "I love the idea of a band and a band name.
"But at this stage," Easter says, "my name is more known than anything else I could come up with. If people will notice the record because they've heard of me, that's pretty useful."
Fans of 1980s college rock certainly will have heard of Easter. He produced or co-produced discs by R.E.M., Game Theory, Marshall Crenshaw, Marti Jones and The Connells. His own band, Let's Active, was responsible for college radio staples such as "Every Word Means No," "Easy Does" and "Fell."
His Drive-In Studio, located in the garage of his parents' Winston-Salem home, became a mecca for the jangly Southern rock of the period.
Easter's initial inspirations, though, were the guitar hero-fronted power trios of the late '60s.
"When I was first starting to play it was when the heavy guitar rock was coming in," Easter says. "I loved that stuff and I played in bands that did that.
"In the '80s, I started doing more of an '80s kind of music," Easter continues. "It was just kind of a new sound and it was fun to play. And that's when I sort of got somewhere, so I'm associated with that and that's understandable."
Easter seemingly was in a position to parlay his credits into a career as a big-name producer. But he never had the stomach for "looking for these really terrible songs and making hits of them," Easter says. "That's kind of what's involved in being a real record producer.
"Even when we did the first R.E.M. album ["Murmur," 1983], we got comments like that out of I.R.S., which blew my mind because they sold themselves as this super-hip label. And yet the kind of stuff they were saying … it was straight out of 1957, some guy with a cigar saying, 'Get this kid out here! Get him a hit!' If R.E.M. had listened to the advice these people were giving them, we probably wouldn't be remembering them. It would have ruined them."
More importantly, Easter wanted to play music himself, not just record others.
"I saw recording other people as secondary to playing music," Easter says. "I know all these people I record are better than me, and more people like them, but it's my life and what I want to do is play guitar."
Nevertheless, there was a long stretch between the final Let's Active album, 1988's "Every Dog Has His Day," and "Dynamico."
"When Let's Active came to an end, I assumed I would do the next record right away and of course it didn't happen," Easter says.
He wasn't idle: He produced albums for Pavement, Helium and Velvet Crush and played bass with Shalini, the band led by his wife, Shalini Chatterjee. He couldn't stay away from his own music forever, though.
"But I really am a music person," Easter says. "That's sort of all I do so it's sort of stupid to not be doing it."
ON TOUR
Mitch Easter
WITH: Big Kitty
WHEN: 9:30 p.m. Saturday
WHERE: New World Brewery, 1323 E. Eighth Ave., Tampa; (813) 248-4969
COST: $8
Curtis Ross can be reached at (813) 259-7568 or cross@tampatrib.com.
