E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cover boys Chris Stamey teams up with Yo La Tengo BY JONATHAN PERRY
	Related Links Chris Stamey's official site Phoenix review of his 2004 album, Travels in the South

The last time Chris Stamey played the Paradise, nearly 20 years ago, the one-time dB’s singer-guitarist-turned-Golden-Palominos-collaborator alerted R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe to a front-page story in the New York Times. Both men were back stage, getting ready to play an afternoon show with R.E.M. headlining and Stamey opening with the Palominos, New York percussionist Anton Fier’s revolving-door ensemble. The Times article, Stamey now recalls over the phone from his Chapel Hill home, was about scientists discovering a phenomenon dubbed "hyper-gravity, a negative kind of gravity."

"I showed Michael this article, which said if you dropped a feather and a rock from the leaning tower of Pisa, the feather might actually hit the ground first," Stamey remembers. "And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got this track I’ve got to write words for, and that would really fit — can I keep this?’ " The song Stipe had in mind for the image and idea was "Fall on Me," which would subsequently appear on 1986’s Lifes Rich Pageant (I.R.S.) and become one of R.E.M.’s signature tunes.

Stamey’s creative life is seeded with these kinds of moments of aiding and abetting the pop zeitgeist. One way or another, his influence on the shape and the sound of the independent-music landscape of the past 25 years has been felt — sometimes directly, sometimes subtly. That impact began with Sneakers, a mid-’70s band with a pre–Let’s Active Mitch Easter and Gene Holder. Holder was a future member of the dB’s, the seminal, almost-famous North Carolina jangle-pop outfit of Stamey and Peter Holsapple that also included drummer Will Rigby. Stamey’s CV reads like a who’s who of indie rock: he’s worked with everyone from Alex Chilton and Bob Mould to Le Tigre and Boston’s own Helium.

For much of the past 10 years, Stamey’s stamp has been subtle as a producer and arranger, but these days, it seems, he’s taking a far more direct approach. Hot on the heels of 2004’s Travels in the South (Yep Roc), his first album in more than a decade, he’s just issued A Question of Temperature (also Yep Roc) under the banner of the Chris Stamey Experience. It’s a boisterous, loose-knit collection of covers and originals with the nifty Hoboken combo Yo La Tengo as his backing band. They had all played together years before when Stamey was a New Jersey neighbor, and he’s occasionally recorded and toured with YLT as second guitarist. The Hoboken trio even named their most recent album, Summer Sun (Matador), after a 1978 Stamey solo single.

"Question of Temperature started as a kind of in-between EP," says Stamey, who brings a band with him to play the Paradise Lounge this Tuesday. "We already had the idea of recutting ‘Summer Sun,’ and in the meantime, I had written a song called ‘McCauley Street (Let’s Go Downtown)’ that I wanted Yo La Tengo to play on. When I was in the dB’s, we used to do the cover ‘Compared to What,’ and [Yo La Tengo guitarist] Ira [Kaplan] had been at some of those shows, so that’s another one we thought of — particularly since Gene Holder was working the sessions and he was in the dB’s with me."

Soon, the intended EP turned into a full-fledged album that was recorded during a torrid three days in Hoboken last August. "The trick to sounding spontaneous is no rehearsal and only using one take," says Stamey. "You can get there real fast!" Apart from the clutch of solid Stamey originals, Temperature revives such ’60s state-of-the-union warhorses as the Yardbirds’ "Shapes of Things," Cream’s "Politician," and the aforementioned "Compared to What." The album was recorded 12 weeks before the November elections, and that in part explains the mood of disgruntled dread and ferment swarming around the covers they chose. "I think that election was on all of our minds, even though those songs are pretty old and were written about a different war in a different time."

Still, there’s no shortage of new original material. Stamey is finishing up yet another solo album, but the big news is that, after quitting his best-regarded band in the early 1980s to pursue a solo career, he’s working on a new dB’s record with his former compatriots. The first recording sessions commenced last month. "Peter Holsapple and I have been working on another duo record together [they released Mavericks in 1992], and he had a couple of songs that sounded more like dB’s songs to me, so I suggested that we do this." The band are aiming to release a new dB’s album in 2006, and they want to play some shows. But first things first. "We did part of the recording on our own, but I’m suggesting to everyone that we need an outside producer to finish it up. It’d be too easy to be our own worst enemy — times four."

The Boston Pop Underground Presents the Chris Stamey Experience featuring Anton Fier, John Chumbris, and Tyson Rogers this Tuesday, February 15, at the Paradise Lounge, 969 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston; call (617) 562-8814.