Activatism

Album: Let's Active, Cypress, 1984

Best Track: "Blue Line"

Lasting Memory: Let's Active once bumped me from a gig.

I can't recall the exact date, but sometime in 1991, Let's Active played a show at Buddy's in Blacksburg, Va., on a Sunday night. Sunday nights were comedy nights at Buddy's, and the very evening that Let's Active blew through town, I was scheduled to be the featured comedian.

The gig wouldn't have paid me anything but a free meal and maybe some comped beers, but I remember that I would have opened the regularly scheduled comedy show, introduced all the other comedians, and closed the show. I didn't get the chance to do that that one night, and I didn't even get to see/hear Let's Active play because Buddy's filled up to the point that I left through the kitchen rather than deal with the sweaty, writhing mass of humanity.

Damn you, Let's Active, for stealing my limelight and for being more popular than I was. Damn you straight to hell.

But, hey, thank for the music, and all.

Let's Active was and is fronted by indie super producer Mitch Easter, whose Drive-In Studio in Winston-Salem, N.C., launched the mainstream careers of a surprising number of the best East Coast acts of the 1980s, including R.E.M.

As a musician, producer, arranger, and sound engineer, Easter champions the jangle, which as near a I can tell is a sound marked by open tuned guitars, 4/4 beats, and country-ish vocals. In other words, jangle pop is audio nirvana.

I take points away from Let's Active because most of the vocals are provided by the two female members of the band, Faye Hunter and Sara Romweber (who has to be some relation to the main guy from Flat Duo Jets). I just generally don't like female singing.

Still and all, "Blue Line" is as good an example of the transition from the arena/art rock of the 1970s to the informed-by-the-gospel-and-bluegrass-origins-of-rock-'n'-roll that was the alternative music revolution of the late 1980s and early 1990s as you're ever going to hear. "Flags for Everything" is also pretty genre-defining.

Samples of all the songs on Cypress are available here as tracks 1-12. You could do much worse than clicking through those samples.

Up Next: Let's Active, Big Plans for Everybody, 1986