Chris Stamey

Event information

Clerkenville East-West and Decor are delighted to welcome back legendary US musician Chris Stamey to the Betsey Trotwood, following his two sold out shows at the venue in 2023. This will be a matinee with music starting at 2pm and ending around 5pm.

Chris Stamey is an indie-rock icon with a long and illustrious history that’s encompassed co-founding seminal avant-pop band The dBs, playing with Alex Chilton in the 70s, and more recently with Jody Stephens's Big Star Quintet. His upcoming album, Modernism (June 19 but available at show) was conceived as a companion piece to 2025’s lauded Anything Is Possible (with guests the Lemon Twigs), and is a further “love letter” to the kaleidoscopic variety of music heard on AM and free-form FM radio in the 1960s and early 70s. It features many of his favorite songs from that era, with special guests such as Jody Stephens (Big Star), Pat Sansone (Wilco), long-time cohort Mitch Easter, Probyn Gregory and Nelson Bragg (formerly of the Brian Wilson band), The dB’s, NC legend Wes Lachot, and Emily Frantz (Watchhouse), among others. First singles are “Hey Bulldog” (with Stephens) and “Waterloo Sunset” (with The dB’s).

As a producer and a featured singer/songwriter with the Paris-based Salt Collective project, he has collaborated with Matthew Caws (Nada Surf), Juliana Hatfield, Richard Lloyd (Television), Matthew Sweet, Aimee Mann, Andy Partridge, The Lemon Twigs, Mike Mills, and Lynn Blakey, among others. As a producer, arranger, and mixer, he has worked with over a hundred artists, including Alejandro Escovedo, Kronos Quartet, Flat Duo Jets, Skylar Gudasz, Branford Marsalis, Tift Merritt, Le Tigre, Those Pretty Wrongs, Ryan Adams, and Yo La Tengo.

Other tracks on the new record Modernism include Sly and the Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” (featuring the Uptown Horns, Brian Dennis [DAG], and Jon Wurster [Mountain Goats, Superchunk]), “Shadows Breaking Over My Head” by the Left Banke, “Hernando’s Hideaway” (from The Pajama Game, and a 1954 hit for Everly Bros. producer Archie Bleyer), “At Last” (by Harry Warren), as well as three new interpretations of his own earlier tunes. There’s also a closer of the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday,” a version produced by Alex Chilton in 1977.

BIO:

Chris Stamey began writing and playing music in grade school in Winston-Salem, NC, in the mid 1960s, in what is known now as the Combo Corner scene. In 1976, while studying music composition at UNC-Chapel Hill, he self-released Sneakers, one of the very first American “indie” records. The following year, he relocated to Manhattan to play and record with Alex Chilton in the burgeoning CBGB rock scene, then formed The dB’s with fellow Carolinians Will Rigby, Gene Holder, and Peter Holsapple, with whom he made several acclaimed records of original material, including Stands for deciBels (self-produced with Alan Betrock) and Repercussion (produced by Scott Litt).

During the next decade and a half in New York, Stamey worked with a wide variety of musicians. He recorded well-received solo records for A&M and Warners and was a part of Anton Fier’s Golden Palominos project, alongside an international touring cast that included Michael Stipe (R.E.M.), Jack Bruce (Cream), Carla Bley, and Bernie Worrell (Talking Heads, George Clinton). He continued recording and producing upon returning to NC in 1993.

His recent releases include The Great Escape, Lovesick Blues and Euphoria, as well as Falling Off the Sky with The dB’s and A Brand-New Shade of Blue with the Fellow Travelers. From 2010-2018, Stamey was orchestrator and musical director for an international series of concert performances of Big Star’s classic album Third, alongside Big Star’s Jody Stephens, Ray Davies, members of the Posies, R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, Wilco, Kronos Quartet and Yo La Tengo; Thank You, Friends, a concert film of these arrangements, was released by Concord in March 2017. He currently tours as a member of Jody Stephens’s Big Star Quintet, whose line-up includes Mike Mills (R.E.M), Pat Sansone (Wilco), and Jon Auer (Posies). His original radio musical about the early ’60s in Manhattan, Occasional Shivers, premiered nationwide on Christmas Day 2016. A “songwriting memoir,” A Spy in the House of Loud (Univ. of Texas Press), was published in 2018, followed in 2019 by his first printed collection, New Songs for the 20th Century, with a companion two-disc CD (Omnivore Recordings).

Links:
open.spotify.com/artist/1i7YYagcULgnW5Qilsto1d
music.apple.com/us/artist/chris-stamey/4034250
youtube.com/channel/UCG3O3S8Zg_WJoz2uTt_duig#
instagram.com/mrstamey/?hl=en
facebook.com/chrisstameymusic/
twitter.com/chrisstamey
songkick.com/artists/186319-chris-stamey
bandsintown.com/a/78299-chris-stamey
deezer.com/us/artist/1279457
tidal.com/browse/artist/3611403
qobuz.com/us-en/interpreter/chris-stamey/515742
audiomack.com/chris-stamey
music.amazon.com/artists/B008LPNC4M
@chris-stamey.bsky.social
chrisstamey.bandcamp.com/