Maybe you can carry this Wayback Machine business too far? While I was prepping the review for that recent Sneakers reissue, I learned of the existence of a recent exhumed set of tunes predating the material in Nonsequitur of Silence, featuring many of the same parties in a high-school band called Little Diesel. Future dB's Peter Holsapple, Will Rigby & Chris Stamey – along with that other NC power-pop giant Mitch Easter – all had a role in Little Diesel, and the results have been recorded for CD posterity by Telstar Records as No Lie.
Originally recorded by Stamey "in his bedroom" back in 1974/5, the seventeen tracks were cleaned and polished by him in 2006 (to demonstrate the difference, a '74 version of one cut is appended to the disc) – then released with high school yearbook pix of all the players on the label side of the CD. Someone's old girlfriend must be getting misty-eyed, one suspects, but is this teenaged material at all listenable?
Surprisingly, much of it is – though I won't be tossing away my dB's or Let's Active discs any time soon. What we've got here is the work of a brace of enthusiastic high schoolers showing off their smarts with a buncha cool covers (Robert Parker's "Barefootin'," MC5's "American Ruse," Bowie's "Rebel Rebel," and more) and dipping their toes into the act of writing tunes themselves. Holsapple appears to have been the primary creative force behind the band's three original tracks: "Kissy Boys" attempts to mesh several New York Dolls songs ("Private World," "Jet Boy," "Lookin' for a Kiss") in a manner that must've really discombobulated NC teens back in the mid-seventies; Holsapple/Northcott's "Flamingo" is an appealingly adolescent paean to a local drive-in with some Manfred Mannisms inserted into the chorus; "Teenage Heartbreak Lament," the only track featuring Peter's engagingly fallible vocals, sounds like somp'n Head East might've concocted. Yeah, we're in the seventies, alright.
Though Little Diesel has great taste in covers (you just know that the MC5ers who gave us Back in the USA would've been tickled as hell to know that real-life teenagers were recording "Ruse"), on more than occasion (a decidedly unsexy "Barefootin'," a you've-gotta-be-kiddin'-me cover of "Riot in Cell Block No. 9") you can hear the material defeating 'em. Like most young bands, LD frequently shores up its lack of experience with youthful enthusiasm. Lead singer Bob Northcott is an inspired babbler – particularly when it comes to tackling psychedelic poesy like "Pictures of Matchstick Men" – while young Rigby gets a lot out of his small drum kit and electric guitarists Holsapple and Tommy Eshelman (who appears to do the big solos) provide plenty of good garagey noise.
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