IT'S TIME FOR EASTER IN ROCK'S NEW SOUTH
Los Angeles Times, 1985
By Richard Cromelin

Is Mitch Easter a record producer who also happens to front his own band, or is he a musician and songwriter who also happens to produce records?

The 30-year-old North Carolinian has no trouble answering that one. "Certainly the latter. I still feel a little embarrassed about getting all this fame as a producer because I really don't have any ambition in that area. I kind of enjoy it, but I don't really care about it too much. I care so much more about writing songs," he says.

The fame Easter refers to has come from his work with a brigade of young bands, spearheaded by R.E.M., who are revitalizing the tradition of guitar-centered pop-rock. Now Easter is hoping to follow R.E.M. into the hearts of the hip, college-age audience with the dense, layered pop of his own group Let's Active, which released its debut album Cypress last summer. Following a recent personnel change that turned it from a trio into a quartet, the band headlines the Spirit in San Diego on Thursday and the Music Machine on Friday.

Easter has been playing in bands since he was 12, and his detour into producing came in 1980 when he built a recording studio in the garage of his parents' home on the outskirts of Winston-Salem.

"It was a time when I wasn't in a band, and you never know if you're gonna be able to form one," he said during a phone interview this week from a tour stop in Oklahoma City. "I felt like I had to have a job, and that was one I could enjoy.

"I wanted to have the studio available to everybody and I just started making tapes for people. They put my name on the backs of their records with the producer's credit. I got tons of credit all of a sudden, but it's really weird because I never thought about it."

Easter's Drive-In Studio has attracted such new-underground luminaries as the Individuals, Pylon and members of the dB's and the Bongos. Said Easter: "It's been kind of a self-selecting thing in that the bands found out about the studio through word of mouth and they tended to be friends or in the same scene. They've all tended to be guitar bands, rootsy but modern groups. But I would have been perfectly happy to record hardcore bands or synthesizer bands or anything."

Even if he's a producer by accident, Easter does have a studio philosophy, which he sums up in three words: "Leave it alone." His experience with Georgia-based R.E.M. illustrates his point. "When we first recorded them for the Murmur album, they had worked for a potential producer who had convinced them they were all terrible musicians. He had made them do everything a thousand times, he terrified them about their rhythm and stuff like that.

"With R.E.M., they just pick up their guitars and start playing and it's kind of nice to listen to. That's the thing to get across. That's a thousand times more important than any kind of precision interaction between the bass drum and the bass guitar. It's nice to record bands and make them enjoy the whole process. When you buy a record, you can tell whether the band is enjoying themselves or whether it's a mechanical process. So many records these days are made to these mechanical standards. I like being an alternative to that."

Easter, who returned to North Carolina after a frustrating attempt to establish himself in New York in the late '70s, also likes being an alternative to the idea that you have to move to the big city to succeed in the rock world.

"That's absolute garbage, that you have to go to New York or someplace like that," he fumed. "That was one of the big hopes I had, that I'd be able to have a studio someplace else that would stay in business, and it's been true. I feel really great that I don't have to live in New York anymore. Why should you live someplace where the rent's too high and there's bad plumbing and no heat just to play music? It doesn't make you write better songs."

So now Easter lives in downtown Winston-Salem, quietly presiding over a changing of the guard in Southern rock. "There's still plenty of guys that drive around in pickup trucks with gun racks and listen to eight-tracks of Lynyrd Skynyrd," he said. "But most of the people that are my age and younger never did listen to that stuff and it didn't have any effect on them. It's not like I really feel we're part of this revolution, although it probably has happened. There is a whole new batch of American bands that count now."

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