Is 1986 the year Let's Active graduates from college radio? Their producer/lead guitarist/songwriter/singer/only member hopes so.
Music and Sound Output
July 1986
By Alan di Perna

Mitch Easter is:
(A) A noted producer/engineer/purveyor of Southern guitar pop
(B) A member of Let's Active
(C) A oneman band
(D) Too damned cute for his own good
(E) All of the above

A trick question, of course. Pick any single answer and you'll be a little bit wrong and a little bit right. While each of the options touches a nerve, none of them really sums up the case accurately or completely.

Tricky as it is, the question raises an important point. Mitch Easter has had to endure no small measure of stereotyping in the course of his career. The unisex moptop look of Let's Active's first incarnation was kinda fey, and their music owed an obvious debt to Sixties pop. But is that any reason to make poor Mitch go through life with the words 'lovable moppet" branded on his forehead?

And yes, Easter lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he has his own studio, the Drive-In. That's where he produced the first two R.E.M. albums and other guitar-driven gems by people like Richard Barone and James Mastro of the Bongos and, of course, Let's Active. But because of all this, Easter sometimes feels as though someone has thrust a banner into his hands—a banner he's not particularly interested in carrying.

"If you're from the South and you play the kind of music Let's Active does, you're supposed to be Guitar Pop, which I guess we are," he concedes. "But for me, there was never any sort of statement in using a lot of guitars. I've always been interested in using whatever works. The thing that bugs me is I don't think our band is really a part of that scene. I've been playing longer than most of those people, you know. And I'm not sure about this, but they might have a kind of vision about what it all means that I probably don't have. I feel there are a lot more different things I'll pick up and choose from in my tastes. I think I'm just a lot fruitier about liking backwards guitars and Mellotrons and some of those older and weirder things."

Big Plans for Everybody (I.R.S.), Let's Active's latest album, goes a long way toward supporting that last observation. The record differs from the band's previous releases, Cypress and afoot, in several respects, and will probably give rise to as many new generalizations as it will dispel old ones. For the most part, the songs on the new record are structurally more straightforward than Let's Active songs have been in the past. Big Plans tends more toward standard verse/chorus/bridge song structures, whereas the older songs were more collages of melodic fragments combined in odd, unexpected ways.

"I felt I was writing as close to Brill Building as I ever have," is the way Easter sums up the songs on Big Plans. "But the funny thing is that people still hear the songs and think there's something slightly weird about them."

Along with being more linear in his writing, Easter is also a lot more upfront about his musical influences on Big Plans. Probably the most obvious example of this is "Writing the Book of Last Pages," a direct and deliberate evocation of the Beatles' single, "Baby You're a Rich Man." "Somehow, I just felt a little more relaxed about that kind of thing on this record," he says. "In the past, if I felt I was copying anything, I would immediately throw it right out. This time I figured, 'Hell, I will copy it!' I mean, it's still a song. And actually, I think the groove of 'Baby You're a Rich Man' is one of my favorite things ever."

Once he'd cleared it with his artistic conscience, Easter tapped the sonic resources of the Drive-In to recreate lovingly the hallucinogenic atmosphere of the Beatles classic that inspired the song. He laid on backward guitar tracks and even the vintage Dan Lectro electric sitar he owned for 12 years but never used on a record until now. Easter hardly took a purist approach to recording the song, though. The track's characteristically Beetiesque piano, for example, is actually an Ensoniq Mirage piano sample (the tipoff comes when the piano starts doing pitchwheel bends). In fact, all the keyboard parts you hear on Big Plans were created on the Ensoniq—even the ambient, giantsounding piano on the opening cut, "In Little Ways."

"For that song, I ran the Ensoniq through a Lexicon 200 and used one of the Lexicon's inverse room programs. You can get some real funny programs that sort of swell up on you, and you can mess around with them a lot until you get exactly what you want. I just went right to tape with that. Originally I had planned to replace all the Ensoniq piano parts with real piano, but I found I didn't have to."

The Beatles influence behind "Writing the Book of Last Pages" is one you might reasonably expect from Mitch Easter. But other songs on Big Plans have less expected sources. "Last Chance Town," he says, "is supposed to be one of those 1972 glitter-era, Mott the Hoople/T. Rex kind of songs." And "Route 67" is a Bo Diddley-inspired slide guitar rave-up that was written arid recorded in all of 20 minutes. Incidentally, it marks Easter's debut on slide.

"I don't think Duane Allman's going to roll over in his grave hearing this," he quips. "It's hardly the next big dent in the slide-guitar legacy."

It's hard to say how ol Duane might have reacted to "Still Dark Out," which includes a note-for-note quotation of the riff from the Allman Brothers' "Midnight Rider." Is this a case of Easter baring his Southern rock roots? "No, I don't think so," he deadpans, likening the song's rhythmic feel to Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." "I think up songs real fast. And in the case of 'Still Dark Out,' I just came up with that rhythm. About five minutes later, it did strike me that it was the same as 'Midnight Rider,' and I just thought it was hilarious. But I also think that rhythm works, so I thought, 'I'm definitely going to leave it in.'"

Although it is a full-scale commercial recording facility, the Drive-In is located—appropriately enough—in Mitch Easter's garage. By the time Easter found himself in a position to move his studio out of the garage, he discovered it had become one of those "legendary rooms" you hear about in the annals of recording. In the wake of the REM sessions, Easter has developed a production style—emphasizing bright guitar lines, poppy beats and harmonies—that has become synonymous with the bustling college-radio market. Working occasionally with longtime collaborator Don Dixon, who's become pretty hot himself (see MSO, January 1986), Easter has helmed records by Pylon, Game Theory, Beat Rodeo, the Windbreakers, Marshall Crenshaw (one track on Downtown), Wind and many other acts. If any one producer besides T-Bone Burnett is linked with the new "American sound," it's Mitch Easter.

The Drive-In centers around an Amek Angela console, and Big Plans for Everybody, like a great deal of Easter's previous work as a producer and performer, was recorded on the studio's 3M 16-track machine. But after finishing Big Plans, Easter finally capitulated to the prevailing analog multitrack standard and brought a used 3M 24-track from New York's Power Station.

As you can tell by now, Easter is a real 3M man: the Drive-In is also equipped with a 3M 2-track as well as an MCI 2-track. There's also an ancient 3M Model 23 4-track Easter is fairly certain was used to record the live tracks on 1968's Cheap Thrills album by Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. The principal monitors at the Drive-In are a pair of ADS 810 stereo speakers. "I don't trust any of those things," Easter says of monitors, although he also has Yamaha NS-10s, JBL 4401s and Auratones at the Drive-In and prefers Tannoys and UREIs when he works elsewhere.

Cutting Big Plans at the Drive-In, Easter found himself exploring a wider variety of guitar sounds than he had used on previous Let's Active records. In the past, he says, he felt more or less obliged to stick to one guitar—a blue Rickenbacker semi-acoustic—for both studio and live work, thereby ensuring the concerts would sound reasonably like the records. But, as a function of Big Plans' stylistic diversity, he finally abandoned that philosophy. His principal guitars for the new album were a pair of Gibson SGs: a 1968 model with P-90 pickups and a 1960 model. He also used his Rickenbacker, a Strat, a Fender 12 and the Dan Lectro sitar, among others.

Ever one for esoteric and vintage equipment, Easter favors an old Matamp 100W head he found at a friend's music store. "They were made by Orange Amps," he volunteers. "Remember them?" And speaking of vintage gear, quite a few guitar tracks on Big Plans were played through Easter's recently acquired Leslie cabinet, a road-worn, bastardized hybrid of parts from the Leslie 145 and 147 models. The Leslie also contributes to the Seventies feel on a number of the album's songs. "It's funny how you play one note of guitar through a Leslie and you instantly think of Cream's 'Badge' or something," Easter laughs. "But it's a sound I always loved, so I used it."

For recording guitars, Easter generally likes to use a Shure SM7 (not to be confused with an SM57) close to the speaker cabinet. For an ambient guitar mic, he likes to use an AKG 414, "because it's got a polar pattern switch, so you can set it up for a figure-8 pattern.

"Guitars are real easy to record," he continues. "You can be real sloppy and just stick a microphone right up in front of the amp and still get great results. Or you can get fancy. For example, there's a real singy 12-string overdub on 'Still Dark Out.' For that sort of thing, the guitar would go into an amp, which would be close-miked. Then the distant mic would be compressed to get a lot of room noise. And then maybe there would be a direct line to get real definition. And also maybe a split-off from the direct line into a channel that goes through an Eventide Harmonizer or another effect to gIve it zing."

Apart from technical and musical considerations, one other thing helped make Big Plans different from prior Let's Active efforts: it was recorded after the original Let's Active broke up. Drummer Sara Romweber left just after the previous album, 1984's Cypress, was recorded, and Easter and bassist Faye Hunter toured with some fill-in musicians. When they came off the road, Easter started recording on his own. "I just figured, Well, we've got this situation where it's not strictly a band right now. So I'm just going to start making sounds on tape.' In the past, I would do demos, but we wouldn't consider putting them on a record because it wasn't the band playing."

This time, though, much of the material Easter cut by himself wound up on the album. (In fact, a couple of parts were even transferred over from 4-track cassette sketches he'd done on a Fostex X-15.) Faye Hunter departed while Big Plans was taking shape, but not before contributing several bass tracks. Keyboardist/guitarist/vocalist Angie Carlson joined up, as did drummer Eric Marshall, both of whom play on some of Big Plans' songs.

And although Easter appears all by himself on the album cover, he insists he is by no means edging toward a solo career. "We really did not know who was going to be in the band when it was time to take the picture," he says. "The only constant factor was me. I hope that cover doesn't look too pompous—it wasn't meant like that. The next album, I'm hoping, will be a band record. This one was an accident of fate, but it turned out to be fun for me, because I do like to play drums and bass."

He better be careful, though. Next thing you know, Mitch Easter will be typecast as Southern guitar pop's greatest rhythm section.

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