Don Dixon

Don Dixon:
"Roommate"
"ICU"
(from The Entire Combustible World in One Small Room 2006. Buy/download)

Don Dixon has a long history of involvement with great southern rock music. In the 1970s, he was a member of Arrogance, probably the first of North Carolina's should-have-made-it-big bands (and mentioned in just about the first post I ever wrote, though I didn't know much about them back then). Subsequently, he produced R.E.M.'s Murmur with Mitch Easter, and worked on other records in that vein by Chris Stamey and others. He also released a couple of well-regarded pop albums in the 80s and 90s.

Last year, Dixon put out his first new recording in a while, The Entire Combustible World in One Small Room. Each of the songs is a slice of life taking place in a single room -- it's less of a concept album than one with a nice device to ground the songwriting and unify something about the point of view. As Dixon notes, "the the rooms are almost characters in the songs" themselves.

Combustible World is full of smart songwriting, and the great production that you'd expect from someone with Dixon's track record. It strikes me as similar to late-80s/early 90s Elvis Costello -- sharply observed songs and interestingly arranged music that covers a pretty diverse range of styles in the course of the album. "Roommate" is one of the most straight-ahead pop-rock songs on the album, the story of a girl who can't really admit to herself that she's fallen in love with her roommate. "ICU" stands out to me since I'm always a sucker for interesting percussion sounds. The album has plenty of other good stuff, including a cover of Let's Active's "Room With A View".

The North Carolina Rock Project

Let's start things off with a little nostalgia. Time was, the Triangle (and I guess Chapel Hill in particular) was going to be "the new Seattle". Since grunge has long since faded and Seattle was only briefly the fount of the new cool, I'm not sure what that would have gotten us, so perhaps it's just as well that it never came to pass. There were some great bands with NC and Triangle ties in the 80s bubbling under the REM-led college rock scene -- the dB's and Let's Active, and then later Dillon Fence are my touchstones for this -- but they never really hit it big. I think it was Superchunk in the 90s that really drew national attention to the Triangle music scene.

Here's an article from the Independent a couple of weeks back about a documentary under production highlighting "the North Carolina music scene, specifically the rock/power pop from Arrogance in the late '70s/early '80s up to Dillon Fence in the late '80s." Sounds like an interesting project -- I hope it comes to fruition. I'm not familiar with the bands that are highlighted in this article -- Arrogance, the Woods, and the Hanks -- but I'll see if I can dig anything up and post it later.