Let's Active

All Music Guide:

Mitch Easter carved his place in music history as a hip producer in the '80s, most notably for the early R.E.M. albums Murmur and Reckoning; unfortunately, these achievements often overshadowed and distracted him from giving his full commitment to his own recording career with Let's Active, a band that, between 1983 and 1988, released some of the finest Southern power pop/jangle pop of the decade.

After a short stint with the Sneakers, a band he formed with future dB's member Chris Stamey in North Carolina in the late '70s, Mitch Easter set up his legendary Drive-In Studios in 1981 and formed Let's Active with bassist Faye Hunter and drummer Sara Romweber. The trio released a six-song EP, 1983's Afoot, on IRS Records. In 1984, the band released the more experimental Cypress. While the EP and album sold modestly, they found a strong following in the emerging alternative/"college rock" audience. Hunter and Romweber left shortly after the release, leaving Let's Active as essentially a solo project for Easter. Romweber later went on to join Snatches of Pink.

Easter recruited drummers Eric Marshall and Rob Ladd along with multi-instrumentalist Angie Carlson (Hunter returned temporarily for bass duties) for Big Plans for Everybody in 1986, another critically praised yet commercially undervalued album. The harder-edged Every Dog Has His Day, which replaced Hunter with a full-time bassist, John Heames, was released in 1988. Following a small-scale promotional tour of college campuses, the band hung in limbo -- no subsequent albums were recorded. Easter has continued producing in subsequent years while also playing with such other bands as Velvet Crush, Vinyl Devotion, Shalini, and the Fiendish Minstrels. He released his first solo album, Dynamico, in 2007.

Wikipedia:

Let's Active was an American rock musical group formed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1981.

History

The principal songwriter and sole continuous member of Let's Active was Mitch Easter, who kept the band active through most of the 1980s. The band's musical style is sometimes referred to as jangle pop. Although critically praised, Let's Active had limited commercial success and are mostly known because of Easter's production work with R.E.M., The Bongos, and Pylon. The name of the group is taken from a t-shirt sold in Japan bearing the inadvertently nonsensical English phrase (a popular fashion at the time).

Let's Active formed in 1981 and soon signed with I.R.S. Records. The original trio, comprising Easter (vocals/guitar), Faye Hunter (bass), and Sara Romweber (drums), played their first performance with their friends R.E.M. They recorded the EP Afoot in 1983 and the full-length Cypress the following year.

Romweber quit the band during a U.K. tour in 1984, and Hunter and Easter (a couple) split up shortly thereafter. However, the band name was kept alive by Easter, who played as Let's Active with Hunter and members of The Windbreakers until a new permanent line-up could be established.

The band's second full-length album, Big Plans For Everybody (1986), was largely a solo recording by Easter, who played most of the instruments himself and handled the mixing and production. On board for a few tracks, however, were bassist/vocalist Hunter, drummers Eric Marshall and Rob Ladd, and multi-instrumentalist Angie Carlson (who would later marry Easter).

By the time of Let's Active's third and final album, Every Dog Has His Day (1988), the band's sound had evolved into harder-edged power pop. The album was produced by John Leckie and Easter, and credited a line-up of Easter, Carlson, Marshall and new member Jon Heames (credited as "John Heames"), a bassist. Despite the credits, though, the album was largely played by Easter and Marshall, with significant contributions by Carlson. The subsequent tour featured a cohesive lineup of Easter, Carlson, Marshall, and Heames.

The band has been inactive since a final performance in early 1990 — around the same time Easter and Carlson broke up. Carlson went on to form the band Grover, who released one album with Easter producing some of the tracks. Easter, meanwhile, concentrated on his production career, and rarely performed or recorded his own music throughout the 1990s, although he did join Velvet Crush as a touring guitarist for a time in the mid-1990s. In 2000, he re-teamed with Eric Marshall and his new wife, vocalist Shalini Chaterjee, to form the trio Shalini. The three briefly played under the name The Fiendish Minstrels, which featured Easter's lead vocals, as well as a selection of Let's Active tunes in their repertoire. Easter currently records and performs under his own name. His first solo album, Dynamico, was released in 2007.