This talent on the keyboard and guitar has played with everyone from R.E.M to Hootie and the Blowfish. Now based in the Triangle, his latest album is The Face of 68
by David Menconi
Peter Holsapple has performed onstage as a musician since his teenage years alongside everyone from R.E.M. to underground pop legend Alex Chilton. And yet his dominant gene has always seemed more Rock Fan than Rock Star. A very particular kind of rock fan, in fact — the sort of obsessive devotee who can recite the catalog numbers of classic albums like 1969’s The Velvet Underground (MGM Records SE-4617), tell you about Flying Burrito Brothers pedal-steel player “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow’s other career (animator for the claymation series Gumby) or identify the lowest-selling album in CBS Record International’s history (Hampton Grease Band’s Music To Eat).
There’s a song about that on Holsapple’s new album The Face of 68 (Label 51 Recordings). “That Kind of Guy” depicts a character straight out of novelist Nick Hornby’s record-store love letter High Fidelity, proudly rattling off titles from his record collection before concluding, “I carry a lot inside my head.”
“Yeah,” Holsapple says with a laugh, “I am that guy. I’ve worked in record stores most of my non-performing life, so I can spot ‘that guy’ when he walks in and go head to head if I must. But I’ve been on both sides of it, because I also know what it’s like to be abused by clerks who know everything.”
Holsapple grew up in Winston-Salem as part of a thriving music scene that sprang up in the wake of 1960s Beatlemania, when the city was overrun with garage bands. Holsapple, his fellow cult-pop legend Chris Stamey, future North Carolina Music Hall of Famer Mitch Easter and other young musicians would congregate outside Reynolds High School at what they called “Combo Corner,” to talk about records and their own garage-combo bands.
Eventually Holsapple and Stamey ended up in New York in the late 1970s as co-leaders of The dB’s, a key band in the city’s burgeoning new-wave underground. Equal parts jittery and catchy, The dB’s made some brilliant power-pop records that never caught on commercially.
Nevertheless, Holsapple developed a reputation as a reliable team player, skilled on keyboards as well as guitar. That led to a robust sideman career, beginning with R.E.M. as that band was breaking through to the mainstream at the end of the 1980s, followed by a 26-year tenure with Hootie & the Blowfish. Between tours, he moved to New Orleans and co-founded Continental Drifters, a supergroup featuring members of the Bangles and Dream Syndicate, plus Holsapple’s then-wife Susan Cowsill (they divorced in 2001).
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina drove Holsapple back home to North Carolina, and he’s lived in Durham ever since. And while sideman work has paid most of his bills, he’s also continued making records of his own.
The Face of 68 is his third solo album, recorded with a crack backup band featuring drummer Rob Ladd (whose credits include everyone from Alanis Morissette to Red Clay Ramblers), ex-Ben Folds Five bassist Robert Sledge and The Old Ceremony keyboardist Mark Simonsen. Pre-recording preparation consisted of Holsapple sending everyone demo recordings of the songs before they gathered for a brisk four days in the studio.
“Rehearsing is a horrible idea for recording,” says album producer Don Dixon, whose many studio credits include co-producing R.E.M. with Mitch Easter. “What you want is to capture spontaneous ideas as they happen, before things get stale and everybody is sick of playing something. Peter came in with great songs, totally prepared and ready to rock.”
Holsapple was indeed 68 at the time of recording (although he turned 69 before the album’s release), and The Face of 68 has a fair amount of back-page introspection. “She and Me,” written about Holsapple’s current wife Sarah, might be the sweetest love song he’s ever written. And two songs pay tribute to late musicians, “So Sad About Sam” (about guitarist Sam Moss, who was a musical mentor to him) and “Larger Than Life” (about Continental Drifters drummer Carlo Nuccio).
“Sam especially was the big brother, best friend and guitar-god mentor to us all,” Holsapple says of Winston-Salem legend Moss, who took his own life in 2007 at age 54. “Losing him was huge. Carlo, too. Larger than life, just like the song says.”
The album’s looking-backward vibe extends to its physical package, with a February 1968 calendar page going up in flames on the back cover. That was the month Holsapple turned 12 years old, and even at that young age he was well along the path of a musical career.
“Hearing all the music in the air that year really hammered home the point that I should be a musician,” he says. “I don’t know what else I would have done — well, other than working in record stores. But it’s been a great run. Who knows, maybe I’ll make another record. Hope so. But if I don’t, this was a great last record to make. I like leaving songs around to see if anybody else picks up on them.”
By now, Holsapple is philosophical about his cult status.
“I’ve always been mostly under the radar, but the good part is I’ve always been able to be uncompromising about the work,” he says. “With any of my bands or others I played with, everything’s been what I wanted to do. I have virtually no regrets about the music industry. It feels like what I do makes sense.”
This article originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of WALTER magazine.
