The Pitch
Falling Stairs was three Johns and a guy named Charlie from Flushing, Queens in the late 80s and early 90s who were slightly obsessed by independent punk, post-punk, pop, and rock and roll music coming from Minneapolis, Hoboken, Athens, Boston, Melbourne, Washington, D.C., Austin, Sydney, Detroit, Amherst, and our hometown of New York. It inspired us to pick up guitars, a bass, and drums and make our own kind of noise.
We played a couple of hundred shows, recorded at Fort Apache in Cambridge, MA (with producer Tim O’Heir: Buffalo Tom, Sebadoh, Superdrag, Come) and Water Music in Hoboken, NJ (with producer Rich Grula: Rage to Live, Freedy Johnston, Big Happy Crowd), we got some airplay around the country, a bunch of good press, then promptly imploded.
Fast, noisy, and melodic in the tradition of The Feelies, The New York Dolls, The Ramones, R.E.M, The Replacements, and The Stooges this collection of songs are a time capsule of a pre-digital recording era of American indie rock: anthemic, noisy, angry, poppy, and insistent.
Twelve songs were recorded and mixed on 2”, 1”—and even some on a VHS tape. The masters ended up in boxes and moved around with us for thirty years. Decades (and many children later) we gathered up 2” and 1” tapes and even a VHS, had them baked (so the ferric oxide particles containing all the music wouldn’t get scraped off the recordings) and digitized at Soundmirror.
The album was mastered by Greg Calbi and Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound.
Upon hearing the songs for the first time in decades, we realized maybe this quad of misfits quit too soon.
We were fans of Antietam, Archers of Loaf, Belly, Bettie Serveert, Big Black, Big Dipper, The Birthday Party, The Blasters, Buffalo Tom, The Celibate Rifles, The Clash, The dBs, De La Soul, Dinosaur Jr., Echo and the Bunnymen, The Feelies, Fetchin’ Bones, The Fleshtones, Fugazi, Galaxie 500, Gang of Four, Go-Betweens, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Jason & The Scorchers, Hoodoo Gurus, Hüsker Dü, The Individuals, Jesus Lizard, Let’s Active, Lime Spiders, MC5, Meat Puppets, Mental as Anything, Mission of Burma, The Minutemen, Naked Raygun, New Order, New York Dolls, Patti Smith Group, Pixies, Polvo, Prince, Psychedelic Furs, Public Enemy, Pylon, Radio Birdman, The Ramones, The Replacements, R.E.M., Romeo Void, Run-D.M.C., The Saints, Salem 66, Sebadoh, Sonic Youth, Soul Asylum, Squirrelbait, The Stooges, Superchunk, Talking Heads, Television, They Might Be Giants, U2, Uncle Tupelo, Violent Femmes, Wall of Voodoo, Wire, X, Zeitgeist, and lots of others.
We all grew up with older siblings, too, so we had been hearing everything from rock to blues to metal to folk to disco.
We played live all over New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, and Connecticut at Brownie’s, CBGB’s, Downtown Beirut, The El-n-Gee, King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut, Lauterbach’s, Lismar Lounge, Maxwell’s, Nightingale’s, The Pool Bar, The Pyramid, The Right Track Inn, The Space at Chase, Tramps, and others we have long forgotten.
We did a few short tours in the south, sent out our EP to radio stations and got lots of plays.
We sent more to fanzines and newspapers and got a bunch of nice reviews. It was a lot of fun and we wouldn’t change it for the world.
In truth, very few people ever heard any of it.
All these many years later, this collection of songs are a time capsule of an earlier era of American rock: angry, anthemic, hooky, noisy, and insistent. These well-constructed, well-performed, and well-recorded songs have stood the test of time, even if that was in a bunch of cardboard boxes.
So, 30 years later, we present the debut album by Falling Stairs.
We put some band photos and album cover art in this Google Drive folder.
The album is available on all the streaming services, but you can also find some mp3s here.
Band photos and album cover art on Google Drive.
The album is available on all the streaming services, but you can also find some mp3s here.