R. Stevie Moore

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R. Stevie Moore
R. Stevie Moore
Origin	Nashville TN; Essex County, New Jersey
Years active	1955 - present
Genres	All Styles, Psych-Pop, Folk-Jazz, Lo-Fi, Anti-Country, Humor-less, tape manipulation, Cut and Paste

Robert Steven Moore (born January 18, 1952) is a prolific singer and songwriter. Often referred to as the "father of DIY home recording", he has maintained a remarkably low profile throughout a career which began in the early-1970s, which has led to his work being classified as outsider music. He has historically released this music through the R. Stevie Moore Cassette Club, and more recently online and through various netlabels.

[edit] Biography

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of famed bassist Bob Moore (often confused with Elvis' guitarist Scotty Moore), the young R. Stevie Moore's musical tastes were often at odds with the predominant country music of the town. He was heavily influenced by the innovative music of The Beatles, and other British Invasion artists, and of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, among many others, embracing both slick mainstream pop and underground extremes. Before and since relocating to New Jersey in 1978, he has self-released hundreds of cassettes, CDs and home videos (mostly as a one-man band), and reveled in the freedom (and yet, curse) of being without a steady record label.

For decades Moore's varied styles have traversed countless musical forms, making his daring releases similar to eclectic free-form radio shows. Adventurous listeners around the world continue to privately sing his praises, admiring and supporting not only his deep talent for consistent originality but also his unique and steadfast independent modus operandi. His self-released albums are virtuoso showcases for Moore's popcentric vision and skill at screwing around with tape decks that don't always behave. Happy accidents make for unpredictable music in the hands of a man who never met a mistake he couldn't tweak to his advantage. He genre-surfs with impunity: quasi-metal guitar weirdness, bastard bluegrass, sweet jangly pop, unclassifiable novelties, tender melodic ballads, and avant-monsterdom that outskronks Thurston Moore and Eugene Chadbourne, with more seductive pop underpinnings than either.

R. Stevie's legendary 1976 debut vinyl album Phonography was listed in the Rolling Stone 1996 book Alt-Rock-A-Rama as being one of "the Fifty Most Significant Indie Records".

The frontpage of his huge, self-maintained website currently claims RSM "quietly resides as curator of his own museum", yet conversely his celebrated prolific output continues to runneth over, 2 to 3 choice potent albums a year remaining his norm.

R. Stevie Moore is often called a "lost treasure" and "criminally neglected," and perhaps during his lifetime, that may become his biggest credit.