From Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll, by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes and Ken Tucker: "His [Ronnie Van Zant] songs prefigured much of the sentiment of rock in the early 1980s from bands such as R.E.M., the Long Ryders, and the dBs."
"On one early tour, the band intersected with the dB's at a show at Duke University. The band's guitarist Peter Holsapple knew Jesperson was a big fan and gave him a copy of the brand-new dB's single."
From Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop, by Rob Jovanovich: "Late in 1977 Chris Stamey managed to land a support slot for his friend Peter Holsapple's band, the H-Bombs...to open for Chilton's band at Max's Kansas City. Holsapple was excited about the opportunity to, especially because he'd been a Big Star fan from the word go. 'A number of us kids in Winston-Salem had heard one of the college DJs play stuff from #1 Record on a late-night program called 'Deaconlight' on the Wake Forest University radio station WFDD-FM,' recalls Holsapple. 'I'm pretty sure Chris Stamey was the first person to actively seek out a copy of the record. My high-school band Little Diesel played a bunch of songs from that album, too. You could say that my friends and I had pretty rarefied tastes even at fifteen to seventeen years old. We lived in a town in the midst of Allman, Marshall Tucker, Skynyrd mindset. Our band song lists had a lot of what we wanted to play, but we had to know 'Midnight Rider' in order to play a lot of places. So we were pretty pumped to find out about an actual Southern band playing actual Beatles-style pop, and not jamming endlessly.'"
From wikipedia: "Peter Holsapple- bass guitar on 'Radio Song' and 'Low'; acoustic guitar on 'Losing My Religion', 'Shiny Happy People', and 'Texarkana'; electric guitar on 'Belong'"
Those are just references I found by briefly glancing through the indices of the rock books I keep on my shelf in my bedroom, and a quick check on wikipedia. In a casual conversation today, he mentioned a couple of musicians who I view as minor deities (Alex Chilton and Paul Westerberg) the way I might mention people I knew in high school (and in the case of Westerberg, the way I would refer to someone I really didn't like in high school, but I had kind of gathered that much about Westerberg already) I'm listening to his solo album, Out Of My Way (available from eMusic and Amazon, and probably iTunes as well, but I haven't checked since I won't use iTunes until they quit trying to make my life with a Palm Pre difficult) right now, and it's pretty goo. He's a good singer and a better guitarist. His recent album with his dB's collaborator Chris Stamey is even better. And now he's my coworker at a struggling book chain. At one point, he was signed to a record label owned by the legendary Albert Grossman (Dylan's manager in the 60's- if you saw Don't Look Back, and if you haven't I have to wonder why not, you remember Grossman).
Nothing much more to report than that, but sometimes attention must be paid, as some guy who was married to Marilyn Monroe once wrote. Joe DiMaggio, I think.
