the ’Zine

Boston, You’re My Home

Filed under: 52 Weeks to Rock / 1 comment

Brett Milano is literally an expert on Boston rock & roll history. Want to know more about Boston’s amazing rock history? Brett’s book The Sound of Our Town is available now!

So your band is about to hit Boston on its first tour? Well then, welcome: The city is alive, the weather sucks less than it did last month, and the students are back. As Spinal Tap never found out, Boston really is a college town. So assuming you’ve done a little advance prep—like calling the Globe, the Herald and the Phoenix a few weeks before you hit town, and making sure that all your local friends, enemies and ex-lovers know you’re coming—you should at least be able to pull a few dozen people to a club on a weeknight. Rest assured that worse and more obscure bands than yours have done the same.

Assuming you don’t have any high-powered connections—like a major label or agency that’s gotten you booked into the Paradise or the House of Blues—odds are good that you’ll be playing in the Central Square area of Cambridge, home of the long running clubs the Middle East and TT the Bear’s Place. They may look like grungy dives, but they’re our grungy dives—and not a bad place to play to nobody if that’s who ends there. A few tips for bands visiting this street corner for the first time:

Remember that a lot of bands you know and love played these same places when they were obscure. The Pixies and the Lemonheads once played TT’s on the same Tuesday night; it was both bands’ second show and roughly 30 people were there. Juliana Hatfield’s first band, the Blake Babies were the first band to play the Middle East, but not the first act altogether—That was Danny Mydlack, a performance artist who was known for shaving his chest while playing accordion. Hey, we never claimed that everyone who played here got famous. (Bigger national bands frequented this corner too: Jane’s Addiction made their local debut for a suitably packed-in crowd at TT’s).
While you’re at it, don’t forget to step outside and salute the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Prospect Street, where local heroes Morphine played their last local show. Leader Mark Sandman was a regular presence in these parts (his favorite Middle East barstool was and still is upstairs, last on the right) and the corner is officially named for him.
Two blocks away on Pearl Street is a low-rent apartment that Peter Wolf lived on before the J. Geils Band started making any serious rent money. Though there was barely room for one person there, he let Van Morrison and his wife crash in the living room for a large chunk of 1967. Morrison used the time to write and rehearse Astral Weeks, the most praised disc of his career.
That pizza shop just across the street from the Middle East will provide all the grease and carbs your system needs at the end of the night. We can’t guarantee you’ll feel great in the morning, but you probably won’t be hung over.
Go down a few blocks, cross the street and maybe you can visit us. We can’t be as open to visitors as we’d like, though. Sometimes there are top-secret projects in the works that we need to keep our mouths shut about. Are we allowed to mention the Beatles yet?
Just one subway stop away, Harvard Square is a place you’ll probably want to visit. It may not look like a rock & roll hotbed—except of course for the acoustic guy playing bad Pink Floyd covers, and the skateboard punks who’ll collide into you on your way out of the subway—but a lot of musical history was made on this corner. A few examples:
Summer 1972: A gangly, aspiring songwriter named Ric Ocasek, recently moved out from Ann Arbor, happens across a free concert at Cambridge Common by seminal Boston punk band the Modern Lovers. Without much of a buzz and with even less of a PA, they played a set that hit Ocasek hard enough to change his musical direction: He meant to do acoustic folk songs, and wound up forming The Cars.
Mid-1967: The entire concept of country-rock was born in a convenience store on Harvard Square. No kidding: That’s where Barry Tashain, whose rock’n’roll band the Remains had recently opened the final Beatles concert in Candlestick Park, ran into a Harvard dropout named Gram Parsons. The two started talking about their favorite country songs, sat up all night playing them, and wound up forming a band that evolved into the Flying Burrito Brothers.
May 1974: Not yet famous, Bruce Springsteen plays a show for the ages at Harvard Square Theater. Local rock scribe Jon Landau has his mind blown and writes a long think piece that ponders “rock & roll past” before saying “I saw rock & roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” The man himself reads it; Landau is now Springsteen’s manager.
Summer 1977: The Clash make their local debut at Harvard Square Theater. At least one important Boston band, the Neighborhoods, was formed specifically because they’d been at this show; but the show was a life-changer for just about everyone there. Except the one local cynic we know who still swears that local act Bo Diddley was better.

If you want to check out the sites in Boston proper, we can suggest a few Boston shrines to visit. The Paradise Club has only been there since 1978, but it’s one of the few Boston clubs that’s been in the same place for that long (despite a number of false closing alarms over the years). More legendary bands made their debut here than any other—including U2, who were ambitious enough to take an opening slot a couple months before their debut album Boy was released in the US. The headlining band—a long-forgotten Southern act called Barooga—was overjoyed to see they had a full house; and mighty confused when everybody left before their set.

1325 Commonwealth Avenue is a nondescript dorm-house in the heart of Boston University; just like it was when Aerosmith lived there in 1970. This was the band’s first headquarters, where they rehearsed every waking hour but one—That was when The Three Stooges came on TV at 4:15, and they dropped anything they were doing to watch it in Brad Whitford’s room (he was the one band member with a TV). The area doesn’t look much different today, and the Three Stooges are still on TV—but you probably can’t rent the place for the $300 a month that Aerosmith paid.

Lots of old-timers will get all misty-eyed about the legendary Boston clubs that aren’t there anymore—In fact, most of our conference rooms at Harmonix are named after those very clubs. Can’t blame us for being sentimental about The Rat—heck, a lot of our employees played there—but you really don’t need to visit its former site (525 Commonwealth Avenue), now a high-priced hotel bar where one drink will cost more than it took to see Husker Du and R.E.M. in 1984. Now would you recognize the Channel in the industrial parking lot that’s there now. This was effectively where hardcore started in Boston, at a series of Sunday matinees that shook the walls. If you poke around the foundations, maybe you can find the spiked bracelet that someone I used to go out with lost there.

One thing that hasn’t changed though is that the B.U. suburb of Allston still has the most musicians per square mile. If you stand on the corner of Prospect and Commonwealth, you can get hit by traffic from eight different directions. Not long ago it was members of the Pixies, Throwing Muses and Sebadoh driving those cars; now the speed demons are upstarts you may hear of in about ten years.

One long-dead club does deserve mention however: Green Street in Jamaica Plain was the site of at least two of the most legendary shows in Boston history. One was the night in 1991 when out-of-town visitors Nirvana opened for local bad-asses the Cheater Slicks, who weren’t impressed by what they thought were a bunch of hippies from Seattle. It was also here that the notorious punk artist GG Allin played the shortest rock show in Boston history. Allin was known for doing unspeakable things with body fluids onstage; and the local authorities were ready to cut the show short the minute Allin cut loose. Turned out they didn’t have to: One fan beat Allin to the punch and took a whiz on one of the club’s couches, halfway through the set’s first and only song.

And if you’re still sitting outside the Middle East and thought you just got a killer idea for drawing some attention during your show—Trust me, you didn’t.

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Sayburr...

Wow... makes me wish Alesia and I had driven to Boston last week instead of Charlestown, SC. The history here in Bristol ended after the second round of Bristol Recordings were completed. I am still not sure why country music moved to Nashville from its birthplace in Bristol but it sure did kill the music scene.

The one place in downtown Bristol where bands could go closed last year. Now there is no "new band" outlet.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

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