Distant Replay — The Past Recaptured

by John Dylan Keith

	The Remains: Chip Damiani (SED’64), Vern Miller (CFA’69), Bill Briggs (CGS’66), and Barry Tashian (CGS’65) (from left). Photograph courtesy of the Remains

What do you do if your friends were members of one of the notable bands of the sixties, still remembered by critics and record aficionados, but by hardly anyone else? To Remains fan and theater enthusiast Fred Cantor, the answer was obvious: produce a musical. All Good Things premiered in August at New York’s annual International Fringe Festival.

The Remains met as Boston University undergrads in the early sixties, when they began their gravity slingshot pass by stardom, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show and touring nationally with the Beatles along the way. On the brink of international fame, the group split up.

With a script by veteran television writer Michael Eric Stein and direction by David Roth, All Good Things had a cast of experienced Broadway talent and of course, original music by the Remains. The show is set as a present-day radio interview with drummer Chip Damiani (SED’64), whose narration of the band’s history is interspersed with flashbacks and rock-and-roll reenactments.

The Fringe Festival audience was able to compare the actors’ performances with the real thing when the Remains themselves reunited onstage after the show for a bonus reprise of “Once Before” and “Why Do I Cry?” — two of their big Rathskeller-era numbers. Both the real and the simulated Remains thrilled the crowd, but the acid test for the actors was the band’s reaction.

“They were great,” says bassist Vern Miller (CFA’69). “The more they rehearsed, the more they started acting like a real band.” Hardly surprising: as the show’s musical director, Miller had whipped the actor-musicians into shape, drawing on his current career skills as a music teacher. Also pleased was singer-guitarist Barry Tashian (CGS’65). “It was fantastic,” he says, “a real gift to the band after all this time.”