Boston Rocks
How four decades of BU students turned up the volume.
By Brett Milano
It was an unlikely spawning ground for one of the most successful bands in the history of rock and roll. In the spring of 1970, an apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue — a building owned by Boston University — was rented to five guys who didn’t exactly go to college. They somehow managed to cough up the $300 rent each month to share three bedrooms and one bathroom, stacking guitars and amps along all available wall space. None of them had day jobs, so they spent all their waking hours writing songs and rehearsing, pausing only to catch The Three Stooges on TV. For anyone attending BU at the time, they were a hard band to miss: they could be seen playing the George Sherman Union and dormitory quads between shows at other unspectacular venues, such as the Franklin Park Zoo, naval bases, and area high schools. For years survival depended on taking any gig that came along. And any student who got through BU at the time without hearing their music has certainly heard them since: they’re called Aerosmith.
Boston has a long history in rock and roll — from fifties doo-woppers the G-Clefs and early sixties punk legends the Remains through the glory days of J. Geils, Boston, and the Cars to today’s indie bands like the Dropkick Murphys and the Dresden Dolls. At various times in various decades, the music scene seemed to swirl around BU. There were the clubs, like Kenmore Square’s Rathskeller — affectionately known as the Rat — and the Paradise, all within blocks of the University. There were the BU students who formed the bands and those who followed them, mobbing the clubs and providing the critical mass required to create a cultural scene and a Boston sound.
Listen to the Cars, Mission of Burma, or the Pixies, and you’ll hear a relatively erudite tone in the lyrics and a sophistication in the music that’s tailor-made for an educated audience. Many of the musicians themselves were undergraduates. And while the Remains may be the only great band made up entirely of BU students, musicians in many Boston bands came to the city to attend Boston University.
They include talents from Seth Justman (CGS’71), the keyboardist who completed the classic lineup of the J. Geils Band, to Mary Timony (CAS’92), one of the maverick songwriters who made nineties independent rock so vital.
Even when there weren’t students in the band, the music was colored by its proximity to the University. Aerosmith didn’t just live on BU territory; they played enough parties and mixers to send them on their way to being the unstoppable live band they became. In fact, generations of musicians cut their teeth at those parties — even the future superstar band Boston played an obscure BU show in 1974 under the prestardom name Mother’s Milk. Anyone writing songs about Boston was bound to mention the University sooner or later. Punk hero Jonathan Richman’s “Modern World” throws this comeback at a woman who is too cool to talk to him: “Put down your cigarette and drop out of BU!” Local punk godfather Willie Alexander was more complimentary than Richman, singing about his “BU baby” in several tunes.
Only the Songs Remain
For the Boston-based bands that started in the early sixties, life was strangely similar to that of bands hoping to make it today. They had to scrounge for gigs, lug their amps down the street, play weekday nights for nobody, and hope that some record label would notice. That’s how the Remains began, in 1963. Now remembered as the first great Boston band, the Remains were formed by four BU undergraduates living in Myles Standish Hall: singer-guitarist Barry Tashian (CGS’65), bassist Vern Miller (CFA’69), keyboardist Bill Briggs (CGS’66), and drummer Chip Damiani (SED’64). The sound was raw and bluesy, an early version of punk rock, and the band jelled through its early shows at the Rathskeller.
“We started playing together in our dorm and thought we’d make some extra money by carrying our gear across the street to the Rathskeller,” Tashian says. “They had just opened up the huge space downstairs, or at least it seemed huge to us. There was a jukebox, a few picnic tables, a few beer signs, a stage made of boards on crates. On a good night we’d do a song like ‘Got My Mojo Working’ and have a conversation with our instruments, like we were all playing to a central focal point.”
The Remains eventually went from Kenmore Square to The Ed Sullivan Show and scored a minor national hit with “Diddy Wah Diddy.” Over the years, their records have been rediscovered, and their one LP has just been reissued. But as far as Tashian is concerned, nothing was more fun than those early club and frat house gigs. Those memories are even better than the ones of the last show the Remains played, on tour with the Beatles, a huge outdoor event in San Francisco in 1966. “The stage was big and we were a long way from the audience,” Tashian says. “I remember turning around and seeing the fog rolling over the water. It seemed very ominous.” As it turned out, the night wasn’t great for the headlining band either. It was the Beatles’ final concert.
Like many bands from the BU neighborhood, the Remains made a valuable friend in fellow undergraduate Don Law, Jr. (CAS’68), who helped them get a record label deal. This was the first of many savvy career moves made by Law, who would become New England’s leading concert promoter. Music was the Law family business; his father was a Columbia Records producer and worked with a number of important country acts. Being at BU gave Law a perfect opportunity to scout bands for Columbia, which was then moving into the rock market. He would also do some bookings for the Hallucinations, a psychedelic blues band whose singer, Peter Wolf, would become a star after jumping to the J. Geils Band.
By the time he graduated, Law was promoting concerts at the Tea Party, in a cavernous building on Berkeley Street, which opened in January 1967 (it later moved to the Lansdowne Street site where Avalon stands now). According to Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill, Law was extraordinarily disciplined, a man who knew how to translate great concepts into business successes. He also had a sharp eye for emerging talent, particularly from the U.K.: Elton John, Led Zeppelin, and Fleetwood Mac all played some of their first U.S. shows at the Tea Party. Law’s career would only grow in the coming years; of the seventy-six rock shows staged at Boston Garden between 1976 and 1980, Law promoted all but three.
Strutting the Blues
In the late sixties, as the psychedelic era waned, Boston entered a serious rhythm-and-blues boom, one that was kicked off largely by the city’s first superstar band, the J. Geils Blues Band. The group, which started out as a reverent group of blues scholars and record collectors, slipped into high gear when they moved to Boston from Worcester, dropped “Blues” from their name, and brought in former art student, sometime WBCN DJ, and full-time wild man Wolf as lead singer. The band honed its skills through weekly gigs at the Catacombs, a basement club on Boylston Street.
It was there they met Justman, the last member of the original group to join the band. Five years younger than the others, Justman worked hard to get accepted. “We gave him an audition, and he shows up schlepping this big organ,” guitarist J. Geils recalls. “Wolf was immediately suspicious. ‘What’s that, a piece of your grandmother’s furniture?’ But once we heard him play it was, ‘Yeah, man!’” It proved a smart decision — Justman wound up writing with Wolf the band’s two greatest hits, “Centerfold” and “Freeze Frame.”
Hot on the heels of the J. Geils Band came a pair of blues-drenched party bands, Duke and the Drivers and the James Montgomery Band, which ruled both colleges and clubs in the early seventies. If you liked sweaty grooves and wanted a perfect soundtrack to a night of alcoholic libation, these were likely your favorite bands. Indeed, when the Drivers — which included keyboardist Tom Swift (CGS,’71, CAS’73) and singer–sax player Andrew Hixon (CAS’72) — played Paul’s Mall on Boylston Street in 1974, the club is said to have set an all-time record for beer sales.
It says something about Boston’s reputation at the time that James Montgomery (DGE’69, CAS’71) moved here from Detroit, no slouch of a music city itself. “I chose BU because of the music scene,” he says. “In Detroit you could see two or three great bands a month. Here you could see that every week.” With his wailing harmonica, lean and hungry look, and flashy clothes, Montgomery became a local fixture, a favorite jamming partner of Bonnie Raitt’s and an occasional drinking buddy of Mick Jagger’s, who dropped in “with two blondes and a limousine” for a memorable New Year’s Eve gig with Montgomery in New York in 1982. Montgomery is still a mainstay of the Boston blues circuit; in recent years he’s been leading his own band as well as playing harmonica with guitar hero Johnny Winter.
Punk Renaissance
In the mid-seventies, something happened in Kenmore Square. Jim Harold, owner of the Rat, bucked the local pattern by booking bands that played their own material. Odds are that Harold didn’t have any grand designs in mind; he simply couldn’t afford the polished disco cover bands that played across the street at Narcissus. But it was enough to give the new phenomenon known as punk rock an unofficial home.
With its fallout-shelter ambiance and mysteriously sticky carpets, the Rat looked as gritty as the music sounded. Each night you could catch now-legendary Boston bands like the Neighborhoods, the Real Kids, Willie Alexander, and even the Cars and the Pixies before they became famous (the Pixies got their record label deal, with the British label 4AD, after a Rat showcase).
Before long the scruffy, low-budget scene had leaked out to clubs all over town — at Cantone’s downtown, at the Channel near South Station, and at Bunratty’s in Allston. But Kenmore after dark remained its heart: a sea of black leather that migrated from the Rat to the late-night food spots like Deli Haus and the Pizza Pad. For a while there was a second club, Storyville, just across the square, where Pizzeria Uno now stands. Instead of competing, the two clubs agreed to stagger their sets so listeners could cross the street and catch both headliners.
One of the great Rat-era bands had its roots in Warren Towers. Even before he enrolled at BU in 1975, Connecticut native Jeff Conolly had a reputation as a music nut; in high school his fanatical record-collecting had earned him the nickname Monoman. Conolly learned that his Warren downstairs neighbor Adam Schwartz (CGS’77), who went by the name Adam Bomb, was singing in a band called DMZ, and he wangled an invitation to a rehearsal. Schwartz argued with the band that night and stomped out. Instead of trying to smooth things out, Conolly turned to the band and asked if they knew any Iggy Pop songs. By the end of the night Schwartz was out and Monoman was in.
Conolly’s rock career lasted longer than his tenure at the University. The BU dropout’s second group, the Lyres, founded in 1979, is still going strong. The sight of Conolly shaking his blond hair and banging a tambourine became familiar in town, and he’s well known to lovers of raw and raucous garage rock.
In later years BU would leave a mark on music from hard-core punk (three-quarters of the band Sam Black Church) to abstract pop. Indeed, some of the best alternative rock in the eighties and nineties came from female son5gwriters with a maverick streak. High on the list were two friends who met at Freshman Orientation, Mary Timony and Joan Wasser (CFA’93). They went on to two of the era’s more original bands. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Timony led Helium, which blended punk aggression with classical touches, fairy-tale imagery, and sexual politics. Despite her demure look offstage, Timony, with her intense stare, cut a no-nonsense figure onstage. Wasser became that rock and roll rarity: a lead violin player, whose guitar-like sounds and visual flamboyance made a strong impression with her band, the Dambuilders. The two women’s paths often crossed, and Wasser even joined Helium for a time. Both are now solo artists. A recent set at the South by Southwest new music conference in Austin earned a Rolling Stone magazine rave for Wasser’s latest project, Joan As Police Woman.
Some aficionados of the BU rock world would say the party ended when the Rat shut down in 1997. Certainly, one needs to look hard to find any trace of rock and roll in the newly gentrified Kenmore Square. But some people do look hard.
“I think the spirit is always here,” says Jordan Hamilton, who is the Web communications manager for the BU School of Public Health when she’s not singing for one of the current club scene’s most popular bands, the World’s Greatest Sinners. “If anything, there are more bands now, but it’s more diversified, so you don’t feel it in that intense Kenmore Square way.”
The Paradise remains, more upscale than it was two decades ago, and to hear the next big rock stars before they become stars, these days it’s necessary to venture into Allston or Cambridge. Still, if it’s true, as they say, that rock and roll will never die, somebody’s going to dig up a dusty old Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers album, find a cheap guitar, and write the next chapter in the long story of BU rock.
Brett Milano (COM’82) is the author of The Sound of Our Town, to be published in August by Commonwealth Editions.
