BABY'S
ARM
by Joe Harvard
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I'd look over at his girlfriend, Denise Donahue, and laugh; she towered over him, and while I never actually saw her push him around I didn't doubt for a moment that she could. Denise later became Frank's wife, and I imagine her wonderful sense of humor was of great help to Frank when it came to maintaining the wryworld-view that launched so many classic tunes. Denise was also an accomplished photographer whose camera helped chronicle those great years in Boston rock, and her sudden death in 2004 came as a sad, sad shock to the many old school rockers who knew her.
He is, however, in touch with the source of his troubles: "If
I was to write an introductory note/ Later on he figures out a solution, albeit a drastic one: "I
made up my mind I'm going back to school / The photo above is Frank sitting (standing?) in with the bones at Maverick's one very snowy winter night in 1982, when a few dozen folks (bands included!) ventured out into a near blizzard to patronize the strip-club-by-day, rock club by night. We had to wait for the dancers to vacate the bar top before we started. Once we did, though, it was a cool show, with the Dogmatics opening for us, and then Frank showing up for a cameo vocal appearance. The only problem was our arrangement was nothing like the one he'd been playing with Classic Ruins at that time, and much closer to the original Baby's Arm rendition, so there was a wee bit of confusion. To make up for it we gave away a bagfull of old watches and a half dozen instamatic cameras I had been pack-ratting. The night ended with the Dogmatics and their girlfriends dancing to our set, taking mock photos of each other and dancing with their arms in the air, proudly modeling their new watches.
Frank had the ability to instantaneously transform life into rock tune, as in the time that Wild Johnny, the aptly named drummer from Tracks, was forced to hock his drums to get out of jail. That resulted in a Rat benefit and the wonderfully melodic Baby's Arm tune "Geraldine I Need Money (More Than I Need You)".
Hanging
around the Record Garage in the mid-to-late '70's had a serious
effect on my tender young mind. I worked there with Billy Cole, and in
the drug and music heavy atmosphere of the place it wasn't long before
I went from observer to participant in that theater of chaos. Billy was
the store's Sales Manager, so Baby's Arm would rehearse at the Garage
after closing. I'd stick around while they practiced, and the music had
such a big influence on me that I decided to abandon the Aerosmith, Bowie
and Led Zep I played in various basement bands to try for a spot in an
original group. My guitar playing was still very sketchy, so I thought
I'd try a few less strings. I could see that bass players were a commodity
while guitarists were everyplace, and I figured I had a much better shot
if I switched instruments. I went out and bought myself a lovely 1966
metallic red Fender Jazz Bass with a matching red headstock, and a massive
Sunn Colliseum bass amp. Then I sat back and waited for the band's bass
player to quit. This required far less patience than one might think.
Given the group's history it was a pretty sound plan, and except for the
fact that I didn't really know how to play bass the scheme was a resounding
success. In a few weeks the current bass player quit- I think it was Carmen
Monoxide, a petite redhead from Lexington, Kentucky who later paired
with Loretta Baretta to publish the fanzine Miscarriage: The
Abortive Truth...Loretta is wearing the 'I Go Down' shirt and holding
Carmen's foot in the photo at right ( photo courtesy Carmen Monoxide).
A story that was sent to me in 2006 by a Joe from Slow Children: "This took place during the time Richie Johnson had no drums. There was a band that pre dated Slow Children called Virginia Porker .We thought that was funny for some reason. Aut on bass, me on gee-tar and a 16 year old named Timmy on drums. We played a set at Cantones and Timmy reluctantly agreed to let Richie play his drums for the Arm set. Well things went on a little to long and Timmy had to go home. Possibly school the next day. So he began to remove the drums out from under Richie one piece at at a time during the set. Until all that was left was the snare drum and drum stool. He took those and the set was over. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw happen on stage. And since Richie was not the sort of warm friendly kind of guy you would want to help out no one really made any attempt to talk Timmy out of this course of action. We never saw Timmy again either . I think the whole experience unnerved him a bit." The funnything is, my own band, the bones, has a drummer named Richie, and a very similar story. Before I had my abortive attempt at being a member of the Arm I somehow convinced the Fourth of July Committee in my neighborhood (Jeffries Point, East Boston) that they should come up with a couple hundred dollars for my band to play at the block party. My own band was going to headline, and for an opening act I hired Baby's Arm. Then I decided they should really headline, being a real band and all. This was one of their first shows as it turned out. This was a perverse experience. First we went on and did our whole cover set. We played the standard cover band set that was probably being echoed simultaneously in a thousand basements and top 40 clubs around the country: the "Ziggy Stardust/Suffragette City medley, Zep's "Good Times, Bad Times", three Thin Lizzy tunes ("Emerald", "Boys Are Back", "Jailbreak"), Queen's "Tie Your Mother Down", and two songs by Boston- yes, "More Than A Feeling" and "Smokin'". Our guitarist Ricky Risti was a great player, and drummer Anthony Rauseo was solid too. They had to be, as we had no singer! Here we were playing these note-for-note solos and all, but when the verses started there was just- silence. Well, not silence, just no singing. Still the local kids ate it up, we let Ricky take long ass solos to fill the space. So we got away with it, aside from a few odd looks and a direct question or two to which we lied that our singer was in jail (not a complete lie, as the one guy we'd rehearsed with had landed in the clink for beating up his girlfriend 2 weeks earlier- when he got out my girlfriend Kathy Pompeo threatened to beat him and me up if I let him back in the band). Hey, if it was good enough for the Ventures and the Shadows, right...? As though the set we'd just finished hadn't baffled people enough, next up was Baby's Arm. Now my neighborhood wasn't exactly in the forefront of the DIY post-Punk scene in 1976. There were lots of teenage kids from the hood, but there were also lots of old Italian ladies and bookies sitting in cars and very confused Fourth of July Committee marshals. Our band stood in front of the "stage"- a flatbed set up in an empty lot -and made it obvious we both knew and liked Baby's Arm. This was enough to insure that they wouldn't be attacked or seriously heckled, since our band was all guys from Eastie and/or the neighborhood and they were our guests. The funny thing was that there were a lot of younger guys who really liked them, even though the musical style of a band like Baby's Arm was so far from the heavy rock and disco that they usually listened to that it may as well have been a bunch of Moonmen singing in an alien tongue about craters and the dangers of space debris. Just about anything but ELP, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith was considered "weird" by the guys in my old neighborhood (once I mentioned to the crew at the corner that I was learning an Allman Brothers song, and they all broke up laughing. For weeks, every time I went up the corner someone would say 'how's those Almond Brothers' and everyone would crack up...apparently just the name was enough to invoke hilarity). To this day there are guys who come up to me and say "remember that time that you had that Arm band play down the Point? They were pretty good", and one of the women my age still asks about Billy, whose skin-tight jeans and prominent bulge made an impression on her that's lasted two-decades!
When Billy Cole left the band to join the Real Kids Frank threw in the Baby's Arm towel and soon regrouped with a new project. He formed the Classic Ruins in 1979, taking a good chunk of the Arm's songbook with him and enlisting all new personnel. Aside from those tunes very little survived of Baby's Arm, with the exception of a demo of "I'm A Wimp" on Throbbing Lobster's 1984 compilation LP. That, the dollar bill above, and a middle-aged women's memory of a Greek boy with full lips and a lovely lump in his jeans. the Band:
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Baby's
Arm were founded and fronted by Frank Rowe, an accomplished
comic artist and career musician (that's like a career criminal- he just
couldn't seem to stop). Frank had played with a few bands already, including
the Vandals, the C Street Blues Band and the Backsteppers.
His songs were often angst-ridden and full of unveiled frustration, but
they never lost their sense of humor as they detailed the sometimes-ups
but mostly-downs of Frank's "Wimp" alter-ego. At the time Frank had plenty
to be frustrated about. By day he toiled at the Bra Factory next to East
Boston's White Stadium, by night he traded the stifling sweatshop for
the sweaty nightspot. He penned wonderful tunes such as "Heart Attack",
"Kulture Wars", "Nyquil Stinger" and the song he claimed was autobiographical
and which became the band's best known number: "I'm A Wimp". When he sang
:
Frank
Rowe writes great songs. When I played in 
Billy
Cole played guitar for the Arm, and it was a source of great amusement
to friends of the band that Frank had chosen the band's name to describe
Billy's legendary reproductive equipage, as in "that thing looks like
a Baby's Arm holding an apple" (fans of the Tubes will remember
this same phrase as being the last words uttered in the song "What Do
You Want From Life?", but Frank Rowe and company had already been there
first). The photo to the left was e-mailed to me by Frank's lovely
wife Denise, and shows 
I assumed Carmen had also never played bass before (hey, this was the
DIY '70's, remember? There were loads of non-musicians joining
and starting bands). In reality, Ms. Monoxide (now married and residing
in Vancouver, British Columbia) had a dozen years of classical training
and had been playing bass for a year, holding down the four-string chair
with the Girls (fall/winter '77) prior to her Arm gig. But Carmen
got a better offer from March Thor and moved on to play with that Beanscene
legend, so I got my chance to play a few gigs with Baby's Arm- including
the aforementioned Club show when I mauled my way through "Heart Attack"
and a few other hits. The plan seemed to be that I would play shows that
sucked- say, a Tuesday at the Club -and a hired gun like Swine would come
in for good shows like a Friday at the Rat. Noone ever said "you suck
and can't play with us", but the decided lack of approval was obvious.
I succumbed to the same atrophy of enthusiasm as a number of other bass
players, brow-beat on a continual basis by the very-outspoken Richee
Johnson, a solid drummer but no great diplomat. Richee had been the
drummer for the Boize so he was treated as a veteran. Drums must
have run in the family- Richee was Dave Robinson's cousin (formerly with
the Modern Lovers,later in the 
I
went to most of the shows that Baby's Arm played, sometimes as a fan,
sometimes as an informal roadie. I even mixed a show or two for them,
including my first sound job ever at a show they played at Club Circe
in Worcester, when a fairly new band called the 
