You've already read about how the first musical love of my life, the bones, got started. Sometimes we were able to add a member for a show or a series of shows. One very cool guest was Jonathan Richman, who sat in with the band on a few occasions. One gig that involved JR in a memorable way was on Valentine's Day of 1982. The 3-piece Bones were opening for the Sex Execs at the Honey Lounge on Boylston Street. JR showed up and played guitar on "Astral Plane", a tune off the first Modern Lovers album that we covered as part of our regular set. Then Ted Pine asked him to jam and he sat in to play a George Jones song with the Sex Execs, so we all went home happy. But the oddest of all had to be a series of shows that Jonathan played as replacement drummer for the Bones in 1981. We had a full weekend of shows booked when our drummer had a bit of a nervous breakdown and ended up in Charles River Mental Hospital, former host to a number of other temporarily zonked musician's like James Taylor, according to nuthouse lore.

Now, Richie is one of the sweetest, most intelligent, most stable and gifted people I have ever known, but we were both doing scads of mind-warping substances in those days and there is that fine line between genius and...Charles River Mental Hospital (we may have been the only band in the history of that institution to rehearse there, which we did for that next month)! We should have seen it coming, what with Eastie being Angel Dust ("Diesel") capital of the world at the time and Rich's behavior growing more and more erratic. I remember one night he called me up, totally freaked out, after he had gone to buy some weed from a couple of wanna-be East Boston wiseguys. They had accused him of being an informer, and hijacked him to a barber shop by Orient Heights Station. There they plied him with questions in the darkened room, and he explained that he lived just around the corner, giving them his phone number...except he was so weirded out that he gave them the wrong number! They almost shot him. After several hours they finally let him go, in the middle of the night.

Another call I got around that time was from outside an antique store on Boylston St., in downtown Boston. Rich said he'd gone in and right away the proprietors had asked him a number of astrological questions, guessing his sign correctly, and that he'd heard chanting from the back room which he was sure was part of their plot to steal his soul, or something to that effect. When he tried to leave the door was locked. As I calmed him down, he said they were witches who were putting a spell on him of some sort, practicing mind control, and we had to go back. So I took the train in to Boston, joined him and went in to see these odd Russian sisters that ran Barkavian Antiques. It was one of those places where they automatically lock the doors when you come in, and have to buzz you out. I explained that they "locked" everyone in, and Rich seemed satisfied, so I chalked it up to too much diesel or bad acid. Funny thing is, years later I worked for a lawyer who was a practicing Satanist, and who served as counsel for the Mass Society of Practicing Hypnotists and a few quasi-occult organizations. I mentioned that years before a friend of mine had thought he ran into some witches who ran an antique store, and right off he said "Oh, you mean the sisters over at Barkavian? Yes, they're witches, definitely"! So who knows...Part of Richie's problems at the time were dietary, as he'd become a vegetarian and quit nicotine and sugar, which put him in a very susceptible state, stimulants-wise. He'd been locking himself overnight in our room at the Music Complex, putting a mike on his crappy little cassette player and playing these badly recorded Bowie tapes through the PA at maximum volume, over and over, chain smoking Rothmans. The room smelled like a cave. You knew there was a problem when the graveyard shift metalheads, who always worked amidst the constant din of a dozen bands rehearsing at the same time, started complaining about the noise coming from our room! We were less than sensitive, however, and missed these subtle signs, so it took the band totally by surprise when we went to pick Rich up for the first of several shows and were told he was "in New York visiting his sister". I'd worked for months to line up a week with 6 straight shows, and it was the weekend of the grand opening of a new club I was trying to get off the ground, so I was completely undone by Richie's disappearance. His mom was convinced we were somehow at fault and would tell the band nothing, holding fast to the cover story of his spontaeous New York trip.

I'd run into Jonathan and he'd noticed I was agitated and asked why. When he found out it was due to the loss of our drummer on the busiest week we'd ever had he mentioned that he'd played drums a bit for folks like Patti Smith when he was in NYC. He said he'd help out but he didn't want to play any rock clubs. That night Dave "Bone" Pedersen and I played the first scheduled show- a Wednesday at Cantones -sitting on bar stools without a rhythm section. The show went great. When Jonathan heard that he decided that if the Cantones crowd would accept two "stoolies" then they weren't typical rock fans and he'd be comfortable drumming there. He joined us for that Thursday night show at Cantone's without rehearsal so we wrote a set of mostly old covers that we played: "Slow Down", "Bad Boy", some Fugs and MC5 tunes. The funny thing is that the Bones played a lot of our stuff really fast, but as we hadn't rehearsed Jonathan counted them off at half speed compared to our regular wunderkind drummer. Dave, Bob and I were so impressed to be playing with Jonathan that we were too intimidated to mention the pace and just played everything slower- with sometimes comic effect. On Friday night we played our next show- a Booze Cruise benefit for Bob Capucci, candidate for Representative of East Boston. After our set Jonathan danced with every old Italian lady I ever grew up with. Two specific images frozen in my memory include JR in the midst of a long line of dancers doing a rockette chorus line to Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York ", and JR doing the Hully-Gully surrounded by all my mother's townie friends from the 'hood. On Saturday we were opening a new club on Huntington Ave. called Jimbo's that I was booking (now Huskie's), and Jonathan played drums for that too. By then word was out that Jonathan was playing with us and it was announced on the radio that he'd be appearing. They forgot to say exactly what he was playing, however, and fans who flocked to the place to see him. The closest they got to a JR song was our version of "Astral Plane". Luckily there weren't too many complaints, and the night was a sellout. Since I'd also booked John Felice's new group- the Remakes -that night was the closest thing to a Modern Lovers reunion that probably will ever happen.

No matter who might fill in on the drum stool, for better or worse, I missed playing with Cunningham, our nickname for Richie within the band. One night he was doig his drum solo, which he always did in the song "Group Grope", a very loose adaptation of the Fugs tune by that name. The solo started as a joke, but soon became a staple of the set. Richie had the damn thing composed, so there were sections that always happened exactly the same, and then within the structure there were parts where he would improvise. You could pick out little snatches of different drum parts, oddball stuff like Chick Corea, a riff from "Billion Dollar Babies", Bonham, old time stuff like Chick Webb and Gene Krupa. One night, just as the solo was in full steam, I started pulling drums away from the kit. First the crash cymbal. Then the ride. A tom. Another tom. Floor tom. Richie kept playing, never missed a beat, but all the time he was somehow maintaining the regular patterns he usually played with one stick, while swinging at my hands with his second stick, trying to keep me away. He landed a few good shots as I yanked away his hi-hats, leaving him with a kick drum and a snare. He finished the solo with one hand playing the snare, the other holding onto it so I couldn't get it away from him, and then played the rest of the song, once the band came back in, just like that. I would be big money that if you heard a recording of that night, you would never know what was happening during that song -- that's how good a drummer Richie is.

Another great player who we got to play with was Peter Ivers. One of my closest friends at the time (1980) was Leslie Dunton-Downer, a very cool Santa Cruz native majoring in Folklore and Mythology, and at the time performing in . Leslie went on to writing libretos in Paris, co-writing the Essential Shalespeare Handook, co-founded the Cambridge Riverside Players, became a lecturer at Harvard and received numerous awards for her work as a teacher, scholar, and writer for music and theater, including from the Sheldon Fellowship, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.among other pursuits. Leslie was and is one of the most interesting and brilliant people I've ever met - after hearing him at a wedding, she devoted a few years to becoming a booster, promoter and interpreter for a little-known Tadjiki musician, Aqnaza, the modern expo0nent of a centuries old tradition of singing the poems of Sufi Jalal ad-Din Rumi. With her help Aqnaza became the first Tadjiki musician to tour the US - an amazing feat, considering that this was at the height of post-911 anti-Muslim paranoia. She managed to get him to Paris the week before 911, which she talks a bit about in an interview and Aqnaza solo performance on the KUSP archives - go to Dec. 7, 2003 when you get to the page]. That was all in her future, though, the day she called and said she had a friend coming in from LA that she really thought I should meet.

It was a friend named Peter who, she said, she'd told all about me, and he was eager to get together. Peter had written the song "Heaven" for Peter Lynch's darkly original film Eraserhead- that's his electronically altered voice singing it too! When I doubted that fact he sang it for me using a little Casio keyboard and his angelic falsetto. He also ran an enormously influential cable TV show called New Wave Theater that had scores of bands on it for interviews and performances. Peter was composing the score for a musical production directed by an old friend of his, so he would be an artist in residence that semester. From our first meeting Peter and I got on like a house on fire. There was a connection there that we both sensed at once and remarked on. We found we shared a sort of common background- we'd both grown up in a Boston neighborhood (he in West Roxbury, me in East Boston), both gone to Harvard on scholarship, both played in bands and practiced martial arts. Although we didn't discuss it I later found that we both had experienced problems with drugs.

Peter was an amazing harmonica player. He had a briefcase he carried with the first portable studio I'd ever seen, lots of little pedals and a 4-track cassette in a briefcase that he recorded with. Anytime he had an idea he pulled it out and got it on tape, and that was how he assembled integral parts of the scores he did, including Eraserhead. He used an old Green Monster microphone, and he could make that harp sound like anything- a sax, a trumpet, a violin, you name it. The score he was writing was a gas, I'd love to get a copy of it. There was an electric punk trio and a chamber orchestra that would play together at times and at other times alone, and every now and again there was written into the score "punk band attacks orchestra" and the two ensembles would go at it, struggling for supremacy. Absolutely out of sight, ethereal at times with these lovely middle eastern motifs and at others cacophonic. Peter invited me to play guitar for the show even though I couldn't read music and it was his plan to get a guitarist who did. I was disappointed that I couldn't do it but I was going to Pakistan for almost a month right when the show was being performed. He got Peter Bell, who used to play with James Montgomery (and I think Bonnie Raitt, too), to do the gig instead. We jammed a few times upstairs at the Aggassiz Theater and it was as though he'd always been in the band. We had a great time and planned future shows for the West Coast that we'd bill as Private Ivers.

Several year went by, and I was running a studio I owned called Fort Apache. My partner had brought in an amazing band called the Pixies, and one of the songs they recorded was "In Heaven". I thought it would be great to have the band meet Peter, and Charles White (later known as Black Francis, now Frank Black) was enthused by the idea. Not too long after that, while trying to contact Peter to arrange a meeting, I found out Peter was murdered in LA, a brutal crime that was never solved. Hopefully "in heaven everything is fine"- Peter Ivers deserved that. The Pixies, as most music fans will know by now, became hugely popular, and the inspiration for Nirvana, whose late singer Kurt Kolbain once called his group "a Pixies cover band".

Other luminary personalities sat in over time with us. When Richie moved on around late 1982 we got former Taxi Boys drummer Bobby McNabb to play with us. Bob was a true pirate as well as a very, very hard hitting drummer who played thunderous tom-toms and dispensed with all but the stripped-down essence of the beat. Dave and I loved his playing, but he was a wild card in any situation. One night when we were playing at Mr. McNasty's, right before they changed their name to Jumpin' Jack Flash to help eradicate the memory of a shooting that had occurred there, McNabb showed up late as hell (this became a sort of trademark with Bob...the night we played with Johnny Thunders at Storyville he missed the sound check and the set, then sauntered in as we were breaking down AFTER our set and asked "is sound check over already?" On this particular night he walks in (late) and Dave and I were having a pleasant chat with the manager, a very cute waitress, and a few patrons as well. It's all real friendly and warm, they're giving us free drinks, we're schmoozing for a future show and such. So in comes McNabb and looks around for three seconds, then at the top of his voice announces "oh, shit, this is the place that that guy got wasted, isn't it? Where'd he get shot, over here by the bar?" The entire bar turns around, the manager physically winces, the waitress shoots us all a filthy look and wanders off, never to return. Dave and I just look at one another and shake our heads, and it's "excuse me, Bob, can I speak to you outside for a short moment?" But he was a mother of a drummer. When he showed up, few were better on the throne for a rock gig. I took the photos below, taken at a Maverick's show during a winter snowstorm in '82, Bob is on drums. The show, in which the super-cool Dogmatics opened for us, is also the one shown below when Frank Rowe (Classic Ruins) joined us onstage to sing "Can't Spell Romance", a tune that we covered (and later recorded) that Frank wrote while he was still in Baby's Arm

Maverick's, winter of '82, a great gig with the Dogmatics opening for us.



Same gig, Frank Rowe of the Classic Ruins joins us onstage to sing his tune "Can't Spell Romance".

Dave Bone at the Rat, from our stint as the Monday night house band.

This is from a gig I was trying to set up, but never happened.

All I want for Christmas is ... a gig with Lou Miami?

Back to Part 1, Birth of the Bones

Next, Part 3, Born Under a Bad Sign

Visit these other sites for bands in the Bones family tree:
Fort Apache ... Mr. Happy ... 500 TV ... Local 22's ... the Middle East Restaurant ... Pink Cadillac ... Lazy Susan... the Real Kids... Brothers Kendall...