The Boston-Cambridge area could boast of a vital music scene since the early sixties when, along with New York's Greenwich Village, Boston was a center for folk music in the hootenany tradition. That folk scene continued well into the seventies. Later in the sixties some fine rock groups appeared- the Lost and the Hallucinations to name two. To relate the story of Beantown's ascendency to the heights of Rock scenedom, however, Kenmore Square is as good a place as any to begin. The Rat, that venerable basement home of so many great shows, was still the Rathskellar- though for a brief period it tried to fly as a top 40 club called TJ's. Jimmy Harold, longtime Rat owner, was a mere bouncer back then, under Rathskellar owner Hank Steadman, we're talking 1965. And the beloved basement hadn't yet been set up for bands. Enter Barry and the Remains and the Lovelace Lads.

The Remains were the first of the mid-60's Boston groups to gain national attention. Unlike Revere singer Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon, whose "Palisades Park" was a national hit, the Remains' sound owed less to the Brill Building and more to Merseyside pop. They shared house gigs at the Rat and at the Unicorn with the Lads, eking out the traditional slim living of musicians before Rock became Product.The big break for the Remains camein 1966 when the Beatles came to America, and sought an American group to open shows on the tour which took Beatlemania to America. The Remains scored bigtime, and crossed the US opening for the Fab Four,including the legendary Shea Stadium gig. They also opened for the Beatles at the Suffolk Downs show. Yes! The selfsame horse racing track outside the Orient Heights Projects in East Boston hosted the Fab Four. I remember holding my sister's hand in the rain when my mother let us all go to Logan Airport to wait for the Beatles plane to land, then repeating the vigil for Herman's Hermits and the Dave Clark Five not long after that. The British Invasion was on, and it hit local groups as hard as it would the rest of the nation- maybe harder.

Scott Baerenwald, then just a skinny hockey-playing teen (he later played bass for both Reddy Teddy and Robin Lane & the Chartbusters) told me of sitting upstairs at the Rat, among a room packed with regulars, to watch the Remains perform on the same Ed Sullivan Show which brought the moptops into our living rooms. As Bomp Magazine related in October, 1976:

" Needless to say, the locals were ecstatic.Unfortunately, even with rave notices, the group broke up a year later. Their one Epic album, which got little promotion, became an expensive collector's item; frequently going for $30.00 or more. For the next eight years, members of the band wandered about in other Boston bands like Kangaroo and Swallow trying to get something going. Barry himself was in the L.A. area playing with International Submarine Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers. His playing can also be found on Gram Parsons' highly influential GP album. Now, after eight years, The Remains have reformed and will attempt to re-capture that legendary level of energy that made them so great in the sixties." That 1976 reunion was short-lived, although I'm not sure what became of reported plans for the group to pursue "recording all new material at the new Kasenatz-Katz 16-track studio on Long Island and hopefully landing a major deal." The point is, the Remains exited the Boston stage at precisely the time they should have been cashing in bigtime. And just as labels were beginning to sniff around major cities such as Boston for their own signings to tap into the fast growing rock market.

MGM, like every other label in the universe, wanted to cash in on the Beatlemania frenzy, and probably would've chosen the Remains to do it...except they band broke up a year after the Beatles tour. Around this time ('66 - '67) a new style began to take hold in the states, fueled largely by the sounds emanating from San Francisco's Bay Area.They came up with three other bands: the Ultimate Spinach, Beacon Street Union and Orpheus. To market them, the label began the Bosstown Sound schtick. The idea was that just as there was a Mersey Beat sound, and just as there was now a San Francisco Sound, there was also a Bosstown sound. Unfortunately, the anticipated flood of Boston groups failed to materialize, and the bogus-ness of the ploy ended up backfiring, and making it tougher for Beantown bands to be taken seriously for years to come. A great band, the Remains were sucked under in the whirlpool, and failed to receive due recognition as the classic pop group that they were. On a more legitimate note, the sounds of the British Invasion would color the sound of Boston groups for many years to come. Elements of the Mod groups, in particular, can still be heard in clubs today, and form a significant component of that noise which is hard to define but easy to recognize as the Boston sound.

A bit more on the Boss-town sound. The Remains really opened the door for the possibility of Boston being taken seriously as a place where nationally viable bands could be found. But they really represented an earlier era when compared to the groups that MGM rustled together to try and cash in. I always wondered why there were so many Ultimate Spinach records at local garage sales, but never realized they were a local band. They had a great name so I bought a copy and found the record unlistenable. Likewise Orpheus. I hope I'm not offending anyone here, but this stuff was less than stellar, and sounded dated even faster than most sounds of the period. The Beacon Street Union was innocuous enough but that was about it. Aside from producing some future Beantown luminaries such as John Lincoln Wright the band came and went with hardly a ripple on the surface of rock's stormy seas. In their defense, the MGM signed groups weren't given development time, and the sessions musdt have been rushed in the label's frantic hurry to release product. I've heard that these bands were a lot better live than those albums would let you know.

Peter Ivers is one noteable alumni of Beacon Street Union fans the Street Choir; he was a great harp player from West Roxbury who went on to become a major scene presence in LA's punk and new wave scene. Peter would write "Heaven" for the Eraserhead soundtrack- the same song covered by the Pixies for their debut recordings at Fort Apache that later was released by 4 AD as Come on Pilgrim. I got to hang out with Peter -see the Pixies article or the bones article -and showed him a copy of the Beacon Street Union LP I owned, I think it was Through the Eyes of..., and he groaned. "What a sorry mess that whole thing was. MGM lost a fortune trying to invent psychadelic bands to compete with the San Francisco thing. The whole scene was an invention of their publicity department. It was really embarrassing. What did we know, bands were just excited to get signed by this major label."

The Lovelace Lads are neither as well-remembered as the Remains nor as cursed with reverse notoriety as the Boss-town bands, but they were every bit as popular in their day as the former. Bandleader Kent Baerenwald changed his name to Stefan Lovelace -- he bore a slight resemblance to the Rocky Horror Picture Show's Riff-Raff. Gaunt and tall, Stefan would be one of only a handful of contemporaries whose career would span from this early period right on up through the 70's and 80's. Stefan- known lovingly as "Swine" to his close friends - fronted the One in the early 70's and the Mindless Fucks - a later version of Mickey Clean and the Mezz, the band responsible for opening the Rat up to the new crop of punk-era bands. He also produced Willie Loco on the first Boom Boom Band single: "Mass Ave." b/w "Kerouac" (and of less historic importance handled production on sessions with my own band the bones). Until his untimely death in the 1980's Swine was a fixture on the local scene. Wearing a white leather jacket with black lapels and chain-smoking filterless Djarum clove cigarettes, it was impossible to miss Swine enter a room- if you didn't see him you could smell him!

Toad Wyman, AKA James Caan, Winchester HS Class of '62, emailed me some details on the earliest line up of Lovelace Lads, in "1965, in the days of Hank Steadman, Rathskellar owner". Toad was the group's bassist/lead vocalist, Dave Random handled rhythm guitar and vocals, the drummer was Willie Thayer, and the "leadman pre-Stefan-Lovelace Kent Baerenwald". What counts is that you have chronicled part of what I had thought long lost, and it was a pleasure to see it still alive in its spiritual form.

Meanwhile, down Comm. Ave, there were other bands and other venues beginning to blossom. The club Where It's At featured the popular Chosen Few as their house band, just one of the groups that enjoyed moderate success while gigging throughout the growing circuit. They were fronted by the suggestively-named Artie Kannabis on lead vocals. Willie Alexander hadn't become Willie "Loco" yet. He was playing at the teenybopper clubs, and his group The Lost had yet to join the mainstream of the slowly growing local scene. The Lost played different rooms, but they were doing something right, for when Lou Reed and John Cale left the Velvet Underground, the splintered group- who had always had strong ties to Boston -hired Willie to play keyboards and sing. In this capacity Willie toured Europe on the last tour of the amazing Velvets' final gasp. Ah, to have been a fly on that wall (the Velvet Underground will turn up again in our Beantown history when teenage Jonathan Richman takes the bus to NYC to meet Lou Reed, planting the seeds of the Modern Lovers' sound).

Rock would soon accumulate some new prefixes- Acid, Hard, Psychadelic -to join those already in its collection: Blues, Pop, Mod. The gritty realism of bands like the Velvet Underground would also affect the newly emerging Boston sound. The transitional period between the sixties scene and the upcoming explosion of Boston's Underground in the mid-seventies saw a number of good bands that were either rock bands leaning mainly towards cover material, or groups that adhered to the folk-inflected styles coming out of the West Coast. In the former category were groups like Orphan Annie and Fresh Cream, with their repective showstopping guitarists Rikki Raves and Gerry Toomey, and the popular Daddy Warbucks; in the latter category were bands like John's Children, the early International Submarine Band, and the Outer Space Band- who became semi-famous after six years of circuit gigs when they played at the White House for presidential offspring Susan Ford's prom.

Wheatstraw and the Beacon Street Union each counted John Lincoln Wright as a member, prior to his forming the Sour Mash Boys. John's Children produced Leroy Radcliffe, the outstanding guitarist who would play for the reformed 1976 version of the Modern Lovers, while the ISB featured country-rock pioneer Graham Parsons and Remains' leader Barry Tashian (the group soon relocated to LA after initially forming in Cambridge). Other Remains members would play for the bands Swallow and Kangaroo prior to their reformation in 1976. One of the most influential Boston bands ever- the Modern Lovers -and a lesser known but talented group called the Sidewinders would be among the only things happening for a few years. They would each record one excellent LP before breaking up, although the four year delay in the release of the Modern Lovers album made it seem to many that they were part of the new crop of Underground groups springing up around '75, when in fact they had called it quits in '73, following the shelving of their John Cale-produced '72 Warner Brothers demo sessions that would eventually be released to wide-spread critical acclaim just in time for the appearance of a new scene centered in two clubs: the Rat and the Club (in Cambridge) Jonathan has told me- despite a common assumption among local rock afficionados -that the Modern Lovers never played the Rat.

The Sidewinders produced Eric Rosenfeld, Billy Squier and Andy Paley; Paley would later start the Paley Brothers along with brother Jonathan, and Eric would play on their one LP as well as becoming a member of the touring band. The Paleys may be remembered as the 'other' band whose music graced the film (and soundtrack LP) Rock and Roll High School. Andy went on to become a first-line producer, whose work included LP's by Jonathan Richman and a grammy-winning effort by his personal idol, Brian Wilson. Rosenfeld, who also played under the name Eric Rose, was the best guitarist I have personally ever seen live- local or otherwise. He joined the three Marshall brothers- Barry (drums), Kenny (bass), and Kevin (rhythm guitar), as lead guitarist for the Marshalls, a much beloved local outfit in the first tier of punk-era bands, of whom Bomp's Bruce Dickerson said: "It's generally conceded that it's Eric, a dazzling player in the great British Flash Guitarist tradition, who provides the band with its energy and makes it go." After stepping out from under Rosenfeld's shadow -- having been rhythm guitarist to Eric's lead -- Billy Squier was aided by a dedicated A&R rep, whose convinction that Squier would be a hittmaker kept him plugging away despite a few false starts.Patience was rewarded when Squier became mega-huge .