The owner and proprietor of the Plough and Stars,
George has given music lovers the longest running series of shows in Boston.

For over 20 years the Plough and Stars has been a bastion of Cambridge nightlife. Located midway between Harvard and Central Squares, the room is barely wide enough for two tables and a path for the waiter, but it has hosted some of the most exciting shows in Beantown. The closest thing in town to a pub such as you'd find in London or Dublin, the Plough is also a genuine neighborhood bar, and on any given night you'll find a combination of college students, local blue-collar workers, rockers and generation X types. It's this democratic demographic spread that makes the Plough such a fun place to be. With a social mix like this folks tend to let it all hang out, and the tight quarters makes for a warm and cozy atmosphere. The bartenders, including Noel and Barry (the bartender with the clean-shaven pate), are among the cities most capable and friendly.

I first started to frequent the Plough regularly when Treat Her Right began their residency there. The long series of weekly shows that they played built up a steady crowd, and while they honed their chops and polished their tunes they also cultivated the core group of loyal fans that would stick with them throughout their career. Treat Her Right was a perfect band for that room. Their blend of smokey blues and roots rock was made for a cramped pub, and most nights ended with a stream of spent revelers filing out, soaked with dance sweat and with broad smiles on their faces. It made me think of what early London blues-rock shows must have been like when groups like the Yardbirds, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones held residencies at spots such as the Richmond Hotel. Or the early 60's gigs in the US when the Kingsmen and their peers held sway as house bands. When I interviewed Dave Alcott (AKA Dave Champagne) recently and asked him what shows with THR were his favorites there was no hesitation: "the early shows while we were still playing at the Plough were easily the best...the band was unsigned, relatively unknown, it was still fresh and we weren't afraid to experiment. There were a lot of things we tried then that we couldn't or wouldn't later on when things took off".

I can't remember how I ended up booking my own weekly shows at the Plough. I had sat in a few times with Treat Her Right, either singing or playing guitar on "Home of the Blues"- which I'd played with Dave during the short time I was with Pink Cadillac. I'd also started to become a regular for the THR, Hubcaps and Boogaloo Swamis shows, and I thought it seemed like a cool way to break in a band. The only free night at that point was Monday, so I booked a month's worth of Monday shows. They went pretty good, and I kept on going for another month, then another, until a year had gone by and I'd spent the start of every week in the tiny space next to the Men's Room that passes for a stage at the Plough. Every week was a bit better, and I tried new things. The highlight of the year came around month four, when I began to invite one or two guests to play a set, turning the night into a sort of variety show-cum-cabaret. While I kept up that series things went grand- we would often have a line going out the door and down the street waiting to get in, while the crowd in the room turned over two to three times a night. This was during the same time that I was working with Billy Ruane and Greg "Skeggie" Kendall in Helldorado Productions, so there was a nice cooperative overlap between the shows we booked at the Middle East Restaurant and those I set up at the Plough. Acts and performers shuttled back and forth from the Mondays at he Plough to the Tuesday nights we started out with at the Middle East, and later the Sundays and Thursdays as they were added to Helldorado's piece of the Middle East schedule.

The "stage" at the Plough and Stars presents its own set of unavoidable variables, and the tiny patch of real esatate that he band must occupy between the Fir (Men's Room), the rear door and the side wall makes for a challenging stage setup. As I faced the crowd there was a wall inches to my left, the men's Room three or four feet to my right, the drummer just behind me and just behind him the stairs leading down to the kitchen. Rather than make playing there a drag, however, this arrangement creates a unique interaction between the crowd and the band. It also helps musicians who play the room to develop an acrobatic sense of movement and keen peripheral vision. Try to keep from knocking over your double Stoli on the floor as you pirouhette to the left to let a patron get to the bathroom, then veer back right, barely avoiding crushing your strobe tuner and twisting your guitar into an improbable position to keep from whacking it on the mic stand, as you let the bartender whisk by with a mountainous stack of dirty pint glasses, headed for the basement. I called the weekly shows at the Plough "Gig Adversity Training" as a joke within the band, but in truth those shows were as much fun as any I've ever done. Anybody playing in a big band complaining about losing touch with the audience, craving closeness, etc., need only set up a weekly gig at the Plough to recapture all the intimacy possible between a band and an audience. Just as importantly the guys who run the place, from George the owner to the bartenders like Noel are all great people. They let the band do their job, they do theirs, and there is never any bullshit power tripping beyond that. I love those guys.

There have been many wonderful moments at the Plough that I've enjoyed. The band I used was an ever-shifting group of musicians that was regularly augmented by members of the audience. Regulars included Mark Sandman, Kim Deal, Richie Parsons, Bucky Baer and Marylou Lord. The band at one time or another featured Clark "Dark" Goodpastor, John Shriver, Matt Burns, Vinnie Roberto, Dave "Bone" Pedersen. It would be hard to put together a list of all the local and out-of-town musicians who sat in during the 24 months of shows that I played at the Plough over the next three years.

The best journalistic photograph of those days at the Plough was written by Ted Widmer, in a Boston Phoenix article entitled "A Tale of Two Nitespots", wherein he detailed a typical night at the Plough when Kim Deal sped over via hackney carriage from a Pixies show at Citi, played her traditional Plough guest spot, and then jumped back into the cab to get back across the Charles River for the second Pixies show. Ted, who is now in Washington writing Foreign Affairs speeches for President Clinton (!), tells it better than I can. Take this link to read that fine Ted Widmer article over in the Joe Harvard Press Kit section.