Boston Rock Clubs of the 1980s: Jack's

Jack’s was right on Mass Ave in Cambridge just before you hit Harvard Square and where it once stood has been occupied by a large office building ever since.

The place was basically a retail store-front that was turned into a music club with the thick high glass windows still in place but blacked out. It was a good sized club for the Boston area but it would be a stretch to say it was big. It was larger than downstairs at the Rat and about the size of TT the Bear's but with a high ceiling that gave you the impression that it was bigger than it was. Not a rough crowd like at the Rat or what would sometimes show up at the Channel. Cambridge was what we called the "Soda & Lime" crowd in reference to Cambridge's reputation for an unusually low level of beer consumption. I don't know how bars even survived in Cambridge but somebody was out drinking because there are a lot of bars in that town.

As a music venue Jack's was laid out pretty well. They had a stage that had room enough for a five-piece band but not much more. Nobody was going to Duck-Walk it at any rate and it was set rather high and located to the right as you walked in the door and the bar was against the opposite wall. A major plus was that Jack's had a decent sounding pa system. Can’t recall if the monitors worked and most likely they did not since although we played there twice and I don’t remember a fucking thing about the shows, I'm going to rely on the premise that if a monitor on a Boston stage outside of the Channel Nightclub had ever worked, it would be such a standout memory in my mind.

Cambridge sported a number of music venues in those days and Jack's had plenty of competition. Johnathan Swifts, TT the Bears, Bunratty’s and the Plough & Stars were all in that neck of the woods and showcasing similar entertainment. Of these clubs, Johnathan Swifts was the better place to see a band. I was only in there once to see Til Tuesday and there was no place to hide on that stage, it was right out into the audience and you could see and hear the performers from anywhere in the room. There was also the Western Front but that was a different animal since they stuck to touring Reggae acts. Neither I nor my friends ever actually went in there because the cover was $20.00 in 1980s money which was $15 to $17 more than any place else we went to in town and hell, I didn't pay half that much to see Jimmy Cliff at the Channel so I'm gonna shell out that kind of money to see who, nobody I ever heard of at the Western Front? Fuck that. I was paying rent on my apt in West Roxbury and rent on our rehearsal spot at the Pixy Theater, I wasn't made of money! I was only insuring my car half the year as it was and I would cringe every time I broke a string on my bass since it was going to cost me $5.00 for a replacement. Makes you wonder why you put yourself through such things. But what, and give up Show Business!

We got into playing Jack’s during its last year or so of existence but it had a reputation of being one of the “in” places to play in Boston since, much like the Rathskeller, had a famed “History” that had come and gone. We ended up playing two of the three shows, all Wednesdays, booked there and would have played the third except that the place suddenly had a fire the Saturday prior to our scheduled show later in that same week.

It is now part of Boston musical history that the band Treat Her Right had all their equipment burned up in that fire since it broke out just after they setup and then did a Telethon on WBCN to raise money to replace it. WBCN was the top radio station in Boston at the time and they played the bands music ALL DAY and had the band members live on the air, winning new fans and getting them signed to a major record label as a result. We were all saying what “Good Luck” they had! But the bottom line was that Treat Her Right WAS a good band and getting all their stuff burned up wouldn't have done them much good if they weren't.

Jack’s was the hardest time we ever had booking a Boston venue in our seven "odd" years stay on the city music scene. It was the twenty question routine we always got with a new place but more intense: "So why should we book YOU GUYS?" “How many people can you bring?” “Are you POSITIVE you can ABSOLUTELY bring that many?”  "Where else do you play?" “You’re not playing anywhere else this month are you?” And this is for a spot on a Wednesday lineup. It took a lot of time for them to decide to book us at all. One particular back and forth with management lead to what later became an oft quoted declarative out-of-the-blue statement that James made at the time: “No, we are NOT going to give you any Cocaine!” 

Not to play a Wednesday at 11:00PM in Cambridge at any rate. It’s not like we were actually expecting to get PAID for this gig in the middle of the week so far out from our regular and gainfully employed fan-base or any other absurd Pie-in-the-Sky notion. Just what on Earth were the other bands being shaken down for?

Jack’s was the home stage for a popular Boston band named New Man that put out a not-so-well engineered album of pop rock at the time. Although they were a bit slick for my liking in those days of my musical infancy and punk mentality, they certainly sounded better than that live and their shows had more energy than the record had captured. I’d seen the band a couple of times; once at Jack’s and another at Scotch & Sounds (where nobody sounded bad) and heard cuts on the radio where it did a slow fade. From what I saw of them they drew a good crowd and played a lively set. Then the bass player cut out to join the Jon Butcher Axis and I think that was it for them.  

Other acts that played Jack’s on a regular basis were the Greg Greenway Band and Asa Brebner. Greg Greenway has had a long professional music career since then and put out a number of records under just his own name as a “solo” act although I guess he always was a solo act and Asa of course was previously with Robin Lane and was always on the scene playing with different names of bands that came after his own name like Asa Brebner and "Idle Hands" and such. What these three groups had in common was more of a well rehearsed and polished guitar based pop sound as compared to a more, let's just use the term "less-refined", energetic and straight ahead rock & roll which was where our band, Cool McCool, fell into as a genre.

James reminded me that Jack's was the place that George Thorogood was a popular performer and also where he was playing when Rounder Records discovered him and he then put them on the American musical map.

But that was in the past and the New Man\Greenway\Brebner model was what Jack’s was looking for and if you didn't fit that genre and still wanted to play there, I guess you had to pay. Once again we found ourselves as a bit of a square peg in the Boston music scene but you can't be all things to all people, nobody else was either. Only the most popular acts could draw well anywhere in town. We all had our home markets, ours was Green Street Station, Chet's and The Channel but the tough part for any band was breaking out and getting a foothold in a new area. The drinking age had gone from 18 to 21 years earlier and the pressure that caused rolled downhill to the bands. So many bands, so few original venues. But ultimately Jack's just gave us the Wednesdays without tribute. 

Our “Sister” band, the group we shared our rehearsal space at the Pixie Theater in Hyde Park with, Those Damned Kids: Scott Harris, Dave Yanolis and John Brelia had gotten into Jack’s first and so we went to their show and knew ahead of time about what management was looking for and what you got in return.

We knew we were never going to move up the ladder at the place but had the chance to book one more show there and took it because word was already out that Jack’s was on its last legs and what the hell, a gig’s a gig, right? The owner of the building, as the story was told, had a new tenant with deep pockets just waiting to get in there and who was willing to pay much more to lease the property than Jack’s could possibly come up with and so, since the lease was going to be up later that summer, Jack’s was doomed, doomed, DOOMED. No, we weren't broken up by this prospect. 

Well it never got that far. The place had an “accidental fire” a month or so before the lease was to expire and the result became Treat Her Right’s well timed and well deserved destiny.

We all joked afterwards that if only Jack’s had burned up four days later that perhaps we would have had a Cool McCool Telethon on WBCN and have signed a recording contract.

I guess we’ll never know. 

Boston Rock of the 1980s: Boston Band Names

How important is having a good band name? It is most important! Most bands agonize over the name and they should too. For a band it’s about something bigger than the sum of its parts, it’s the name you hang out front, it’s what people will remember…or not. A good band name is a sign of imagination, an indication of your collective creativity and…it’s a king-size pain in the ass!

It’s so tough to get band members to agree on a stupid band name. “Jeez, just call it anything.” Oh, but it can’t be just ANYTHING! It’s got to mean SOMETHING, right?

Our first band, Cool McCool, was a trio and yet it took us three months to agree on a name. Tony thought “Second Sight” was a really cool name which James and I thought rightly, of course, was just plain stupid. At one point in our machinations I cracked and blurted out; “We don’t want anything sullen and gloomy like “Nuclear Winter” or anything like that do we?!”  At this James and Tony looked at each other and said “Now THAT would be a good name.”

I don’t know who it was but someone said that, with his dark hair and mustache, James looked just like that cartoon character Cool McCool that was on Saturday morning TV right after George of the Jungle. Whether it was fatigue, the fact we didn’t dismiss it out of hand or that we may actually have liked it, we agreed on it at any rate and were able to move on with our lives, our imaginations and collective creativity exhausted.

Anyway, I didn’t get to see all of these bands but here are some of the Boston Bands whose names I thought were really cool back in the day:

 

Arms Akimbo: Never saw them but they played the Rat a lot as well as other places in town. I remember reading that Amie Mann said she liked them back when she was fronting Til Tuesday. If you don’t know already it’s the term for falling backwards with your arms outstretched. Pretty clever in mho.

 

Band 19: Not to be confused with Forever 19 that had a rehearsal room next to ours at the Pixie Theater in Hyde Park. The story goes that this was the bandleader’s 19^th band that he had put together. That’s enough personnel changes to last a lifetime.

 

Berlin Airlift: Rick Berlin’s band, get it? I guess he could have just called the band “Berlin”. Previously Rick had put together a much talked about act named; Orchestra Luna.

 

Del Fuegos: “Of the Fire” in Spanish. Wonder how they came up with that one? These guys endured some hardships along the way when they were touring the country all crammed into a ford van, had all their shit stolen and a local radio station held a radio-thon to raise some money for them and put their album on the air and the band on the map. We shared the stage with them twice ourselves and I still cover “Don’t Run Wild” solo. Frank Zane has recorded a few children’s music projects that can be found in stores. Liked the name, liked the band.

 

Extreme: Not remarkable in itself except the back story was that this band was first called “The Dream” and then the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was developing a series about a young band trying (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) to climb their way to the top and this TV band and the series was to be called The Dream. So the story goes that NBC paid The Dream handsomely for their name so they could produce their very very short lived series. The Dream became the “Ex-Dream” or “The Extreme”. Coincidence? Perhaps. A fairy tale? I don’t know.

 

Girl on Top: A trio fronted by a chic guitar player. Played a gig with them in the waning days of Green Street Station.  Good attention grabbing name I think. Got my attention at any rate.

Loners Shoot Presidents: This is a great name for a punk band which they were. Tim Catz, the drummer for this group went on to win the 1991 Rock & Roll Rumble with the band Seka, named for an “exotic dancer” in Boston’s red light district known as the Combat Zone. 

Pajama Slave Dancers: I really enjoyed these guys; they were hardcore and funny at the same time. Songs like “Defreeze Walt Disney”, “Farm Rap” and “Homo Truck Driving Man” are classics. I think they put out three albums in all of which I have two. I was told they were originally from Springfield, MA. The name is a wacky as the band's stage show. You see that name, you pretty much know what you're going to get. Cool.

Plate o’ Shrimp: A ska band most likely out of Brighton since it seems all the ska bands in town emanate from there. This came from a monologue by the character Miller in one of my favorite movies of all time, Repo Man. After Miller’s monologue an ad with the term can also be seen on a wall of a fast food place in the movie.

Rash of Stabbings: This name was fine for these guys for years and years and then all of a sudden somebody somewhere realized they found it offensive. Sort of like the character of Uncle Fester on the Adams Family. One day you hear it and say “Hey, do you know what that name really means?” They had to go as RoS afterwards since nobody would book them. I think it’s a cool name reflective of the kind of rock & roll they played. They didn’t invent the term.

Sleep Chamber: As far as I know, this band only ever played at Chet’s Last Call but they had very cool, very erotic hand drawn black & white posters with women in bondage themes. One band I really wish I could have seen live.

Stop Calling Me Frank: Our friends from Hyde Park. Never got a straight answer as to how they came up with the name. The explanation changed with each telling. Dave Forbes on guitar and Lenny was the frontman. Three chord full speed ahead rock & roll band. Their big hit was “Cyclone Ranger” “My baby treat me like a cyclone ranger, she spin me round and round, she pick me up, she put me down, she spin me round and round”. That’s gold!

Valdez the Sinner: Saw these guys at “Chetstock” and never saw their name on a marque ever again. The one set I ever saw them play was a great one, however. How they came up with this name is a mystery. Nobody was named Valdez. Maybe it was someone they knew? 

Perhaps this will be food for thought for fledgling groups banging their heads against a wall trying to come up with a band name.

Good Luck!

 

 

 

Boston Rock of the 1980s: The Pixie Theater

Band Seeks Rehearsal Space

It’s 1985 and after a year and a half in Tony’s dad’s basement on Austin Street, Hyde Park and since we have started playing at Chet’s Last Call, TT the Bears and a number of high profile clam bakes, we decided that Cool McCool is ready to move into its first real rehearsal studio.

But where do we go? Rehearsal space is hard to find in the Boston area and generally not cheap. There were the Lennox street studios out in suburban Norwood…way too expensive and not particularly close either.  They were charging $350.00 a month! There’s that place under Kenmore Square behind what is now Pizzeria Uno (and where the rock club Storyville used to be).  No, way too creepy. The place was more like an underground dungeon than a studio space, a claustrophobic labyrinth of darkness and despair! In other words, nothing different than anything you’d find in the Boston area. I think Til Tuesday rehearsed there at one point. Don’t know how they did it.

The Pixie Theater

But since we were based in the Hyde Park area, the southernmost neighborhood of Boston, there was a place right off of Cleary Square named Joseph A. Logan Square over the store fronts that was known to the musicians who rented there as The Pixie Theater or “The Pixie”.  The place originally opened in 1915 as The Everett Square Theatre and then became the Fairmount Theatre after 1934 when the city of Boston changed the name of Everett Square to Joseph A. Logan Square. In the 1970s it became the Nu-Pixie Cinema, and it was known as Premiere Performances by the 1980s, before becoming an auction hall and then being abandoned. But it wasn't abandoned at all. The actual theater stage was still there but the place had fallen into disrepair over the years and the guy who owned the place didn't feel it was worth putting money into so he partitioned the upstairs into rehearsal rooms sometime in the mid-1980s and became the home of some very good working Boston bands.

Bands entered through the big double doors at street level and took the LONG, wide and somewhat steep stairway that ran straight up to the 2^nd floor with no interruption to where the rooms were laid out on both sides of a single long hallway to the right of the stairs. There was nothing like hauling stuff up this thing at 2:30 in the morning.  But what are you gonna do, give up SHOWBUSINESS?

There was a large room available at the top of the stairs. Good position but it was $185.00 1985 dollars and for three marginally employed musicians living on our own we didn't even have that kind of dough so we were fortunate enough to talk another band, friends of James our guitar player, into sharing the room with us. Dave Y and John B had a band called Those Damned Kids and who later went on to back up Ms. Xanna Don’t in the most successful act of her Boston career. Dave Y himself went on to form the Boston band Nisi Period which had a local hit with “Treat Her Like a Sailor”.

The rooms at the Pixie were pretty well insulated. You could hear the band next door if they were rehearsing but you wouldn't be put off by it. The sound was well muted and when you were playing, that’s all you could hear. As a band we didn't have to alter our volume to “get over” the band next door. Not bad.

Moving In

So now we’re all set, we've told the building manager, Bob…something, that we have a band to go in on the Pixie space with us and paid him the first and last and WE’RE IN! Our first “professional” rehearsal space complete with its punk-esque black lacquered Styrofoam covered walls, a bare light bulb hanging from the high ceiling to light the WHOLE ROOM and a vibrating couch/lounger that the last band left there perhaps because it weighted about 400 lbs. Apparently it had been in almost every room in the Pixie at one time or other. Everyone desired it but nobody wanted to lift it. How it ever even got up those straight-assed two flights of steps was something I would have liked to see. But there is was and it worked and that was the important thing.

It felt good to be out of Tony’s dad’s basement. Among the more obvious issues of carving a space out of a cluttered basement and squeezing our stuff in and out of the bulkhead door in the back of the house, Tony’s dad, Petro, was always coming down and interrupting our rehearsals asking if we wanted sandwiches and the like and Tony was always saying “Not now, dad!” 

We thanked Petro for letting us have use of his basement and giving us a place to get our ideas into song. For this and his other acts of kindness, we lovingly hold him in our hearts today. He truly enjoyed his role as our benefactor and for this we are forever grateful.

Tony’s Dad Returns

So here we are playing our first set in the new room, safely ensconced behind two locked doors and a virtual Himalaya of a staircase. Nobody could bother us now! Wait, there’s a commotion out in the hallway, I hear a voice. No, wait, it couldn't be…and in walks Tony’s dad! “I missed you boys!” he says. “We missed you too, Petro, we say”.

We Are Not Alone

There were many Boston bands rehearsing at the Pixie at that time. The one next door to us was called Forever 19 they were playing all over town and I’d say they most sounded like “Quarter Flash” that Canadian band that recorded “Harden My Heart”.

There was also Rob Nordberg’s band The Faith, an original rock band with keys, which played the Boston Scene and more local Hyde Park establishments. Rob Played drums for more than one act up at the Pixie. Other bands included Frankie Holland’s long time band, Alpha Whiskey and the local popular band, Uncalled For fronted by my friend and guitar hero, Mike DeSimone, had also rented a room there for a time. Then there were The Preapistics a band we played our first gig with at Chet’s.

Evenings after 5pm were busy at the Pixie. People loading in, out and people coming and going either trying out for one of the bands or coming in to hang out, drink beer and listen to their friends band. People would pop their heads into the rooms to ask if they had strings or hoot or to just say “hi” since nobody locked their doors until they left. Very few break-ins ever occurred there since people always seemed to be around. It was 24 hour access even though people lived over the storefronts right across the street.

Hearing Aid Joe

There was also a guy named Joe or as we called him, “Hearing Aid Joe” because he was deaf in one ear and had a hearing aid in the other.  Joe was older than us like in his mid-30s and had rented at the Pixie the longest of anybody. His room was on our side of the hallway, three doors down. Bob said that until all these new bands started moving into the Pixie and began playing out regularly; Joe had only ever used the Pixie to bring chics to. I could never imagine a woman wanting to take her pants off in ANY room in the Pixie but that’s what Bob said. Anyway, since all these bands started playing out, Joe decides to put his band back together. As a guitar player, Joe played a double Marshall stack and his bass player did the same. I don’t know how many watts that added up to but they could move a lot of air!

Working original acts of the day didn't travel that heavy.  James had a solid state Crate amp with 2 - 12’ speakers with 100 watts of power and I used a Peavey 100 watt Combo amp with one 15’ speaker, still do. Tony was sporting a Jazz kit at the time that was very portable. We would bargain on a decent stage throw, mic the amps and let the house PA do the rest of the work.

But Joe’s band was something else.

Who Is That Band Next Door?

Together with the most impossibly loud drummer I've ever heard, Joe’s band would rehearse a couple nights a week. We tried to make sure we weren't there at the same time because when those guys played, it was like time fucking stood still. Communication in our room became impossible and we were reduced to making hand motions or literally cupping our hands over the other person’s ear to speak into. People would come into our room and yell “That band next door is fucking LOUD!” and we’d just nod because we couldn't tell ‘em that they didn't know the half of it.

Then, when they took a break, the band would TURN THEIR GUITARS INTO THE AMPS causing massive feedback and then they would just sit down and smoke a joint while everything went: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

I can’t remember his name but there was a guy who had a room on the other side of Joe’s who had the only cover band in the Pixie and his band would go nuts when Joe took his “break”.

Leaving the Pixie after one of Joe’s rehearsals, the people in the apartments across the street would yell at us because of the noise. Hard to convince them it wasn't us.

The More You Sweat…

Being up near the roof, a flat black tar roof, made Summer rehearsals a sweat-fest. There were no windows and there was no air conditioning causing our drummer Tony to coin the phrase “The more you sweat, the better you get.” And to a certain extent that turned out to be true. We busted our asses up there in that room and we got tight, real tight. It didn't matter what the conditions were, we were lean, mean, fighting machines because of the Pixie and we would often play 4 nights a week.  Our friends all knew where we’d be if they wanted to see us, either at the Pixie or at a gig.

The Official Beer of Rehearsal

Since we were on a shoe-string budget, our beer of choice was a 12 pack of Old Milwaukee since it could be had for $5.00 or under and that meant 4 beers apiece, enough to last the practice without getting us toasted. Decades later James and I still drink the stuff. Old habits are hard to break.  During the late 90’s James moved to the island of St Croix for a couple of years and the number one beer down there apparently is also our brand. He was told by the local Rastas that he was the only white guy they ever saw who drank Old Milwaukee.

Peavey Equipment

Loading in and out of the Pixie made for some interesting events. We rarely had to use our PA on the road but one time a friend was helping us lug one of our old Peavey speakers, big unwieldy square boxes with a 15’ speaker and horn built in,  up the ‘steeps’ of the Pixie and when he gets to the top of the stairs the thing slips out of his hands.

The speaker cabinet quickly reached escape velocity and rocketed down the two flights and, KAP-POW, the heavy double doors bang against the outside walls as the cab sails through them then over the sidewalk and finally tumbling to rest on the opposite end of the empty street at 2:30 in the morning. I was about 4 feet from the door when this happened. Terror quickly turned to horror as we grabbed up the speaker and the rest of the stuff and returned the neighborhood, since the long suffering people of Joseph A. Logan Square had a hair trigger for such goings on, to silence.

We plugged the speaker in later and it worked fine. The thing was barely dented. Peavey equipment of the 80s was not just hard to lift, the cabs were unbreakable.  When the end of the world does come, there will be only cockroaches and old Peavey speaker cabs left.

All Good Things

We spent almost 4 years at the Pixie Theater and many of the bands were playing out regularly, writing and performing great material and actually making some money. And sometime early in 1989 Bob Had to inform us that the owner of the building has sold out and that the Pixie, at least the top of it, is going to become dentist offices. Bob was pretty down about it since after all the time he was running the place that just as the bands were actually making names for themselves; the Pixie had to come to an end.

As a band, 1989, with 6 years of playing together under our belts, found us at the top of our game. We had an “every Wednesday night” residency at Green Street Station that lasted for well over a year, we had worked our way up to weekends at The Channel  and Chet’s Last Call and were performing 3 to 4 sets of our own written material as well as being able to play hours of cover material.

Petro’s basement brought us together as a group but the Pixie Theater made us a BAND.  We weren't an isolated entity; we were sharing a space with our peers, hearing what others were doing, seeing them perform and the spirit of competition and admiration brought out the best in everybody. We now had to make a new home somehow.

As we approached the 1990s, many things began to change for the Boston music scene and for us as people. Some legendary clubs never made it to the new decade and for which there was no replacement. The Boston original scene starting to fade and the players and participants began to move on to other things since you only have a certain window in your life to pursue your rock & roll dreams.

And even though we all continue to write, play and perform, other things in life begin to take precedent. Change is the way of all things but our love for the Pixie and those times we had there never will.