In the summer of 1967, at a small-time bar and ballroom in Hyannis, a group called the Underground Cinema was doing its set. Ian Bruce Douglas, now probably the most fiscally successful of the Boston rock musicians, was rapping at the audience, mostly fortyish folk with company suits who were sucking booze from the bar and looking woozily over their shoulders at the weirdos on the stage. Occasionally a bleached-blonde hot tomato would do her version of the Swim with some paunchy insurance salesman, the type who would have had a lampshade on his head if there had been any around. "We play psychedelic love-rock," Douglas shouted to the impervious audience. Those of us in the second band, the Church Bizarre, laughed at him. The Cinema finished their set, and left the stage. We ran through our set of R&B numbers, disgusted by the whole scene. As we walked outside for a smoke, Douglas cornered me.
"You know," he said in the speeded-up way that rock musicians have when they are about to show their knowledge, "You guys ought to play more of your own material, Top-40 isn't where it's at anymore." He bounced on the balls of his feet, flashing his hands around and laughing. I looked at Billy, our rhythm guitarist, who shrugged. It was obvious that this Douglas cat belonged in Bridgewater. I just said yeah, I guess we ought to, and Douglas disappeared from my life until the next fall when the Ultimate Spinach album came out. I was with the Bead Game by then, fighting hard to get ahead, playing exclusively our own music, and I read, as I stood there holding this green vegetable psychotic album in my hands, "Top-40 isn't where it's at, any more." The Ultimate Spinach had arrived. I had a strange premonition that I was doomed to follow in Ian-Bruce Douglas' footsteps, although I hated his music. The Boston Sound was beginning to strangle its young. We were going to have to pay for the sins of the Ultimate Spinach, I knew it in my bones.
Rock musicians are the bastard offspring of Horatio Alger, just as the hip movement is the enfant naturel of the middle class. The success ethic, entrepreneurial impulse, and belligerent independence of the robber barons are stamped indelibly in their acid-mutated genes as surely as in Lyndon Johnson's. The musicians wanted to make it, but the only possible way seemed to be to deny that they wanted to make it. All the accoutrements of the hip life in rock were reminders that you were first and foremost a Beautiful Person, with loyalties not to entertainment but to other Beautiful People. We played a gig in Bedford, New York for some society chick, who introduced me after our third set to -- zowie! -- George Plimpton.
"That was beautiful," said George. Even he knew what it was all about. It was the high-point of my career as a rock star.
John Leone has been the singer for The Bead Game, The Church Bizarre, and several rock 'n' roll bands. He is a junior from Los Angeles, California. He has written many things, including a book.
THE GREAT UNDERGROUND MUSICIAN SHUCK -- IV
JOHN HAMMOND, the great blues singer, leapt scornfully upon me for designating myself as an "underground" musician.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you better than other musicians?" We were sitting in the dressing room at the Scene in New York.
'No. It just means I haven't made it yet." I was beginning to see the Emperors new clothes fairly clearly by now.
"Good. I'm tired of hearing all this crap about those soulful starving musicians. Everybody's trying to make a living. I'm a working musician, and all this romanticized stuff about being a beautiful cat is just pure shit." I agreed with him. Everybody was on the make; the underground musicians I knew were like a school of hip piranhas not averse to a little backstabbing here and there. We all did our share; I can't think of more than two or three people in the whole scene who hadn't been screwed at least once by someone in a hurry to get ahead. Everyone wants to make it. Why shouldn't they? Everyone wants to cut an album, everyone wants to have a gig at the Fillmore and do huge concerts before rapt audiences. It is only the jokers who haven't been around for very long who don't recognize their own self-interestedness, who think that they're just doing their thing. Those who have made it are very careful about preserving their images, because thy know that they are trafficking not primarily in their art but in their charisma. Great music is only half of successful rock personalities. The other half is knowing how to act like a celebrity. This is because the hip audience doesn't want somebody who's just a good performer, like Elvis or Little Richard: that conjures up images of a mindless buffoon in a sequined jacket falling on his knees or miming copulation onstage, and everyone knows that that's stupid. Of course, if you fall on your knees and copulate with your guitar, and let it be known that you are hip, well, that's okay. Third-rate musicians and thinkers try to fashion themselves after the Lennons and Dylans and Zappas, trying to exhibit in their not-so-subtle ways that they are not merely Entertainers, but Important Thinkers. People with Something To Say. The Norman Vincent Peales of the Pop World, the Eric Burdons and the Jackie de Shannons, ruin what talents they have by imitating the concerns of smarter folk. They lack the convincing power of a Dylan or a Jagger. This was the Boston Sound all over. It was rife with rotten social commentators and fourth-rate hip prophets. They played the silly game of Keeping Up with the San Francisco Groups. Instead of becoming a solid block in the great Gothic cathedral of Pop, they became the pale shadows of the stained glass windows of its heroes.
There are several great musicians in Boston, people as good as any in the country: Mike Tschudin and Walter Powers of Listening, both among the top in their instruments; Peter Ivers, Harvard graduate and harp virtuoso, if he'd ever get out of the Chinese Anal-Retentive New Orleans Do-Dah Band bag; Richard Shamach of Eden's Children, matched in guitar speed only by Danny Kalb and in virtuosity by Mike Bloomfield; Peter Wolf and J. Geils, who between them have kept blues alive in Boston since Al Wilson left; the old rhythm section of the Bead Game, Lassic Sachs and Jimmie Hodder, articulate and inventive musicians each; David Mowry, a truly fine singer and guitarist; Livingston Taylor and Bob Telson, both fine composers. There are others who are top-notch players, some good lyricists and a great number of hip people. Why didn't it work?
Boston was infected early with the Syphilis of Success, Status Anxiety. There never was a Boston Sound, a music with its own definable character, and that is partly the fault of the musicians, partly the fault of the expectations of the audiences. They preyed upon their music with the teeth of unfair comparison, and took out their boredom as a token of their hipness. The musicians were wasted away by self-consciousness. These are to some degree the afflictions being visited upon the whole rock scene today, out Boston consumed itself in its rage to be recognized. It forgot that it was supposed to entertain, and not posture. The Boston Sound died, in the final analysis, from an overdose of self-importance