Music will set you free!!

So here I am 53. Never made a freakin dime in the music industry, but know I probably could have if someone just believed in me. You see artistic types tend to give up after they aren't taken seriously. Well it wasn't that way for me. We had great songs, we were tighter than a frog's pussy live and we were on a mission.
The only thing is, we weren't in the inner circle of Boston musicians, and I had no idea how to play that game. I mean, yeah we were the house band at the Rat in Kenmore Square for 2 months on Thursday night's in 1982!! Everyone loved us from the bouncer's to the waitresses to the roided out door guy, who was nuts!!! There was a sound guy named Granny that had been there forever, but the trick was, you had to get the levels right at sound check and make sure he had your name on the fader's because by the time your second set and the bottle of Dewar's set in, you would sound like the worst garageband ever. And that was on us man not him, shit he dealt with a bunch of shitheads on a daily basis!
I understood, believe me, I had seen all the pre-maddonnas and I knew he was a good guy. So before our second set, I'd sit there and make sure all the fader's he'd marked so attentively during our sound check were good. You know what, they always were. He was a hell of a nice guy.
In our minds if you weren't good live, you didn't matter so that was important, and we used to kill it! I mean it was was crazy, how well rehearsed we were. But, and there is always a but, we were young and wide eyed, but very inexperienced.
I remember one night we were absolutely killing it, and the club owner was there. We were the third band, headliner's I guess, but our second set wasn't supposed to start until 1 am. Well the second band did an extremely short set, for whatever reason and we had a great crowd!! I am thinking ok we are going to crush this place!! Well, it was like 12:30 and I said to Granny, we'll go on now, so we don't lose the crowd, after all it was a Thursday!! He says to me, oh no, you guys can't go on until 1:15, because you could play until 2 am back then. I was livid!!! I said we'll lose the crowd, even offered to play a double set, we'll just repeat the first set, because we only had maybe 23 songs. Half the people in there weren't there for the first set anyway, so what do we have to lose? I'll never forget Granny's face when he walked up to me and said, no the owner doesn't want you to go on until 1:15. My heart sunk, we had 200 people in a club ready to rock but by the time we went on after 45 minutes of waiting, we had maybe 20 people, and the club owner and Granny.
Well it was probably the best set we had ever played and no one saw it because of the owner of The Rat!! But he sat there with his girlfriend laughing and smiling!! I wanted to paste my Telecaster across his forehead, but hey, he was the boss. It was a shame, I still have a cassette tape of that performance recorded in the audience by my brother, who covered a cassette recorder with my jean jacket!!! It still to this day is riveting!! Too bad no one heard it. Life as a musician, with no juice is really tough. But we were far from through...........

So here we are in Hyde Park, over the Pixie Cinema a one trick pony!! But it didn't matter we were rock musicians and we played original music and we were calling everyday to get booked at The Rat, or Cantones, or Bunratty's. I am from Boston so that's the clubs. The first guy I bump into is this guy named Hoffman, can't remember his first name but he was booking gigs at this place called the Underground over in Allston. I'll never forget it, it was in the basement of this quasi college dormitory! Probably a BU or Northeastern dorm, who knows?  I gave him this shitty 4 track tape of 3 songs and he books us!! We were thrilled, holy shit, we've made it we were finally playing out!! So he books us on a Wednesday night in November, great right? Well there is like 3 bands playing that night and we were slotted for the middle slot, 2 sets each in rotation. I was on top of the world!! Well the HEADLINER, uh hum uh hum, that night was supposed to be some hot up and coming band from Boston. Well during the load in, and all this monotony, the drummer or bassist, ah who gives a shit, gets pissed because, somebody doesn't do something and they start screaming they are not playing to the club personnel and they leave!!! So now we have 2 bands for the night and the crowd finds out the LA-TI-Da's have bagged out!!! Great right? So half of them leave, but for some reason a fair amount stayed. I went up to the other band, who seemed like a good enough bunch of guys and said, hey we'll have to play 3 sets a piece to get the evening full. Well the lead singer comes over and informs me, NO F ing way he's doing 2 sets and that's it!! So I say no problem then you only get 30% of the door we'll cover the rest!! He gets all up in arms, doesn't know what to do, but that is what went down. Anyway, since they were only going to do 2 sets I said well do them in a row and get the fuck out of here!! And that was our first gig. We did 4 sets god knows how, but we did and got $98 at the end of the night!! Wow, we were rock stars, but after that all the guys in the band said, hey you have to book the gigs and negotiate the terms, we want no part of this!!! I was like, are you shitting me? I write 90% of the songs and I have to do all the work? The answer was yeah, you do. Well alright alright I'll show these fucker's!!! And off we went into the late 70's Boston original rock scene. But you know what it was exhilarating!!!!

Hey so we were killing it playing on Abbey Lane for Christsakes!!! We had to be the next Beatles. Oh well we practiced in that gordforsaken cellar for 2 years straight. So clueless talking about playing out!!! That was the goal to "play out". What hte hell did that mean a high school dance playing covers, well shit, I wasn't very interested in that!!! A copycat band, great so I always thaought that meant you could play some chords and now you were a fucking manmade copy machine to sell records or justify the greatness of bands that had hits!! It was ludicrous!!! They were already hits and yeah I understand that 15 year old teenagers want to dance to Colour My World so they have the first chance to experience a boner, and really connect with some girl. But I had no use for it at all ! If I did a cover song I promised myself from that day forward it would not be a accurate cover song, what is the purpose of that? They already wrote it, it was a hit big fucking deal!!! If it can be done differently fine otherwise NO DEAL!!! write your own fucking songs, be your own person, get some balls. So the band like the first one broke up on Abbey Lane, but it was far from over, and far from being what it became. We rented a space in Hyde Park, it was the scene there, there was probably 16 other bands trying to do exactly, what I wanted to do!!! I loved it it was exhilarating, it was creative, it was art.I didn't care, it felt like home to me. We got this crazy drummer and this new lead guitar player who I had played one gig with way back when. We rented the space and we were on our way!!! It was treasured ground and a creative breakthrough. It was also organic, a lot of the bands although competing, became good friends. What an atmosphere. It was real.

My first real band wasn't even a band it was three guys who loved music, sometimes four if we could ever get the talented lazy guy to come down and play bass for us. Well the first really wierd thing was that we rehearsed at our drummer's house and he lived on a street, now hold it for a second but this is no shit, called Abbey Lane in Quincy, Mass. Hell go by that street today and that sign is up there so high on the lightpost it would take a acrobat to steal it!! But this was 1975 and we stole it a bunch!! Holy crap, it was mayhem. I faked my way into the band by telling some guy I worked with at Sears that I smashed my Strat!!! Who knew he loved the who right? well anyway we thought we were really going to make it, the only problem was we didn't have ant songs and we didn't really have anywhere to play. Perfect I guess for a bunch of wide eyed 15-16 year old kids. But oh no, that wasn't going to do for me. I had my sights set on much bigger things, but what were they? Who knew, but hey at least we were rehearsing and getting better in a basement. Little did we know there were tens of thousands of people doing the same thing, but it didn't matter we were doing our thing. Our thing was cool, well at least we thought it was. Oh to be young and carefree, how does Brian Wilson do it? MAAAAAAN....

I have always loved music. Even when I was five or six and saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I loved it. I liked it all Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra? Are you kidding me? Barbara Streisand's voice still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up! I grew in the 60's but I was jus a kid, sure I loved music, but my world was all about The Midnight Special and Don Kirschner's In Concert series! I will never forget seeing Grand Funk Railroad on that show, I was amazed and in awe. I saw Linda Ronstadt, voice of an angel, with I think most members of the Eagles backing her up, I was amazed.
My love of music started in the weirdest way. I was in a catholic grammar school, and we went and saw Godspell at the Wilbur theatre in Boston. I was in the seventh grade! I was blown away. From then on I wanted to play guitar and sing. So I begged my mom and dad to buy me a guitar and I would sign up to be in the folk masses, to play on the Saturday night folk mass on Saturday night at our parish! I also begged for lessons, so I could really understand how to play. All I wanted to do was play music, I was 11. So I got good enough to play in the weekly folk masses pretty quickly. We had some nun, I forget her name, teaching us these NEW catholic folk mass tunes, I felt I was part of a revolution. Hey I didn't know about John Lennon yet.
I remember I used to save my money and go to the cut out bin at Osco's Pharmacy and buy these cassettes. I bought them because the cover looked cool, or I heard some older guys taking about bands. So I bought a little shit cassette player and started buying these tapes. The first one I bought was a band called T-Rex, because the cover was so cool and I only had $1.99. I went home and fell in love with that stuff. I mean Jeepster and Bang-A-Gong were on that cassette, pure stuff. Then I bought an cassette from Led Zeppelin II, I thought that was even cooler. i mean don't get me wrong, I still loved The Monkees and The Partridge Family but this was another level. I mean all I wanted to be from when I was 11, was to be in a rock n roll band! I found my calling. Except where I lived that was a very unusual calling. i didn't care. my mother signed me up for guitar lessons every Saturday with this gut, who was probably 18 at the time. All he wanted to teach me was classical music, you know not three chords and the truth, it was actually scales on nylon strings!
I wanted to learn how to play, Are you Ready by Grand Funk and he was teaching me classical guitar, which was hard and legitimate, but far from my dream. So I stuck with it for a few years, learned my scales, learned chord inversions, blah, blah, blah. But when I heard the White Album for the first time or Hendrix, I knew that was it for me. I had a guitar from Lechmere's, called a Crucianello, the strings were 2 inches off the neck, impossible to play! I knew I had to get an electric guitar and an amp. But how do I do that? Well by then I was 14, so I had a pretty successful paper route and I was hell bent on getting an electric guitar. I remember, I had figured out the chords to I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane. My mother asked me to play it for my grandmother over the phone! Then I realized what performance meant, I refused and ran up to my room, as my mother explained, no he's really good. Something I would have to get over I guess to reach my dream. But, wow, was I good in my room all alone, how do you translate that? It wasn't going to be easy, I wasn't a natural performer, I didn't even know I could do it. All I knew is I loved it.