A Bitch Magnet’s Ode to Boston, When Indie Was King
Sooyoung drove and I ride shotgun, sneakers on the dashboard, my seat reclined as far as it could against the wall of guitars and amps in the backseat of my mom’s blue Toyota Camry, as we listed to a tape I’d made from a bunch of new 7’s and compilation tracks: Green River, Rapeman, Honor Role, and Spacemen 3’s seventeen-minute-long cover of the 13th Floor Elevators’ ‘Rollercoaster,’ which no one else in Bitch Magnet liked at all. It was late August of 1988. We were on our way to our first show in Boston and savoring the last dregs of that lovely summer between junior and senior year. Orestes, who’d already graduated, was living in Boston, working at a store that sold maps. Our first record, Star Booty, which we were putting out ourselves, would come out in a couple of weeks. In six months I’d turn twenty-one. Few things are as grand as being a young American male road-tripping on a glorious day in August, and I may even have realized this at the time.
A few hastily dubbed cassettes of Star Booty had drummed up enough interest to get us a gig and some college radio airplay in Boston. A DJ from Harvard’s station wanted to interview us once we arrived. It wasn’t that we were excited by these first tendrils of attention reaching our way because we thought they meant that untold treasures awaited—that we’d soon sell tons of records and that fleshpots were quivering and ready, throughout the nation, across the world. That wasn’t it at all. We were excited because the fact of anyone, anywhere, listening was amazing. That we’d been invited to play in Boston, by some guy we didn’t know and had never met, felt like someone had found our message in a bottle. And in a sense he had, given the crates of demo tapes and records that every big-city booking agent watched their weary mailman haul in each day.
We had no idea whether anyone would come see us in Boston, though I sensed some minor excitement stirring, a hint or a tingle that the show wouldn’t be like playing to five people in Youngstown, Ohio, or an empty room in Atlanta. But not even that mattered. Boston was a new city to us, and, new to the whole experience, we thrilled to each microdevelopment. I looked out the window at the shimmer of a late-summer afternoon, the sun lighting each leaf while we sped through some placeless place in Connecticut or central Massachusetts. I probably lit a cigarette. We still smoked. That, too, was fun, that summer.
As it often happened, our Boston show was actually in Cambridge, at the Middle East, a tiny room just off Central Square with surprisingly good sound. Billy Ruane, a local legend who booked shows there, had tracked us down and set it up. “Local legend” is, of course, a terrible and overused term, but anyone from Boston—even anyone in a band that came through Boston—will testify that he deserved it. Billy combed his hair up, wore loafers with no socks, and looked exactly like a drunk preppie, which is what he was. He had the pinkish skin you see on Irish guys who don’t really need to shave. I always picture him in a partially buttoned white shirt, shirttail out, long before that was a common look, under a blazer or a brownish knee-length overcoat. One term was so frequently, and accurately, applied to his appearance that, were you to type his name into Google, I half expect autofill would offer up “billy ruane disheveled.” Billy was notorious for jumping around at shows in an exuberant, flailing way, and I highly recommend that you go to YouTube and watch him dance. I was told there was family money, and a lot of it. Much later I learned that his dad had done well enough to warrant being described as an investor-slash-philanthropist. Billy’s day job was guarding rare books at Harvard’s Widener Library—really—but he lived to drink and go to shows and movies every night.
Sooyoung and I drove straight to Orestes’s apartment, laughed and hugged him at the door, lugged our gear up a few flights of stairs to the sweltering attic where he kept his drums, stripped off our shirts—that again, but it was just too damn hot—set up as quickly as we could, and started ripping through our songs. We hadn’t played together for several weeks, so having these guys behind me again felt like holding a jackhammer between my legs. After we’d slammed through a few songs, Sooyoung had to stop. He was laughing too hard to play, because it was so much fun, maybe more fun than ever, and it sounded even better than it ever had before. Afterward Orestes, who could drink like a camel, got us started on a mostly full bottle of tequila in his currently favored rugby-guy fashion: pour the booze and ginger ale into a rocks glass, cover the glass with a towel, place your hand on top, slam the glass on a countertop, then slurp down the foam just after the BOOM of impact. I weighed maybe 130 pounds, and I doubt that Sooyoung weighed more, but the three of us drank until the bottle was empty. Then we went to visit some friends, but neither Sooyoung nor I were much good for conversation that night.
Everything about Boston was new to Sooyoung and me: its neighborhoods of shingled Queen Annes and corner spas, its myriad insularities and strangenesses (like calling convenience stores spas), the omnipresence of college radio. In 1988 it was almost without question the American city that had built the best infrastructure for underground rock bands. There were a shocking number of great record stores for a town its size, like Newbury Comics and Mystery Train and In Your Ear, all of them encyclopedic about the latest stuff. Giveaway magazines like The Noise and Boston Rock focused on local bands, and college radio stations at Harvard and MIT and Emerson and pretty much every other school obsessively followed this music. Boston was the only city where bands made “radio tapes,” cassette-only demos you passed off to local stations. They got airplay—in some cases, lots of airplay—and because people actually listened to these stations, every local band made them. The stores and stations and clubs and media that supported Boston bands, most of which were unknown anywhere else, fed off one another and created an ecosystem sufficiently self-reinforcing to make Billy Ruane and other superfans, like the wannabe impresario known as the Count, into something approaching local celebrities.
You needed the right kind of eyes to find bands like us in virtually every other American city, but the line between underground and mainstream was much more permeable in Boston. (The city was unusually European in that respect.) Though it may have been a bit too comfortable being a band in an affluent, welcoming college town. Once you separated out the city’s hardcore scene, Boston circa 1988 was breeding lots of unthrilling guitar pop—Salem 66, Big Dipper, Scruffy the Cat, Blake Babies, Dumptruck—and many Boston bands lacked the sense of opposition, the chip on the shoulder, that fueled the psyches and ambitions and music of bands everywhere else. A different strain of Boston Disease took root in Austin, Texas, where it was so easy for weirdo musicians to scrape by on local gigs, local kudos, and part-time jobs that, in the late eighties, many of its more ambitious musicians fled to New York and Chicago. If you asked why, many said the same thing: they feared they’d just coast in Austin forever.
At the Middle East we played with a band fronted by Kenny Chambers, the guitarist in Moving Targets, one of the few bands everyone in Bitch Magnet really liked. That night, though, Kenny sang for a band that did Stooges covers, billed as “The (Fucking) Stooges.” Evan Dando, long before he was a heartthrob and longer before he did too many drugs, was on the bill, too, performing a solo set of Eagles covers, which he sang while drumming, Don Henley−style. Apparently jokey cover bands were a thing in Boston. Kenny came over and chatted with us while we devoured a spread of Middle Eastern grub from the restaurant next door, and acted like he’d heard of us, thrilling the fanboy in me. We met the Harvard radio DJ before the show, too, and when she realized it was us, her eyes widened and her hand fluttered up to cover her open mouth, and I thought, Shit—someone’s actually excited to meet us.
My hangover from the tequila had practically paralyzed me, and I was barely back to being human by showtime. There were a few technical fuckups that night, and I probably broke a string or two, because that’s what always happened, but the crowd was excited—there was a crowd, for once—and it rubbed off on us, and it became a great night.
I soon started a brief dalliance with the Harvard radio DJ. When I stayed with her when we played her hometown of Youngstown in early September, or when she came to visit me at Oberlin one weekend there-after, I stole her Grim Reaper T- shirt—the laughably awful metal band, not the guy who kills everyone—which I would wear onstage into the twenty-first century. I had to steal it. I still have it today. It’s an absolutely perfect artifact. Not just because it brilliantly encapsulates the idiocy of most eighties metal, but because it’s a reminder of how easily dreams of big-time commercial success could curdle. Black-light poster colors of purple and bright yellow, silk-screened onto the deep black of a half-polyester fabric. The front depicts a skeleton in a hooded cloak in a jail cell, bony hands curling around a prison bar and smoke seeping from ol’ Grim’s open mouth, over the legend lust for freedom. The back displays a soul-crushing litany of fifth- and sixth-tier markets through which the band death-marched for over six weeks in 1987, towns known only to their residents, places no band ever wants to see on its itinerary: Cookstown, New Jersey. Pasadena, Maryland. Salina, Kansas. Papillion, Nebraska. Lawton, Oklahoma. Some years later our friends in Codeine crossed paths on tour with an obscure Seattle band called Sweet Water as Sweet Water flogged an instantly forgotten major-label album and slogged through their version of this tour. In the lyrics for Codeine’s “Loss Leader,” you hear that band’s story: alone on the road, utterly abandoned by their record label and everyone else, all but left to die alongside some obscure highway, as the song sadly repeats, far from home, far from home.
In 1988 you couldn’t imagine the sorry fate of a band like Sweet Water, which lived in the right zip code to get scooped up in the post-Nirvana major-label feeding frenzy. Nor could the fate be foretold of an oddball band we met in Chicago that summer, with whom we’d soon play shows in Ohio. They had few fans, performed their strange, tough, and beautiful songs while wearing elaborate velvet and lamé suits, and in general acted as if they alone were in on a colossal joke. Urge Overkill’s guitarist, Nate Kaatrud, and its bassist, Ed Roeser, both came from small towns in Minnesota, though both seemed far too weird and knowing for it: rightly or wrongly, I always sensed some savvy lurking beneath their generally dazed and stoney mien. Nate was a rare lady-killer in our midst, tall, rail-thin and angular, with sharply turned cheekbones and giant blue eyes. Rock-star looks, in the sense that rock stars often have odd and exaggerated features. He was a talented graphic artist, though he was too lazy to do much with said skill. He improvised absurd asides in any situation. Once, in Pittsburgh, we watched a confused drunk wallow on the sidewalk outside the Bloomfield Bridge Tavern—the sort of old dive bar that got colonized by punk kids putting on shows, to the bafflement of the native clientele. When the guy unzipped his fly and started reaching within, Nate immediately urged, “No, no, no, no. Let’s keep Li’l Elvis in Graceland.” If he liked your set, he wouldn’t come up and say “great show” or any such standard nonsense, but he’d fix you with a bug-eyed stare and enthuse, “You smoked my butt!” People often thought Nate led the band, since he played guitar and was the most charismatic. But Ed sang most of their songs, while playing rock-solid and tuneful bass, and I secretly liked him better. He looked nothing like a rock star: short, chunky, with long hair that went stringy, not lank like Nate’s. He often seemed bewildered, but if you knew how to listen, something ultraperceptive lurked in his observations. Like this: “You’ve got to waste a lot of fucking time to come up with something like Urge Overkill.”
It feels appropriate to end this chapter this way. On October 26, 2010, a friend found Billy Ruane slumped in front of his computer, dead of a heart attack. He was fifty-two. All his zaniness and alcoholism were eventually recognized as symptoms of bipolar disorder. He’d been in and out of treatment, was by all accounts very casual about taking his meds, and in general never took proper care of himself. I last saw him at a Wipers show at New York’s Irving Plaza in the late nineties. He was dancing his spastic Snoopy dance in front of the stage, as he always did, and though it had been years since we’d spoken, and though in fact we barely knew each other, when I tapped his shoulder, he recognized me, grabbed my cheeks, and kissed me on the lips. I miss him.
