There’s always a lot of chatter about the “underground,” generally the mythical rock ‘n’ roll underground, that credible, real music scene that exists somewhere deep under the mainstream, where all the cool bands hang and all the cool kids go to rock.
The Underground that existed in Allston – a student-centered area of Boston – was really was underground. It was a rock club forged out of a failing pool table-bar called Sweet Virginia’s and it was around for only a moment in post-punk time, Feb. 1980-June 1981. And, yes, it hosted key bands of the then-underground from England (the Cure, OMD, Au Pairs, Bauhaus, Brian Brain, New Order) from New York (Human Switchboard, Lydia Lunch, Bush Tetras) from the Midwest (the Suburbs), the south (Pylon), the west coast (Snakefinger, the Mutants) and most certainly from Boston itself (Mission of Burma, the Neats, the Lyres, Peter Dayton, Bound & Gagged. People in Stores and others on the local art-punk indie, Propeller Records.).
Peter Hook remembers the Underground. Well, sort of.
“Eh, I’ve got a tape of that,” says the former Joy Division/New Order bassist. “Someone filmed it.” It was New Order’s second gig in the US. Initially, they were coming in May 1980 as Joy Division, but singer Ian Curtis having hanged himself on the eve of that tour. “I have it on the Joy Division itinerary,” recalls Hook. “The proposed tour.”
They came Sept. 30. It was a short set, just seven songs, all three guys sharing lead vocals because no knew who the lead singer was to be yet. They were all “trying out,” and trying to fill impossible shoes. (Guitarist Bernard Sumner sang “In a Lonely Place,” “Truth” and “Homage”; Hook sang “Dreams Never End” and Mesh”; drummer Stephen Morris sang “Cries and Whispers,” with Hook and Morris sharing the as-yet-unreleased “Ceremony.”) “In a Lonely Place.”
“I do remember that we had to sleep on the promoter’s floor,” Hook tells me, “and we had cockroaches running over us while we fucking slept. The swine! Good character building stuff, though. It was the longest night in my life. We couldn’t afford a hotel. We had so many adventures on that first American tour as New Order. It was like that film where the family goes on holiday and everything that could possibly go wrong did. It was hilarious. Ian must have been pissing himself laughing.”
Jim Coffman, the then 19-year-old promoter/booker/manager, remembers, too, sort of. “Everybody else slept on the mats in my loft,” says Coffman. “Maybe they did, too.” Because New Order’s equipment and van had just been stolen two days earlier in New York, Coffman had to rent gear, which knocked down the band’s take to $300.
The Cure probably walked away with the biggest haul, $800. For the customer, if you weren’t on the guest list – and many were – it would cost you between $3 and $5 to get in, the Cure commanding that top dollar.
“My fondest memory of that club was the Cure show, which was kismet,” says Daved Hild, who was in the Girls prior to the Underground’s start, played the Underground a couple of times “solo on accordion with various aggregations of weirdos. The Cure were great and Jim had the sound system from the stage piped in to the other rooms there. A few beers and it was other-worldly.”
“Bands would come in with their riders,” Coffman says, “and we no room for anything. They’d pull up with trucks and gear and had to deal with it. The Factory bands especially. The worst was New York’s Polyrock with all their equipment. Certain bands got pissed off but most accepted it once they knew what it was. There were a few financial baths, but not many.”
Boston University owned the building at 1110 Commonwealth Ave. and leased the space that became the Underground to Henry and Carmen Vara’s restaurant and nightclub group.
“The Underground was my idea,” says Coffman, who’d been working as a waiter at another Vara joint, Our House. “They were losing money at Sweet Virginia’s. I’d been hanging out at clubs for years, and they gave me a shot. They didn’t know what was going to happen. They were pleased, obviously, and were taken by surprise.”
I wrote this in the Boston Globe in September, 1980, as part of a club wrap-up: “The small, L-shaped Underground is one of the latest new wave bastions. While the sound is sometimes constrained, the club has a good, unpretentious, non-trendy feeling to it. A plus is that you can escape the volume and talk by moving to the far corner of the ‘L.’”
Of course, this could also make it difficult to see the band should you want that experience.
The people who went, they (we) felt we were in the right place at the right time. “There wasn’t that weird, codified ‘punk’ dress code. Jimmy never wanted those types, really.” says Michael Whittaker, who handled most of the sound duties along with Mark “Bonehead” Davis. ““It was inclusive and front-thinking,” It seemed that almost everyone there either wanted to make shit or to help other people make shit happen.
“We had a couple fights, a couple of incidents,” says Coffman, “and of course Billy Ruane causing a ruckus. He came on the scene and it was like ‘Who is this guy? Slam dance in a small club?’ It freaks people out.” (There are many similar stories about the late scenester-promoter, Ruane, who became a good friend of mine and much of the Boston rock ‘n’ roll world.)
The Underground was not allowed to have signage for whatever building code reason and thus had a thunderbolt over the entrance way. It was open seven nights a week, with two or three bands a night. The ceiling was 12-feet high, but the drop-down ceiling made it 10. The stage initially was a step up from the floor, but they doubled it to two. Coffman says legal capacity was 125, but “we could do 200.” And certainly did some nights.
Mission of Burma was the opening night headliner and liked to think of the club as a home base. “It’s a weird loss,” says drummer Peter Prescott. “It’s far more important than many people think, at least in Boston terms. At that point, any band that was noisy, art-punky, not the garage-punk, but the other side of the punk coin, was generally not welcome anywhere. For us to get a show early on, at the Rat it was really difficult. The Underground was a godsend.
“Punk was mutating into post-punk and people were starting to get a little more open-minded around the same time. And that place was a home for that. It was where we got an audience and if not for Jim Coffman [who went on to manage Burma for a spell] and the Underground, who knows if we would have gotten an audience? We played with tons of bands that didn’t sound like us, but had the same dilemma like Christmas, CCCP-TV, Dangerous Birds, People in Stores.
“I remember it was not after that long that we felt that was a home, a comfortable place to be. The size and sound emphasized interaction with the audience. Everyone was ready for the music booked there. We all loved Buzzcocks, the Clash and the Damned, but where is this stuff gonna go? We’re not gonna hang it up now. Everyone was ready for the bands that flourished. It coincided with that moment in time where punk rock started mutating. Audience and bands really bonded heavily.”
“It was a very young crowd,” recalls singer-guitarist Peter Dayton who had led the late-’70s Boston punk band La Peste. Dayton had shifted course with his new group, the Peter Dayton Band. “Things were shifting away from hard punk rock – at least I thought so – and becoming more new wave-y and experimental. The Underground made things new again.”
Martin Atkins – former drummer for Public image, Ltd., Killing Joke and Pigface – remembers fronting his post-Pil band Brian Brain at the club, prefacing it with the reality that there was a lot of drinking in those days. The first he mentions is “wood paneling, like in my dad’s basement,” and echoes Prescott’s sentiment about its vibe: “My memories from the Underground are that it was like safe home place. It wasn’t threatening. It felt welcoming and supporting of our development.”
When the club first opened, Thalia Zedek – you know her as singer-guitarist in Dangerous Birds, Uzi, Come, etc. – applied for a job. “A couple of my friends already worked there,” she says, “and suggested that I apply. I came in and filled out an application, I was only 18 at the time so I lied about my age. The manager interviewed me and as I was leaving, he called out ‘Wait, I think that you dropped something.’ It turns out that I had somehow dropped my driver’s license on the floor. He looked at it and just kind of shook his head. I didn’t get the job but I was welcomed back to play and drink there many times.” Eric Martin got a part-time job, too. “I did sound and cleaned the club, mopped up for $50.” His new band, the Neats, also played started playing the club and did so every couple of weeks. They, in fact, played the chaotic club-closing set.
Zedek played the Underground with her early band, White Women. “I remember it having really low ceilings and always being a bit damp,” she says. “Peter Murphy’s head was brushing the ceiling when Bauhaus played there. It was in a basement and pretty dank, but it was a super fun place to play. It was a small scene back then, so the staff and the bands all knew each other intimately. I remember the Underground as being particularly supportive of women musicians, which was also really different and cool.”
Coffman booked the all Factory Records bands, via his contact with the New York point-person Ruth Polski: A Certain Ratio, New Order, OMD, Delta 5. This carried over for Coffman when the Underground closed and Coffman and Whittaker took their skills to Streets, a club owned by Digney Fignus up Commonwealth Avenue, just past Harvard Avenue. Where the Underground was underground, Streets was at street level.
Coffman recalls Factory Records owner Tony Wilson coming with one of his bands – he thinks it was A Certain Ratio – and “we had to bring in a 400-pound converter or transformer from UK power. I would try to warn them. We can’t do your full production. OMD was the worst. It was 1:30 and they hadn’t gone on, still checking their mics, and we had a 2 a.m. closing time. They went on, but not very long, and they didn’t like me very much.”
. “The most amazing thing about the Underground,” Whittaker says, “is that it was the focal point for all these seemingly disconnected threads of the US post-punk mishegash. The outré bands like Steve Stain and Ground Zero oozing and colliding full force into desperately searing youth that bubbled out that cauldron that the London and New York City scenes were stoking.”
“I remember right before the Underground opened and the Boston Film and Video Foundation had a video party. It was just videos of Wire, the Damned and Sid Vicious doing ‘My Way.’ Maybe 100 people there, but going and sharing a batshit notion of something. Finally, for fucks sake! Something new that wasn’t bogged down by the ‘FM’ crowd. What was special is that not a one of us knew what we were doing. Jimmy had never really booked a club. I had never really done sound. The Vara brothers had Rick O’Donnell watching the bar because we didn’t know much about that side of things.
“It was about the music! Jimmy would obsess over the mix tapes and only wanted the newest and coolest shit to be played. What was special is that cool bands that we didn’t really like could open for bigger acts because they “fit,” not because they owed us or vice versa. We had plenty of ‘uncool’ bands play there.”
Fifteen months after it opened the landlord pulled the plug. “There was a culture clash. B.U. would fuck with us” says Coffman, of the Vara brothers and their lease. Above the club were B.U. dorms. “They couldn’t kick us out ‘til later. I hated B.U. as a student and I hated B.U. as a club guy. They came in and bought out the lease.”
I was there that final night. The Neats headlined at bill that also had the Dark, People in Stores and CCCP-TV, and, no shock, the reveling and mourning took on a destructive nature. Cherry bombs down the toilet, bathrooms flooded, holes punched in walls, the suspended ceiling came down.
The Neats’ final two songs? Two very appropriate choices, their own “Another Broken Dream” and the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”
“It was crazy,” says singer-guitarist Martin, adding there’s a pretty good chance the closing songs they selected pertained to the club’s situation. “There’s a cassette of that show. During ‘Another Broken Dream; you can hear the ceiling coming down the cassette tape When we did ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me,’ I remember standing on the stage looking and seeing someone shoot straight up and pull down a tile! And then everyone was going up to get tiles. I remember thinking I should be scared – this is crazy – but I wasn’t.”
After it closed, the Underground space was converted into a laundromat. And, not that it matters much, but now the space at 1110 Commonwealth is a dormitory for CATS Academy, a prep school.
The sounds, they’ve been long entombed in that faceless edifice. The memories? The memories remain. Well, sort of. After 36 years, we’re all just doing our best that way.
– Jim Sullivan, Writer/Host, Boston Talk Rock
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