Lord of the thighs

DOUG SIMMONS — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:36:45 GMT

Aerosmith should throw in the towel
This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

To get into the Aerosmith concert at Cape Cod Coliseum last week you had to worm through a battalion of helmeted police, a few of them with German shepherds. One officer standing next to a trash barrel was popping the tops off confiscated six-packs. The rest milled around the doors, eyeballing the crowd, warding off gatecrashers, and demanding immediate apologies for wisecracks. As I neared the door a rowdy young man was arrested and led away. Not a minute had passed when a different scuffle began and another geek was handcuffed and taken to the nearby paddy wagon. Inside, hundreds of cantankerous, bleary-eyed louts thronged the halls and greeted each other with a punch in the arm, a slug in the kidney, or my favorite, a surprise hammerlock. Most of these guys, ranging in age from their mid-teens to early 20’s, wore a variation of the following: leather jacket, denim jacket, hooded sweatshirt, T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, workboots, (many of these were intentionally laceless, forcing the wearer into a distinctively graceless gait), and the occasional bandanna or crucifix (à la Ozzy Osbourne). The quarter or less of the crowd that was female looked the same. The clothing was faded and tattered, sometimes held together only by sewn-on patches boasting favorite bands. Judging from these patches, and the hand-painted vests or jackets (JIM MORRISON LIVES!) or T-shirts (on sale here with Aerosmith’s logo at $10 per, $14 for the long-sleeved), the following are among the revered acts of the Aerosmith crowd: Rush, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Foreigner, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Doors, Led Zeppelin…and Marvin Gaye (just kidding).

Aerosmith worked their way into this rank 10 years ago in the Midwest, the first area beyond New England the band cracked. Out there, the group’s bargain-basement Stones show delighted guys like me and my friends. We aped the band’s delinquent image, albeit with less mascara, and marveled at Joe Perry’s kerchunkachunka guitar and Steven Tyler’s gypsy sleaze and ripped-larynx singing. Looking back I have no regrets, but looking across Cape Cod Coliseum’s iceless hockey rink, my nostalgia soured. Were my friends and I this surly? Probably. When I found an empty wrapper on the floor that said Big Bomb Super Firecrackers I began to wonder. Were we this stupid? Most certainly. One of the first times I should have been arrested for drunken driving, Get Your Wings was in the tape deck. There was only one difference between the Cape crowd and my crew a decade ago: as a companion said of the 6500-strong mob, “If we nuked Iran tomorrow there aren’t three people in this place would care.” We would have cared, but only because when it came to war we had Vietnam to wise us up.

Mission completed

DOUG SIMMONS — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:08:17 GMT

The break-up of Mission of Burma
This article originally appeared in the January 18, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

This article originally appeared in the January 18, 1983 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Roger Miller, the lanky 30-year old guitarist in Mission of Burma who has been playing “in incredibly loud bands since I’ve been 12,” announced this week that he will be leaving the band after February. The reason: irreparable damage to his hearing. Before he moved to Boston from Ann Arbor in 1977, tests indicated his right ear had weakened. He tried to prevent further loss with earplugs, to no avail. Last summer he added rifle-range earmuffs, but those too failed – as a doctor told him, even skullbones transmit sound. Miller has three distinct hearing afflictions: decreased reception in both ears, distortion in the right, and tinnitus (or ringing) in both. “In September a middle-octave E appeared in my left ear,” he says, “and in December a C-sharp below that E formed. In my right ear, a slightly sharp E began in October. They’re forming fairly interesting chords that never leave. When it’s quiet at night, these notes are screaming.” In addition to suffering this discomfort, which gets much worse after a gig, Miller worries that he’s going to ruin his ability to tune pianos (one of the ways he’s earned a living). He says there was only one solution.

Specifically, Miller won’t perform live with the group, a quartet with three members on stage and tape manipulator Martin Swope at the soundboard. The band wants to record again, but vinyl itself can’t pay the bills. For the past two of the band’s four years, each member has been subsisting off shows: a monthly income of roughly $500 each. Waiters and cab drivers make more, but this is still no small feat for a local band on an indy record label. Like many of their peers on the indy-label/van-tour circuit (the Bongos, Bush Tetras, Pylon, Human Switchboard, Flipper, the Dead Kennedys, and Black Flag), Burma have nurtured a small but potent network of clubs, college stations, and fanzines across the country. Drummer Peter Prescott says Burma try to play their twist-and-maul barrage smart, but gut impulse comes first. “We never write music just for people to dance to or get on the radio.” This uncompromising stance makes mass acceptance difficult, and to win fans, the band crisscrossed the country for two years. In bigger cities (Washington, Atlanta, New Orleans, LA, Seattle, Detroit, and so on) they played for crowds of 200 to 400. In smaller cities (Lawrence, Kansas; Athens, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama) anywhere from five to 50 showed. But even these turnouts apparently increased sales of Burma’s records. According to Richard Harte, owner of the band’s label, Ace of Hearts, Burma’s first single, “Academy Fight Song”/“Max Ernst” (1980), sold 7500 copies; the EP, Signals, Calls, and Marches (1981), 11,000; and last year’s album, VS., 5000. Burma’s endurance scoffs at the platinum-or-pack-it-in logic of the record industry. By thriving on an economics of scarcity, Burma blazed a trail that interconnects all the underground scenes in America and Canada.