Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  The band also took great inspiration from pointy-headed punks Pere Ubu, and Swope’s noises and tape effects also had a direct lineage to Ubu synthesizer player Allen Ravenstine’s atonal, arhythmic sonic commentary. Swope’s tapes also had intellectual appeal—they recalled the cut-up approach of avant-garde literature; it was also a modernist idea to emphasize that what was coming out of the PA was not a direct representation of what was actually happening onstage. Indeed, even Conley, Miller, and Prescott had little idea what they sounded like to the audience as they played.

  Swope didn’t go to rehearsals since the band didn’t have a proper PA system; besides, he didn’t like going down to the basement because of the exposed fiberglass on the walls. So he was a different kind of member, but a member all the same. “We split our money four ways,” says Conley. “It was kind of novel, looking back. I can’t remember us thinking, ‘Oh, this is kind of neat having somebody who’s not onstage.’ It’s just sort of the way it mutated.”

  Punk’s idea of maximizing minimalism ran deep in Burma. There was no second guitar to carry on the chords while someone else played a melody line, so everyone, even Prescott, had to be inventive. The idea was “strip it down as far as you can go, then do as much as you can possibly do with it,” according to Miller. “In fact, do more than you can possibly do with it.” Even Miller’s guitar was a statement: a lowly, one-pickup Fender Lead One. Unlike the Les Paul or the Stratocaster, the Lead One had no rock legend enshrouding it. “They were like Chevrolets,” says Miller. “Get rid of one Chevrolet, you get another one.”

  Locals loved the band from the start. “We were obviously destined for something,” says Miller. “People knew that right away.” The hip local music paper Boston Rock did a lengthy interview with the band even before they had a record out and mentioned Burma in practically every other issue; since Boston Rock was published by Newbury Comics, Boston’s leading alternative record store, the synergy was fairly powerful.

  Boston college radio was far ahead of the rest of the country in terms of supporting its local independent bands. The town had a unique tradition of “radio tapes,” recordings made exclusively for local college stations. Some of those tapes became very popular, becoming hit singles you couldn’t buy. Burma scored a major coup when Peter Dayton of Boston’s reigning kings of cool La Peste produced a radio tape of Conley’s “Peking Spring” and Miller’s “This Is Not a Photograph.” There were so few bands that when something good came along, especially something local, it received copious airplay. MIT’s WMBR loved “Peking Spring” and it became the station’s most played song in 1979.

  Had Burma started a few years later, the song might have been the band’s first single, but in 1979 the possibilities for manufacturing, distributing, and marketing independently released singles were dauntingly limited. By the time the band found a label, they felt “Peking Spring” was too old—“It was already a hit,” says Miller. “It had already lived its life, at least in Boston.”

  Rick Harte had started Ace of Hearts Records in 1978. He tooled around town in a spiffy little Volvo sports car, living beyond the means of his modest job at a hi-fi store. “Rick had money,” explains Jim Coffman, who later managed Mission of Burma. “He didn’t have to worry about a lot of things.” Harte didn’t have cutting-edge taste, but he could read people’s reactions to bands very well. He was a familiar figure in the clubs and had the money, the talent, and the inclination to record bands. And on top of it, people just liked him. “He’s just a really good guy,” says Prescott. “I couldn’t say a bad word about him if someone had a knife to my throat.”

  Harte’s specialty was well-produced, tightly played recordings, with great stereo separation and a walloping bottom end; Harte’s covers, printed on expensive heavy stock, were strikingly attractive—everything was done with meticulous care. “No other bands at the time approached it like that,” Harte says. “It was rehearsed and discussed and planned and then we’d go to the studio to the recording session and then another night to do the overdubs and then only one mix a night, never any more. It was the way to achieve the ultimate result.”

  “Rick Harte had a real aesthetic as far as the music, the packaging, the way the records were recorded—he was meticulous,” says Gerard Cosloy, then a Boston area teen with a fanzine and a talent for talking his way into nightclubs. “Those records sound amazing, they look amazing. He set a standard that we’re still trying to live up to today.”

  Harte was by no means prolific—his painstaking approach precluded that—but Ace of Hearts had released a glittering string of singles by Boston bands, including the Neighborhoods, the Infliktors, and Classic Ruins, all of whom played fairly conventional rock music, even though it was considered “new wave.”

  After hearing the buzz about Burma, Harte went to check them out. At first he didn’t understand what the fuss was about. “The first time that I saw them,” he says, “I was going, ‘Gee, most of that didn’t make much sense to me.’ ” But he did like two songs and, figuring two songs make a single, he approached Burma about recording.

  Harte had just released the Neighborhoods’ “Prettiest Girl” single, which went on to become a huge local hit, selling a still astounding ten thousand copies. The single was Harte’s very persuasive calling card. “If you want to do that with us,” Harte offered Burma, “we’ll do it.” It was an offer Burma couldn’t refuse. In Boston, unless you could imagine being signed to a major label, Harte was virtually the only game in town. “People say, ‘How do you get a recording contract?’ and I don’t know,” says Miller. “This guy came, said he’ll record us. That’s how you do it. That’s one of the reasons we went along with him—here’s the only guy in town who has a label and he wants to do a record. That sounds great. As simple as that.”

  They worked slavishly, recording late at night, when studio rates went down, until daylight. Harte’s method was utterly painstaking, layering electric guitars, acoustic guitars, and feedback. Unaccustomed to the rigors of recording, various band members would occasionally have “psycho-moods” and storm out of the studio. At one point they trekked up to a studio on a Vermont mountainside and mixed the song “Max Ernst” for two stressful days, completing the mix only in the last of the twenty-eight hours of studio time they’d rented. To top it off, they wound up scrapping that mix and using one they’d done earlier.

  Like so many first-time-recording bands, Burma succumbed to studio rapture, where insecurity, the allure of technical tricks, and obsessive fussing can make a recording far from what the band originally intended. “It was sort of ironic for the first single of this noisy, furious machine,” Prescott says. “What came out was probably a lot more polite than we approved of. But Rick’s input may have made it palatable enough that people did get into it.”

  “It didn’t sound anything like the band,” Miller says, adding with a chuckle, “And if it sounded like the band, you know, we might not have been so popular.”

  But even though Harte’s recording shaved down many of Burma’s sharp edges, it was still a raw blast of noise at a time when synth-pop bands like Martha and the Muffins, the Cure, and Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark were considered edgy. One reviewer called the arty new wave pulse of “Max Ernst” “raw power played to the edge of control. You expect the song to explode or collapse.” Asked why he chose to write a song about the painter Max Ernst, Miller replied, “He got accepted eventually, but when he started he was involved with Dada, which is about as against the grain as you can get. After years of bashing his head against the wall, something happened.” The interviewer wondered aloud if this was a theme song for Burma. “Maybe,” Miller said. “Everything’s a theme song.” In fact, it would turn out to be quite an apt theme song.

  Another theme song for many who heard the record was Conley’s “Academy Fight Song”—the kind of song one plays three times a day for weeks on end (as a Minneapolis kid named Paul Westerberg did). “And I’m not-not-not-not your academy,” Con
ley sings to a needy friend over the song’s huge, anthemic chorus. Conley never liked to talk about lyrics and was typically evasive when asked if the song was angry. “Yeah, pretty angry,” Conley said. “It’s just a big conceit. A metaphor.” He still won’t elaborate on the song’s basis. “I find the whole notion of talking about lyrics very embarrassing,” Conley explains.

  The Boston radio scene was then fairly open—local bands got played on even the large commercial stations, mostly because many of the DJs had come from the area’s numerous free-form college stations. In fact, the program director of Boston rock stalwart WBCN, Oedipus, had hosted what many consider the first all-punk radio show in the U.S. during his days at MIT’s station. “Academy” won WBCN’s Juke Box Jury competition three weeks in a row, beating out bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones. As a result, the classic “Academy Fight Song” / “Max Ernst” single, released in June ’80, sold out its 7,500-copy initial pressing in weeks, something very few independent punk singles had done before.

  Still, Conley was working for the Census Bureau, Prescott was moving cars around a Pontiac dealership, Miller was tuning pianos and busking on the Boston subway, and Swope, as he told Boston Rock in typically enigmatic fashion, found “money on the ground.”

  But Burma had a lot of things going for them. They won Boston Rock magazine’s awards for best local band and best local single. They’d already opened for Gang of Four, the Cure, and the Buzzcocks and struck up friendships and artistic affinities with all of them. Prescott even bragged that the Fall told them Burma was “the only band they could stand.”

  And the underground field wasn’t as crowded as it would later become. Back in 1981 the same faces would show up at indie rock shows, even by widely differing bands—that April the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra sang encores with Burma on two successive nights—so attending a show wasn’t just being in a room with a bunch of other people; it was more like the latest meeting of a tiny club. A very tight community developed, and enthusiasm about a band could spread like wildfire, albeit within a small forest. That’s how “Academy,” a record on a tiny regional independent label, got named one of the ten best singles of 1980 by the influential New York Rocker, along with songs by the likes of the Clash, Elvis Costello, and the Pretenders.

  Harte wasn’t just the record label—he worked closely with his bands, putting in endless hours choosing material, working out arrangements, doing extensive preproduction, even tweaking amplifiers. He was manager, mentor, number one fan, and more. And he was definitely ambitious. “A band should only think national,” he told Boston Rock. “Selling records to a local market is a hobby, like making records for your friends. It doesn’t justify the cost and effort.” But because he spent so much time on the music itself, Harte didn’t have much time for the business end, and his distribution and promotion left a lot to be desired, even by the standards of the time.

  There just wasn’t a lot Harte could do about sales anyway. Being one of the relatively few indie labels in the country, Ace of Hearts didn’t have the clout to make sure manufacturing, distribution, and retail kept up with demand. Simply getting the records into stores was difficult. In Boston Harte simply brought them to the shops himself. There were some national distributors, but the chain stores didn’t carry this type of music; business was confined to a small number of individually owned (or “mom-and-pop”) stores, and even they didn’t buy much American indie music because there was little support from college radio, never mind commercial radio, at the time.

  Harte says his distributors were very good about paying him as long as he had another hot release upcoming. “You can get paid,” he explains, “if you have something they want.” But often distributors didn’t pay Harte for the records they had sold. Harte would threaten not to send them anything else, but it was an empty threat—the fact was Ace of Hearts needed to get its records out there more than the distributor did.

  Mission of Burma’s saving grace was its unfailing appeal to the press, who found the music easy to write about; an added bonus was that the band members, all articulate and very genial, were good interviews. But there was very little national press about the underground: Spin didn’t exist yet; Rolling Stone covered the music only sporadically. New York Rocker’s circulation was limited at best, Trouser Press didn’t last, and Creem was vainly struggling to stay afloat. Fanzines weren’t nearly as plentiful as they would become in a few years—the home computer was still in its infancy, and even photocopiers weren’t as accessible as they soon would be. Pretty much all American indie bands had going for them was word of mouth and touring, and even those things were hard to mobilize.

  Compounding Mission of Burma’s problem was the fact that their music was difficult to grasp on first listen—there was a lot of chaos to get through before the pop elements emerged. Plenty of people didn’t bother to give the band a second chance, but others were won over by the band’s determination. “People would hear us and it wouldn’t make much sense,” says Conley, “but we were doing it with such conviction that they would give it another shot.”

  Many people who liked the band’s relatively well-groomed records were often in for a rude shock when they saw the band live, where they were another beast altogether. For instance, in the typical buildup into a chorus, most bands would play in rhythmic unison, but not Mission of Burma—typically, Miller’s guitar would be squealing, Prescott would be playing what amounted to a four-bar drum solo, Conley would be playing some melodic figure, and Swope would be making some freakish noise. What ordinarily would be a straightforward moment of tension was instead a few seconds of bracing chaos.

  But what really stuck out was the volume—huge, body-shaking mountains of it that made the band’s sound literally palpable. Despite his ear problems, Miller had his guitar cranked up so high that all kinds of phantom harmonics ricocheted around the room, wringing jaw-dropping textures from his instrument. Conley’s bass also assumed gargantuan proportions, while Prescott’s booming drums made a sound like the hammer of the gods. Combined with Swope’s unearthly tape loop sounds, the effect was simply overwhelming.

  MISSION OF BURMA AT BOSTON’S PUNK BASTION THE RATHSKELLAR, CIRCA 1981.

  DIANE BERGAMASCO

  “Why is there so much faith in this band?” an interviewer asked in July ’80. “I think we’re real original,” Conley replied. Punk had largely been modeled on older styles of rock—even the Ramones recalled the Beach Boys and Phil Spector. Burma was more modern—they played fractured, discordant music with no clear reference points. And rather than girls and cars, they sang about surrealist painters. It may have been a northeastern thing—older, and more urban, artsy, and affluent than what was going on in California at the same time, though the band’s similarities to even other Boston bands were few. Their volume and speed connected them to some bands, their occasional pop hooks tied them to others. But no one else combined the two.

  The tug-of-war between art and pop sensibilities was symbolized by Conley’s and Miller’s disparate writing styles. “Clint wrote these real anthemic songs, but kind of wounded sounding, too, in a deeper way than a punk rock song often was,” Prescott says. “And Roger’s stuff was much more sort of analytical—angular parts and quick changes, that sort of thing. It was almost, not John Cage, but almost that kind of a look at rock.”

  While Conley’s songs were more melodic, more conventionally structured, more pop, Miller’s compositions were arty and iconoclastic, often incorporating as many as half a dozen distinct sections. Typically, his songs got over on things like guitar textures rather than melody. “He was more a hardcore modernist—always exploring, always making things sound new,” Conley says.

  In fact, making things sound new was the whole idea. The band members were outspoken about their distaste for conformism, especially within the post-punk scene, where bands were already tailoring their music to contrived images, threatening to reverse punk’s hardwon gains. “It’s so much style over content,
” Prescott grumbled in an interview in the Boston Phoenix. “It’s gone full circle into crap again.”

  The band was furiously idiosyncratic not only collectively but individually: the usual snipe at Mission of Burma was that they’d be really good—if only they all played the same song at the same time. In an interview in Boston Rock, Prescott declared, “My idea of this band is to fuck up whatever anybody thinks we’re going to do. I don’t want to satisfy expectations. If they think we’re a dance band—we’re not. If they think we’re an art band—then we’re not.”

  “See,” Conley chimed in, “we’re nothing!”

  Miller in particular expressed his disdain for the ordinary with his zest for the Dada movement, whose downright aggressive absurdism was also an attack on the complacency of its day (not to mention a key tributary of punk rock). Even Miller’s lyrics, often alienated ruminations, seemed less like personal commentary than metaphors for an aversion to the mundane. With song titles like “Max Ernst” and the Magritte-like “This Is Not a Photograph,” Miller’s lyrics reflected what was in the air around college campuses at the time, when surrealism and dadaism were very much in vogue and even band posters tended toward kitschy dadaesque collage.

  The band’s love of spontaneity even ran to their set list—they never used one.