Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Jim Coffman ran the Underground, which for a time was Boston’s hippest club, an odd shoe box of a place small enough that it could feel crowded with even a handful of people. The hip British bands liked the Underground and often gave up shows at larger venues to play there; Burma was often their opening band. It was a natural step for Coffman to manage them. With his connections to promoters in other cities, Coffman would get the band out-of-town gigs with bands like the Fall, Human Switchboard, Sonic Youth, Johnny Thunders, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, and Circle Jerks. As a result, the band members were able to quit their day jobs, although they lived just above poverty level. Even at Burma’s peak, the band members only got a $500 a month payout, but it was then possible to pay $120 a month in rent and buy cool clothes from thrift stores. “And we were hip, so we’d go into clubs and get in for free,” Miller says. “They’d give us free beer. You had a girlfriend and if there’s food in her house…”

  At the time the cool thing for Boston bands to do was have official colors, as if they were a sports team, and Burma took primer gray and fluorescent orange, the color scheme for the “Academy” single. It seemed to embody the band’s contradictions—the gray, machinelike aspects and the sensational Day-Glo side as well.

  Burma was founded on just such opposing elements. “There’s always been this idea that if you put brains in rock & roll, you’ll poison it or something,” Prescott says. “But it doesn’t have to be.” In concert Mission of Burma was no stoic art unit; it was all high energy, Miller and Conley bouncing and lunging around the stage, Prescott flailing viciously, often screaming like a traumatized drill sergeant as he rolled around the drums. But live, Burma was like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead: When they were good, they were very good. And when they were bad, they were horrid. “But that was the nature of the beast,” says Tristram Lozaw, a longtime Boston rock critic and musician. “Because they took chances, you never knew whether you were going to get one of the most spectacular experiences of your life or if it was going to be a ball of incomprehensible noise.”

  Yet Conley did not exactly live for performing. “I’m not sure why I’m in this business,” Conley revealed to Matter in 1983. “I don’t like making albums and I’ve never felt very comfortable on stage. The idea of being an entertainer has never been my thing.”

  “I think I struggled more with self-consciousness than anyone else in the band—I always felt sort of awkward onstage; it wasn’t a natural thing for me,” Conley admits. “I never said anything in the microphone. I just felt uncomfortable having people look at me.” Conley’s belief in the band kept him going through the band’s numerous tours, but it never got any easier. He took to drinking to dull the anxiety, a move that would eventually take its toll.

  The late Seventies saw the advent of the “rock disco” phenomenon. Clubs preferred the ease, predictability, and economy of DJs while seemingly every critic paid lip service to the new buzzword “danceable.” All this made it even harder for bands, especially not particularly danceable bands like Burma, to get gigs. So it wasn’t easy to set up their first national tour: a 22-day, 15-show, 11-city engagement in the winter of ’80. Such a tour was unprecedented for a Boston underground band—and all they had on vinyl was a single.

  Incredibly, the tour was done by jet. Eastern Airlines offered a $300 flat rate for unlimited travel within the United States for a month. The catch was you always had to fly out of Atlanta. So even if they were traveling from San Francisco to Seattle, they had to go back through Atlanta. And because they would hopscotch all around the four corners of the country, they’d endure all sorts of extremes in weather—a blizzard in Milwaukee, blistering heat in Austin. “Sheer insanity,” says Miller, still marveling at the folly of it all.

  They got to know the boys in Mission of Burma very well at Eastern’s lounge in the Atlanta airport. Virtually every day the band would straggle in with their instrument cases, looking more and more haggard, commandeer an empty patch of floor, and try to get some sleep. “The whole thing seems like some fever dream,” Conley says.

  Distribution was weak at best. “When we got to the cities,” Conley said, “everybody was saying, ‘We’ve heard about your single…. Where is it?’ ” There was no way to find out essential marketing information like whether enough records would be in stores when the band came to town or whether their appearance generated sales—the apparatus simply wasn’t in place yet. “It was like a new frontier,” Coffman says. “Indie music, it was do whatever you can, call whoever you know.” Coffman relied on local promoters to help the band get to the right local record store, the right radio station, the right critic. “Everybody was just figuring it out for themselves,” Coffman says, adding that sharing information was the key to survival. “There weren’t too many secrets back then—everybody was just kind of helping everybody out.”

  They played clubs that could hold about two hundred patrons. Sometimes little bits of national press about the band had reached those towns, sometimes local sophisticates had managed to score copies of hip New York papers like New York Rocker or the Village Voice. When that happened, the place was respectably filled. When it didn’t, one of America’s greatest rock bands would sometimes find themselves outnumbering the audience. “If it had gone along that way all the time, I think we wouldn’t have done it even as long as we did,” Prescott says. “But there were moments when you knew it was connecting.” In Minneapolis they played two nights and drew enough people to make the then astronomical sum of $800. The opener was an unpopular local band called Hüsker Dü. (“The most amazing thing I remember about them,” says Hüsker Dü guitarist Bob Mould, “was hanging around at sound check and watching Clint Conley plug his electric razor in the back of his SVT [amplifier] and shave. I was like, ‘These guys are so square, they’re cool!’ ”)

  They opened for Black Flag in New York. Today the bill would be considered an odd pairing, but in the then tiny world of indie rock, nobody batted an eyelash—Burma and Black Flag were stylistic compadres, just two bands who both played hard, loud, and noisy.

  The band got “money gigs” in major cities and college towns, but then there were all the shows on the long stretches in between. Usually no one there had heard of the band except for the poor sap who booked the show, which inevitably attracted no more than a handful of people. Like the time they played Montgomery, Alabama. “Oh god,” says Prescott, somehow grinning and grimacing simultaneously at the memory.

  “There were about ten people in the crowd and it was clown night—people were wearing clown suits,” Miller says. “After about the third song, this girl in a clown suit came up and put a note in front of me onstage and it said ‘Do you know any Loverboy?’ I went, ‘Ha-ha-ha’ and put it down. We played the next song and someone slipped us a note that said ‘Do you know any Devo?’ ‘Ha-ha-ha.’ And after the next song, there was a note that said ‘Would you please stop?’ ”

  As they were getting ready to play their second set, the owner of the club came backstage and approached the band. “You guys sounded good,” he said, “but everyone’s having such a good time…. Why don’t we just call it a night—no sense goin’ back out, is there?”

  “There were moments where you realize,” says Prescott, “that certain kinds of music will never be accepted by certain people.”

  On tour they slept on friends’ floors and splurged on the occasional motel—except during their frequent trips down to New York. The company Conley’s father worked for kept suites at a couple of midtown hotels, so sometimes the band would stay at the posh Waldorf Towers. “We’d be living the life of real rock stars with open liquor cabinets and all that stuff up in the big suites,” Conley recalls, shaking his head. “Ironic.”

  After touring they recorded the Signals, Calls and Marches EP from January through March ’81, concentrating on their most crowd-pleasing material. As usual, Harte and the band slaved over the recordings. “We loved it, we were way into it,” says Presco
tt. “We didn’t do it in a punk rock way. We really wanted to get the fire in it, but we were very serious about making good recordings.”

  Signals began with Conley’s anthemic “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” which swiftly became one of the band’s most popular songs. Conley had first seen the phrase in the title of a Henry Miller essay, not knowing it was a reference to an infamous line often attributed to Nazi leader Hermann Göring, “When I hear the word culture, that’s when I reach for my revolver.” “I wasn’t too happy to hear about that because I don’t want to be linked to that sort of thing,” Conley says. “But it was a phrase, it had power, I had this riff. To me, that’s just sort of the alchemy of writing songs.”

  The song was instantly catchy, with quiet but tension-filled verses that exploded into a gigantic chorus; the formula would be replicated with vastly greater commercial success ten years later. But from there, Signals get increasingly unconventional, as if easing the listener into uncharted realms: “Outlaw” recalls Gang of Four; “Fame and Fortune” begins as a triumphant rocker then wanders into a placid pool of reverie; “Red” attains a cool propulsion, then Swope’s almost operatic two-note loop, Miller’s harmonics and counterrhythms, and Prescott’s odd flourishes put it over the top. The extended, droning instrumental “All World Cowboy Romance” closes the EP on a grand note.

  Despite its diversity, Signals was of a piece, and it was all good. Burma hadn’t yet captured all the physicality and sonic free-for-all of their live shows, but the anthemic streak that came barreling through seemed to say that, true to their name, these guys really were on a mission.

  Swope did the lyric sheet for Signals, Calls and Marches, taking all the words and then alphabetizing them. You had to piece the lyrics together yourself, which, as Burma expert Eric Van has said, was a metaphor for listening to the band’s music. But it was also a metaphor for even finding out about the band in the first place. Nothing was easy. “For people who are around now, it’s hard to convey just how marginal this music was,” Conley says. “We alienated about five-sixths of the people that we played in front of because we were just loud and blurred and fast and painful, punishing. But the people that liked us were very intense and kept coming back.”

  When Signals was finally released on, fittingly, the Fourth of July of that year, Burma’s local popularity was such that the six-song EP entered local FM powerhouse WBCN’s charts at number six, even though the band was largely unknown in the rest of the country. But because the EP was released in the dead of summer, when college radio went into hibernation, it didn’t get even the modest exposure it could have if they’d waited until fall. Still, Signals went top five on Rockpool’s progressive charts, right up there with Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Pretenders, and sold out its first run of ten thousand copies within the year.

  Mission of Burma had no careerist goals whatsoever. “I don’t think any of us wanted to be rock stars,” says Miller. “That was what I thought punk had set out to do—to get rid of rock stars.” At the time, rock was still considered to be exclusively popular music—if you played rock music, you wanted to be a star ipso facto. Burma’s rejection of that was extraordinary. “Exactly,” says Prescott. “Everyone said, ‘You don’t want to be popular, you don’t want to be famous? What’s wrong with you?’ ”

  But when X signed to Elektra in 1982, the mood changed… for a minute. “It did occur to us that, wow, there are other bands getting signed to major labels—maybe it’s possible,” Prescott says. “And then we’d look at each other and go, ‘Naaaah.’ ”

  Coffman knew some people at PolyGram, but the label was then struggling to establish even the Jam, who were massive in their native England and boasted tuneful, well-recorded songs with clear roots in classic rock. “If we can’t get the Jam on the radio,” they told Coffman, “we’re not going to get Mission of Burma on the radio.”

  Reasoning that the label was cool enough to sign the Gang of Four, they sent a copy of Signals to Warner Brothers and got a note back saying they only liked “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver.” “So we said fuck them,” says Miller. “Of course, they’d said fuck us first. If we’d had six ‘Revolver’s, they would have taken us. And then we would have been dropped the next year.”

  Artistically (and in many other ways), the band was liberated by the fact that they’d never sign to a major label. “In a way, we were cheating because we didn’t have that light at the end of the tunnel,” Prescott says. “And who knows? We were human—if the light had been there, maybe we would have turned crappy quicker. It’s a really hard thing to say. Now I’m glad that it was like it was.”

  In 1981 three-week tours of the Midwest, South, and West drummed up a buzz for the band. That fall they played a big show in Hollywood with the Circle Jerks and Dead Kennedys, but the hardcore punks in the audience were unimpressed. “We got out there and we were like little lambs to slaughter,” says Conley. “We were art-punk weenies out there.” All the audience did was murmur and spit at the band. “Not the most enlightened audience, is it?” Jello Biafra asked them after their set. (After the show the crowd erupted into a huge riot.)

  Back at home Burma had been enjoying continuing support from WBCN. But 1982 saw the debut of WCOZ, one of the early radio consultant stations, whose playlist was determined not by the DJs, but by a central office hot on the trail of the lowest common denominator. In response, WBCN shifted to a more commercial format. The area’s abundant college stations stepped in to fill the gap, but WBCN’s defection dealt Burma and the entire Boston scene a devastating blow.

  After the relatively studied recordings of the single and Signals, the band wanted their next release—their first album—to sound more like their live show. Having played out a lot—and playing very loudly at that—they had been discovering different ways to warp and harness noise through various types of distortion, feedback, and tonal phenomena; noise became a more central part of the arrangements. To simulate that, they decided to record the instruments in the same room simultaneously, instead of overdubbing separately. The large room at Rhode Island’s Normandy Studios would allow the band to crank the amps up to peak volume and take advantage of the space’s massive acoustics. Incorporating Swope’s loops more often was another part of the strategy, and his contributions, which vary from up-front to nearly subliminal, make the sound all the denser.

  Sure enough, the band’s sonic phenomena and furious onstage energy are much more vividly captured on Vs. The first vocal on Vs. is Prescott screaming his head off after two minutes of blistering one-chord rock. The music became more deeply bipolar, going from eerie meditations like “Trem Two” and the grandeur of “Einstein’s Day” to more aggro workouts. Prescott’s rhythms both skitter and pound, Conley and Miller crash their hulking chord clusters against each other like wrecking balls, accumulating a huge mass of ringing tone. Even in the fairly subdued “Trem Two,” the tensions they set up were cataclysmic—the song dwells on one percolating note, and when it finally changes, everything starts rushing out on a par with their loudest, most cacophonous climaxes.

  MISSION OF BURMA SIT FOR A PORTRAIT BACKSTAGE AT CBGB ON THE LAST TOUR. LEFT TO RIGHT: PETER PRESCOTT, ROGER MILLER, CLINT CONLEY. THE HAND AT UPPER LEFT BELONGS TO THE EVER-ENIGMATIC MARTIN SWOPE.

  LAURA LEVINE

  In “The Ballad of Johnny Burma,” Miller hollers, “I said my mother’s dead, well I don’t care about it / I say my father’s dead, I don’t care about it.” At the time both his parents were very much alive. “It was more like cutting loose from all that stuff—they’re all dead and now I’m free to be me,” Miller says. “At that point in Burma, it was like, here I’m finally doing this thing that I’ve known I should be doing since I was in eleventh grade. I was certain, like all of us were, that we were doing the right thing.”

  Vs. appeared that October and won glowing reviews in places as prominent as the New York Times and the English music weekly Sounds. “Vs. is by far our best recording,�
� Miller says. “If that’s all we did, then that’s enough. It’s one of the fifteen hundred greatest rock & roll albums of all time.”

  When Burma started, the possibilities seemed limitless, at least in terms of the exploding post-punk scene. “There always seemed to be mechanisms for expanding your audience,” says Tristram Lozaw. “You’d play at [Boston’s tiny] Cantone’s, then you’d play a bigger club, then a bigger one. Then you’d go on tour and you’d be on BCN.” It was the route Talking Heads had taken, along with plenty of other bands.

  But then the door shut. “It was the conservatism of the country and also the onset of a lot of the hardcore stuff—it excluded a whole artier side of rock and it narrowed the underground,” Lozaw says. To celebrate the April ’82 release of “Trem Two”—the new single by an important, critically acclaimed band—Mission of Burma played a club in New York to a grand total of seven people. At a Cleveland show, the club owner requested that the jukebox replace the band for the second set.

  Even worse, WBCN, not hearing a “hit,” gave scant airplay to Vs. “It was very disturbing to me because I thought that we built this whole thing and that it was really going to just take off,” says Harte, his disappointment still plain. “And they simply didn’t play it.” The “us against the world” stance of the album title was becoming all too true.

  Boston’s nightclubs also abandoned the band. In October ’82, after the band played the Paradise, the club’s manager told Burma they could never play there again because not enough people came. (This may well have been because the band played their hometown perhaps too frequently, as much as twice a month, seriously hurting their draw.)

  At one point they played a sparsely attended show in Atlanta the same night R.E.M. had sold out a big college theater. R.E.M. had quickly become college darlings while Burma, who had started before them, still toiled in obscurity. Conley says it might have been a dream, but he thinks that late that night, long after the gig, the two bands’ vans passed each other in a parking lot. He saw R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills looking out the window. “He was just peering out, looking at us from another world,” says Conley, still wistful after all these years, “a world of privilege and packed houses and upward mobility… and nice vans.”