“Hey man, I’m so glad Orpheus is playing there tonight,” Arnold’s friend said to the musician at the club. “Are you the same Orpheus who does that song, ‘Can’t Find the Time’?”
“Yeah, that’s us!” the young man happily answered. Bruce Arnold was beyond bewildered. Why was there another Orpheus? When he confronted Alan Lorber, the producer denied having anything to do with it.
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“THE COUNTRY IS NOW LOOKING TOWARD the East Coast because flower music is dying,” Beacon Street Union drummer Dick Weisberg told New England Teen Scene, a comment all too typical of the scene. With so many Boston Sound musicians putting down the opposite side of the continent, it comes as no surprise that the first major piece of criticism about the scene came from the West Coast. The real surprise is that they found a local to pull the trigger.
Jon Landau is best known as the music critic who saw Bruce Springsteen perform in a club in Cambridge, wrote that he had seen the future of rock ’n’ roll, and soon found himself to be the Boss’s manager. But the lesser-known fact is that Jon Landau—born in Lexington, site of the original “Shot Heard Round the World”—was right there at the birth of rock criticism. In January 1966, Paul Williams published the inaugural issue of Crawdaddy, which The New York Times later called “the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously”; Landau tore through it cover to cover, thinking, I can do better than this.*
“I was overcome with the vibrations emanating from Cambridge’s folk revival,” Landau wrote of his Lexington upbringing. “I started going to the Boston clubs, especially the old Club 47, as often as school and parents would allow. During a good week it wouldn’t be surprising to see Eric Von Schmidt, Rolf Cahn, Tom Rush, Geoff Muldaur, Bobby Neuwirth, Jim Kweskin, the Charles River Valley Boys, Bill Keith, and Jim Rooney all up on stage at one point or another.”
In his first Crawdaddy piece, Landau eulogizes the Remains (“They were how you told a stranger about rock ’n’ roll”); his byline graces the debut issue of Rolling Stone in November 1967. By April 1968, the Boston Sound had incited such a heavy press cycle that Rolling Stone wanted it for the cover. Who better to get the facts right than a Bay Stater? Landau was no fan of the West Coast’s musical output, having gone on record that the “San Francisco shit corrupted the purity of the rock that I loved and I could have led a crusade against it.” But the first target for his lance would be home.
Under the headline “THE SOUND OF BOSTON: ‘KERPLOP,’” Landau wrote, “The very real problem that Boston faces at the moment is that the hype may boomerang and hurt what has been a slowly developing situation. The first wave of albums is likely to give Boston a black eye with people genuinely interested in music.” The piece retraced what happened in Boston and Cambridge in the previous five years, explaining the rise and fall of the folk scene, as well as mid-sixties garage rock bands such as the Lost, whom he considered “far superior to anything the city has now.”
Though Landau was harshly critical of Lorber’s grand scene scheme, the article is largely informational, with the headline and captions doing most of the name-calling (“PAUL REVERE IS SHAMED: ‘BOSSTOWN SOUND’ A DUD”). He highlighted the nightclubs and underground newspapers that made the scene more vibrant, pointing out that Avatar’s struggles with censorship had only made the paper stronger. “Nonetheless,” he concluded, “one good club and two publications don’t make a scene.” The final word in the piece went to Jim Kweskin, who declared that geography is irrelevant—and that there is no Bosstown Sound. The next time Kweskin was quoted in the pages of Rolling Stone, he’d be explaining why he broke up his band to follow Mel Lyman.
In hindsight, Landau admits that he might have been too rough on some of the musicians, and that the whole debacle wasn’t their fault. But most of all he remembers Kweskin’s talent. “He was the best damn performer—you almost can’t imagine how good he was,” says the man who discovered Springsteen. “And Mel was great! Then Avatar arrived and I couldn’t put the two things together.
“The real Boston Sound,” Landau adds, “was Club 47 at the height of its existence.”
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PER LANDAU, it was true that the Lost had broken up before the Boston Sound went national, but the members of the band were all connected to this new development. In fact, every single member of the Lost appeared in one or more Boston Sound bands.*
Lost singer Ted Myers had watched some of his wildest dreams come true in the mid-sixties. In 1965 his band was signed to Capitol Records and toured with the Beach Boys; the following year, he married his girlfriend, Eve. One advertisement for the band in 1965 declared, “Five Americans from Boston—making the most British sound heard since the Tea Party.” But botched distribution, recalled 45s, and substance use hampered their momentum, and in 1967 Myers announced the band was over.
For Myers, keeping his marriage together with his wife, Eve, proved to be just as hard as unifying his rock band. “We would break up every two or three months and ultimately get back together again,” Myers explained. He had never been up to Fort Hill before, but when she joined up with Mel Lyman for a few days he finally drove up there to get her back. Lyman wasn’t around, but Myers found the place unsettling, with what looked like a dozen or more Lyman “wives” and children milling about the houses on Fort Ave. Terrace. Eve gladly left with him.
Relocating to New York, Myers did a double take as his hometown suddenly exploded in the press as the chosen new music-industry ground zero. Since Alan Lorber was now looking to Ray Paret at Amphion for Boston musician recommendations, it was only a matter of time before Paret connected his old friend Myers with Lorber. “He offered me a publishing deal, which provided a small weekly stipend,” Myers recalls. The $75 a week was enough for him to live on. Lorber said he would make an album with Myers if he put a band together. Thus was born Chamaeleon Church.
Personnel included his former Lost bandmate Kyle Garrahan, co- songwriter and bass player Tony Schueren, and on the drums, future Saturday Night Live star Chevy Chase. They met in the fall of ’63, at the funeral of a mutual friend who had died in a motorcycle accident during Myers’s first semester at Goddard College. Chase was eager to join the new band. “He was sort of straighter than us,” Kyle Garrahan remembers. “But soon enough he became a freak.” “Remember the Boston Sound?” Chase once asked a reporter. “Really heavy on violins.”
Lorber sorted through all of Myers’s new compositions, either declaring them suitable for recording or throwing them in the trash. “Lorber was not an easy person to deal with,” Myers says. For instance, he insisted the singer change the line “kids on a bench getting high” to “kids on a bench getting by,” which Myers unsuccessfully protested as not making a lick of sense. “He was a suit,” guitarist Garrahan says of Lorber. “Suits are suits.”
Before the photo shoot for the back cover, the image-conscious Myers took the band clothes shopping. They decided on long Edwardian morning coats. “Chevy’s had a Nehru collar and looked like it was made out of brocaded upholstery fabric,” he writes. In one of the few public comments Chevy Chase has ever made about Chamaeleon Church (to music writer Steve Simels), Chase goes beyond uncharitable—he’s downright offensive: “They wore faggy little suits, they wrote faggy little songs, and they were all junkies and they’re probably dead.”
The band recorded their basic tracks in New York, after which Lorber assured Myers that he’d be looped in for the orchestral overdubs and mixing. But a few weeks later, the producer told him it was finished. “Don’t complain until you’ve heard it,” Lorber said, calling it “the best work I’ve ever done.”
The musicians huddled around Myers’s turntable and put the acetate test pressing on. “What we heard made us all physically ill,” Myers wrote in his memoir. “There were weird, repeating echo effects and backwards envelopes—Lorber’s idea of psychedelic effects. . . . To u
s, it just sounded like mush.”
Lukewarm reviews greeted Chamaeleon Church; radio ignored it, and so did MGM. Amphion’s Paret convinced the band that if they relocated to Boston he could get them live gigs. They played three shows to little fanfare, the last of which was at a high school football stadium in Waltham. At one point Chase walked to the front of the stage and started a filthy improv as the band vamped—the last sermon from Chamaeleon Church.
After the band’s brief run, Alan Lorber suggested guitarist Kyle Garrahan go solo. Garrahan agreed and recorded a single, an original titled “Shame.” Lorber set him up with a booking agent, who casually mentioned, “You know, if you got a full band together, you could go do some of Orpheus’s gigs.” The agent explained that sometimes other bands would learn a few Orpheus songs and tour regions that the actual band was too busy to hit. Initially repelled by the offer, Garrahan came around. The booking agent assured him that the real Orpheus knew about it. Garrahan recruited Chevy Chase and a few other musicians, learned how to play the breakout single “Can’t Find the Time,” and hopped in a van. “This band shows up for these gigs looking nothing like Orpheus, sounding nothing like Orpheus, and doing zero Orpheus tunes except that one hit single,” Garrahan says. Chase remembered performing in a gym at the University of Kentucky when people started to notice.
“You’re not Orpheus!” an audience member screamed.
“Yes, we are!” Chase yelled back.
These escalating audience encounters got back to the booking agent, and the fake southern U.S. Orpheus sham was over after just a few gigs. Later, when Bruce Arnold from Orpheus figured out what happened, it made a lot of sense to him why their booking agent only had the band tour the East Coast—there were Orpheus clones to cover the rest of the country. To this day, Arnold isn’t certain how many fake versions of his band were on tour in the late sixties.
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A MONTH AFTER Rolling Stone covered the Boston Sound, a Wall Street Journal feature printed dollar figures and marketing tactics so baldly that it seemed designed to turn a rock ’n’ roll fan off music forever. “MGM sells each Ultimate Spinach album to the distributor for $2.03 (the retail list price is $4.79). It gives 49 cents of this to producer Alan Lorber, who gives an undisclosed share of this to performers.”
Ed Abramson, however, the new manager for Ultimate Spinach and Orpheus, makes the article’s most repellent remark. Abramson was Alan Lorber’s accountant and head of a nascent artist management company called International Career Consultants. He explained to the Journal how he was enjoying his newfound power over the bands’ creative instincts. “Ian [Bruce-Douglas] has a conception in his mind that anything he wants to say or do is fine. My job is to control that aspect. I had a meeting with him recently. It had to do with his overall attitude. On solos, for example, Ian might feel he wants to take a guitar solo and go on forever. I tell him he has to limit himself.” It doesn’t get any cooler than accountants telling musicians how long their guitar solos should be, does it?
“These articles and others were enough to overboil the outraged ‘underground press,’” Lorber noted. He was likely referring, in part, to Avatar. Ken Emerson, a Harvard student who frequently wrote about music for the paper, started commenting on the Boston Sound in Avatar in late March 1968. Up until then, non-MGM Boston bands were bending over backward to associate themselves as part of the so-called Sound. Apple Pie Motherhood Band’s 1968 debut on Atlantic, for instance, declares on the back cover that the band hails from Boston. “They made their first impact on the pop scene in Boss Town and they’ve been spreading the gospel of the Boston Sound throughout the length and breadth of the East Coast and the Mid-West.”
Now, though, bands were becoming far less enthusiastic. Rusty Marcus, bassist for Eden’s Children, shared his grim point of view with Avatar. “Just look at Boston,” Marcus said. “Look at the colors, grey, brown, black. Everything’s dirty, even the sky. In San Francisco there are pinks, whites, and yellows. . . . Boston could never support a music scene. You can’t enjoy yourself if your body’s sick, and Boston’s sick, physically, psychologically sick.
“We’re glad we’re not lumped together with the rest of the Boston Sound,” he concluded. “I mean, MGM’s trying to buy its way on the charts. . . .”
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IAN BRUCE-DOUGLAS ESCALATED his ego-fueled reign of terror. He hired Karyl Lee Britt to replace Priscilla DiDonato, and immediately began to pressure her to drop LSD with him. At a show in Central Park, the Spinach singer went berserk, throwing a piano bench onstage that nearly knocked Britt over.
Behold & See, the second album by Ultimate Spinach, arrived in August. Britt was already gone. It stalled at #198 on the Billboard chart. “Spinach must now abandon its eclecticism,” Broadside of Boston wrote in its review. “They must stop borrowing indiscriminately and develop and do ‘their own thing’ or else they will find that whatever they do will really be nothing at all.”
Bruce-Douglas seemed to agree. “I fired myself,” he recalled, though his bandmates remember it the other way around. They last saw him in September 1968, going down the lift at the Amphion Management building, shouting obscenities up the elevator shaft. An Ian-less Ultimate Spinach was of little consequence to Lorber, who built an entirely new lineup around remaining original member Barbara Hudson almost instantly after Ian’s departure. He still had Ted Myers and Tony Schueren, of the defunct Chamaeleon Church, under contract, so he installed the pair as the new leaders of Ultimate Spinach. “It felt weird,” Myers says. For the first time, he had no say in the personnel. “The songs Tony and I wrote were not remotely like the rather bombastic stuff that Ian had written, so it was, for all intents and purposes, a whole other band.”
Myers thought the album should be called A New Leaf (a clever nod to the big spinach leaf that graced the cover of the first LP). “But, in their infinite wisdom,” Myers writes in his memoir, “Lorber and MGM Records decided to simply call the album Ultimate Spinach, which was the same title as the first album. Maybe they were hoping that people would buy this one by mistake.”
During the subsequent tour, no one seemed to notice Ian wasn’t in Ultimate Spinach anymore. “I guess my counterfeit Spinach fared better,” Myers says in regard to the faux-Orpheus. After the Spinach tour, most of the new lineup was caught in a Back Bay drug raid. Myers took it as his cue to split. His wife, Eve, had just run off again, all the way to California, and he decided to chase her down one last time.
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AKIN TO THE FAUX-SPINACH LP, the Lyman Family too released a record around this time whose origins were dubious. If you take the cover at face value, Love Comes Tumbling Down (Reprise 6353) is a record by—deep breath—“American Avatar: The Lyman Family with Lisa Kindred.” The front cover shows Lyman in profile, standing in front of a gorgeous sunset on Fort Hill. The band name unfurls in a Tolkien-esque font designed by Eben Given.
But that’s not the real title of this LP, which Reprise Records, a Warner subsidiary, released in 1969. It’s actually supposed to be Kindred Spirits, an album that blues singer Lisa Kindred made for Vanguard in 1964. The Lyman Family stole it, renamed it, repackaged it, and resold it to a major record label, which in turn released it, oblivious to its origins.
David Gude, the Lyman Family member and Vanguard engineer on the project, explained what happened to David Felton in 1971. Kindred had a Vanguard contract, and Mel, an old friend, asked if he could back her up. “Lisa loved Melvin and she said sure.” The band featured Fort Hill Community members Lyman, Kweskin, and Terry Bernhard, as well as Bruce Langhorne, a musician whose predilection for playing a giant “wagon wheel” tambourine inspired Bob Dylan to write a song about him.
Gude’s boss at Vanguard didn’t like the results. “He thought the harmonica was too loud, there was too much Melvin and not enough Lisa.” In the end,
Lyman had Gude steal the master tapes, thereby ending his employment at the record company. Then the guru of Fort Hill sat on the tapes for years. “At that time there was no such thing as the Lyman Family,” Lisa Kindred told Felton. “At that time it was still my album.”
Upon seeing the record for the first time, Kindred exclaimed, “I know Mel is an Aries with a God complex, but this is too much!” (Everyone who performs on the album is listed inside the gatefold with their astrological sign printed next to their name.) Lyman wrote the sententious liner notes: “The force that drew us together to record this music is the same force that is always evidenced in great works of art, and like all great works of art this music was created to elevate men, we were merely the instruments.” This kind of note might have been appropriate if it were one of the greatest recordings of all time. As it stands, it’s a pleasant-sounding blues record with loudly mixed harmonica all over it.
“I ended up being a sideman on my own album!” Kindred lamented.
The name of the record isn’t the only fiction here. The intimidating photo of the Fort Hill Community on the back cover, showing twenty-two Family members arrayed in front of the tower, is in its own way false too. Amid the crowd, one person in the back row sticks out. For one, he’s the only person smiling, and—even more strikingly—he’s the only African American in the entire group. But look a little closer and you’ll notice something strange. His shoulder seems to defy the rules of physics and exists, partially, on top of the person next to him. It almost seems as if he’s been pasted into the group photo. It turns out the community had provided the same exact photo for an earlier Globe article about the commune. That time, though, the smiling man wasn’t there. Someone had cut and pasted him into the group shot used for the album sleeve.
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