Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  Ronna Page, who acted in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and later joined the Fort Hill Community, introduced Mekas to Mel Lyman. They met at her favorite hangout in Manhattan: the Paradox Restaurant, New York City’s first macrobiotic eatery, where you could sit and watch Yoko Ono and others climb into a bag as conceptual art. When he learned that Lyman needed a place to stay, Mekas put him up for a few weeks. (“I’m not one of those people that asks too many questions about where you’ve come from,” Mekas says.) During that time, Lyman saw how Mekas was always filming something, often with no expressed purpose or endgame.

  “You just do it!” Mekas told Lyman, who was worried that filmmaking was too complicated. “That opened their eyes to possibilities,” he says. “They got a camera and started fooling around.” Fort Hill Community member George Peper felt inspired by the burgeoning DIY genre as well, and itched to start a Boston offshoot of the Cinematheque. “I will help with films, and suggest programming, but you do everything else,” the busy Mekas told Peper. “It’s your baby.”

  At the precise time Peper was searching for a way to open a Boston Cinematheque, he picked up a skinny hitchhiker in Cambridge named David Hahn. A twenty-two-year-old MIT dropout just back from a business venture in Honduras, Hahn wanted to construct an experimental light show to see what happened when the mind is overloaded with stimuli—a vision that fit with Peper’s. They scouted locations, landing on the Magna building at 53 Berkeley Street in the South End, most recently home to a coffeehouse called the Moondial. It seemed perfect, but the lease was much more than they could afford. Jessie Benton knew someone from back home, now in Boston to attend Harvard, who might be able to help. She called Ray Riepen with some exciting news: Warhol and Mekas wanted to do a Boston division of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. According to Benton, the two notorious filmmakers had a location, but they couldn’t tie it up just yet. Would Ray help them secure the property?

  After five years practicing law in Kansas City, Riepen had just come to Harvard for a master’s degree, living in Somerville. “She told me the Ford Foundation was backing the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, and they were about to make a decision to come to Boston,” he recalls. Therefore, Riepen’s monetary investment would be temporary, but he’d be permanently connected to something très chic. He picked up a shirt off the floor, put on one of his three-piece suits, and drove without a license down to 53 Berkeley Street to check the place out. Riepen walked around the building with George Peper and Hahn. To this day you’ll hear people involved with the Boston Tea Party, Riepen included, identify the place as a former synagogue, due to the prominent Star of David–shaped window. This is incorrect; the building was constructed in the early 1870s as a Unitarian Meeting House, and the stellar glass likely symbolizes the unity of all religions. Up a steep flight of stairs, inside the main room, was an altar/stage, behind which was a phrase written in the shape of a rainbow on the wall: “PRAISE YE THE LORD.”

  For reasons he still doesn’t fully understand, Riepen put up his own money to secure the lease. Two weeks later, Benton called Riepen with some bad news. The grant money had fallen through. (Mekas recalls the Ford Foundation grant in question, but doesn’t believe it was ever slated for anything in Boston. Jessie Benton doesn’t recall the grant at all.) Riepen now held the lease to an “abandoned synagogue.” This was not an ideal situation for a frugal man from Kansas City, attending grad school without a current source of income. After meeting Peper’s new hitchhiker friend, he felt he had found someone he could work with; Riepen made David Hahn a co-owner of the operation. There were rumors that Hahn had driven up from Honduras with a trunk of gold bricks he had “acquired” in South America, but regardless of what his actual source of disposable income was, Hahn was able to make up the other half of the money needed to keep the Tea Party’s doors open.

  Under Fort Hill guidance, the Boston Cinematheque was ready to roll, but Riepen knew ticket sales to kooky flicks wouldn’t cover costs, especially if Warhol wasn’t actually involved. Riepen thought he could “give some dances” to help pay the rent, and Benton came up with the idea of opening a store as well. The Fort Hill contingent went to work, opening a shop on the second floor called Moon in Leo that dispensed “hodgepodge hippie” wares. Eben Given hand-painted names of FHC heroes on the wall next to the street-level staircase. Visitors passing names like Prometheus, Edison, and Lao Tzu must have wondered what exactly they were walking into.

  Riepen came up with the club’s name while sitting at Jim Kweskin’s kitchen table (“Tea is code for ‘dope,’” he points out), then aww-shucksed his way through the straitlaced city’s entertainment licensing process. “I just want to give a dance or two for the kids on the weekends,” he’d tell the person behind every desk with a manufactured air of naivete. He pretended to stumble through the process, and made under-the-table payments when required. (“Everybody in Boston was on the take,” Riepen claims.) In the coming years, Riepen tried to mark these payments down on his tax returns. “You can’t put $78,000 a year down for ‘police payoffs,’” his accountant said, aghast. “You’ll end up in the trunk of your car!”

  * * *

  • • •

  AT FIRST, the schedule was fairly simple: The Fort Hill Community would screen films at the Cinematheque all week long, then turn the reins over to the Tea Party for the weekend.

  Lyman immediately started making soundtracks for some of the silent pictures and adding live-action flourishes to others, such as when the Fort Hill gang sat at a table and ate a full meal while Warhol’s Harlot played behind them, to the director’s delight. Despite being the connection that made the Cinematheque possible, Jessie Benton went to only one screening, whereupon she watched a long close-up of a vagina for twenty minutes before deciding these films weren’t for her.

  In the first Globe story on the venue, the entire endeavor is presented as the work of the Fort Hill Community; Riepen’s name isn’t even mentioned. “The wedding of the Cinemateque [sic] and the Boston Tea Party was almost a happenstance thing. But the people involved in the two projects, imbued as they were with astrological astuteness and a sensitivity to the cosmic forces of the stars, are not surprised.” This version of the story wouldn’t last long. Within a few months, Riepen would dominate every Tea Party story, and the Cinematheque would fade out of the picture completely. But in those early days, Ray and the FHC were unlikely collaborators; he recalled occasionally visiting Fort Ave. Terrace to see what life was like up there. “That was not my scene,” he says. “Mel Lyman would organize his group by giving them acid at dinner and then taking them up in the attic and telling them how much he loved them. He did that with a lot of people, and a lot of people who were fairly bright stayed with him. I was very paranoid about it. I practically took my own taster to dinner there.”

  When an interviewer asked Lyman why the Cinematheque closed, he claimed it was because the Tea Party contingent was “out to make money. We’d like to make money too, but we don’t want to stop doing what we love to do, we don’t put that first.” He then revealed what was really taking up most of Fort Hill’s time: an underground newspaper that had just published its first issue, under the name Avatar.

  On January 20, 1967, the Boston Tea Party held its first rock ’n’ roll concert—or, as Riepen had presented it to city officials, “a dance for the kids.” Local legends the Lost, on the verge of splintering into three different Bosstown Sound units, were the triumphant headliners. For Rolling Stone, it was “without a doubt the most important date in Boston Rock and Roll history.”

  David Hahn had hired all manner of local freaks and geeks to produce a psychedelic atmosphere inside. Scott Bradner, who worked at Harvard, came across an old sensory deprivation chamber on campus—a giant hemisphere that would enclose a human from the waist up. He “borrowed” it and built the venue’s all-important strobe light inside. The strobe, in combination with overhead projectors and color organs, transformed the Tea Part
y from a cavernous church room into a disorienting, hallucinogenic playground. One visual technician at the club recalled how attendees would come in and say, “Turn on the strobes!,” then “whirl around and fall on the floor. This was a safe place to temporarily lose your mind; the city had never seen anything like it.”

  The Boston Tea Party’s concert room had an otherworldly ambience, according to the employees, musicians, and audience members who were there. By all accounts, it was a space where people from all walks of life could mix without tension. According to Fred Griffeth of the Bagatelle, “At that time if you went to South Boston, you could get your ass kicked. But people were getting together at the Tea Party from all over the city. I never saw a fight there. MIT students were becoming friends with members of biker gangs. Even with my pessimism, I was saying, ‘Wow, maybe, maybe, maybe people can get along.’ I thought it was the future.”

  Press coverage was generous and steady. “Harvardians, hippies, cyclists, stray sailors, tuned-up insurance company drones all gyrate with the bliss of children,” the Globe drooled. By the time city officials realized that Riepen was doing a lot more than throwing weekend dances “for the kids,” it was too late: The club was a phenomenon. Riepen now wondered how he might make some real money off the place. With the hefty rent and his partner David Hahn taking home half the profits, he wasn’t exactly raking it in. A few months into 1968, Riepen bought out Hahn and became the sole owner of the Boston Tea Party.

  “The last time I saw David was on top of Fort Hill,” George Peper says. “After we talked, he ran back down toward his house but turned back to me and said, ‘Tell everyone that I love them so much.’” Hahn returned to Honduras. In 1976, he dove under his ship, the Olive Oyl, had a heart attack, and never resurfaced.

  * * *

  • • •

  VAN MORRISON FIRST appeared on the Tea Party stage during a Hallucinations set. In late May 1968, Peter Wolf’s band opened for John Lee Hooker three nights in a row. On the third night, Wolf invited his new friend to sing with the band. “We’d been doing ‘Gloria’ for some time, even before it was a popular thing to do,” Wolf explained in 1973. When an inebriated Morrison joined the Hallucinations to perform the song he wrote, the audience was aghast. “Up comes Van Morrison doing this whole crazed show, talking Japanese for thirty-five minutes into the microphone,” Wolf said. He recalled an unintentional mash-up, Morrison singing “Mean Ole’ World” as the Hallucinations played “Gloria.” Wolf admonished the confused audience: “Don’t you know who this man is? He wrote the song!”

  Later that night, Tea Party manager Steve Nelson drove Wolf, Morrison, and Hooker home in the club’s VW Bus. The trio had a lot to talk about, but between the booze and the accents, Nelson couldn’t make out a single word.

  Getting drunk rock stars home safely was one of Nelson’s easier Tea Party tasks; keeping the police and licensing commission from shutting the club down turned out to be far more laborious. For the opening weekend of 1968, the Harvard Law School grad had booked a strong bill of locals, and word of mouth helped make the Saturday crowd double the previous night’s. As five hundred people danced and zoned out to the sounds of Cloud, the house lights came on.

  It was a raid. The band petered out as Dapper O’Neil—a loudmouthed, old-school conservative who was on the city’s licensing board—came jogging up the stairwell to the second-floor stage, a dozen police officers in tow, certain that he’d find drugs everywhere. Nelson watched them fan out to search the premises. A police detail was already at every show, so the clientele “sort of knew to come to the shows high.” The underground press helpfully prescribed such etiquette. “Nobody minds you going zonked,” Broadside of Boston advised, “but leave the stuff at home. If one person gets busted, the place is closed. Licenses don’t grow in fields.”

  Dapper O’Neil made his way to the balcony and cast his eyes upon a floor littered with empty plastic casings. The Devil’s Disciples, a motorcycle gang, liked to watch the action from up here, inhaling amyl nitrate poppers for quick head rushes. But now all that remained was the packaging. He had brought a Boston Herald Traveler reporter along for the big drug bust—now what? Dapper stormed back downstairs and grilled Nelson. Did he have a valid license to operate? Nelson produced it. In desperation, Dapper spun around and saw a frightened young woman working the soda pop station.

  He walked slowly toward her. “How ’bout the pop?” he barked.

  Later that week, Dapper O’Neil hauled Riepen and Nelson into court for the one thing he found amiss at the Boston Tea Party: an expired soft drink license. “Your honor,” Riepen explained to the judge, doing his hayseed routine, “we’re just trying to keep kids off the streets of Boston, is all. Give ’em something to do!”

  Riepen, in one of his signature three-piece suits, was right at home, walking back and forth in front of the judge, putting on a performance of blissful innocence. “Now, if I knew there was a problem with our soft drink license, you know I would’ve corrected it right away. This is merely an oversight and by no means a sign of managerial ineptitude.” Then, with the professional timing of an old vaudeville routine, Riepen and Nelson recounted the overblown raid on the club in vivid detail.

  The judge forced a furious Dapper to apologize to Riepen and Nelson, right there in the courtroom. His florid face turned even redder. “SODA POP RAID FIZZLES,” blared the next day’s Boston Herald Traveler.

  Dapper kept looking for ways to get the club in trouble, even harassing the Tea Party for plastering the city with flyers that featured the word “psychedelic.” But for the most part, Nelson and Riepen made sure there was nothing to complain about. One occasion in late 1968 deserves a note: When Fleetwood Mac played past the city’s curfew, policemen walked onstage and unplugged their amps. Two kids in the crowd, Tom Hamilton and Joe Perry—soon to start a band called Aerosmith—watched in horror as the “kick-ass” set was cut short.

  * * *

  • • •

  JONATHAN RICHMAN GREW UP in the suburb of Natick, but whenever his father wasn’t using the family car for his job as a traveling salesman, Richman would flee his neighborhood to soak up the sounds of the city. “When I was sixteen,” he said, “I heard the music of the Velvet Underground and everything changed for me.” One spring afternoon in 1967, while loitering in Harvard Square, he saw someone walking down the street that he recognized from photographs.

  “Excuse me, are you Lou Reed?” Richman asked.

  “Yeah,” answered Reed, taken aback. Richman looked like he could have been one of the Li’l Rascals. This was not the kind of person Reed would have suspected to be a fan of his decadent art-rock band named after a book about sexual fetishes.

  “I heard your record,” Richman said, “and I love the sound you get.”

  “Really?” asked Reed.

  “Yeah, for example, the way you use the guitars like they were drums,” Richman explained.

  “Wait a minute,” Reed said. “Are you saying we use rhythm guitar tracks as percussion instruments?” He was beaming. “That’s what we do! You heard that?”

  The next day, as he had done in the past, Richman showed up at the Boston Tea Party at four p.m. with a hand-painted poster commemorating that night’s show. He offered to give the poster to the club if he could slip in early and bypass the age restrictions. Inside, members of his favorite band seemed to already know who he was.

  “They grasped how seriously I took the music,” Richman later explained. “It was life-or-death serious. It still is for me. If music isn’t life-or-death serious, I don’t wanna do it. I wasn’t a musician yet. The Velvet Underground made me a musician.”

  Today, Richman is a beloved singer-songwriter with a singularly eccentric point of view and disarming delivery. Unlike nonnative sons like Morrison and Reed, he’s composed countless odes to Boston and New England, beginning with his masterpiece, “Roadrunner.” It’s a gleeful, proto-punk
classic—the only rock song that Johnny Rotten claimed not to hate. It’s also a gloriously goofy reinterpretation of VU’s epic “Sister Ray,” a song that was released right as the teenage Richman was getting to know the band.*

  A few weeks after Richman met Lou Reed, his father returned home from work with an unsold bingo prize for his son: a junky $10 guitar.

  * * *

  • • •

  SOON AFTER ITS INCEPTION, the Boston Tea Party had to compete with imitators. Over in a factory space in Brighton Center, a student named Ken Keyes launched a venue called the Crosstown Bus with a series of summer concerts culminating with an appearance by the Doors in August 1967. At the time of booking, the band was on the rise; as showtime neared, “Light My Fire” was already a giant radio hit.

  Riepen wondered if the Tea Party was doomed to be swallowed up by competitors. He had an idea. If he could persuade Andy Warhol to turn the Tea Party’s weekend of Velvet Underground concerts into a movie starring the audience, that would be a bigger splash than Jim Morrison and company headlining at Crosstown Bus. He called Warhol and said, “Listen, you son of a bitch, I’m the guy that’s keeping the Velvet Underground alive here, and you’ve got to do me a favor and play like you’re shooting a movie.” Curiously, Warhol agreed, though time lines place this weekend after the Velvet Underground fired him as manager. Riepen reportedly told the artist he didn’t even care if the camera was empty. The notion of shooting a movie would suffice.

  “You are the star. You are what’s happening. Be a part of Boston’s first authentic underground movie,” read the flyer touting Warhol’s name. For plugged-in members of Boston’s counterculture, suddenly a very difficult choice had to be made on August 11, 1967. According to Riepen, Crosstown Bus associates drove by the Boston Tea Party to revel in their victory, only to find “a line of women from Dedham in Pucci dresses three blocks long standing in the rain trying to get in Andy Warhol’s next movie,” as Riepen put it. Shortly after the Doors left town, Crosstown Bus stalled for good.*