By 1967, the Villagers were playing Boston venues like Club 47 and the Unicorn, and had won “Best Folk Duo” in Broadside of Boston’s reader poll. Arnold once played a show with Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band before it disbanded. “I know this sounds odd,” Arnold says, “but Mel Lyman was sitting in a lotus position . . . upside down. He didn’t say a word the whole time he was in there and, of course, people have said that he ascended, that he was one of the ascended masters.” Run-ins with possible ascended masters aside, the energy at folk shows was dwindling. Friends advised Arnold and McKenes to form a British Invasion–style band, but Bruce Arnold wasn’t interested in mimicking English hit makers. “I wanted it to be a new modern American music,” Arnold says. They added Eric Gulliksen on second guitar, and found a drummer in Harry Sandler, who cut his teeth with a surf rock outfit called the Mods.
The new lineup immediately caused a stir. “Over a period of two days we talked to nine different record companies and every one of them offered us some sort of a deal,” Arnold recalled. One suitor, producer and songwriter Wes Farrell, liked their earthy, surging “Can’t Find the Time” in particular. (“Write more songs like that!” he instructed.)
On the ride home the band landed on a name: Orpheus, the poet and musician in Greek mythology who traveled into hell to save his wife, Eurydice. Back in Boston, Amphion told the band that Alan Lorber wanted to audition them right away. “We showed up the next day and upon completing our set, Alan presented us with contracts,” Bruce Arnold recalls. “We were told that MGM would be putting up a quarter of a million dollars to market us.” That sum was accurate, but it turned out that the money would be spread out among all of the Boston bands included in the ad campaign. Drummer Harry Sandler remembers an immediate kinship with Lorber, something they weren’t feeling with anyone they auditioned for in New York.
“We’re going to work together on making Orpheus into a great pop group,” Lorber told them confidently as they signed.
He set up the band in a suite at the Park Sheraton, across the street from Carnegie Hall in New York, while they recorded their debut. In the studio, Lorber would have Bruce Arnold sit down next to him at the piano and play through the Orpheus songs on guitar. Arnold recalled, “I would play the chords and he would go find each note and then not only, to my delight, did he take care to use that exact chord I had discovered on the guitar, but also he had a name for it!”
“That’s not a B minor, that’s a B minor eleventh with a double flatted third,” Lorber would say to an impressed Arnold. Lorber’s main strength was arranging, and much more than any of the other Boston Sound bands, Orpheus is where his arranging talents had room to flourish. When it came time to record members of the New York Philharmonic on top of Orpheus’s basic tracks, Lorber didn’t want the whole band at the sessions. “While at the hotel, I would get confidential telegrams from Alan asking me to come to the studio to hear mixes or work on arrangements,” says Arnold, who strategically remained in New York after his bandmates went back to Boston. Arnold had to tell a white lie to quell the others’ suspicion, but hey, it was worth it to see orchestra members perform his compositions, right?
* * *
• • •
TODAY, BOSTON’S BEACON STREET is a vision of immaculate brownstones with astronomical price tags. But in the mid-sixties, it was a reasonably priced location to set up your kid while he or she attended Emerson or BU. Beacon Street was “the epicenter of the college scene,” Dick Weisberg says, explaining his band’s name.
Beacon Street Union followed up a series of successful local gigs—including opening for Jerry Lee Lewis and backing up Chuck Berry—with a trip to New York. After a show at Steve Paul’s Scene on West Forty-sixth Street, they met producer Wes Farrell. Like Lorber, he was a seasoned industry hand. He had composed “Hang On Sloopy” with Bert Berns and penned the theme to the 1966 monster flick Gammera the Invincible. Walking into the Scene, Farrell bowled over the Beacon Street Union with his silk suit and Frankie Avalon hairdo. Over meals at Manhattan’s fanciest restaurants, Farrell would order for the whole table while telling the boys he was looking for bands who had “fresh material and knew how to play in the contemporary style.”
Back in Boston, word got around quickly. Weisberg remembers the Hallucinations’ Peter Wolf asking if they had indeed signed with Farrell to make a record. Weisberg asked if there was something sketchy about Farrell, but it wasn’t that.
“You can’t make a good record if you haven’t paid your dues,” Wolf said.
* * *
• • •
THE FIRST THING you hear when you put on The Eyes of the Beacon Street Union is a voice intoning, with horror-movie gravitas:
Look into the land of the prophet. Look past the living streets of Boston. Look finally, into the eyes of the Beacon Street Union.
This faux-profound Bay State poetry was written by a Boston College friend of the band’s and mailed to Wes Farrell while he was mixing the album in New York. They were intended as the liner notes, but for some reason, Farrell put Tom Wilson in the vocal booth and had him read. Wilson was most famous for producing Bob Dylan’s first electric album and his breakout hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.” His orchestral overdubs on Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” helped turn the forgotten song into a #1 radio hit in 1966. And although Andy Warhol is credited as producer of The Velvet Underground and Nico in 1967, it was Wilson who was in the studio, shaping the band’s beautiful dark twisted fantasy. But his pedigree didn’t lessen the Beacon Street Union’s horror as the needle worked through the opening salvo.
“We finally get our hands on the album, and we can’t wait to hear like what it sounds like,” drummer Dick Weisberg says. “All of a sudden this spooky voice comes on and starts reading the liner notes. Our first reaction was: This is not cool. This is not cool at all.”
Even so, tracks like “Sadie Said No” and “Mystic Mourning” can still mesmerize, half a century later. It’s by no means the train wreck that Weisberg implies, though you can understand his annoyance. “We were like this counterculture, weird thing that Farrell experimented with. But he did it his way, not ours.” The band was embarrassed, and started to get on each other’s cases. “It was a bad thing.”
The initial reviews of the three Boston Sound albums were positive. Broadside covered them all in early 1968. The Eyes of the Beacon Street Union is “a fine album which makes it good listening,” and Orpheus possessed “the magic that separates great from orgasmic.” The eponymous Ultimate Spinach LP, hailed as the most unique of the bunch, overflows with ingenuity and humor. But like the Beacon Streeters, the Spinach front man wasn’t thrilled with how the producer took control, mixing the album without consulting him. “He never was interested in my vision of these songs,” Bruce-Douglas complained. “With all the grace and style of a bull in a china shop, he slapped those albums together.” Almost as bad, in the liner notes Alan Lorber heaped praise on . . . Alan Lorber: “This first Ultimate Spinach LP is a result of the creative genius of producer Alan Lorber. The ever-changing fabric of sound and unique concept of the album is a high-point in the Lorber career which has been dotted with numerous successes.” To this day, Bruce-Douglas will often still sarcastically refer to Lorber as “the creative genius.”
* * *
• • •
WITH THE JANUARY 29, 1968, Newsweek, the Boston Sound hit the national radar, acquiring a spelling variation that would stick. “At first only the names seem changed,” the article begins.
The scene is right from San Francisco as the psychedelic blobs assault the nerves and the raucous music hounds the dancers crowded hip to hippie in squirming abandon. Instead of the Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead, the music is by Ultimate Spinach, Earth Opera, Phluph and Butter. And instead of the Fillmore Auditorium, the scene is in the cavernous Psychedelic Supermarket, The Catacombs or The Boston Tea Party. The place, astonishingly, of this latest
outbreak in the pop revolution is puritanical Boston. What has happened is more than just a new rock word— Bosstown. . . .
By February 1968, everyone under thirty in Boston had an opinion on the article and the bands named therein. The Boston Globe tirelessly covered the topic, noting gamely if stiffly, “What has happened is a ‘pop’ explosion with our beloved old Beantown square in the middle.” More bands were forming practically overnight: Puff, Quill, Ill Wind, the Improper Bostonians, the Apple Pie Motherhood Band, Eden’s Children, Phluph, A Warm Puppy, Bead Game, Bo Grumpus, Listening, Butter, the Cambridge Electric Opera Co., the Ford Theatre, One, the Freeborne, the Orphans, Cambridge Concept of Timothy Clover, Fort Mudge Memorial Dump, Groundspeed, Good Tymes.
By the time writer Richard Goldstein arrived from New York, on assignment from Vogue, everyone knew that “the word is out: Boston is ‘in.’” His lengthy feature sways between praise and fair criticism:
Fledgling Boston groups have been signed, sealed, and delivered like birthday Candygrams . . . these musicians know that the record industry has selected Boston to be the Florence of American rock. “Sometimes,” explained a public-relations man, “you can make something happen by pushing hard enough,” and the push is definitely on.
MGM president Mort Nasitir gets scholarly about it, remarking, “Some of this music is so intellectual that it is a little like the poet T. S. Eliot with his seven layers of ambiguity in each line.”
Next, Goldstein sets his journalistic focus on a fascinating, new Bosstown group named Earth Opera. “There’s actually a much stronger underground situation here than in Frisco, precisely because Boston is one of the most up-tight cities in America,” singer Peter Rowan explained to the Vogue writer. Rowan, twenty-five, was already a music veteran, having recorded his first song (as part of the Cupids) at age fourteen. Gravitating toward bluegrass music, in 1963 he started playing mandolin for legendary picker Bill Monroe. Rowan moved to Nashville to play guitar in Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys; he recalls watching Dylan bang out most of Blonde on Blonde during that Tennessee residency. “We worked on the big repertoire night after night, playing the Grand Ole Opry, and stuff like that,” Rowan recalls. “Monroe saw me getting too close to his style, so he used to stand behind me onstage and shout at me, ‘Sing it like Pete Rowan! Tell ’em it’s Pete Rowan!’”
Back in Boston, Rowan took Monroe’s advice. He formed Earth Opera with David Grisman, and they proceeded to make some of the strangest music to be associated with the Bosstown Sound, flavored with dramatic lyrics, inventively sparse arrangements, and prog-rock leanings, most memorably on the genre-hopping enigma entitled “The Red Sox Are Winning.”
Today, Rowan is a soft-spoken, practicing Buddhist, and he recalls that era with a smile. In 1967, he and Grisman first began working on songs that he thought of as “bluegrass slowed down,” performing them at Club 47 and elsewhere. At one gig he came upon Mel Lyman backstage soaking his harmonicas in a jar of liquid, a common practice to a get a richer tone from a blues harp. When Rowan asked what was in the jar, Lyman said it was LSD.
He laughs at the recollection. “The scary thing is, he could’ve been telling me the truth!”
But neither the developing rock scene nor the strange community forming up on Fort Hill piqued Rowan’s interest. Instead he holed up in Brookline with Grisman, perfecting their “slow arpeggiated music.” Elektra Records signed Earth Opera, who defied all their advice on how their debut record should sound. To the label’s credit, “they let us form a band, put us up in L.A., and let us figure out what the fuck we were doing.” The self-titled debut’s mix of styles was distinctive enough in itself, but out of all the Boston Sound acts, Rowan’s lyrics stand alone in directly addressing the Vietnam War. The leadoff song, “The Red Sox Are Winning,” was no feel-good sports anthem, but instead a damning indictment of a city that would rather celebrate a baseball team than protest a generation of young men dying in a foreign war. Inside a fragmented, collage-style song structure, the singer embodies the apathy he saw in the people of Boston in the summer of 1967:
Should I turn off the TV
or go to the race track
The Red Sox were, in fact, winning. Rowan wrote the song in the middle of the season baseball fans would come to call “The Impossible Dream,” where the team climbed out of a nine-year slump, clinching the American League pennant.
“I thought I picked up on the vibe pretty good at that time,” Rowan says. “That was the summer when the Red Sox were winning but the gloom and doom of the whole Vietnam thing . . .” Rowan pauses, before mentioning a childhood friend who went to fight and didn’t return.
Rowan was proud to express his anger on record. “I had a platform. I could say what I wanted. I was sympathizing with the warriors who had gone to Vietnam.” “The Red Sox Are Winning” ends with the sound of an audience going rabid at Fenway, as an announcer goes berserk: “Let’s make Boston America’s #1 baseball city! Kill the hippies! Kill the hippies!”*
Elektra sent Earth Opera on tour with the Doors in the spring of 1968. Jim Morrison would frequently be MIA moments before their scheduled time, and Earth Opera would be asked to extend their set. It warped Rowan’s mind. “You’re in front of an audience that wants to see a freak show,” he says. “It’s not that Jim himself was a freak so much, but that he knew how to touch that freak aspect in people.” The Great American Eagle Tragedy, Earth Opera’s follow-up, doubled down on the antiwar sentiment. The title track is a ten-minute opus that ends with Rowan shredding his vocal cords, screaming, “I can’t stand it anymore!” After a long tour that unceremoniously ended in Huntington Beach, California, the band broke up in front of Rowan’s eyes.
“We had no idea what the Bosstown Sound was,” he adds.
* * *
• • •
AS THE BOSTON SOUND ads and promotion rolled out, Ultimate Spinach commenced their first tour in San Francisco, playing the Fillmore two weekends in a row. They now featured a second female singer, Priscilla DiDonato—an occasional cartoonist for Broadside—to match the layered sound on their recorded debut.
Amphion’s Paret says Ian Bruce-Douglas “became an egomaniac, especially after he saw all the promotions. But they were a good live band!” Bruce-Douglas said that his bandmates turned against him on subsequent tours, claiming he caught wind of plans to accidentally attack him with a guitar in the middle of a show. He was still having disagreements with Lorber as well, who “wanted to market us as G-rated psychedelic bubblegum” and never forgave the group for acting like feedback-happy mad acid hatters on The Pat Boone Show.
Over in the Beacon Street Union camp, the guys had lobbied their colleges for a year off in order to tour behind their major-label debut. Their first show was on February 5 in Detroit’s Grand Ballroom; the owner of the venue gave a tour, proudly pointing out bullet holes from the previous summer’s riots. The opening act was the hometown MC5. “We get an endorsement deal from Custom Amplifiers, because we’re MGM recording artists now,” drummer Dick Weisberg recalls. “The only problem was, all the new gear was gonna meet us in Detroit when we got there.” The band found the new equipment bewildering, perhaps explaining why they lost control over their usual tight live show that first night: A shriek from Tartachny’s amp brought the guitarist to his knees, as though he’d been knifed in the skull.
In Los Angeles MGM Records threw a release party, but no one in Beacon Street Union was of drinking age yet, so the musicians had to stay in another room adjacent to the one with full bar service. Occasionally an executive would pop his head in to congratulate them. “It just kept getting weirder and weirder,” Weisberg says. When the band played the following night, the crowd filled up with identical-looking waifs with floral wreaths on their heads, many carrying violin cases. Weisberg felt like he was in a Fellini movie.
Meanwhile, Orpheus was getting significant radio play, first with “I’ve Never Seen Love Like This,”
followed by the soft-rock precursor “Can’t Find the Time,” which peaked at #80 on Billboard’s Hot 100. With their mellow strum-a-thons and harmonizing, it’s hard to imagine Orpheus opening for the Who, Led Zeppelin, and Cream, but they held their own, even without the orchestral sounds that enhanced their debut record. Orpheus was doing well in Boston and New York, in Bakersfield, California, in Hawaii—and that was about it, as those were the only places that were carrying the record in stores. Orpheus didn’t know it, but MGM hadn’t paid the pressing plant and according to Arnold was “basically going into bankruptcy” at the time.
The band was ecstatic when they were named #10 in the 1968 Playboy Jazz and Pop Reader Poll, between Hendrix and the Beatles, but were disillusioned to learn it was due to voter fraud. “We went into every magazine store in New York City and we posed as being from Playboy,” an industry insider eventually explained to Arnold. “We told them that there was a typographical error on the ballot in this month’s issue and [we] were going to take all of them, and that new ballots would be in the next issue.” After collecting thousands of ballots, they wrote Orpheus on every single one of them, mailed them to multiple locations around the country, and then had them mailed to Playboy from those outposts. It’s unclear if Alan Lorber knew this poll was rigged or not, but he would later cite the group’s position on the Playboy list as proof that the critics had been wrong all along—and that audiences across the country adored them.
It got stranger. A friend of Arnold’s returned from a visit to California with a few of the region’s best underground newspapers. He pointed out an ad for a band called Orpheus set to appear live in San Francisco later that week. Orpheus—the band Arnold had founded—had never played, and were not scheduled to play, anywhere on the West Coast. The ad used the same distinctive font that adorned their album cover. The night of the San Francisco performance, his friend called the club and asked to speak to someone in the band.
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