Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  Why would they do this? Was it an ill-advised attempt at faking racial diversity? Was this their way of taunting the community around Fort Hill, whose neighborhood they invaded in 1966?

  Why, from stolen tapes to inserted man, would they do any of this?

  * * *

  • • •

  IN HINDSIGHT, Dick Weisberg agrees that Peter Wolf was right: The Beacon Street Union hadn’t paid their dues yet when they scored a record deal in 1967. And in a cruel twist of fate, now that they had paid their dues, listeners labeled them a cookie-cutter product of MGM. Producer Wes Farrell promised that their second album, The Clown Died in Marvin Gardens, would put them back on track, but it tanked. Original members quit. The band tried to reform as the Eagles; Wes Farrell said they should call it the Silver Eagles. They settled on Eagle, releasing one album that no one heard. There were times in the next few years when they couldn’t get a booking as Eagle, so they’d revert to their old Beacon Street Union name to score a gig.

  Out of the three original Boston Sound bands, Orpheus was the least affected by the negative press and record company schemes, like fake versions of their band or music-reader-poll ballot stuffing. Maybe that’s what they had in mind when they titled their second album Ascending. For singer Bruce Arnold, the only downside to their growing fame in New England was the way locals pronounced the band name: “Ahhh-fee-us.”

  Arnold’s private belief that he was Orpheus and that the rest of the guys were simply his backing band was becoming harder to conceal. Tensions rose. Harry Sandler’s showy live drumming was getting a lot of attention; Jack McKenes was doing a lot of drinking. After a sold-out show at Arlington High School in December 1969, a full-blown screaming match erupted in the dressing room. “Are we a band? Or are we just your sidemen?” Sandler fumed. Arnold didn’t have to say it out loud. McKenes and Sandler quit that night.

  In classic Alan Lorber fashion, a changing lineup wasn’t a problem, as long as the band name could still be capitalized upon. Orpheus continued to release new music, but the first two albums undoubtedly represent their commercial peak. If you want to find out if Harry Sandler and Bruce Arnold eventually buried the hatchet, you don’t need to look very far to get your answer. There’s an Orpheus website where Bruce Arnold’s name and likeness are conspicuously removed from all photographs and the band’s biography. Stranger still, the website states that it was done at Arnold’s request.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1969, Fusion magazine’s Robert Somma published a cover story about what went wrong with the Boston Sound. Two balloons depict the scene in ’68 and ’69, with the latter completely deflated and flaccid.

  In the fall of 1970, twenty-five-year-old Michael Curb became president of MGM Records. On his first day, he fired the entire A&R staff. Curb was just getting started. In November, he announced he was going to rid the label of any act that sang about hard drugs or promoted heavy substance use. Curb dropped eighteen bands, describing how the alleged miscreants “wipe out your secretary, waste the time of your promotion people, abuse the people in your organization, show no concern in the recording studio, abuse the equipment, and then to top things off, they break up.” President Richard Nixon praised Curb, stating, “Your forthright stand against drug abuse is a responsible contribution to the welfare of your country.” The young record exec denied the policy could turn into a witch hunt, magnanimously assuring Billboard readers that MGM wouldn’t be making the specific list of dropped bands public.

  The bands, of course, knew: They suddenly no longer had record contracts. Bruce Arnold from Orpheus, now operating the band with an entirely new lineup, was shocked to learn that his innocuous act was part of the druggy MGM 18. “I had to think back what lyric it could possibly be,” Arnold says. “Then I remembered: ‘Baby, I remember when we turned on to a rainy day,’ from ‘I’ve Never Seen Love Like This.’ The track was actually about getting turned on to a rainy day, cannabis optional.” To this day, Arnold believes if the band had actually been busted for drugs, they would have been a lot more popular. When Curb was asked to comment on the Boston Sound, he dismissed his own label’s recent back catalog as “just a bunch of junk.”

  Things got worse at the label. In 1972, MGM’s Lenny Scheer, who had been instrumental in the marketing of the Boston Sound, was indicted for tax evasion related to unreported income he made by selling returned, unsold LPs from stores to discount houses and pocketing a portion for himself. Later that year, an MGM executive leaked stories to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, who ran an ongoing investigation on payola in the music business. For the first time since the early sixties, the FCC started paying attention again. In 1975, a series of federal indictments ensnared everyone from low-level private record sellers like Bang Records associate Carmine “Wassel” DeNoia to big shots like Clive Davis, the president of CBS Records.* The party was over. Polydor absorbed MGM Records in 1976. Alan Lorber later trademarked the titles “Boston Sound” and “Bosstown Sound,” just in case.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’M AT A TINY CAMBRIDGE CLUB called Toad to see a local band, Fandango, do their regular Wednesday night slot. The packed room brims with joy, the crowd dancing as the band rips through a repertoire of classic soul covers. Fred Griffeth, the seventy-four-year-old lead singer, belts out a version of Ernie K-Doe’s “A Certain Girl” as if he were half a century younger, looking for love.

  Afterward, we talk in his camper van across the street. Griffeth was one of three lead singers in the Bagatelle, the only band associated with the Boston Sound to feature black performers. He’d been recruited by Lee Mason, ex-drummer for the Lost, to join a large soul band he was assembling. The Bagatelle ballooned into a nine-person outfit, featuring three African-American singers trading off on lead vocals and backing each other up with tight harmonies. Opening for national acts like Richie Havens and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, the band earned a reputation for putting on a hot live show—occasionally literally incorporating the talents of a fire-eating mime. In Rolling Stone, Landau raved about their “hip kind of soul music,” judging them the best performing band in the city.

  The Bagatelle landed a deal with ABC Records. Tom Wilson—fresh from his surprise Beacon Street Union incantation—was on board to produce. He promised the Bagatelle they would “figure out how to make it happen together,” Griffeth says. “We went in the studio, recorded it, and next thing we knew, you know, they had put it out with strings and blah, blah, blah. We never got to say a word about what happened.” At one point, to test if Wilson was paying more attention to their music or the model sitting on his lap, the mighty Bagatelle horn section purposely played off key during a take. “Great, guys,” Wilson said, simultaneously flirting with women in the control room, “it’s great!”

  11pm SATURDAY arrived in the early summer of 1968. One review optimistically predicted that the album “ought to do a lot to wipe out the bad taste of the ‘Boston Sound.’” The Bagatelle hit the road: nine men, two vans. Despite the critical praise, tempers were already running high by the time the band arrived in Chicago for an August show—just as the Democratic National Convention was under way at the International Amphitheatre. Ten thousand protesters filled the streets, chanting “The Whole World Is Watching!” and clashing with cops.

  After the gig, Griffeth and a local friend went to check out if the riots were as bad as the TV coverage made it seem. Griffeth watched in shock as the police rushed a crowd, bashing them with batons. A white man stumbled away, holding his bloodied head and yelling, “Oh my God—they’re hitting us like we’re niggers.”

  The Bagatelle did not survive Chicago. Half the band decided to go to New York to try and start under a new name, while the other half headed for California. All of them were tired—not just of the Boston Sound, but of Boston itself. Griffeth went with the California crew. “When you get outta Chicago the whole landscape jus
t blows out and opens you up,” he says. The band drove west through Iowa and Nebraska, then decided to visit New Mexico. West and then south, the Bostonians kept driving, farther and farther from home. “Everybody was still, like, a little uptight because we had experienced some bad vibes and racial shit in the Midwest. But then that sign for New Mexico comes up: The Land of Enchantment. You pass over the border, man, and it was like that knot in your stomach went away. Everything relaxed. We get into Santa Fe and everybody said, This is it. This is it for me.”

  FIVE

  The White Light Underground

  My other big record of the day was White Light/White Heat.

  —LESTER BANGS, “Astral Weeks”

  BUT WHAT IF THERE REALLY WAS A BOSTON SOUND? Something truly revolutionary, a music evocative of the city from which it sprang?

  Critic Wayne McGuire believed it existed. In August 1968, he published a manifesto in Crawdaddy, arguing that two musicians were actually creating it.

  It is irrelevant that the Velvet Underground first received significant exposure in their home city New York with Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It was in Boston, through record sales and Boston Tea Party performances, that they began to find some acceptance and meaningful response (like getting their equipment stolen). It is irrelevant that Mel Lyman’s present instrument is Avatar and film, not music. What is relevant is that these two voices best express the character and spirit of the forces at work in Boston, home of the first American Revolution. It is a character and spirit which in the near future will make Boston the center of the second American Revolution, a revolution of the spirit.

  The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed and the guru of Fort Hill would seem to be polar opposites, but in strange articles like McGuire’s and a rock palace called the Boston Tea Party, the two briefly converged. At 53 Berkeley Street, the Velvets found a second life as a band, playing the club forty-three times between 1967 and 1970 (versus only three shows in their home base, New York). There, the band transformed from an Andy Warhol Factory novelty into a musical force. One night, after a chaotic MC5 set in which someone urged the crowd to tear down the hall, Reed took the stage and pledged his allegiance: “This is our favorite place to play in the whole country and we would hate to see anyone even try to destroy it!”

  The Velvet Underground’s favorite venue would never have existed had it not been for Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Community.

  * * *

  • • •

  JESSIE BENTON WAS BORN in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1939. The daughter of painter Thomas Hart Benton, Jessie enjoyed an artistic, celebrity-filled upbringing. When a certain movie star stayed at the Benton residence for a time, posing for her father, she fell head over heels. “I stayed in love with Marlon Brando for the rest of my life,” Benton said. “Who wouldn’t? He noticed me, and liked my father.”

  Both Thomas and his wife, Rita, revered traditional American music, and Jessie learned guitar at an early age; her first job was singing at the Ocean View Hotel on Martha’s Vineyard, where the family spent their summers. When Edward R. Murrow brought his Person to Person interview program to the painter’s house in 1955, a nineteen-year-old Jessie performed “The Turtle Dove Song” on dulcimer for a national TV audience.

  Jessie Benton recalled an idyllic upbringing, especially those summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where none of the island’s residents made a fuss about her father’s controversial public persona or batted an eye when the family skinny-dipped in the ocean.* As a child, Jessie immersed herself in Greek mythology, and for several years believed she was secretly Persephone, Zeus’s daughter, the beautiful queen of the underworld (and also the subject of one of her father’s most revered paintings). Showing a reporter around the Bentons’ island property in 2012, she dreamily gazed over the landscape and declared, “This was our world.”

  With her striking looks and confidence, she exerted a powerful force. “We engaged Jessie to sit with our two four-year-olds,” said one Vineyard resident. “It was strange that both fathers awoke early on the days Jessie was to come and soon appeared shaved and sporting combed locks.” She attended Radcliffe College in the late fifties, just as Harvard Square’s folk scene was blossoming. On Martha’s Vineyard, she met David Gude, a recording engineer who exerted an influence on other young island musicians like James Taylor and Carly Simon. Gude and Benton married on New Year’s Eve 1962, at St. Francis Xavier’s Church in Kansas City. They had a son, Anthony, and though it would be years before she obtained a divorce, Jessie freely dated other men throughout the early sixties.

  One such suitor was Robert Peter Cohon, who would become a successful character actor as Peter Coyote. In 1964, he was an artistic young man with interests in everything from political activism to mime work—to Jessie Benton.

  She was a natural aristocrat, haughty and achingly beautiful, blessed by her Italian mother with dark, tangled hair and a Caravaggio mouth. Her unerring instinct for the first-rate and the precision of her dismissive ridicule invigorated any room she entered, charging the atmosphere and alerting people to impending adventure or disgrace. Her behavior was restless and bold, and her natural incandescence made others pale by comparison. Her gifts were so abundant that her peers (the best and the brightest of Radcliffe and Harvard) seemed to accept as just her uncontested status as reigning queen.

  Coyote persuaded her to move to San Francisco with Anthony, but Benton returned east every summer to Martha’s Vineyard to be with her family. One night during the summer of 1965 she tried LSD for the first time. It was the same night Gude brought Mel Lyman to the Benton house.

  Lyman walked into the living room and confidently assessed the huge portrait of an eighteen-year-old Jessie holding a guitar, painted by her father. “That doesn’t look anything like you,” Mel bluntly told Jessie. “That looks like a frog.” Jessie had never cared for the portrait herself and was immediately fascinated by the first person to ever criticize it. “He was like something I had never seen or known ever,” Benton says. “He really was like something from another planet.” Jessie’s first LSD trip was a bad one, but Mel stayed by her side throughout the forty-eight-hour psychedelic breakdown, singing and reading her his poetry. When she finally came out of it, she promptly called Peter Coyote and told him to send her things. “I’ve found God and I’m moving in with him,” she said.

  The new couple moved into their first home on Fort Hill in early 1966. Securing a divorce from Gude to marry Lyman would take some doing. She was going to need a good lawyer.

  * * *

  • • •

  NOW IN HIS EIGHTIES, the accidental architect of Boston’s alternative-media landscape currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas. “At the time I was one of the most famous people in Boston,” Ray Riepen crows. “Riepen would say ‘hello,’ and voila! A 400-word feature,” The Boston Globe noted, tongue in cheek. In the late sixties, Riepen was known as the “hippie entrepreneur” because he opened the Boston Tea Party, started the free-form phase of radio station WBCN, and bankrolled the pioneering alternative weekly The Cambridge Phoenix. Though all three institutions are now defunct, Riepen’s business moves in the late sixties and early seventies resonated in Boston for decades.

  How did a thirty-year-old Kansas City lawyer trigger a cultural transformation 1,400 miles away? The chain of events started when he went out on a few dates with fellow Kansas City native Jessie Benton; the evenings would end with Riepen bringing Jessie home and getting drunk on bourbon with her father.

  In the summer of 1966, Riepen and Benton connected again, as she was trying to figure out how to legally split from David Gude. According to Benton, things with her estranged husband were amicable, but Riepen suggested that manufacturing a record of ill will would expedite the legal proceedings.

  Lacking an actual “indignity,” Riepen staged one. He had Benton dial Gude and ask if he was interested in getting back together; Gude unloaded, counting the ways sh
e had hurt him. “Most people are too busy socializing to read the law anymore, but indignities can occur by the phone, and that was the grounds we used to file,” Riepen explains.

  Benton got her divorce. But she and David didn’t drift physically far from each other. In fact, shortly after Benton and Lyman married and moved up to Fort Hill, Gude settled in next door with his new love interest, Faith Franckenstein. The four of them would constitute the founding members of the Fort Hill Community, a number that would steadily rise. (“20 or more adults, 9 to 12 children, some cats, two houses, seven apartments, lots of cars, a badly battered Revolutionary War monument . . . and one of the loveliest views of the city,” read the first Globe profile, the following year.) With a new wife and free of his musical duties in Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, Mel turned his attention to what he believed would be his great artistic medium: experimental films.

  Lucky for Mel, he had briefly roomed with one of the titans of the form: Jonas Mekas. A Lithuanian immigrant, Mekas had helped publish an anti-German newsletter back home. After his typewriter disappeared from its hiding place inside a stack of firewood, he fled to the United States, and within weeks of arriving, he and his brother Adolfas rented a Bolex 8mm camera. In 1964, he established the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, a peripatetic Manhattan institution that built its fan base and notoriety with artists like Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol.