“I’m on the floor and all of a sudden I look up as Van Morrison is singing, and there are flames coming through the fan above his head,” Law says. He and Mitch Blake grabbed fire extinguishers and raced up the stairs that led to the roof ladder. Morrison, who clearly noticed the blaze, had the presence of mind to keep singing—a song, no less, about climbing a ladder—and as the two men put out the fire, a cocktail of water, foam, and debris rained down on the band. After the concert, a stoned audience member approached Morrison and Law, making it clear they had mistaken the fire and its extinguishing as part of the light show.
* * *
• • •
JONATHAN RICHMAN FINALLY found the nerve to perform songs in front of other people later in 1968. “I knew I couldn’t play or sing like the other guys,” Richman recalled. “I figured I had a feeling and that was enough. I knew I was honest.”
Sometimes Richman didn’t even have a guitar, according to Willie Alexander, who saw an early performance at one of the free Sunday afternoon concerts on Cambridge Common. “He would just sing on top of him hitting his fuckin’ baseball glove for percussion. People thought he was wonderful. I thought he was completely out to lunch. And that was a good thing.”
Four years later, in 1972, Richman would record an album for Warner Brothers with his band, the Modern Lovers; John Cale produced most of the tracks. The result was a rock touchstone, with Jonathan’s peculiar but sincere songs backed by a banging band: future Talking Head Jerry Harrison on keyboards, future Car David Robinson on drums, and future lawyer Ernie Brooks on bass. The Modern Lovers wouldn’t see release until 1976, and in the intervening years, something made Richman swear off electric instruments and his dedication to glorious, droning Velvet-style noise—a dream or vision, à la Van Morrison.
“I don’t think it was so much that he was getting tired of the old songs as he was developing this idea that the whole rock-’n’-roll-star-making machinery was corrupt,” bandmate Ernie Brooks recalled. “And part of that was the whole system of burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, using a lot of power for amps and sound systems, playing stadiums—you know, feeling that there was something wrong in profiting from all these things—and he started tying it all together in his mind and decided that he didn’t want the Modern Lovers to be a conventional rock ’n’ roll band.”
The combination of Jonathan’s complete sincerity and the strange reasons he was doling out to explain the change made it hard to understand exactly what was happening. “The band has to learn volume and to play softer,” Richman said in 1973, otherwise “infants wouldn’t like us because we hurt their little ears, and I believe that any group that would hurt the ears of infants—and this is no joke—sucks.” Even decades later, at a 2016 acoustic show at the Middle East club in Cambridge, Richman stopped the show midway through to inform the sound engineer that he could still hear a slight electric hum in the room, and could anything be done?
The first incarnation of the Modern Lovers did not survive Richman’s transformation into a full-blown nature boy. Robinson, who would later cofound the Cars, recalled an “obsessed” Richman wanting to do shows on street corners and rest homes, asking that he “play a rolled-up newspaper by banging it against my fist.”
* * *
• • •
EVEN IN THEIR HOME AWAY FROM HOME, some people simply hated the Velvet Underground. The Globe complained about their “headache-making and ear splitting” music, while Boston After Dark noted that they performed like “automatons with a fairly lackluster attack and endings that broke off like racing cars hitting a brick wall at full-tilt.” Elsewhere, reviewers complained that they dressed sloppily in sweatpants, or expressed disbelief that their drummer was female.* But it wasn’t just the overly dramatic Wayne McGuire spreading the gospel of the Velvets in Boston. The height of VU evangelism could be found in Fusion, a nationally distributed magazine published out of Boston. Its editor, Robert Somma—formerly of Crawdaddy—was one of the band’s “pet” writers, and in April 1969 praised their third album as “technically perfect.” He even recorded some voice-overs for radio spots promoting that very same record.
Somma socialized with the band whenever they performed in Boston, often joining them afterward at the Cambridge apartment of Ed Hood.* The star of Warhol’s 1965 film My Hustler, Hood was a balding, intellectual, entertainingly bitchy man who was taking a stab at an English degree at Harvard. The gatherings contained the feeling of a transcendental salon—“séances,” Somma calls them. In Jonathan Richman’s 1992 song about the band, he sang, “Wild wild parties when they start to unwind / A close encounter of the thirdest kind.” Over Chinese food, Reed would hold court and rave about theosophist Alice Bailey; Hood would balance a cocktail on his head and recite the opening of Paradise Lost. Doug Yule cryptically alluded to spending “a lot of time together in strange places and strange situations,” and Sterling Morrison enjoyed repeating a story about encountering a dwarf with a gun in Boston who threatened to kill him.
It would all come to an end, sort of, in 1970, when Lou Reed abandoned the band he’d built, turning his back on the Velvet Underground and, for a while, on music altogether. He was supposedly displeased with the direction in which Steve Sesnick wanted to take the band, and might have been developing a new kind of competitive, unhealthy relationship with Yule as well. After his departure, Reed, twenty-eight, moved back to Long Island where he worked for his accountant father as a typist for $40 a week. One night Reed showed up unannounced at Somma’s Ipswich apartment to get high and watch TV. As the stoned pair tuned in the film Fantastic Voyage—a movie about scientists converted into miniatures and injected into a body—Reed turned to Somma and gravely declared, “This is going to be very disturbing.”
Somma sensed Reed was going through a profoundly difficult time and made attempts to keep his creative juices flowing. To encourage Reed, he published some of his poems in Fusion. Like Morrison with his poem on the back of Astral Weeks, Reed’s direct references to Boston were limited to verse, never finding their way into any of his VU or solo songs. “And in the back pornography too / (distilled, that is, to Boston taste),” Reed wrote in a piece about walking through the shops of Cambridge. In his Fusion poems from 1971, you can track his struggle to keep it together after leaving the band. In “We Are the People,” the magical rules of Alice Bailey’s White Magic seem turned against him: “We are the insects of someone else’s thoughts, a casualty / of daytime, nighttime, space and god.” Reed was no longer seeing his own negative thoughts as bugs; now he’d been demoted from god to pawn, a mere bug in some grander entity’s vision. It would be two years before Reed took the stage again.
Today, Robert Somma’s life couldn’t be more distant from the rock journalist profession that brought him close to Lou Reed in the late sixties and early seventies—Somma is currently a bankruptcy attorney at a law firm in Boston; in 2004 President George W. Bush appointed him as a federal judge, a position he held for three years. From the conference room of his office suite, there’s an incredible view of Boston, including the Fort Hill tower where he spent a harrowing afternoon in 1971; Somma was once detained and harassed by the Fort Hill Community after Fusion published a critical piece about the members’ way of life. When the discussion turns to whatever happened to Mel Lyman, I mention that the FHC say he died in 1978. “If it came from them,” Somma replies, “I’m not sure I’d believe it.”
* * *
• • •
IN JULY 1969, Riepen and Law relocated the Boston Tea Party from Berkeley Street to a larger space across from Fenway Park on Lansdowne. The lack of PRAISE YE THE LORD above the stage wasn’t the only difference; fans and musicians thought that the new locale simply didn’t contain the magic atmosphere that made the original room so special. Bigger acts like T. Rex, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, and the Kinks all performed there. Still, Riepen could see that his financial plan for the club wasn’t panning out. In 196
8, he had sold $300,000 in public stocks, figuring that Boston’s status as the quintessential college town would keep renewing the club’s audience. But according to the Globe, the 1970 student strike protesting the Vietnam War caused admissions to plunge, with the fiscal year ending in May showing a $40,000 loss. “The only people who made money out of this,” one Tea Party stockholder grumbled, “are the rock musicians themselves.”
The artists were demanding higher guarantees; it was impossible for the Tea Party to go back to the smaller-scale bands it used to host on Berkeley Street. In its last months of operation, the club hosted everyone from Traffic to Little Richard, who brandished a pistol in the presence of Don Law after an impossibly energetic performance, demanding prompt payment be deposited into a glittering suitcase. On December 29, 1970, Sha Na Na headlined the Boston Tea Party’s final show. “They say I was some eccentric lawyer with a seedy midwestern accent, a rube that all of these clever people used to get rich,” Riepen says. “But let me tell you, there wasn’t anybody that dreamed of any fucking thing like the Tea Party in Boston when I got there.”
* * *
• • •
MANAGER STEVE SESNICK found no cause for the Velvet Underground to split just because Lou Reed was gone, and the rest of the members agreed at first. Then Sterling Morrison quit after a show in Houston, and Yule recruited Walter Powers and Willie Alexander, whom he’d left behind in the Grass Menagerie. Moe Tucker, the sole original Velvet, hung on through the early seventies. At a show in 1971, David Bowie excitedly talked to Doug Yule for fifteen minutes, only later learning it wasn’t Lou.
Yule later said that the trouble all started with Sesnick. “I was like a kid thrown into the deep end of a pool and told to swim,” he said. The manager took advantage of the fact that the members of VU had a habit of not talking things over among themselves, allowing him to divide and conquer. “I would be told by him that I was better than Lou and that the others were not really my friends,” Yule said.
“You can’t con someone unless they’re greedy,” Yule admitted, “and I was real greedy.”
Willie Alexander, now in his seventies and living in Gloucester, shows me a “cheat sheet” scribbled with song titles—the total information he received hours before playing his first VU show. A chord progression ends with the directive “Watch Walter.” A note at the bottom reads, in Yule’s handwriting, “Fuck it/Fake it.”
“That was what I had to go on,” Alexander says. “Some people thought I was John Cale.”
Thus the Velvet Underground transformed from a groundbreaking New York art-rock group into a better-than-average bar band from Boston. Like a ghost ship sailing through the club circuit, they burned off any excitement still attached to their name. Before Lou Reed resurrected the band in 1993, the Velvet Underground’s final performance was at a ski lodge in Vermont, featuring no original members. The audience kept asking Yule to turn down the volume.
SIX
Scenes from the Real World
THE FIVE MEN, identically dressed in gray suits, straw Stetsons, and dark glasses, had never met before, but their actions had been planned in advance. In the basement of the Boston Mercantile Bank on Congress Street, two guards were transporting sacks of cash into the vault when the men sprang into action. Two of them stepped off the elevator, guns drawn, forcing customers to sit along the wall while the other three disarmed the guards. A woman in a business suit screamed. As more customers unwittingly stepped off the elevator and into the crime scene, one of the robbers shot a hostage in the ankle as a warning. The cart full of cash was wheeled toward the exit. As the mystery men left, one of them rolled a canister toward the huddled hostages. An enormous cloud of pink smoke filled the hallway.
Outside, a sixth man sat in a station wagon. One by one the five others left the bank, tossing two sacks each into the car, then dispersing. Across the street, on the tenth floor of an office building, the mastermind watched through binoculars. It was the largest heist in Boston since the 1950s Brink’s robbery, and it had all gone off without a hitch.
* * *
• • •
SCREENWRITER ALAN TRUSTMAN wasn’t surprised. He had been planning it for more than twenty years.
Trustman was born in Brookline in 1930. At fifteen, he got a summer job at the First National Bank in downtown Boston, where he sorted checks all day and imagined pulling off the perfect heist. As an experiment in theft, he had a friend cash a $100 check, which he removed from his alphabetical sorting and shredded. Check cashed, Trustman returned the money and informed his bosses of the security hole. They knew such a scheme was possible, but decided it would cost far more to install preventive measures. They didn’t fire him.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Trustman was hired at Nutter McClennen & Fish, where his father was a partner. From his corner office, Alan could look down at the First National Bank of Boston. His heist fantasies returned with a vengeance. But instead of committing a felony, he turned his idea into a screenplay, pounding out The Crown Caper over the course of seven Sundays in 1967.
Without any connection to the movie business, he naively sent the result to Alfred Hitchcock. Amazingly, Hitchcock’s assistant read it, liked it, and phoned Trustman. She explained that in order to get his script in front of a reputable director, he needed an agent. Trustman had his firm’s best switchboard operator flood the lines at William Morris until an agent agreed to speak with him. The man who took him on, John Flaxman, was a fan of Norman Jewison’s recent movie The Russians Are Coming. Flaxman met the director at the airport in New York before a trip, handed him Trustman’s script, and told him to make a decision within ten minutes of landing in Los Angeles. Somewhere over the Midwest, Jewison knew that his next motion picture would be The Thomas Crown Affair.
Soon after, during scouting visits to Boston, Jewison learned just how close the title character was to its author. When Jewison suggested certain details of the heist were unbelievable, Trustman brought him to the actual bank and walked him through each robber’s route. “He was incredulous that no one stopped us, asked us anything, or paid any attention to us. I looked like a bank employee, but Norman had a California tan, an expensive camel-hair, non-Boston coat and non-Boston sideburns well below his ears,” Trustman says.
Jewison signed up, and Steve McQueen was keen to play the title role. He didn’t strike the director as a natural fit: “The character wears suits, Steve.” But since Jewison’s last picture with the actor, McQueen had become the world’s biggest box-office draw. McQueen, who had never worn a suit, even in a film, made an impassioned pitch and got the part.
Trustman balked; how could “this thug, this biker, this dead-end kid” play his Boston Brahmin thief? At Jewison’s urging, Trustman screened McQueen’s oeuvre, cataloging “everything he liked to do, everything he did not like to do, everything that made him comfortable, and everything where he looked stiff and frozen.” He “McQueened” Crown’s lines, capping each at six words, and added scenes where the character zoomed around in a dune buggy. McQueen loved it.
Thrilled by the prospect of a Steve McQueen picture being filmed in town, the mayor’s office gave Jewison plenty of support. But this didn’t guarantee a smooth shoot in public locales, as reported in a 1977 Boston Magazine article. For a scene on Beacon Hill, just as Jewison had called “Action!” a patrolman strolled into the shot and told the crew they couldn’t film there.
“But we have permission from the mayor’s office!” a production assistant insisted.
“You’ve got to go through district headquarters,” the cop said, dumbfounding Jewison and the crew. To lose a day’s shoot to get the official permit would set the production back $90,000. You don’t have to read too hard between the lines of the story to grasp how things were resolved: “A production assistant and the officer took a stroll around the block. When they returned, production was resumed.”
Throughout filmi
ng, cameras were concealed during public shoots, to capture more natural performances from the actors and background extras. When it was time to film the movie’s climactic robbery, there were very few indicators a shoot was under way. “Our heisters scared a lot of customers and pedestrians who thought they were seeing a real robbery,” Jewison told The Boston Globe, “but oddly no one tried to interfere. I think they were afraid of getting involved.”
McQueen was playing a fictional version of Trustman, and there were times during production when the lines between the two men became blurred, even competitive. “I had recently bought a new suit, which I used to do every five years. It was a very nice suit. And I was wearing this suit on the set.” Suddenly, Steve McQueen stormed off—a “tantrum” as Trustman described it—refusing to film his next scene. Norman Jewison quietly pulled Trustman off to the side and told him, “He says your suit is better than his. I think it would be helpful if you left.” Trustman was in shock; McQueen didn’t even like wearing suits.
After spending months turning Trustman’s fantasy into a kind of reality, the production wrapped and the Hollywood filmmakers exited Boston. For the writer, it must have been like waking from a dream. There was no evidence left behind of the events that had just transpired—the heists, the famous endless kiss between McQueen and costar Faye Dunaway. Had any of it really happened? It was a question that arose again and again across 1968, as daydreams and brutal reality alike became fodder for the silver screen.
* * *
• • •
“BOSTON IS CELEBRATING a big bank robbery this week,” the Globe reported on June 16. The all-day premiere gala kicked off with the presentation of “the Thomas Crown purse” to the winner of the sixth horse race at Suffolk Downs, followed by a party on a yacht, a cocktail reception at the New England Aquarium, and a parade downtown. McQueen arrived via helicopter. “Think of it,” Norman Jewison told an interviewer, “a movie shot in Boston. Nobody ever shoots movies in Boston.”
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