NOTES
PROLOGUE: IN THE BEGINNING
All quotes from author interviews with John Sheldon, Tom Kielbania, Carmine DeNoia, Janet Planet, John Payne, Eric Kraft, and Joe Smith except as follows:
“If I had an axe”: No Direction Home.
“I wanted to save the world”: Felton, “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America.”
“the most beautiful music”: Levey, “Friendly Fifty on Fort Hill—Better Way for People?”
“before I knew what poetry was”: Cott, “Van Morrison: The Poet.”
“That’s art, man”: Heylin, Can You Feel the Silence?, 156.
“I looked at him”: Ibid., 127.
“Pall Malls”: Selvin, Here Comes the Night, 250.
“rock and roll version”: Ibid., 343.
“I showed up for the session”: Smith, Off the Record, 271.
“He was just torn apart”: Heylin, Can You Feel the Silence?, 153.
“Boston: a famous place”: Powell, “Pixies: Catalog Album Review.”
“That year itself”: French, The Women’s Room, 5.
1: AGAINST ELECTRICITY
All quotes from author interviews with John Sheldon, Tom Kielbania, Carmine DeNoia, Janet Planet, John Payne, Eric Kraft, and Joe Smith except as follows:
“my whole being”: Shteamer, “In Full: Lewis Merenstein, Producer of Astral Weeks.”
“the quality of a beacon”: Bangs, “Astral Weeks,” 20.
“just channeled. They just came through”: Heylin, Can You Feel the Silence?, 163.
“Bert loved and identified”: Ibid., 153.
“So here’s this disc jockey”: Tosches, Vanity Fair.
“winces and strains”: Kraft, Boston After Dark.
“We were finally really LIVING”: Mills, Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison, 45.
“Too samey . . . It’s not about me”: Gleason, NPR.
2: GOD’S UNDERGROUND NEWSPAPER
All quotes from author interviews with Jim Kweskin, David Felton, Harvey Silverglate, Charles Giuliano, and Dick Russell except as follows:
“It’s not like we were Elvis”: Reed, “The Jim Kweskin Jug Band Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary.”
“Sometimes you have to create”: Felton, “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America.”
“He worshipped Judy”: Ibid.
bringing “hate” to everything: Earle, Broadside of Boston.
“Every year, they build on the ruins”: Ibid.
“The Manson Family preached peace and love”: Felton, “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America.”
“He does manipulate us”: Ibid.
“The only rules”: Ibid.
“Once the basic requirements”: Ibid.
“Why don’t you just try”: Lyman, Avatar #13, November 12, 1967.
“The great unwashed”: Reed, Harvard Crimson.
“The editors were warned”: Uncredited, “Incident in Harvard Square.”
“I’ll rent a goddamn airplane”: Lyman, Avatar #13, November 12, 1967.
“I was a typical Boston College grad”: Barton, The Heights.
“You’re falling back on a technicality”: Reed, “Judge Convicts Two in Avatar Trial: ‘What Justifies Words Like These?’”
“Things have never been better for Avatar”: Lyman, Avatar #14, November 24, 1967.
“enemy of modernism”: Nicholson, Apollo Magazine.
“promise him” a #1 single: Hilburn and Philips, “Quotations from Chairman Mo.”
“even in the ephemeral state”: Uncredited, “Cult Leader’s Early Years Were Spent on the Move.”
3: THE SILVER AGE OF TELEVISION
All quotes from author interviews with David Silver, Fred Barzyk, Karen Thorne, Peter Simon, and David Atwood except as follows:
“I was only able to view the half”: Lyman, Avatar #23, April 12, 1968.
“It makes me angry”: Silver, New England Scene.
“Would you call yourself a director?”: WHMS? Episode: “Underground Films.”
“By the end”: Mcdonald, “The Happening in Studio A.”
“Hey kids, your eyes see”: WHMS? Episode: “McLuhan’s Children.”
“Would you like an Avatar?”: WHMS? Episode: “Mel Lyman and the Avatar.”
“We are a big funny family”: Lyman, Avatar #17, January 19, February 1, 1968.
“When you’ve said you’re God”: Silver, “Transcript of an Interview Between Mel Lyman and Dave Silver.”
“Good evening . . . The reason you saw”: WHMS? Episode: “Magazine Show.”
“What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? has been seen at this time”: WHMS? Episode: “Reaction to Magazine Show.”
“Channel 2 closed in”: Ascheim, Avatar #19, February 16, February 29, 1968.
“masterpiece of camp”: Mcdonald, “A Cheer for Channel Two.”
4: PAUL REVERE IS SHAMED
All quotes from author interviews with Bruce Arnold, Harry Sandler, Dick Weisberg, Robert Rosenblatt, David Jenks, Ray Paret, Karyl Lee Britt, Ted Myers, Kyle Garrahan, Fred Griffeth, Peter Rowan, and Jon Landau except as follows:
“They did so much acid”: Gerlach, “Joe Smith Interview.”
“Liverpool of America”: Gleason, San Francisco Chronicle.
“I started looking at myself”: Breznikar, “Ultimate Spinach Interview with Ian Bruce-Douglas.”
“a fine album . . . the magic that separates”: Uncredited, Broadside of Boston.
“He never was interested”: Burns, “An Interview with Ian Bruce Douglas.”
“The scene is right from San Francisco”: Newsweek, “The Bosstown Sound.”
“the word is out”: Goldstein, “The New Boston Sound and the Rock Scholars.”
“G-rated psychedelic bubblegum”: Burns, “An Interview with Ian Bruce Douglas.”
“The country is now looking toward the East Coast”: Faltz, “Boston . . . The Next San Francisco?”
“the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously”: Vitellomarch, “Father of Rock Criticism Is Dead at 64.”
“I was overcome with the vibrations”: Landau, It’s Too Late to Stop Now: A Rock and Roll Journal, 16.
“San Francisco shit corrupted the purity”: Landau, “Growing Young with Rock and Roll.”
“The very real problem that Boston faces”: Landau, “The Sound of Boston: ‘Kerplop.’”
“We would break up every two or three months”: Myers, Making It: Music, Sex & Drugs in the Golden Age of Rock.
“Remember the Boston Sound?”: Sheehan, “Chevy Chase Is Fletching, Kvetching.”
“Chevy’s had a Nehru collar”: Myers, Making It: Music, Sex & Drugs in the Golden Age of Rock.
“They wore faggy little suits”: Simels, Unpublished Chevy Chase Profile for Rolling Stone.
“You’re not Orpheus!”: Sheehan, “Chevy Chase Is Fletching, Kvetching.”
“MGM sells each Ultimate Spinach album”: Penn, “Selling a New Sound.”
“Ian [Bruce-Douglas] has a conception in his mind”: Ibid.
“These articles and others were enough to overboil”: Lorber, “Something Called the ‘Boston Sound’—by Its Creator.”
“Just look at Boston”: Emerson, “Boston Sound: Eden’s Children.”
“Spinach must now abandon its eclecticism”: Murray, Broadside of Boston.
“I fired myself’: Burns, “An Interview with Ian Bruce Douglas.”
“But, in their infinite wisdom”: Myers, Making It: Music, Sex & Drugs in the Golden Age of Rock.
“Lisa loved Melvin”: Felton, “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America.”
“abuse the people in your organization”: Somma, “The Boston Sound Revisited.”
“hip kind of soul m
usic”: Landau, “The Sound of Boston: ‘Kerplop.’”
“ought to do a lot to wipe out”: J.K., “Bagatelle Review.”
5: THE WHITE LIGHT UNDERGROUND
All quotes from author interviews with Jonathan Richman, Rob Norris, Ray Riepen, Steve Nelson, Jessie Benton, George Peper, Peter Wolf, Dennis Dreher, Betsy Polatin, Fred Griffeth, Scott Bradner, Jim Horn, Mitch Blake, Don Law, Jonas Mekas, Walter Powers, Willie “Loco” Alexander, Peter Simon, and Robert Somma, except as follows:
“My other big record”: Bangs, “Astral Weeks.”
“It is irrelevant that the Velvet Underground”: McGuire, “The Boston Sound/The Velvet Underground & Mel Lyman.”
“This is our favorite place to play”: Norris, “I Was a Velveteen”
“I stayed in love with Marlon Brando”: Ken Burns’ America: Thomas Hart Benton.
“This was our world”: Theroux, “The Story Behind Thomas Hart Benton’s Incredible Masterwork.”
“We engaged Jessie to sit”: Ginzberg, Children and Other Strangers, 85.
“She was a natural aristocrat”: Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle, 3.
“Riepen would say ‘hello’”: Cobb, “Ray Riepen Rides Off into the Sunset to a New Future.”
“20 or more adults”: Enzer, “In Boston, It’s a Tea Party.”
“The wedding of the Cinemateque”: Ibid.
“We’d been doing ‘Gloria’ for some time”: Kent, “The J. Geils Band: Hard Drivin’ Sweet Soundin’ Rock and Roll.”
“Nobody minds you going zonked”: Rotman, “Gripe Time, People.”
“When I was sixteen . . . I heard the music of the Velvet Underground”: Richman, Radio Valencia.
“Excuse me, are you Lou Reed?”: Ibid.
“You are the star”: Unterberger, White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day by Day, 158.
“In the 20th century, in a technological age”: Bangs, Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, 196.
“NOW IS THE TIME FOR DISTORTIONS TO BURN”: McGuire, “The Boston Sound/The Velvet Underground & Mel Lyman.”
“Jonathan Richman is nothing”: Laughner, “The Modern Lovers.”
“You will relax your physical body”: Bailey, A Treatise on White Magic.
“When I was in L.A. I saw a reverend”: “Interview with Lou Reed,” KVAN.
“One of my big mistakes”: Cohen, “Funny How Love Is.”
“Jonathan was a big fan of Van Morrison’s”: Brooks, “Jonathan Richman: In Love with the Modern World.”
“I’ve read Glamour four or five times”: Heylin, Can You Feel the Silence?, 370.
“a determined study of childhood visions”: Ibid., 352.
“Every now and then these experiences”: Ibid., 6.
“I had some amazing projections”: Ibid., 7.
“What do you think about the blood of Jesus?”: Ibid., 353.
“I said, ‘Lou, all this stuff is going on’”: MTV News Staff, “Van Morrison Guided by Voices?”
“I’d never seen Andy angry”: Fricke, “Lou Reed: The Rolling Stone Interview.”
“I don’t think it was so much”: Brooks, “Jonathan Richman: In Love with the Modern World.”
“The band has to learn volume”: Cohen, “Funny How Love Is.”
“play a rolled-up newspaper”: Ibid.
“headache-making and ear splitting”: McKinnon, “Boom, Boom, Boom Bores.”
“automatons with a fairly lackluster attack”: DeTurk, Boston After Dark.
“An honest-to-goodness chick”: Grant, “Talking Rock.”
“A regular 9-to-5 job was too confining”: White, “She Gave Up Computers to Play Drums in Band.”
their third album as “technically perfect”: Somma, “Eponymous Album Review.”
“a lot of time together in strange places”: Mercuri, “Head Held High: The Velvet Underground Featuring Doug Yule.”
“We are the insects of someone else’s thoughts”: Reed, “We Are the People.”
“The only people who made money”: Cobb, “Tea Party’s Demise in Five Acts.”
“I was like a kid thrown into the deep end”: Mercuri, “Head Held High: The Velvet Underground Featuring Doug Yule.”
6: SCENES FROM THE REAL WORLD
All quotes from author interviews with Alan Trustman, Norman Jewison, Beverly Walker, Sally Dennison, Fred Roos, and Harvey Silverglate except as follows:
“The character wears suits, Steve”: Jewison, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me: An Autobiography, 161.
“this thug, this biker, this dead-end kid”: Trustman, Stories, Some of Which Are True.
“But we have permission from the mayor’s office!”: Blowen and Grossman, “Making Movies in the Hub Is a Nightmare.”
“Our heisters scared a lot of customers”: Uncredited, “Boston-Filmed ‘Crown Affair’ Premieres in June 19 Benefit.”
“Boston is celebrating a big bank robbery this week”: Adams, “Gala Premiere Here Wednesday for Boston-Filmed ‘Thomas Crown Affair.’”
“Think of it, . . . a movie shot in Boston”: Ebert, “Interview with Norman Jewison.”
Kael called it a “chic crappy movie”: Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”
“Possibly the most under-plotted, underwritten”: Ebert, “Thomas Crown Affair.”
“They cut off my face”: Sherman, “Fleeting Glimpses of Selves on Screen Satisfied Bostonian.”
“Movies are commercially packaged dreams”: Trustman, “Who Killed Hollywood?”
“a corpulent young man”: Archer, “Tony Curtis Comedy.”
“My interest was not so much”: Frank, The Boston Strangler.
“If the reader is left feeling”: Ebersola, “Review: The Boston Strangler.”
“I’m not good-looking, I’m not educated”: Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters.
“an extensive need to prove”: “Albert Henry DeSalvo Trial: 1967—Sanity Hearing.”
“I’m known as the Green Man now”: Frank, The Boston Strangler.
“If a man was the strangler”: Kelly, The Boston Stranglers.
“What’s a nice guy like Tony Curtis”: Goldstein, “Determination of ‘New’ Tony Curtis Won Film Role of Boston Strangler.”
“has the same attractive personality”: Adams, “Director Searches City for Authentic Locations.”
“I wanted to play DeSalvo so much”: Malone, The Defiant One: A Biography of Tony Curtis, 137.
“shy girl from Cambridge”: Adams, “No Make-Up for Curtis as ‘Strangler.’”
“There’s a little bit of the Boston Strangler”: Malone, The Defiant One: A Biography of Tony Curtis, 136.
“There have been lots of movies about murders”: Ebert, “The Boston Strangler.”
“The film has ended”: The Boston Strangler, directed by Richard Fleischer.
“The film is—although I hesitate”: Helford, “New Angle in ‘Strangler.’”
“anyone could stand next before the celluloid jury”: Diehl, “‘Boston Strangler’ Raises Disturbing Questions.”
“You’re not the Boston Strangler”: Malone, The Defiant One: A Biography of Tony Curtis, 141.
“DeSalvo said the film portrays him”: Uncredited, “DeSalvo Seeks $2-Million in ‘Boston Strangler’ Suit.”
“a very clever, very smooth”: Sanchez, “Ames Robey; Psychiatrist Argued DeSalvo Was Innocent.”
“He was going to tell us”: Uncredited, “He’s Not the Boston Strangler: He Didn’t Kill My Aunt.”
“Here’s the story of the strangler yet untold”: Ibid.
“Maybe people will know what it means”: Junger, A Death in Belmont, 217.
“nightmare of ghoulish obscenities”: Pearson, “The Follies of Documenta
ry Filmmaking.”
“convalescing patients mingled with violent ones”: Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic.
“colony of lost men”: Micciche, “Bridgewater Holds Colony of Lost Men.”
“about a prison and the people”: Anderson and Benson, Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies.
“I don’t think this constitutes censoring”: Goodrich, “Titicut Follies.”
“a startling example of film truth”: Anderson and Benson, Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies.
“Some little biddy from Minnesota”: Brinkley-Rogers, “Titicut Follies.”
“The doctor is like nothing”: Avatar staff.
“message of shock”: Goodrich, “Titicut Follies.”
“The real privacy sought”: Harvey, “‘Titicut’ Trial Nears Finish.”
“causes ‘rational,’ middle class people”: Uncredited, “The Two Sides of Titicut.”
“The film speaks for itself”: Anderson and Benson, Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies.
“80 minutes of brutal sordidness”: Ibid.
“On the contract issue, the judge”: Pearson, “The Follies of Documentary Filmmaking.”
“Since I was shot, everything”: Leonard, “The Return of Andy Warhol.”
“DON’T CRITICIZE. If you think”: Mekas, “Films.”
“The mind is a beautiful instrument”: Lyman, Autobiography of a World Saviour.
“I just fell in love with the Hill”: Felton, “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America.”
“You double Cancer!”: Ibid.
“‘You talk about The Real World?”: Ibid.
“All I can say is that it’s a story”: Koefod, “Antonioni Flick: Sally Dennison Interview.”
“He wasn’t equipped to handle”: Death Valley Superstar, directed by Michael Yaroshovsky.
“I was a self-respecting hippie dropout bum”: Felton, “The Lyman Family’s Holy Siege of America.”
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