After Bart dropped Ziggy off, he turned the car toward Cambridge. We parked behind the McDonalds, but crossed the street to the Middle East where greater quantities of food could be had, cheaper, if you didn’t mind rude waitresses and a lot of spillover noise from the club room in the back. He wanted to [...]
A lot of the time when I play, it’s like my brain shuts off. Later, I kind of wake up in the middle of a song and I can remember everything that has been going on, but it’s almost like someone else was doing it. I don’t realize it when I’m slipping into that state, [...]
The name on the card Artie had given me was Michael Knight. I had figured he’d be a guy a lot like Artie, but he wasn’t really. We played phone tag for about two weeks and then one day his secretary caught me at home and told me Mister Knight was on the line–after which [...]
As soon as I could, I booked us a gig in New York, anywhere, so we could showcase for Artie. This was not a simple feat, even for a band willing to play for basically nothing. NYC is crawling with underworked bands and the club owners don’t even have to give you the time of [...]
I picked up our pay in cash from the club owner. Seventy five bucks. Michelle helped us load our stuff into Bart’s car. “Good thing you guys don’t have a drummer,” she said, looking at the packed back seat. “How are we going to unpack when we get home?”
“What do you mean?” Bart said. “We’ll [...]
It didn’t take long to get our first gig as a threesome–in early summer I sent out the demo tapes and had booked the gig within a week. So it was that a few weeks later we had our debut at this hole in the wall place in Jamaica Plain, one of those places whose [...]
We knocked off a little after midnight and Ziggy left us standing on Beacon Street with our heap of equipment, giving us a little salute with one finger as he crossed at a break in the traffic. Then Bart left me to watch the stuff while he retrieved the car from a nearby side street. [...]
By April it got warm enough that I started convincing Bart to come out and busk with me, to relieve some of the itch to play and boredom. But he was afraid to bring any of his good basses outside, so he bought a set of bongos and beat on them sometimes, and he had [...]
It was a long, dull winter in Boston. Bart and Michelle moved into a nice one bedroom in Allston, right on the T line, while I got myself a cheap studio sublet in the Fenway from a Berklee student who was abroad until September. Michelle worked at Tower and got me a job there as [...]
I arrived at the Copa at 1:30 and sat there staring at strangers for a half an hour, Brown students talking Derrida and Freud, some Rimconners discussing their recital, a few townie kids trying to be artsy, some part of me thinking that Bart wasn’t going to show. But he walked in the door at [...]
