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[Cellars]

Boom Boom time
Willie Alexander and the gang return to ‘Mass Ave’
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Willie Alexander takes the stage and stands splay-legged behind his electric keyboard. The room, Gloucester’s downtown Art Space, is already a trip, with its sculptures of giant rainbow-colored fish, paper seaweed streamers, and a glaring Chinese dragon hanging overhead. But Alexander ups the ante on the crowd who’ve clambered up three flights of steps for this historic performance — a double bill of Alexander and John Sinclair that fans the flames of beat poetry and its tradition of mingling words and music.

Alexander starts pawing at his piano, and the chords that come out first seem formless and then start to jell into something like Brian Eno’s ribbons of roiling ambient music but with hot propulsion. And that’s before his drummer rolls in. Then Alexander starts singing, his stretched syllables matching the slow boil of notes his fingers are pumping out. After a few lines where his voice seems to yank the melody as though it were taffy in a six-way pull, the audience adjusts, and smiles of recognition break out. It’s Little Richard’s "Long Tall Sally," filtered through Alexander’s sharp improvisational sensibility, flashpoint imagination, and ceaseless desire to pound vowels and syllables into his own rhythmic mold.

That October 2001 night of words and music was terrific. Both Alexander and Sinclair caught the kite tails of their local inspirations, Jack Kerouac and Charles Olsen. And the fact that Olsen lived in Gloucester seemed to heighten the electric charge. But if you missed it, you’re outta luck. That kind of performance will never take place in the Art Space again. Earlier this year Gloucester’s city fathers banned the venue, which is primarily a creative haven for teens, from holding the live concerts that have been a weekend staple for years. It’s an act of primal stupidity for the heroin-plagued town, putting kids on the streets Friday nights with nothing to do.

But that’s a different story. This one is about an opportunity to see another historic performance. This Saturday, June 8, Willie Alexander will be reuniting with the original members of his Boom Boom Band for a concert downstairs at the Middle East, in Central Square. Alexander and the Boomers — guitarist Billy Loosigian, bassist Severin Grossman, and drummer David McLean — were kingpins of Boston’s original punk scene, leading a stylistic rampage across club stages from 1976 to 1978. Although they were never as well known as the Ramones, Patti Smith, or the Sex Pistols, Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band were peers to those performers, doing their part to spearhead the punk-rock revolution as they toured and made two albums for the major label MCA. Those discs, Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band and Meanwhile . . . Back in the States, remain hot collector’s items. Armed with brilliant, growling, poetic stomp ’n’ moan workouts like "Dirty Eddie," "Kerouac," "At the Rat," "Hit Her wid de Axe," "Rhythm a Baby," and "Mass Ave" — the latter recorded with "Kerouac" in 1975 to become Boston’s first punk-rock single — they put an indelible mark on Boston’s underground. Willie, Billy, Dave, and Sev helped define the city as a safe harbor for garage rock that had a smart-ass streak and was fueled by snarling guitars. It’s a sound that’s the basis for much of what happens in local live rock clubs to this day. This is not always a good thing, since so many of the city’s underground guitar bands seem to suffer from musical arrested adolescence. But hell, that’s not Willie and the guys’ fault. They did their part for evolution — and moved on.

"I can’t even remember why we broke up," Alexander says when we meet at his Gloucester home, a cool old house filled with his colorful paintings, just a few vertebrae up the city’s hilly spine from the Art Space. As seagulls fly past his second-story window, Alexander recounts how he and the Boom Boom Band first came together 26 year ago.

Willie was already a veteran performer, having played in a post–Lou Reed version of the Velvet Underground and local outfits the Lost, Bagatelle, and Grass Menagerie. "At the time I didn’t even have a band, but I had these songs like ‘Mass Ave’ and ‘Hit Her wid de Axe,’ and I would borrow bands to play out. We got together on a dare. There was a battle of the bands at the old Club in Cambridge [a Main Street venue that had an ’80s reincarnation as Night Stage], and a manager dared me to put a group together. I used this band called Wild Honey, which was Dave and Sev and Billy, and we won, so they decided to stick with me.

"This was the first band where I was the frontman doing all of my own material, although I’d written most of the songs before I met these guys. Which is good, because once you get in a band, you don’t have time to write new songs."

Willie and the Boom Boom Band quickly developed a loose, muscular sound driven by the raw intensity of their sheer will to rock and by lots of alcohol. By the time they split, they were headlining classy joints like the Paradise.

Alexander and Loosigian in particular have remained constant presences on the rock scene. Willie’s career has gone through dozens of permutations, from solo artist to frontman of the Confessions and, in the ’90s, leader of the avant-jazz-inflected Persistence of Memory Orchestra, which may regroup this summer. Loosigian has bent strings with the Jackals, the Nervous Eaters, the Jonses, the Real Kids, and many other outfits. At the time of last year’s concert with Sinclair, Alexander was in the midst of a new direction, working up near-free-form variations on "Sweet Lorraine," "Ain’t Misbehavin’," and other standards. "I was planning to make a record of that stuff when all of a sudden the guys started calling, and now it’s like I’m in a gang again."

The phone calls and messages began after the Japanese label Captain Trips released Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band — Loco Live 1976 last year. "That’s a recording of our second or third gig, something like that," he says. "Then [Phoenix contributor] Brett Milano told me about this live bootleg of a Paradise show in 1978. So I went out and bought that. I really liked that one, because I could tell I was pretty sober. My intonation was really good. Usually when I hear a live tape from that era, I can tell how much I was drinking that night by the pitch of my voice. When I’m really drunk, I start singing like Gabby Hayes and it becomes really unintelligible."

It’s not unusual for Alexander to find out about his archival albums by word of mouth. All phases of his career have been widely bootlegged, across the globe. What was unusual is the excitement those two discs sparked in his old bandmates. "They just started visiting me. It’s like three old girlfriends. We had relationships a long time ago that were very close and intense for three years. But that was when I was almost a completely different person, when I was drinking. I’ve hardly thought about the band for 20 years. But we had a sound, and when we started playing together again, we found out it was still there.

"What I’m going through with these guys now is weird. Rehearsing? Years ago I said, ‘Fuck that. No more loud guitars, no more arrangements chiseled in stone.’ Plus there’s the matter of control. For the past decade, it’s just been me playing the chords, so I could ramble or get spacy whenever I want. Now we’re relearning the old songs and some of the rock tunes I wrote after the Boom Boom Band so we’re not an oldies act. I’ve got to show them the parts, and I can get very spacy just explaining a two-chord song, because I don’t really know how long the verse is gonna be and stuff."

Not that the rehearsals are hell. "Typically we’ll do a tune and the guys will start talking about stuff for 20 minutes. The ratio of music to blather . . . whew! But I have it all on tape, so we could just put violins to it and have a spoken-word album: The Saga of the Boom Boom Band. It’s all, ‘Oh man, we were so fucked up and our manager had all this coke and you did this and you did that. Oh no! Did I really?’ "

On the other hand, Alexander, Loosigian, Grossman, and McLean obviously have a real legacy to celebrate. "We realized we’ve outlived most of the clubs we played," Willie says. "Most of the bands from that era have one or two guys who are dead. Drummer-wise, I’ve lost two or three guys from other bands. So because we’re all still around . . . say, what the fuck? If it sounds good, why not?"

But don’t expect a glut of Boom Boom gigs. After the Middle East show, which Alexander calls "completing a sacred tract, going back to play on Mass Ave and our beginning," they’ll aim to hop to Japan and Europe, where they’ve never played.

"The thing is, rock and roll is getting old now," Willie, who’s a very vigorous 59, notes. "Besides, they were writing me off when I was starting the Boom Boom Band. I was 35 when we were cutting the first album. [Long-time Village Voice critic Robert] Christgau wrote at the time that I was a failed rocker at 35 writing his paean to failed rockers. Critics wrote some nasty things, like that I had poor epiglottal hygiene and that I got my inspiration from the back of my urinary tract. But we liked those things, so we used to pull them and use them.

"They always try to shove this ‘you’re too old’ thing on rock musicians, like it’s just some youth-culture thing. I say music is music. Look at Duke Ellington and Count Basie. When you’ve got a sound, you can’t deny it."

Issue Date: June 6 - 13, 2002
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