The Boston Sound

January 1968 Billboard Magazine ad

Last week I wrote about the San Francisco Sound and we identified the qualities in the music, along with other things, that defined it.  Today I want to cross the continent and talk about the Boston Sound, or the “Bosstown Sound” as it was more commonly referred.  If I were to mention some of the better known artists of the San Francisco Sound, like the Grateful Dead, Santana or Janis Joplin, there is no problem with people recognizing them today.  However, if I mention what are probably the three most famous Bosstown Sound artists, Orpheus, the Beacon Street Union and Ultimate Spinach, how many people have even heard of one of these, even among classic rock buffs?

The San Francisco Sound developed spontaneously in the incubator of the Bay Area around San Francisco.  It came about gradually and you can’t point to a single event or date and say, “it started here.”   The Bosstown Sound started in January 1968 when the ad shown above appeared.  The sound was really a marketing campaign by MGM records.  They created hype about Boston Area artists, much like the hype around San Francisco the previous year.  Let’s face it; there was a lot of money being made by those Bay Area groups and MGM wanted to cash in.  Even the name “Bosstown” was chosen to emulate “Motown.”

Before I get into it further, I want to say that the Bosstown Sound has its supporters. There are many that would contend that after you dig through the hype and marketing that there really was something legitimate there.  However, many more would tell you it was a hoax, a scam to sell records and there never really was a defining Boston Sound.

The Counter Culture of the late 60s, the market that MGM was targeting, was pretty much against the corporate machine and the “Man.”  Anything capitalized was anathema to the hippie culture of the time.  The push back was almost immediate and the bands of the Bosstown Sound were at best marginalized and viewed as “manufactured” much like the Monkees and many of the “studio only” acts of Buddah Records.  To say that there was outward hostility to their “selling out,” is probably fair.  After all, it began with an advertisement in Billboard Magazine, complete with the MGM logo emblazoned in the center of the top banner. (see above)

This air of capitalization would continue in the Boston area, outside of the MGM corporate machine.  Waleeco Candy, a local area company, employed a local Boston Area band, the Flat Earth Society, to produce a jingle for their candy bars.  In turn, Waleeco sponsored their first album, which just so happen to be titled, “Waleeco.”  Talk about marketing gone amok!  To add insult to injury, packed with every Waleeco Bar was a coupon to send in $1.50 and six Waleeco wrappers to get a copy of the album.  The Boston music scene had just received another corporate black eye.

Is this reputation really deserved?  I don’t think so.  There was some great talent creating some amazing music in the Boston area, just as there was in L.A., Chicago, Atlanta and every other city.  The term, “Boston Sound,” was already coined a few months earlier by local radio DJs, before MGM capitalized it.  There were area venues, like the Boston Tea Party, where many bands attracted the hippies and college students of the area, much like their counter parts in San Francisco.  Much like the City on the Bay, Boston had its own outdoor concerts in Boston Common and other places.  In the spring of 1968, Dick Summer, a DJ on WBZ radio, was supporting the artists of the “Boston Sound” by promoting the “Spring Sing.”  He urged concert goers to bend open a paperclip into a letter “S” and wear it prominently in support of the event.

(I used to love listening to WBZ when I was a kid living in Massachusetts.)

Despite the legitimate talent and music, the MGM campaign deserved the disdain it received when one considers the culture of the day.  Unfortunately, there was guilt by association and the listening public and fan base couldn’t separate the music from the record label. Soon it was not just MGM but any Boston Area band that became part of the artificially created corporate “Bosstown Sound.”  Eventually, MGM would abandon the failed campaign and the bands they had pulled into the fiasco.  Those artists knew that no record label would sign them up after such negative press.  Most disbanded or died in anonymity in the local clubs or doing high school dances in gyms.  That is why no one ever heard of Ford Theater or Ill Wind.  There was plenty of great bands and great music but unfortunately they were all collateral damage of the MGM corporate machine as it came crashing down on Eastern Massachusetts.

So, was there actually a Boston sound?  The debate continues to this day.  If there is, it would probably be a more folksy sound.  The beatniks in Boston left a similar legacy to the one they left in San Francisco.  The Folk influence remained very strong until January of 1968.  The Boston Sound was muddied from the beginning, when the ad above grouped together three different sounding bands, the Beacon Street Union, Orpheus and the uber psychedelic Ultimate Spinach. (The three record jackets in the upper right of the ad)

During my set tomorrow (7-9 pm SL time at AWT) I will play two hours of the Bosstown Sound.  I’ll let you decide if it is real or strictly a contrived hoax.  You can post your opinion or vote in the comments below and I invite you to participate in the discussion and debate.

As Bosstown was in its most final death throes, the Beacon Street Union released one more album in the summer of 1968, the Clown Died in Marvin Gardens.  Afterwards, they would change their name to Eagle in an attempt to distance themselves, but in the end it was not enough and they too folded.  Maybe the lyrics of the title cut of that album were telling…

Through the dust on the panes of my window
I watch a street show in the rain.
The rusted spokes and the charcoal cloaks,
A funeral below.
Over puddled streets of asphalt
The cortege treads slowly by.
The design that once graced the black pall
The rainfall dissolved; dissolved all and died…

…And then the ground dried and hardened
After the clown died in Marvin Gardens.

The San Francisco Sound

Poster for the Avalon Ballroom

If I asked people today, “Are you familiar with the San Francisco Sound of the late 60s,” most would probably say they are not or have not heard of it.  However, if I started mentioning some of the artists that were a part of the San Francisco sound, like Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, there would be no shortage of familiarity.  So what makes them part of the San Francisco Sound?  Is it just because they come from the same city, or is there something in the music that can be isolated as defining it?

Things were changing rapidly in the 60s, both culturally and musically.  The main beatnik meccas like Greenwich Village in New York City, Provincetown on Cape Cod and especially San Francisco, were morphing into something new.  Beatniks were being replaced by flower children, folk music was evolving into folk rock and a new word was making the scene, “psychedelic.”  Ground zero for this change was a neighborhood in San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury, or the “Haight” as it was known then and now by locals.  The open microphoness of the Beat coffee houses were becoming the open jam sessions and free concerts of many of the local bands like the Grateful Dead, and spontaneous gatherings in Golden Gate Park.

While many things like free love, LSD and flower power were helping to shape the music, so was the spontaneity of the performances.  While most Rock ‘n’ Roll concerts consisted of a band doing relatively faithful renditions of their vinyl pressings, San Francisco bands were gather in places like the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore West and other places, and serving up 30-40 minute improvisations of their songs to the acid soaked hippies in attendance.  In my post of June 3, 2013, on the Sidewalk Skipper Band, I talked about how their success was hampered by how they were marketed.  The music industry standard up to this point was the typical 2:30 single, pressed on a 45 RPM record.  The San Francisco Sound was a prime mover in the shift to the record album or LP, capable of conveying longer tracks of psychedelia. Songs like Santana’s Soul Sacrifice (6:42), the Dead’s St. Stephen (4:30) and Jefferson Airplane’s We Can Be Together (5:49) were becoming the well-known staples by the artists.  The Sidewalk Skipper band was marketed and released as singles instead of as an album, which was the opposite of what the fans were demanding of its psychedelic bands.

This same shift in recordings found its way onto the airwaves.  Most Rock ‘n’ Roll and Pop stations were on AM radio.  Those that existed on FM almost always just simulcast their counterpart’s content from the AM airwaves.  The FCC was cracking down on this with regulations and FM radio soon became more “free form,” allowing DJs to play longer sets of whatever they wanted.  Soon these longer tracks were finding a home on FM radio, leaving AM to play the more mainstream acts like Simon & Garfunkel and the Beatles.  Hence, Album Oriented Rock (AOR) as an FCC station format was born on FM radio.

So, the psychedelic flower power coming out of Haigh-Ashbury and the Summer of Love (1967) was shaping the San Francisco Sound, as were the concerts in the city at places like the Fillmore West, the Carousel and the Avalon.  There were also the larger servings of music with the longer songs and albums dominating FM radio.  But is this enough to categorize these bands as a “sound?”  Is there anything in the music that pulls this together and defines the sound?  There are.

The folk music embraced by the predecessor beatniks was still to be found in much of the music.  Bassists like Phil Lesh of the Dead and Jack Cassidy of the Airplane were breaking their traditional bonds and taking a more prominent place in the music for the bass.  Also, one thing that is almost completely absent are the brasses like you often hear in bands like the Beatles and Chicago.  Finally, the lyrics are deeper and more poetic than their more “Pop” counterparts.  These more complex lyrics can inevitably be listed as an additional beatnik influence.

From 1966 to about 1972, many bands in San Francisco “made the scene.”  Many more bands heard what was going down and traveled to that city.  Many more hippies put flowers in their hair and also came to the city by the bay to be part of the groovy scene going down.  At the height of the Summer of Love, Eric Burdon and the Animals released a song that said it all in its intro…

This following program is dedicated to the city and people of San Francisco, who may not know it but they are beautiful, and so is their city.  This is a very personal song so if the viewer cannot understand it, particularly those of you who are European residents, save up all your bread and fly Trans-Love Airways to San Francisco, U.S.A.  Then maybe you'll understand the song.  It will be worth it, if not for the sake of this song, but for the sake of your own peace of mind.

The Grateful Dead play a free concert on Haight Street, 1968