Boston Alternative
College radio, cheap rehearsal rooms and loud guitars: the US underground's most literate, least glamorous engine room.
What you're really asking
Not a sound — a city with too many students, cheap practice space and three strong college stations. T.
the Bear's, then got signed by British labels or Chicago ones because the local majors never came. What links Burma's tape loops to Galaxie 500's slow drift to the Pixies' loud-quiet is a shared allergy to polish, not a shared tempo.
Where it sits
Fuse lit in Kenmore Square: the Rathskeller and the hardcore clubs, then Rick Harte's Ace of Hearts label pressing the "Academy Fight Song" single in 1980 for Mission of Burma. Burma folded in 1983 after one studio album, undone by Roger Miller's tinnitus, and the players scattered into Volcano Suns and Birdsongs of the Mesozoic.
The second wave had infrastructure: Curtis Casella's Taang! from 1984, WMBR and WZBC in rotation, and Fort Apache, opened in spring 1986 in an industrial Roxbury space by Sean Slade, Jim Fitting, Paul Kolderie and Joe Harvard — a no-frills operation that grew into a producer of major '90s guitar records.
It moved above the Rounder Records warehouse on Camp Street in Cambridge in 1988. By 1993 the A&R men were on flights to Logan.
The scene
Who: Harte and Casella on the labels; Gary Smith, Slade and Kolderie behind the desks; the Rat, the Channel, Green Street Station, the Middle East. What: guitars recorded close and dry, drums hit hard, lyrics oblique or deadpan — Boston bands rarely wail.
Burma set the template by chasing live chaos onto tape in a big room, with Martin Swope's loops pushed forward in the mix. How a record gets in: cut locally or at Fort Apache, broken on college radio before any press, and carrying that New England flatness of affect — smart, dry, slightly withholding.
The leading records
Pixies
Doolittle
1989
Gil Norton sanded the edges and the loud-quiet-loud trick went worldwide — Boston's biggest export, made by two UMass roommates and a bassist who answered an ad.
Galaxie 500
On Fire
1989
Three Harvard friends, Kramer at the board, everything slowed to a crawl — the city's counter-argument to volume.
Mission Of Burma
Vs.
1982
Ace of Hearts AHS 10010, produced by Rick Harte, cut at Normandy Sound — the record every later Boston band had a dub of.
The Lemonheads
It's A Shame About Ray
1992
Taang! hardcore kids turned into a major-label pop band; Dando's acoustic strum over punk timing, thirty minutes flat.
Throwing Muses
Throwing Muses
1986
The first American band 4AD signed — Hersh's lurching time signatures opened the London door the Pixies walked through next.
Dinosaur Jr
You're Living All Over Me
1987
Western Mass by postcode, Boston by gig circuit: the volume-plus-melody formula J Mascis handed to everyone who followed.
Oddballs
Morphine
Cure For Pain
1993
Two-string slide bass, baritone sax, drums, no guitar at all — proof the scene's rule was attitude, not instrumentation.
The Modern Lovers
The Modern Lovers
1976
Recorded years before release, Natick's Jonathan Richman singing plainly about Route 128 — the deadpan every Boston lyricist inherited.
Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic
Magnetic Flip
1984
Miller and Swope's instrumental combo after Burma — keyboards and composition where you expected more guitar damage.
Keep digging
- What did Taang! Records actually press?
- Which Fort Apache sessions are worth tracking?
- How do original Ace of Hearts pressings differ?