"the boston rock legend"

richard axtman is doing the whole world a solid by promoting a raft of artists that the whole world needs to see. through his northern music ("the northern music network for fans bands and soloists") he's promoted everything from new years eve parties with james montgomery to linda mccluskey's latest showing at the whistler house museum's parker gallery.

i'm on his list, and i'm impressed with everything he's putting out there. want to catch up with the lastest appearances of bellevue cadillac? richard's your guy. miss the recent tex macnamara & his bucking broncos gig when they took over fortunato's in downtown lowell last friday night? you wouldn't have if you'd been hooked up with richard via his facebook page. (and it was a GREAT night). get it? GET IT!

so it's with a certain amount of amusement and bored detachment that i see his promotions for andy pratt always followed by the all-cap blare-out: "the boston rock legend". c'mon. really?

from where i was standing, andy seemed like a nice enough guy with a self-indulgent adventurous streak (you know what they mean when they put the tag "experimental rock" on reviews of all your circa 1970 albums) that really didn't translate into the clubs or into anyone's record collections. it certain didn't define, represent or seem like "boston". rumor has it that the song columbia records commissioned based on a demo ripped off from woody guthrie's "ballad of pretty boy floyd" ("avenging annie") took 500 hours of studio time for andy to be satisfied with it, which is ok, i guess, because the pop manifesto eventually charted, and even i've got the thing on my ipod these days, but what did that ever have to do with my home musical town? don't get me wrong--i've got nothing bad to say about what little of andy's ouevre i've got. (little, because he's put out over 20 albums, so it's not like he's shy or anything).

but, geez, "boston rock legend"???

in point of fact, andy could have been doing what he was doing just about anywhere in the world, and boston just happened to be where he collected his mail. "boston rock legend", to me, implies someone like willie "loco" alexander (and his boom-boom band, yo) who popped the cherry on so many great boston venues (like the rat and etc.) after he came off his teeth-cutting stint with the velvet underground that everybody who was anybody couldn't wait to get billed on one of his gigs, or at least play in one of the same clubs cuz you knew that place would ROCK.

it's little more than ironic to me that andy's latest projects are hooked up with people like sal baglio (the stompers--now there's a boston band) who actually WERE boston musicians back in the day.

andy's farewell quote before he let punk drive him out of the country was "i hate ugly music". which only to me means that he must have hated everything there was to do with what finally kicked "the bosstown sound" (bad 60's psychedelia joke for which you had to be there to understand, and, no, you didn't miss a thing) to the curb, and, courtesy of actual boston rock legends like willie alexander and his all-out punk-sensible though also quite fluently pop contemporaries (duke and the drivers, j geils, aerosmith, etc.), actually put boston squarely on the musical map.

caveat capital letters, folks.

get the real thing at a local venue near you. (treat her right are at toad on the 14th, 21st and 28th this month, and having seen them just a few weeks ago, i can promise you that THERE is a legendary lineup--jim fitting and dave champagne plus tim gearan, billy beard and steve mayone).

get it?

GET IT!