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rock ‘n roll

Six Art Deco Gems

You don’t have to go to Miami or Hollywood for an Art Deco experience. New England has plenty of Art Deco office buildings, theatres and post offices – you just need to know where to look.

Art Deco, a term coined in the 1960s, describes the first truly international style of art, architecture and design. It took its name from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925. Initially, Art Deco style melded fine craftsmanship and rich material into a sleek modern style. It evolved into a more streamlined, subdued style during the Great Depression. (Read more about Art Deco here.)

Art Deco gave way to even more modernist styles such as Brutalism after World War II. The movement to preserve Art Deco buildings then began with the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 and spread to other U.S. cities. Boston, for example, started the Art Deco Society of Boston in 1989.

But you can find Art Deco buildings throughout New England. Here are six, one in each state. If you know of a great Art Deco building in your state, please share it in the comment section.

The Eli, New Haven

The Eli Building

The forward-looking design of the Southern New England Telephone Administration Building promised a bright future for the company when finished in 1938. Then the tallest building in New Haven, it was intended to show the company’s prosperity and importance to Connecticut with its size, its costly materials and its lavish embellishments.

The outside of the 17-story building is faced with Indiana limestone, the lobby’s Spanish marble walls richly embellished with zig-zag patterns, flying geese and futuristic nickel-bronze alloy.

When construction began in 1937, New Haven had about 20 phones for every 100 people, among the highest usage rates for telephone service in the country. SNET had built the first telephone exchange in the country in New Haven in 1878. (Before exchanges, customers had to have a different instrument for each person they called.)

Douglas Orr, who also renovated the White House, and Roy Foote designed it as the corporate headquarters for 1,200 Southern New England Telephone Company employees. Growing demand for telephone service caused overcrowding in the building within 10 years.

Today, the building is known as The Eli and used for luxury apartments.

227 Church St., New Haven, Conn.

The Grand, Ellsworth, Maine

The Grand

In 1933, an arsonist burned down 130 buildings in the Ellsworth business district by starting a fire in the city’s new Bijou movie theatre. The city rebuilt a brick shopping block in 1938, including The Grand movie theatre for 730 people. Its opening was such a civic achievement that a high school band gave a concert and the entire city council showed up to see the film Holiday.

The striking marquee made The Grand stand out. It’s topped by a 20-foot-tall sculptural tower of stainless steel and colored glass with stylized lettering. Geometric gold trim stamps the interior as Deco style.

By the 1950s, television took away The Grand’s movie audience, so the owners installed a boxing ring and held boxing matches. It didn’t work. They then tried film, stage productions and rock ‘n roll. In 1975, a local theatre group, The Ellsworth Players, formed a nonprofit and bought The Grand. It was a mess. After refurbishing it, Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary reopened with a benefit concert. More groups began using the theatre. In 2012, the historic marquee was restored and the National Register of Historic Places put The Grand on its list.

165 Main St., Ellsworth, Maine

The Old John Hancock Building, Boston

Old John Hancock Building

The Old John Hancock Building is now called The Berkeley Building, but this is New England and we call things what they used to be.

The firm of Ralph Adams Cram and Frank Ferguson designed the Old John Hancock to stand out boldly in the Back Bay skyline. Finished in 1947, the old Hancock stood as the tallest office building in Boston for 17 years, surpassed only by the Custom House Tower. From 1947-1976 it served as the headquarters for the John Hancock Insurance Co.

Though dwarfed physically by newer skyscrapers – including the new John Hancock Tower – the Old Hancock has a special place in the hearts of Bostonians. On top of its very Deco-esque ziggurat roof sits an illuminated spire that forecasts the weather – and announces Red Sox victories.

A well-known rhyme explains the Old Hancock’s signals:

Steady blue, clear view.
Flashing blue, clouds due.
Steady red, rain ahead.
Flashing red, snow instead.

During baseball season, flashing red means bad weather caused the cancellation of the Red Sox game. When the Red Sox won the World Series in 2003, another line was added to the poem:

Flashing Blue and Red, when The Curse of the Bambino is dead!

200 Berkeley St., Boston

Post Office, Lancaster, N.H.

Lancaster Post Office

Way up in the North Country of New Hampshire one doesn’t expect to see an Art Deco post office, but one stands in a commanding position in downtown Lancaster. The building made it onto the National Register of Historic Places list in 1986 as a prime example of ‘starved classicism’ — a style prevalent in big cities.

The Lancaster Post Office, built in 1935, is a simple brick-and-granite building with steel-framed windows. The lobby, with its patterned quarry tile floor, hasn’t changed, except for the light fixtures. The service windows also have the original lattice grillwork.

“The architectural design of this Post Office is most unexpected, especially so being located in a small northern New England town,” wrote the architect who nominated the building for the NRHP.

120 Main St., Lancaster, N.H.

Pawtucket City Hall

Pawtucket’s machine politician mayor, Boss Tom McCoy, made sure the city got its share of federal recovery programs during the Great Depression. Pawtucket City Hall was one of the first beneficiaries of the program, costing $450,000 to build it between 1933 and 1936. The monumental structure allowed Pawtucket to consolidate all city departments in one building. The central fire department occupies the left wing, police headquarters the right.

A talented local architect, John O’Malley, designed the Pawtucket City Hall as well as Pawtucket West High school. He planned a soaring tower that included four 12’9” carved eagles at the summit. Carved bas-relief panels below the first floor windows illustrate people, buildings and scenes important to Pawtucket. Two eagles sculpted on each side of the main stairway look as if they are landing on City Hall’s doorstep.

Critics consider the Pawtucket City Hall one of the finest examples of Art Deco architecture in Rhode Island. The tower, though, is strictly ornamental and prone to leaking. A rehab project in 2005-6 cost $4.5 million and didn’t fix the leak. Some Pawtucket city councilors have proposed lopping off the tower to save money.

137 Roosevelt Ave., Pawtucket, R.I.

Latchis Hotel and Theatre, Brattleboro, Vt.

The Latchis Hotel

The sons of Demetrius Latchis built a four-story mixed-use hotel and theatre in his honor in 1938. Demetrius had arrived in New England a poor Greek immigrant, but he and his sons built a business empire that included restaurants, hotels and theatres.

For years the Latchis played a vital role in downtown Brattleboro, with a theatre, hotel, restaurant and shops. A rare example of Art Deco architecture, it features museum-quality terrazzo floors, statues of Greek gods and goddesses and murals of Greek mythology.

Eventually the Latchis declined. The theaters were broken up and the hotel reverted to single-room occupancy for poor people. Then in 2003 the Brattleboro Arts Initiative bought the building and restored it. Now known as Latchis Arts, it features first-run and independent films, live shows and a 40-room boutique hotel.

50 Main St., Brattleboro, Vt.

Images: Eli Building By Sage Ross – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5026497; The Grand By SarekOfVulcan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21006691; Old John Hancock Building, Peter H. Dreyer; Lancaster Post Office By AlexiusHoratius – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25070704; Pawtucket City Hall By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28128656. This story last updated in 2022.

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Seven Things You Didn’t Know (But Want To) About the Boston Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party is one of the most misunderstood signature events of the American Revolution. For starters, it wasn’t about high taxes. The following explains why, along with some other little-known facts.

1. The Boston Tea Party protested a corporate bailout.

Engraving of the Boston Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party didn’t protest excessive taxation. It protested a corporate bailout that threatened small merchants in Boston.

For years the East India Company had to ship its tea to Britain and pay a commission, or tax, before selling it in the other colonies. In exchange, Parliament gave it a monopoly on tea.

The tax paid by the East India Company in Britain made its tea more expensive in America than tea smuggled in from Dutch traders. When the East India Company ran into financial trouble, Parliament gave it a special deal. The company could keep its monopoly and export tea directly to America without paying the tax in Britain. That made East India tea cheaper in America than Dutch imported tea.

The bailout also made small, independent tea merchants less competitive than the East India Company. And even though Parliament’s action reduced the price of tea, it established the principle that America was subject to British taxes. Hence the Boston Tea Party.

2. A famous artist tried to stop it.

John Singleton Copley, detail from self portrait

John Singleton Copley, the artist who painted so many of the important people of the late 18^th century, tried to work out a compromise with the Sons of Liberty. His father-in-law, an East India merchant, needed the tea.

At the Old South Meetinghouse on Nov. 30, 1773, Copley argued for unloading the tea and keeping it in a warehouse while the colonists pressed their case with the governor and the Crown.

He didn’t win his argument.

3. Rhode Island did it first.

The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles deWolf Brownell, c1892

A year before the Boston Tea Party, Rhode Island staged its own maritime protest against import taxes in the Gaspee Affair.

The crew of the British customs schooner HMS Gaspee was aggressively boarding American ships in Narragansett Bay. They were searching for smuggled rum so they could collect the Sugar Tax. When the Gaspee ran aground, colonists led by John Brown and Abraham Whipple mustered 100 men to board longboats at night, capture the crew and burn the ship to the waterline.

And, like the Boston Tea Partiers, the perpetrators escaped punishment.

4. There was a fourth ship.

Caricature of Alexander Leslie

A fourth ship carried East India tea to Boston in addition to the Eleanor, the Beaver and the Dartmouth.

The vessel was shipwrecked on Cape Cod. Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie, stationed at Castle William in Boston, wrote about it to Lord Viscount Barrington in London:

The fourth vessel that brought the Tea is strand’d near to Cape Cod, but the Tea was got safe on Shore, and it’s expected by this time it has fared the same fate as the rest.

He got it partly right. Patriots, again dressed as Indians, destroyed several chests of tea. The other 50-odd chests made it back to Castle William, a fort in Boston Harbor (now Castle Island) where loyalists had holed up. The tea stayed there, safe until Aug. 8, 1775, when merchants — probably loyalist — bought it at auction. Boston by then was a loyalist city under siege.

5. Benjamin Edes forever kept the secret of the Boston Tea Party.

18th-century printing press.

Benjamin Edes, printer of the Boston Gazette, was considered the father of the Boston Tea Party. All of his life, he kept a list of participants locked in his desk drawer.

He went to his grave without revealing who participated. After he died, his widow gave the list to a Boston selectman named Benjamin Austin.

According to Edes’ son Peter, the list disappeared forever.

6. The British scapegoated a teenager for the Tea Party.

The Battle of Bunker Hill by Winthrop Chandler

Peter Edes was imprisoned for 3-1/2 months by the British – but technically not because of the Boston Tea Party. He had served punch to the Tea Partiers, who gathered at his father’s house on the night they dumped the tea in the harbor. He turned 17 the next day.

Eighteen months later, on June 17, 1775, the British noticed young Edes on Copps Hill cheering the patriots during the Battle of Bunker Hill. British regulars arrested him after searching his house and finding illegal firearms.

They probably punished him for the sins of his father. Peter Edes later went into the printing business himself, publishing the first newspaper in eastern Maine.

7. There were copycats all along the coast.

Replica of the Beaver in Boston Harbor.

At least half a dozen towns along the coast destroyed tea in their own versions of the Boston Tea Party.

In Greenwich and Princeton, N.J., and in Providence, patriots burned tea. In Annapolis, Md., they burned the whole ship.

New York and Philadelphia patriots turned back tea-carrying ships.

In Chestertown, Md., and Charleston, S.C., they dumped tea into the water and in York, Maine, they seized it.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Replica of the Beaver By Murgatroyd49 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84884221. Thanks to James R. Fichter in The Journal of the American Revolution, June 20, 2019, “The Tea That Survived the Boston Tea Party.”

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A Star Is Born in Boston: Jon Landau Shows Bruce Springsteen the Future

Bruce Springsteen was about to get dropped by his record company when Jon Landau, a 27-year-old music critic for Boston’s Real Paper, wrote a column that launched both their careers.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in 1977.

Springsteen’s first two albums had flopped commercially. He also couldn’t quite get the sound he heard in his head onto vinyl. In the spring of 1974 his band was touring college auditoriums and small theaters to support his second album, The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle.

Boston was a paradise for rock ‘n roll fans in the 1970s. The city’s many colleges provided a ready audience for groups like the Cars, The J. Geils Band and the Modern Lovers. Aerosmith seemed to perform at every frat party, high school and country club in Greater Boston. In far off Toledo, Ohio, Tom Scholz listened to rock ‘n roll on Boston’s WBZ radio. He then went to MIT and named his band after the town.

So perhaps it was inevitable that Springsteen’s career would get its biggest lift in the town where the mayor once bailed out the Rolling Stones.

Jon Landau

Jon Landau had been born in suburban Boston and spent much of his time at Brandeis in the ‘60s listening to rock ‘n roll records. In 1965 and 1966 he played in a band called the Jellyroll that never made it. Landau blamed himself; he was too much of a perfectionist to work with others.

Realizing he’d never play rock ‘n roll, he became a critic for alternative newspapers, including Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy and The Real Paper. He once wrote:

I flipped for the Animals’ two-hour show at Rindge Tech; the Rolling Stones, not just at Boston Garden, where they did the best half hour rock’n’roll set I had ever seen, but at Lynn Football Stadium, where they started a riot; Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels overcoming the worst of performing conditions at Walpole Skating Rink; and the Beatles at Suffolk Down…

Landau had also parlayed a friendship with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records to produce a few records. The MC5’s Back in the USA flopped, and he failed at producing J Geils’ debut album.

By 1974, rock ‘n roll bored Landau. He only liked Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder – and Bruce Springsteen.

The two had met in April that year outside Charlie’s Place, a Cambridge bar where the band played. Then on May 9, 1974, Springsteen played two separate shows opening for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theatre.

Born to Run

Springsteen announced his band as The E Street Band for the first time ever. They played I Sold My Heart to the Junkman during the first set, and closed the second with a frenzied version of Twist and Shout. During the second set, Springsteen unveiled Born to Run.

Landau attended the second set, and it blew him away.

Jon Landau wrote for the Real Paper, one of Boston’s alternative weekly newspapers.

In the May 22, 1974 issue of The Real Paper, Jon Landau wrote a column about the concert. It became one of the most famous pieces of rock criticism ever. Novelist Nick Hornby called the column ‘influential, exciting, career-changing, and subsequently much derided and parodied article.’

Jon Landau had written:

I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.

Springsteen’s record company built a campaign for Springsteen’s breakthrough album, Born to Run, around that quote. More importantly, Springsteen asked Landau’s advice about getting the wall of sound he wanted on the album.

Jon Landau knew enough about record production to advise Springsteen to switch studios. He helped Springsteen so much on Born to Run that he received a credit as co-producer.

Born to Run – which includes Thunder Road, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, Jungleland and, of course, Born to Run — is considered one of the greatest rock ‘n roll albums ever.

No Thank You

Jon Landau went on to become Springsteen’s manager and to produce his records until 1992. At Springsteen’s induction into the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, he acknowledged Jon Landau:

We were worlds colliding. His creative ability as a producer, an editor, speechwriter earlier this evening, his ability to see through to the heart of matters both professional and personal, and the love that he’s given me has altered my life forever. What I hope to give to my fans with my music — a greater sense of themselves, and greater freedom — he with his talents and his abilities has done that for me. There’s no ‘thank you’ tonight that’s gonna do the job, and it’s a debt that I can’t repay, and one that I treasure owing.

You can hear a tape of the May 9, 1974 concert here.

This story about Jon Landau was updated in 2022.

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The Other Boston Tea Party, The Hippest Club in Town

Boston and Cambridge were centers of the Sixties counterculture, and from 1967-70 the other Boston Tea Party was the epicenter of the center.

It was a run-down 19^th-century house of worship in Boston’s South End that had been showing underground films in the 1960s. In 1967, a Kansas City lawyer and a hippie MIT graduate scraped together a few thousand dollars to stage rock concerts on weekends.

The Boston Tea Party in 2019. Photo courtesy Google maps.

For $3 or $3.50, you could see acts like the Grateful Dead, The Byrds, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, The Allman Brothers Band, Joe Cocker, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Taj Mahal, Ten Years After and Sly and the Family Stone. The Who commanded a premium of $4.50 for their Tommy concert. Unknowns Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, later of the Rolling Stones, played as part of Jeff Beck.

Jonathan Richman played there with his proto-punk band, the Modern Lovers. He remembers how fun the crowd was:

Wall-to-wall hippies, bikers, Harvard students, Northeastern students, fashion models, professors, drug dealers, art teachers, groupies, MIT students, photographers, local thugs, local disc jockeys, skinny-bohemian-artist girls, visiting dignitaries from the New York art scene, and the royalty of the Boston music set — the local singers and guitar-players in their mod suits strolling around with their beautiful girlfriends.

Kansas City Lawyer

People called the other Boston Tea Party ‘a psychedelic ballroom,’ ‘a cathedral of the hippie era,’ ‘the hippest club in Boston’ and ‘everybody’s cup of tea.’

It opened on Jan. 20, 1967, with a capacity of 400. Local record stores and designated shoe stores sold tickets. A Boston group, The Lost, played the first concert. Other local bands included The Hallucinations, The Beacon Street Union, The Bagatelle, Ill Wind and The Cloud. A sign behind the stage said ‘Praise Ye The Lord,’ and psychedelic light shows accompanied the concerts.

Ray Riepen was The Boston Tea Party’s unlikely owner. A chain-smoking lawyer from Kansas City, he had moved to Cambridge to earn a master’s degree at Harvard School of Law. Riepen kept his hair short, wore three-piece suits and drove a Mercedes.

He got involved with The Boston Tea Party when the manager of the underground film series wanted to stage rock ‘n roll dance parties on weekends. Riepen and the hippie MIT graduate, David Hahn, put together $3,000 and organized the concerts. Riepen later bought out Hahn.

Soon after The Boston Tea Party opened, Riepen approached the management of a struggling classical music FM station and persuaded them to let him run it as an underground rock station. He assembled a group of hippie DJs who promoted The Boston Tea Party concerts.

Alternative Media

He hired as one of his DJs a singer named Peter Wolf, who also fronted The Hallucination and later The J. Geils Band.

Alternative newspapers such as Boston After Dark and the Avatar also promoted the concerts.

The concert hall’s manager, Steve Nelson, used to walk into the offices of Boston After Dark, take over a workspace, open a briefcase full of graphic layout tools and make up ads on the spot. His successor, Bob Driscoll, later created a Boston Tea Party look, spare with plenty of white space. Those posters are now highly collectible. (To see Boston Tea Party posters in chronological order, click here.)

The Velvets

By the spring of 1967, The Boston Tea Party booked bands from out of town. Jon Landau, then a music critic and later Bruce Springsteen’s manager, called the Tea Party ‘consistently well-run.’ He said out-of-town groups liked it because of the professional treatment they received.

On May 26, 1967, the Velvet Underground played The Boston Tea Party, the first of many times. The band was one of the most influential in rock history. Andy Warhol managed them as the house band for his Factory, but for several years they used The Boston Tea Party as their home base. In late 1968, Lou Reed said onstage, “This is our favorite place to play in the whole country.”

That first concert launched the Velvets career as a touring band. The German singer Nico showed up late for it, toward the end of the show, and Reed wouldn’t let her on stage.

A photograph of the Velvet Underground on the back cover of the White Light/White Heat album shows them under The Boston Tea Party marquee and the letters ‘ARTY.’ (To hear the Jan. 10, 1969 Velvet Underground show, click here.)

Drugs and Rock ‘N Roll

Led Zeppelin played The Boston Tea Party on their first US tour in January 1969. “They only had an hour’s worth of material, but the crowd wouldn’t let them stop, so they just kept jamming,” said Nelson. Critics considered that gig key to the transformation of the band’s performance style to long sets with extended solos.

Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler saw a Led Zeppelin show at The Boston Tea Party in 1969. He called it one of two concerts in which he ‘just sat with my mouth open.’ (To hear a Led Zeppelin concert at The Boston Tea Party, click here.)

In July ‘69 the club relocated to 15 Landsdowne Street, a space that held 1900 people. The Grateful Dead played there on New Year’s Eve 1969, but not before trying to get everyone high on LSD. They spiked the drinks in the soda machine and injected it into a sealed bottle of Mateus. The Dead managed to victimize manager Don Law and the security guards.

Soda Pop Raid

Boston politicians and law enforcement officers did not love the racially mixed crowd of longhaired rock ‘n roll fans. One night while The Cloud was playing, the house lights went on and dozens of Boston police officers swarmed into the hall looking for drugs. They were led by Boston Licensing Commissioner Albert P. ‘Dapper’ O’Neil, who brought with him a Boston Herald-Traveler reporter hoping for a story.

The police didn’t find any drugs, but arrested the management for an expired license to sell soft drinks. Ray Repien appeared in court and put on a country lawyer routine for the judge. Manager Steve Nelson remembers him saying, “No your honor, we don’t approve of drugs, shucks, all we’re doing at the Tea Party is giving the kids something to do.”

The Herald-Traveler’s headline was not what Dapper O’Neil hoped for: “Soda Pop Raid Fizzles.”

Wild Times

Stage manager Stanley Kastner had to hold the piano so it wouldn’t collapse while Little Richard danced on it. While the audience gave him a 45-minute ovation, Kastner said Little Richard went backstage to get paid in cash. He took a gun out of a metal briefcase, counted the bills and left while the audience was still applauding.

B.B. King played to his first white audience in Boston there. So did Muddy Waters.

It’s a well-known story that James Brown calmed Boston after Martin Luther King’s assassination by letting WGBH-TV carry his Boston Garden performance live. Less well-known is the blues concert Muddy Waters gave at The Boston Tea Party the night King was killed. “Muddy sang the bluest blues I’ve ever heard, more of a wake really than a concert,“ remembered Nelson.

Historic Marker

The Boston Tea Party closed for good in December 1970, a victim of the rock ‘n roll popularity it helped to create. Bands were commanding more money for larger venues.

The 40^th anniversary of the other Boston Tea Party was celebrated on Jan. 24, 2007, with a gathering of 100 Boston music people. The Bostonian Society unveiled a small marker next to the 7-Eleven that occupies the ground floor. The rest of the building is now condominiums.

The Velvet Underground pictured in front of The Boston Tea Party

Nelson recalled how The Boston Tea Party acolytes managed to persuade the staid historical society to agree to the marker.

The building, built in 1872, once functioned as a Unitarian church. For some never-explained reason one of the windows was shaped like a Star of David. The meeting house was built on land donated by a rich Bostonian, John Gardner, whose son married Isabelle Stewart. It was dedicated to the memory of Theodore Parker, the Unitarian minister, abolitionist and early supporter of women’s rights.

Said Nelson,

…the kind of people who hung out at the Tea Party in the Sixties were for civil rights and women’s rights and against the Vietnam War, so Theodore Parker’s spirit was very much alive at the Tea Party. What karma!

With thanks to the Music Museum of New England and Berkshire Fine Arts. This story about the other Boston Tea Party was updated in 2023.

Images: Boston Tea Party building courtesy Google Maps, image capture 2019. Mick Fleetwood By W.W.Thaler – H. Weber, Hildesheim – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13409500.

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Beatles Roll Through Boston – With Pandemonium to Spare

In 1964, New England – along with the rest of the country — went Beatles crazy. Since the day they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in February, with their scandalously long hair, the boys from Liverpool did nothing but wow crowds across the U.S. on their first American tour.

The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.

On Sept. 12, 1964, Boston took its turn. All summer, the Beatles had made their presence known in New England parents. Images of girls shrieking and fainting at their concerts disturbed parents and inflamed teenagers.

Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital tried to explain the frenzy as a sort of natural reaction fueled by parental disapproval.

Beatles Meet the Pops

Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler put a smile on concert-goers’ faces by adding a rendition of I Want to Hold Your Hand to the summer concert. Orchestra members did not find it amusing.

Fiedler had traveled to Liverpool earlier and found the band’s appeal fascinating. The band members joked a bit about it, but one loyal Beatles fan would later say the Pops turned her on to the group. “I thought if the Pops did it, the Beatles couldn’t be that bad.”

Girls with their Beatles tickets. (Boston Public Library)

When the Beatles finally arrived in Boston, they tried to stay low-key. Their plane arrived at 3:40 a.m. at Hanscom Field Air Force Base under tight security. Only a small crowd greeted them.

They stayed at the Madison Hotel, on an upper floor of the building located next to Boston Garden. People of a certain age knew well the Madison Hotel sign. Any effort to keep a low profile failed, however, and hundreds of fans stampeded the hotel to get at the quartet.

North Station area in early 1960s, Hotel Madison (with Boston Garden immediately behind it) at upper right

The (Short) Main Event

A quick press conference – crashed by three fans – let the band giggle with the media over their success and teed up the main event that evening.

By the start of the show, 13,909 fans officially packed the Boston Garden. Each had a ticket tickets priced at $3.50 to $5.50. Girls screamed and fainted. Causeway Street was flooded with thousands who couldn’t get in but wanted to witness the event anyway.

The band took the stage at 9:15, and sang a dozen songs that went virtually unheard because of the screaming fans. They began with Twist and Shout and included two recent hits: She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand. They ended with Long Tall Sally, making history with a 35-minute show. The British had conquered Boston again.

The boys boarded a flight to Baltimore before midnight as thousands of fans lingered outside Boston Garden hoping for one last glimpse.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Beatles with Ed Sullivan By CBS Television – eBayfrontbackarchived copy of auction and photos, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46675073. Hotel Mdison and Boston Garden By Urban Redevelopment Division, Boston Housing Authority – West End project area looking northeasterly via City of Boston ArchivesBoston Housing Authority photographs in Boston Redevelopment Authority photographsCollection # 4010.001, File name: WE_0021, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45247573.

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Boston Mayor Frees Rolling Stones From Rhode Island Police

When Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richards got arrested for assault in Warwick, R.I., just before they were scheduled to play Boston Garden, Boston Mayor Kevin White rushed to their rescue.

The baddest rock’n roll band in the world ended up speeding along the interstate with police sirens blaring, into the personal custody of the pinstripe-suited mayor

Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Mick Jagger

It was the Stones’ 1972 Exile on Main Street tour, when the band was at its height. During that tour, they typically opened with Brown Sugar, then rocked through Gimme Shelter, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Street Fighting Man and ended Mayor with Satisfaction.

Fifteen thousand fans waited for them in Boston on July 18, 1972, but Richards and Jagger scuffled with a photographer in Warwick. They had flown into T.F. Green Airport because fog shut down Logan. The Rhode Island State Police took them into custody just before they had to leave for their Boston concert.

Mayor White probably didn’t know who the Rolling Stones were, but he got on the phone and called Rhode Island officials, telling them a riot could break out at Boston Garden if they didn’t play.

It took some doing, but White persuaded the police to release the Stones into his personal custody.

Rolling Stones Make a Mad Dash

Then Kevin White rushed to Boston Garden, took off his suit jacket and claimed the stage in shirtsleeves and loosened tie.

Boston Mayor Kevin White

“The Stones have been busted, but I have sprung them!” he told the audience. He also said he asked the MBTA to stay open late so the concertgoers could be sure to get home.

As the Rolling Stones raced up I-95 to Boston with a screaming police escort, White tried to keep the crowd calm, even throwing a football into the audience as a distraction. Opening act Stevie Wonder played a set described as ‘one of the longest in history.’

At 1 a.m. the Rolling Stones pulled up at the rear of the Garden, ran to the stage and played one of the best concerts of the tour.

Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry told the Boston Phoenix it was the best concert ever in Boston:

It was as amazing as you can imagine. And it was a combination of events that you just can’t orchestrate. It was the kind of thing that made the Stones what they are. I mean, the biggest rock-and-roll outlaws in the world get arrested and then make a mad dash to Boston with a police escort! And, I remember Mayor White throwing a football out into the crowd to keep everyone occupied. And, then, finally, they arrived: the street-fighting men with all the rock-and-roll lifestyle they had.

The feared riot never materialized. Kevin White suggested the Stones give a private concert to his family and supporters to thank him for his help. He never got it.

Four years earlier, Kevin White persuaded James Brown to calm angry Bostonians. Read the amazing story here.

Kevin White photo via Wikipedia. This story was updated in 2022.

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