Buffalo Tom turns 25 Part 3 of 3: A Sheet of Paper

On the second floor of the Neilson Library at Smith College there were huge well-lit open rooms with rows of long dark wooden conference tables where students could spread out their textbooks and spiral bounds and chew on pencils while computing Calculus or studying Silvia Plath or contemplating aborigine customs in pre-colonial Australia. These tables were big enough to sit twelve or fourteen with adequate elbow room, which wasn’t always a good idea if the owners of those elbows were also your friends and housemates. The serious tables had no more than four or five while the social ones were crowded with eight or ten. In the fall of 1986, we were the latter. As Umassers living in Northhampton, we felt it a right more than a privilege to help ourselves to the luxuries the five-college consortium sometimes had to offer. We wore this “right” like a cologne. Those cool, crunchy Smithies would be drawn to our intoxicating danger when we, from the other side of the consortium tracks, slid into their library’s high-backed Windsor chairs.

Hamilton brothers Pete, Bob, and Paul at Paul and Amy's wedding.

One Sunday night when those girls weren’t paying us the attention we presumed, after a weekend of kicking ass western mass style, with Joe well on his way back to Boston, we were sitting at one of these trestle tables, sketching out possible names for the band three of our friends had recently formed. I don’t remember the exact list on the sheet of paper being passed around, but I remember the chief scribbler. If there had been a Varsity Doodling team at UMass, the captaincy would belong solely to Bob Hamilton. No surprise the guy today runs his own graphic design business. The sheet had a border of typical Hamiltonian characters - grotesques with bulging tummies and anemic tapered limbs. In the center was a list of possibilities, some of which were hybrids riffing on, for reasons that perhaps only Bob could explain, Buffalo Springfield. I don’t remember if Tom Maginnis, the drummer of the newly-formed band, was in attendance, but his name had also been penned into some of the hybrids. By the end of the “study session” the name with the oval around it was Buffalo Tom. I’m not sure any of the members of the band were present that night – maybe all were – but when the name was presented to them, it was Tom’s toothy resistance to it that sealed the deal. For however long they played together, a semester or twenty-five years, he would always have to insist the “Tom” part had nothing to do with him. How could it not, anyone with rational thought might ask. Then Tom would have to explain it on an ironic level, and then the joke shrouding it would wither in his unease. The name was perfect.

Lately I’ve been doing some home renovations. I’m at the mudding stage, whereby various materials – wood, drywall, glass, iron - have to merge together to create wholeness. I spend hours spreading mortar, sanding seams, hiding screws. My mistakes have to do with seams being seen. For not sufficiently camouflaging the process. I stand at the sink, picking out the dried joint compound and wood filler that has gunked up in the webbing of my fingers and wonder, watching the creamy mixture froth under the running water, how so much material waste there is in the process of construction.

Every now and then I wander down to my office and flip through the boxes of Joe’s photos. Sometimes I read his academic essays, written during his time at RISD and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sometimes they blow my mind. I don’t always understand them. Some really abstract stuff having to do with the memory and the construction of experience. Of course his drug addiction and recovery factored huge in his photography and video-making. In one paper he writes:

…Both psychologically and visually, my work considers the dilemmas of absorbing only a small part of the richness in the world in conjunction with dreams, memory and perception…From the path of perception to meaning, the mind is manifold, made in parts, operating on many computations simultaneously, bundling them together only as needed. I have been shown just how delicate and changeable memory is, as it forms and reforms after the fact. It has become clear that the act of memory is an act of construction. That is to say, we create our experience and our experience creates us…I’m constantly reconstructing my past experience when living in the present or even when designing the future…

There are two Joes in my memory. The concrete Joe and the abstract Joe. The former is the one I see performing a task, a skill, a maneuver – the one hurdling picnic tables in a tuxedo at my wedding reception or the one hovering over the hot glue of seam tape, joining two rugs together, rubbing them out and trimming with scissors the frizzy threads unspooling from the seam, like a proud barber. The seam is unseen. The abstract Joe is the one who operated in the internal world, who took his drug addiction and recovery and fashioned it into an art by which he could further understand himself specifically and human nature in general. This Joe could talk for an eternity about the human psychic condition. This was Joe the philosopher.

Anyway, I don’t remember if that’s exactly how Buffalo Tom came upon its name. It might not have been the second floor of the Neilson Library. It might have been the first or the sixth. But I distinctly remember the sheet of paper with the name Buffalo Tom written on it in Bob’s droopy penmanship. Those two words – Buffalo and Tom – written on that sheet of paper on that long conference table, surrounded by giggling, not so studious students, on some floor of the Neilson Library, on the campus of Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1986, is “a small part of the richness in the world.”

Buffalo Tom Turns 25 Part 2 of 3: Late at Night

Two summers ago the four of us minimally packed up the Mini with clothes, sheets, ipods, books, assorted library materials, and drove down to Rehobeth Beach, Delaware for a family reunion. Me and my extended family are transplanted New Yorkers now living up and down the East Coast, and a few westward, so this particular year Delaware was the neutral location decided on by the more geographically convenienced of the family. As usual, us Bostonians had the longest trek, but despite the unavoidable hell-ride through New York, our week in the smallest state proved bountiful. We had the beach, the boardwalk, the amusement park (where we saw Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters putting his kid in a rocket ship and my wife was star-struck), frozen custard, Dogfish Head brewery pub, crab hammering…plenty enough to keep kids and adults happy for the week. At the rental homestead, where ten of us were adequately dispersed, we all managed quite well. There was both public and private time to be had. Sometimes, with my then four-year-old clamped to my ankle, I would wonder where my wife and oldest daughter had drifted off to. And where my laptop disappeared to. And the Red Sox tote bag filled with library materials. I sensed a connection.

I found them, like two squint-eyed shut-ins, shouldered together in a dark room between two beds, faces lit up by my laptop screen, watching episode after episode of the 1994-95 teen-angst television hit “My So-Called Life.” The hit that was cancelled after one year. My wife had taken out the series before we left. All nineteen episodes. It was their bonding thing, my wife and her step-daughter. Their inbetween time activity. Back from the beach, they’d brush off sand and pop in episode three. While the men shelled crabs, they holed up like addicts for episodes six through ten. Dinner reservations were strategically placed by my wife, whose calculations allowed for both pre-dinner primping and so-called watching time. That’s how it went for a week. At dinner, on the boardwalk, in and out of seaside shops, the talk between them was always Claire Danes this and Claire Danes that. Penalized by my gender, I guess, I was excluded from this so-called sorority.

Then, one day, they let me watch. Episode twelve. Special dispensation. It was called “Self-Esteem.” Of course, I had seen this episode before, and my friendship with the special guests won me a berth for the carpeted viewing.

Kristen Hughes and Bob Hamilton at Record Release Party of Buffalo Tom's Big Red Letter Day. Boston, MA. 1993.

Thirteen years before there had been a chain of phone calls (pre-email) made between our circle of friends – all nosing thirty - alerting each other to the coming “My So-Called Life” episode. It was November 17, 1994. I was teaching, coaching, and houseparenting at an all-girls boarding school during the mid-nineties. Not surprisingly, the girls on my corridor loved “My So-Called Life.” It was made for them. An assortment of cute, alternative, misunderstood, unrequited high school boys. An equal assortment of catty, aloof, aggressive, lippy girls. Goofy English teachers. Addled yet sensitive parents. And kissing, lots of kissing. Especially in that “Self-Esteem” episode, in which Angela and Jordan meet in the boiler room for a series of publicly forbidden make-out sessions. A good-looking but reticent nineties grunger, Jordan’s romantic urge – evidenced by his identification with a Shakespeare poem about un-fantasized love – remains unspoken, or “in a jar,” as the emotional weight of the episode culminates at the much-anticipated Buffalo Tom show. Angela, who risks failing a Geometry midterm, attends, believing that Jordan will risk his social standing amongst his fellow grungers, and acknowledge their bond at the show.

Buffalo Tom at Paradise Rock Club. Boston, MA. 1993.

But alas, he cannot. He would if he could, and hopes she knows he would, but cannot. The song “Late at Night” from the album Big Red Letter Day is played during the club scene and echoes throughout the episode seemingly as a theme for felt but unarticulated love. We want so badly for this night to be a public reckoning for Angela and Jordan. For god’s sake, have some sack Jordan and put the pool stick down, profess your love in whatever simian gesture you can muster, and let your friends go eat chips somewhere else. She is your unspectacularly spectacular babe, so go claim her, dude. But of course he can’t. Not there. Not until the end of the episode, with “Late at Night” again playing overhead, does Jordan cross the social divide in the riskiest of places, not the boiler room but the locker-lined corridor. The jar for Jordan is now open and despite the crowd of onlookers, he crosses over to Angela’s locker, takes her by the hand, finally claiming her in public, and the two walk down the corridor, fingers linked, in what is arguably the most romantic scene in the history of high school dramatic television. I know, because some of the girls on my corridor who watched that episode that night of November 17th, 1994 left our living room sodden in tears.

Tom Maginnis on skins at Paradise Rock Club. Boston, MA. 1993.

The fact that I was friends with Buffalo Tom gave me some cred with the boarding school girls back then, even though they weren’t Nirvana. The anticipation of the Buffalo Tom show in that “Self-Esteem” episode is borderline silly – a veritable chorus of “Are you going to the Buffalo Tom show?...I’m going to the Buffalo Tom show…You’re going to the Buffalo Tom show?...I can’t wait for the Buffalo Tom show…” That’s how I remember it, anyway. And I guess it wasn’t so different from our chain of phone calls asking each other if we were going to watch that particular episode.

I thought again of that episode this past Friday night when Buffalo Tom played “Late at Night” during the first of a sold-out three night set at Brighton Music Hall. Before and after the show, the band was flanked backstage by friends and local celebs. If still alive, Joe would have been there, too, chatting briefly, but all the while readjusting his tripod, switching lenses, and flashing shots, just as he did at the Record Release Party for Big Red Letter Day back in 1993. That was when Buffalo Tom was hitting its stride, pumping out an album about every two years during that decade, traveling the globe and gaining international recognition.

Kristine and Paul (forground), Eric (middleground right), Rosie and Maureen (background left) at Buffalo Tom's Record Release Party of Big Red Letter Day. Boston, MA. 1993.

Much of Buffalo Tom’s work over the past quarter-century has to do with time passing, good things lost, readjusted dreams, exhaustion and renewal. Maybe that’s why they speak to so many of us, why for years committed dudes in the front row would shout out lyrics as if part of the band themselves. As a friend and follower of this band for those many years, I can look at this batch of Joey’s photos, his documentation of Buffalo Tom, and see again the energy they radiated. Still do. Joey would have taken a hundred pictures alone of their encore late Friday night, an awesome rendition of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer,” with legendary guitarist J. Mascis leading them through.

The late Billy Ruane, Legendary Boston Rock Promoter, at Buffalo Tom's Big Red Letter Day Record Release Party. Boston, MA. 1993.

Packing up for a trip is often a process of deciding what parts of the past to bring into the future. When we return, we are changed by that merger.

Buffalo Tom Turns 25. Part 1 of 3: The Initiated

There was a pack of us in high school, in the spring of 1983, who took very little seriously. Except, perhaps, punkish music and what street to fuggin take. Joe had the money and the wheels, since he had already started throwing down rugs for his father. On afternoons he wasn’t working for Joe Sr. or at Randy’s Texaco, we would slide into the cab or hop into the bed of his shiny new red Ford S-10 and set about the streets of Medfield, with open minds and the thrashy chords of The Clash pumping us stupid with some sort of rebellion. We spent our afternoons wending our way around the confining neighborhoods, a serpentine enough route to allow for the entire cassette to play through, and for “White Riot” to stimulate our suburban blood with plebeian rage. Looking back, I can admit that our brand of suburban angst didn’t quite measure up to the racial and economic strife among class relations in England during the late seventies. But it was pretty damn close. Back then, it was enough that Joe Strummer’s lyrics were firing Joe Cafferelli’s cylinders.

A couple years later, Joey traded in his S-10 for a brown Ford van. We named her Wicked Brown, paying mock-homage to WBCN’s Wicked Yellow van, which showed up proudly at the biggest rock shows in Boston during the eighties. A year or two later he traded in Wicked Brown for what would be Wicked Blue. Wicked Blue, like its predecessor Wicked Brown, was a plush den of potential mischief. On wheels. Joey had built a cargo-length bench out of plywood and two-by-fours to box his carpeting tools and to hide other sundries. The three hinged doors opened upward and doubled as seats, upholstered, of course, with a durable commercial carpeting for both seating comfort and added protection for the van’s various inhabitants.

During the daylight hours, Wicked Blue was often stuffed with 2 or 3 rolls of 300 pound shark-skin-backed carpeting, extending from cab to gate. The gate doors usually had to be tied with rope or bungied with cords to restrain the rolls and hinder their jostling. Atop the rolls of carpeting lay as many rolls of padding, encased in plastic wrap to maintain a cylindrical shape.

During the twilight to midnight hours, the cargo’s inhabitants were anything but restrained. We were now twenty-year-olds, who – after clearing carpet remnants for a mosh pit- slam-danced to bands like Flipper and The Sex Pistols and a little-known local band out of Andover called Plate of Mutton (later Schuyler Heinkel), the members of which we met through college. At the helm was Joey, who drove Wicked Blue like a dirt bike. On the dashboard stood several varieties of plastic, glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs. Basically, it was a rock club on wheels.

Phil Retelle, lead singer and guitarist of Plate of Mutton. Party at Joey's Dale Street house. Medfield, Massachusetts. 1984.

There was a tacit understanding between all of us passengers and Joey that at some point during our van residency we would have to pay for our accommodations with initiations, or tests of humility. For instance, since I was Joey’s lackey during the day, he would make me unload bales of carpeting sticks into his father’s supply room. You’ve seen these sticks. The ones with quarter-inch spikes angled forty-five degrees outward that, when nailed to the borders of rooms, grip the shark-skin backing and anchor the rug tight. They came bundled in logrolls, and to carry a bundle from van gate to storage area was crucifying for a college kid with soft palms. So Joe Junior and Joe Senior would jeer me with female monikers, as I shuffled, pierced and wincing, with these malevolent instruments of torture. “C’mon, Sally, hurry up,” said Joe Sr. “Move it, Mary,” said Joe Jr. I was initiated. Bloody as Jesus. But initiated.

Others of us had their own brands of initiation. Sarah, for one, after selflessly offering to be designated driver from a house party in Andover to our homes in Medfield, had to endure mock threats. “Just drive,” said Joe, brandishing a loaded cap gun in the passenger seat of his own van, “and don’t worry your pretty little head about a thing.” Bill Janovitz claims to have introduced this line to the mini-drama, and maybe he did. But whatever its origin, the line was shamelessly repeated over and over, taking on further dimension as the ride wore on, and the scene did its best to approximate the innocent girl taken hostage by evil wrongdoers plot. Or something like that. Even when the gun went off, she took it like a champion, and got us all home safely. She was initiated. Charred along her neck. But initiated.

Bill Janovitz, Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts. 1994.

Speaking of Bill, he was another. Admittedly, my memory is a bit hazy here. But the story is legend, so anything goes. Wherever this happened - it could have been Brattleboro, or it could have been Northampton, or it could have been Vegas (the Medfield Vegas) – it happened at the end of a boozy spiraling night with Billy in a bathtub, faucet running, water rushing up around him, and Joey plunging Billy’s face beneath the surf, pretending to drown him. When motivated, Joey could be quite convincing as a serial killer. It would be wise at these times to avoid his crosshairs. Whatever brought us to that point in the night might have had something to do with Vermont’s then generous drinking age, but I remember a bunch of us clamoring around the bathroom doorway, edging for a glimpse of the mock drowning. The realism was remarkable. Hitchcock meets Tarantino. The menacing laughter from Joey, the blue face and splashy protests from Billy, one would have almost thought a real murder was taking place. In the end Billy escaped alive and we lauded him for his stellar portrayal of a drowning victim. But he stayed in character, serious and shivering under a towel, refusing our praise. He was initiated. Damp in the lungs. But initiated.

Chris "Flippa" McGinley in Slapshot tee, Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts. 1994.

Wicked Blue spent a lot of time on the Pike back in the mid-eighties, racing between eastern and western Massachusetts while we were all out at Umass. Particularly Northhampton, where two Medfield guys and an Andover guy would come together to form a band. Bill Janovitz, guitarist for Rambunctious Llamas; Tom MaGinnis, bass player for Plate of Mutton; and Chris Colburn, guitarist for Watch the Teeth Kate, joined together, shifted instruments, and in 1986 Buffalo Tom was born.

Tom MaGinnis on bass for Plate of Mutton. Party at Joe's Dale Street house, Medfield, Massachusetts. 1984.

Wicked Blue is gone now. And so is its driver. We are left only with memories. I try not to live too much in the past, but I guess hanging out with the same friends over decades requires we do that to a certain extent. Some of my fondest memories have to do with the driver of Wicked Blue torturing his friends as compensation for the accommodations he made for them. There he was, that squirmy little red-head, frequent passenger, begging for breath in a bathtub. Ah memories. Ah friendships.

Buffalo Tom in concert, Paradise Rock Club. Boston, Massachusetts. 1995.

In a couple of weeks, Buffalo Tom will celebrate twenty-five years together by putting on three gigs over the Thanksgiving weekend. Congratulations to them. As is often said about bands that stay together for so long: it has been quite a ride.

One thing I learned from Joey was this: There are no free rides in life; we all must pay for where we go.