NEIGHBORHOODS WATCH...AND WAIT

NEIGHBORTHOODS WATCH...AND WAIT

FEATURES

Steve Peters

There’s a medium-sized club on the outskirts of Los Angeles called the Music Machine. It is singularly unspectacular, but notable primarily for some of the acts that have performed there. The Violent Femmes were there before Gordon Gano found God. Australia’s Hoodoo Gurus made their local debut there. I even saw Spinal Tap there, just before their “Sex Farm” single topped the charts in Japan and precipitated a sold-out stadium tour of that country.

On this particular September evening, about 50 people are scattered throughout the darkened club as the Neighborhoods, a Boston-based trio, take the stage. The place holds a maximum of 300, but hey—it iso a Wednesday evening, and besides, the new Star Trek is premiering on the tube tonight.

“How ya doin’?” frontman David Minehan calls into the darkness, strapping on his guitar and launching the band into their first song. I’ve never seen the Neighborhoods, but it only takes me a minute to realize that there are about 2,999,950 people in this fair city of three million who don’t know what the hell they’re missing.

I’ve always thought it was at»it.silly for scribes to write articles along the lines of “I have seen the future of rock ’n’ roll, and it is (fill in the band name).” For one thing, it’s pretentious as hell, as if your mildmannered music critic has suddenly been transformed into some kind of rock Nostradamus or something. Besides, things don’t always work out the way they should—if they did, bands like the Neighborhoods would be signed to major labels, and Whitesnake would be working split-shifts at McDonalds.

But the fact is, if true rock ’n’ roll—that which stresses musicianship over makeup, integrity instead of income—does indeed have a future, the Neighborhoods are destined to become a vital part of it.

“What do you do with just a rock band these days?” Minehan wonders aloud, sprawled out on a wooden bench in the Music Machine dressing room after the show. The ’Hoods—Minehan, bassist Lee Harrington and drummer Michael Quaglia—have just delivered a blistering set of original tunes. Their style combines the heavy attack of ’70s hard rock with the frantic urgency of the post-punk ’80s. It’s the catchy hooks of the Jam, the roughedged, pjayful rowdiness of the Replacements, and the power-crunch chords of the Who all in one, presented live by rifling off one song after another, Ramones-style, with furious intensity.

The Neighborhoods know their business, and after an eight-year career spanning three independent albums.for three independent labels, they ought to. After forming on the hpels of the punk era in 1979, the ’Hoods toiled on the Nortneastern club circuit for a couple of years, winning a WBCN Battle Of The Bands and releasing a handful of well-received indie singles along the way. They were extremely popular locally, and things were looking good—but, in 1982, they suddenly disbanded.

“At the time, we didn’t have the underground network which has been worked out over the last five or six years,” Minehan recalls. “You didn’t have the college stations connected. You didn’t have CMJ (College Media Journal). There was no touring involved unless you were on a major label, and major labels bac|& then were signing bands and dropping them the next year, anyway.

“There’s too many reptiles involved with rock to be overlooked. ’’. —David Minehan

“We were pretty pompous about doing a major,” he admits. “We just saw too many of our friends in bands being signed and dropped. We waited too long, until we overstayed our welcome. Then we were faced with playing 20 shows, a month with no real road out of it, and we quickly burned out on that. That led to the break-up.”

Part of the problem, Minehan says, was that the band was lacking a clearlyfocused musical direction. That problem was resolved when the ’Hoods decided to reform the following year, replacing their original bassist with Harrington.

“Thefe was a musical direction that needed to tfe assessed and redirected,” Minehan says. “There were a lot of different Neighborhoods songs that were this, that and the next kind of music, but—by the time Lee joined—we started to see the alchemy. . .”

He is interrupted by one of the club’s employees, who forcefully informs us that the club is closing.

“We’re just doing an interview here for CREEM magazine,” Minehan says, trying to buy time.

“Hey,” the guy shoots back, making an obscene-gesture around his crotch area, “CREEM this.”

Geez, has no one any respect for venerable institutions these days?

Well my life ain’t easy It ain’t easy being a hood

The wrong place at the wrong time And they might take me away for good.

“Beer, Steve?” Lee holds out a cold one, adding with a grin, “off the record, of course.”

We’re sitting in the Neighborhoods’ van outside the club, trying to pick up where we left off. I mention that they’ve learned the first lesson in do-it-yourself P.R.—get the budding rock writer soused.

“I got arrested the other day in California,” Minehan offers.

“Strike that,” Lee says. Too late.

“I got arrested for shoplifting, in Los Banos,” David continues. “I stole some rubbers. So now I have a record in California. I was photographed and printed, and Mike had to deal with it.”

“Nothing to be proud of, Rusty,” Lee warns.

“Mike should’ve just said, ‘You’re staying in jail this time.’ ”

“If we didn’t have to come here to play, we would’ve,” Lee says, only half-joking.

For now, the Neighborhoods are content with the push they’re getting from their current label, New York-based Emergo Records. Their 1987 Reptile Men LP comes the closest yet to the energy of their live performances, and the band agrees that it’s their best effort to date. But after nearly a decade as a group, they’re starting to get a little restless about when or even if they’re going to land the big one.

“It’s just as easy these days to sign a deal and get screwed,” Minehan says, “but for us, at this point, we can really take it no further. This is our third major tour of the country, and we understand that the machinery needed is not gonna come from an indie.”

One factor in the ’Hoods’ favor is the support they’re getting from other artists. They’ve played with acts like the Clash and the Jam in the past, but they pulled a minor coup last year when they opened for David Bowie at the 60,000-seat Sullivan Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts—at Bowie’s request.

“He bumped Duran Duran off the show,” Quaglia says proudly.

“We kept hearing these reports about Bowie talking about us in interviews and stuff, and we’re going ‘Yeah., sure,’ ” Minehan explains. “Then we had friends and relatives in Philadelphia, and they taped this interview on a major station down there, and we heard it for ourselves. The interviewer asks him, ‘What bands have you been listening to lately?’ and Bowie says, (he does an uncanny impression of the soft-spokeri Englishman) ‘There’s a little, little rock band from Boston called the Neighborhoods.’ And we’re like, ‘Yaaaahhhh!’

“But still, when he was coming to Foxboro we thought, ‘Well, that’s all well and good, maybe we can jget on the guest list.’ Then he asked us to play!”

Nothing better for getting the word to the masses than playing a packed arena. And it’s no coincidence that one of the covers the ’Hoods perform live these days is Bowie’s “Queen Bitch.” They also do an occasional tune by Beantown brethren Aerosmith, an undeniable influence for virtually every would-be Massachusetts rocker who grew up in Boston in the 1970s.

“Aerosmith to us is just so inbred, you know?” Lee says. “Since I was 10 or 11, it’s just been there. I remember when everyone was saying, ‘Oh, they’re just a bad Stones imitation,’ and I was like. ‘Who are the Stones? Fred and Barney?’ ”

As the interview winds down, I pose the obvious questions—how did they get their name and, more importantly, the name for their new album?

“There’s a section in Newton (Mass.) called the Neighborhood,” Minehan explains, “and it’s one of those places where all the kids from the towns surrounding it go to drink and smoke, lose their virginity, puke and cause trouble.” OK. What about Reptile Men?

“Reptile Men came about because there’s too many reptiles involved with rock to be overlooked. Iggy Pop did the Iguanas before he was Iggy; Alice Cooper with his boa constrictors; the Lizard King, Jim Morrison.

“Also, our record company made it known to us that reptiles live in the harshest environments on absolutely nothing and make it through, and that’s what musicians do.”

Hopefully, the ’Hoods won’t have to do it for much longer. Plenty of fine bands have become casualties before they met their potential, but the Neighborhoods have every intention of sticking it out. o “I think we’re one of those bands that can’t be pigeonholed,” David says. “We have a lot of influences, and if we see this through to the successful end of it, we’re going to be known not as a genre of music, but as the Neighborhoods.” ®