Blake Babies History Part 3

My parents knew I didn’t really care about college. They never considered me a serious student, barely passing public middle school in Southern Indiana, though I’d become a very serious student of punk culture and underground music. All the energy I used to put into constructing a fantasy world I channeled into making my music dream a reality. It felt like life and death: I had to leave town and find my people.

I’d pulled my grades and test scores up from bleak prospects. Nevertheless, I wasn’t in the mix for elite colleges like a lot of my friends or my much more academic-focused older brother Jake. I had other friends who dropped out entirely with zero prospects, which put me somewhere in the middle on the scale of hometown screw-ups. My parents knew I wasn’t quite a lost cause, but they couldn’t begin to picture the future I had in mind. They had the good sense to recognize I wasn’t like those other kids. Accordingly, they encouraged my creativity in every way. They had the wisdom to know I had a chance to figure it out—they sure weren’t going to figure it out for me.

I knew about all the American cities with the most legendary local punk scenes. That’s how I picked potential schools. That’s all I needed—a music scene anchored in hardcore punk evolving into something new, places like Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C… or Boston.

I ended up choosing Berklee College of Music because it wasn’t really college at all, or so I thought. I assumed it would be easier and looser than real college, and that it would leave me more time and resources to figure out how to get my band going. That plan didn’t work out so well, but I did magically end up in exactly the right city at the right time to launch a band. If I’d landed in another city, I’d have had a different band. But I believe I made the right choice.

Freda and I had an immature, dysfunctional relationship. We used to break up and get back together constantly. We would date other people during the time off, then we’d make up. It became a never-ending cycle…until eventually it just ended along with the band. Eventually it became an extension of the band, the band an extension of the relationship. We continued to play music together even after we’d declared our relationship a failure, but by then most of what we did came from habit. Breaking up took a long time.

Our parents saw all the dysfunction, but they knew better than to seriously intervene. My mom let Freda come along to drop me off at the Berklee dorms. We didn’t say much when Freda left with my mom; we just held each other for a long time and cried. If Freda could get it together to move to Boston, then we’d do it together. If not, I’d be on my own. I wasn’t going back—not until I’d done something.

We might continue as a couple. If not, I’d do it on my own. I urgently wished she’d return, but Freda didn’t have the money to join me. She was eighteen and dead broke, crashing in her friend Anne’s dorm room. She could attend Indiana University for free, which is the only thing that made sense.

When she left, I felt completely alone and a little bit terrified. I didn’t know anyone in Boston. I lived with constant anxiety, wondering what Freda was doing, whether she’d found someone new.

After a few days of making new friends on my hall and attending classes, labs, and lessons, I quickly realized Berklee wouldn’t be that easy after all. I wasn’t prepared for the rigor of the curriculum or the musical proficiency of the students—including some of the best musicians in the world. When it came to sight reading, music theory, and even technical guitar ability, I was near the bottom—in way over my head. I found my work ethic in a hurry.

First semester I locked in, and ended up making decent grades. I practiced guitar many hours every day until I developed thick callouses, focusing as much on songwriting as my lessons. By the end of the semester, I’d made friends with the weirdest outsiders on my hall. Before the holidays I had enough original material to make a 4-track demo.

I had three songs I considered good enough to share: Hanging Out, inspired by Lou Reed’s solo albums, one I can’t remember the title that I basically ripped off of R.E.M., and then the best of the lot, a mid-tempo song titled Rain that was inspired by Husker Du. In each instance, the music came easy; but I struggled to write lyrics I liked. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, so I did my best. I wrote in the style of famous bands because it gave me some structure, a way to get started. If I could imitate well enough then I’d find my way to something original.

I came home for the holidays with my demo to play for Freda. She liked what she heard—actual coherent songs—even good songs! We’d seen each other twice during the semester—once when she visited for a week in October, and once when I came home for the R.E.M. concert in November. By the holidays, we’d rekindled our romance and hatched a plan for Freda to move to Boston later in the winter to start our band.

I met a skinny guy with glasses named Dan Wolcott on my dorm floor. Dan came from Michigan. He shared my obsession with Lou and The Velvets. He had a wry sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurd. We went to see The Minutemen together at The Rat. I asked him if he wanted to try a band and he said sure, why not.

Dan had a few cool songs and wanted “to play out,” as the Berklee kids used to say. Dan’s songs were solidly-written, but they were mostly these jokey sort of novelty songs. One I remember was called “Blues Man.” He sang “I’m a blues man, my baby left me…that’s why I’m a blues man…so I went for a walk.” He had another one that was a love song from Eva Braun to Hitler. They were really funny, but I’ll admit to some trepidation about being in a funny band. I loved clever lyricists like Paul Westerberg and Evan Dando. But I didn’t really have an appetite for “funny.”

Freda arrived in town in late January—on Super Bowl Sunday—blackout drunk with her best friend Anne, also wasted, who had decided on a whim to follow Freda to Boston and learn bass. I don’t think Anne had any musical background or training—certainly not on guitar.

Dan and I gave Anne some lessons on the fly until she could cover the most basic chord changes. There we were, Dan and I: two proficient guitar students at an elite music school starting a band with two beginner musicians. Attractive beginners, but beginners nonetheless. It’s what I’d signed up for. Dan, not so much.

Freda and Anne rented a studio apartment on the corner of Hemenway and Haviland streets a couple blocks from Berklee, a corner that always had a prostitute and a crack dealer on duty. We called the place “The Radiator” because it had an old-fashioned steam heat radiator that constantly hissed during the winter. It was a roach and rat-infested shithole on one of the worst blocks in Boston. The Radiator quickly became a hangout for my hard-partying Berklee friends as well as a rehearsal space for the band.

The four of us in the group—Freda, Anne, Dan, and I—shared an interest in the Beat writers, Kerouac, Burroughs, and of course Allen Ginsberg. One night in early 1986 we all went to the Sanders Theater on the Harvard campus for a Ginsberg poetry reading. The set ended up being more of a concert than a reading as Ginsberg accompanied himself on the harmonium and sang a bunch of filthy songs, such as Hard On Blues (“blues is like a hard on…it comes in your mouth”).

Ginsberg spoke intensely and passionately about the works of William Blake and about Buddhism, more of our shared interests. He was about 60 at the time—unimaginably ancient and wise beyond anything our young minds could fathom. We loved him so much we decided to hang around after and try to pay our respects.

When we walked across the sturdy wooden stage and claimed our place in line to the impromptu meet and greet with all these older Harvard Square beatnik types, Anne had the idea to ask him to name our new band. When our turn came, Anne approached and said, “We’ve just started a band, we’d love it if you’d give us the honor of naming our band.” He glanced at each of us and without missing a beat he said, “You’re Blake Babies.”

We had our name, but that’s the only real progress we made in those early months. Dan lost patience and it all came to a head one night when Anne and Dan had some sort of a verbal fight, or maybe just a misunderstanding. I can’t remember what they had to fight about, but it ended with Anne storming out of the Radiator in tears. Freda told Dan and me we had to go after her, so we walked down the block and ate a slice of pizza. Dan said, “So…I guess that’s it for the band?” “Yes,” I agreed. “I think we’ve taken this as far as it’s meant to go.” Just like that, our quartet became a duo.

All wasn’t a loss for Anne. She fell in love with my Berklee roommate Tom, a wildly creative experimental musician from Pittsburgh. They’ve been happily married and making art in San Francisco for nearly 40 years.

Freda and I considered remaining a duo, though there wasn’t much precedent for an electric guitar and drums duo. We didn’t have the example of The White Stripes, and I didn’t really want to be the lead singer. I wanted to write songs and play guitar while someone else fronted the band.

We pushed on with our writing, including a song titled “Radiator” that told the story of the scene that increasingly gathered in the apartment at night to drink, smoke, and hang out. I wrote the rockabilly-influenced tune while Freda wrote the lyrics, referencing among other things the free Hare Krishna dinners we enjoyed every Sunday to supplement Freda’s diet of stolen dorm food, and Freda’s scorn for all the potheads who sat around smoking weed all day on the floor of the Radiator (which had lots of instruments but no furniture—just foam rubber pads on the floor for sleeping).¹

By late spring we decided that we needed to find our new singer and try to move things forward for Blake Babies. Freda had her eye on this pretty brunette we’d noticed in the halls of Berklee who dressed the part—black leather motorcycle jacket, hair pulled back in a ponytail—cute but seemingly very shy, moving quickly through the halls to avoid human contact. Compelling.

In those days you could take an informed guess as to someone’s musical taste based on their fashion. Berklee had metal guys, bebop purists, jazz-funk virtuosos (mostly from Japan), and goth kids. We didn’t fit any of those categories. We loved all sorts of music, but we favored underground rock. We recognized the sartorial statement by this girl as consistent with ours and correctly guessed that we had similar taste in music. Freda became increasingly confident this girl was our singer, and that we needed to meet her and talk to her about the band immediately.

One evening after several rounds at a nearby bar that served underage Berklee students, Freda and I were in the lobby with my friend Stevie Blacke, a talented multi-instrumentalist and one of the hippy regulars at the Radiator’s nightly stoner jam sessions. Suddenly our mystery girl walked into the lobby carrying a pineapple, making for the elevators. Freda subtly gestured towards the elevators like the commander of a Special Forces unit.

Freda had stalked mystery girl for weeks, so that she knew which room she lived in. It was a rare solo on the 8^th floor, also my floor. She led us to the door and knocked. The girl answered and said hello. “Hi,” Freda said. “I’m Freda and this is John and Stevie. John and I are starting a band, and we think you might be our singer.” Mystery Girl smiled and quietly said, “Hi, I’m Juliana.” She invited us into her small dorm room.

Juliana had pictures neatly taped to the walls around her bed of some of our favorite bands—our shared Big Three of R.E.M., X, and The Replacements. Those bands form the basis of our early sound. We talked about music and Juliana said she studied piano and voice but she was learning to play guitar and write songs. Perfect. After a half-hour of small talk we invited Juliana back to The Radiator to play some songs together.

It all happened that easily, because Juliana had her eye on us as well. She thought we looked cool too, but her deep shyness prevented her from making the first move. I wouldn’t have either; but Freda wasn’t shy at all—especially if she had a few drinks. Freda’s energy and momentum had everything to do with our formation and early success. She had a vision and confidence to get things moving.

That night I played a few of my songs that Juliana seemed to enjoy. Then she played some of her songs on her Yamaha acoustic guitar and sang so quietly we had to strain to hear the words. I could tell her songs were good and carefully crafted. She’d spent a lot of time figuring out how to do what she does without much outside influence beyond her main musical sources—her underground heroes plus The Police and Olivia Newton-John. In a sense, she arrived fully formed. By the end of the evening, I joined in on guitar and Freda played drums. Just like that, we had a band.

1. We recorded Radiator and kept it off our debut album for some reason. We were short of material, so I can’t imagine what we were thinking, and I don’t know how to find the recording. If anyone has it, hook a brother out. Here’s the first verse I can remember

It’s going home to the Radiator, Radiator
Going home to rock to the radiator beat.
It’s my goal in life to watch you all get high again,
You’re way to hip to go the the Hare Krishna feast