When Mission of Burma headline the Paradise next Saturday at the second of the band’s two reunion shows in Boston, it will be a landmark of sorts that perhaps only the band and their close friends will fully appreciate. Because, as the band well remember, back in the early ’80s, after one particularly messy, underattended Mission of Burma gig at the Paradise, the trio were politely informed that their services would no longer be required by the club in question — in other words, one of the bands who would eventually come to symbolize the groundbreaking creativity that characterized the best of the American post-punk movement had been bounced from one of the hotter rock spots in their own home town. And somewhere in that little anecdote from almost 20 years ago lies one of the crucial paradoxes of Mission of Burma. Back in the day they may have been heralded by progressive critics and forward-thinking music fans as the best of Boston — our own Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Minutemen, Big Black, Gang of Four, etc. . . . But the real horrible truth about Burma (to borrow the title of their posthumous live album) is that they weren’t particularly popular until guitarist Roger Miller’s tinnitus broke up the band in 1983, after just a full-length, an EP, and four years together.
"You guys were really popular with critics and musicians," interjects Mark Kates, the former president of Grand Royal records and the band’s de facto manager back in the ’80s and now once again for the reunion shows, which include a pair of gigs in NYC this weekend (January 12 and 13) at Irving Plaza and an already sold-out show at Avalon in Boston next Friday. "And I remember there being some well-attended shows," he continues as we sit around the lobby of Longwood Towers, Kates’s temporary Boston residence. "My predominant feeling was that it was a struggle that had occasional victories in terms of live performances and enthusiastic audience responses," bassist Clint Conley recalls. "Yeah," adds drummer Peter Prescott, "if you’re asking if we were a popular band, the answer is definitely no." "We always felt like our music was important up until the very end," Miller offers by way of clarification. "Not to be puffing ourselves up — I mean it wasn’t like we sat around thinking about how great we were. How could you think that when nobody was coming out to the shows?"
Of course, times were a lot different back in the early ’80s. For one, there weren’t nearly as many bands clamoring for the "alternative" mantle as there have been in the past decade or so. Bands like Mission of Burma were well-guarded secrets, passed by word of mouth, college radio, and fanzines from one small scene to another, until by the mid ’80s there were enough so-called "alternative" or post-punk bands making their way in America that it had become a somewhat marketable movement.
"It helped that we were in Boston because Boston is a breeder city," Conley recalls. "There are a ton of students here who go on to work all over the country. They disperse and they bring their records with them. On the issue of importance, I’m not comfortable with that. But we were all absolutely certain that we were doing something unique and that it wasn’t going to be mass-appeal stuff. Even in the tiny mass-appeal genre of punk, we knew we weren’t going to be for everybody."
Unfortunately, by the time word had spread about the exciting new bands that were taking over the American underground, Mission of Burma had parted ways. Prescott, the diehard punk-rocker in the group, went on to form the highly touted Volcano Suns and until recently was the leader of a Matador-signed band called the Peer Group. Miller, the band’s avowed experimentalist and a piano player as well as a guitarist, helped form the avant-classical group Birdsongs of the Mesozoic before moving on to record experimental compositions under the name the Binary System and perform as part of the Alloy Orchestra. And Conley, who had been responsible for writing Mission of Burma’s two biggest pop numbers, "Academy Fight Song" and "That’s When I Reach for My Revolver," left music altogether to become a producer at Channel 5’s Chronicle news magazine, where he’s worked for the past decade. Although from time to time he would come out of retirement to guest with the Peer Group or record with Miller, and though Prescott and Miller could occasionally be found together on the same stage, Mission of Burma were not the kind of band who seemed ripe for a reunion.
As Prescott puts it, "I was the one who was most against breaking the band up at the time, but in retrospect it was the best thing we could have done. And it’s probably one of the few reasons people give a shit to hear us now. We killed it before it got terrible and the break-up was a really organic thing." Given that and Miller’s continuing bout with tinnitus, the notion that Burma would ever reconvene on stage seemed remote. But the past few years have seen a renewed interest in the band and the music they made. Back in the late ’80s, R.E.M. covered "Academy Fight Song" as a B-side, but just a few years ago Moby scored a radio hit with the note-for-note version of "That’s When I Reach for My Revolver" on his Animal Rights CD (Elektra). And then last year Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad published Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (Little, Brown), whose 13 chapters include one on Mission of Burma.
"The Azerrad book got me somewhat stirred up," admits Conley, who’s once again started hitting the clubs with a new band of his own. "I mean, for me the idea of getting back together came up over the years and we always dismissed it out of hand. I wasn’t playing music, so it didn’t seem to make any sense. But I started playing music more this past year, and it seemed to uncork some creative bottle. And then, the event that triggered it was that Roger e-mailed me with an offer for Burma to get back together in New York. He sort of ha-ha’d it, like here’s another one of these things, do with it what you want. And I e-mailed him back to say that I was a little intrigued by it. So that’s when the door cracked open. That gig didn’t work out, but the camel’s nose was under the tent.
"I kept looking at it this way: if we want to play these songs the way we like to play them, pretty soon — at least in a couple of years — it’s going to be hard to do that physically, at least for me. Also I think that we were all in a state of mind for a long time where reuniting seemed unnecessary, pointless, unnatural — and a number of things happened over the past few years that changed that view of it for us. One is that Clint had been out of the music scene and I coaxed him out of retirement to play in the Peer Group a couple of times, and he found that he was enjoying that. And that got him right in and playing off on his own. And Roger played at a Peer Group show and that was fun. And then that group broke up and it just seemed to make sense for us to get back together."
The Burma reunions scheduled for New York and Boston aren’t exactly full reunion shows, because though the original outfit was a trio, along the way they picked up a fourth member who helped ensure that the music they were making would be well ahead of its time. His name was Martin Swope, and as the soundman he worked with tape manipulation, adding loops and noise in real time to the band’s live mix and helping to flesh out the trio’s songwriting style. "Martin and I both grew up in Michigan," Miller remembers. "He moved to the house that Burma rehearsed in. And he had this tape-loop machine. I wrote the song ‘New Disco’ that had these gradually ascending vocal lines, so we had Martin loop each one of them. And it just morphed from there. And then, as Clint has always said, ‘pretty soon he started showing up in all the photos.’ "
Modern technology has made it much easier for a drummer, bassist, or guitarist to control and trigger digital tape loops on stage during a song. In fact, it’s something Prescott did quite a bit with the Peer Group. So fans of Moby’s version of "That’s When I Reach for My Revolver" should be warned ahead of time that the Mission of Burma who show up at Irving Plaza, Avalon, and the Paradise will be every bit the experimental post-punk band they were back in the day. "If someone just heard ‘Revolver’ or ‘Academy Fight Song,’ " Prescott points out, "they did not know who we really were . . . I mean, live a lot of times people didn’t like us because the rest of the beast could be pretty ugly."
Listening back to the recordings the band made in the early ’80s — especially to the raw and howling versions of the songs on The Horrible Truth About Burma (re-released along with the rest of the Burma catalogue by Rykodisc a few years ago) — I find it hard to imagine a Burma without the yin and the yang of the pop songs and the experimental compositions. In some ways, it was the very willingness of bands like Burma and Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth to draw on both traditional rock forms and more avant-experimental influences that made them so important in terms of their contributions to the rock canon. It’s impossible to say where rock and roll would be without a Mission of Burma, but it’s clear that Boston’s place on the post-punk map wouldn’t be half as prominent if Conley, Miller, Prescott, and Swope hadn’t spent those four years together making music as much for themselves as for anyone else. And that, in the end, may be the true lesson of the post-punk era — that pleasing yourself is more important than placating the powers that be.
Mission of Burma’s January 18 show at Avalon is officially sold out. They play the Paradise on January 19. Call (617) 423-NEXT.
