Boston's Finest Sons: The Neighborhoods, including new CD, Last Known Address (w/ special guest, JCE)

This blog originally appeared - in a slightly different form - on pencilstorm.com.


In the age of the internet, it’s possible to have a friend you have never actually met. Ricki C. and JCE are fast friends after years of correspondence, and one of the things they have always agreed upon is the greatness of Boston’s best band, THE NEIGHBORHOODS. After literally years of anticipating a new record, it’s finally here. Titled “Last Known Address,” the new ‘Hoods record is worth talking about, so Ricki C. hatched a plan to do just that. Below, he and JCE discuss the new record and The Neighborhoods in general, through a back and forth conversation. Here you go…

How did you first learn about the Neighborhoods anyway?

JCE: I went to school in Charlottesville, VA, and I lived there afterwards - pretty much all of the 1980’s. One day, probably in 1985, this guy named Maynard was tacking up flyers around town that said “Fire Is Coming” (the band’s then-current indie release). Maynard played in local bands, managed a band and booked shows for bands he wanted to bring to town. Anyway, I had never heard of The Neighborhoods until that day.

RICKI C.: My high school best friend & bandmate Dave Blackburn (who taught me more about music and rock & roll than anybody else in my existence) moved to Boston in 1972 after intentionally flunking out of Ohio State University. My visits to Dave in Boston over the next couple of years is what launched my love of Boston rock & roll. That love affair started with The Modern Lovers, who Dave saw play at a high school – with a young up & coming band called Aerosmith OPENING the show – pretty soon after he got to Boston. Said love affair continued through the 1970’s with Willie Alexander, The Real Kids, The Nervous Eaters and about twenty more. (see appendix A below)

In mid-1980, on one of those visits, I happened on a new magazine called Boston Rock that featured The Neighborhoods on the cover of its debut issue and it was literally love at first sight. I sent away for their debut single on the Ace Of Hearts label – “Prettiest Girl” b/w “No Place Like Home” – when I got back to Columbus and the rest is history.

The Neighborhoods 1980: David Minehan, guitar; John Hartcorn, bass; Michael Quaglia, drums

What’s been your experience seeing them play—how many times have you seen them?

JCE: I saw that show in Charlottesville when I first heard of them, at a place called the C&O, I believe. After that I was hooked. I’ve seen them in their hometown of Boston at Bunratty’s, I’ve seen them in Richmond, VA Beach, at least twice in D.C. and probably at least three other times in Charlottesville. One time I even saw them at a frat party at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. My wife (fiancé at the time) and I lived in Charlotte, NC, for a year. On our last night there, before we moved back home to VA, we saw The ‘Hoods play a club called The Pterodactyl. All the boys in the band were wearing matching black t-shirts that said “Fuck You, We’re From Boston” on the back. I’m forgetting some, so I would say I’ve seen them about 12 or 13 times. They are so spectacular live that me and my friends in Charlottesville would never miss them if we were within a couple of hours. My friends’ band 98 Colours opened for them sometimes and they slept on the couches and floors of people I knew on multiple occasions.

RICKI C.: Oh man, this live category has GOT to be the one where I’m most jealous of my long-distance compatriot, JCE. Virginia & Washington being on the East Coast means he got ‘Hoods live opportunities WAY more often than this Midwest/Ohio boy. I had to FLY to Boston to see The Neighborhoods in the early years. (see: Flying to Boston To See The Rock & Roll)  Luckily, from 1980 to 1984 I was working in the stockroom of Ross Laboratories here in Columbus, and it was simultaneously the HIGHEST-PAYING and EASIEST job I ever had, affording me the cash to indulge myself in live ‘Hoods.

I never got to see the John-Hartcorn-on-bass era band but I know I saw the Tim-Green-on-bass Neighborhoods twice. I was still drinking heavily AND smoking pot in those early-80’s days, though, so those shows are kinda hazy. I don’t even recall what clubs they were at, but one seemed to be in a strip-shopping-center with a carry-out and maybe a laundromat or tanning place in it. For sure it wasn’t The Rat, which I had been to a few times earlier in the 1970’s.

By far my favorite place to see The Neighborhoods in Boston was The Channel, a 1700-person capacity bar near Boston Garden, right on a subway line, really easy to get to from my Commonwealth Motel Boston home base. As much as I’ve come to enjoy seeing bands in small (50-200 capacity) clubs, I dearly LOVE seeing rock & roll bands kick out the jams in big-ass bars, auditoriums & theaters like the shows I grew up on in the 1960’s: Veteran’s Memorial (capacity 3172) and later the Columbus Agora (still in operation, now called The Newport, capacity 1500 or so).

The Neighborhoods @ The Channel, 1982: Minehan & Quaglia; Lee Harrington on bass

The Neighborhoods only played my home town of Columbus, Ohio, once, in May of 1986. This is a review I did of that show for The Noise, a Boston fanzine I dearly loved back in the day. (Along with Boston Groupie News and the short-lived Frenzy.) All tolled I probably saw the guys maybe 7 times, i.e. not nearly enough.

Tell me about the best show you ever saw them play…..

JCE: That’s impossible. The show I saw in Richmond had my friends as the opener and The Neighborhoods had a guest guitarist that night. It was this guy from a Richmond band called The Good Guys. He was great and Dave Minehan loved him. He invited the guy, right there on stage, to officially join the Neighborhoods as a second guitarist, but the offer was declined. I honestly believe it was a serious offer though. Another good one was at a club in D.C. called 15 Minutes. They announced that they were calling it quits and it would be their last show. They played with a vengeance that night (the Dave, Lee and Mike lineup). Afterwards I got a CD signed by them and Dave wrote “Neighborhoods, R.I.P.” under his name. It was heartbreaking. All the shows in Charlottesville were good, because all my friends were always there and they knew us. They would take the stage and my friend Tracy would start yelling for them to play her favorite song, “Shake” before they even played the first note.

RICKI C. I’ve gotta say one of The Channel shows in either 1982 (when I went to Boston to spend my 30th birthday alone, when I was first sobering up), or 1985 were the most rocking shows I ever saw from David, Lee Harrington & Mike Quaglia. But that Columbus show in Stache’s - capacity 85 people (though the club owner once sold 300 tickets to a Dream Syndicate show there) - was the BEST show. When you pack the sheer excitement of a band like The Neighborhoods - who regularly played 1700 capacity venues in their hometown - into a tiny rock club roughly the size of some rich guy’s frickin’ LIVING ROOM, the magic was just OVERWHELMING.

Plus that show was the only time I ever got to talk to & hang out with The Neighborhoods.  It was a real bonding experience for me, and I treasure that rock & roll memory TO THIS DAY, 33 years later.

Rank their records from best to worst.

JCE: Reptile Men, The High Hard One, Last Known Address, Hoodwinked, The Neighborhoods, Fire is Coming, The Last Rat.

Hoodwinked and The Neighborhoods have mostly the same songs. Hoodwinked has that amazing cover of “Southern Girls” by Cheap Trick. Also, I am one person who happens to absolutely love the version of “Prettiest Girl” that is on the self-titled Atlantic release. A lot of people would disagree.

RICKI C.: Wow, their recorded output is a place we really diverge on The ‘Hoods. My best to worst: The High Hard One, Fire Is Coming, The Last Rat, and Reptile Men are the great ones. I haven’t absorbed Last Known Address enough yet to drop it into the canon, but I gotta think it’s gonna slot between Fire Is Coming and The Last Rat. Further, I find Hoodwinked and the self-titled Atlantic CD almost unlistenable. (Indeed, that Brad Whitford-produced record is why I couldn’t ever get people to take The Neighborhoods seriously when I pronounced them my “favorite Boston band ever” and “better than The Replacements” in blogs like this one, The Neighborhoods “Cultured Pearls.”)

Then again, in the first decade of this 21st century I was lucky enough to be supplied – courtesy of Eric Law of Boston and Vic Gagnon of Ann Arbor, MI. (among others) – with a couple dozen live sets of The Neighborhoods from all over America stretching from 1979 to well into the late 1980’s, and any number of those live sets just MIGHT be better than any of the ‘Hoods official releases.

Let’s (finally) get to the new record. Review it in 1,000 words or less.

JCE: Well, I obviously love it, since I have it ranked right after The High Hard One. First off, there are no clunkers on it whatsoever. It starts strong with “Half Life” and if every song was about that good, I would be happy. But it gets even better. I really get fired up starting with track two. “ByGone Era” is a killer, probably my favorite or second favorite on the record. I love the sort-of play on words, and the sentiment: is it ‘good bygone era’ or is it ‘goodbye gone era’? The answer is both.

Tracks 2-5 are my favorite, I think. Track 3, “I Go Dark” is strong. For track 4, we get “Billy the Kid” which is maybe my third favorite on the record. I like the slow, melancholy start and then the way it kicks into gear. Tracks 5, “Don’t Look Down,” is excellent and probably my second favorite. Track 6, “In Case of Creeps” is great. Unfortunately, it has this section that is just talking/noodling that goes on way too long and ruins the song. I cured that by using iTunes to clip the song at the 1:45 mark. That way it’s short, but it’s perfect.  Tracks 7-10 are very good, maybe not great. Track 8 is called “the Stowaway” and it is my least favorite. Track 10, “The Parasites” is a song most ‘Hoods fans already know. It’s never been a favorite of mine but it’s still damn good.

Track 11 jumps up a notch. It’s called “The Tiled Room” and it has a Replacements vibe to me.
The record winds down with track 12, “We Are All Alone.” It’s a really cool slower song. I really like this one a lot, but I think because it is so repetitive that it would have been better if it were four minutes long instead of 5:26.

Overall, it’s just so good. After all these years I feared the possibility of disappointment, but to the contrary, this exceeded all my expectations. I will say that the CD packaging is really weak, but hey, it’s about the music, right? Still, after all these years some liner notes or lyrics would have been nice.

RICKI C.: I concur about the CD packaging. Artists & labels these days just seem NOT TO CARE at all about CD’s as a physical product, everything is just about downloads: Spotify and Rhapsody rule. I really miss jewel-case CD’s with cool covers and inside booklets with credits and lyrics, like JCE said. (I suspect that’s all just about economics in the indie world, and I FAILED Econ 101 in school all those decades ago.)

Musically the record is BEYOND solid: crunching guitars, cool bass, kick-ass drums, great vocals; what else and what more is a rocker gonna ask for these days? Plus, lyrically the songs are actually ABOUT something, and how many places do you get that in 2019, where every band I hear writes maybe two verses and then just bores us with a chorus until the (sometimes merciful) conclusion of the tune? “Half Life,” “Bygone Era” and “Billy The Kid” are my early standout favorites. (And are you gonna find lyrics as sharp, heartbreaking AND insightful as “Standin’ here as sad as birthday candles blown out so long ago / If you could only tell us not to worry, ‘cuz everything is beautiful / We’d let it go” from “Billy The Kid”about a departed compadre on a rock record this year? I kinda doubt it.)

So the entire disc is kinda like a supercharged Cheap Trick rumbling with The Jam in a dark alley in Boston sometime in 1979, only with WAY better lyrics and I’m gonna leave it at that.  David Minehan is absolutely one of my top 10 rock & roll songwriters of all time and bassist Lee Harrington comes up with a couple of solid tunes & lead vocals on this disc.  Buy it, or download it, NOW!

The Neighborhoods, 2010: Minehan & Harrington; John Lynch on drums

Final words or stories?

JCE: I would just say that this has been a long time coming. I discovered a website called Hoods Online years and years ago. At one time, they would post a live show once in a while. I started getting emails from an email list I signed up for, and at one point, they were promising not only a new record, but the release of an apparently finished record called “Last of the Mohicans.” Neither ever came out, that was like eight years ago, or more. Then this one started being teased and there were even little clips of the songs on that website for a couple of years. Guitarist & main songwriter David Minehan is obviously a busy man, but it was so worth the wait. I hope I can see them play live again. I saw Dave play with the Replacements a couple of years ago and he is still just the best to watch.

Oh yeah, and thanks to you, Ricki C, for asking me to do this. You are a real friend, a great writer, and you have pretty decent taste in music. And thanks for the GIANT pile of live Neighborhoods CD’s that you gave me!

RICKI C: I can’t think of a better Christmas present for the rockers on everybody’s list than Last Known Address. It’s on Spotify & all that, or you can order from my favorite Boston-related merch outlet QRST’s Store, linked here…….Neighborhoods & Boston rockers merch.

Appendix A: track listing of Ricki C.’s homemade-from-vinyl Best of Boston Rock & Roll

(note: The Modern Lovers, The Sidewinders, The J. Geils Band, Aerosmith, Reddy Teddy, The Cars, The Neighborhoods, Mission of Burma and 'til tuesday all have individual "best of" CD's in my collection. These are all the other Boston bands that I love.)

CD-1 / Boston Rocks / 1975 – 1977 

1) Kerouac

2) Mass. Ave. – Willie Alexander, indie single, ’75

3) Holiday Fire – Marc Thor

4) Boystown Boize – The Boize, split indie single, ’75

5) Prized Possession – Fox Pass, indie single, ‘76 

6) Loretta – The Nervous Eaters, indie single, ’76

7) All Kindsa Girls

8) Common At Noon – The Real Kids, indie single, ’77

9) Lift Up Your Hood – DMZ, indie ep track, ’77

10) You Looked So Pretty When – Willie Alexander, indie single ’76

11) Boys & Girls

12) Romance – Reddy Teddy, album tracks, ’76

13) Hot For Teacher – Thundertrain, indie single, ’76

14) Pup Tune – Willie Alexander & The Boom Boom Band

15) Boy From Nowhere 

16) Ball Me Out – DMZ 

17) Better Be Good

18) Who Needs Ya – The Real Kids

19) I’ve Got To Rock – Thundertrain 

tracks 14 – 19 from Live At The Rat album, 1976

CD-2 / Boston Rocks / 1978 – 1986

1) Baby Boom – DMZ, album track, ’78

2) Psycho Blonde – Pastiche, compilation track, ’80

3) Better Off Dead – La Peste, indie single, ’78

4) When You’re Young

5) Teenage Flu

6) Big City Rock – The Atlantics, album tracks, ’79

7) Everybody Wants To Survive – The Infliktors, indie single, ’79

8) I’m Talking To You – The Maps, indie single, ’79

9) When Things Go Wrong – Robin Lane & The Chartbusters, ’79

10) Stuck On The Same Refrain – The Peter Dayton Band, ’81

11) Ina’s Song – Limbo Race, indie single, ’83

12) Tiger, Tiger – Scruffy The Cat, indie ep track, ’86

13) The Room Starts Spinning – Classic Ruins, album track, ’86

14) I Want To Help You Ann

15) High On Yourself

16) What A Girl Can’t Do – The Lyres, indie ep tracks, ’83

17) Generic New York City Woman

18) Junk Train

19) Motherfuckers – The Blackjacks, album tracks, ’86

20) I Couldn’t Say No – Robert Ellis Orrall w/ Carlene Carter, ‘83

(c) 2019 Ricki C. & JCE