Mission of Burma: Classic or Dud?

Here,

and

Here...

i wish i could go to ATP

arse

I'd be very curious to hear if anyone wants to make a case for them being other than classic. I would, however, be the last person to make such a case.

Round #2 - MOB - Classic or Dud?....

Duds - MOB from the get-go were a conservative band!

Classics - Eyes/ears wide open, MOB runs with ball, score!

Maybe you're focussing on "Max Ernst" and "New Nails" too much.

Classic - We will rock you! Dud - Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters!

Sorry, Bob, can't get with you. It's like you're angry at your salad for not being steak.

Well, I happened to be meet Roger Miller by sitting almost directly in front of him in the Mass. Collge of Art auditorium when he saw the Girls open for LaPeste and Human Sexual Response -- his first Boston show. The first thing I ever heard Roger say was "Man, they [the Girls] were great." I believe the following are demonstrable facts:

1) Burma loved the Girls. Roger's wife Su still teases him that the Girls were better. The only artist Roger has ever played solo sideman to was Daved Hild (in the Farmers).

2) The Girls had far less influence on the Boston scene than you think. Almost zero, in fact. Hard to influence people when club owners won't let you play. Almost all of the credit you're giving them belongs to LaPeste, who were also coming out of the Museum School and got their act together much earlier. It was LaPeste, not the Girls, who completely challenged the local garage rock hegemony, and who were widely regarded by locals as being the peer of the Ramones, Clash, Buzzcocks, etc.

Your claims for the Girls are flat-out contradicted by chronology. They'd played only a handful of gigs of any note as of 1/79 (I know of just two -- the aforementioned gig at B.A.C. in 2/78, and a gig at a Knights of Colunbus hall that summer or fall), when Burma was formed. They didn't start playing clubs with regularity until summer '79, exactly contemporaneous with Burma.

3) The Moving Parts, the band that turned into Burma, were gigging in fall '78 without ever having heard the Girls, were infinitely more radical harmonically, and also used synth (although not nearly as radically). But their way had already been paved by LaPeste, going back more than a year before.

IOW -- the history of radical music in Boston starts with the Molls, who were unsuccesful; then LaPeste broke down the door (as much with attitude as musical content) and a number of bands -- HSR, the Moving Parts, The Girls, Ground Zero, the Maps, etc. -- followed. The Girls' primary contribution was to push the performance art / weird sonics end of the spectrum as far as it could go.

4) I don't recall the Girls using any live tapes, nor can I hear any such use on the album. AFAIK, Martin Swope absolutely did pioneer that. It would be pretty amazing for everyone documenting the Boston scene to have missed the fact that the Girls did it first and Martin accidentally re-invented it.

5) Had the Girls never existed, the Mission of Burma catalogue would exist precisely as it does today. There were numerous contemporary bands that influenced Burma -- most notably Pere Ubu, but also Wire, the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, etc. -- but the Girls are not anywhere close to being on that list. They were kindred spirits who had almost nothing in common musically.

6) Repeat above paragraph, substituting "Gang of Four" for "the Girls" and "less than people think" for "nothing."

"There were dozens of groups all over the states working more or less in isolation at that time and earlier. Many were sonically more interesting and/or weird/strange than MOB"

If by "sonically" you include actual notes in chords, as opposed to just weird noises in the mix, the number of bands more sonically interesting than Burma in the history or rock 'n' roll may be zero. But some people just aren't interested in that.

"Unlike MOB, G's were artists and sound engineers first and foremost, more interested in electronic music, performance art, Duchamp, Beuys and Warhol more than the limited alternative rock scene they seemed to be formulating."

Well, yes, and that's what made them great. And unlike almost all of their contemporaries, Burma were musicians first, and musicians with instrumental and compositional chops that were scary, world-class good (I don't believe there's a trio in the history of rock music, all of whom play their instruments better than all of the guys in Burma). Some people aren't interested in that, either.

The Girls were great. Daved Hild's duo with Roger, the Farmers, was phenomenal (*there's* a collection of amazing, mind-blowing songs that has been lost to the aether). It's great to see someone plugging them online. But there's no need to put them and Burma in any kind of opposition -- that's completely bogus. There was more guitar chordal / harmonic interest in any randomly selected 30 seconds of Burma than in the entire Girls catalogue, and more great performance art and dada lyric wit in any randomly selected 30 seconds of Girls than in the entire Burma catalogue. It's like comparing apples and Volvos. You pro-Girls anti-Burma argument is in fact a pro-Girls-approach anti-Burma-approach argument that pays absolutely zero attention to how well each executed their game plan. (Though I believe that history has decreed that Burma had a better execution of a game plan that more people care about).

By the way The Stains were far out also. There is a LP on Homestead I believe.

BK

Basically, while their less dangerous contemporaries were playing the Rat and Cantone's and The Club regularly, the Girls were relegated to playing art venues. These were not the best-publicized or attended gigs in the world.

The Girls and Moving Parts, it turns out, were exact contemporaries. Both bands played 13 gigs between the fall of '77 and end of '78, when the Parts transformed into Burma. But the Parts had a slightly higher profile, since they played a bunch of times at Cantone's (and were interrupted for a few months while they changed guitarists to Roger). And I can vouch that the Parts were still pretty unknown when they broke up. Both bands were hugely in the shadow of LaPeste.

The story about Roger seeing Mark Dagley doing loops for Steve Stain is a great one (but it's not what you originally asserted, of course). I would point out that it's a leap from doing tape loops at a one-off gig in an art venue to incorprating them into regular sets at the Rat.

The Girls were undoubtedly a huge *inspiration* for Burma. But an influence on their music? That's ridiculous. Roger had written "Max Ernst," a song which still defines the Burma style as much as any other, before he ever knew the Girls existed.

Double BTW, my point about those Girls gigs being badly publicized (by illegal postering, word of mouth, and college radio, which you couldn't get in the suburbs where I lived) is backed up by the fact tht I missed so many of them. E.g., I was a LaPeste fanatic but I never heard of the 2/11/78 KOC gig until just now. Hard to be a big influence on a scene when nobody knows you're playing.

It is interesting how time and space can alter information. I want to thank you guys for your interest and discussion regarding my friends Burma and my own musical activities of that era. The list of gigs that Mark compiled on the recent Girls live cd is incomplete but includes about 80% of our shows.

First off - MOB are close friends of the Girls and we share a common bond of the love of both bands music. The reason that the Girls never participated in any of the local "rumbles" was due to our feeling that this kind of activity was anti to the musical community that we were attempting to establish. We did play the Rat and Cantones at least once a month for the first year or so until we acquired our own space that held 100 people (24 Thayer St) - after which we then held most of our local shows there so we could have control over the event and also invite out of town friends such as the Contortions and Devo
to play alongside our local friends such as the Maps, MOB etc. One point - aside from the first few shows at Cantones - our shows were always well attended.

To set the record straight - we never had a problems playing club dates - we choose to play alternative venues to help establish the scene - our club dates did become more difficult to secure after our shows started having more fights break out during them.

When the Girls formed in late 77,the only other bands that we considered relevent to the "new" rock being established were
DMZ, the Molls and LaPeste (who had played two gigs before we did our first). I actually auditioned for LaPeste before joining the Girls. They were our closest friends and we did a lot of activities together.

I remember very well meeting Roger Miller after he attended one of our Mass Art gigs - and we were supportive of the Moving Parts (as well as other Boston bands attempting new forms (ie punk) during this
time (Unnatural Axe, Bound and Gagged, etc)- it was one of our goals to help the new bands get established - we definitely wanted punk to rule in Boston (and being essentially the third punk band of that era felt it important to push forward this agenda).

Yes - it is true that we utilized tapes during our shows - but this was nothing new, tape echo and tape loop techniques had already been established in Rock by Eno and the German bands that we admired. Martin certainly focused on this more than we did - I would credit Steve Stain for being the first local rock performer to really embrace these techniques in a live rock format.

I agree that it is like comparing "apples and oranges" to compare the Girls to MOB. We were heavily influnced by Kraut rock and the Ramones whereas MOB being of the next generation was more influnced by Gang of Four and the like. The Girls became attached to the Ohio scene thru our friendship with Ubu, Devo and other Ohio bands - we also became deeply involved in the No New York scene and tried to promote that scene to the Boston crowd.

I do want to mention that contrary to popular belief: all the members of the Girls were highly proficient musicians - Mark was already an established and accomplished blues guitarist, Daved had been playing drums for a number of years, George was a decent bass player (though his first instrument was the violin) and I had been playing synths for three years prior to the Girls. Granted we rehearsed four nights a week and our music was extremely tight - we didn't feel the need or have the desire to perform the material the same way every gig and we were always interested in the life that the music had on it's own (in other words, we were willing to let the songs dictate where they would go in a live context).

One other point - I can't say for sure how much we influnced things in Boston outside of the punk scene but within it - we were instrumental in helping form Bound and Gagged (the first Boston all female punk band), the Stains, Unnatural Axe, Human Sexual Response (we basically helped Larry get the band together), The Dull, V, Daily Bodies, various arty punk bands that lasted only a few gigs (which
sadly I remember the band mates but not their band names). I suspect that we influenced Someone and the Somebodies (given that they would cover Jeffery), what I'm getting at is that the Girls definitely helped establish the local left-of center punk scene - MOB can be included in this scene as well (given that Roger told me that he decided to move to Boston after experiencing the Girls live). We also were the main band to establish the Thayer Street scene (which included the Dogmatics and others later on).

I normally don't like to toot my horn but the truth is that the Girls were significant to that Boston music scene and our influence was intensely felt during those years and for a few years afterwards.

Thanks again for the discussion. I hope this helps put an end to it.

Robin Amos

Geeze... can't think of even 5 bands coming from Boston!

So were Joy Division and the Clash... oh NO!!!!!

The distinction I was trying to make to Bob was about *musical* influence. I actually think it's doing an injustice to the Girls as a musical group to say that they influenced other important Boston bands musically. There was no one like you guys. Not a lot of chords or novelty in the chord progressions (apples and oranges to Burma), so how can you make that work? Always picking the *perfect* chords or riff (the magical four notes that open "Jeffrey"), amazingly tight playing, novel rhythmic grooves, great layers of synth noise. And that's not even mentioning the lyrics and the dada / performance art aspect (which would have worn out their welcome if they didn't have great music as the underpinning). The whole notion of hearing something that original and difficult to pull off and going "gee, we should sound like them!" is silly. (In contrast, a lot of bands, like the Axe, were trying to sound like LaPeste at least a little. They had a formula that seemed reproducible with variations. You didn't.)

Not to say that the various one-off and short-lived bands (the Fuckin' Barbies? That's a name I recall) weren't inevitably drawing some from the Girls. But originality was king here, much more so than in the straight punk scene (and what made LaPeste so influential is that they managed to have one foot in both the straight punk and art-punk scenes.)

As a role model for the possibilities of creative art within the punk framework (is that a rock critic sentence to make you barf, or what?), I do think the Girls were the most important Boston band of the era. (And I would say the same thing about LaPeste for the possibilities of sneaking art into a much more conventional / commercial package.) It's impossible to overstate the admiration that Burma (and just about everyone else) had for the Girls.

One correction: Roger had just moved to Boston when he saw the Girls for the first time (at the same show I did, Mass. Collge of Art opening for the Humans and LaPeste). First words I ever heard him speak were "Man, they were great." At that time, he'd already answered the Moving Parts ad and may or may not have had his first audition. But it's absolutely true that at the time he was merely considering joining a punk band despite his tinnitus (which is why he moved to Boston in the first place, to study piano tuning). And I'll certainly buy the notion that it was seeing the Girls that made him certain that he had to join a band and be a part of that scene.

Please don't feed the troll.

Bob

I just find this debate pointless although some of the side effects are interesting. Some interesting MOB as well as Girls facts are coming into the light. It would be interesting to see someone lay out a nice chronology of the Boston musical climate at this point in time much like has been done with Manchester (notably 24 Hour Party People).

http://www.rockinboston.com

http://www.rockinboston.com/bandlist.html

Monica

Not really.

V.

If anybody is really quick, there are tickets on wegottickets for a Burma show in Bristol on 15th November. Well, there are only about 8 because it's at The Croft, which is the size of a front room.

deluxe CD and 2LP reissues out today : )

Those reissues turned up today on eMusic, BTW. MOB has never been my cup-of-tea, but there it is; maybe I should try listening to them again.

Horrible Truth about Burma is a great live record.

sooo psyched to upgrade my 20 year old LP of VS.

Daniel, one listen to 'Weatherbox" at high volume should answer your question.

I'm sticking with my 20 year-old vinyl

"Weatherbox," eh? Okay, I'll check it out today.

'Academy Fight Song' on its own makes them classic

I'm sticking with my 20 year-old vinyl

I would also if mine wasn't fairly thrashed.

At least you're not sticking to your 20 year-old vinyl.

2wice is nice

I do need to get some of that vinyl transformed into cds and digital data though.

xp to new fan: The live 'Terrible Truth About Burma' is also essential listening. I never saw them live, but they sure kicked ass

_loved_ the reunion era stuff, actually got to see them twice. def one of my fave groups. one day i might put together a comp of the covers they did...

Basically every note they note they recorded during their first run is perfect, all of the reunion records are good to great, I personally love the "The Sound The Speed The Light"

They did an iTunes live ep with a cover of the Wipers's "Youth of America" that is absolutely crucial

I saw them a few times and they were always awesome. I saw them in NYC when they were doing nights of entire records, I saw them do all "Signals, Calls, and Marches" though honestly the show highlight was an encore of "Nancy Regan's Head" from "The Obliterati" natch

Fun fact: UMS played me Burma for the first time when we lived in the dorm together, an event which is further back in time from now then the original Burma records, which seemed like artifacts from another age, were at the time *insert mind-blow gif here*

an event which is further back in time from now then the original Burma records

jeeezus

They completely rocked the roof off when I saw them live in 2008 or so, I’m not even a fan of their records really but they rocked so hard they may as well have been AC/DC

They were such a satisfying band to see finally get their due.

Old guy me saw 'em 5 times on their visits to DC circa early 80s, and a reunion show later. All great

Old guy me saw 'em 5 times on their visits to DC circa early 80s, and a reunion show later. All great

I have teh Rykodisc set which had the longer than usual playtime for its time. Think it went over 80 minutes when I think cds were still stopping at 72 largely. Could be a bit out on the timeline there but i did note at teh time taht i exceeded what I understood to be normal limits, seemed to be 80 minutes plus slightly though RYM has it listed as 79.55 which isn't what I remember my cd display saying.
It has some great stuff on since it did seem to be mopping up nearly everything official from what I can remember.

Trying to think if i had actually had any vinyl of them before moving to Ireland. I know i picked up Forget early on or rather that is for me. Early to mid 90s, Also got the Sproton Layer cd while I was in Dublin. Roger Miller on bass in a garage space rock band from the early 70s alongside his brothers and a friend. Version I have is on New Alliance though it has been picked up and remastered elsewhere since.

I heard that Miller suffered massively from tinnitus. I thought i heard that prior to Burma reforming.
I think I have an in depth Forcedexposure interview with him from the late 80s somewhere. Talking about where the band name came from, how to live by finding money on the street and a few other bits and pieces

I have the same Ryko CD, Stevo. I think it came with a note saying it wouldn’t play on car stereos because the wobble meant the laser couldn’t read to the edge of the disc.

Correct about the tinnitus issues, too. Roger was wearing massive cans the twice I saw them on their reunion swings.

That Sproton Layer album is really good! Recorded in 1970 and issues on New Alliance in 1991. My digital copy is from Donut Duck’s late, lamented MP3 blog.

I love those slower epic songs like Einstein's Day and the anthemic ones.
Noisy ones like Trem two are pretty dashed fine too.
Still not seen them live so may have missed the boat.
But yeah prettty great I guess. Probably about time i heard some of the more recent stuff methinks.

I discovered them at a time taht meant I could share them with listeners in Dublin back in the mid 90s when I had a show on a station there. Really don't know how recognised most of the bands I've been into are at any point. Probably picked up on tehm through having read US underground press from late 80s/90s. Hope some people picked up on them from me. Fit in with the post-punk stuff I played like Pop Group, Pere Ubu and some of the weirder post hardcore, psychedelic and proggy stuff I guess. I think I played pretty diverse stuff anyway. But do think I played them quite a bit at times.

xp Did they play Dublin much, I take it you're still there.
I should have made the trek over.

First was in July 2004 and the second was May 2010, which I just verified by finding my photos! They were slated to play Crawdaddy in 2007 but I don’t think that show happened, and if they did play around that time I can’t confirm if I saw them. Brains are funny that way. The last time they were in Dublin was 2016, the internet tells me, and I’d moved to Dundalk by then and became much pickier about shows.

I've only seen them once, on a triple bill with Wild Flag and Ted Leo in 2012. (A FREE show to boot.) Pretty great night.

was that at the prospect park bandshell? great show for sure

Yes, that's the one!

thanks all for the revive. sorry i don't have any rad old school stories, just a random thought/question: is mob kinda like the punk rock joni mitchell? in the sense that their appeal seems to transcend scenes and time to the point that even pansy ass r+b fans like me dig 'em?

(also something completely unrelated to all of this that i've always wondered about: d'you think roger miller's no man cover of "man who sold the world" from 1990 had any impact on nirvana's later coverage of the tune?)

as much as i love mob, i do think of them as being more cultish than someone like joni is... but then my bias is that i believe someone can be pansy-ass and still like all kinds of music :)

idk how familiar cobain was with no man... it's more likely that he just knew the bowie version, but i guess anything's possible!

At tiny 35 person Rhizome place in W DC saw Roger Clark Miller do one set of keyboard and guitar experiments and then a second set where he sang with his guitar and closed with a great version of MOB “Fame and Fortune “

This was Friday night.

Ah fuck I left after the first set.

He sort of mumbled he was doing a second set and my wife thought he was kidding. But I had read on Rhizome site or somewhere I think that he was doing a second set so we waited. He also did a Syd Barrett sing among others.

Plus Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows" in the second set. All with extra guitar noise

Listened to that Life Of The Record a few days ago and it was pretty great.
Need to find a way to listen to the lp properly and the reunion stuff which I haven't really heard much of.
Did enjoy bits of Volcano Suns when I heard them late 80s. I liked Walk Around but not sure what recognition it got.

i'm kinda trying to compile all the covers MOB did... i don't think MOB ever did tomorrow never knows but they did do paperback writer/rain... they also did astronomy domine, took me forever to track down a tape of them doing that. also seven deadly finns, editions of you, see my friends, break on through, you don't know me, heart of darkness, feast on my heart, pancake house, public image, happenings ten years time ago, youth of america, class war... probably other stuff too but those are the ones i know offhand. not counting the stuff they did with dredd foole and the din. that "sister ray" is fun, even though i've never heard a version of sister ray that lives up to the original.

Oh man, you made me imagine Burma doing Tomorrow Never Knows and now I WANT IT

While not the same I do have a video clip from Friday of Miller doing it that I might share online. I tweeted and put on FB & IG a bit of “Fame & Fortune”.

Oh, Roger also sang at least one newer song of his own that he hasn’t recorded plus a Trinity System song ( his current rock band)

Oh, that would be sweet.

xxxps Wow, Kate. Is there, uh, a way to share the bounty?

^^ the colloquial ILX term is "YSI??" named after the long-defunct YouSendIt filesharing site

also, cosign

(so) fuck it, why not

most of these are just shit i grabbed from the internet archive, i just threw them together for convenience

a lot of them are performances with members of the original groups, for instance, vanessa briscoe hay is singing "feast on my heart", daved hild is singing "pancake house", paul mccartney comes on stage for "paperback writer"

(that last one is a lie)

i use sendspace because i'm old, there are probably better ways to transfer this stuff

also "heart of darkness" is on the official live, they did it lots though so i just substituted a version from an early bootleg

oh wait i forgot the link duh

https://www.sendspace.com/file/qeho7v

tyvm!!!

Thanks!

I'd never heard that old Rykodisc comp, but picked that up cheap a few weeks ago and it's been stuck in my car CD player since.

didn't it at one point hold a record for the most amount of minutes stored on a CD? 80 plus, IIRC.

The copy I got shows 79:55, so just under, but yeah I vaguely remember something about it pushing limits.

didn’t it at one point hold a record for the most amount of minutes stored on a CD? 80 plus, IIRC.

It did when it came out, and held it for a while I believe. It also had a disclaimer that it might not work in car CD players!

Relieved to know it works just fine in my car CD player here in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-three!

digging through the internet archive and came across this roger miller solo piano cut-up video

https://archive.org/details/roger-miller-to-chance-rework-2021

I thought Clint Conley was retired altogether but he's been touring in one of Chris Brokaw's combos and they played a triple bill with Tsunami and Scrawl last night at Union Pool. Got to chat with him, such a nice guy, completely down to earth and still great onstage - it was fun watching him and Brokaw play (it was a trio) and before they went on, they joined Tsunami for a cover of "Academy Fight Song" with Conley on lead vocals.

FWIW, the final act was Scrawl who flew in from Columbus, OH for what I think was their first NYC gig in 20 (!) years. (They've done occasional festival gigs since them, and they played upstate last year.) They had the best audience interaction of the night, thanking everyone for choosing them over Oasis, adding "we opened for them in Holland in 1997...and they were such DICKS! All of them....but they were SO good. You wanted to HATE them because they were dicks....but they were so good."

Also mentioned in another thread that Roger Miller played a show here in NYC earlier this summer. Peter Prescott's current band in swinging through Brooklyn in the fall. (I think they played in Brooklyn last year too.)

<3 Scrawl

that sounds like an amazing gig. would love to see Tsunami, I didn't realise they'd reunited. I did manage to see Scrawl when they played London in 2012

was great to see Scrawl after all these years (got to see Tsunami, with Ida, at Levon Helm's Barn earlier this year).

bird, trying to remember the cover Scrawl did with Franklin Bruno coming back out (he plays with Tsunami these days)?

and CC was great both for Academy Fight Song and also with Chris Brokaw (Luther Gray excellent on drums with all 3 bands).

bulb, it was Magazine's "A Song from Under the Floorboards" (great choice)

One thing that was kind of surreal about the show was having members of the non-performing acts constantly walking by and even standing next or in front of me momentarily to get a photo of whoever was performing. Bruno in particularly took a lot of photos and video.

yes, thank you!

loved hearing those voices together again. hope it's not another 20 years, as Marcy Mays joked at the end.

man Scrawl numero box set now

wow, haven't seen Tsunami since the 'Monsters Of Rock II' tour in 1994 with Rodan and Eggs