kudos for the not-just-boston approach, as so much happened regionally that it all fits together like a puzzle. i've been taking mental notes for my own regional page, and here's a few things off the top of my head you are welcome to print if you care and think they are germane to your topic. or german. or germ free.

apparently there was a way-cool late-sixties, early seventies n.h. scene that encompassed not just laconia [proto-aerosmith] and the town [?] the shaggs were from, but also keene. old-skool cats i knew when i was first starting to play in east boston [jerry toomey, bob campagnan] regaled me with stories of seducing lovely, naive, milk-fed 'cow hampshire' maidens when they used to play there with fresh cream, 'round the time of daddy warbucks [rikki raves on gtr., n.e.'s answer to leslie west] and the sidewinders. eric rose [aka rosenfeld] of the sidewinders remains to date the finest single guitarist i have ever seen live, bar nobody, superstar or not. back then, eric was n.e.'s jeff beck, rikki raves was our leslie west, and jerry toomey was clapton. later - around 78, we got our hendrix, too, the cat everyone at the record garage knew as 'mike the street bum'. his busking out in harvard sq., with a beat up strat he always carried in a soft shell case over his back, and a pignose amp, was amazing, and he predated stevie ray vaughan as a blue-print perfect champion of the hendrix lix and style. mike would later meet and marry a really wonderful young lady who motivated him to become a sedentary indoor dweller like the rest of us, and he then went on to play with planet street, but i never tought their pop approach allowed him to blow the ferocity he had living on the streets.

i think chuck white [dirtywater.com] may have written a bit about the solid beach scene, with revere beach and salisbury [the frolics club seems to be a vestige of that era] in the fore, it was also real healthy in the late sixties and early seventies, and a regular haunt of revere's underrated and brilliant brother-led, three-piece team [dana west was one, i think] sass. in the 80s local groups like street kid tried to pull it back together with some limited success.

even east boston had our moments. there was one group i saw as a kid ['66 thru '71, so i was seven thru eleven years old] with a one-armed singer, very rocking, and another band i would catch at the city yards with a much talked about gtr. player named sal baglio. back then, who knew he had the stompers in him, just waiting to bust out? of course the beatles played at suffolk downs, and so did sha-na-na on one early gig, and at the small-plane landing field at logan airport, which was then just a three blocks walk from my house, i recall waiting outside the gate of the administration building as private bigwigs landed and disemabarked. i was probably six years old or so when i got dragged to wait for the beatles there, also herman's hermits, and both involved standing for hours on end with my sisters in the pouring rain. a bit older, i went down on my own for landings of danny kaye [hey, i was a kid], the bruins players like bobby orr and phil esposito, red sox local boy made good dana canigliaro, and more to the point grand funk and led zeppelin. zep were travelling then ['71 or '73] in their own jet, a big ass purple painted commercial size behemoth with their name painted on the rear tail. bitchin.

any day now i expect a zillionaire bo-rock fan to call me and say 'joe, the hell with work, do the site full time and i'll PAY you goddamn it!' mmm hmmm. and then i woke up.

be well, jh