Seventeen
Bostons Seventeen speaks to guys and girls in their teens and in their twenties Its high school and college students who like rock with a twist
119
plays
Point A was where it ought to have been, a seam-busted warehouse space in Roxbury, MA that our 3-piece outfit shared with Boston toughguy product Tree. This was the fall of 1996, when Seventeen had all the earmarks of your crash-and-burn variety garage band: the yard-sale kit with folding lawn chair, loaner P.A., the pieced-together Pixies covers passed off as originals, the noise complaints and inevitable visits from the police and so forth. The plan being to stick there long enough that Tree would take us out on the road with them.
Failing that, though, we bore down and debuted under the name 'Standard' in Jan 1997 at Deco's Lounge, forgoing the expected 4-song sampler for a 2-hour onslaught that remains our longest single set to date. Lots of "what the hell was that"/ "where in hell are you kids from," etc. which we've been answering ever since with a string of hard-driving and unself-important songs, and with one of the most bombastic and consistently well-attended live shows in Boston.
We hadn't been out of the gates for half a year and we were suddenly getting called up from our self-organized, left-field venues into the higher profile [err, for Boston] clubs. Our shoddy demo tape became a 14-track, professionally mixed and mastered CD that Boston DJ's were putting into rotation, which in turn led to a contract with startup label Risky Music. A pair of roster changes saw Jason, a college bandmate of Jon's, joining in at lead guitar, and Tony taking over on drums for Chris while Chris stepped up to the front line. By the winter of 98 we'd ponied up for the Econoline 250 and taken the act on the road, ranging as far south as Blacksburg, VA and slogging our way up the coast to Maine, playing 7 states in all over 2 weeks. And if the kids weren't exactly chasing our van through the streets and camping out for tickets, we at least won some new converts to the cause--and not with any major-label PR juggernaut but with the show itself, what the Noise called "the punch of Iggy Pop, the intellect of Nirvana, and the heart of the Dogmatics, driven by cool-as-hell ultra-slam vocals ... [all] delivered in an artful, intense cleverness that automatically springboards this band way beyond all the average punk-clone wannabe's."
So Point B is, of course, what everyone wants: the tour bus with oxhorn hood ornament, scuffles with rednecks and skinheads, a U.K. tour for inattentive and hostile teens, manipulation and exploitation at the hands of major-label moneymen, the repackaging of an original and risk-taking musical act into a safe and viable commercial proposal, the hotel riots and crashed muscle-cars and the doberman teams with rhinestone collars: all of it. Just so long as we get to keep playing.
Seventeen is:
Jason Adams, lead guitar; Jon Baird, rhythm guitar; Chris Baird, bass; Tony Mellace, drums
Boston, MA
USA
ID
2941
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