One garage band’s cult following
PHILLIPS Academy, the prestigious prep school in Andover, Masschusetts, wrapped in waisthigh stone walls, is an unlikely incubator for rock ’n’ roll history. But in early June, nostalgia sauntered in, with gray beards and corrective lenses.
The six members of the Rising Storm, a garage-rock band that recorded its debut album as seniors there, returned to perform at their 50th class reunion. The group set up in a small ballroom in Paresky Hall, the building where its members had gathered for meals three times a day for four years. Harmonies were worked out; a guitar amp was deemed too loud; nervous energy was palpable.
A few hours later, the band members changed into black shirts and assembled in front of a crowd fresh from a weekend of reminiscing. Their former classmates craned for a good look as a friend introduced the set with a nod to the group’s unusual backstory.
“If you have an unopened copy of Calm Before . . .”, he told the crowd, referring to the band’s 1967 album, “you’re sitting on about $10,000.”
The band laughed, and kicked into the Remains’ Don’t Look Back, the first song on the record, which features a testimonial-style breakdown in which the singer, Tony Thompson, rails against the forces holding him and his generation back. The room swelled. Lighters were raised. In a sea of khaki and sensible footwear, the oldies were sweated to. Two men in the bathroom later raved about the set: “Always leave ’em wanting more – and that’s true in life,” one said, turning wistful.
The Rising Storm has been a band for half a century, but its path to cult stardom has less to do with ambition than with odd luck – and the murky economic world of record collecting.
Calm Before . . ., which was limited to 500 copies, contained more original material than most albums by prep- school garage bands of the era, and the covers the group chose (including Love’s Message to Pretty and Jimmy Reed’s Big Boss Man) were eccentric for the time. After graduation, the band members did what was expected of them: They went on to college, pursuing careers in law, medicine, education and journalism, and raised families. Rock stardom – any tenure as a band, really – was not the plan.
But by 1982, for reasons that no one in the band can really explain, Calm Before . . . had become highly coveted in the circle of garage-rock record collectors. An article that year in the Boston Phoenix, a local weekly, cited prices of $350 at a used record store; European collectors were paying even more for unopened copies.
In 1992, the band played its 25th reunion at Phillips during a series of club gigs on the East Coast; a film treatment about the group was optioned by a classmate who was at the reunion, and it landed on the desk of Robert Zemeckis. (It later fizzled.) A book, Unknown Legends of Rock ’n’ Roll, placed the Rising Storm in the company of Nick Drake and Syd Barrett. The band opened for the Yardbirds in Rotterdam in 2007. A European collector recently paid $6,500 for an unopened copy of Calm Before ....
“That’s really a gift from the universe – I don’t know why that happened in my life, that I get to play rock star every couple years,” said Bob Cohan, 67, one of the group’s three guitarists. “This was just handed to us on a platter: ‘Here, your album is now a collector’s item, and people want to hear you play.’”
I know all this because my father, Todd Cohen, is the Rising Storm’s bassist. When I was a child, he often spent Saturday afternoons playing along to Beatles or Rolling Stones records on his old upright bass. I knew he had been in a band, but the idea was more legend than reality. When I first saw the group play on a small club tour in 1992, when I was a teenager, there were strangers screaming song titles at my father and his friends. It was a bit of a shock.
It was also a spark. A year later, my father gave me my first guitar, and a decade later I played those same clubs in my own bands. My father had no designs of being a rock star – he still finds the situation bizarre – but his experience as a musician cultivated a particular taste that he passed on to me.
Improbably, the Rising Storm keeps carrying on. This fall, Sundazed Records will reissue Calm Before .. . on vinyl – the third such reissue of the album. A documentary about the group is expected in 2018. And as the external forces continue to coalesce, bringing the band back together time and time again, it creates an opportunity beyond just reliving a dream.
These men have known one another for most of their lives, in a uniquely complicated dynamic: a band.
“You can have intimacy, but you can enrich intimacy with shared experiences, and we have 52 years of shared experiences around a common theme,” said Richard Weinberg, 67, another of the band’s guitarists.
“For my father, the album reminds him of ‘times in your life when something hap- pens, and you actually create something’, and it’s almost as if you’re not there – you’re just doing it. For lack of a better word, it’s inspired.”
“I’m not speaking to its value, or how good it is,” he added. “It’s not like we were expressing something about ourselves in the world, because we were really isolated and insulated. But the music we listened to was a reflection of what was going on in the world, and that’s what we were reflecting.”
At the Phillips reunion in June, my brothers – both younger, from my father’s second marriage – and I watched with a sense of amazement and amusement. There’s an obvious chasm in the musical aesthetic of our dad’s generation and our respective ones, but the joy it brings him and his friends is hard not to get caught up in.
And for our father, the moment was to be savoured: For various reasons, work and family, he was absent from the Rising Storm’s activities from 1992 until 2014. His continued participation is a way to connect with the teenager he was, before he was a man, or a father.
“There’s part of me that’s always going to be part of that group,” my father told me a few weeks after the reunion. “I’ve played with other people over the years occasionally, but almost always, I just play completely by myself, either listening to something or not. And in my head, there’s always the rest of them playing.”