Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection
Performance
Free Admission
Harvard Library’s Archives, Arts, and Special Collections is pleased to present this special event showcasing the Arthur Freedman Collection, an archive of recorded performances by bands in the Boston area from 1976-2011, held by the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library and the Harvard Film Archive.
Growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, Arthur “Artie” Freedman was inspired from an early age by rock and roll, and as a teenager in the early 1970s he began to seek out live music. In 1975, when he turned eighteen and was old enough go to nightclubs, the city’s rock scene was gathering momentum: a number of high-profile bands (Aerosmith, the J. Geils Band) had emerged from Boston onto the national stage, and the following years would see the sudden onrush of punk—a new, harder-hitting musical style that would come to be associated with the clubs Freedman visited most frequently. Venues like The Channel, Bunratty’s, Cantone’s and the infamous Rathskeller (known affectionately as “the Rat”) helped build Boston’s reputation as an incubator for a thriving, raucous punk scene that would later seed waves of musical development in the styles of post-punk, new wave, no wave and beyond.
Freedman realized that what he witnessed on stage—the raw energy of the performers, the reactions of the crowd, the mishaps and idiosyncrasies of the sets—could not be reproduced in the controlled environment of a recording studio. In the late 1970s, inspired to document the scene, rough edges and all, he began bringing a tape recorder to the shows. In 1985 he upgraded to a video camcorder, which allowed him to capture the often-electrifying visual details of the performances and venues. The output of his efforts is an archive of approximately 1,500 shows spanning over thirty years of Boston music, which Harvard acquired in 2011 as an essential document of local sounds, spaces and people—in essence, a “scene.”
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In 1976 the owner of the Rat started the label Rat Records to release this double LP of live performances. It helped cement Boston’s reputation as a hub of punk culture. - Enlarge the image
Bound & Gagged, an all-women no wave band that made a splash around 1979-80 and is documented in the audio collection. Enhanced electrographic print by Sherry Edwards. - Enlarge the image
Enhanced electrographic print of the band Ground Zero made by Sherry Edwards from a photo by band member Marie Favorito. Ground Zero isn’t in the collection but Artie has said that their breakup directly inspired him to start documenting live sets.
2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Rat, a location that looms large in both the Freedman Collection and in Boston lore. To mark the occasion, the Harvard Film Archive and the Loeb Music Library—who collectively steward the tapes in the collection—have partnered to bring you an evening celebrating the bands, venues and wider scene documented in the Freedman collection. Not so surprisingly, the scene and the venue were socially dominated by straight white male bands; this archive is a compelling document partly because it captures this dominance, but also because of everything else it captures that falls outside that mold. Further, it raises questions about what and who was absent, and why. It’s time to pry the lid of the scene open to see what else was really in there: a recent initiative to build programming around the collection is driven by a desire to de-center bands that are already celebrated and well-remembered, and re-center other groups and individuals, styles of music, and spaces that expose the scene in fuller color. This shifts the spotlight towards bands with notable female musicians; people who identified openly as gay, lesbian, or gender non-conforming; and people of color—all of whom frequently struggled to gain equal access to spaces like the Rat but made inroads anyway, not to mention great music.
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The Nervous Eaters and Third Rail were both influential Boston punk bands. - Enlarge the image
Backstage pass from The Channel which was a major and well-remembered venue. Lyres is a long-running garage rock band still playing today. - Enlarge the image
Flyer by Sherry Edwards for the band Pastiche, a band featured in the collection. - Enlarge the image
Lou Miami is a great example of a performer who broke the molds set by the "Live at the Rat” bands. He was openly queer, played with a mixed-gender band earlier than most and was an advocate for gender and racial equality in the music scene. - Enlarge the image
Throbbing Lobster was a local independent record label. Artie kept a number of show tickets, like this one, which are included in the collection.
The program will include live performances from musicians featured in the collection, remarks from Arthur Freedman and a film reel of excerpts that includes performances by both canonical rockers and musicians who diverged from the norm in their identities, their musical approaches, or both. It is presented in conjunction with an exhibition on view at the Loeb Music Library. From November 1, 2024 - April 18, 2025, Making a Scene will showcase flyers, records and other objects from the collection. In revisiting, reexamining and reframing the diverse, multigenre landscape of the Boston music scene, these programs will address, among other concerns, inequity along lines of race, gender and sexuality, the changing conditions for artists in the shifting environment of a gentrifying city and the vital role of those who document its subcultural spaces. – Evan McGonagill
