A Place In The Basement
Boston's Rathskellar, a sense of place, and otherness revisited
We all have associations with places - our “happy places” or spots where we have strong, personal memories, a sense of historical and familial presence that draws us back. The “god of a place” thread goes back through recorded literature; there are wells mentioned in the Bible as places of significance; Carlos Castenada explored it five decades ago in his Don Juan novels (largely seen as fiction today, not historical narrative of Sonoran desert indigenous practice); favorite author Monica Byrne built parts of her last novel “The Actual Star” around the sense of attachment to place; when FourSquare was A Thing we had the digital mayors of locations to simply make the fiction become the real, at least to our circle of friends.
The counter-story to my piece about leaving technology for healthcare involves a horrendously wonderful basement bar called The Rathskellar in Boston’s Kenmore Square. It was where I came face to face (literally) with my “otherness,” was the background beat to my Boston musical cadence for nearly a decade, and was projected as a shadow when I switched industries and found the location had a new, less terrifying but somehow less fun identity. I’ve explored my forty years intersecting “The Rat” and pulled on more threads than I’d have thought possible. Three hours in a dive bar have given me a sense of place magnified through four decades of time – or bent around the gravity well of a lost piece of rock history.
Home for Counter Culture….
The Rat’s aura appeared in my vision about six months before I moved to Boston. While a DJ at WPRB-FM, what’s now “alt rock” and “first wave” bands filled most of our afternoon schedule and occasionally, we’d send out our culture front-runners to see a show. WPRB airwave regulars Husker Du were opening for the even more regular REM at the Rathskellar, and somehow we decided to send a small contingent to the show in the radio station car, over Princeton’s historically poorly timed spring break. It was one of those shows that likely had a capacity crowd of maybe a few hundred people, but over the ensuing decades thousands of people claim to have been there. It’s the alt-rock Woodstock.
How do I know all of this? The station car was towed out of Kenmore Square, in the days before cell phones and email, and we had to help our fearsome foursome find the cash, car and routing home.
I should have taken careful notes.
I descended the structurally suspect stairs into the Rat exactly once, but it is a night so ingrained in my memory I continue to believe it shaped me as much as scarred me. A frosty Febraury Saturday night started with a parent-encouraged trip to the Jewish Singles of Boston dance; it was likely in some hotel in downtown Boston and was unremarkable except for running into a friend from work. Once we had both determined that our parents made us attend, we had been there long enough to count as attendance, and we were desperate to leave, it was decided (for, not by, me) to go to see whoever was in the second slot at the Rat. My co-worker had interned at WBCN, Boston’s AOR rock station, and knew her way around the sketchier sections of Kenmore Square adjacent to WBCN’s studios. Off we went in search of parking, good music, and fewer Yuppies.
I was wearing something that could best be described as “Bar Mitzvah lite” clothing, and entering this dark, loud club filled with an audience that would define grunge, alt rock and punk was as “other” as you could get in 1985. Reagan was President; there was palpable anger about everything from 15% interest rates to the Cold War and a renewed draft to the rise and fall of disco. Boston’s music scene, as it always had, broadcast the zeitgeist. It was not an appropriate time to be wearing a tweed jacket, glasses and looking for a light beer. “Otherness” defined.
I have no idea who played that night; I remember it was freezing cold in Kenmore and I shed my outer jacket having been warned that I’d likely never see it again if it crossed the threshold. Simple goals for the night: Don’t get beaten up, don’t use the bathroom even if it meant long term kidney damage, and don’t try to shout over the music. I truly felt out of place, but it was thrilling.
With that badge of courage, listening to WBCN, Carter Allen’s tales of the Rock and Roll Rumble and on-air discussions of the Hoo Doo BBQ (a surprisingly good rib place that sat upstairs) made me feel less outside and more inside. I never set foot inside the Rathskellar again, but I’ve consumed just about every synopsis of that era.
If all of the fan literature is to be believed, the Rat was everything good, bad, ugly, dangerous, and wonderful about rock and roll for almost 25 years.
…Until Culture Won…
The Rat closed in 1997, four years after we departed Boston for a life back in NJ with kids, mortgage and perhaps less “other” environs. In my first few months at Merck in 2013, I was invited to coach a business plan competition at Boston University. Due to some cross-connected histories, we got to stay at the Hotel Commonwealth in the heart of Kenmore Square, Citgo sign blinking over the gentrified storefronts.
Upon check in I realized with abject horror that the Hotel Commonwealth sits atop the Rathskellar and replaced the HooDoo BBQ. My memories of Kenmore, the Rat, the punk ethos, the bands that played in the current vicinity of high thread count linens became dinner stories for the next few years. I found a “Rat” tee-shirt down the street at one of the remaining vinyl stores and with a polite but plaintive ask I was shown the “Rat Suite” in the hotel, decorated with the original Farfisa stage organ and part of the bathroom wall. Rock and roll history gave way to economics.
The Yuppies I escaped in 1985 ended up winning anyway, paved the bar and put up a traveler’s paradise.
For $800 a night you can pretend you were an angry rocker, but it’s more swimming with sharks in a tank than running with bulls. It upsets me more than the John Varvatos store that occupies CBGB’s former home in New York City.
…For More Values of Culture
For some reason, poorly understood yet the source of numerous social sidebars, I didn’t contract Covid-19 until four years after the pandemic started. Of course, I publicly attributed this to those three hours I spent at the Rat in 1985, as well as a steady diet of Che-Chis sausage and peppers subs every time I’m on Lansdowne Street.
Over the last few years, as I’ve clicked down and down through internet rabbit holes to learn more about the Rat, the HooDoo BBQ, and the halcyon days of Boston rock radio, I find more small lights shining back at me from the 80s.
My friends of friends closure includes the band Scruffy the Cat, Rat regulars as well as the last band to play TT The Bears in Cambridge, MA. They also rocked out Legendary Dobbs in Philadelphia, a few years before my son’s own band played the upstairs club (more parking tickets and near towings surround that gig)
Stona Fitch, Princeton and WPRB contemporary, Scruffy mandolin player, superb author (read “Give + Take” and “Death Watch”) was a waiter at the Hoo Doo HooDoo BBQ. If there is a god of that place, it’s probably Stona who has preserved the counter cultural bias for many values of culture.
That is, after all, what the Rat was – a home for ideas, sounds and people that needed one.
Loved this one. “ Simple goals for the night: Don’t get beaten up, don’t use the bathroom even if it meant long term kidney damage, and don’t try to shout over the music. I truly felt out of place, but it was thrilling. ”
<3