The Bigger Picture
Burmese Days: Living in Peggy's World
by Bob Moses
I became familiar with Roger’s preferred guitar, the Fender Lead II, and I later adopted them myself, more out of habit than devotion. It’s a workmanlike guitar, sturdy and dependable if unexciting. I’ve had several over the years, and the instrument Roger plays now is an early model I had customized and played in the Statues. (The other Lead II Miller currently uses is one of the first two he purchased, which came back to him via Richard Balyut of the band Vs. See my interview with Roger on the Lead II and how his style evolved at Follow Roger Miller's Lead).
We came to our places at the side of the stage through various relationships pre-dating Burma. Jimmy is Clint’s younger brother; Michael Mooney worked with Bob, who knew Peter back in his hometown of Wareham, MA. I first knew Clint.
In 1978, we were both bartenders at Jack’s, a Cambridge bar that had a moment of glory in the early ‘70s as a frequent stop for singer/songwriters, including Bonnie Raitt (it later witnessed an early version of the Cars with the regrettable name of Cap’n Swing). In the late afternoon, light pierced smoky plate-glass windows filled with woebegone spider plants. Clint held down a shift as day bartender; I relieved him sometimes at night and we must have gotten around to music. He was in a band called Moving Parts with a guitarist named Roger Miller (who did the occasional fill-in janitorial work at Jack’s), and, hey, we’re playing a show at Boston Film/Video Foundation and you want to come? I did. And I continued to go, through Moving Parts’s demise, Burma’s formation, Martin’s arrival, many nights at the Underground, Cantone’s (where I was knocked unconscious by a Southie gang who later busted the windows out of the club and most of the cars on the street), the Space, the Rat, the Paradise… and on to Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, New York, Toronto, and beyond, everywhere I could manage to get in the van. It remains the most vivid time of my life – as one’s early adulthood must always be. Like everyone I knew, I shed more than one persona, fell in and out of love, inhabited a downwardly mobile series of crummy apartments. But I filled many nights of freedom with music and friends – some who were making a new music that inspired me to produce words, sounds and images.
We’ve got lots more Mission of Burma stories to come this summer as they and we look back on an influential 25 years: recollections and fleeting memories, video feature interviews with Holly Anderson, writer and lyricist, a dialogue on John Cage with Roger Miller… more to come.
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