1987

A bad year
January 7
In Bill Van Siclen's final piece for the NewPaper, he looked back at 1986 and found it lacking.

1986 was a strange year even by Rhode Island standards. It was supposed to be a year in which we celebrated and commemorated the legacy of Roger Williams' "lively experiment."

Instead, it was a year in which the Diocese of Providence became the first arm of the American Catholic Church to excommunicate a pro-choice advocate; a year in which the state's first non-partisan Constitutional Convention passed the country's most restrictive and retrograde anti-abortion measure; and a year in which the Bevilacqua investigation led to charges of an anti-Italian bias against the state's largest newspaper.

Last call
January 28
Nearly a decade after they began their slow climb to become the top band in the state, the Schemers were calling it quits. Bill Flanagan hailed them farewell.

The Schemers have been called the best rock 'n' roll band Rhode Island ever produced, and though there have been two or three other groups which could give them a run for that honor, no one would feel comfortable making the claim for another band as long as the Schemers existed. Keith Richards once said that the greatest rock 'n' roll band in the world is a different band every night.There have been nights when the Schemers seemed to be the very best.

And maybe that's why they have to break up. The Schemers have managed to grow and improve for seven years. If they stayed in Providence any longer they'd get stale; they'd start repeating themselves. They'd turn into the Rhode Island version of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. So let them go out on top. And before anyone says that it's a shame they never made it big, never made a record for a major label, let's remember how many great songs they wrote and how many great performances they gave. The Schemers reached more people, moved and inspired and made sense for more people, than a lot of big stars ever will. Because for their audience, the Schemers really mattered. They articulated exactly what it felt like to be living hungry in New England in the 1980s. And it was not affected, it was real. The Schemers were their audience -- they weren't separated by backstage passes or videos or record labels. The Schemers' audience knew the girl in the "Red Thunderbird," and the suicide in "Walter Jumped." The Rhode Island audience knew Cutler and the people in his songs. They were the people in his songs.

That's an intimacy big rock stars on major labels can approximate but never really achieve, and very few local bands have the talent or courage to summon. But how long could a small Rhode Island audience keep asking Mark Cutler to open his veins in public? How long can you turn local life into rock 'n' roll before the vitality is replaced by affectation or voyeurism?The Schemers did it right, they did it real and they did it long enough. Which doesn't mean they won't be missed; they'll be missed like crazy.

Hoop dreams
February 4
Rick Pitino re-ignited Friar fever with an improbable run to college basketball's hallowed ground -- the Final Four. Chip Young was one of thousands of converts.

Reverend Rick and Our Lady of Perpetual Motion. The talk of the Big East, the darling of ESPN and the surprise team in the country. NBC's Sportsworld features the St. John's upset on its weekly program, announcers Tim Brando and Bill Raftery call the PC-Georgetown game the most scintillating contest they've ever seen outside the NCAA tournament and the SRO sign goes up outside the Civic Center box office a week before the next home game. Meanwhile, inside the arena, Rick paces, Billy [Donovan] sweats, Delray [Brooks] swoops, Ernie pops, Jacek [Duda] jumphooks and Dave [Kipfer] pulls the wagon, with the infantry running along behind.

And the crowd rises up and goes wild. Even dreams aren't as good as this.

20 years of Madness
May 20
The Mad Peck's 20th anniversary as Rhode Island's most famous cartoonist/ writer/television critic preceded ours by 11 years. Ty Davis toasted the good Dr. Oldie on that austere occasion.

I don't recall ever meeting Peck; he was simply There. Peck ought to be revered as one of Rhode Island's cultural icons. The State Council On the Arts should award him a lifetime pension. Of course, real money would probably destroy his art. Distinguished writer Richard Meltzer says: "If he had $200, he'd probably leave town."

Complex film
August 26
The rumors were flying when Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel became the setting for the filming of Complex World. Scott Duhamel got the lowdown.

What is it?What the hell are they doing down there at Lupo's?What's it all about?

Everybody's talkin', everybody's walkin', and every hipster and flipster in the downtown scene knows at least a few of the facts. (1) They're making some kinda magic movie in and around Lupo's. (2) The Young Adults got back together to make some big-time bucks and appear (prominently) in said movie. (3) Longtime Lupo buddy and filmmaker Jim Wolpaw is behind the whole buzz.

Yeah, yeah, yeah -- but what's it all about?

Wolpaw tongue-in-cheekily labels his movie a "rock and roll terrorist comedy." Set on a hot 4th of July night in a club called the Heartbreak Hotel, with the Young Adults on stage throughout the evening, the movie comically intercuts between two separate groups who plan to do harm to the venerable rock and roll club. One group contains your garden variety terrorists, led by psycho folksinger Stanley Matis; the other is a batch of big, bad bikers led by Captain Lou Albano and hired by the unnamed setting's mayor (played by Rich Lupo). Add to this a hilariously whacked-out phone conversation between members of a band known as the Beat Legends (a Beatles clone band) and the all-knowing spirits of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Big Elvis Presley, occurring in the club's subterranean basement, plus the ongoing filming of a rather inept in-club documentary (the 16-millimeter footage from this ostensible documentary will show up intermittently during the film), as well as the funky and familiar behavior of various bar patrons. Put it all together and you've got the real thing -- a 90-minute feature called Complex World.

Bayou bonhomie
September 2
Jim Macnie waxed ecstatic in advance of the eighth annual Cajun and Bluegrass Festival.

At the risk of overstatement, I'll go out on a limb and say that it almost didn't matter who was on stage at the four Cajun and Bluegrass festivals I've gone to. What's really been happening down in Escoheag for the past seven years is the vibe. OK, Imay be momentarily guilty of speaking in dreaded San Francisco-ese, but community is the rampant feeling down there. It comes from focus: when so many facets of one culture are compacted together for such a short time, you really get the feel. No, no, you don't think you're a Cajun; that kind of assimiliation rhetoric is boo-shee. But once you start to dance and eat, deal with the come-hither of the Cajun rhythms and knock around with the players, there is a sort of hands-on training that's going down. It's more than simply hedonism's finest hour -- it's a learning experience.

No place like home
September 2
Psychedelic rock thrived in the little hamlet of Shannock, home base for the boundary-stretching Plan 9. Evelyn McDonnell dropped in to see what condition their condition was in.

"When we first started out, no one knew what we were doing," Plan 9 guitarist, singer and songwriter Eric Stumpo told me from the kitchen of the Plan 9 house down in deepest, darkest Shannock, Rhode Island last weekend. "We're playing more here now because more people understand us."

"Understand" with quotes, bass player John Florence motions. Indeed, in a state seemingly hungry for good live entertainment, Rhode Island's most internationally famous underground band -- before Throwing Muses came along, that is -- has always gotten a lukewarm reception on its home turf. I wouldn't say it's because they're over people's heads; it's because they run through, around and in between brain synapses. The average clubgoer doesn't like to have his or her mind probed with an electric guitar that opens up vistas of two-headed beasts lurking in caves and the according Freudian analyses.

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