The late Seventies saw the... «Our Band Could Be Your Life»
AntonDoppelganger10 февраля 2015The late Seventies saw the advent of the “rock disco” phenomenon. Clubs preferred the ease, predictability, and economy of DJs while seemingly every critic paid lip service to the new buzzword “danceable.” All this made it even harder for bands, especially not particularly danceable bands like Burma, to get gigs. So it wasn’t easy to set up their first national tour: a 22-day, 15- show, 11-city engagement in the winter of ’80. Such a tour was unprecedented for a Boston underground band—and all they had on vinyl was a single. Incredibly, the tour was done by jet. Eastern Airlines offered a $300 flat rate for unlimited travel within the United States for a month. The catch was you always had to fly out of Atlanta. So even if they were traveling from San Francisco to Seattle, they had to go back through Atlanta. And because they would hopscotch all around the four corners of the country, they’d endure all sorts of extremes in weather—a blizzard in Milwaukee, blistering heat in Austin. “Sheer insanity,” says Miller, still marveling at the folly of it all. They got to know the boys in Mission of Burma very well at Eastern’s lounge in the Atlanta airport. Virtually every day the band would straggle in with their instrument cases, looking more and more haggard, commandeer an empty patch of floor, and try to get some sleep. “The whole thing seems like some fever dream,” Conley says.
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