Black Light Rainbow
at The Causeway
by Bill Dorang
The Causeway passed its two year milestone this summer. The club celebrated its birthday with a greater than usual line up of bands. What can you say about The Causeway? It’s the crazy, mixed-up story of a booking agent who decides to open his own club featuring live music. The location is not great, their P.R. is worse. I was invited to see Black Light Rainbow on the Sunday before the anniversary of the club that Doyle built (kind of). But I needed to know what time they were playing.
I called 232-City: Not updated. I talked to Martin’s sister. I talked to a guy at the Causeway Coffee Shop. He told me to call The Penalty Box, the old-guy bar below the club. Evidently, the Causeway doesn’t have a telephone on the premises. After an amiable and completely fruitless conversation with some Dean Martin fan at the Penalty Box, I decided to just go down to the club. There was Doyle, as unflappable as the wacky next door neighbor on a TV sitcom, in his Kafkaesque club.
And there was Black Light Rainbow, a Delaware/NY-based band who want to show Boston how hard hard really is. If these guys were local, they could play anywhere around here any night of the week, and soon will if they set their minds to it.
Swaying their instruments like a big band from hell, it was as if the Dorsey brothers and Glenn Miller sold their souls, or willingly gave them away, then ditched the sissy sax and clarinet for jeeped-up electric guitars. Black Light Rainbow’s superior metal musicianship proves you don’t have to be bad to be bad.
“This song goes out to the biggest queen in Boston,” the lead singer said. “And since I’m in town, that’s me.” Bigger, inkier, and with more square yards of black leather on their pierced hides than just about anyone, Boston’s hardcore scene take note: These guys are playing for keeps with a punk attitude and steely fingers. And with the resurgence of punk in New York, there are more than a few Rotten Apple bands who believe Boston is a ripe cherry just waiting to be popped.
