Flashback nearly a decade ago, to Game 1 of the 2004 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals. A young indie rock band from Red Hook, Brooklyn, was on-stage at Great Scott, playing to a group of sports-minded Allstonians with their backs turned away from the stage, all eyes glued to the televisions by the bar flashing Tim Wakefield's grill on the hill at Fenway for the team that would eventually break an 86-year-old curse. Boston was really in no mood for hip New Yorkers.
The band on stage that night, pretty much alone in a room full of people, was PELA.
They actually got banned from Great Scott after their brief performance, after frontman Billy McCarthy kicked a mic stand off the stage and far across the empty checkerboard floor. No one really noticed, but the venue sound engineer did, and that was that.
Maybe a year or so later, I fell in love with a demo for Pela's upcoming 2007 masterpiece, Anytown Graffiti. I had to settle some disputes at Great Scott to allow them to play at my dance party, the Pill. This band, with raw, rootsy emotion and a rock passion rarely seen in the shallow world of indifferent 2000s indie rock, seemed destined for greatness, and I was immediately drawn to McCarthy's personalized storytelling, especially in songs like "Tenement Teeth" and "Lost To The Lonesome." (Years later, they still give me chills; "Waiting On The Stairs," which wasn't on the demo but would go on to open their album, is another that has never left my head since I first heard it.)
Pela played the Pill, I think, three times over the next two years, bringing one of the greatest live shows I've ever seen with them each time, and hit T.T. The Bear's and the Middle East a bunch before finally calling it a day in 2009. One time at T.T.'s, I walked in midset and was able to walk up to the stage to fist-bump bassist Eric Sanderson. Every time I watched this band play live, I wondered, where the fuck was everyone, and why wasn't this band famous?
As I wrote in a rare display of personal anecdotes in a Phoenix feature on McCarthy and Sanderson last year -- when their new project, WE ARE AUGUSTINES, rolled into Great Scott under very different circumstances -- fame never found Pela. Tragedy did. Heartbreak as well. For reasons as varied as they were unjust, suffering and loss were constants over a 24 month stretch for the troubled band and its members.
But McCarthy and Sanderson persevered, and re-emerged last year with We Are Augustines's debut record, the critically-acclaimed Rise Ye Sunken Ships. The boys played Letterman a few weeks ago. They just got back from a successful European tour. They captivated SXSW, are at Coachella next month, and their backstory story has been everywhere from KEXP to NPR.
We Are Augustines are at the Paradise tonight, playing with Band of Skulls. Go see this band. They are deserving of your attention, even when the Red Sox are playing in October.
Latest Slideshows
