The old god is holding forth, pontificating about how hard it was for him back when he was just a young god, and no local scene had yet sprung up to exalt him. Punk shows were far and few between, original-music shows of any kind rare enough. The idea of any area bar embracing local new music to the extent that the Bullfinch (and to a lesser extent Hamilton’s) has still has the god dumbfounded, he says.

We suspect that he’s building up some of this bafflement to burnish his own myth. After all, there are other legends to consider. Back in those ancient times, the drinking age was lower. More people were drinking, more bars were there to serve them, and many of those bands made a concerted effort to stand out from the houseband pack. If they didn’t all get around to writing new songs, they at least found new arrangements or styles or formats to push the older standards into. We’ve heard dozens of these stories. No lack of originality there.

Not to blow our own horn—in whichever style suits the era—but it’s also true that the alternative press barely existed then, and that there’s precious little record of that scene. We’ve all seen the comp LPs from that time on the shelves of the Scene Touting Area Records (STAR) shop, which suggests a handful of hardy bands. We suspect there were many more, and we’d love to hear about them, even if it diminishes the celestial standing of a couple of gods a little.

Tonight at the Bullfinch, few of those pioneers, depending on when you start calculating the histories: Backus, The Faggin, Tommy Flowers and The Cuthbert Hurd. Hamilton’s has The Butler Lampsons, The Mooers, The Grimsdales and Conny Palm. Yes, it’s home-for-the-holidays reunion time. The only other chance to see most of these acts reunite is in summertime when class reunions are held on the campus up the hill, paid for by nerds who made software bucks and now get to hold the parties which they used to stand in the corner wistfully at. We prefer the winter reunions—looser, livelier, and you don’t have to figure out how to crash them.

We’d comment more on these bands, but they’re before our time, and we only just got the bright idea of starting an oral history project to investigate them further.