“We’ re the lead in the soil! We’re the contaminants!”
That’s the dirt on the Sucking Ragweed, whose mission is to infiltrate sets by other bands and add their own distinctive bursts of percussion, brass and guitar frenzy.
But get this: they do it by appointment, with the full approval of the invaded acts.
“We’re not vandals,” says SR co-founder Rag Rob, a master of mixed metaphors. “We’re more like parasites. We want to play along, but we have our own ideas.”
We first saw the Sucking Ragweed when they joined the Rocking Rock Pirates of Rocky Rock (or whatever they can legally call themselves these days) onstage just a few weeks ago at the Bullfinch. But they’ve apparently been around for a while now, first planting themselves in the nu-jazz scene. “There, we felt redundant,” Rob says. Among the rocks, the weeds stood out.
This collective of sidemen, who deny that they are a band themselves, follow a carefully crated list of objectives, which begins “First, do no harmony.”

They’re not there merely to enhance an arrangement. But neither are they advocating musical destruction. They don’t jam, and they don’t jam a wrench in a show. So what do they do exactly? Find out Friday at the Bullfinch—the first Sucking Ragweed weekend incursion and their biggest show yet, leeching off none other than The Blats. Kudos to Sonny and his Blatmates for making the gracious offer.

Case 21, Ultra the Multi-Alien and A True Tale from Saucer Country at the Bullfinch… Multi-culti acoustic ambient shindig at Hamilton’s with Ulla Laroo, Trao Raagan and Ace Arn, sponsored by the International Studies department of the college on the hill… An Evening with Strange Adventures at D’Ollaire’s. Bring a helmet…