DAYOF THE


THE REMAINS built a fan base in Boston. They recorded an album. They toured with The Beatles.Then they broke up before the album came out. Years later they became legends as part of the Nuggets collection. BILL KOPP talks with Remains founder/leader Barry Tashian about all that and more, including Tashian’s later work with Gram Parsons, The Remains reunion and a new film about the band.


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n 1966, an R&B-influenced band – one that had considerable local following in Boston but was largely unknown outside that region – got the opportunity of a lifetime: they would be touring with The Beatles. On what would become The


Beatles’ final USA tour, The Remains (also known as Barry & The Remains) toured and lived with The Beatles for two weeks. Once the tour was over, the group broke up, and shortly thereafter, their sole album was released.


For a lesser band, that would have been the end of the story. But thanks to the inclusion of a Remains track on the Lenny Kaye- curated Nuggets compilation – and due to the sheer quality of The Remains’ music – interest in the band bubbled under, never really going away. Decades later the group reunited; the original quartet now performs a handful of select dates each year. New reissues of the band’s slim but essential catalogue are available, and both a stage play and motion picture have been put together to chronicle The Remains phenomenon.


The young band got its start in the Boston area in the early ’60s. The Remains tuned in to a British influence a bit sooner than many of their contemporaries. “I would account for that because of my summer in London and Europe in ’64,” says Remains leader Barry Tashian. “I picked up the flavour of some of the British music I heard over there and must have retained some part of it.” Tashian observes that the Boston music scene in ’64- 65 was made up of bands that “continued to play contemporary American rock ’n’ roll and pop music.”


Remains fan Louise Baker recalls seeing the group. “In ’66 I was a freshman at a Girls’


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Latin School. I loved rock ’n’ roll and would venture out to some of the teen clubs with my older brother. I’m not sure how I first heard The Remains, but I know I thought they were really talented. So I signed up to be part of their fan club. I would pick up posters for their shows and hang them up at colleges and high schools in the Boston area. At one of the fan parties I got to meet The Remains; at the age of 15 I thought that was really cool.”


“We were middle class blokes,” Tashian says. “You absorb what you listen to. And we listened to a lot of great ’50s rock, R&B, and blues/jazz artists. So, we picked up a certain amount of the vernacular and musical motifs from those great recordings. I don’t think we were typical because, from the start, we had a very identifiable sound. Because of the philosophy of listening to each other, we became very tight, very soon after forming. We could jam together free-form and always find ourselves in the end. There was a climax to every Remains performance. At first we thought we were just a jamming unit… but it soon evolved into something stronger, with an intention and ambition that, sooner or later, surmounted our challenges.”


The group was signed to Epic Records in 1965, and laid down 10 tracks. But the band felt that the Epic sessions didn’t capture the group’s energy. Frustrated with Epic, the band and its management decided


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