| Drumsticks and Pizza Slices
Indie rock princess Juliana Hatfield wishes she had a shopping list with her. We are in Looney Tunes (1106 Boylston St., 617-247-2238), a used record haven near Berklee College of Music, from which she graduated in 1989. “I go blank,” Hatfield says as she thumbs through the stock of vintage vinyl examining releases by Camper Van Beethoven, and the Dream Syndicate. At my request we wander over to the section where Hatfield’s CDs might be. “Wow, I have my own slot,” she notices. “Cheap! This is only six bucks.” Hatfield, 37 who this month released Made in China, her eighth solo album of new material, and her first on her own label, Ye Olde Records, says she no longer spends much time in the Back Bay neighborhood where Berklee is located. But the Cambridge resident, who grew up around Boston, has agreed to give me a tour of her old favorites. Shyly, but eagerly, the veteran rocker points to places and blurts out what she remembers about each one as if the details will be lost if she doesn’t say it quickly enough. “I bought my first drum set there,” she says, pointing to Jack’s Drum Shop (1096 Boylston, 617-266-4617). We duck into Little Stevie’s (1114 Boylston, 617-266-5576), a greasy pizza joint that serves up slices so big that when you fold it over, it’s still huge. “We used to come in here and get slices after rehearsal,” says Hatfield. “I remember their slices being really good and cheap.” The “we” she is referring to is the band Blake Babies, which she formed as a Berklee freshman. She points to a roof with conical towers on Boylston Street where the back cover of the Blake Babies’ debut album was photographed. We try to enter the giant hollow backlit globe that is The Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity (200 Massachusetts Ave., 617-450-7000), but it is closed for the evening. Hatfield recalls how the structure can cause sound to travel in odd directions. We walk to the reflecting pool in the Christian Science Plaza, which Hatfield says she used to jog around when she and the Blake Babies shared a place on Symphony Road. She looks out onto Mass. Ave., where a group of 20-somethings parade by with guitars slung on their backs. “I feel like I spent some formative years here discovering what I was capable of and discovering my music, but now I’m gone, and it’s their world now.” Patrick Gerard HealyBack |
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