Hanoville

The Freeborne Blues Band was situated in Allston, MA on Hano Street. This band played local colleges and bars and occasionally the Cambridge Common in Cambridge, MA on Sunday afternoons in the late 60's , early 70's. There was some sort of magic, some white boy dues paying accomplished through copious drug use and, thus, entrance into the hallowed World of Blues without being Black. Nobody in this Band was 'down' so some did the best they could with what they could cop in Dudley Square. How could you possibly play the blues without knowing heroin? But I digress.

Hanoville as it was called was the home for a few of the band members. I went there with Bill M. who I met through Paul C, another musician, who I met through Lynne H. a Lynn English High hippie girl I picked up on the side of the road by Wonderland Station MTA. These were the creative and smart kids who I had nothing to do with in High School as I was stuck in St. Marys and stayed with the neighborhood guys. I had some cache as a vet, more as a anti-war poster boy than anything else, as a tangible reason not to go to Nam.

Hano was a place to get fucked up. I remember vividly leaving the 2nd staircase on Nahant Beach after dropping acid and piling into my VW for Hano. Johnny G. from Sicily, Joey L., Bill and Sherry I think. Things went spendidly until the toll at the Mystic River Bridge. The car stalled and I just wandered away in the rain. I wanted to look over the bridge and into the water below, so I just left the car and walked through traffic to the railing in the rain. It seemed like the 'right thing to do'. While I was on my nature walk, someone got the car started and I was collected and demoted from driver to shotgun and off we went. At Hano the boys had constructed a large space ship built of cardboard boxes complete with controls and crawl spaces and had a couple of levels. It was very detailed and a great place to wile away your hallucinations.

All manner of drug was consumed there. Johnny G. from Sicily, once chopped a hole through the basement wall to the adjoining house while smoking animal tranquilizer, PCP from an engineering student at Cornell U, because he could "hear" the women's desire for him through the walls. The HA from Lowell used it as a party spot when in town. ZZ Top partied there. A couple of Harvard Square girls, dubbed the Emco Foam Twins, showed up for festive occassions.

But he band broke up, as all bands are want to do. The members from Hano reconstituted themselves into Hot to Trot which owed more to glam bands and Bowie than Muddy Waters. The boys morphed into big hair. The lease dried up for Hano and things shifted back to Lynn and a practise space on lower Washington Street in a sign shop owned by a friend of the band.



Original paintings by Angelo Aversa