Human Sexual Response

Once upon a time, there were four best friends who did everything together. They lived together in a big house in Boston, Massachusetts, where they threw parties, dressed up, made movies, staged plays, and generally enjoyed themselves like there was no tomorrow. They loved to sing and dance for anyone who would sit still long enough to watch. And it wasn’t long before they started making up their own songs and dances, so they wouldn’t have to always be learning ones from the radio and TV. The first song they came up with was called “Plain Brown Wrapper,” and people liked it so much that Casey got the inspiration that they should form an official group, and play every talent show, wedding, frat party, or ice cream parlor they could wrangle their way into.
Sure enough, Honey Bea and the Meadow Muffins, as they decided to call themselves, soon started making a dent in the Boston/Cambridge music scene. With Larry turning out catchy numbers like “Thick Shake”, “Just a Piece of Paper”, and “The Devil May Care”, and good friend Caleb contributing “Beauty Brigade”, “Car Boy” and others, the group’s repertoire grew rapidly. Dubious, however, of how far they could go performing a capella, the Meadow Muffins began seeking out musicians to join them. At first, they auditioned country and western players, since that was the style they’d started out with, but the more they sang with live guitars and drums, the more they realized they really wanted to be a rock band, since that was the music they’d grown up with.
This was around 1976, when there was a giant explosion of do-it-yourself style bands, with a lot of the best ones coming from Boston, or at least stopping by to play there. Casey and Larry and Windle and Dini went out all the time—you could hear a new group just about every week then—and meanwhile kept searching for the right musicians to work with themselves. It took nearly a year, but by the fall of 1977 they had found a bass player named Rolfe, who had played with The Modern Lovers; a guitar player named Rich, who had just left the Berklee School of Music; and a drummer named Malcolm, who had left his drum kit in Plymouth, Massachusetts and was making do beating concrete blocks with a hammer. This new group called themselves Human Sexual Response, after the best selling sex research book of a few years earlier, because it’s good to be named after something that’s already popular, and even better when there’s sex involved. At the urging of the very cool band, La Peste, HSR played their first show, along with the soon-to-be-legendary The Girls, in October 1977 at The Bird Cage, a biker strip club in Boston’s old Combat Zone. During the second set, the bikers started beating one another with pool cues, and Human Sexual Response decided to take this as a good omen.
Soon the city was decorated regularly with posters designed by Dini announcing Humans gigs at clubs like Cantone’s, The Space and The Rat, and also at less conventional venues, such as the Boston Film and Video Foundation and the Boston Architectural Center. Eye-catching enough to draw in strangers who had never heard of the band, the advertisements did backfire once, when the BPD Vice Squad became intrigued enough to raid an HSR performance at Cantone’s. Smooth-talking manager, Marlo, offered the officers front row seats, and the band dedicated a song to the squad members.
The turning point in the band’s history was their recording of their song “Jackie Onassis” in the summer of 1978. Released as a demo tape to local radio stations, the song’s clever lyric and catchy pop musical arrangement combined with Casey’s devastatingly sincere lead vocal to win the hearts of music programmers all over the northeast. Thanks to the exposure, the band was suddenly headlining bigger clubs, and snaring high-profile opening slots with popular groups like The Police, The Ramones and PIL. They even played Boston’s hallowed Symphony Hall, and hardly minded being booed off the stage by rabid reggae fans appalled by the pop trash they had to sit through while awaiting Jimmy Cliff’s set. HSR also began to venture beyond Boston, regularly playing New York City at CBGB, Hurrah, and Danceteria. During this period, a new bass player named Chris took over Rolfe’s position, debuting in raccoon makeup at a Halloween show, where the Humans shared the bill with a brand-new band on the scene, Mission of Burma.
Then, almost like magic, Don Roze arrived. A record store owner looking to start his own label, he recorded and released the first Human Sexual Response album, Fig. 14, on Eat Records in 1980. The reviews were good, and the band prepared for its first international tour. Thanks to the diligence and persistence of their publicist Roberta in making sure every alternative and college radio station was familiar with Fig. 14, the band arrived in strange cities with ready fans. Even in London, where the critics slammed them, the Humans got a wild reception at their concerts.
Sooner than they would have expected, Human Sexual Response was back in the studio recording a second album, this time with producer Mike Thorne, whom the band had admired for his work with Wire. Mike widened the group’s sonic terrain, capturing the stunning atmospheric versatility and visceral power of the musicians (the instrumental version of “Public Alley 909”, released as a dance single, testifies to the band’s purely musical beauty and energy), and enhancing the texture and interplay of the vocals to render them as evocative as their content. The resulting album, In a Roman Mood, was stronger and more complex than Fig. 14., playful and eerie at the same time. Lacking, however, the outrageous pop of “Jackie Onassis” and the aggressive topicality of “What Does Sex Mean to Me?” from the first album, it failed to sell as well.
Still, as a live act, the Humans continued to thrive. Playing nearly constantly, they remained fresh and surprising by refusing ever to repeat a set list, and by channeling their theatrical impulses into a number of extraordinary performance pieces. Members of the audiences for the band’s Mother’s Day show, during which Dini gave birth, via Caesarean section, to a stillborn child; for the Christmas show, in which the band’s crèche tableau came to life to perform, along with other seasonal standards, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Silent Night/7:00 News”; for the faux-prom at Spit, in Boston, whose all-cover set included “Wooly Bully”, “Cherish”, a bitchin’ “Sunshine of Your Love”/”Purple Haze” medley, and Windle’s rendition of “Hanky Panky”, simultaneously spoofing and celebrating his role as HSR’s blonde heartthrob; or for the Los Angeles nude performance in black body paint, which left stripper/guest-star Candi Sample’s breasts mysteriously “bruised” after she bounced them on Malcolm’s shoulders during “Pound”, recount now for their children the joy and surprise of these and other unique HSR spectacles.
Extravaganzas aside, the Humans’ regular shows became tighter, deeper, and more musically transcendent. Larry and Rich, the group’s main songwriters, continued to hone a varied but distinctive style, and songs from the second album, like “Land of the Glass Pinecones”, “Andy Fell” and “Pound” became audience favorites while garnering significant airplay. The band made videos and films, including one directed by future Academy Award winner Robert Richardson. In the midst of a heavy touring schedule, HSR carried on the research of Masters and Johnson, from whose groundbreaking book they took their name. Distributed at Humans shows, and circulated in several newspapers, The Busy Body Sex Quiz received hundreds of responses, only recently analyzed and made public.
Then came the crash. Inevitably, but prematurely, Human Sexual Response broke up in the spring of 1982. The last show was at the Metro in Boston; the last song performed was “Hang On, Sloopy.”
The members pursued various projects afterwards—The Zulus, Musty Chiffon, The Country Bumpkins, The Concussion Ensemble, and Sugar among them—and reunited three times for spectacular HSR shows that proved to be even more fun for the band than for the loyal fans who turned out to enjoy them. In 1992, Don Roze, by then president of Rykodisc, revived the Eat label to re-release the first album, re-titled for the occasion Fig. 15. In a Roman Mood continues to float in audio limbo, but is bound to resurface somehow someday—it’s a law of physics that energy is never lost; the variable is time. In 1981, the band sang: “The future’s too slow.” Still is.
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Human Sexual Response
Rolfe Anderson
Larry Bangor
Casey Cameron
Windle Davis
Rich Gilbert
Dini Lamot
Chris Maclachlan
Malcolm Travis
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Key collaborators
Caleb Fullam songwriting collaborator
Frank Gardiner soundman/roadie
Jim Harkey road manager
Daved Hild songwriting collaborator
Roberta Korus publicist
Gina Polcari groupie
Richard Prior roadie
Sheila Ryan groupie
Dana Southern roadie
Dan Elias roadie
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Fig. 15 is available in iTunes Music Store now.
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