Musical Interlude: A Less Than Short, Melancholic History of the Band LESSER ANGLOS & Its Many Haunted Successors

This was during late 80's Boston,
I'm sure you saw them during their all too brief 17 month "career"...
Probably at The Ratt or Ground Zero,
maybe some loft party or open studios?
Wherever doesn't matter. It's the whatever--
The gossamer keyboard arrangements,
as cold & useless as a nylon bedsheet in winter.
The twin bass,
plucking sounds like drunk bees coated in molasses.
The only band this side of the 16th century featuring lead gittern.
And the vocals were always lost
amid the percussion & theatrical tomfoolery.
You'd remember them more for the dry ice spectacle,
blasting the stage & front row w/ smoke smoke smoke!
There were figures pirouetting in there,
an occasional spot penetrated the gelid mass
only to reveal skinny teens in Germanic gear,
their pants tucked into knee-high boots
their hairs parted neatly & oily to the right.

No one paid them much attention.
They released all of one EP--"National Anathema"
(on cassette, no less!).
Four songs like lost bastards to each of their more obvious influences:
Pale Saints!
The Swans!
Simple Minds circa "Empires & Dance"!
Sleep Chamber!
Nothing stood out, mind you.
The music just as lost in the studio as it was on-stage,
a swirling threatening gail off-shore
which never reached dry land...which never connected.
If there was a single in that 22 mins. of aural fog
it was the opening 12 minute epic
that inaugerated all their sets-- "Mastiff (At Its Master's Heels)".
The lyrics are written down somewhere for posterity...
something about oligarchies & father figures
with the tell-tale refrain of awkward, post-adolescent grist:
"And it nips at the heels,
the heels it serves! It serves to pleeeeeeeze!"

Then the lead singer killed himself.
He was from Acton & lived with his seventy-two year old father.
He even had a stage name which he pinched from a comicbook character--
He was T. Constantine,
a blond bleached thing that looked like left-over summer sand
who dressed in tight black slacks
& wore cheap rings on every finger & thumb
& a medallion he found at the Brimsfield Fair.
He hanged himself in the same basement his grandmother had her accident
(she fell down the stairs, shattering her pelvis...
& despite his father's protests, she had corrective surgery...
which at 90 years of age...took the last of life & cognition out of her)
They found him by the clothes dryer,
in the corner beneath his 1st floor high school bed.
He must've even played the band's tape,
but the boombox had gnarled the magnetic strips
& all the musical elegy left was whirr fuzz static...
& a crunchy sound like fried chicked skin.

Oh this is too pathetic.
Must I go on how T. Constantine dropped acid
& did the beanies & reds & popped his pills...
trying to get into Robert Smith's head by telekenetic transmutation?
Or that he believed the medallion round his neck,
ultimately overlapped by a taunt red-orange extension cord,
gave him magical properties?
Toward the end, even when all the bandbates knew they were going nowhere...
T. Constantine BELIEVED!
He believed in the perfect long-distance song
& finally connecting w/ an audience...
There would be the appreciative Goth girl in there too
& eventual parental approval
& his own van w/ velvet curtains
which he & the Goth girl (might her name not be Clarisse?)
would drive to Montreal.

But this is all supposition...
culled from "he said this" & "one day I heard him say that".
Who knows what T.Constantine, lead singer for Lesser Anglos was truly thinking
that last day?
As his single artistic expression played beside him all of one minute
before tearing itself to greasy shreds?
& T. Constantine's 4th & 5th vertebrea separated in a clean wrench?

Most suicides glamorize a band,
but Lesser Anglos went their indifferent, separate ways...
most back to Roger Williams College or neighboring RISD
where art school & educational canopies insulated them from their dead.
And a summer passed.
And another...
and more Boston bands you have heard of,
played the same venues that Lesser Anglos once did...
only they did it much better & with a lot less pretense.
And went to better parties in Allston
& maybe even got to see breasts & drink really good wine.

But one day...
at an exclusive Castle vonBuhler shindig
a new band made its surprising debut
amid the dyed red walls & Renaissance artwork...
perhaps you've heard of them?
Lesser Anglos II?

CONTINUED...