Re-meet the Remains

WEST NEWBURY -- The landscaper has been working all week on the rolling lawn of Bill Briggs's handsome colonial here. Months after the unexpected death of his wife of 34 years, Barrie , Briggs is preparing to sell.

His new place won't be a condo, says the 61-year-old Porsche and Audi salesman. "You can't play rock 'n' roll in a condo," he says with a smile.

If the house is full of echoes, the spacious sun room is still full of rock 'n' roll equipment -- keyboards, amplifiers, guitars. Briggs has played in local blues bands for years. It's a hobby now, but there was a time when Briggs and his friends might have been one of the great rock bands of the '60s.

The Remains were four Boston University undergrads led by the dynamic singer-guitarist Barry Tashian , with Vern Miller on bass, Chip Damiani on drums, and Briggs on Wurlitzer electric piano. For a brief moment, they made a stand against the British Invasion, matching up favorably with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Yardbirds with their rhythmic drive and effusive singing.

But the Remains became a footnote before their second chapter was finished. The band broke up shortly after its finest moment, an August 1966 tour with the Beatles. Just as that chaotic tour famously discouraged the Beatles from per forming live again, it also spelled the end for their extraordinary opening act.

More than 40 years after the Remains scrapped their dream of stardom, the band is belatedly getting some well-deserved recognition. On Tuesday, Epic Records will reissue the Remains' self-titled (and only pre-breakup ) album, which didn't debut until after the band broke up. Later this year, director Michael Stich plans to release a documentary about the group, titled after a definitive line by onetime rock critic (and future Bruce Springsteen manager) Jon Landau , an avid Remains fan -- "They Were How You Told a Stranger About Rock 'n' Roll."

Music would give the band members plenty of pleasure (and paychecks) in years to come. In California, Tashian and Briggs were part of the original Flying Burrito Brothers, who were eventually taken over by their friend Gram Parsons. Tashian went on to play for Parsons's protege Emmylou Harris, before embarking on a successful career in bluegrass with his wife, Holly. Back in Boston, Briggs and Miller -- a former all-state tuba player from New Jersey who recently retired after a long career teaching music in his home state -- both had popular club acts in the early 1970s.

Though there are devotees who feel the Remains are one of rock 'n' roll's true hidden gems, the band members say they don't waste much time lamenting what might have been.

"It makes a better story that everything went down the way it did," says Briggs, dressed in head-to-toe black -- T-shirt, jeans, boots. "I wouldn't change anything."

From the beginning, the band revolved around Tashian, a teenage prodigy from Westport, Conn., who appeared on "American Bandstand" with a group called the Ramblers when he was in ninth grade. Briggs, a year younger, was also from Westport. In high school, the two were in rival bands; Briggs was playing in strip clubs when he was just 14.

"My parents were so cool," he recalls. "Westport was a very artistic, beatnik kind of town then." (His sister grew up to become the porn star Marilyn Chambers.)

In the spring of 1964, Tashian recruited Miller and Damiani, fellow dorm mates at BU's Myles Standish Hall in Kenmore Square. The trio began playing unbilled gigs in the barroom above the basement that would soon become the Rathskellar .

That summer, while traveling in Europe, Tashian had an epiphany about his band. Playing covers of the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and other early rock 'n' rollers, he sang on the streets of Nice and Cannes and in a restaurant in Barcelona. But it was the club scene in London that really gave him a vision.

"The first night I was in London, I went to Piccadilly and saw a band that played Stones covers," he says, on the phone from his home in Nashville. "I remember they played ' Carol,' and it blew my socks off. It didn't hurt that I was being initiated into smoking pot at the time."

Before returning to Boston, he spent the last weeks of summer in Westport, at his new friend Briggs's house. "He and I got pretty intense about this thing," says Briggs, who was starting his own studies at BU.

Back at school, the foursome convinced the owner of the Kenmore bar to set up a stage of beer crates in the basement. The raw intensity of their Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry covers and Beatles-esque originals drew long lines every Monday night, and they began traveling to colleges across New England.

The band's upward trajectory was sharp enough to give them whiplash. After sharing stages with acts including the Supremes and the Crystals, the Remains headed for New York, where they played a grueling residency -- six sets a night -- at Trude Heller's in Greenwich Village. They signed to Epic and got television exposure on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and "Hullabaloo."

By the time of the Beatles tour, however, they were already burning out. The producers and engineers at Epic had been unsure how to handle the sheer force of the band ("We were really loud, very precise," says Briggs), and the label was stalling on the album release.

The big city, too, was fraying their nerves. "We couldn't pay the bills," says Briggs. "It was a bad scene." When Damiani opted out of the Beatles tour, his bandmates were disappointed but not surprised. (Damiani now runs a successful construction company in New Haven.)

"I felt a little spit out at the end of the tour," recalls Tashian, who published a memoir of those weeks on the road, "Ticket to Ride," in 1996. With all the self-assurance of youth, he felt he would just take a break, then start another band and get himself right back on "Ed Sullivan." It wasn't quite that easy.

The Remains have reunited periodically over the years, most recently for a 2002 album called "Movin' On" and select dates last year in California and Europe. Stich, a staff director for CBS who has worked in daytime television for years, filmed the Los Angeles appearances last summer and is now in the editing stage of the forthcoming Remains documentary.

A few years ago Stich caught a play based on the band's story, "All Good Things," in a New York theater festival. Produced by a Westport native, a lifelong fan who went to college with Stich's wife, the play featured a closing-night performance by the original band.

"It was a magic moment, to see that," says Stich. "They still got into it all these years later."

For Tashian, the band's missed opportunities have actually turned out to be a blessing. "If we kept touring, we probably wouldn't like each other anymore. We would've sued each other or gotten royally [swindled].

"Now, we love it when we get together."