BIG
DIPPER
by Joe Harvard
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 The Muses were headlining, with Dipper opening for them...and some new band called the Pixies starting the night out. What's a time to be alive! By my reckoning
Big Dipper were one of the ten best bands to come out of the city of Boston
(or, as former Mayor Kevin White used to say, 'the shitty of Boshton)
in the 1980's. That puts them in the company of the Pixies,
Throwing Muses, Sex
Execs and Lifeboat, all of whom
were constituted from transplanted non-Bostonians who hit their stride
in the Beanscene. I had this great theory, it went like this: Be that as it may, neither soaring guitars, feel-it-in-yer-gut drums, nor the jagged energy that typified many of their fellow Homestead Records labelmates could disguise the shimmer and sheen of the near-perfect Pop that Big Dipper laid out on record. The beautiful thing was they were one of the few groups that managed to combine the rich layering, lush vocal harmonies, and polished arrangements of a great Pop outfit with a driving, balls-to-the-wall instrumental approach, heavy on the guitars, and with a lyrical IQ far too high to hang the standard "power pop" tag on them. Yum, yum, pop rock well done...just like I like it!
 I
had believed the core of the band came from the Embarrasment, who
had torn up the Midwest back when Ron Klaus was a bandmate of Bill
Goffrier. Part of that misconception was due to Dipper's composition
"Ron Klaus Wrecked His House", a majestic tune that glides along like a
seagull made of brushed aluminum, hitting peaks at the end of the verses
until it is enveloped in a mad rush of storm-cloud chaos within the perfect
pop order of the choruses. I mean wouldn't that have confused YOU? But anyway
Bill wa the only Dipper member who matriculated in the Embarrassment. Steve
Michener fills in the details from the time he left Dumptruck...
STEVE: " in the meantime gary graduated emerson and became friends with bill goffrier who had recently moved here from kansas after the embarrassment broke up. are you still with me? so bill is doing nothing, retired from rock and roll, just painting landscapes when gary convinces him to innocently jam with him. so gary loads me and bill in his dart and takes us to his cousin jeff oliphant's house in the burbs where jeff, who was in a band called XS that put out one vanity punk LP, has a practice space and a lot of pot. we jam on old embos and fleetwood mac and wings songs, fall in love and start big dipper. we call lou who records 3 songs at white dog, we send them to gerard at homestead, he sends us $1000 to record 3 more songs which we do at Q division also with lou and it comes out in Feb 87 as Boo-Boo." During '86 - '89, the years that I considered Fort Apache was at it's peak creatively and productivity-wise (though they may well have surpassed those glory days since I sold out in 1993 to Billy Bragg, and my former partner Gary Smith took over), we were lucky enough to work with almost every Boston band we really dug. Still, I considered it a big feather in our caps to net our two Dipper projects. A punk-era hero of Radio Beat Studios, the brilliant engineer and producer Lou Giordano had worked with the band already on the non-Fort Boo Boo tracks, but he may have been away on tour or recording with Husker Du veteran Bob Mould for the first Fort sessions, produced and engineered by Paul "Quick" Kolderie and Sean Slade. Slade and Kolderie were resulting in the solid Homestead LP Heavens. Before that they worked at both White Dog and Q Division to create Boo Boo, also released on Homestead. Each record they'd recorded presented a band that was stronger and more melodic, and their live shows kicked ass.
 Big Dipper, 1988. Craps Produced by Lou Giordano and Paul "Quick" Kolderie Recorded at Fort Apache North Recording Studio
Personnel on Craps were as follows: Bill Goffrier
- Guitar,Vocals,Key Tree
Besides a number of demos whose most characteristic feature were their Speedy Gonzalez in-and-out rapidity, the last Fort Apache saw of Big Dipper- sort of - was a reunion of the Embarrassment, which takes solid form in the LP Sorry...er, at least I think it does. Steve can't remember then name of that record either, though he isn't on it so that's excusable.I need to get some fact checking in the Dipper department, soon. But I got to meet the immortal Ron Klaus, he of the wrecked house, and found in him a soul-mate and a very, very cool guy all around. When the record was done I wished he didn't have to go home.
As for the post-Fort
events, Steve again: Of all the bands that I write about on this site, there are a dozen or so I get mail on regularly, and of those there are a handful of clear favorites: the Neighborhoods, Real Kids, Lyres, Reddy Teddy, and Big Dipper are in that group. Michener said "we always said 'we're just doing it for the kids'", and in my own band I always announced from the stage "this is one for all the kids, cause ...the kids, they make it all worthwhile!" Nowadays it's funny how what was a tongue-in-cheek riff, spoofing the bloated dinosaur rockers, has become somewhat true. A big reason I do this site is because it's a blast to hear from the next generation of players who are always excited to read about the last. With fewer clubs, and higher prices for everything, as well as a myriad number of other reasons having to do with changes in society and the inexorable march of history, it's not possible to re-create the sort of wide open scene that existed in the 70's and 80's. Those of us who were playing then got to meet and hang with the generation of bands who came before us, and to learn the lore and absorb it all first hand. This site is worth the work when I get a message from an 18 or 19 year old who tells me that it makes them feel like they were a part of it all when they read these articles. And they're right. They are a part of it all. The torch gets passed, and the rockin' never stops.
The
Sorry reunion, with Dipper in the middle...and the Lemonheads
starting the night off. Within a week the Pixies, Dumptruck, Last Stand
would all play... and my own band Mr. Happy would get to opoen for the
Neighborhoods and John Felice's rebuilt Real Kids AKA the Primevals. Have
I mentioned that it was a great time to be alive?
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The
second Dipper LP done at Fort Apache, their third overall, was Homestead
Records 122-2, generally known by the simpler title Craps. With
Lou Giordano now an official member of the Fort's production and engineering
family, a turf crisis was narrowly avoided surrounding the production
of the record. Paul Kolderie had done some demo work for the band back
when he was the principal engineer at the Sex Execs home 4-track
studio in Dorchester (my home 8-track studio So-So and the Execs
Contempt Studios merged to create the 1st year collective that
founded the Fort). He was way into the band, and after he missed the boat
on producing their first LP he had courted them heavily prior to the second,
snagging Heavens for a joint PQK / Sean Slade production at the
original Fort Apache South. This was before Lou Giordano, who produced
and engineered the Boo-Boo tracks, had joined the Fort team (that's him
below, sitting at the board at Fort Apache North in a photo taken as part
of a Boston Globe article on the city's burgeoning recording scene). Now
however, as the third record loomed, Giordano was on board the crew, and
the pregnant question of who had "dibbs" hung tensely in the air. A lack
of a clear preference within the band itself- as far as choosing a producer
-wasn't helping, and the issue almost caused a nasty mess. Instead, fortunately,
it led to an eleventh hour compromise and a new Fort policy.
The
compromise was simple: the record was produced by Lou and Paul together,
sharing engineering chores between them as well, while Paul's regular
cohort Sean stepped out of the project. The aversion of what could have
been a disastrous confrontation- and had Lou, Sean or Paul been the sort
of ego-driven dickheads you commonly find in studios it surely would have
been -led to formalizing our previously unspoken "hands-off" policy regarding
prior working relationships; it was agreed that before any "family" member
approached another member's former client, they would clear it first,
but that no band would be expected to postpone working if an engineer
was unavailable. The important thing was communication. As we grew, and
as we recorded more and more of the city's best bands, the pool of available
new projects was shrinking fast. With six production mouths to feed, it
wasn't enough to take it for granted that having worked with a band 2
years ago made it clear nobody else should approach them. And as we all
got busier, we also had to deal with the fact that one of us might be
busy at a time a former client wanted to record. And there were some bands,
like Dipper, that had already worked with more than one team member. So
the "first dibbs" policy helped us formulate a strategy which protected
a prior relationship, but also gave us a way to avoid losing a project
to another studio needlessly. So beyond recording two of my personal favorite
Fort LP's, Dipper inadvertently left behind a bit of a legacy in the way
we ran the studio.
Steve
Michener read this account and replied:
