James Boylan Live at Wesleyan University, April 1980

In April of 1980, young James Boylan played the West College Coffeehouse at Wesleyan University.  The evening consisted of a bunch of original tunes, a couple of Fairport Convention covers, and a wide range of strange jams, non-sequiters, and complete nonsense.  Boylan performed on piano, concertina, and electric autoharp.

Now, thirty years later, the original tape of the event has been unearthed by Ed Roseman, a composer and musician now living in Massachusetts.  Edly has cleaned up the recording (slightly) and posted it up on his web site.

It’s not to be mistaken for a high-grade anything.

But the concert, for me, is full of humor and sentiment.  Interestingly, it’s the quiet, melancholy tunes, with the audience momentarily hushed, that touch me the most now.   Still, “Mr. Rogers Does the Puppets Voices” and “New Jersey” and “Just a Bunch of Assholes from Outer Space” are a really nice portrait of where I was, at that time, then.

You can download the concert here.  This will put a folder on your laptop that contains all the tunes, which you can then play right on your iTunes player, or whatever other application you use.  The download will take about five minutes, plus or minus, depending on  your connection speed.  Hope you enjoy.