The undeniable truth about Burma

Mission of Burma recorded 21 songs, helped invent post-punk, and left a legacy that resonated from R.E.M. to Moby. More than 20 years later, no one will let the band die.

By Greg Milner

July 9, 2002 | At the 15th annual Boston Music Awards, held earlier this year, the 2002 Hall of Fame honor -- essentially a lifetime achievement award -- was given to Mission of Burma, a band whose lifetime lasted a mere four years and whose cumulative recorded achievement amounted to 21 songs that few people heard. From 1979 to 1983, Burma put out two singles, one six-song mini-album ("Signals, Calls and Marches"), and one full-length album ("Vs."), all on the tiny Boston independent label Ace of Hearts. Enshrining the band's lifetime accomplishment would seem to be the equivalent of inducting Pedro Martinez into baseball's Hall of Fame -- in an alternate universe where he disappeared after pitching one year with the Red Sox, during a season when no fans showed up at Fenway.

The honor coincides with the first reunion tour by the legendary band in the nearly two decades since it broke up. Since January, Burma has headlined a handful of shows in Boston, New York and London, and done two shows at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in southern England, playing to audiences much larger than any the band had ever encountered. Later this month, the band will hit the West Coast for three shows, including one at Seattle's Experience Music Project, the high-tech museum of rock history launched by former Microsoft impresario Paul Allen. These shows haven't been accompanied by any new records (though some new songs have crept into the band's set), but in a way, that dearth of new material is itself an argument for Burma's receiving the award. The strange career of Mission of Burma is proof that in art, the ability to make a lifetime last forever is often an artist's greatest achievement.

This canonizing has been a process undertaken with almost no participation by the band members themselves. After a quixotic and often disastrous national "farewell" tour in '83, Burma called it quits by playing one more largely disastrous show in the urban no-man's land known as Staten Island, opening for Public Image Ltd., who refused to let Burma use the P.A. and rushed them off the stage. Shortly thereafter, Ace of Hearts founder Richard Harte put together "The Horrible Truth About Burma," an album of live recordings he'd made from those shows. In the mid-'80s, the Boston label Taang scraped together two albums of demo and unreleased material, "Mission of Burma" and "Forget." In 1998, as Burma's original releases became the rare stuff of collectors, yet another Boston label, Rykodisc, issued a CD of all but two of those 21 songs, plus some live material. Finally, in 1997, Rykodisc reissued "Signals," "Vs." and "Horrible Truth," with bonus material. And then there have been the collections of music by bands -- such as Sproton Layer and the Moving Parts -- that preceded Mission of Burma but that had some of the band's future members. In light of Mission of Burma's protracted history, the sleeve accompanying the revealingly titled "Forget" seems especially appropriate: "Can we stop now?" reads the caption below a photo of the band. "Please?"

That's a good question. For one thing, given that the band members themselves had almost nothing to do with seeing that Burma's 21-song cycle remained available over the years, the real intended recipient of the Hall of Fame award seems to be the noble and faceless Boston record geek who selflessly kept the band's memory alive, even before local boosterism gave someone the bright idea to give out Boston Music Awards. Which just might be the point. The seemingly endless supply of posthumous releases by long-gone superstars like the Doors or Jimi Hendrix, besides being attempts to keep lucrative revenue streams flowing, also signals a desire to turn the fire of a particular cultural moment into an eternal flame. But with Mission of Burma, whose current popularity far outstrips anything the band experienced during its lifetime, an inverse process is at work. Rather than prolong Burma's original moment, the labor keeping those 21 songs alive has been an attempt to add, retroactively, fuel to a fire whose brightness is apparent only in hindsight. The ongoing renewal of Burma's meager catalog is nothing less than an attempt to remake history.

For their part, the members of Mission of Burma did their job and got off the stage. They've occasionally come together over the years to be interviewed by eager fanzine writers, always maintaining a wry attitude toward Burma's legacy. (The "horrible truth," they joked when the live record was released, was that Burma's concerts were rarely as cohesive as their records.) They declined offers to reunite, not out of any apparent animosity, but because they felt as if they'd done what they'd set out to do. And so they stopped.

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