Actually, there was a more mundane reason Burma called it quits when they did, one that literally speaks volumes about the intensity with which the band pursued its project. Guitarist Roger Miller, a music composition major at the University of Michigan in the mid-'70s and the veteran of several loud rock bands, had developed a severe case of tinnitus (a condition characterized by a constant ringing in the ears) even before he moved to Boston. Miller had intended to devote himself to playing experimental music of a more reasonable volume, but found himself seduced by the punk rock explosion of 1976-77 and figured he'd endure his own power chords for as long as he could. By 1983, he couldn't.
Miller and his bandmates never really stopped; they just stopped being Mission of Burma. Under his own name and as No Man, Miller released several records of music played on guitar and treated piano, and he's continued to perform with avant-garde groups, including Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, the Alloy Orchestra and the Wrong Pipe. Drummer Peter Prescott has also had a prolific post-Burma career, leading his own largely underrated punk-derived bands, Volcano Suns, Kustomized and Peer Group. Martin Swope, whose role in the band as "sound manipulator" (he worked behind the mixing board at Burma's shows, adding sound effects and recording live tape loops, which he would reintegrate into the music) predated the now common practice of rock bands employing DJs of indeterminate purpose, also played with Birdsongs before moving to Hawaii in the early '90s and apparently dropping out of music altogether. Although bassist Clint Conley wrote and sang "Academy Fight Song" and "That's When I Reach for My Revolver," Burma's most famous songs, he stopped making music almost immediately following the Staten Island debacle. For the past several years, he's worked as a producer on "Chronicle," a Boston TV newsmagazine. He's lately begun to record and perform again, with his new band, Consonant, and the Wrong Pipe, in a collaboration with Miller.
The indifference of its members notwithstanding, Mission of Burma has, over the past 20 years, quietly gone from being just another scruffy punk band that never got its due to becoming one of the touchstones of American post-punk. At least three recorded versions of "That's When I Reach for My Revolver" have cropped up over the years, including one in 1997 by Moby. (Displaying the marketing savvy that would later lead him to license an entire album's worth of songs to various commercial concerns, Moby recorded a special version, "That's When I Realize It's Over," for a squeamish MTV.) For a few years, R.E.M. made "Academy Fight Song" a staple of its live show; the recorded version was fan-club only, but "Crush With Eyeliner," from 1995's "Monster," is a clear homage to Burma's "Trem Two." In 2000, Graham Coxon, the guitarist for Blur, a band known more for its plundering of British pre-punk rather than American post-punk, released a solo record that included two Burma tunes.
Perhaps the best illustration of Burma's lasting influence was the coterie of guests that came onstage during the encores of the band's first reunion shows, held in New York and Boston in February, to accompany Burma on "All World Cowboy Romance," the chiming, almost psychedelic instrumental that ends "Signals, Calls and Marches." On the first of two nights in New York, it was Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth. The second night was a more diverse group: Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, another Tri State-area band that took Burma's sound and ran with it (plus, Conley produced their 1986 debut); Richard Baluyut of the band Versus, whose name echoes the title of Burma's only full-length album; and Moby, who stood off to the side tentatively strumming a guitar, looking somewhat lost, until he realized it was over. A week later in Boston, Burma performed the song with drummer Hugo Burnham of early '80s British post-punk legends Gang of Four, one of the bands whose musical approach most closely mirrored Mission of Burma's.
Martin Swope has declined to take part in the reunion activities (the band has been good-naturedly dedicating the shows to him), but even his vacancy has been turned into a kind of tribute. For these reunion shows, the role of sound manipulator has been filled by Bob Weston, a former member of Prescott's Volcano Suns and the bassist for the Chicago band Shellac, one of the groups working today that owe the most to Burma. Shellac's guitarist, the recording engineer Steve Albini, was instrumental in getting Burma to reunite for the All Tomorrow's Parties festival.
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"Mission of Burma's only sin was bad timing," writes Michael Azzerad in "Our Band Could Be Your Life," his history of American underground music from 1981 to 1991. Burma didn't succeed, he argues, because the "support system" that would later nurture underground rock bands -- independent record companies, college radio, and sympathetic rock clubs -- was still in an embryonic stage. But what if Burma's music was, regardless of the lack of this support system, actually ahead of its time? What if it articulated a code, a nascent group of symbols and sounds, that would not gain the critical mass of language until some point in the future?
Azerrad's 1981-91 continuum tells a tidy tale, beginning with the release of Black Flag's "Damaged," the Southern California punk band's most singular document, and the calling card the band used as it conducted shoestring tours across the United States, blazing a trail that indie bands have followed ever since. And 1991, as the title of a Sonic Youth documentary put it, was the year that punk broke, when the music industry and the underground converged for Nirvana's "Nevermind." Time was not on the side of any American indie rock band that began in 1979, but blaming Burma's initial obscurity on the lack of an adequate support system doesn't tell the whole story.
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