The Bigger Picture
Burmese Days: Living in Peggy's World
by Bob Moses
Memory resides in startling places. Like the head of an armadillo, charred and partially covered in orange wax. Peggy, by name. Peggy lived on the engine cover of a beat-brown Dodge van that hauled Mission of Burma around Boston and much of the country. That was “Peggy’s World,” as Roger Miller wrote on the back of the snapshot of the van’s front quarters found in The Horrible Truth about Burma. (Roger's original snapshots above and below right.) Peggy was all that was rescued after a fire destroyed Ace of Hearts labelmates The Neats's house. Turn the pages of the oversize booklet in Matador’s re-release of The Horrible Truth, and there she is. And there in front of me are hundreds of miles in Peggy’s World, sleeping on floors, parties in band houses, ringing ears and the feel of strings under fingers.
Matador recently released what would have to be the exhaustive final word for a while on Mission of Burma’s three original releases (following, of course, five years of what must be one of the more improbable resurrections in rock history, at least in vivacity and duration). And a summer tour presents the two studio albums, Signals, Calls and Marches and Vs., in their entirety. That, and Peggy, have put me in a reflective mood.
I watched the band in most of the period covered by those re-releases from stage right, standing just to the side and behind Roger Miller, amidst the guitars and Burma bag and beer. I was what came to be known as a Deacon. A roadie, I suppose, though I don’t recall that job description being used by any of us. Fellow traveler might get closer.
Peggy's WorldMichael Mooney (variously Moon, Mooncraft, Stone of Terror or other tags foist on his good nature, and later the drummer in Busted Statues and Gingerbread Men) and Jim Conley (Jimmybeef, Beef Europa and other AKAs) were consistent performers, and hence named on the records. Bob L’Heureux, another bandmate in Busted Statues, was also on hand much of the time. I made one long tour, a few shorter, and all Boston shows when I was in town, including the climactic Bradford Ballroom shows, which appear on the Matador re-issue DVDs.
Roger’s guitars were my primary concern, and I kept watch from my perch for broken strings (a not insignificant number of broken strings given Roger’s physical approach to the instrument), faulty pedal switches, cords pulling out, amps toppling and mic stands falling over. I moonlighted by keeping an eye on Peter Prescott’s titanic struggles with his truculent drum kit. I saw many sunrises from behind the wheel of the Burma van, some in relatively exotic locales such as Wisconsin’s eerie plains on the way to Minneapolis, and some grindingly mundane such as the loading dock behind Little Stevie’s Pizza on Mass Ave, where flour dusted your shoes on the way to the basement rehearsal space.
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