The Underground (Boston) [CLOSED]

The Underground was a music club located in the Allston neighborhood of Boston that featured local, national and international acts performing independent and post-punk music. Although the emerging acts who played there included Mission of Burma, The Cure and New Order, its lifespan was short, from February 1980 until June 1981. Jim Coffman, a Boston University sophomore who was waiting tables at the nearby restaurant Our House, started the club after convincing the same owners of the pub Sweet Virginia's (whose boss was the infamous Boston club owner Henry Vara) to turn over the dying business at 1110 Commonwealth Avenue, an L-shaped wood-paneled venue (one-time home of music club Brandy's II.) As Doug Simmons wrote in his 1981 Boston Phoenix postmortem for the club, The Underground's opening launched "the city's most far-ranging search for underground talent," adding that "never had so many bands traveled so far to play in front of so few for so little." As but one memorable example, The Cure performed their first time in Boston at the venue, playing virtually the entire Boys Don't Cry album before little more than a hundred people the night of Robert Smith's 21st birthday which MIT film and video student Jan Crocker recorded along with warmup Mission of Burma. [...]