Craig Reptile: Your Sunday Sonic Sundowner writesThe Blake Babies Reunion Show is at Evanston SPACE This Saturday!

Boston’s Blake Babies were one of those many, many “college rock” bands that burned brightly and burned out quickly in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.  Legend has it that their name was provided by Allen “Howl” Ginsberg after a reading at Harvard, most likely inspired by a poet of an earlier generation, William Blake.

The core trio of Juliana Hatfield, John Strohm and Freda Boner came together in 1986, released three high quality but little heard records, Nicely, Nicely (1987), Earwig (1989), Sunburn(1990), broke up in 1991, and reunited in 2001 with God Bless The Blake Babies.

During those ten years or so, Hatfield embarked on a successful solo career (she was the crush of many a bespectacled cardigan-wearing indie-rock loving college boy, back in the day), including her hit single “My Sister” (which was either a very strong song or a brazen attempt to garner Top 40 airplay, depending on which of those fans you asked, many of whose fickle favors had moved on to other, similarly unrequited focuses of adoration).

In addition, Strohm and Boner had formed the Indiana-based Antenna to the acclaim of critics, if not a lot of record buyers.  Their penchant for writing lovely, autobiographical songs like “Snakes” may have created a fan in Craig Reptile, but didn’t interest the record buying public, even when their CDs ended up in cut-out bins at deeply discounted prices.

Today, Hatfield is fresh off a collaboration with Paul Westerberg, Strohm is a successful entertainment attorney, and Freda Love Smith is a lecturer in the Communications Department at Northwestern (although she has worked with Hatfield since Blake Babies in the band Some Girls with Heidi Gluck).

But if you went back to those first three Blake Babies records, you would hear a fresh innocence and an inveterate minimalism, necessitated partially through lack of “chops” one imagines, but more importantly a recognition that the tunes were there and the lyrics mattered.  In 2015 they discovered demos to their sophomore record, and more importantly discovered that they sounded pretty good.

They remixed and remastered the “Earwig Demos” and are releasing them through a Pledge Music campaign, they’ve just played their first show in 15 years in Boston (which they described as “pretty intense”), and the only other live date so far on what they are calling “Not a Reunion Tour/Not a Tour 2016” will be a matinee performance this Saturday July 23rd at SPACE in Evanston.

Click here to see STEREOGUM’s coverage and click here to buy tickets.

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