First album is better late than never for Prime Movers

January 19, 2007|Jonathan Perry, Globe Correspondent

The writer Thomas Wolfe wasn't entirely correct. Sometimes, you can go home again -- or, at least, return to the recording studio to produce the debut album you never got around to making the first time around. In the case of Boston's garage-soul rockers the Prime Movers, it only took these four onetime high school buddies 25 years to record and release "Back in Line," their first full-length CD in a musical career that dates back to the Reagan presidency. But what's a quarter-century between friends?

"It's been a long, slow boil," says Movers singer Cam Ackland, 45, whose band celebrates the CD's release tomorrow night at the Middle East Upstairs. "Ironically, all these years later, these guys have become much more adept at playing. It's leaner and it's meaner, and it feels better." Lean and mean have always been two of the Movers' best qualities, although one doesn't usually associate slow boils with a band that made its mark exploding from the stage in a loud, fast flurry of hooks, harmonies, and blinding white denim.

"They were one of those bands that really got me wanting to be a musician," says Jack Younger, who recorded and mixed most of "Back in Line" at his Basement 247 studio in Allston. "I used to go see them when I was 15. They weren't great players back then, but they had incredible energy coming off the stage. Now they're great players."

It's hard to believe, upon checking out the bracing, taut tracks on the new disc or catching the Movers' blistering recent shows around town, that the band hasn't been here all along. But after its more-or-less official run (1981-87) ended, the Movers broke up for most of the '90s, with each member pursuing a succession of other band projects. (A reunion around 1995, without drummer Dennis McCarthy, who had moved to the West Coast, was short-lived.)

It was a chance reunion at the Middle East in 2003 that got the gang -- three of whom are from Newton (McCarthy is from Malden) -- thinking about unfinished business. They agreed their backlog of original songs had never been properly recorded. Aside from an occasional split-single or random compilation track, the Movers say they were never able to completely capture the unbound energy or raw charisma of the live sound that made them a Boston favorite in their heyday.

"We actually did record a full length album [around 1986] with Sean Slade at Fort Apache studios," recalls guitarist Dick Tate, 42. "But by then, the band had been so beaten down by circumstances that it was too little too late. . . . The shame of it was, it was some of the best-sounding stuff we had recorded."