Punk rock would have come to Boston soon enough anyway, but maybe Peter Dayton gave it a head start. Dayton was a 20-year-old art student when he took the train to New York City in October 1975 to see a rock concert that got canceled at the last minute. He ended up on the Bowery instead, at CBGB, where the Ramones were wrapping up a three-night stand, six months before the release of their debut album. The Queens foursome made such an impression on Dayton that he returned to Boston and talked his roommates, Mark Andreasson and Roger Tripp, into starting a punk band they called La Peste.
Once the trio learned to play instruments—Dayton on guitar, Andreasson on bass, and Tripp on drums—La Peste became a fixture on the Boston music scene, where their influence exceeded their output. Without much more than the Ramones as a punk-rock reference point (and maybe a little Black Sabbath-style thunder), La Peste made their own way, figuring out how to structure and arrange songs as they went. They earned their place in the tight-knit local music community with live shows remembered for their intensity, and also a sense of shared fervor between the band and the audience.
Gigs were the only place to hear most of their music: The original incarnation released just one 7" record, the 1978 single “Better Off Dead,” with “Black” on the B-side. Yet they had plenty more in reserve: I Don’t Know Right From Wrong: Lost La Peste 1976-1979 collects 23 tracks the band had stockpiled before a disillusioned Dayton left in 1980. (The group continued with a new guitarist until 1982 before calling it quits.) These songs come from sessions scattered over two years, including tracks that a friend captured in 1977 on a reel-to-reel machine in La Peste’s loft rehearsal space, four-track recordings, the stint in the studio that yielded “Better Off Dead,” and four songs—the best-sounding ones here—that they recorded in 1978 with Ric Ocasek, who was then on the cusp of stardom with the Cars.
The first dozen tracks, sequenced by Dayton and Andreasson, represent the La Peste album that never was. Some of them are as strong as anything else coming out at the time. The explosive opener “I Don’t Know Right From Wrong” is a lean blast of sawtoothed guitars and hurtling drums, with a subtle, eerie synth (Ocasek’s idea) floating at the back of the mix. Later, a hooky chorus and bright ringlets of guitar on “Kindness Invites Abuse” contrast with the lo-fi scrum of power chords, aggressive bass, and cymbal-heavy drums that propel the tune. Part of what made La Peste distinctive was the vocal balance Dayton struck, between disdain and an almost deadpan affect. He was comfortable with melodies not far distant from the bubblegum pop of his adolescence, but “Acid Test” shows he also wasn’t afraid to get weird by talk-singing his way to a cathartic moment and then letting rip with a knowing shriek.
Playing songs from the perspective of a disaffected boyfriend suited La Peste—it’s surely no coincidence that the forceful “Better Off Dead” was the band’s lead single, or that the strongest songs on I Don’t Know Right From Wrong tend to be the ones with oppositional romantic tension. The group didn’t always fare as well when the musicians broadened their thematic reach with stabs at social commentary or more character-driven writing. The buzzy “Spymaster” undercuts an air of claustrophobic paranoia with a smirking drug reference, while the plodding “Army Now,” about the unquestioning obedience of soldiers, feels mostly like a pose, thanks to first-person narration and lyrics about killing Nazis in Dresden.
Much of the second half of the anthology comes from those early loft recordings, and they reveal a band in its most primal phase. The sound is raw and the musicians were still learning how to do more than just play as fast as they could manage. Yet there’s an undeniable spark in the rumbling bassline and scuzzy guitars of “Whirlpool,” or the sneering attitude and clenched-jaw churning of “Figure It Out.” It makes you wonder how the songs might have evolved, and where the band might have gone, if Dayton had stuck it out. Instead, I Don’t Know Right from Wrong scans as a collection of might-have-beens. There are surely countless bands from that era that flared out before they could break through, leaving even less documentary evidence than La Peste did. These recordings help put into context the vibrant Boston alt-rock scene that blossomed in the ’80s, slotting into Boston’s underground timeline a missing link between the Modern Lovers and Mission of Burma. I Don’t Know Right From Wrong shows that La Peste did as much as anyone to lay the foundation for what followed. It’s too bad they didn’t last long enough to build on what they helped to start.
