When the now-legendary Boston band Treat Her Right did its regular shows at the Plough & Stars in Cambridge or the Rat in Kenmore Square, there would inevitably be a few female admirers dancing upfront. When the band plays a one-off reunion at Sally O’Brien’s Thursday, the “Treat Her Right Dancers” will take their rightful place onstage.
A local favorite in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Treat Her Right opened punk-trained ears to the blues and R&B that they loved. Two of its members, guitarist Mark Sandman and drummer Billy Conway, went onto national success with Morphine. Both are now deceased, but cofounders David Champagne (vocals/guitar) and Jim Fitting (harmonica) have remained fixtures on the rock and roots scene. They’ll take a rare spin through the Treat Her Right catalogue, with the core band completed by drummer Jerome Deupree (Conway’s friend and a fellow Morphine alum) and Russ Gershon (the local jazz saxophonist, here taking a rare turn on bass guitar). And the “dancers”– who in truth will be doing more singing — include a bunch of local names: ex-Face to Face and Twinemen frontwoman Laurie Sargent (who was married to Conway), songwriters Rose Polenzani, Katie Champagne, Franc Graham and others.
“It’s going to be somewhat ramshackled, but in a good way,” David Champagne said last week. “Our first idea was to have it be like when fans jump onstage to sing a song, but it evolved into something more than that. We thought we’d reach out to some of the women who used to be there dancing, and some others who might have been fans.” And yes, one of the women will be singing Treat Her Right’s greatest hit, “I Think She Likes Me.” Says Champagne, “There will certainly be a lot of gender-fluid meanings added to some of the stuff.”
Treat Her Right’s founders were all school friends who bonded over their love for vintage records on the Chess label. “I thought Mark was the only white person I’d ever met who could sing that music and not sound silly,” Champagne recalls. Adds Fitting in a separate interview, “That stripped-down sound we had was our attempt to take that Chess sound to the present day. We were kind of evangelical about it. We weren’t out there saying ‘Yes, everybody dig the blues’. It was more like ‘This is a great sound and it’s music that inspires us, so check it out’.
They ultimately made two albums on the RCA label, but their warmest memories are of shows played in small clubs. Says Champagne, “I remember playing a gig on the Jersey shore opening for the Georgia Satellites — They had these walls of Marshall amps and there were 50,000 people there — but that wasn’t what we were about. We were really an outlier in a way — for instance, we were about ten years older than the Pixies. But we knew we had something, from the first few months we were together. It’s like falling in love, when you know its unique and it just works.”
While this show is a one-off, Champange is still writing new songs and Fitting is playing harmonica in another local roots institution, Session Americana. “I feel that music’s been in a funny place the last 50 years,” Champagne says. “You can do what you did back then and people will still be entertained by it. It’s difficult to be innovative using the same tools. But that’s not gonna stop me from trying.”
