When she’d arrived, it felt like Boston still had the power to turn its most talented musicians into stars. All those records she’d made, all the elaborate shows she’d staged, all the awards she’d won - they didn’t seem to be adding up to much. It wasn’t just the financial pressure, though. And it felt like a real blow: “Broke my heart a thousand times,” she says. When a developer swooped in with plans to clear out the artists and build office space, she helped lead the fight to stop him. Tom Herde/Globe Staff/The Boston Globeįor years, Fox and dozens of other musicians relied on low-cost rehearsal space at the EMF Building, a former electrical supply company in Cambridge’s Central Square. “When you’re in a ska band and Dicky Barrett was just there a couple of hours before you, you get this feeling like you’re part of something,” Fox says.įrom left, Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, Ralph Tresvant, and Ronnie DeVoe of the R&B group New Edition received a Hall of Fame award at the Boston Music Awards in Boston on April 16, 1991. Hysteria, played Bill’s Bar on Lansdowne Street, angled for reviews in a still-robust music press, and recorded in a downtown studio just hours after the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Her first band, a ska outfit called Mass. “I was leaving not because I wanted to,” she says from her new home in Chicago, but because “I felt like an exile.”įox moved to Brookline as a teenager, in 1998, and when she arrived, there was still a certain energy in the air. And at the 2018 New England Music Awards, she won Band of the Year, Album of the Year, and Video of the Year.Īnd yet, there she was: Driving out of town on a chilly day this past December, with tears running down her face.įor everything that went right here, ultimately it felt like the city had let her down. She was named Female Vocalist of the Year at the Boston Music Awards in 20. RUBY ROSE FOX came into her own in Boston. Keith Bedford/Globe Staff/The Boston Globe Ruby Rose Fox in her old rehearsal space at EMF in Cambridge. And when a DJ at the station named Maxanne Sartori put a pair of Cars demos - “Just What I Needed” and “Best Friend’s Girl” - into regular rotation, she handed the band an enormous opportunity. It also had one of the most influential rock stations in the country, WBCN. It had a thriving alternative weekly that could bring them together with an advertisement for a sound man - and then spread the word about their work. It was circumstance.īoston was the sort of place musicians could afford. There was a certain amount of luck, of course, in this convergence of talents. And he started talking up Easton’s guitar skills.Īfter a nerve-wracking tryout at Orr’s Porter Square apartment - “OK, play something amazing,” Orr said - Easton latched onto the band that would eventually become the Cars. Easton’s roommate was still doing sound for the guys. Later, two of the guys from the Rabbits, Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr, started playing as a duo at The Idler in Harvard Square.
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