January 17, 1970 would have been its fourth birthday, but that hardly matters now. The Boston Tea Party is no more. Since the beginning of time (or so it now seems) the Tea Party was the one place in Boston where name brand rock and roll entertainment could be found. Day-glo palaces (the Psychedelic Supermarket, the Crosstown Bus, and countless others that never got beyond the initial stages of delusion) came and went in wispers, but the Tea Party, with its talent solidarity and comparatively unoffensive presentation, had attained a position of relative institutionalization. The final door-closing found the club located on Lansdowne Street in the shadow of Fenway Park (the home of the Red Sox, baseball’s answer to the Denver Broncos) on the site of another of 1 Boston’s ill-fated rock emporiums, the Ark. (The Ark, it will be remembered, was a tasteless attempt to bring an Electric Circus to Boston, not realizing that Boston’s basic charm stems from her insistence on historical personality and consequent resistence to all but organic face-lifts.)

Before the Tea Party assimilated the Ark, however, it was located on Berkely Street in the South End. The South End is that section of the city where the buildings have decayed just a shade past the point of respectable tradition, and is therefore doomed to serve as a receptacle for those too poor to move out of the city and too defeated to even entertain dreams of ever doing so. It was in the Magnus Hall, a beautifully grotesque old monolith with spectacularly high ceilings and “Praise