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    Soon the Tea Party was playing host to many of the city’s hippest young bands like Bagatelle, the Lost, the Hallucinations (featuring Wolf), Beacon Street Union, and Ultimate Spinach. Riepen also began attracting smaller regional and national acts like Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground, Country Joe & the Fish, Canned Heat, Lothar and the Hand People, and Richie Havens. The legendary gigs that most people associate with the Tea Party—Led Zeppelin, the Jeff Beck Group, Fleetwood Mac, and The Who—were at least two years down the road at this point. But Riepen, as a lawyer and entrepreneur, was not all that keen on running the place: “I don’t like to operate businesses. Once you get them and once you figure them out, it’s not very elegant to be running them, so I hire people to run them.” Steve Nelson, a Harvard-schooled lawyer who became disenchanted working in Washington (for NASA , no less, in the thick of the space race with the Russians), returned to Boston and went to see the Velvet Underground at the Tea Party to celebrate his twenty-sixth birthday. This was an extra special celebration night for Nelson: after being drafted years earlier and using his legal skills to avoid deployment, he had reached the magic age where Uncle Sam declassified him as eligible for service. “It was the end of May 1967; I went to that gig and I met Ray. A couple of months later, he said, ‘I know you went to law school, you have a business sense and you know the music scene; would you be interested in becoming the manager of the Tea Party?’ I thought, ‘Yeah! That was so much cooler than working for the federal government!’”
    So Steve Nelson went from launching moon rockets to moonlighting, taking the day-to-day management of the Tea Party off Riepen’s shoulders. But things were perilous at best at the Berkeley Street location, and it seemed like Nelson’s exciting new job might actually end up being the shortest one of his life. The Tea Party’s bookings, although cool and hip to the underground scene, produced inconsistent results. While a pair of Country Joe & the Fish shows in August did terrific sell-out business, many other bands played to near-empty rooms. “It was a pretty small place,” Nelson acknowledged, “especially when you think about where the musicbusiness went after that.” In a nightclub of this size there was little space for error. With a legal capacity of around seven hundred patrons, the Tea Party was not the kind of spot that could turn a huge profit unless the cover charge was jacked up, which Riepen refused to do. “I never made any money at the Tea Party,” he said. “I was charging three dollars to get in [while] Bill Graham charged twelve, for the same acts!”

    WBCN presents concerts at the Boston Tea Party, June 1968, original poster. Courtesy of the David Bieber Archives. Photo by Matt Dolloff.
    Don Law, who would eventually replace Steve Nelson as general managerof the Tea Party and go on to become Boston’s most successful rock impresario, met Ray Riepen at Boston University ( BU ) where he was a student, as well as an instructor who conducted an educational workshop entitled “Evolution of the Blues.” Law’s early music education came from his quite famous father, Don Sr., who worked as a talent scout and producer for Brunswick and then Columbia Records, plying the American South for talent, which included the iconic Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, and even Gene Autry. Through his father, Don Jr. had developed some hefty connections on his own. He brought in blues artists to play and speak at his BU workshops, including the already-legendary Muddy Waters and his outstanding piano player Otis Spann. “[The workshop] got a lot of attention; the New York Times covered it,” Law mentioned, “and that’s how I met Riepen. At the time, he was struggling with the Tea