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Party; it was sort of hit or miss.” The pair shared their backgrounds, and Law filled Riepen in on his recent successes as a young player in the music business. “I considered myself somewhat of an authority because I had worked as a college [booking] agent and had gotten Barry and the Remains their recording contract with Epic.” Not only that, Law had also helped the Boston band land a spot on the road as an opening act for the Beatles. Riepen was impressed, quickly inducting Don Law into the Tea Party’s inner circle. “It’s been written that I was a lot smarter than I think I was,” Law revealed, “or more Machiavellian. But the truth is that we were just kids who wanted to be in the music business. There wasn’t any money in live entertainment anyway; it was all sort of a small business; we were doing it because we thought it was fun. Here it was: 1967 and ’68, we really didn’t have that much pressure; we were [just] having a blast. [But] then, the Earth moved!”
    In the Tea Party’s daily business conundrum, accounts receivable often didn’t cover accounts payable, but the inner circle let it ride, counting on the next night’s gate receipts to save the day. However, even as 1968 arrived with more consistent bookings, the profits were never outstanding. Plus, as Don Law remembered, his boss could be a financial problem himself: “Every time I’d get myself in a good position and start making money, [because] you had to have some around to make guarantees [with bands and their agents] and pay out bills, [Riepen] would just come in and take it all out to fund whatever else he was doing. I was always going, ‘Oh no! I’m down to zero again!’ I was always playing this game trying to keep the place afloat, [acting] as if I had resources . . . and I didn’t!” Riepen’s personallife also bordered on the dramatic, as Law recalled with a smile: “He was a really sweet guy, but he was just so difficult. I’d get a call at three in the morning . . . it was him: ‘I’m over here in Belmont and I’m in jail and I don’t have a license. Can you get me out of here?’ He didn’t have a license, and he would always drive without one. He had a Porsche one time and he was visiting some girlfriend on the Hill, then someone stole his Porsche. He said, ‘Aw, fuck it,’ went down the Hill and just bought himself a Volkswagen!”
    Ray Riepen asserted that he didn’t make any money off the Tea Party, but that’s only true depending on how you do the math. To his credit, he kept the ticket prices low, insanely cheap by today’s standards, and the hippies who were around then will always tell fond memories about how they saw Led Zeppelin or The Who for less than five bucks. Even so, Riepen did make money off the club, but he just spent it as quickly as he made it. Some of those expenditures, like financing his impending venture at WBCN and eventual stake in the Cambridge Phoenix newspaper, were clever and considered business endeavors. Others were more impulsive, as Don Law explained: “By 1969, 1970, there was this ‘Free the Music’ thing [in which] people thought there shouldn’t be any charges for music. There was a lot of this, so we always tried to be sensitive about it and keep the prices down. Riepen took it upon himself to buy a Mercedes 600 limo! It was as ugly and corporate as you could get: a long black box that the only other people in the world used was the Secretary-General of the U.S. or the Pope. He’d pull up in this massive limousine at the Tea Party; I’d be out there trying to run things, and people are shouting, ‘Free the music! Free the music!’ He’d get out in his three-piece suit and stand there on the curb. I’d just go: ‘Damnit!’ And you know, if you looked in that limo, you’d notice that it was stacked with books.