The Art of Playing for Twelve People and a Bartender

A sticky floor, a half-broken PA, and fifteen people who actually listen—sometimes that’s all it takes to shape a voice you’ll carry for life. We revisit our Boston days with Unction, the band that treated Monday nights at The Rat like a creative laboratory, and we unpack why low-stakes rooms are the secret engine of real growth. From peeling paint to tight harmonies, we explore how small, attentive crowds and imperfect venues gave us permission to be unfinished, to fail loudly, and to discover the groove that still pulses underneath everything we make.

We talk about the gap between pretense and practice—how chasing the right look or the right scene couldn’t compete with the discipline of showing up, trying new riffs, and learning in public. There’s a tension we learned to love: hope and hangovers, opera house by day and chaos by night. That friction sharpened our timing, stripped away our masks, and left us with a creative ethic that outlived the venue itself. The Rat is gone, but the pattern remains: real creativity is born in cheap rooms on the wrong nights, where nobody is waiting for you to impress them and failure counts as progress.

If you’re building anything—songs, startups, stories, or a new chapter—go find your Monday night. Seek a space with low stakes and high attention, where you can test ideas, watch honest reactions, and refine your voice without the glare of big-stage expectations. Press play to hear the stories behind Unction’s experiments, the lessons that stuck, and a practical blueprint for finding your own unpolished room. If the journey resonates, subscribe, share this with a friend who’s in the messy middle, and leave a quick review to help more creators find their Monday night.

Thanks for listening.

Chapters

• 0:00 Naive Beginnings And Itch To Experiment
• 1:53 Forming Unction And Chasing A New Sound
• 2:53 The Rat: A Dive Bar As Lab
• 4:45 Permission To Be Unpolished
• 5:55 Cheap Rooms And Real Creativity
• 6:39 Vanished Venues And Monday Crowds
• 8:17 Hope, Hangovers, And Double Lives
• 10:21 Outside The Scene Yet All In

Transcript

Rita: 0:00

Welcome back to Creativity GGG, the show where inspiration hides in strange places. Old notebooks, broken amplifiers, and sometimes in the back room of a Boston dive bar with a sticky floor.

Chris: 0:14

Here's the part I didn't understand back then. I didn't understand anything back then. I thought I knew everything, and I knew nothing. I had lived all over the world, and I had lived nowhere at the same time. I was incredibly naive, and I I think I kind of liked being that way. I didn't want to learn things. I wanted to experience them. So I think back. And I think back to those memories. I think about my total journey, my total creative journey, you know, which started when I was a kid and has brought me to this point now where I'm still working and my work has evolved. But there was this one period that stood out for me, which was back in Boston after college and before I moved to New York. I was in a band called Unction. And Unction was a giant music experiment. You know, we wanted to try things. We had come out of college and we had some sophisticated ideas about harmony and rhythm, and we wanted to rock, you know. The guy who put us together was a guy called Danny Pellegrino, and Danny wanted to rock. And, you know, I kind of like rocking too, although I was more of a folk musician, but I liked the idea of it, you know. We used to play this place called The Rat in Kenmore Square, right up against um the outfield green monster of Fenway Park. There was a little bar called the Raskiller, but it was known as the Rat. And it was like that classic dive bar, you know, that you don't want to go to the bathroom, and the walls are covered in uh in all sorts of symbolic language, you know. It's just amazing. I love dive bars. You always are welcome in a dive bar. There's always lower expectations in a dive bar. And the rat was like that. It was like a laboratory, and we were the rats, you know. It was a place where you could be safe to be and be like incomplete. You know, I mean that's that's what stands out to me about that moment in my journey. You know, on Mondays in the Rat, there were maybe 15 people in the room, including the bartender. And we we tried things and we failed and we succeeded, and we peeled paint off the wall with excessive volume, and we played new songs and had half-formed ideas and crazy riffs that we weren't even sure we liked. I mean, we just throw everything out there and then kind of watched how people took it, you know? I mean, what a great, safe place Monday night in the rat with the band unction experimenting. You know? That was the secret. That was the secret. The unpolished room gives you permission to be the artist you're you're becoming instead of uh the artist you're pretending to be. I mean, we had a lot of pretense. We better we should dress like this, we should cut our hair like that, we'd look at pictures, we'd listen to other bands and think we should do this, we should do that. I mean, we're trying to find ourselves. But the unpolished room gives you permission to go through all that and come out the other side a better artist. And you need places where you can be bad when you're growing as an artist, when the stakes are low, when nobody is waiting for you to impress them. You know? I mean, you need those places. You need to find them, you know, because that's that's that's where the breakthroughs happen. That's where you you learn your real voice. I'm not sure any of us did, but every night was a step, a small part of the journey. You know, I'm talking about 40 years ago, and I've had a long career, but that was a part of the journey, and more than that, that was like a diamond in my journey, you know? That was like a highlight, and it still is true to me. I look at those songs and I want to get my hands around them, I want to keep singing them. You know, there was a an innocence and a beauty and a reckless madness to what we were doing, and some of it just sounds completely awesome. You know, I actually have a couple of live performances from The Rat, and and they kind of boggle my mind a little bit, to be honest, that we played with um such accuracy and and speed, you know. The rat was a a step in our journey. And uh the truth is creativity isn't born on the big stages, you know? It doesn't come whole cloth. You don't go straight from your bedroom to the arena. It's born in a cheap room on a wrong night, with the PA half broken and your heart wide open. The rat.

unknown: 5:51

Yeah.

Chris: 5:53

Isn't even there anymore. Places like that don't close. They just disappear. They evaporate like steam on a sidewalk after the rain, like paper mache mountains, you know, in a monsoon. They're one day, gone the next. We used to play in the rat on Mondays, and I always like playing on Mondays and Tuesdays because the people that are there, they want to hear the music, you know? And uh ultimately for a musician, that's the ultimate thing. I mean, when you're a musician, you play a lot uh where people are eating and talking over your music, and you kinda end up playing for yourself. But usually a crowd on a Monday night in a city dive bar, and they want to hear stuff. They want to hear the music, they're gonna they're gonna listen, you know, and you love them for it. And you learn from how they listen, how they react, what what's going on. Those rooms would feel empty sometimes from the stage, and they would be full at the same time, like our heads, to be honest. And there was uh a strange equilibrium going on there between hope and um a hangover. Hope and a hangover. Those were kind of like the dichotomy of our existence, you know. We hoped that the music would take us someplace, and the music certainly took me someplace, and uh we drank a lot, so we had hangovers, and you would kind of like go out full of hope, you play your gig, you come home with a hangover, and you go to sleep. And then you wake up at 7:30 and you go to the opera house to work, and that was our life. What do you think about that? I mean, it's a little crazy, right? Umperas, sex drug, madness, betrayal, and uh so are our songs in our life. We it was uh our life was a soap opera and we were working the opera. There was no distance between working the operas and hauling our gear down the steps at the rat. It was seamless for us, one to the other. Opera and unction. Ritual and racket. Um Cathedral by day, chaos by night. Unction wasn't a humble bed at all. We were loud, we were reckless, and we were arrogant, and we wrote our own rules. Uh, we were in with the outcrowd, like Danny used to sing. There was this whole rock and roll scene in Boston, um, but we were not part of that whole rock and roll scene. We were either playing or loading trucks, and there was not much in between. You think back, you know, and uh the memories break apart like old two-inch tape. Bits flake off. Uh most of it disappears. So fuck it. Fuck it, fuck all the broken memories. I mean, just fuck them. What matters most is that uh we lived it once, that the music was alive, and that we were there. And most important of all, we were together. We were friends. We were friends chasing grooves. I mean, it really doesn't get much better than that. So creativity isn't always clean, it isn't always polite, it's selfish, it's loud, it's sweaty, it's held together with duct tape and adrenaline. Because if you lived it, if you really, really, really lived it, it becomes part of the rhythm you carry for the rest of your life, no matter what you do with your life. You're gonna carry this diamond with you. And uh you could be working in the bank, but but that unction rhythm is is gonna be in the back of your head. Pounding beats, fast riffs, crazy lyrics. Look. If you're building something new, a story, a company, a composition, a life, do yourself a favor. Go find your Monday night. A low stakes room, a low stakes place, a place where you're allowed to try things that might not work, where failure isn't punishment, it's progress, where nobody's watching too closely. That's where the real work begins. That's where the spark shows up. That's where the art gets honest. Every creator needs a Monday night. The rat was mine. Find yours.

Rita: 10:57

This has been Creativity GGG. Follow the song lines, tell your stories, and if you're brave, play the Monday night slot. Nothing refines an artist like performing for 12 people. Unction was Danny Pellegrino, Jay Johnson, Ray Schmarder, Cliff Coleman, and Chris McHale. And if nostalgia moves you, visit Bandcamp, produced by studio GGG Production, and spend one dollar on Unction's music. Truly, it's more than the band ever made on those legendary Monday night rat gigs. Inflation works wonders.