A Miraculous Homecoming On College Street

After 20 years apart, New Haven born and bred Miracle Legion is preparing to do something it never thought it would have the chance to: Get back together in the city that gave the band its start.

Starting Tuesday, members of the group plan to show two Elm City audiences at two different venues a time so good it takes them back to 1983. Or something like that.

Don’t drop everything: Members aren’t getting back together forever. At least, not yet. New Haven is the first stop on the group’s seven-week reunion tour, which will also hit other cities on the East Coast before moving to the midwest and UK later this month.

On Tuesday night, four reunited members — Mark Mulcahy on vocals and guitar, Ray Neal on lead guitar, Scott Boutier on drums and Dave McCaffrey on bass — will play College Street Music Hall. On Sunday, the band will swoop through again, playing an already sold-out show at the Outer Space in Hamden.

The Independent had the chance to catch up with Neal to talk about the reunion, which picks up where the group’s dissolution in 1996, just after the soft release of its Portrait of A Damaged Family, left off.

For the guitarist, now settled in Edinburgh with his family, a reunion was never a sure thing. In 2014, a Polaris reunion tour had reunited Mulcahy with Boutier and McCaffrey, but even then the thought of the four together was a hopeful and uncertain one. They didn’t know how they would gel. Mulcahy’s career, which had skyrocketed in the years after 1996, was manically busy. Dates kept not syncing.

A trial run with Neal and Mulcahy in New York City earlier this year left the two feeling like there was still untapped chemistry, and a rehearsal with other members in May felt natural. Fast forward, Neal said, and they’d somehow almost gotten to Tuesday, for which they’ve been practicing in a barn on northeast Connecticut. Excerpts of that interview are below.

Let’s just start with how you’ve all gotten to this point.

Well, Mark contacted me and we thought we would test the waters. We released our final record, Portrait of A Damaged Family, on vinyl on record store day, and the interest has been really amazing. It feels nice. There’s a lot of people talking about us in a sort of historically important way. So we decided we would do some shows, and that’s the point we’re at now. I don’t know what’s next … if there will be a record or not. The band starts doing shows next week, and that goes thought August. Then we reassess, I guess.

You’ve been hopping about practicing, yeah? How has that been?

You know, it’s been a bit international. I was over here in May, and then Mark came to London last month and we rehearsed and played some shows in Britain, and now I’m back here [New Haven], and then I’ll go back and they’ll join me the second week in August. So it’s been a bit of a challenge, but it’s been an excuse for me to come here because I hadn’t been back in more than three years. So in a way, I’m combining it with coming back to the homeland. 

OK. So I was born at the tail end of the ​‘80s, and I didn’t see Miracle Legion perform before the group disbanded. I don’t have that historical context like many of the people who will be in the audience Tuesday. But for you, does this — I mean New Haven specifically — feel like a sort of homecoming?

It does. I think I always … in general, this whole process has been amazing for me because I’m always very critical of what I do. I’m not the kind of person who would go home and listen to my own album or something. But now that I have gone back and listened to them, because I had to remember how to play them, I’m incredibly proud of what we did. I think we did great work. And then to have the show at The Space … it sold out really fast, which is just amazing.

I think during the time when we were an active band, you don’t really … I never knew how we were perceived in New Haven. Certainly in the music scene itself you’re always going to get jealousies, rivalries, things like that — but I never really knew. So it’s been amazing to feel like … to see what’s happening. I’m really proud of the work we did, and to be doing it in New Haven.

Do you think of it as moving into a possible new chapter for the group?

On a personal level, it’s been, like I said, a realization of what we did. When we first made an album, all I could do when I listened to it was hear what I could have done better, or the arguments that you might have had. When you step away from that after all these years … I feel really good that we did great work. I would like to do more. We’re an international band now. Everybody has responsibilities. Mark has a solo career. But I would hate to not write with Mark again. I’ve realized in the shows that we’ve played recently … that we definitely have something that I’ve never had with anybody else. I think it would be sad to not pursue it.

A reunion’s risky, right? 

Yes. I came over in May, and we … Mark and I did a show together in New York as a two piece. But we rehearsed with the band for a day, and that really was like: OK, we have to play together and see. Maybe this isn’t going to work. But it literally felt like ​‘OK, this is the next day of the tour we were on in 1991.’ Certainly there were things like: ​‚How does that part go?’ but it felt completely right. The few shows I’ve played with Mark have just been … we really have a thing. To feel that thing, to look across the stage and see Mark — it doesn’t feel foreign or forced. So I’m happy. I’m really ecstatic.

You make music for yourself, but hopefully you also make music for the public. So what are you hoping that New Haven gets out of it?

Certainly when Mark and I started playing music together we had no idea that it was going to come to this. It was purely by accident that something we had done got reviewed in Britain … then it took on a life of it’s own. But I think for me always the point was to try to make people feel like I always felt in my bedroom and I put a record on. That’s the goal for me. Back in the day, we were much more pursuing trying to make a living at it … none of us were like: ​‘Let’s get in a band to be rich!’ But we always wanted to just be able to do it. You’re always trying to make enough money so that you can put on a good show and you can get from town to town.

Now, the pressure is off on that, in that I’m not expecting that I’m gonna be a rock star. So for me, it’s just to touch people in the way that music touches me … there’s no auto-tuning, there’s no light show. We have that to offer. I believe what we do is as pure as it gets. If you like it or not, I can’t control that.

How much have you been back to the city?

Well I wasn’t for a bit, but now I’ve been back for a month. It’s kind of interesting — I’m not a big fan of where New Haven is going. No. Not at all.

Tell me more. 

Because it’s Disney world. I look back on the era that I come out of, late ​‘70s, early ​‘80s. They’re talking now about how you wouldn’t move to New York to be a budding musician or artist, because the CBGB’s environment doesn’t exist anymore there. I don’t think it exists here. I mean, to get a loft space to make noise all night, to have a space like Ron’s Place at the corner of Park and Chapel, the prostitute, heroin addict bar that you could play in. That’s just not gonna happen. And you could survive without a job! I used to put up fliers for Toad’s Place, do this and that, and I think that … for me, that’s what I like.

Now I’ve fallen in love with Edinburgh. It’s one of the loveliest cities in the world, and it has a nice mix — whereas I think New Haven is becoming incredibly one dimensional. It’s not just New Haven though. It’s everywhere.

In an interview with the Independent, Mulcahy added a few comments to Neal’s sentiments about the show:

“In many ways, it feels exactly the same. We’re basically falling backwards into something that’s very comfortable. In that way, we’re a little closer to the Replacements than I remember being. We’ve played these songs a lot — so whenever one of them comes up and we play it, there’s a certain place where we go. Each song is kind of a new song — kind of like turning on a light in a room and looking at it again.”

“I certainly have nothing to feel except good things about New Haven, and playing in New Haven. We presented ourselves as being from the Elm City, so I’m going to be in a good mood.”