One summer night in 1982 myself and my best friend Lenny were staggering through Malden Square. The Manager of an all night restaurant called Joe D's called us over. I had talked to him a few months before when I canvassed Malden Square looking for rehearsal space. He told us we could have his basement for $100.00 per month. We now had practice space all we needed was a name, a drummer and a singer. I had worked with Barry in the band Phase 4 in 1980 and in Paradox with Lenny in '81. It wasn't just the fact that Barry was talented but he was also a cool guy and we knew he would fit. We had a few singers attempt to front the band. The pool of singers in Malden was slim. We knew a lot of female singers but that wasn't going to work with our style and material. We had once jammed with Billy a great guy with a killer voice. Billy also had the looks to front a band. We had the best rehearsal space in the city and a couple of sets of killer tunes, there was no way he could resist and B.F. Raid was born.
Many times before we had named our band only to find the name was already taken. We decided to call the band The Raid. Knowing the name could already be taken we thought about Air Raid and Ear Raid, but neither worked for us. We then thought if we put two initials in front of the word Raid that would personalize the name. So we randomly picked the letters B and F. Once the letters were picked we had to justify the choice. That was the birth of Bloody Fucking Raid. We soon realized that Bloody Fucking Raid wouldn't work too well on the radio or MTV, so Boston's Final Raid was born. Never did we mean for the name to suggest Be Afraid.
Menace Productions-Jon Mendell and Harry Wallace, Menace Productions were our management. Jon and Harry were old enough to buy and they were great guys so they got the job. On the Talented Rats Demo it list them as Personal Management and Chief Production Coordinator respectively, Those were fairly descriptive titles. Jon would deal with us not an easy job. Attitudes and egos would always clash from time to time. He would mainly keep us in check and let us know when we were being pinheads. Harry rigged everything in the Studio from the doorbell to the equipment. Everything Harry saw he had to make better. He never went by the "if it's not broke don't fix it attitude". Harry felt if it wasn't broke, we were going to break it sooner or later, so lets avoid the situation. Jon and Harry had an amazing road crew Jim "Big Red" Smith and Al "Punjabi" Velleman were staples but they had a few others time to time. We never had an equipment van our stuff would find its way in Howie's Car O' Death, Jon's wagon Sandy and various other strange vehicles.
