By Randal C. Hill
Was “Please Come to Boston” a true story? Let’s find out.
In 1972, musician Dave Loggins (Kenny Loggins’s cousin) contracted with Nashville’s Vanguard Records as a solo artist. His album “Personal Belongings” tanked, but Three Dog Night lifted one of the LP’s tracks—“Pieces of April”—which became the group’s 14th Top 20 hit.
“Pieces of April,” however, did nothing to advance the brand name of Dave Loggins, so he pressed on. In 1974, Epic Records had him record the album “Apprentice (In a Musical Workshop).” “Please Come to Boston” became the lead-off single, and that held the key to Dave’s fleeting success.
In the ballad, a traveling-musician narrator pleads with the love of his life back home to join him on the tour road:
Please come to Boston for the springtime // I’m stayin’ here with some friends // And they’ve got lots of room
Please come to Denver with the snowfall // We’ll move up into the mountains so far // That we can’t be found
Please come to L. A. to live forever // A California life alone // Is just too hard to bear
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The woman he misses may love the vagabond, but she always refuses to join him:
And she said, “Hey, ramblin’ boy // Now won’t you settle down?
There ain’t no gold and there ain’t nobody like me // I’m the Number One fan of the man from Tennessee
Loggins’s inspiration for the song followed a 1972 tour with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (“Mr. Bojangles”) that included stops in Boston, Denver and Los Angeles, all locales then new to Dave.
As with so many other story-songs, music fans often wonder if such tear-jerkers are based on truth or are created from scratch. “The story is almost true,” Grammy-nominated Loggins explains, “except that there wasn’t anyone waiting. So I made her up, in effect making the longing for someone stronger. It was a recap to my first trip to each of these cities and out of innocence. That was how I saw each one. The fact of having no one to come home to made the chorus easy to write.”
