Not since rise of Elton John in the 1970s with his fantastical glasses has the improbable pairing of eyewear and rock & roll gone hand in hand until the advent of Spectacle. Paul Fox, the owner/optician of Spectacle Eyeware at 505 Tremont Street, is a friendly eyewear purveyor by day, rocker by night, and the shop itself does double duty as an eyewear boutique and occasional rock venue.
On Saturday, October 1, Fox and friends played classics by both local and national acts of the 1980s while guests snacked on calzones washed down with wine and soft drinks at the "Fall into Spectacle" gathering.
Upon first glance, Fox's shop reveals his dual passions, the walls lined with shelves of frames and sunglasses, many of his own design, while the turntable on the counter cranks his favorite vinyl, mostly rock & roll, R & B and jazz. Every customer who selects glasses becomes a rock star for a moment as Fox asks them to pose with his guitar in their new frames for photos that he posts on Instagram. His guitar sits at the ready in a corner while a row of shelves below the eyewear displays album vintage album covers. Between sets at the Fall Into Spectacle soiree, guests plucked frames from the shelves and experimented with new looks, culminating in at least one customer ordering a pair of glasses. Other guests spoke happily of overcoming their dislike of glasses upon visiting Fox and benefiting from his gift for matching faces with flattering frames. The dapper Fox often sports blue-tinted aviators, a vest and a fedora.
One of the guests and performers at Saturday evening's party was Drew Stone, a filmmaker who plays in and chronicles the New York hardcore scene as singer/songwriter with Antidote and as director of the New York Hardcore Chronicles" and the recent Sick of It All video, "The Road Less Traveled". Stone met Fox back in the 1980s, the era when Stone was in college at Emerson and Fox was in one of Boston's first hardcore bands, Jerry's Kids. "Paul's an old-school punk rock kid that I've known since the early '80s coming out of the same punk/hardcore scene, a very do-it=yourself kind of environment. Here we are many years later and it's great to see that he still has that ethos, that 'You Can Do It' ethos. I see that he still has it in this fabulous store that he has and it's great," Stone said.
Stone accompanied himself on guitar on a few punk chestnuts by bands such as Sham 69's "If the Kids Are United", while attendees called out requests including Jim Carroll's "People Who Died", and Fox played guitar and sang a string of '80s crowd-pleasers including Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell" and Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl". Fox will play a more extended set with his band Spectacle on Friday, November 11 at the Midway Café, 3496 Washington Street, Jamaica Plain.