David Loggins ‘Please Come To Boston’ was a well crafted work of fiction.

By Randal Hill
Guest Columnist

Dave Loggins

Was “Please Come to Boston” a true story? Let’s find out.

David Allen Loggins was born in 1947 in Mountain City, Tenn. A second cousin to musician Kenny Loggins (“Footloose”), after high school Loggins sold insurance before deciding to become a professional singer/guitarist/songwriter.

In 1972, he contracted with Nashville’s Vanguard Records as a solo artist. His album “Personal Belongings” tanked, but Three Dog Night lifted one of Loggins’s LP’s tracks — “Pieces of April” — which became the group’s 14th Top 20 hit. (A YouTube comparison, though, shows that Loggins had the superior version.)

“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 Loggin’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”

Then

“Please come to Denver with the snowfall

”We’ll move up into the mountains so far

“That we can’t be found”

And finally

“Please come to L.A. to live forever

“A California life alone

“Is just too hard to bear”

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”

Near the tale’s end, the narrator comes clean about how conflicted he is about his situation:

“Now this drifter’s world goes ‘round and ‘round

“And I doubt it’s ever gonna stop

“But of all the dreams I’ve lost or found

“And all that I ain’t got

“I still need to lean to

“Somebody I can sing to”

His lone Top 5 hit explores the tension tug-of-war between a musician’s yearning for the tour road and the desire for a stable relationship; 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 new to Loggins.

As with so many other story-songs—“Cat’s in the Cradle,” “Honey,” “The Boxer” — music fans often wonder if such tear-jerkers are based on truth or are created from scratch. “The story is almost true,” the 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.”

Were “Cat’s in the Cradle,” “Honey” and “The Boxer” true tales? Nope, each creation was also a well-crafted work of pure fiction.