The Robin Lane & The Chartbusters CD Release Show takes place at The Burren Saturday at 7:00 p.m. and Sunday at 4:00 p.m.

By Blake Maddux

Before establishing herself in the Boston music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Robin Lane had been immersed in two very different Los Angeles entertainment realms.

Her father, Ken Lane, was Dean Martin’s pianist and had – the year that Robin was born – co-written Everybody Loves Somebody, which was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, and Peggy Lee before Martin took to #1 in 1964.

In the 1960s, Robin was a denizen of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter community. This led to her singing on a track from Neil Young’s 1969 album Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. From 1968 to 1970, Lane was married to guitarist Andy Summers, who joined The Police in 1977. All the while, she was composing her own songs in the folk-rock mode of those whom she had befriended.

In was in this musical frame of mind that she arrived in Cambridge, MA, in the late 1970s. However, she was soon engrossed in the punk scene that centered around the Kenmore Square venue The Rathskeller, or “The Rat.” She formed The Chartbusters with former Modern Lovers members Asa Brebner and Leroy Radcliffe on guitar, bassist Scott Baerenwald, and drummer Tim Jackson. Robin Lane & the Chartbusters released two albums and an EP on Warner Bros. and their video for When Things Go Wrong was the eleventh one to air on MTV.

Tim Jackson used the title of that song for his 2014 documentary about Robin Lane because, for reasons that were least of all their own fault, the band did not become the commercial success that it could have been. They disbanded in 1983.

Since then, Robin Lane has remained active in music, most recently by founding the nonprofit organization Songbird Sings, which conducts songwriting workshops to benefit those who have suffered various traumas.

Although Lane says, “I thought that was the last gig” about a January 2016 performance at Johnny D’s, another of her old band’s sporadic reunions – with Billy Loosigian filling in for Leroy Radcliffe – will occur on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon at the Burren to commemorate the release of Many Years Ago: The Complete Robin Lane & the Chartbusters Collection. This 3-CD compilation includes all of the band’s Warner Bros. material and more than 25 previously unavailable tracks.

Lane spoke by phone to The Somerville Times from Los Angeles, where she was visiting family, in advance of her eventful upcoming weekend.

The Somerville Times: What brought you eastward from Los Angeles to Cambridge, MA?

Robin Lane: I went to visit a friend in Pennsylvania in Bucks County. He’d inherited a gentleman’s farm, I guess they call it. And then I just ended up staying in Pennsylvania, then New York, and then I moved up to Boston, met a lot of people and played around as kind of a singer-songwriter type person and then eventually started my band.

TST: How did your musical style change once you started the band?

RL: I went from like a Cambridge person into a Boston person. I started hanging out at The Rat, and my whole musical style changed. People from Cambridge who had known my nice little songs from before thought I’d lost my mind. They just couldn’t believe it. I went from somebody that would play at Passim, or there was this place called The Idler, into someone who would just be a banshee with my new band. I was just kinda hit over the head with a brick, kinda like, whoa, this music is really vital that I was hearing around. New music and all the bands that were playing at the Rat and those kinds of places. It was really a vital era for music. It reminded me of what was happening in the mid- to late-60s here in LA.

TST: Did you know anything about MTV when it premiered?

RL: No, because it had just started. We didn’t even know why we were making videos, really. We didn’t think ours was very cool, you know. You couldn’t get MTV in Boston, so when we’d be on the road, we’d see the video in different places ‘cause everybody was playing MTV in their clubs.

TST: Do you have any particularly unpleasant memories of being on the road?

RL: We played with The Undertones. They didn’t like us at all. We liked them, but their fans were throwing lemons at us and screaming at us to get off the stage, calling us pop stars. One guy grabbed the mike from me at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go – this was after we were signed, but Warner Bros. was there – and was going, “You suck! You suck! You suck!”

When I was married to Andy Summers, he used to tell me stories about England in the early 60s, they had the mods and the rockers. It was just like that: the mods were for us and the rockers were for the Undertones. I guess those were Spinal Tap moments, but not really. I don’t think we were quite as dumb as those guys!

TST: What brought about the rerelease of the material included on Many Years Ago?

RL: Dan Perloff from Manifesto Records called me up a few years ago and said that he would help me get my copyrights back. And then about a year after that, he said, if you want, we could put those songs out – and anything else that you want – on a CD. That’s how that came to be. I guess they do that with a lot of people, like the Turtles, Allan Holdsworth, a whole bunch of people.

TST: How did it feel to listen to those songs all over again?

RL: They remastered them, and they sound good. Kind of surprising. There are some songs I even like. (laughs) “Wow. This is really good!” In a way, some of them are dated and some of them are not. I mean, I moved on musically. I don’t like to stay in one place.

TST: How did Songbird Sings originate and how has it evolved?

RL: I ran into a bunch of women when I moved out to western Massachusetts and they were having writing groups. It was some kind of method that came from Amherst. Not judging or critiquing, but more finding what you liked.

They found out I was a songwriter and they asked me If I could teach them how to write songs. So I just jumped into it. I had no idea that all these women were survivors of various kinds of trauma, like childhood abuse, domestic violence, you name it. Later I found out, and it reminded me of some things that had happened to me.

And I just continued doing that and saw how the effect of writing their own story, or even part of their story, in a song, how that was so good for them. So healing. Then later I started my nonprofit, Songbird Sings. I started working with girls that had been trafficked, young girls, and some older women that were trafficked and had been kidnapped and sold into prostitution. The whole gamut of those kind of things that you hear about.

Now I work with veterans, too, with PTSD. When I get back, I’ll be doing a workshop with people that are in recovery from addictions. It’s so great. I just wish I had tons of money to be able to do it all the time and not have to go seeking money. Writing grants is not quite my forte!