Its closing was due in part to the increasing cost of hiring bands who were playing more and more at large outdoor festivals and arena rock concerts.

[1] Originally playing host exclusively to local acts, the venue quickly began to attract famous artists, including the Grateful Dead, Chicago, Neil Young, The J. Geils Band, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, The Allman Brothers Band, Joe Cocker & the Grease Band, Led Zeppelin, The Stooges, Dr. John, Free, The Buddy Miles Express, Charlie Musselwhite, Jeff Beck, The Who, The Byrds, Santana, Taj Mahal, Ten Years After and Sly and the Family Stone.

[6][7] According to the club's former manager, Steve Nelson, "People in Boston just adopted them, and that ranges from Harvard graduate students to tough kids from the neighborhood...and that really was the start of their, I guess we could call it a residency.

Wall-to-wall hippies, bikers, Harvard students, Northeastern students, fashion models, professors, drug dealers, art teachers, groupies, MIT students, photographers, local thugs, local disc jockeys, skinny-bohemian-artist girls, visiting dignitaries from the New York art scene, and the royalty of the Boston music set — the local singers and guitar-players in their mod suits strolling around with their beautiful girlfriends.An infamous concert featuring the Velvet Underground (as headliners) and the recently signed MC5, took place at the Tea Party in December 1968.

"[10] The Tea Party was also the site of a 1969 Velvet Underground show whose bootleg became known as the Guitar Amp Tapes because the microphone was placed inside Lou Reed's amplifier.

[11] In its previous incarnation as a branch of the Filmmakers' Cinémathèque, the Tea Party building itself had a connection to the Velvet Underground: it served as a showcase for underground filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, who managed the band for a time, and Jonas Mekas,[12] a friend who let them rehearse in his loft and filmed their famous performance at the Annual Dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry in 1966.