A dozen songs by bands I’ve seen live, in honor of the fact that I’m planning to attend my first live concert in about a thousand years — thanks to a very kind invitation (scroll down to the comments) and a wife who owes me big for five days of three-on-one childcare while she visited multiple coasts on business:
1. Richard Thompson: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
TheWife (who was, at the time, TheGirlfriend) and I saw him at some goofy hippie festival in Marin County back in the late 90s. It was a daytime show, just him standing alone on a stage with his guitar, running through a 90-minute career retrospective while maybe three or four dozen people sat on the grass, enjoying über-organic picnic foods and some really wonderful music. The crime, of course, was the fact that beyond those three or four dozen people, there were probably close to a hundred tie-dyed morons too busy milling around the hand-crafted bong vendors to pay attention to the legendary singer/songwriter/guitarist performing for their benefit. At one point, a couple of women started doing the “dancing in circles, seeing the music” thing, and Thompson noted their enthusiasm by offering to play some Grateful Dead covers. Very, very funny guy.
2. Red House Painters: I Am A Rock
I dragged TheWife and our friend KK to the Great American Music Hall to see Kozelek & Co., who had billed their music as “dreary slop.” Good times! When RHP first stepped on stage, Kozelek announced, “Welcome to the Three Hour Tour. We’re calling it that because that’s about the average length of show we’re putting on. Hope you’re comfortable!” TheWife and KK were more than a little horrified, but I was thrilled: three-plus hours with the kings of sadcore.
A big surprise: they were loud as hell. On CD, RHP was all acoustics and echoes and hushed, sad vocals… live, they were wall-shakers, with melodies rising out of the waves of feedback and guitar crunch. Despite the volume, however, it was a 9pm show… and RHP didn’t actually come on until about 10:30 or 11pm… so by 1pm, both TheWife and KK were actually falling asleep at our table. (Yes, the Great American Music Hall occasionally had tables. It was sweet.) So I had to leave early. Damn you, fatigue! (shaking fist)
3. Rollins Band: You Didn’t Need
This was a transformative experience for me. In the summer of 1991, in an attempt to recover from what I can only describe as a romantic apolcalypse, I found myself living in a welfare motel on Cape Cod (yes, such things do exist), working part-time at a pizza place and trying not to get shot and/or stabbed by the… uh… colorful crowd that frequented the bar on the motel’s first floor. As it happened, that summer also marked the very first Lollapalooza — and in a late-season attempt to try to re-enter society, I enlisted my friend Shinowski to join me at Great Woods for the show.
Rollins was the opener, and while the great majority of the crowd was still out in the parking lot getting loaded, Shinowski and I were in our seats, soaking up what very quickly became a completely spellbinding exercise in rage. I was entranced: here was a guy pounding out song after song about pain, and anger, and betrayal, and… well, basically all the stuff that had been bouncing around my head during my time in the welfare motel. It was cathartic, and coupled with a not-dissimilar set from Nine Inch Nails (who, remember, were a new and largely unheard phenomenon at the time) opened my eyes to the joys of really, really angry music.
The next day, I hauled ass to the only Newbury Comics on Cape Cod and picked up shiny new cassettes of both Turned On and Pretty Hate Machine. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my life was really never the same again afterwards.
4. The Posies: Dream All Day
Ah, the Posies. TheWife’s favorite band of the 90s. We saw them at Slim’s in San Francisco, where they put on a tremendous performance despite the fact that either Jon or Ken was ready to die from the flu, and either Ken or Jon was sporting one of the most dynamic electric purple hairdye jobs I’ve ever seen. I don’t really remember much more, but that’s honestly more a reflection of our robust… uh… dinner at the Twenty-Tank Brewery across the street beforehand than the show itself.
5. Low: Canada
This would be the last show that I saw: Eitzel opening for Low at the Black Cat in DC, three years ago. Which, coincidentally, was also the last time that TheWife and I spent a night away together without children. Which, coincidentally, may have also been the weekend that we… uh… generated the twins who showed up the following summer. (Granted, my math is kind of fuzzy, so this may not be entirely accurate…. but the important thing is that I’ve convinced my friend Angus, in whose home we were staying at the time, that this is the case — thereby skeeving him out forever.)
6. Billy Bragg: An Accident Waiting To Happen
This was a nice win-win scenario for TheWife and me: a dual-headliner bill at Boston’s Harbor Lights Pavilion, with Billy Bragg and Barenaked Ladies. Despite running into a kinda-sorta ex-girlfriend of mine before the show started – and despite the fact that I had to sit through nearly 2 hours of Barenaked Ladies – we had a terrific time. Like Richard Thompson, Bragg performed solo — just him, his guitar, his voice and his trenchant sense of humor. His between-song patter was something close to stand-up comedy (Billy on his infant son: “He’s just starting to learn to talk. Simple stuff, like mama, dada, international socialism now…”), and his actual performance… well, if you know anything about Billy Bragg, you know that he’s an absolutely electric live performer. In the once and future words of the NBA’s marketing department: faaaaaaantastic.
7. The Blue Nile: Stay
The Blue Nile is something of an enigma. Three Scottish guys who rarely record (4 albums over the course of the past 23 years), hardly ever tour, and who have a small but devoted US cult audience of people (like me) who are left dumbstrick by their “yearning for something loved and lost at 3am in the rain” aesthetic. That being said… the moment I found out they were touring the US, I couldn’t buy my tickets fast enough. We saw them at the Fillmore in San Francisco – the only show I ever saw there – with The Sunshine Club (a lovely and long-forgotten SF sadcore band) opening… just lovely.
8. Mark Eitzel: Sacred Heart
I’ve seen Eitzel twice in concert: once at the aforementioned Low show in DC, and once a few years ago at the Great American Music Hall, which I described (sort of) here. I can appreciate that he’s something of an acquired taste, but for me he’s an absolute touchstone. What Bukowski was to poetry, Carver was to short stories and Russell Banks – at his best – is to long-form fiction, Eitzel is to song.
(As an aside… I’m not the kind of guy who buys a lot of “Live” CDs, but I have to say that Eitzel’s Songs of Love is a tremendously moving document of a performer at his peak. Just so you know.)
9. Buffalo Tom: Taillights Fade
We saw them at Boston’s Avalon in early September of ’99. We’d just moved back to the east coast from San Francisco, and were preparing for our wedding later that month up in Maine. This concert was meant to be one of our last evenings out as unmarried people, so we thought we’d do it right with a loooooong Beer Works dinner followed by a couple of hours enjoying one of our favorite bands. Which we did. To be honest, I don’t recall anything about the show itself – other than the general impression that we had a good time – but I do remember the pleasant surprise of running into my friend Shinowski’s sister. She was out with some friends (who we didn’t meet), so we only talked to her for two or three minutes, but I remember giving her a big hug and talking about how excited she was to join us up north in a few weeks.
A little more than a month later, we buried her.
10. Big Country: In A Big Country
It was close to a decade past their heyday, but Big Country put on a tremendous show for a huge, drunken crowd in one of Cork’s larger clubs. Easily the closest I came to a full-on mosh pit in Ireland. GREAT time.
11. The Bats: Dancing As The Boat Goes Down
We saw them in Boston’s Middle East downstairs waaaaaay back in the early 90s. They were part of the NoiZyland Tour (say it out loud and it makes sense), a coast-to-coast tour of three of Kiwipop’s finest: The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, The Bats and Straitjacket Fits. We were just out of college and probably only a month or two into our first crappy jobs, so the idea of going to a concert on a school night – knowing we’d have to be back at our desks, bright-eyed and bushy tailed at 9am the next morning – was an entirely new experience for TheGirlfriendWhoBecameTheWife and me. Perhaps presaging our Red House Painters experience, she got sleepy about three songs into the Fits segment, so we left early… but really, we were there for The Bats. Joyous, jangly, strummingly hummable music that had caught my attention months before — and whom I’d subsequently introduced to this very, very pretty girl. I loved that she was willing to listen to something different. I loved that she was willing to go to some club on a Tuesday night to see a bunch of antipodians hammer away at their instruments. And, most of all, I loved that she was willing to do it all with me.
12. The Afghan Whigs: Debonair
One of the best shows I ever attended. The Whigs were relishing their monent of great triumph – their terrific album Gentleman was garnishing real airplay – and I was head over heels for their unique brand of bitterness and rhythmic complexity. The Spinanes opened, and if you’ve never thought that two people could make just as much wonderful noise as a full 4- or 5-piece… well, before I saw the Spinanes, I wouldn’t have thought so, either. And then the Whigs came out and completely wrecked house. About halfway through the show, they busted out a New Order cover – I think it was “Blue Monday,” although to be honest I’m not sure – which testified to both A) Greg Dulli’s sense of humor, and B) their ability to make anything sound completely kickass. Afterwards, Dulli was kind of chuckling to himself as the band played the opening notes of “Debonair”… and in that split second right before the song kicked into full gear, he screamed “New Order rules” and then the song exploded into full fury and the crowd went completely berserk and…
Damn, that was fun.
In the wake of the season’s first big snowstorm – where it took me 1:50 to travel 7 miles home from work (including a stop at daycare), and apparently I was one of the lucky ones – I have two passionate declarations to make:
