Have spent the evening avoiding most of my usual blog-reading since I really feel like I need a break from the clown maglev. The stupid, it burns. So I've been whiling away the last few hours (aka, wasting) surfing concert videos on youtube. I'm doing one of those "song challenge" meme things on fbook and I'm on the day where I'm supposed to pick a song from the best concert I ever saw. Of course, I can't pick one "best concert." Hell, I try to do a top 10 list of music and end up with 3 CDs. I'm up to 4 so far but there's about a half-dozen other great shows I'll probably include. Assuming I can find decent live footage on youtube. A couple of (theoretically) interesting things have come up while messing around with this.
For one, I've found three clips so far from shows that I was at. Big Black at CBGB in 1986, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Central Park in 1993, and Hot Club of Cowtown at Casbah here in Durham last year. I'm actually surprised I haven't found more footage of recent shows. Phones keep getting smaller and the picture quality they can capture keeps getting better and better. I guess I understand why performers and venue issue no recording policies and statements but I kinda wonder why they bother. I went looking to see if there was any footage from this Cure show I saw back in 1984 at the Beacon. There wasn't but there are 20+ pages of videos from Cure shows at the Beacon in November 2011.
So that's another thing I learned -- that the Cure did a (not quite a) farewell tour last year which included three nights at the Beacon in NYC, playing their first three albums in their entirety. Wow. If you'd told me back when I was waiting on line to buy Cure tix in '84 that they'd be playing the same theater 27 years later, I'm sure I wouldn't have believed it. In a way, I'm kinda glad I never heard anything about those shows. Cos they were over Thanksgiving weekend so it is actually imaginable that we could've gotten up there for one of them. On the other hand, tix were anywhere from 60$ to 100$.
And thinking about that Cure show and "best concerts" in general got me to wondering about how many of what I think of as "best" shows were also the first time I'd seen the band. I used to think that was always true, that the first time was always the best. But I've modified that over time. Some bands just get better. Either the material is better or the players or they just do better in a different space (maybe bigger, maybe smaller). The first Cure show I saw was amazing and new and it knocked me on my ass but if I had to pick the best Cure show I saw it'd probably be Radio City. Maybe MSG but the sound there wasn't nearly as good as at the Music Hall. For me, the 80s versions of the Cure got better as they got into bigger and bigger halls. Unlike, say, Psychedelic Furs who were never better than the first time I saw them (in DC on the Forever Now tour). As they got bigger, they got slicker and lost most of their edge and sense of danger. Some bands are just better in an intimate setting. Like Hot Club of Cowtown. Altho I can't decide whether the house concert we saw them do back about 10 years ago was better than their gig at Casbah. The house concert was amazing but I do think they picked up energy from the crowd and especially the dancers at Casbah.
Well, I'm not sure what my point was anymore. So, goodnight.