The Concerts: 1993

When I reflect on 1993, the following things pop to mind:

*my first semester of grad classes in the winter (although the proper acceptance into grad school was yet to come)

*sweating the summer away in the Forum in MtP while I worked at MI Wherehouse Records (the first summer that I didn't work at Evergreen Park Grocery since '85)

*going to one meeting of my I/O Psych fall class and dropping it 'cause my heart wasn't in it (the only grad class I ever dropped)

*the beginning of my Comedy Night MC career at Boomer's in MtP

*these concerts:

Daniel Ash [St. Andrew's Hall 3.19]
Prince & The New Power Generation [Fox Theatre Detroit 4.2]
Duran Duran / Terence Trent D'Arby [Pine Knob 8.4]
Steely Dan [The Palace of Auburn Hills 8.13]
Neil Young / Soundgarden [Pine Knob 8.16]
Depeche Mode / The The [The Palace of Auburn Hills 10.22]
Curve [St. Andrew's Hall 12.7]

I hadn't really opened up the concert floodgates (that would be in '94), but it's a few tentative steps in that direction. Without question, the Neil Young & Soundgarden show was one of the loudest fucking shows I've ever been to in my life; Neil was backed by the surviving members of Booker T. & The MG's, but all nuance was blasted into oblivion by the towering stacks of Marshall amps. So, so loud, even with earplugs.

The Dan was The Dan, and Curve was still narcotic and dark. Prince (just a year or so away from changing his name to "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince") was stunning in his virtuosity, from piano to guitar to singing to dancing to wry looks. Depeche Mode openers The The were touring on their album Dusk, featuring Johnny Marr from The Smiths (who didn't tour with them, as I recollect); not only was Dusk a great The The record, but a song or two sounded as close to The Smiths as anything I've ever heard. [Try the song "Slow Emotion Replay" if you don't believe me.] Again, I might have missed some, but that list is pretty close.

And then came 1994, or "the year that concerts broke." Oh boy.

Comments

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

"Lost" pre and post

So the season five finale of Lost came and went last night, two hours of riddles, questions asked and posed, and a few genuine "WTF?" moments here and there. In other words, it reaffirmed Godhead status for me, and now I'll have to wait until 2010 to see the sixth and final season wrap up some of the mysteries. Here's what I wrote before seeing last night's capper: My assumptions are that the atomic bomb will detonate, causing the flood of electromagnetic energy that the concrete slab at The Swan will attempt to contain. Furthermore, the energy will push the time-displaced people ahead to the future, where they will band together to save the island from the newest plane crash survivors, who are most likely connected to the original '50s military presence in some fashion. People will die and stay dead, and some people will die and stick around. And there's a great possibility that everything I've conjectured won't happen, either. The fifth seaso...

THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Search This Blog