The Concerts: 1996

As always, I'm sure there are some I've missed, but...

Love And Rockets [St. Andrew’s Hall 4.5]
Fred Schneider [St. Andrew’s Hall 4.26]
Lush [St. Andrew’s Hall 5.5]
Holy Barbarians [St. Andrew’s Hall 5.30]
Tori Amos [Fox Theatre, Detroit 5.31]
Garbage [St. Andrew’s Hall 6.1]
Everclear / Spacehog [Pine Knob 7.11]
The Cure [The Palace of Auburn Hills 7.13]
Dead Can Dance [Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor 7.21]
Everything But The Girl [Royal Oak Music Theatre 7.26]
Steely Dan [Pine Knob 7.31]
The Tragically Hip [Orbit Room 8.13]
Throwing Muses [7th House, Pontiac 8.16]
Red House Painters [Blind Pig 8.31]
James Taylor Quartet [Shelter 9.2]
Bruce Springsteen (Solo Acoustic) [Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor 9.26]
Chris Isaak / Fiona Apple [Fox Theatre, Detroit 10.26]
Suzanne Vega [Royal Oak Music Theatre 11.6]

Certainly, this was the year where I saw one of the best shows I've ever seen in my life, which would be Dead Can Dance (and the solo Bruce show wasn't that bad, either). But this was also the year of meeting a scared and skinny Fiona Apple backstage at the Fox, as well as being one of less than a hundred people present for Fred Schneider blowing the doors off of St. Andrew's Hall, so there were certainly more than a few highlights. A good year, except for the girlfriend transitions.

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"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

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Triple Feature

For the first time since its inception, I was unable to see even one film at the Traverse City Film Festival this year. It wasn't for lack of desire, of course, but rather a scheduling conflict between the TCFF and Lollapalooza, which I attended for the second straight year. (Two quick takeaways from Lolla '18 -- rock music attendance is in the minority, and the young kids enjoy wearing basketball jerseys of varying vintages. And I'm old as fuck.) So to make up for my absence at the TCFF, I decided that yesterday would be my own TCFF in miniature, so I went to three movies back to back to back. I walked into a darkened theater at 3:30pm, and essentially didn't leave until just before 11pm. And thankfully, I was able to see three pretty wonderful movies, each wonderful for different reasons. You should see them if you haven't already. The troika of cinematic joy is as follows, with trailers to click on should you so desire: Mission Impossible: Fallout Rare is the...

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