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.

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...

"I'll Drive You Home"

Upon reflection, I’ve had a fortunate life in the area of work. As a freshly minted teenager, I would visit Evergreen Park Grocery and dream of someday working there like my father did, and at the age of 14, I got $2/hour to live out that dream, such as it was. From there, I yearned to try other occupations, from record stores to teaching, and I’d be chuffed to tell Young Erick that both of those things happened in due course. ( Oh, and Young Erick, one of them got you to meet David Bowie, and one of them got you to own houses and cars, so I’ll let you ponder on which one was better. ) I even got to DJ a bit here and there, and while it never hit the heights of a professional radio gig, it was certainly better than the summer I played preset cassettes on my boom box for a nerd camp dance while my unrequited crush stayed in her room. What I never crossed off my professional life list was acting, either regular or voice, but while I still yearn for that big breakthrough -- seriously, ask...

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