Skip to main content

The Concerts: 1998

Some years are marked by significant transitions, and 1998 certainly qualifies as such a year. I started the year working at Michigan Wherehouse Records in Mt. Pleasant, shifting over to the Ann Arbor WHR store when I moved to Brighton in May, only to leave Brighton at the end of August to start my job at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey as a full-time faculty member, a job I hold to this day.

What remained constant, however, was my love of music. Not a lot of shows, but quality over quantity:

Rammstein [The Metro, Chicago 5.4]
Beck [Pine Knob 6.2]
Kraftwerk [State Theatre, Detroit 6.11]
Ivy [Shelter 6.17]
John Fogerty [Pine Knob 6.18]
Curve [St. Andrew’s Hall 6.20]
The Prodigy [State Theatre, Detroit 6.24]
Lilith Fair ‘98 [Pine Knob 7.6]
Tricky [Clutch Cargo’s 7.23]
Smokin’ Grooves ’98 (Public Enemy, Cypress Hill) [Pine Knob 7.29]
Dishwalla [Shelter 8.22]
Esthero [St. Andrew’s Hall 8.22]
Bauhaus [The Riviera, Chicago 8.27]
The Tragically Hip [Orbit Room 9.24]
Family Values Tour (Korn, Rammstein) [The Palace of Auburn Hills 9.30]
The Church [House Of Blues, Chicago 10.1]
The Church [7th House, Pontiac 10.2]
Ratdog [State Theatre, Detroit 11.7]

As usual, so many highlights:
  • Having dinner with the guys from Dishwalla and, despite not liking their album that much, really rooting for those super-nice dudes to succeed
  • Standing next to Detroit techno heavyweights (Derrick May, Jeff Mills, etc.) with the same awe for Kraftwerk as I was feeling at that moment
  • Soaking in the dark theatricality of a fully revived and reunited Bauhaus playing with the coiled energy of a band with something to prove
  • The back-to-back experience of The Church as their current line-up settled and found their strength
  • Finally seeing Public Enemy on the Smokin' Grooves tour and smelling the most second-hand weed smoke aside from the Steely Dan shows
  • Placating my then-girlfriend by going to Ratdog -- featuring former members of the Grateful Dead -- and marveling at the friendly and benign attitude of the fans (although the music was less than compelling for me)
  • Hanging backstage with the sweet Canadian dudes from the Hip and seeing Gord Downie's beaming face when I told him I wanted neither pictures nor signed stuff, that instead I just wanted to thank him for making such compelling and meaningful music
  • Watching Rammstein bring the spectacle full-blast, either without fire (Chicago) or with (Detroit)

I wish I could say that there were more shows, that I took full advantage of being in Ann Arbor for those months, but it didn't shake out like that. And once I got the Petoskey job, the door was shut on those great WHR years, never to return, which meant that the comp tickets and guest lists trickled to nearly nothing. But at least I have the memories, as well as the hearing loss.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

"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...
4 comments
Read more