Come Together

RAIN – A Tribute to the Beatles
23 January 2011: EJ Thomas Hall, Akron, Ohio

Honestly, when we purchased our season subscription to Broadway in Akron, none of us were entirely sure what RAIN was, other than something involving the Beatles. Although, in reality, it’s nothing more than a tribute band show, that’s selling it a bit short.

I find it fascinating that the Broadway reviews of RAIN all seem to talk about it being another way for aging baby boomers to relive the glory days of the Beatles and their catalog. While the show at EJ Thomas Hall was primarily boomers, there was a healthy 19-and-under contingent in attendance – including my kiddo. Tracy has been under the weather, so I took Jack with me. He’s been to concerts before (The Black Keys, Bob Dylan, Jake Shimabukuro), he’s been to theater productions before, and he digs the Beatles, but this was a funky little mix of all those things.

Beginning with their arrival on American soil for the historic Ed Sullivan Show appearance and using the musicians’ costume changes as signposts, the show moves in rough chronological order through the Beatles career. And, as proven repeatedly throughout the years, it’s difficult to find a Beatles tune that isn’t instantly recognizable, so nearly every song was a sing-along affair.

In the same way it’s difficult to comprehend how The Greatest Generation literally saved the world, I struggle to wrap my head around just how seismic the musical paradigm shift was when the Beatles arrived. In context of the times, it’s amazing to think about these teenagers’ minds being completely blown by an aesthetic and sound that had never been seen or heard previously, and what that experience must have been like. I don’t know that there will ever be another popular cultural revolution like it. You could argue things like the rise of personal computers or the internet, but those weren’t specific moments in time to our collective conscience. We can accurately point to the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan as the exact instant at which music changed.

The timelessness of the Beatles catalog is as impressive as its near-universal familiarity. The entire hall was rocking throughout, singing along, clapping, people standing up and dancing. While perhaps not as fervent as a true Beatles show back in the day, the night crackled with energy.

The sparse sets were unobtrusive, with the focus primarily on the musicians and music, and the three projection screens to enhance the experience. From the Ed Sullivan period, the performers took the audience through the Shea Stadium concert, the Sgt. Pepper era, the Abbey Road and rooftop concert years, and more.

The Fab Four of RAIN did a great job approximating their respective Beatles. Our seats were just far enough away to help maintain the illusion that they just might have been the real Beatles up on the stage. Along with our John, Paul, George, and Ringo, there is also a fifth on stage each night on keyboards to supplement the show. In the RAIN franchise there are three to four different John, Paul, George, and Ringos who tour or perform on Broadway, along with a pair of keyboardists. In a nice hometown touch, our “Paul” was a Northeast Ohio native, Robert “Mac” Ruffing.

With half of the original group now gone and already multiple generations past the group’s working period, it’s easier to make the argument for this tribute band than for something like a KISS or Aerosmith tribute band because there is simply no other way to hear Beatles music live. And while I’m sure it’s possible, you’d have to work pretty hard to come up with a crappy setlist. (Although the kiddo desperately wanted RAIN to play “Yellow Submarine” – they didn’t. But I think the “When I’m 64” sing-along helped smooth things over for him.) I guess you’re pretty much guaranteed a standing ovation if you’re doing it right, and that’s just what the cast of RAIN got when they came through Akron.

First Communion

David Lee Roth
29 September 1986: Richfield Coliseum, Richfield, Ohio

The first concert concert I attended was David Lee Roth at the Richfield Coliseum. I went to the show with Courtney. She was a few years older than me and had just moved to the school district. My dad was in the local Lions Club chapter and I believe Courtney’s dad joined when they moved to our area. I seem to recall meeting her at one of our dads’ Lions Club family functions.

My musical tastes and my parents’ rarely cross, but especially then. My older sister Karen was into popular music – I remember her going to Rick Springfield and Jack Wagner and Corey Hart concerts in high school, all pretty tame. I am, however, grateful for the music Karen exposed me to and my subsequent appreciation for early ’80s pop music. From there, though, I moved on to a cocktail of hard rock and classic rock, a fairly natural progression for mid-’80s Midwestern adolescent. Rush, Boston, Aerosmith, Def Leppard, The Doors, Mötley Crüe, Led Zeppelin, and, of course, Van Halen.

I was a huge Van Halen fan in middle school and early high school. While I was ok with the Van Hagar incarnation (and saw them a couple of years later headline the Monsters of Rock Tour), it was the original lineup that always made me giddy. And, although Diamond Dave’s output took a nosedive after Eat ‘Em and Smile, that first solo album was a lot of fun.

With the Eat ‘Em and Smile concert just days before my sixteenth birthday and that I was going with someone older my parents seemed to trust, they relented and let me go. I don’t remember too much about the concert, to be honest. I vaguely remember the glam (now seemingly camp) metal group Cinderella opening for Roth. They had a few songs with videos that were in fairly heavy rotation on MTV that were up my alley at the time.

The now-long gone Richfield Coliseum was a cinderblock affair set in the middle of nowhere, about 20 miles south of Cleveland, and the only venue in Northeast Ohio outside of the Blossom Music Center amphitheater nearby in Cuyahoga Falls. These venues would be the site of the bulk of my mainstream concert-going activities until discovering modern rock/college radio acts in the late ’80s and the smaller downtown Cleveland stages they hung about.

Courtney got our tickets. Our seats were probably about two-thirds of the way down the floor, on an aisle, next to the front corner of the mixing board. The metal folding chair may or may not have been red cushioned, but even 25 years later I can recall that feeling of heady excitement standing on the deathtrap, straining for the best possible view of Diamond Dave while doing my best to not lose my balance and be eaten by the chair Snoopy style à la A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

Much like Cinderella’s set, I couldn’t tell you specifics about what Roth and his band played that night. I don’t remember any of Steve Vai’s solos or Billy Sheehan’s playing. What I do remember was being struck by the somehow intimate experience of sharing the night with 20,000 strangers. And that communal feeling extended beyond the night of the show. I remember buying my first concert t-shirt and wearing it to school the next day. I was suddenly in a club – exclusive to those that had been to a rock show, a concert at the Coliseum. I had credibility of sorts. It was a very cool feeling.

I lost track of Courtney quickly after she graduated, but I will always be grateful for her role in finally getting me to my first rock show.

I may not be a huge David Lee Roth fan these days, but that first experience of witnessing music I love live – the raw power, the transcending energy, the sense of community – was transformative. For a kid to whom music was so important to anyway, the live experience forever altered how I both perceive and listen to music.

When Music Matters Most

My blog post on The Cure’s Disintegration has prompted some great feedback via comments, Twitter, and email. One of those personal emails was from my good friend and musical confidant Jeff. I’m of the mind that if he had intended for the contents of the email to be shared with a wider audience, he would have sent it as a comment on the blog, but there are some sentiments in his email that I think are worth exploring a bit and using as a jumping off point.

Jeff agreed with my observations on the importance of specific albums being tied to the fervor of one’s fandom at the time of its release, as well as the ties between songs and memories. But to me, his most interesting observation was that “all of the really memorable and important albums [in his life] are from high school and college.”

This is an idea I have always maintained. I wear my sentimentality on my sleeve, and I have no problem looking backwards in order to understand my present. There is something to be said about that period in your life – college in particular, that carries immense weight in shaping who we become as adults.

Jeff and John and I all went to college together, and they, along with Jen and Erin, were my closest friends that freshman year at Bowling Green. John and I have talked at length about the importance of the first year of college. Never before or after in one’s life do we find ourselves away from home for the first time, thrown into a hyper-real mini-society that combines all the cliquishness of high school with the quasi-responsibility of young adulthood. Everything is dramatic. Every decision is the Most. Important. Decision. Ever.

Because of this, at least among my friends it seems, the music of that era is imparted with more significance than music from any other time in our lives. Meeting and dating my wife, getting married. All arguably more significant periods in my life, and music accompanied them all, but not in the way it did when I was 18 and 19 years-old. I have mentioned before how U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind is the only album I can think of that entered my adult consciousness with anywhere near the importance of the music from my youth.

Last year, I wrote about that significance this way in a blog post about Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine: “The closest any other album has ever come to being as fundamentally meaningful to a period in my life is U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Released just after my 30th birthday at the end of 2000, this collection of songs became the soundtrack to our return to Ohio after ten years away, our trip to Paris, the birth of our son, our friendship with Jeff and Anna, our post-9/11 trip to New York City in December 2001, and on and on. But it was different, in that this was a collective soundtrack for experiences Tracy and I shared. And if you’re lucky, your thirties inhabit a very different worldview from that of your 19-year-old self.”

From a practical perspective, I don’t think we consume music in the same way we once did. Listening to Disintegration over and over as I was writing about the album, I recognized that as each song was ending I knew instinctively the next song’s opening notes. I anticipated them, and took comfort in that familiarity. I think that comes from being a product of the last generation to listen to music on LPs and cassette tapes. There was no “shuffle” or downloaded singles. It wasn’t until compact discs that we had a random play option outside of mix tapes (which, of course, are set playlists anyway). And now with digital downloads we live in a singles driven, “album optional” world.

While the way music is consumed affects what is listened to (i.e., our downloadable world lends itself to singles versus whole albums), that doesn’t diminish the importance of the music to today’s youth. I’m sure they are hit just as hard by “their” music today as we were at the same age by “our” music.

Canadian Mash-Up

Sarah McLachlan
15 December 1997: UCF Arena, Orlando, Florida

The other week, there was a parking and traffic mess in trying to get the kiddo to and from his drum lessons on the campus of the University of Akron because there was an event across the street at EJ Thomas Hall that night. On the way off campus, I finally saw the marquee and realized Sarah McLachlan was performing that night, which immediately transported me back 13 years to a concert Tracy and I attended at the University of Central Florida.

We went through a stretch there in the late ’90s where Tracy was winning every flipping contest she entered! Didn’t matter if it was a radio call-in, or at our local CD store, or drawings, or whatever. If Tracy threw her name in the hat, it inevitable was the one selected. We had dinner and VIP tickets to see Duncan Sheik and Lisa Loeb at the Atlantic Dance Club at Disney’s Boardwalk; we saw the Wallflowers at the Hard Rock Café; we attended New Year’s Eve at Disney’s Pleasure Island with Joan Jett and Men at Work that included a night’s stay at the Contemporary resort and limo service to and from Pleasure Island. It was crazy how she scored over and over with these contests.

The particular contest tied to Sarah McLachlan was through Disc Go Round. I don’t know if they are still around, but they were a sort of used CD store franchise. “Ours” was on SR 50 in Colonial Plaza across from TooJay’s, one of our favorite eateries back in the day (and around the corner from Beefy King!). Tracy and I lived nearby in the Conway and Lake Underhill area of Orlando at the time. Because we had both worked at CD stores back in the day and have always been lovers of music, we would go to the store often and got to know the owner.

The cool thing about Disc Go Round (and, as I recall, CD Warehouse had a similar model but with less friendly staff) was that they were the first used CD store I had been to with listening stations. But unlike full booth style ones you used to have in old vinyl record stores, these were just multi-disc players set up on a kitchen bar type counter with barstools and headphones for each station. You could take the empty CD case to the staff and they would pull the corresponding disc and queue it up for you on the player. Tracy and I could waste all kinds of time there!

Tracy had entered the contest at the store because we wanted to see Barenaked Ladies. It’s rare for me to queue up the Barenaked Ladies anymore, but there was a time they were in heavy rotation. Tracy introduced me to their music, and we saw them perform numerous times around Orlando, including in the parking lot of the Hard Rock Café (they had a cool concert series at the time that was cheap and fun and took advantage of the weather). Tracy ended up winning the tickets, and we were treated to one of the most peculiar line-ups we’d ever come across. We joked it was an odd sort of Great White North bill, with Chicago’s Freddy Jones Band opening (who we had, admittedly, never heard of before that night), followed by Canada’s Barenaked Ladies, and headlined by their then-label mate and fellow countrywoman Sarah McLachlan. At the time, she was huge, touring behind the Surfacing album and riding high off the success of the inaugural Lilith Fair music festival she had organized earlier that summer.

Tracy had McLachlan’s Solace, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and Surfacing, but we were clearly going to see Barenaked Ladies! We wanted jokey, goofy, Kraft Cheese throwing fun! We were definitely in it for a good time. It was a cold December night in Central Florida, and the university is nowhere near where we lived. I remember finally getting to the venue after a long line of traffic snaked its way through campus and finding our seats. We weathered the Freddy Jones Band, then had a rollicking good time with Barenaked Ladies touring on Born On a Pirate Ship, and they were amazing.

Eventually, though, they finished their set and soon McLachlan took the stage and the entire tone of the night changed. Melancholy, wistful, longing, and lovely. Decidedly not what we had come for with the Barenaked Ladies set. Soon, some of the girls near us began shouting “We love you, Sarah!” It was, well, odd. Tracy and I hardly knew what to make of it initially, then we began to realize that we were surrounded almost entirely by college girls. Crunchy, granola college girls so overwhelmed with emotion they had tears running down their cheeks as they screamed in adoration.

We quickly figured out that “gay college girls” were a key demographic of McLachlan’s at the time. (Maybe still?) The combination of overwrought emotion and cries of love seemed to only grow as the show continued. Tracy and I ended up leaving the show early, maybe halfway through McLachlan’s set. We were just too unnaturally amused by this clearly odd mix of acts, the completely different tones of both their sets, and their core audiences. It was a strange, strange night.

Another Time Undone

I finally got the deluxe edition of The Cure's Disintegration. It was a long time coming – both for the long-delayed album to finally be released last year and for me to actually get around to picking it up. As much as I love The Cure’s music up to that album, they peaked with Disintegration. Then everything changed after that: The ’80s were over, high school had ended, I left Ohio.

Originally released in May 1989, this was the sole Cure album to come out while I was deep (deep!) in my punk phase. And while I can and do love their other work like “A Few Hours After This…” and Pornography and “The Caterpillar” and Head on the Door and (especially) Faith, there is something to be said for the album that is released when you are actively a fan of a group that makes it that much more personal. Similarly, for example, Nine Inch Nails will never be as good as they were with Pretty Hate Machine, or Depeche Mode with Violator, to my ears.

Disintegration was the soundtrack to the end of my senior year of high school and that turbulent summer immediately after. My girlfriend at the time, the one who pushed me to explore my creative side and expand my musical tastes and really helped set me on the path to becoming the person I ultimately grew into, left me and moved to San Francisco to be with her ex-boyfriend (I never said the relationship was healthy), and I was left alone to process the emotional void.

The album was both the background against and inspiration for the bulk of my first real attempts at creative writing and poetry. That summer, I would go to the lone punk bar in Akron with my friends Jen and Nancy and others. We’d close the place down at 2am, then head over to the Country Kitchen on Arlington Road for sustenance. I’d come rolling into my parents’ house usually sometime after 3, put Disintegration on my stereo in the family room, and write until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more.

I wrote on unruled goldenrod yellow sheets of 8 ½ by 11 paper that came from I don’t know where. My weapon of choice was a fine tipped Sharpie. I had a manila folder that I had scrawled “Random Thoughts Escaping” across the cover (the masthead of this blog is a scan of that original folder turned into a negative). My first angst-y poetry collection. I wrote about all the things that were going on in my life, but primarily about the loss of love filtered through the dark and droning aesthetic of Disintegration.
Opening with the simultaneously crashing and swirling “Plainsong”, every last song on Disintegration is a masterpiece, epic in scope and often in length. From “Pictures of You” to “Last Dance” to “Prayers for Rain” to the thematically anachronistic “Lovesong” to “The Same Deep Water as You”, there isn’t a single song among the twelve that I wouldn’t consider brilliant, but “Closedown” and “Untitled” have always stood out for me.

The liner notes on the original album say “THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO BE PLAYED LOUD SO TURN IT UP,” and the opening tribal drums of “Closedown” are relentless. You feel them thrumming in your chest with urgency at any volume. The immediacy of those four minutes of music – one of the shortest songs on the album – is underscored with a mere 11 lines of lyrics compacted into 40 seconds of song, making every turn of phrase, every word matter. The lyrics are well within lead singer Robert Smith’s doom and gloom wheelhouse, but the music feels uncharacteristically hard. While Cure songs of the era are typically dense, “Closedown” actually seems to apply pressure, actively pushing the air out of the listener’s lungs, suffocating them.

The final track is by far my favorite of the album. To my young man’s sensibilities, it seemed so brazen to not name the song at all and simply refer to it as “Untitled”. Four short verses. No chorus to speak of. “Untitled” never meanders but isn’t too terribly fond of rigid song structure either. The words Smith crafts matched the then-fresh emotional wreckage of my ended relationship. With the exception of Cowboy Junkies’ “Dreaming My Dreams With You”, no other song completely encapsulates that feeling of loss I was experiencing the summer before college when my girlfriend and muse left me. I leaned on this album, and “Untitled”, in particular, to fuel my fevered scribblings.

My dad was a meat cutter for a local grocery store and worked horrible hours, either getting up at four in the morning or working the closing late shift. My parents and I were barely speaking at the time – they didn’t understand what I was going through, and I was an unyielding 18-year-old – but on those early morning days, we’d often pass on the stairs, both of us bleary-eyed as one was heading to bed and the other heading to work.

The Cure didn’t come to Northeast Ohio behind Disintegration until just after I had moved on to Bowling Green for college, but I ended up being able to come home for the Prayer Tour stop at the Richfield Coliseum in late August. I had worked at a local record store in high school and the summer before college, continuing there on breaks from school. I attended the Cure show with Jen and Nancy (who drove across the state to pick me up), along with my record store boss Ron and part-time co-worker Randy, whose full-time job was box office manager of the Coliseum. Thanks to him, we had front row, center floor seats, but it would have been an amazing show even if I’d had to watch from the rafters. The only downside was that although The Cure had The Pixies and Love and Rockets – two bands I love – opening for them on their west coast swing, we ended up with Shelleyan Orphan.

Although I was moving on from the muse in San Francisco, the powerful connection between this album and those events wreaked havoc in me that night. I remember tearing up during “Untitled”, thrilled that they were playing such a deep album cut so important to me. It was a crazy night, and I remember being deposited afterwards in my dorm room on the other side of the state somewhat more worse for the wear, to be honest. I never saw The Cure live again.

The Cure never released another album as good as Disintegration. Wish swung far too much in the opposite direction, and the schizophrenic Wild Mood Swings was aptly named. The lone bright spot was the single “Wrong Number” off Galore, which hinted at late ’90s relevance.

Ten years after Disintegration, in an attempt to link a new album to the glory days, Smith stated 2000’s Bloodflowers was the final part of a retrofitted trilogy that includes the band’s brilliant works of Pornography and Disintegration. Regardless of the manufactured trilogy concept, Bloodflowers was a return to form and hit me as I was turning 30 and returning to Ohio after a decade away. Succumbing to waves of nostalgia, I gave it a pass.

The Cure faded from relevance for good after that, both for me personally and, apparently, commercially with releases of The Cure and 4:13 Dream. I still love the old albums and listen to them regularly. I can reliably queue up a Cure playlist and enjoy the music for what it is, but Disintegration I can also appreciate as an aural marker for some of the messiest stumbles along my path to young adulthood. Without regret.

Youthful Resolve

The kiddo brought this home earlier this week for Tracy and me to sign. Thought it was a pretty awesome resolution, explaining both the problem and the consequences of not changing the behavior.

Plus, the drawing of the student crying because he’s getting bad grades is just priceless!

(click to enlarge)

Brothers In Arms

So, that circle of friends I mentioned I ran with back in high school? Here we are on graduation day nearly 22 years ago. A motley crew if ever there was.

We were the Kings of Inside Jokes. I don’t remember who suggested it, but we decided to take out a “senior ad” in the back of the yearbook and simply list as many of our in-jokes as we could fit.

Once we hatched the idea, I started a handwritten list. Then I typed it all up and printed it out on a dot-matrix printer and circulated it among the group again to add anything else we’d overlooked. We crammed everything in there from Monty Python quotes to movie lines to references to ex-girlfriends and teachers to stupid stuff we’d done that had entered into our personal lore. Ultimately, it fell to yearbook editor John to sneak as much past the faculty advisors as possible. And, frankly, I don’t recall anything being cut from the ad – even blatant stuff like “Freddie Uncle Charlie Kate” made it through.

I have no intention of explaining any of these, but here is the ad scanned from my yearbook.