Dead Links

I’m going to pin this to the top of my blog. Now that my blog is public again there are people who will be coming to the site via search engines or other means, and thus they will not have read the ongoing saga of Amazon and finding a new host for all my shows.

For many years I used Amazon Drive to host all of my show links. They are discontinuing their service at the end of 2023. Not wanting to renew with a dead site I went ahead and canceled my account with them. This means that the thousands of shows I posted with Amazon Drive links are now dead in the water.

I will be reuploading all those old shows to Google Drive. But there are a lot of them and that is going to take me a long time. Especially since my priority will be posting shows that have never been on my blog before.

Please do not leave me a comment telling me my Amazon links are dead. I know they are dead. I canceled that service. Please do leave me a comment asking me to reupload shows that have dead links. Please leave that comment on the post for the show in question. Please don’t leave it on this post or any other post that does not contain the show you want to be reuploaded.

Please be nice about it. Please be patient. I will get to your requests eventually. Following these simple rules and a little kindness will help me get to your requests faster.

Shows of the Day: June 10, 2023

Not that anyone was complaining about all the Van shows, but we will be moving on tomorrow. I’ll have some Neil Young for you and then probably a few days of Bob.

Van Morrison – 2002.05.04 – Dublin, Ireland

Van Morrison – 2002.12.27 – Utrecht, The Netherlands

Van Morrison – 2002.12.28 – Utrecht, The Netherlands

Van Morrison – 2003.10.24 – Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Van Morrison – 2006.11.07 – Detroit, MI

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2004)

ginger snaps 2 poster

Ginger Snaps (2000) is a wonderful coming-of-age horror film about two angst-filled, sarcastic teenagers who form a death pact before one of them gets bitten by a werewolf and begins to change.

Its sequel finds one of the girls, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) stuck in a rehab clinic after she overdoses on the wolfsbane she’s been injecting to keep her own transformation at bay.

At the clinic, she meets Tyler (Eric Johnson) who trades whatever the girls are addicted to for sexual favors, and Ghost (Tatiana Maslany) a young ward of the clinic who quickly realizes that Brigitte is a werewolf and becomes her only friend.

The film loses a lot of what made the original so great – mainly the bond between the two sisters and their withering takes on suburban life in high school. Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) does appear in the film, but only as a hallucination and she’s more foreboding than fun). Ghost doesn’t provide nearly the same punch.

Yet, it is still an enjoyable film. It relies more on the drama of whether or not Brigitte will escape the clinic and stop her full transformation into a werewolf than horror tropes. Though there is a werewolf stalking her, looking for a mate.

The first film used the werewolf transformation as a commentary on puberty, this film critiques the ways in which men tend to prey on young women.

When the horror does come it is appropriately violent, and gory. Overall it isn’t quite as great as the first one, but it’s still carries quite a bite.

Shows of the Day: June 9, 2023

Happy (for real) Van Morrison Friday. You’ll probably get some more Van tomorrow and then we’ll move on to a new artist. Enjoy.

Van Morrison – 2000.02.09 – Oxford, England

Van Morrison – 2000.03.25 – Dublin, Ireland

Van Morrison – 2001.07.13 – Den Haag, The Netherlands

Van Morrison – 2001.07.27 – Chester, England

Van Morrison – 2001.08.24 – Ross-On-Wye, England

Van Morrison – 2001.09.08 – Cardiff, Wales

Shows of the Day: June 8, 2023

Happy Van Morrison Friday everyone…no wait, it is Thursday. What the heck is going on around here?

Don’t worry, Neil Young will be back soon enough. As I mentioned yesterday, I’m just working through some sorting projects. Enjoy the Van.

Van Morrison – 1999.07.19 – London, England

Van Morrison – 1999.08.11 – Cornwall, England

Van Morrison – 1999.10.14 – Sheffield, England

Van Morrison – 1999.10.22 – Torquay, England

Van Morrison – 1999.12.08 – Later with Jools Holland

Shows of the Day: June 7, 2023

I am (once again) making a pact with myself to work through all of the unsorted, unlisted shows I have hanging around various hard drives. I have (once again) promised myself I will not download anything until the sorting is done.

I have actually been diligently working on this project for a few months so I am pretty close to being finished. It really depends on work and life and how busy I am through the day, and how tired I am at the end of it, but at a guess, I’d say I should have it complete in a few weeks.

I have made this promise to myself before and have always broken it, so I may get distracted and put it off indefinitely, but I hope this time I’ll actually get it done.

What that means to you all is that my normal schedule of artists will be thrown off. You will have several days of one artist and then maybe some random artists here and there. So, right now I’m working through a bunch of Van Morrison shows someone sent me a while back. So you will have a few days of Van showing up in your inbox. Then I might move on to Neil Young, or Bob Dylan, or Pink Floyd. Etc.

No big deal, really, but I thought I’d give you a heads-up.

Grateful Dead – 1994.03.30 – Atlanta, GA

Grateful Dead – 1994.04.01 – Atlanta, GA

Grateful Dead – 1994.04.04 – Orlando, FL

Shows of the Day: June 6, 2023

Legion of Mary – 1975.05.15 – San Francisco, CA

Legion of Mary – 1975.05.21 – Berkeley, CA

Legion of Mary – 1975.05.22 – Berkeley, CA

Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders – 1975.06.04 – Berkeley, CA

Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh & Ned Lagin – 1975.06.06 – San Rafael, CA

Shows of the Day: June 4, 2023

Pink Floyd – 1994.06.06 – Syracuse, NY

Pink Floyd – 1994.06.10 – New York NY

The Other Ones – 2000.08.24 – Universal City, CA

The Other Ones – 2002.08.03 – East Troy, WI

The Other Ones – 2002.10.27 – Mountain View, CA

The Other Ones – 2002.11.19 – Boston, MA

Shows of the Day: June 3, 2023

Gillian Welch – 1995.05.xx – Boston, MA

Pink Floyd – 1968-1972 – Live in Grantchester Meadows

Pink Floyd – 1968-1972 – Stranger Than Fiction

Santana – 1987.03.17 – Stuttgart, Germany

String Cheese Incident – 2000.08.13 – Great Barrington, MA

The Doors – 1972.07.21 – Chicago, IL

The Who – 1966.06.02 – Stockholm, Sweden

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Special Effects (1984)

special effects movie poster

There is a question that, I suppose, needs to be asked here. What, exactly, is a horror movie? Sometimes that’s easy to define. Horror movies have ghosts or monsters in them. Vampires, blobs, werewolves and other creatures of the night fill the screen of many a horror film. But what about more pedestrian horror? Movies in which the villain is human.

Jason Vorhees is just a man in a hockey mask with a machete (at least in the early films, he later becomes superhuman and virtually unkillable). But there are lots of crime movies with higher body counts. No one would argue that the Friday the 13th movies are anything other than horror, but serial killer movies are often called thrillers.

Maybe that’s because there usually isn’t a police detective trying to solve the case of the Jason killings. But then there are a lot of Italian horror films, giallos especially, that plotwise are basically police procedurals.

Maybe horror movies are more gore-filled. But that doesn’t always track either because some cop flicks concentrate on the extreme violence of their killers. And plenty of horror films have very little gore or none at all.

I don’t have an answer here. It is a big debate that I won’t solve in these pages. I mention it because tonight’s Friday Night Horror movie could be considered more of a thriller than a horror, but it does carry the horror genre label on IMDB and that’s what I thought it was coming into it, so that’s what we’re gonna keep calling it.

Andrea Wilcox (Zoë Lund) left her husband Keefe (Brad Rijn) and small child in Texas to go to New York City and pursue an acting career. Though she’s willing to sleep with producers and directors and anybody who will give her a part she’s only able to find jobs doing nude modeling and the like.

When Keefe comes to get her back and bring her home she lies and says that her career is starting to take off. Why, she has a meeting that evening with Neville (Eric Bogosian) a famous movie director. She does in fact go to his house that evening and literally begs him to at least take a look at her.

He does look at her, then sleeps with her, and secretly films the encounter, and strangles her to death. He cleans her up, puts her inside Keef’s car, and dumps it at Coney Island.

The cops immediately suspect Keef and arrest him. Neville hires an expensive attorney and gets him free on bail. He then decides to make a movie about Keef and Andrea. He gets Keef to play himself and finds an amazing Andrea look-alike in a woman named Elaine (also played by Zoë Lund) to play Andrea.

Things get weird from there.

B-movie auteur Larry Cohen mixes Vertigo (1958) with Body Double (1984) and bits of Peeping Tom (1960) into a sleazy cauldron of awesome. He has Brian DePalma’s flair for taking Hitchcockian ideas and amping up the sex and violence, but very little of either director’s sense of style. Though he does create some really interesting sets, especially Neville’s giant apartment filled with mirrors and water.

The film really is more thriller than horror as Neville takes his movie ideas to extremes and is more than willing to kill again to maintain his cinematic goals.

Special Effects wasn’t at all what I was expecting when I put it on, but I found it to be quite enjoyable.