I managed to listen to this show this afternoon and then got busy and forgot to write anything about it. And now it is late, and I have some other things to do, so this will be short.
Get this show. It is excellent. There are at least two versions of it over at Expecting Rain, and I can’t recommend it enough.
Bob is in excellent form, and the band is on fire. And if that wasn’t enough, you get Elvis Costello (guitar & shared vocals), Chrissie Hynde, and Carole King on a couple of songs.
Here’s the setlist:
Brixton Academy London, England 31 March 1995
01 – Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood) 02 – SeÒor (Tales Of Yankee Power) 03 – All Along The Watchtower 04 – I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) 05 – Tombstone Blues 06 – Shelter From The Storm 07 – Mr. Tambourine Man 08 – The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll 09 – It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue 10 – Highway 61 Revisited 11 – In The Garden 12 – Joey (Bob Dylan-Jacques Levy/Bob Dylan)
(encore)
13 – Like A Rolling Stone 14 – My Back Pages 15 – I Shall Be Released 16 – Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35
I uploaded “Shelter From the Storm” for your listening pleasure.
Other shows that were played on this date in history.
I’m going to try this again. I do like this idea. I like looking at what shows were played on any particular day. There is a part of me that loves stats. I love seeing if there are particular days that have a lot of shows or others that have very few shows. When I am good at this sort of thing, you can follow a tour and see how often the setlists change, etc.
But really, right now, I like listening to shows that happen today. I have a lot of shows, and it is always difficult to know what to listen to. Finding a show that was performed on this day sometime in history is easy. And fun. And here we go.
As much as I love Van Morrison, I’m not well versed in his different eras. I know about Them and the Caledonia Soul Orchestra, his time with Pee Wee Ellis, his brief stint with Linda Gail Lewis, etc. But I unlike with the Grateful Dead or Bob Dylan, I couldn’t tell you my favorite year for Van Morrison performances or anything really about a specific time period. For me with Van I’m usually just picking out something at random and giving it a listen. I should work on that.
I mention this to say I don’t really know what was going on with Van in 1991. I know he released Hymns to the Silence this year, and that’s a good album. But I don’t know if this is considered a good year for Van or not.
Listening to this show, I suspect it is a good year. The liner notes indicate the bootleg Pagan Streams was recorded around this time, and that one’s a killer. This is a long show with something like 29 songs being played and running just over three hours in length.
Most of the first disc isn’t really my thing. I don’t tend to like his bluesy numbers. Songs like “Stormy Monday” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go” are fine, not bad, but they don’t really do it for me.
Things pick up toward the end of Disc 1 with “And the Healing Has Begun” and the rest of the disc finishes out strongly. Disc 2 begins with “Help Me” which is another song I tend to not gravitate toward, though I’ve heard some good versions. This one is certainly energetic.
But then we get to “Orangefield” and I’m in heaven. The rest of the set is wonderful straight through. “Summertime in England” lasts a full twenty two minutes, which I think is the longest one he ever played. Certainly the longest version I’ve ever heard.
Van is in good spirits throughout. He talks a lot, and the conversations are interesting.
The sound quality is mostly good. The liner notes talk about how there was a low quality AUD that circulated for a long time, but then they found a new source of a much better quality. Unfortunately, that source doesn’t have all the songs, so they are spliced in, which can be a little jarring. Especially in the middle of “Summertime in England” which I guess got cut off in the best-sounding tape.
If you don’t already have this, email me, and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Just for kicks I played around with it today and managed to upload “Whenever God Shines His Light” to YouTube. I really just wanted to see if I could do that.
Here are the full show notes.
Van Morrison March 30, 1991 De Doelen – Rotterdam, Netherlands
Source: Daud clone, except for the three Georgie Fame selections, the conclusion to Summertime in England starting at approximately 17:00, and Caravan through end of show , which are from unknown generation cassettes > CD
The Complete Show
CD 1 1) You’re The One 2) Out of Sight 3) Ain’t That Loving You Baby 4) Stormy Monday, 5) Baby Please Don’t Go 6) We’re Gonna Groove > Who Do You Love (Van with Howlin’ Wilf and the Vee Jays (James Hunter)
7) Parchman Farm 8) Yeh Yeh 9) Green Onions (Georgie Fame and band)
10) And The Healing Has Begun 11) See Me Through 12) Moondance 13) Youth of 1000 Summers 14) Whenever God Shines His Light
CD 2:
1) Help Me 2) Carrying a Torch 3) Orangefield 4) It’s All In The Game > Make It Real One More Time 5) Northern Muse(Solid Ground) > When Heart Is Open 6) I’ll Go Crazy 7) Enlightenment 8) Summertime In England
CD 3: 1) In The Garden 2) Vanlose Stairway > Trans-Euro Train 3) Caravan 4) Send In The Clowns 5) I Can’t Stop Loving You 6) Why Must I Always Explain 7) Gloria (Cuts. Tape apparently gave out at 3-hour mark)
Band: Haji Ahkba, trumpet; Richie Buckley sax; Dave Early, drums; Georgie Fame, organ; Howard Francis, piano; Steve Gregory, sax; Ronnie Johnson, guitar; Nicky Scott, bass.
Notes: Many years ago I received two Maxell analog cassette tapes containing this show. The sound on the tapes was very muffled and sounded like the show was duplicated on a boom box with dirty heads. Oh, those were the days. Despite the sound quality caveats, Van and the band’s performance was a treasure that I cherished and studied because of its depth and length. I believe the Summertime in England is the longest ever performed by Van. It runs almost 22 minutes. Morrison talks about Christianity, psychiatry, and cults, among other things. I searched and searched for a good quality recording of this gig for years, and finally one surfaced, but it ended 17 minutes into Summertime, then cut abruptly. The entire rest of the show involving an additional 7 songs was missing. Recently, in a true labor of love, a friend and Van archivist and my brother helped prepare this complete version of the show, which contains the original nearly two hours of good quality recording, plus the rest of the show from a higher quality analog cassette tape. I remember that on my original cassettes of the gig, the final song, Gloria, cut, as it does here. It appears that the taper just “ran out of road” as the show went just over the 3-hour mark! The show has never been uploaded in as complete a condition as this project. This upload runs just a few seconds shy of 3 hours, and contains the opening set of Van with Howlin’ Wilf and the Vee Jays. Georgie Fame then performs for three songs before Van takes the stage again. Rotterdam was the first show of a legendary 3-gig run that also included The Hague and then Utrecht, made famous as Pagan Streams.
Here are some other shows that were performed today in history.
In my last post I talked about how I got my first CD player from my brother and how excited I was that it was a five disc changer. The idea of owning five whole CDs that would fill that changer was so exciting to me. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I bought a sixth CD, and I’d have to make a decision as to which disc to hold out.
I can’t remember now if Queensrÿche’s Empire was my second or third CD. I know I also bought U2’s Achtung Baby around that same time. Whatever number it was, I absolutely loved it.
I’m sure I bought it because of the hit single “Silent Lucidity.” That’s a great song, and it is part of a long tradition of power ballads where hard rockers show off their sensitive side with acoustic guitars and introspective lyrics. As a teenager, I was a sucker for that sort of thing.
I have a great memory of watching them play that song at the MTV Video Awards with a full orchestra. I thought that was the coolest thing.
The rest of the album rocked. As a teenager, all of 14-15 years old, I thought the social and political lyrics were amazing. They spoke about real things. Important things. They spoke directly to me.
The opening track “Best That I Can” told the story of a man in a wheelchair who dreamed of being a writer, of doing big things despite his disability. “Della Brown” talks about a woman living on the street. “Empire” was its magnum opus, a big, loud song that talked about gun violence, the illicit drug trade, and the lack of federal support for law enforcement. That was big stuff for little old me.
I took a drama class in eighth or ninth grade. For extra credit, you could lip synch any song you liked. You needed to get the synch just right, but you were also supposed to dress up like the character in the song or bring in props.
I was way too shy to actually do any of that, but I used to sit in my bedroom, listening to this album, thinking of all the ways I could perform these songs. I created all these little dances to go with them, gyrating in tune and doing my best to create a story. I thought it would blow their mind to hear “Empire.”
Like so many of these early albums, I haven’t listened to this in a very long time. Listening now, I still mostly like it. The hit songs are still great. I still love “Silent Lucidity” and “Jet City Woman” is a banger. I like “Another Rainy Night (Without You),” and “Best That I Can” has a nice beat. I like the progressive rock angles of many of the songs.
The lyrics seem a little pompous and simplistic to me now. “Empire” has a spoken word bit about how little the federal government spends on law enforcement, which seems absolutely wild now when you realize how much we spend these days and how little it has worked.
I added a few of those songs to my regular playlist, but most of them I’ll leave off and probably never listen to again. I can’t see myself listening to the album again any time soon.
This is by far the best album out of the three I’ve thus far talked about in this series, so that’s something.
On the old music site, I used to periodically do a Shows in History post where I’d link to all the shows that had taken place on today’s date throughout history. It was a fun way to highlight a bunch of different shows, and I always enjoyed seeing the wide variety of acts one could potentially have caught on a particular day.
Though I no longer post download links to shows, I still think that idea is a fun one.
I am going to try and actually listen to one of the shows that was performed on today’s date (whatever date that is) and maybe give a short review of it or some random thoughts. I know that won’t happen every day, as some days are weird, and busy, and I won’t have time to sit and listen to a full show.
Knowing me, this will be the only time I do this at all.
Today’s show is from the Grateful Dead back in 1986. That’s no one’s favorite year for the Dead. It is the infamous year that Garcia’s addictions/poor health put him in a diabetic coma in July.
But while this is certainly not Peak Grateful Dead nor the best that Jerry ever did, this is a pretty darn good show. The big news here is they played “Box of Rain” something they hadn’t regularly done in over a decade and a half. They’d played it a few nights before in Hampton, which was the first time they’d busted it out in some seventeen years. So it wasn’t a complete surprise when Phil started singing it this night, but you can hear the crowd roar in exultant joy.
The first set is well played but not spectacular. The second set features a very nice “Lost Sailor>Saint of Circumstance” with Bob doing a weird little rap in the transition about freedom. Weirdly, the set ends with just one song being played after the “Drums/Space” combo, but it’s a very nice version of “Morning Dew.” It all ends with a quick little “In the Midnight Hour” for the encore.
So yeah, not the greatest of shows, but still a very good one. If you’ve written off 1986 entirely, I’d give this one a go (and you can do just that over at the Archive)
Here’s the full setlist:
Grateful Dead 3/24/86 The Spectrum Philadelphia, PA
–Set 1– Alabama Getaway -> Greatest Story Ever Told Dire Wolf Little Red Rooster Brown Eyed Women My Brother Esau Ramble on Rose El Paso Box of Rain
–Set 2– Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo -> Man Smart (Women Are Smarter) High Time Lost Sailor -> Saint of Circumstance -> Drums -> Space -> Morning Dew
Those links just go to show information; there is nothing to download. I feel a little guilty that I spent some fifteen years providing you all with thousands of shows to download and then just one day stopped and transitioned to talking about movies.
Maybe someday I’ll go back to sharing shows, but that won’t ever be on this site. But I still want to talk about music more. That seems only fair. One idea I have is to do regular show reviews. And maybe provide lots of information about the different shows – setlists, artwork, various reviews, etc. That’s a lot of work, and I get so involved with my movie stuff that I forget to do that sort of thing. So this is like a step in that direction. I hope you like it. If you do, please leave me a comment.
120 Minutes first aired on MTV on March 10, 1986. My social media feed was full of remembrances on this 40th anniversary, and I meant to say something myself. Then I got distracted and forgot. But those thoughts are still in my head, so I thought I’d get them out anyway.
I was born in the late 1970s, was raised in the 1980s, and came of age in the early 1990s. I grew up listening to hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Bon Jovi, but I also dug pop stars like Tiffany, Madonna, and Michael Jackson.
I was a shy, nerdy kid from rural Oklahoma; I didn’t have access to truly alternative bands. My brother was a lot cooler than me, and he turned me on to bands like R.E.M. and The Cure, but even then it was just their bigger songs.
Then Nirvana broke. That changed everything. Suddenly alternative was popular. I can’t remember now if I had watched 120 Minutes before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was released or after. I probably knew about it before then because I was an MTV junkie, but I don’t think I tuned in every week.
But at some point it became a fixture in my life. Again, I was a shy, nerdy kid from rural Oklahoma. I had very few outlets for discovering alternative music. The local radio stations certainly didn’t play anything but popular music.
I subscribed to Spin magazine and Alternative Press, and they were great at tuning me into new music, but that was only print; they didn’t give me any ways to actually listen. Sometimes I’d go to a Tulsa record shop and buy one of the records those magazines raved about, but I wasn’t rich, and that was taking an awful chance. There is nothing worse than spending your hard-earned money on a record and finding you don’t like it.
Discovering 120 Minutes was like discovering the Holy Grail. Suddenly, every week amazing alternative music was being beamed into my living room. I could now listen to (and watch the cool videos) music I previously would have never been able to hear. It was amazing.
Alternative music became more and more popular. One of the Tulsa radio stations became “The Edge” and played alternative tunes. MTV created a nightly show called Alternative Nation. Record shops in the malls even had an alternative section right next to rock and roll and heavy metal.
But nothing ever beat 120 Minutes for me. It felt more real than all that other stuff. The Edge, Alternative Nation, and everything felt like they were hitching themselves to a bandwagon. 120 Minutes was there before alternative became cool. You could tell the VJs really got the music and loved it. I loved it too.
In my first post of this series, I talked about the very first cassette tape I owned. This time I’m going to talk about the very first CD I bought.
The truth is I don’t really remember any other cassette tapes that I owned before I got a CD player. I’m sure there were some. I remember owning some kind of compilation album that had lots of 1950s-era hits on it – artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley, and Little Richard. I think I had the Stand By Me soundtrack and maybe cassette singles from Tiffany and Debbie Gibson.
Things get muddled a bit because even after I owned a CD player for my home stereo, I still had a cassette player in my car. Sometimes I’d record my CDs to cassette for listening in the car, and I often bought used cassettes at the local head shop. My memory of which tapes I bought before I owned a CD player and which tapes I bought just for the car gets muddled.
I just looked it up, and there were only five years between when Europe’s Final Countdown (my first cassette tape) came out and Van Halen released For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (my first CD). That’s not a huge period of time for me to have built up a big cassette collection, especially since I was fairly young during that time period.
Not that any of that matters; it’s just the way my brain works. I had intended for this series to be more or less chronological, and the fact that I can’t think of another cassette tape I bought before CDs came along bugs me.
I have a very specific memory of being in a Wal-Mart with my mother and my older brother Neal. He was trying to convince Mom that he needed a CD player. These were fairly new at the time, and he was excitedly extolling the virtues of this new technology. About how the sound quality was so much better, about how they lasted longer, and most importantly, you didn’t have to fast forward and rewind a CD, you could just press skip.
Mom wasn’t having it. She’d been through vinyl albums, 8-tracks, and cassette tapes. She didn’t want to have to buy all her old albums on yet another format. She argued that in a few years some new technology would come along and he’d have to buy everything once again. Cassette tapes were good enough.
My brother saved up and bought himself a five-disc CD changer. Some time after that, he joined the Navy and moved away, leaving his CD changer behind. I can’t remember if he actually gave it to me, or if I just started using it after he left. But I was so excited by it.
Truth be told, I can’t remember if For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge was the first CD I bought. It might have been U2’s Achtung Baby or Queensrÿche’s Empire. But whatever, the Van Halen disc was an early purchase. I thought the 5-Disc changer was awesome. I remember putting the first couple of CDs in it and wondering what I’d do when I got a sixth one. Then I’d have to decide which discs stayed in and which one had to wait. This was a big deal to me at the time.
Honestly, I was never a huge Van Halen fan. I absolutely loved “Jump” and enjoyed songs like “Hot For Teacher” and “Runnin’ With the Devil” but I’d never bought one of their albums and didn’t follow them in any way.
I bought the album primarily because I loved the song “Right Now” and I loved that song primarily because of the video. It is weird to think about how much time I spent watching MTV back then.
The video channel is gone now, but it was a long running joke to say that you remembered when Music Television actually played music. Like so many channels, they drifted in later years to mostly airing reality TV.
But the truth is, they played non-music-related stuff relatively early in their history. I remember a comedy show with Julie Brown, the game show Remote Control, and of course The Real World, which essentially launched the reality boom we are still living in today.
But they did play a lot of music videos, and I watched those all the time. Every day I watched their Top 10 countdown, but I’d also sit and just watch random videos whenever there was nothing else on to watch. Music videos were awesome. Not only did you get the great music, but they often did interesting visuals to match. I know people like Taylor Swift are still doing interesting videos for YouTube or whatever, but the late 1980s/early 1990s feel like the heyday of great music videos. Or maybe that’s just when I watched them.
Anyway, “Right Now” had a great video. They used big block letters running across the screen to discuss various social and political issues from the time. They’d say things like “Right Now No One Is Safe From Loneliness” and “Right Now Our Government Is Doing Things We Think Only Other Countries Do.” Behind the words were visuals that brought home those messages.
Watching it now, I find most of the messaging fairly simplistic, but at the time I thought it was amazing. I was 14 or 15 when I first saw it, so political messaging in a music video felt revolutionary. It touched on things I was thinking about. It. made me feel like Van Halen really understood me.
I don’t remember much of the rest of the album. I think I liked it, but didn’t love it. I certainly didn’t listen to it like I listened to Achtung Baby or Empire. At a guess, I’d say it was the first album that got taken out of the disc changer when I bought my sixth CD. Though I’d certainly pop it back in every now and again.
It is an album I haven’t listened to in a very long time. Listening to it now, I find it to be just okay. I still love “Right Now.” “Poundcake” is pretty good, and I like “Runaround” quite a bit. The rest of it is fine, I guess, but not really my thing.
Eddie Van Halen was a brilliant technical guitar player, but I’ve never really connected to him. I don’t want to say he lacked soul, but I don’t tend to connect to music that relies on technical prowess without having something deeper and more meaningful inside. It doesn’t help that a lot of Van Halen’s music focuses on frat boy antics and base sexuality.
But I don’t want to argue about that. I’m not a musician. I don’t understand all the technical stuff. I just like what I like. I connect to what moves me, and I don’t know how to explain it. But I also have no problem with those who connect to things I don’t like.
In the end, this is not an album I’ll probably ever listen to again. I didn’t add any of those songs to my playlists. Except for “Right Now” that song still rocks.
I used to write a series entitled “Random Shuffle.” This is where I’d literally put my entire music collection (all ripped to iTunes), put it on shuffle mode, and then talk about whatever songs came up. Sometimes I’d talk about the music, but mostly I talked about the memories the music brought to mind. It became kind of an emotional journal, a history of my life in music.
I love the way music does that. How a certain song can take you back to a specific moment in your life. It is transportive. I love that sometimes it isn’t a specific memory but a feeling. There are songs that remind me of being sixteen and driving around in my beat-up Plymouth with the windows rolled down and not a care in the world.
I loved writing those posts. I think it’s still some of the best writing I ever did. I often think about starting it again. But the thing is I just don’t listen to music like I once did. I no longer buy an album and listen to it over and over and over again. Those long nights where I’d lie on the floor with my headphones on, letting the music take me far away, never happen anymore.
These days I generally listen to music in my car as I’m riding around for work or at home while I’m cooking dinner. Or in my office while doing some work or playing a game. I hate to say it, but more often than not I’m letting Spotify or Amazon Music, or some other streaming service, pipe in a playlist curated for me off of songs I’ve told it I liked. These things usually aren’t that inventive and rarely play me new music that interests me. And I admit when they do play something I don’t already know, I often skip it.
So now when I put my music on shuffle, it doesn’t bring up any new memories. I haven’t connected to music in the way that I used to. I don’t mean I never listen to anything new or that I haven’t found music I loved recently. But I don’t connect to them in the same way.
Maybe I’m just not having the adventures I used to. Maybe my life is too boring to bring in new memories. It doesn’t help that I now own hundreds of albums that I’ve barely listened to or that my music player is filled up with thousands of live concerts. Shuffle looks a lot different now than it did back then.
But I want to write about music in a meaningful way again. My idea is to do something similar to Random Shuffle but more long-form. With Random Shuffle I usually talked about 4-5 songs; now I want to hit on just one album or one song.
This will still be autobiographical. I’ll still be talking about how the music connected to me on a personal and emotional level. I actually hit on this idea because a friend of mine is doing a list of the best 1,000 albums ever, but in a very personal way. He’s not trying to be objective about it (as if that even exists) but making it very subjective. They are his favorite albums.
I like that. I won’t necessarily only be talking about albums. Sometimes I’ll just talk about one song. And I won’t be counting anything down. They won’t necessarily even be songs/albums that I love. Just ones that I’ve connected to at some point in my life. I suspect they’ll start out more or less chronological, but then we’ll just see where it goes.
The third album by Swedish rock band Europe, The Final Countdown, was the first album I ever owned. I got it on cassette tape. I can’t remember now if I bought it with my own money or I got it for a Christmas or birthday present. I can’t remember much about the album now. I remember I liked it. I know I loved the single “The Final Countdown.”
I had probably owned some cassette singles before owning this album. I’m quite sure I had some blank tapes that I recorded songs from the radio onto. to tell the truth, I really don’t remember if this was the first album I ever owned. It is the first album I remember owning, so we’ll leave it at that.
What I do remember is losing it. I took it with me to church one day. This would have been either Sunday night worship or Wednesday night Bible Study. It definitely wasn’t for Sunday morning worship; that would have been uncivilized. I would have been about ten years old.
I vaguely remember taking the tape out of the case. We probably played it on the way to church, but I would have taken it out before going into the building. I probably did not properly put it back into its case. I liked looking at the liner notes and staring at the pictures.
When we got home that night, I realized I did not have the tape. I had the cover, but not the tape. I looked everywhere for it. I tore that car apart. Our best guess at the time was that I had probably laid it on the exterior of the car somewhere. Maybe I put it on the trunk or the hood when I and the boys played around after services. I had a vague notion I may have laid it on the bumper absentmindedly.
I can’t remember now if my parents drove me back to church that night or if they said it was too late and we went the next day. I do remember for weeks after every time we drove to church I’d look out my window hoping I’d see it lying on the side of the road somewhere.
We never did find it.
I was heartbroken.
Years later I remember finding a copy of that album. I think a friend had it or something. I definitely didn’t ever buy it again. This was a CD, and I nostalgically pressed “play” only to discover I didn’t recognize any of the songs. In that memory I loved the entire album, but none of the snippets I played (and I only played snippets; I didn’t have time to play the entire album in that moment) were familiar to me.
It wasn’t until the TV series Arrested Development made “The Final Countdown” popular again that I remembered that song. For me now, that song is a cheesy bit of nostalgia. Something that makes me smile and raise my fists when I hear it, but only if I hear it every once in a while. I had it on one of my Spotify playlists for a while, but that made me hear it too often, and that’s definitely a song you do not need to hear too often.
So this is the type of thing I’ll be doing now. Songs and albums that mean something to me. That provokes memories. I’d like to say this will become a weekly article. I’d like to say that, but I won’t. I’ll likely forget to write it fairly regularly, but hopefully it will at least pop up once a month or so.
I love, love, loved Dinosaur Jr. when I was a teenager. A bad breakup with a girl in college kept me away from them for a long time, but I’ve since come back to enjoy their brand of music.
Wilco is one of my very favorite bands. Wilco invited Dinosaur Jr to play on their Sky Blue Sky festival in Mexico this week. During Wilco’s set J joined them for a fiery version of Neil Young’s “Cortez the Killer.”
Three lead guitar players is always a challenge but I love the way they pulled it off here. Jeff, J, and Nels all get a chance to solo, but when they aren’t doing that they still add plenty of texture. I love how Jeff seems to almost forget about the final verse and just kind of throw it out there at the end.
Earlier this afternoon I was watching a movie. When it was over, I looked at my phone. There were messages from friends from all over the country. They were all saying something like, “I hate to be the one to tell you, but Bob Weir has passed.”
I didn’t know what to say. Now I don’t know what to write. I’m still processing the news.
I first listened to the Grateful Dead in high school. I bought Skeletons From the Closet – a collection of their “greatest hits” from one of those Columbia House deals where you got 12 CDs for a penny or some such thing. I liked quite a lot of it, but found some of it to be a bit weird (strangely, I absolutely loved “Rosemary” one of the most un-Dead like things they ever recorded.)
But I didn’t venture any farther than that until college. I had a buddy who had a handful of shows he’d recorded off a guy he knew in high school whose brother was a collector (the kid would allow him to tape one show every time my friend would take him to McDonald’s for lunch.) He’d play those tapes loud while we were driving around Montgomery, Alabama, and I totally dug it (I also thought the idea of these unofficially released tapes was just the coolest.)
From there I bought American Beauty, and I’ve been on the bus ever since.
In 1994 the Dead came to Birmingham, and my friend asked me if I wanted to go with him. The tickets were like $30 (!), which I thought was way too expensive for my budget, so I figured I’d catch them the next time they came around. Obviously, they never did come around again for the next year Jerry was dead.
I did get to see Bob Weir in various bands over the years and always loved the shows. The last time I got to see him was on the Americanarama tour in Nashville. That was the time Bob Dylan toured around with bands like Wilco and My Morning Jacket. Weir did just a few gigs with them as a solo artist. Before that show, we were all standing around outside the gate, waiting for them to open it. It was an outdoor venue, and the fence keeping us out wasn’t very high.
Suddenly I hear a familiar sound. I’d know Bob Weir’s guitar sound anywhere. Sure enough, I peek over the fence, and there he is, standing all by his lonesome on stage with his guitar. It was a soundcheck, and I could hear him clear as day. He ran through several songs, including a great version of Dylan’s “Most of the Time.”
People all around me were chatting and paying no attention. I kept giving them glares and quietly telling them all to shut up. Didn’t they know one of the greats was on stage giving us a little private concert?
I was enthralled. And Bob wasn’t just going through the motions; he was really playing and singing those songs. He was always the consummate musician. Later that night he joined Wilco for a rousing version of “Bird Song” and an incredible cover of The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”
I had tickets to see him with Dead & Co. in Texas for their “final tour” but I got sick and couldn’t go.
I’m rambling now. Like I said, I’m still processing this loss. I’ve loved The Grateful Dead and Bob Weir for longer than I’ve lost just about anything else. If there is any comfort in this, it is that his music will live on without him. Those songs are timeless. And the fact that so many of his shows were recorded means we can still be listening to them for decades to come.
I’m not good at knowing what my favorite performances of anything are. So I don’t have a list of Bob Weir’s greatest moments. But someone mentioned this performance of “Greatest Story Ever Told” and by god it is a good one.
The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” is one of my favorite songs. It is the perfect Christmas song. I love that it is slightly irreverent, and funny. And sad. It makes me cry every time I listen to it (and I listen to it a lot this time of year.) I love that it is a song for everyone, not just the churchgoing folk. I love its structure and its lyrics. Like I said, it is one of my favorite Christmas songs.
I just discovered this a cappella version of it from an Irish group called The Ramparts. It is quite lovely, and now I’m sharing it with you.
themidnightcafe.org 