This is enjoyable, proper? I’m at an enormous live performance venue, the Frank Gehry-designed Merriweather Submit Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, seeing considered one of my all-time favourite bands stay. The Cure is taking part in music proper in entrance of me. Someplace. I suppose. It sounds kinda like them.
We sit on the high of the garden space of this large out of doors venue, the place holders of tickets for the most affordable ‘seats’ in the home are inspired to unfold out blankets, picnic-style, to observe the present from a distance. But it surely’s extra like a crowded refugee camp: tiny squares of abused grass occupied by squatters surrounded by hundreds of different individuals who can not discover a place to face, not to mention sit. Pissed off past manners, a number of the wandering have taken to trodding immediately throughout the blankets, nonchalantly kicking over something of their paths.
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Getting a line of sight to the stage shouldn’t be even doable. There are three jumbotrons helpfully positioned excessive above the stage and often I can get a glimpse of a type of. Inexplicably, the cameras solely return and forth between a large shot of the entire stage and a close-up of the drummer, Jason Cooper. We by no means get a close-up of Robert Smith himself, however I suppose that I gained’t need any close-ups both when I am in my mid-sixties.
After lacking the complete opening act whereas standing in line for the merch desk to get a t-shirt which can let everybody know, ever after, that I was there for this shit sandwich, I purchased two beers for forty {dollars} and made my means again to the six sq. toes or so wherein we have been jammed. The individuals behind me started a loud thirty minute argument in regards to the deserves of hen tenders versus hen nuggets which continued properly into the beginning of the Cure’s set.
What do Cure followers appear like?
I bear in mind seeing the Cure on their Want tour again in nineteen dickety two. Most of us wore black and seemed just like the handful of different weirdos that I frolicked with in center college. About one in twenty had tried some type of Robert Smith hair and make-up.
Cure followers have lengthy been stereotyped as mopey, black-clad sylphs who hearken to Religion on repeat all day. However for each a type of followers, there are many individuals who consider “Friday I’m in Love,” “The Caterpillar,” “The Stroll,” “Excessive,” or “Lovesong” when the Cure is talked about. It’s a band that’s simply as able to shiny, catchy pop as it’s of funeral dirges and it by no means solely belonged to the gothic set.
The sort of Cure fan that I can not determine is the type that talks and talks and talks by means of a whole live performance. They’re all over the place. A lady someplace in again of me lastly asks the group beside her to please simply shut up and cease speaking so we are able to hear the music. I amen her, they apologize. 5 minutes later they’re again at it.
Some individuals prefer to complain that concert events are too loud. I don’t suppose that they’re loud sufficient. It positive isn’t loud sufficient to drown out the hordes of nattering idiots who got here all this fashion to be able to miss a live performance.
Forward of me, a sea of humanity is lit up by scattered cell telephones. Not simply getting used as cameras however usually scrolling social media.
The set listing is nice. The band is on the high of their musical powers. I may nitpick the way in which that Jason Cooper, the drummer, provides in loads of additional beats to the songs from Seventeen Seconds. Songs that derive their energy as a lot from their empty areas as from precise sound. However he’s taking part in in an enviornment and I suppose you’ve obtained to do one thing to attempt to maintain the viewers’s consideration.
The night time earlier than the large present, I went out to see three unknown bands at a small house venue for a ten greenback instructed donation. The second band, the Mums, from Lynchburg, Virginia, wowed me with their grungy, riot woman vitality and tight sound. It was their 16 yr previous bassist’s first public efficiency.
That was extra enjoyable than seeing the Cure in a stadium-sized venue. Much more enjoyable.
There may be most likely nothing that the Cure can do about this case. Robert Smith has bravely taken on Ticketmaster and not less than made the method of shopping for tickets to his concert events extra equitable. His band is a bunch of tightly-rehearsed virtuosos. The dangerous sound and slaughterhouse administration of the human livestock by the venue and the sociopathic conduct of ticket-holders will not be his fault.
I have seen someplace between one and two thousand bands in stay performances. Not less than fifty reveals a yr, often two or three bands on the invoice, simply within the final ten years. If the one concert events that you simply ever go to are massive names in stadiums and arenas, know that what you might be often experiencing is absolutely the worst of what stay music has to supply.
There are scads of barely-known bands who’re about pretty much as good because the Cure have been throughout their first few years. They play at little native nightclubs the place you may often pay lower than fifteen {dollars} to get in, the place beers are six or seven bucks, individuals are pleasant earlier than the bands go on, and nearly everybody is aware of to close up and put their telephones away when the present begins.
This summer time, please go to a type of locations. For those who should, additionally see the Cure amongst the intimate conversations of 20,000 different individuals who apparently consider themselves as Cure followers. And purchase tour t-shirts from the merch tables, because it’s the one factor that almost all bands actually make any cash from. I did. So I can put on it to different concert events and individuals will know that I was there. Which was apparently the principle cause to point out up in any respect.
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