You must pit the drawing of your heartstrings against a variety of dickbag personalities that could never have loved this band the way you did in 1988. The crowd was so cheesy that it was like hearing a grossly nauseating story at a dinner party. My eyes got a little heavy with the weight of memory during “Pictures of You,” and some girl the row behind me grabbed me and told me it was “okay to cry.” When I went to get beer, some chick grabbed my ass. When I tried to return, I caught an angry elbow from a douchebag that nearly knocked me over. There were fucking meatballs in the front row pointing around like they were cheering on a fight at a hockey game. The place was just like that.

After the jump, our boy Christopher Tucker survives The Cure show on Saturday night in much the same way that The Cure themselves survived it: Old school, and wearing big sneakers.

So I Saw My Second Favorite Band Last Saturday…

Twenty years ago, when I was allowed to do nothing, the only thing I could get away with was sneaking over to my best friend Matt’s house on my bike to watch the music videos he had culled on VHS from 120 Minutes. This was a time when MTV was still playing music videos and 120 Minutes was the “alternative” to the otherwise popular videos aired prime time. With all due respect to irony: This was before The Real World. We were at the age when you don’t even listen to bands as much as you become them. As such, I had become The Smiths and Matt had become The Cure. Matt’s second favorite band was the Smiths. My second favorite band was the Cure.

Every Monday during the summer I was on restriction, I would show up to Matt’s house, throwing my bicycle down in his front lawn like the kids in E.T. did, and enter his house to find him already in front of the television, watching what he’d taped the night before either with quiet focus or animated pointing as I approached. A few months later, I would have a busted-up jacket with THE SMITHS written on the backside collar with a quote from “Still Ill” and Matt would be wearing high tops and spiked hair, as we made our efforts to claim our bands more dear to us than anyone else could. It was serious the way we loved these bands. We had the time to make ourselves that way, in the image of those bands, before the duty of living our lives arrived. So when Matt said he had front row tickets, I was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” On Saturday night, I went to see my former second favorite band with the same best friend in whose living room we sang along and watched “Inbetween Days” for the first time some twenty years ago. I realized it was going to be something interesting, after all these years, but I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.

The Cure is now a classic rock band and the crowd bore it undeniable witness at Saturday night’s show at the Wachovia Spectrum. To that end, I was expecting some more, well, sellout style shit. It didn’t go that way at all. The songs were delivered by a four piece band dropping some seriously old school shit and you could tell they were having a truly good time. It was a family affair and you could watch the show without thinking about the money behind it. Let me expand on that. The current line-up is a bunch of old friends. Porl Thompson, a guitar player who plays the guitar with an all-over-the-place Jimmy Page style, is married to Robert Smith’s younger sister Janet and was in the first version of the band, The Easy Cure, back in 1976. Simon Gallup, looking easily ten years younger than he is (and still drinking!), has been with the band since 1978 (on and off but mostly on). Does anybody remember when Robert Smith married his old lady Mary when they were 30, who he’d been dating since the age of 14, and said he waited to marry her because he wanted to know her longer than he hadn’t? Simon was his best man. These guys were full grown men but you could really see it in their faces at this show: They were still boys. And Simon actually looked like one. Porl looked more like a saggy old queen than the husband of Robert’s sister, and Robert looked more like his South Park caricature than, well, his South Park caricature. But you couldn’t take it away from them: They were still boys and they were playing that shit not like they had to because life turned out that way (the way so many other classic rock bands do) but because they were still enjoying being boys.

It’s true. We enjoy being boys.

Part of seeing a classic rock show, however, is that you must pit the drawing of your heartstrings against a variety of dickbag personalities that could never have loved this band the way you did in 1988. The crowd was so cheesy that it was like hearing a grossly nauseating story at a dinner party. My eyes got a little heavy with the weight of memory during “Pictures of You,” and some girl the row behind me grabbed me and told me it was “okay to cry.” Thanks. Had no idea! When I went to get beer, some chick grabbed my ass. When I tried to return, I caught an angry elbow from a douchebag that nearly knocked me over. I had to shove my ticket in his face to get back to my seat. There were fucking meatballs in the front row pointing around like they were cheering on a fight at a hockey game. The place was just like that.

And so it was that The Cure drove their point home at the spectrum on Saturday night by drilling the heads in the audience full of shit most of them never heard. The best song of the night, “Primary,” rocked like the band were doing it for the first time. The setlist on stage might have simply said “Old-School-Encore” for the band’s third encore, but it sounded like this: “Three Imaginary Boys, Fire in Cairo, Boys Don’t Cry, Jumping Someone Else’s Train, Grinding Halt, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing an Arab”. During the rest of the set, we didn’t get “A Forest,” or “Let’s Go to Bed,” the way that Fairfax did the night before, but how could we care when we got “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep,” and “How Beautiful You Are,” when they did not?

What it amounted to was this: Comparing the set list from the night before, this spot-on performance indicated that the band is in top form. They are playing whatever songs they feel like playing and the breadth of material is almost unthinkable. Despite what they looked like. Despite what the crowd looked like, looking at what the band looked like. When you broke it down to what it was supposed to be about in the first place, the music, it was like having your own life flashing in front of your very eyes as everyone of those words marched through your head in a giant and lyrical parade of memory.

— Christopher Tucker

SET LIST PHILLY:
Open, Fascination Street, A Strange Day, alt.end, The Walk, End of the World, Lovesong, Kyoto Song, Pictures of You, Lullaby, Maybe Someday, The Perfect Boy, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, The Only One, Push, How Beautiful You Are, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, Primary, Never Enough, Wrong Number, One Hundred Years, End

1st encore: If Only Tonight We Could Sleep, The Kiss
2nd encore: Freakshow, Close To Me, Why Can’t I Be You?
3rd encore: Three Imaginary Boys, Fire In Cairo, Boys Don’t Cry, Jumping Someone Else’s Train, Grinding Halt, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing An Arab.

SET LIST FAIRFAX:
Plainsong, Prayers For Rain, A Strange Day, alt.end, The Walk, The End of the World, Lovesong, To Wish Impossible Things, Pictures of You, Lullaby, The Perfect Boy, From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea, Hot Hot Hot!!!, The Only One, Push, Friday I’m In Love, Inbetween Days, Just Like Heaven, Primary, Shake Dog Shake, Never Enough, Wrong Number, One Hundred Years, Disintegration

1st encore: At Night, M, Play For Today, A Forest
2nd encore: Lovecats, Let’s Go To Bed, Freakshow, Close To Me, Why Can’t I Be You
3rd encore: Boys Don’t Cry, Jumping Someone Else’s Train, Grinding Halt, 10:15 Saturday Night, Killing An Arab

Previously: On-the-Scene Report: My Chemical Romance at Electric Factory
[Video credit: YouTube user riske]

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 2:42 pm.