Submitted For Your Listening Pleasure: The Cure’s First American Gig In Cherry Hill, NJ
Way back in the wayback, there was a club in Cherry Hill, NJ called Emerald City. Throughout the 1960s, the locale enjoyed a run of Rat Pack-ish opulence as the famed Latin Casino. But by the early 1980s, not only had that era come and gone but so too, largely, had the disco craze of the 1980s. By this point, the Latin Casino had been reborn as Emerald City for a few years now, and eventually they did what a lot of failing discos did back in those days: They started hosting punk and new wave shows. And having introduced area audiences to The Go-Gos, Blue Oyster Cult and The Talking Heads (fun fact: part of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads was recorded there), Emerald City hosted the Cure’s first-ever American performance on April 10, 1980. And unbelievably, tape of the show just surfaced. Recorded by a writer named Van Goose, then on assignment for the UK’s Melody Maker, the tape is pretty bootleggy, but shows The Cure in pretty great form upon the release of their second album, Faith. Above is side one of the tape, and you can hear more here.
