Curiosity

Until last night The Cure was the last band that I was majorly obsessed with in high school that I still cared to see live (sorry, REM) that I had never seen in concert. U2 - check, Morrissey - check, Pixes - check, check. I missed seeing them in high school on the Wish tour and they never played anywhere near where I went to college. And after Wild Mood Swings I just kind of lost interest.

But when I was in high school...

When I was in high school I was an obsessive collector of the things I was interested in. Still am, but to a lesser degree. I got into The Cure in the period between Disintegration (technically Mixed Up) and Wish. I snagged all the albums (on tape!) and then found out about b-sides from a friend at work who was obsessed with The Cure and the cassette-only extra songs on Standing on a Beach and Concert & Curiosity. So I bought all the Disintegration singles. Bought all the Wish singles. Bought The Crow soundtrack for "Burn." But I could never get the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me singles. Because they were too goddamn expensive. I wanted some sort of boxed set with all of the non-album stuff that I just couldn't track down. Tracking the stuff down was fun, but I wasn't about to buy a four-disc box set of Electra artists just for one stinking Cure song. At least not after thinking about it.

Which brings me around to getting back into The Cure. A few years ago I saw in the Best Buy circular that there was a Cure box set coming out called Join The Dots, which was exactly the collection that I wanted in high school. I hadn't listed to them in years, but I wanted the damn thing. And I got it. And it's good. There's some weak stuff on there (it is a b-sides collection) but overall it's worth getting if you like the band. And I was hooked again.

And then they started putting out remastered versions of the early albums. And then there was a new album that wasn't that great. They toured for that, but I didn't go because I didn't want to pay for the festival thing they did and risk only seeing them play for an hour.

But they announced a show at The Patriot Center last September. The tickets were a little pricey (about $60 - which is more than most of the acts I like to go to) It got postponed until last night, which was good because it allowed Jamee to get me tickets for Christmas.

So, after nearly 18 years of liking this band, I got to see them live.

Here's the setlist:

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.

Yeah, That's 38 songs. Three hours and one minute of show. Let's break that down a little by album.

Three Imaginary Boys - 2 songs
Seventeen Seconds - 4 songs
Faith - 1 song
Pornography - 2 songs
The Top - 1 song
The Head on the Door - 3 songs
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me - 3 songs
Disintegration - 6 songs
Wish - 3 songs
Wild Mood Swings - 0 songs
Bloodflowers - 0 songs
The Cure - 2 songs
the new album - 3 songs
Singles - 8 songs

So half of the show came from their pre-Kiss Me catalog. I think that's pretty impressive. When I saw U2 on the Achtung Baby tour they only played maybe three songs that predated The Joshua Tree. And we're talking about a band that was touring for an album that was only two albums after Joshua Tree. When we saw The Flaming Lips, there wasn't a whole lot of anything prior to The Soft Bulletin that got played. And that was still a damn good show. The U2 one was, too. Pixies opened on that one.

But what impressed me about The Cure show is that they working with thirty years worth of songs and they managed to fit in stuff from just about every period and every album (with the exception of the album that made me give up on them and Bloodflowers, which I didn't pick up until later). And out of thirty-eight songs, they only played two that I don't really care for (verdict's still out on the new ones), and those were back-to-back near the end of the main set, but right after those they played "One Hundred Years," and I got a new appreciation for that one. It's a dark song from a great album (Pornography - which you should put on if you want to feel really bad), but I didn't really get just how dark it was until they showed news photos in teh background of atrocities from the past century.

This was offset by the large woman who was twirling and dancing like a hippy in teh aisle next to Jamee. I'll let her talk about that one.

But think about the number 38. How many concerts have you been to where they played 38 songs. I mean, these guys played for two solid hours before the first encore break. I've never seen a show by a single artist where their set goes past two hours including encore.

So, this is arguably the best show I've ever seen, especially based on lowish expectations going in (It was the Patriot Center). But based on the sheer number of songs, length of the show and enthusiasm of the band (Robert Smith never once seemed bored playing these songs that you know he's done thousands of times) it was well worth the ticket price.

The t-shirts, however, were not worth the price. But I still have three left from high school and they fit. And that makes me happy.

Next Week - DeVotchKa