SOCIAL DISTORTION KNOCKS OUT DENVER

Saturday night and it was time for some live music with Social Distortion up there on the stage, the second of their three nights in town this weekend. Suedehead opened the show followed by Chuck Ragan.

Wikipedia says this about Social D:

Social Distortion (sometimes referred to simply as Social D or SxDx) is an American punk rock band formed in 1978 in Fullerton, California. The band currently consists of Mike Ness (vocals, guitars), Jonny Wickersham (guitars), Brent Harding (bass) and David Hidalgo, Jr. (drums).

Social Distortion temporarily disbanded in 1985, due to frontman Ness' drug addiction and troubles with the law, which resulted in extended stints in various rehabilitation centers, that lasted for two years. However, the band reformed around 1986 and have continued being active today, even after the death of longtime guitarist Dennis Danell, who succumbed to a brain aneurysm in 2000. Since its inception the band lineup has been a virtual revolving-door of talent, with many members coming and going – Ness has been the only constant member.

Westword wrote:

Early on in Social Distortion's Friday night show at the Ogden, the first of a three-night stand, frontman Mike Ness thanked the crowd for coming to the show and said, "I know you had choices tonight. There's the Christmas light parade downtown. You could have stayed at home and watched Sons of Anarchy, but you came to see Social D. I think you made the right choice, homeboy."

Most of the folks in the near-capacity Ogden would have probably agreed that they did in fact the right choice. After walking on to a darkened stage while Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" played over the house system, Social Distortion launched into "Road Zombie," the burning instrumental that opens the band's latest effort, Hard Times And Nursery Rhymes. A back-to-back pair of tunes from 1992's Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell -- "Bad Luck" and "King of Fools" -- fired up the crowd early on while a fiery take on "Another State of Mind" took things up a notch.

​"I'm looking out and seeing some scary looking criminals," Ness said after "Bakersfield." It ain't all women either. Aw, fellas I'm just fucking with ya. When I gauge a person, I don't care about how many tattoos you got. They got tattoo shops on every corner. Kids going right to the neck -- instant bad-ass. So I don't look at your appearance. I don't care about that. I look in your eyes and I see the crazy motherfuckers. You know what I'm talking about. This one's for you."

Read it all here:
http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2011/12/social-distortion-denver-review-photos.php

More pictures from the Saturday night show here:
http://www.heyreverb.com/2011/12/05/social-distortion-ogden-denver-photos-review/

Someone posted a comment on the review of the second nights show: "Wonder how many boneheads showed up? I quit going to Social Distortion shows years ago due to the numbers of neoNazis who showed up and caused trouble."

Well I must have run into one of those people, Mr. Baldy and his girl. I was juiced and gyrating to the music all night long, while all the stiffs around me stood with hands in pocket. How can you go to a high energy show and just stand there. Does a dancing man humiliate all the macho guys around him? Well midway through SD this guy pushes me away, backward through the crowd. I let it go because I was enjoying the music too much, standing right back where I was before. During the third to last song of the night he and his girl turned to the back of the theater, looking like they were leaving. Wanting to make a point, I shoved him, but that set him off. He shoved me backwards through the crowd again, I grabbing his coat and we both tumble, he throws one good punch causing injury. All I could think of is protect the recording equipment and camera! My glasses fell off in the scuffle and I made sure he didn't leave with his either.

The crowd separated us, he immediately departed, and security was summoned. They would not listen to my pleas to watch the rest of the show, the blood running down my face looking far worse than it really was. The theater medic cleaned me up and patched the wound. He said stiches but the doctor I saw Monday morning said "too late" but that the wound looked good and not to worry. I returned to the crowd in the back of the theater for the last song of the show. It's surprising how many pairs of glasses are lost during a typical show, several crushed pair being found, including mine and his. I even ran into the keyboard player from the first band who was looking for a pair he lost in the crowd.

What an exciting punk experience night! Excellent recording of the show, capturing the event with his statement “You made a mistake b*tch!”, calls for security and their trying to get me to see the medic. I learned this morning that some people from the office attended that same show and had their jackets stolen, one guy being chased and observed dumping the contents of the pockets on the ground in search of any valuables.

Download the show here.  The scuffle happens during "Can't Take It With You," the last two song absent from the recording for obvious reasons.  Too bad because I wanted to enjoy them from up close to the stage.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=94FZUXM0

KURT, LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO FLORENCE

Several days of snow this past week, with more due to arrive on Saturday.  But it wasn't nearly as deep as the blizzard of words flying around the office with the news of the "toxic goo."  But on Friday night the sky had cleared and I was outside enjoying the music in the frigid cold.

 I wanted to try something and chose Florence and the Machine, a soft spoken woman who sings beautifully, someone I had been hearing on the radio for the last several months.  Here was my chance to get to know her.  It was a relatively short show from the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge Special on November 25, 2011.  Naturally the sound quality was excellent.

Wikipedia says:

Florence and the Machine (stylised as Florence + the Machine) is the recording name of English musician Florence Welch and a collaboration of other artists who provide music for her voice. Florence and the Machine's sound has been described as a combination of various genres, including rock and soul.

The UK's Sunday Times described Welch as "the most peculiar and most highly acclaimed female singer of the moment" and "the latest in a line of great English pop eccentrics".

Download it here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MUCQTOUA

The main attraction this evening, as it is every night they're playing, was Nirvana performing live at Lee's Palace in Toronto, Canada on April 16, 1990.  A classic Bleach set list, a high quality audience recording from within a relatively small venue, before they skyrocketed to super stardom with the release of Nevermind at the end of the year.  The people in the audience chatter while this Kurt, Krist and Chad pour it out on stage. At the end of the show, Kurt started throwing bottles at the wall behind Chad, then the audience started doing the same. Krist had to be carried off stage because he was barefoot.

Someone says (Kurt?): Mr. Sound man, the drummer can't hear the guitar.  Turn the guitar up a little bit for the drummer.  Thank you

Audience: Turn the guitar way up.

Audience: Yeah, towards the ceiling.

An interview from that evening:

In the spring of 1990, April 16th to be exact, on the stairs leading up to The Dance Cave above Lee's Palace, I had the chance to meet up with the trio who call themselves Nirvana. At the time the lineup consisted of vocalist and "Dark Star" Kurdt Kobain, outspoken and eccentric bassist Chris Novoselic, and since departed drummer Chad Channing. (He has been replaced by former Scream drummer Dave Grohl). The club had approximately 90 people inside. For the bulk of the session, however, it was just Chris rifling off crude comments and dreams.

PEACE: Give me a brief history.

Chris: "We crawled out of the sea. We were amoebas and we crawled out of the sea and slowly evolved into legs and arms and hands and picked up guitars and started playing."

Chad: And then we were born. No wait, we were reborn first

Chris: We were reborn Christians. We're going to talk to you about the Lord and God and your personal relationship with Jesus Christ

PEACE: It has been rumoured that the only reason you were signed is that Kurdt is a Robin Zander lookalike?

Chris: Yeah. See, there was an intense bidding war. It was sign with Sub Pop or sign with K-Tel

Kurdt: Or Buddah Records.

Chris: They put us up because of the Cheap Trick Dream Police album cover.

Kurdt: Made us pose and dress up in exactly the same costumes.

Chris: (singing) Police, Police.

Chris: Yeah. We're gonna do a Cheap Trick cover tonight. We're gonna do "The Flame."

PEACE: Is it true that Kurdt had an accident at a K-mart perfume counter.

Kurdt: Well I wanted a scent that would reflect me so we put together some spices, Ginseng…

Chad: And dirty socks.

Kurdt: Dirty socks. Well actually its not true. You don't have to go by that

PEACE: Tell me about your new material, (which became Nevermind).

Chris: It's a lot more melodic. There's a lot more melody. There's driving songs. There's gonna be melodic songs. There's not gonna be anything real slow or grungy on it.

Chad: There's boating songs and airplane songs.

Kurdt: We're every category you could think of, like Reggae.

Chris: Funk. I do some of the most amazing slap bass on this one song. You should see it. I just break the string right off. I keep on playin' and while I'm playing I tune guitar strings around the broken strings so I can still play while I'm still playing (not a typo) because I am such an accomplished bass player. While we're talking about my bass playing, also, I practice about seven hours a day. You see my talent and the way I play you'd know that it would take dedication. It takes…

Kurdt: A lot of reading Guitar World

Chad: And no drugs.

Chris: I know every John Entwhistle lick and every Emerson, Lake and Palmer like and while we're talking about mmmeeeeee…

Unknown person listening in: But can you slap like Sly Stone? (Editors note: You fool, Larry Graham played bass for Sly.)

Chris: Sure I can slap him. I slap him upside the head. I slap him. I slap him. Let me talk about me again. I'm a pretty nice person. I get along with… I'm insecure. I can't function socially. See. I'm breaking down in public now. Do you like me? What's wrong with me?

PEACE: I don't know. What is?

Chris: What do I look like? A Goddamn psychoanalysis schiz or something?

Unknown person still listening in: I told you we shouldn't have given them the five per cent beer. These Americans can't handle it.

The show which took place following the interview was a rock spectacle which has yet to be matched for both intensity and excitement. It all began when Chris climbed on top of his bass cabinet with his bass head. Towering 12 feet above the stage he began to balance the head on his own and before you could blink threw it across the stage and tumbled into the drums. Chad began to furiously drum all over including on the legs of Chris. Not to be outdone, Kurdt entered the crowd and began to throw beer bottles at the pair. Excited members of the audience joined in. Promoter Elliot Lefko quickly hopped onstage and, dodging bottles, beseeched the audience to stop.

Read it all here:
http://www.livenirvana.com/interviews/9004rw/index.html

Download it here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?js4y8nbj628qv99

PETER MURPHY AND SHE WANTS REVENGE

A Monday night show with the plan to bike to and from it, as is becoming the custom as long as the weather holds out.  What caught my eye about this show was wanting to see She Wants Revenge, the second time they came through Denver this year.  But I got double the pleasure with Peter Murphy, a Brit who's best known as the lead vocalist for Bauhaus, the pioneering post-punk goth rock band of the early '80s. He later went on to release a number of solo albums, such as Deep and Love Hysteria. "Thin, with prominent cheekbones, a baritone voice, and a penchant for gloomy poetics, Murphy is often called the 'Godfather of Goth'."

Pleasant evening temperatures made for a fun ride, having dinner in the bar across the street from the theater.  I arrived early enough to get a spot one person from the stage, this individual being relatively short, giving me an unobstructed view of the stage.  During the shows I could have reached out and polished the shoes of the performers.

Hussle Club opened the show followed by She Wants Revenge and then Peter Murphy.  Peter Murphy spent much of the show having the sound guy adjust tone, instrument emphasis and volume, even stopping the music shortly into "Cuts You Up" during the encore, wanting to get it right for the audience.  The first person standing in line outside the theater was a woman who was dressed up like Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, being serenaded face to face by Peter during one song, pulled up on stage by him to show off how beautiful she was and returned to the stage for his closing number, "Ziggy Stardust."  Wow, I wonder what extra special treatment she would be getting after the show!

Westword's review:

The highlight of last night's show came during the encore, when Peter Murphy came back on stage wearing a short fuzzy hat that looked like a Fez, playing a twelve-string acoustic. After creating an impressionistic soundscape, all four members of the band went into a haunting and powerful rendition of "Marlene Dietrich's Favourite Poem," a delicately beautiful song that served as the perfect segue.

The show started with no preamble. When one of the stage hands flashed his flashlight at the sound board, Peter Murphy and his bandmates took the stage and immediately went into "All Night Long." Throughout the show, Murphy displayed his mastery of subtle theatrical gestures as though he got his training to star in German expressionist films--slightly exaggerated moves done with graceful gestures.

The band didn't really play material from Murphy's previous two albums, but it did play liberally from Ninth, which has more of a rock feel on songs like "Velocity Bird." During "Strange Kind of Love," incensed by the incidental chatter, one person shouted for people to shut up.

You could see Murphy taking mental note of this, and as a private joke perhaps, he switched to the lyrics to "Bela Lugosi's Dead" to kind of nudge some of the crowd back into the show, and it actually worked -- a stroke of genius, if ever there was one, that required no overt and melodramatic act.
Murphy and company also played some Bauhaus material with fairly well reworked versions of "Silent Hedges" and "Too Much 21st Century." But it was Murphy's originals that got the crowd singing along with classic Deep cuts like "Deep Ocean Vast Sea." Right before that song, the guys played a newer song called "Gaslit," and it was an atmospherically rich song with minimal instrumentation that was smoky and gorgeous like a fog-accented sunset.
The main set ended with "Uneven & Brittle," and the foursome came returned for a four song encore. At one point, Murphy spotted a girl in the audience who was dressed up like the character Darryl Hannah played in Blade Runner and brought her up on stage. For a few songs, she stood in the wings before Murphy brought her back up for the final number, a rousing cover of "Ziggy Stardust." As he ended the set, Murphy prowled the stage like Mick Jagger, displaying more poise than machismo as he jumped up and down in spinning circles. The guy's still got it, and his newest material proved he's not out of ideas.

Read it all here:
http://blogs.westword.com/backbeat/2011/11/review_peter_murphy_denver.php

Download the complete show here:
http://www.filefactory.com/file/5cf89jow86xf/?ns=1

Download the complete show here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LAB1BN46