My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Las Vegas, NV - Spring 1990

This was my first show I saw in a bar, so of course I don’t have a ticket for it. My friend Dan and I had driven down to Vegas to help my parents paint our rental house. We figured it was a free vacation of sorts – we didn’t have anything going on during spring break, so we drove down separately and my parents put us up at the Palace Station so we could help with the project.

Our friends Al and Ruth had moved down to Vegas about a year after they graduated from high school. We got together one night after painting all day and Al, who’s always been one of my music mentors, told us there was a show at some club that night that he wanted to see. We liked the band and thought it was a great idea. Only problem was, Dan and I were both still 20. My birthday is in October and his in November, and because we both looked so young, we could never really get away with anything.

Earlier that day the four of us had gone out to eat at a casino, and afterward, we were watching Ruth plug quarters into a video poker machine. Only Ruth was actually gambling, but a change girl on a power trip came over and carded all of us. When Dan and I remarked that we were only watching, she told us we had to go wait in the arcade.

Even after that embarrassing event, we decided to risk trying to get into the show. We drove over together, and Al and Ruth waited in the car for us. The plan was that if we didn’t get in, we would all go somewhere else instead. Dan and I walked up to the door together, and he went first since he was a month younger. Our theory was that maybe they would just look at the year on our drivers’ licenses, after all, many people born in 1969 were already 21.

Our theory actually worked. Dan went in first and I had a momentary panic attack that the bouncer would reject me. But, he looked at my license and let me in right afterward. Woohoo! We were in. We immediately went to the bar and ordered drinks. It took Al and Ruth probably at least half an hour to come in after us. They thought perhaps we had gotten arrested or something.

The show was pretty bizarre, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult had a combo goth/piercing/tattooed kind of crowd before that became mainstream. There were people selling piercing gear, jewelry and S&M leather stuff in the booths at the bar. The music was good, and we wouldn’t have cared anyway, since we were so proud of ourselves for just getting in.

Happy birthday to my friend Dan this week - now we're both 35 and can get into any bar we want!

Ministry (with KMFDM) – UNR Jot Travis Student Union, Reno, NV – February 7, 1990

Thanks to the web I was able to locate the exact date of this show. Some great fan kept a list of all of Ministry’s tour dates going back to their first shows in the early eighties.

I’m probably one of the only Ministry fans who will confess to really liking their first album, With Sympathy. It was a quintessential early 80s type album, sounding a bit like the Cure, Soft Cell, or Heaven 17, kinda whiney guy singing longing love songs on top of great dance music. Their next album also had a great goth rock anthem, Every Day is Halloween, that gets played over at 80s dance clubs, probably still to this day (it was the last time I went to one in Portland a few years ago).

I think Al Jourgensen kind of distances himself from those albums, since they got a lot harder and started to define the industrial genre along with Nine Inch Nails in the 1990s. I did like Twitch and the Land of Rape and Honey, but I haven’t really progressed with them since then. The Land of Rape and Honey was a really good CD to play when your neighbors were being really loud and annoying and you wanted to respond in kind.

In any case, this was the only small venue show I saw at UNR. It was at Jot Travis Student Union, right near the food court. I wonder what the place must have looked like afterwards, because people seemed to get pretty out of hand. The band was behind a chain link fence, and there was much moshing right in front.

KMFDM opened and they were pretty great. Although some guy told us that it stood for “Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode,” which made us feel slightly uncool (or me anyway, but I got over it).

The Cult - Arco Arena, Sacramento, CA - December 28, 1989

I started thinking that I didn’t remember a whole lot about this show, but there are a few nuggets, anyway. This was the first show we went to at the Arco Arena in Sacramento. I know CA and I went together, but I can’t really remember if anyone else was with us. Might have been CE, since she was my roommate at the time.

We got a bit lost getting to the show, since Arco Arena is in the middle of nowhere. We turned off the highway and it was really dark, so we drove for a while without seeing anything, then had to stop at a gas station for directions. Finally, we found the place, it’s quite big, after all.

It was kind of weird seeing a show in a place that normally has basketball games. We were on the shiny hardwood floor. I also remember they didn’t allow smoking inside, which seemed almost unheard of for a concert. Of course people were passing around joints during the show, like most concerts, but no one lit up any cigarettes.

I remember being pretty disappointed with the show overall. The sound was really not so great, and since this was the Sonic Temple tour, the Cult had pretty much transitioned from their sort of edgy days to plain old hard rock. She Sells Sanctuary, one of my favorite all time songs, sounded really crappy. Ian Astbury still had really cool hair, the highlight of the show.

Eurythmics (with Underworld) - Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium, Oakland, CA - November 19, 1989

I was just reminded that today marks the 15th anniversary of this show. So I guess this is a good time for me to blog it. Lots of good stories around this day, hopefully I will document them accurately.

At the time, the Eurythmics were my friend PCH's absolutely favorite band. He collected their music like he collects a lot of other such items – obsessively. A few years ago he paid a couple hundred dollars for two 45” singles of obscure songs from their early days. Not sure if he is still trolling e-bay looking for Annie Lennox recordings from the BBC or some such things…in between getting the latest Biolante movie from the Pet Store…but ah, I digress.

There are some of us who are so lucky to have their first concert be their favorite band. PCH is one of those people. We had enough people signed up to join him on that happy occasion to warrant bringing two cars. BGA and K took PCH in their car, while CA, CE, CL, Shannon/Shay/Kathie and I took my red Subacrusier wagon. We planned to follow each other up to the city and all meet up at the show together.

Luckily, since this was in the days before cell phones, we did stay close together, because less than 50 miles or so out of Reno K’s car began overheating. It was some old Renault or something like that, and I guess it was notorious for such issues. We pulled over at some exit off of I-80, near the turnoff for Nevada City, I think, and spent around half an hour waiting for the car to cool off. I remember that the rest of us played with a nearby salt dispenser while we were waiting.

Finally, after a while, BGA and K decided that we shouldn’t wait any longer. PCH hopped in the wagon, and they waved goodbye, assuring us that they would go home, trade cars, and we would see them in Oakland. That was pretty much max capacity for my car, so Shannon had to sit in the waaay back.

We took off and finished the rest of our little road trip to the bay area. It was a bit eerie, since the Loma Prieta earthquake had happened on October 17 and the SF Bay Bridge was still closed. Luckily we didn’t have to go into the City at all for the show, though Oakland (the bad part) was damaged enough to still have a lot of boarded up buildings.

The show was at the Henry J. Kaiser arena in Oakland, a venue I’ve never visited again – this is the only concert I’ve ever seen in Oakland. We were surprised we didn’t get to go backstage since Shannon’s Dad was friends with Henry J. It was a pretty nice place, and old-school formal theater. I remember the bathrooms being quite elegant.

The opening act was Underworld. They had some stupid song about a bouncing ball and the guy pantomimed it on stage during the song. Many years later though, I would buy an Underworld cd out of choice. Born Slippy is a great song, if you’ve ever seen Trainspotting you won’t forget it.

The show itself was really quite fabulous. I wasn’t the biggest Eurythmics fan in the world at the time – though I had listened to Sweet Dreams and Touch incessantly back in 84 with JS (see 1st TTwins blog). The band was really tight, Annie Lennox sang beautifully and they did some really great acoustic tunes. That part of the show with Annie singing and Dave on the guitar still strikes me as one of my favorite music memories.

During the show, CA snuck in a camera and snapped some pictures, and then almost got in a fight with some large man/woman (we weren’t really sure) – well, he hit him/her in the face, but nothing too bad ensued. We had pushed our way up to the front and it got kind of crowded in there. At one point during the show, Dave Stewart came out with a primitive looking camcorder and panned over the crowd. Months later, PCH bought the video, and with the magic of slow motion and pause, we found ourselves there in the video, thanks to CA and the flash on his camera.

Shannon played the martyr and decided to stand in the back of theatre to wait for BGA and K, so we didn’t see her again until after the show. Unfortunately, they never made it, and PCH still has their unused tickets in a frame. You can see a similar image if you follow the links from here.

The Cure - Shoreline Ampitheatre, Mountain View, CA - September 10, 1989

The Cure was another one of my favorite 80s bands that was on my list of must see shows back at the end of the decade. In high school, the Cure seemed to be a good starting point for the goth kids – Robert Smith had a whiney voice and a huge nest of hairspray and black dye – but their songs were catchy and poppy enough for just about anyone to listen to.

I remember the first Cure video I ever saw – Let’s Go to Bed – I recorded it in the early days of MTV, when I recorded all day and edited out the junk later. I spent a couple of months looking for the cassette/album in record stores all over Reno and Carson with no luck, so I wound up ordering the EP, “The Walk” from Budget Records and Tapes and waiting several weeks for it to arrive. Later I remember I always used to see Cure videos at Macy’s, in their Junior section, for some reason. After I gave up on MTV this was a good place to keep up with Robert Smith’s hair styles.

When I saw them in the fall of 1989 they were really starting to reach their pinnacle of popularity with the release of Disintegration and songs like Lullaby, Lovesong and Pictures of You (recently highlighted in an HP commercial!) Of course I don’t remember that much about the show itself again – but a few tidbits. I remember it was the first shoreline concert where I sat on the lawn instead of in seats, which made it seem more like a day at the park than a concert. The band looked very, very far away. Also, it was the first concert I remember where I saw bootleg t-shirts for sale outside the venue. A guy was trying to sell them to us and we wound up trading him for a bottle of evian water instead…I guess he was pretty thirsty at that point.

Howard Jones (with Midge Ure) - Lawlor Events Center, Reno, NV - July 11, 1989

Howard Jones came again to Reno the last summer of the 80s. It was kind of weird to go back to a concert at Lawlor again after getting used to going out of town for shows.

I remember the show being very low key. We had pretty good seats on the floor and sat on folding chairs. Midge Ure, formerly of Ultravox, opened up and he did an amazing job. His song “Dear God,” is a classic for me and once made it onto a mix tape of atheist songs I was trying to compile. I really only found enough for about 1 and ½ sides of a cassette and never finished it. I remember the girls next to us kept talking during his set and I was really annoyed.

Howard Jones was a bit more simple at this point in his career. He sang a lot from his piano and wasn’t all electronic and programmed like he was in 1985. He really was (and is still I suppose) very talented and though I don’t follow him that much anymore, I can appreciate his influence on my early musical tastes.