Hi Negative8Ball, sorry for the late reply. Long work week.
Because I am doing work now on a desktop computer that has no internet connection, I put a "greatest live sampler" of eighties-2000 concerts on the disconnected desktop. It's got the five-speaker 5.1 surround sound with a bass speaker, so the live audience recordings really stand out.
Today I am doing a bit of housecleaning, ripping my old collection of ZZ Top albums. ZZ Top was my first true music love, it's how I defined my teenage years. The Cure's "Staring at the Sea" CD compilation started me in a new direction in 1989, but ZZ Top was my first music devotion, where you simply had to have "*everything*" of a band. I still use my ZZ Top keychain:
This is because I just caught Billy F Gibbons doing a solo show this week. His blistering blues riffs at the end of each song was like a revelation to me. I'm amazed that he's still got it, ZZ Top's First Album came out in 1971.
Anyway, while I have the opportunity of rummaging around my old CD boxes (who has those anymore?), I pulled out my CDs of Wish and Bloodflowers. Never really liked either album, but I LOVE the tours they put on to promote them. I'd like to rip them at max MP3 resolution and hear them again, for the first time.
AForestFan, I really enjoy knowing what other music fans of TC like. I have to say, you threw me with ZZ Top! I think it's great to have really diverse musical tastes, and there is a good bit of spread between TC and ZZ Top. I'm more likely to give ZZ a good chance next time I hear them since I know there is good taste in liking TC.
Keep an eye out for the "other bands" space regarding my Billy F Gibbons attendance the past week.
After ripping Bloodflowers, I put Possession in that folder from my Join the Dots rip. Nice to give a little exposure to an otherwise completely unnoticed Join the Dots 4th CD track...
It seems the final stretch of my listening of the 1996 Wild Mood Swings Tour is taking forever. But in a good way.
I finally reached the treat of 25.08.1996 New Orleans - Kiefer UNO Lakefront Arena (USALA). As Robert announces, this is their first ever performance of "The 13th". Robert opines before the song that we're about to find out why it hasn't been performed yet!
Not too many performances of this song at all, probably more than Wendy Time or Sadacic, at any rate.
Looking forward to entering 2019, so Happy New Yeaar!
Currently listening to 1996 10 26 - Lyon - Halle Tony Garnier (France). As close to a standard playlist as the '96 tour can get, with The Hanging Garden and Faith to round out the regular setlist.
Driving around in my car, I've been listening to the Bloodflowers and Wish albums. I think that Bloodflowers has aged better, there's a lot I enjoy from that one. Wish just sounds broken. Sorry, Wish has always seemed like an album that needed another six months of polishing, it sounds like a cash grab after Disintegration. Over 25 years later, Wish still has not grown on me. I still don't like it, the artsy Open & End framework, half-finished songs like Wendy Time and Trust.
There are some highlights. I love the closing instrumental on Apart. I love the structure of A Letter to Elise, and From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea. High still delights, and Open is an okay way to start things off. It's just not Disintegration and never will be.
Currently listening to 1996 10 26 - Lyon - Halle Tony Garnier (France). As close to a standard playlist as the '96 tour can get, with The Hanging Garden and Faith to round out the regular setlist.
Driving around in my car, I've been listening to the Bloodflowers and Wish albums. I think that Bloodflowers has aged better, there's a lot I enjoy from that one. Wish just sounds broken. Sorry, Wish has always seemed like an album that needed another six months of polishing, it sounds like a cash grab after Disintegration. Over 25 years later, Wish still has not grown on me. I still don't like it, the artsy Open & End framework, half-finished songs like Wendy Time and Trust.
There are some highlights. I love the closing instrumental on Apart. I love the structure of A Letter to Elise, and From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea. High still delights, and Open is an okay way to start things off. It's just not Disintegration and never will be.
I really 'like' The Wish Album, But i 'love' The b-sides. . Kisses Pillowman
Hi Pillowman. I've given Wish almost 30 years to impress me. It has not grown on me. Now I'm almost a half-century old, so I don't think it's going to happen.
Here's the demo to "Shiver and Shake". Superior to every single track on Wish, and it's not even a favorite of mine!
Working 6 days a week doesn't leave a lot of free time, but I squeezed in 1996_0803_Gorge Ampitheater, George, Washington, USA this weekend.
The American crowd gets a rare latter-day performance of Charlotte Sometimes followed by the even-rarer two-punch of Faith and A Forest.
I remember attending the 2013 New Orleans Voodoo Festival, and being denied any set of encores like that, because of the town's stupid music curfew. That's what we got for The Cure performing on a Sunday night. Oh well! Maybe someday I'll hear Faith live, just not this far into 2019...
Down to my last four 1996 Tour shows, I can't believe it!
The album that I gave away to a family friend's daughter, Wild Mood Swings, has been in my head for what, a year now? The songs have grown on me, but I probably won't listen to them outside of the context of this tour.
Enjoying the encores of cardiff 09.12.1996. Even A Funeral Party is welcome as a break from the tedious overwrought WMS tracks.
Firenze 21-10-1996 has The 13th and Gone back to back as an encore, followed by Mint Car.
Robert almost always apologizes for The 13th. Hey, every album you would take chances on wacky variations. Who would have thought The Head on the Door would be considered standard Cure?
forli 22.10.1996: Robert introduces The Hanging Garden with "Here's one we haven't played in 10 years".
Anyone able to figure out the how and why of something like this? The band had been through many lineup changes from 1986-1996. Would the new band members know the song? Would they know why Robert and his bass player didn't want to play it? Bad memories associated with the Hanging Garden single? Just another mystery in a band full of them...
forli 22.10.1996: Robert introduces The Hanging Garden with "Here's one we haven't played in 10 years".
Anyone able to figure out the how and why of something like this? The band had been through many lineup changes from 1986-1996. Would the new band members know the song? Would they know why Robert and his bass player didn't want to play it? Bad memories associated with the Hanging Garden single? Just another mystery in a band full of them...
I always wonder why the ability to edit a post here is so short. It's not like we have flame wars that need erasing...
Anyway, this show features a rare Why Can't I Be You Medley with Young at Heart and The Lovecats. Great energy on this show!
So happy to reach the 1997 Tour! I have about 15 audience recordings, although it seems one of them is a radio broadcast...
This is 07.12.1997 Dallas Christmas KDGE - Bronco Bowl (USATX).
Now what is shocking to me is that there are almost no Wild Mood Swings tracks from thes 1997 shows. The band feeling fatigued? Robert ticked off at the collapsing album sales? I don't know. All I know is, this is the first time the band is reduced to an "oldies" tour. No longer touring off new material.
Is the band over the hill in 1997? Walkers for everyone, along with fiber drinks? No? I guess not.
Some thoughts on Wild Mood Swings and the 1996 Tour:
Reaching 1997's live shows, it's apparent that the band took it personally the negative reaction to WMS. Even if this negative reaction wasn't universal, they dropped the album from the live setlists upon reaching 1997. All except for Mint Car, which was a recent single and got some airplay. They jettisoned the WMS album entirely.
That had to have smarted Robert Smith. It probably induced him to think of The Cure as only a "greatest hits" band.
I think some of the bands finest shows were from 1997-1998. Of course, this was the time period of my first exposure to the Cure bootleg scene (not audience recordings, I mean bootlegs sold at a profit by my local college music store in 1998. Most of these were single CD edits of much-longer shows, the bums.)
Anyway, I don't know in transitioning from a WMS setlist to an eighties setlist did to Robert's thinking. But one thing is for sure: It affected his thinking in what to put into The Cure's "final album": 2000's Bloodflowers. Interesting.
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I thought it might be neat to offer some sort of final report on how listening to the WMS tour affected my evaluation of the album.
* I did end up liking the opening song selection of Want, Club America, and Fascination Street. Now Want feels like a leftover orphan in later years, as it's about all that is left of that 1996 setlist.
* Songs like Strange Attraction and Gone have grown on me. There's some merit there.
* Other tracks like Return just sound like absolute dreck. Hearing those awful keyboards flare up on this song, it's like nails on a chalkboard.
* The 13th pretty much summed up the experimental nature of the album. But if you think of it, just about every Cure album was experimental. RS did not want any album to sound like the last one. Unfortunately, many of the WMS tracks are more like shelved demos than anything worth repeating.
* For years I've considered Bare to be something of salvage from this album. But hearing the tour overall, now I just skip it as it's tedious and puts me to sleep.
So, thanks to the 1996 tour for their greatest contribution: The Why Can't I Be You? medley in the encores! This is a tradition that continued into the next few years, what lucky fans!
So I briefly touched on page 1 of this thread on how my audience recording collection started back in 1998. But that's a lie.
My 1998 audience collection started by purchasing bootleg recordings at my local university's record store off-campus (which is long-closed now, ironically?). It was all very furtive. I would ask for Cure concerts, and the man would go in the back and produce a half-dozen bootlegs.
Now by 1998, I had already purchased the official "Cure Concert" CD, which was a terrible CD recording of the old Cure vinyl Concert containing 8 tracks and not even a whole concert. I didn't know, for all I knew the band really did play 8 or 9 songs per show and go home. But I wanted more of the live sound.
So in 1998, the bootleg CDs were $20 US and a double-CD show was $40. That was something I couldn't afford, so I fretted and compared the shows trying to see what new songs I could hear.
That's how I ended up with my initial collection of live Cure shows. Oddly during the entire 1990s, I never had any inclination to hear the band live when they came to my state. This was a quiet fandom on my part.
Memory works in strange ways. Today when I play the Fascination Street CD single, it recalls the original game Starcraft, because I was playing through its single-player campaigns while having this 4-track CD on repeat on my CD player.
The bootleg shows are the same way in my mind. Since they were the first that I listened to, they are etched in my mind as "definitive live performances" simply because they were first.
So to me, 17.12.1997 London - Shepherds Bush Empire (England) (single CD FM) is the correct version of "Shake Dog Shake", sounding better than the Cure Concert CD flat rendition. This concert was typical of the bootleg scene, as it was a heavily-chopped up audience recording from someone else (who never intended it for sale), then, insanely, they added three songs from "1991 Limehouse" sessions at the end to round it out. After they had take the rest of the show from you!
Another of this ilk was the 1981 Werchter Music Festival. Here was a chance to hear an entire concert when the band first sharpened into a tight trio, on one CD! Alas, the bootlegger lunatics again struck, omitting the magnificent "Robert Palmer" version of A Forest, and once again tagging on another show to round out the CD, this time most or all of the acoustic set "MTV Unplugged". I always liked the version of If Only Tonight We Could Sleep from this, although it sounds lazy.
It was not until a decade later on the old CCC forum that I was finally able to hear this Werchter show in its full glory. Since I have every note memorized, to me it is the definitive Cure sound from that time. To this day I still am fond of the setlist and order of the tracks.
I obtained two more CDs from this record store in 1998: The Bizarre Festival Complete - 22.08.1998 Köln - Butzweiler Hof (Germany) show and the 31.10.1997 New York - Irving Plaza (USANY). Neither of these single CDs were the complete show, although I loved hearing Sinking for the first time from Bizarre and A Letter to Elise on the Irving Plaza show. Comparing the latter to the Elise version on the official Paris CD, I prefer this New York version because of a simple guitar miscue on the finale instrumental that gives it special meaning to me.
For almost the next decade, this was my only exposure to audience recordings for The Cure. I played these CDs to death, literally in Werchter's case. Over the years I regained them, so I'm glad there is a Cure community to maintain and preserve these things. As we all get older and shuffle along this mortal coil, it's good that some things will outlast us and The Cure.
Geez, sound like early Cure there. Enjoy the weekend!
I'm about halfway through my 1997 shows, when it took me over a year to get through 1996.
Enjoying 1997-10-28 Los Angeles USA [Unkn.] [originally a Flac]. A real surprise is hearing the Mixed Up remix version of Close to Me. The audience was real surprised, too.