Here goes (with links to youtube clips embedded):
1. My first Nick Cave experience (when watching Wings of Desire in 1988)
"This desire to possess her is a wound/ And it's naggin' at me like a shrew"
2. Off of the first cassette tape I bought of his: “The Weeping Song”
Good thing you couldn’t do auto repeat, my roommate would have kicked me out! Weeping is not crying - thanks for education, Nick.
3. The most covered and famous Nick Cave song: “The Mercy Seat”
“In a way I’m yearning to be done with this measuring of truth…”
4. The evil within: “Red Right Hand”
“Rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy”
5. “Slowly Goes the Night” This one did get stuck on repeat (no roommate that year!)
“How goes it? It goes lonely. It goes slowly.”
6. “People ain’t no Good”
“It ain't that in their hearts they’re bad/ They can comfort you, some even try…”
7. “Into My Arms”: First Nick Cave song I shared with Irene. I still recall getting knocked out by that first line...
8.“There She Goes my Beautiful World” Nick Cave does gospel?
“…you weren't much of a muse But then I weren't much of a poet”
9. “I Need You” Just crank it up, surround yourself with the sound and nothing else. This isn’t a song, it’s an ocean.
10. “Abattoir Blues” Everyone has the blues, but Nick Cave takes his to the slaughterhouse!
>May Day 2002 > Orpheum Theater > Boston
ReplyDelete>Irene and I were definitely the most conservative looking patrons at this event. Although wearing the requisite black, we had neither crazy hair style nor color. The crowd was anywhere from 17 to 70, but heavy on white guys in their mid 30’s. I have been waiting for years for this moment - ever since seeing him in Wim Wender’s “Wings of Desire”: we were there to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, of course.
From the 10th row, his thinning hair and pale face gave me momentary pause (Does he still have it in him? Can he handle in a live performance all the ballads he has been pumping out on his recent albums?). Super-thin, but larger than life, Nick Cave came striding cockily on stage and with a breezy “Hello Boston” dispensed with all chit chat and put all my fears and doubt to rest.
Wearing a green suede jacket and alternating ballads at the piano with high energy songs perched on the edge of the stage, leaning out into the audience, he and the Bad Seeds definitely did not disappoint my 14 years of pent up anticipation. The Bad Seeds were bobbing and swaying around him on the stage like cars in some crazy nonlinear musical train anchored the impressively impassive Blixa (who stood motionless in his three piece suit and shades, moving only slightly to strum his bass madly or to screech howls that I had always imagined to be artificially produced on the CD tracks – at the end of the concert, I noticed broken string splayed out from his bass). Cave was the mad conductor, whipping the band into a furious state somehow without seeming to even interacting with them. Pointing straight into the crowd and singing always just above the band, Cave had such confidence that I felt it was he alone building the band’s trademark crescendos until the freight train that is the Bad Seeds jumped its tracks on stage and ran straight over me.
His lyrics were alive as always and he forced me yet again to explore the dark corners of my own soul as he implored, begged, sulked and scowled on stage. The microphone purposefully corded to restrain the wild beast as he moved about the stage, he entered each piece completely and without reserve. Smoking between numbers as well as during them, he inhaled the audience along with the smoke. The cowbell struck on “Red Right Hand” as Cave reached high with his own (not red, but right anyway) in the refrain, might as well have been a hammer striking my soul right out of my chest. (I was “one microscopic cog in his macroscopic plan. Designed and directed by his Red Right Hand”!)
One short set with a double encore, he stuck mostly to material off the recent two albums, but threw in some earlier stuff to let the amps get their workout. He ended on (Mister) “Stagger Lee.” His cocky antics mesmerized the crowd and, as Cave became Stag before our eyes, a last verse was added: the slaying of the devil himself by the undefeated MISTER Stagger Lee. A curt “goodnight” and a nod and he was gone, leaving me hoping it will be less than 14 years until our next encounter.
https://www.nickcave.com/releases/distant-sky/
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwlU_wsT20Q