"Ladies and gentlemen, I have an official announcement to make: it's all right to rock again...."
--This ever happen to you? You're scheduled to see the same band two nights in a row, but the first night's awful: the club is a dive, the singer's voice is rough, over-friendly drunks attach themselves to you and won't scram, the night overall becomes one great big energy drain? And you're discouraged enough that you think maybe you'll skip the next night's show and just get some sleep or something?
If so, then take my advice: never, never skip that second show, no matter what. Every time I've hesitated over this decision, the second show has been something I'll remember forever, utterly redeeming the night before. It's happened with Marilyn Manson, and it happened 100% and then some with The Cult on this date in October.
The previous night's show had been at the notorious Boat House, in Norfolk VA. Anyone who's read my Manson reviews knows how I despise this wretched pit. (Norfolkians, please note: this refers only to the Boat House, not to the whole town of Norfolk, which may be lovely for all I know. I've never been there long enough to see it.) After my last MM experience there I had sworn I would never, ever set foot in the Boat House again, not for any band notime nohow; and though my roomies somehow talked me into the Cult gig, that show not only revived my resolution but set it in concrete. It didn't completely suck, but it did nothing to change my mind (see first paragraph). More to the point, the band sounded lacklustre, slow and lacking energy, and Ian's voice was seriously uneven and seemed short of breath, causing him to chop his phrasing and deliver some songs in virtual shorthand. Not a fun experience. So yes, I did seriously consider handing in my ticket for the Ritz show and spending the night channel-surfing at the Red Roof Inn. But I didn't do it...
...thank all gods. Because The Cult's show at the Ritz on 10/2/99 was a five-star masterpiece, a double-barreled, diamond-studded, kick-ass classic that ought to be mentioned with love as long as people ever talk about the best rock concerts of their lives. Crackling with passionate energy, crammed dizzily full of drum pyrotechnics and gleaming riffs and reckless nonstop dervish-dancing, it electrified the place end-to-end, and the crowd responded with such a flood of kinetic enthusiasm that there's no way this machine could slow down. And it did not. Not for one moment of the set did the energy level drop below pure joy and most of it was up in the rafters of sheer airborne ecstasy. Proud, high-powered, diamond-star-haloed rock and roll at its finest, a triumph and a magnificence,
cross my heart.
How did The Cult do it? What wellspring did they tap into that transformed them from the tired-sounding band of Friday night to the inspired firestorm they became on Saturday? We'll never know, but it's plain that they came determined to go for broke. In the kind of full-speed-and-damn-the-consequences performance you see maybe twice in a lifetime, they hurled themselves headlong into the set, holding nothing back. The two previous shows we'd seen on this tour had started slowly and gradually ascended, as the crowd pumped energy into the band and they recycled it back, but this one I swear STARTED at that height. And speaking of recycling energy, lordy mama! can you say "love transcendence machine"? As the crowd realized what was working here and began to respond with delight, dancing and singing along, it was almost immediately reflected in The Cult. Matt and Martyn grinning delightedly, Billy punching out chords with total authority, Ian colt-kicking and spinning madly, outside gravity, as though he'd never been tired a moment in his life. Boosted incrementally every time it passed from us to them and back, the hall's electricity rose and rose to a degree that's almost indescribable, until the whole band was smiling, irresistibly, until you were laughing almost as much as singing, until you did literally believe you could do this the whole night long. Every gram of energy you gave off came back to you double and triple, and there was no way to get tired, and I do sincerely swear and affirm that I can hardly remember a night when I was so utterly happy.
(And this with the same set of songs that I had hardly been able to stay awake through the night before!
Goddamn, mercy ma'am! )
Speaking of that set - it's nicely designed for maximum soul and firepower. Someone's obviously told them (hades, everyone's probably told them...) that those last two albums (Ceremony and The Cult) are not too beloved of their fanbase, because the setlist sweeps them discreetly under the rug and goes back to square one. It kicks off with a stomping "Li'l Devil" and strides surefootedly from Cult Classic ("Rain", "Revolution", "She Sells Sanctuary" - which Ian proudly describes as "the song that founded the alternative movement") through Electric ("Peace Dog", "Wildflower", and the rave-up, no-wall-left-standing last encore "Love Removal Machine") and Sonic Temple (my least favorite of these, but one that works like mad live)-- ("Sun King", "Edie", "Sweet Soul Sister", and crowd fave "Fire Woman"), with "The Witch" tossed in as a bonus. Familiar stuff but obviously held in as much love and respect as when it was new; it's wonderful how The Cult refuse to condescend or scoff at their original ideals but offer them as earnestly as ever, Ian singing even the most wide-eyed of the old lyrics with open-handed sincerity. Such a relief and so sweet in these days of cool irony and sarcastic distance.
They were all superb but I can't stop talking about Ian, who started out pretty as ever but arose by sheer will to an incandescence formerly known only to saints and devadasis. He seemed to call on some level of strength reached only by the pure of heart, and just blazed, staring past the cameras, past the ceiling, dancing, spinning like a cyclone, all the range and richness of his voice and all his physical strength poured out to the crowd and the music. No sacrifice is greater than the one that goes consenting, it's long been said, and Ian willingly threw himself onto this pyre, a performance of self-transcendent spiritfire like nothing I've ever seen.
Awesome, and I mean that literally.
("I am so completely getting off on this," he panted at one break, and one suspects it was a breathless attempt to translate angelic possession into hippiespeak.)
You look and listen around you, you see how desperate MTV and the magazines and the record labels are to convince you that you don't want to rock anymore, that you're bored with guitars and drums and the power of the voice, that what you really want - if you're a cool person, a hip person, a person who's on that indefinable cutting edge - is electronics and hip-hop and sampled patchworked stuff. Microwaved leftovers that almost taste like food. Frankenstein's-monster music, stitched together from parts of what once lived and shot with voltage to make it jerk around. But look just a little harder and you'll see that not everyone buys that line. You'll see that bands MTV and the magazines laugh at are on the road, getting new record contracts, drawing audiences - OK, not stadium audiences, but hundreds and thousands of people, enthusiastic and happy crowds night after night. You'll see that metal thrives on the radio and Goth in the dance clubs despite hundreds of attempts to proclaim them dead. You'll see that, flat simple, people love rock and roll, and will always have a place for a band like this and a miracle of a night - like this one - that shows you why that love is true.
This is what it's all about.
==paula angelynx==
10-7-99
...go back to Wolfchild Triumphant.