I was recently going through some old files on my back-up external hard drive and I found a bunch of concert reviews from my Metroland music critic days, roughly 1995 to 2003. Most of the reviews don’t merit any sort of preservation beyond sitting on that drive as they have for the past two-plus decades. There are some, though, that I think have public archival value given the caliber of the artists being critiqued, or some unique facet/aspect of the shows attended, especially since Metroland went kaput and has no public archives of its own.

So I’ve been posting these concert reviews here over the past couple of days, and will continue doing so until I’ve trawled through the whole archive. Might take a couple of days more. I’m back-dating them all to whenever the original articles ran in print, so they’re not all at the top of the home page, clogging up newer material. You can use the Concerts category links if you are interested in seeing any or all of them. You can also refer to the Interviews category if you’d like to read that back catalog as well. Many of the interviews were conducted to preview the concerts that I’m posting about now. I may cross-link all of those at some point. Depends on how ambitious and/or bored I get in the weeks ahead.

I’ve turned off the LinkedIn notifications for all of these new/old posts (that’s the only social media presence I maintain for now, somewhat begrudgingly, since I consider the other prominent platforms to be noxious cesspools of swilly shite), but WordPress still puts out new post alerts for these. This means that if you follow me via Reader or email, I must apologize for filling up your feeds/inboxes without being invited to do so. Though maybe you’re liking that, collectively. I’m surprised at how many reads some of these old nuggets are getting already. Go figger.

The last concert I saw in Chicago was an all-time great one, with King Crimson delivering the goods, and how. This photo was taken post-show by bassist Tony Levin. If you click on it to enlarge, and look closely in the front row, just left of center, you’ll see Mr Prog Nerd and Bride, most happy to have been there.