On September 10, 2019, Marcia and I went to see a favorite band, King Crimson, in a favorite venue, Chicago’s Auditorium Theater. I wrote about the experience in effusive terms here. We knew that the show would mark a transition point for us, as it was the last one we saw together in Chicago before relocating back to Des Moines, and then on to Sedona. We knew that we’d have far fewer opportunities to see live music after departing the Windy City, but we had no idea that that particular concert would be the last one we’d see for over two years, as COVID changed everything a few months later, and we’re still not quite back to normal, by a large margin.

That said, we did finally have another live music experience last night, two years and nine days after that gig by The Mighty Crim. We went down to the Phoenix metro area yesterday, which marketing geniuses have somehow managed to brand as “The Valley” over the years, though as a map and geology nerd, I struggle to understand exactly what’s Valley-like about the region, at all. And then we went out to the show on a Sunday night, and it was indeed quite pleasant. So when Mike Nesmith and Micky Dolenz, the surviving half of The Monkees, sang their Gerry Goffin-and-Carole King-penned hit, “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” at the end of their concert’s first set, it all seemed most fitting indeed for the time and the place. (The song’s lyrical concerns are also apt regarding Phoenix’s endless suburban sprawl).

The concert was technically billed as “The Monkees Present: Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith,” to pay proper homage to corporate law and intellectual property protections and suchlike (and also to obliquely honor the title of The Monkees’ eighth studio album). But the evening’s welcoming MC and the artists themselves referred to the event as “The Mike and Micky Show,” which feels a bit more personalized and apt. The duo have been publicly adamant that this tour (which has been delayed multiple times by COVID) will be the last one to go out under The Monkees’ moniker, so there was an elegiac element going into the proceedings as well.

Before offering praise for the experience that Micky and Mike offered us all, I do have to note for the record that COVID has not changed the fact that pop music concert audiences are still mostly jerks who still do not know how to behave in mass performance situations. Marcia and I actually left our pretty good seats and moved up closer to the rafters midway through the show, just to get away from the schmucks and putzes and their cellphone addictions who made it virtually impossible to focus on the music and the show while they indulged in their selfish behaviors. Examples: the nimrod right front of us spent most of his time in his seat endlessly scrolling through various social media sites on his brightly-lit screen (when he wasn’t stumbling over his row-mates to go get another beer at the bar, anyway), while a woman behind us felt entitled to film most of the show using her cellphone flashlight to brighten the scene. I certainly have missed live music over the past two years, but Holy Moly, I did not miss that sort of rude and idiotic behavior in public spaces. We also kept our masks on for most of the show; while everyone in the venue was supposed to present either a vaccination card or proof of a negative COVID test within 72 hours of entry, my Covidiot-radar was pinging at the behavior and attitudes of numerous people near us through the evening, so self-safety seemed warranted.

That all being said, things on the music front last night were much better, thankfully. The group’s two-set show was quite generous, offering an excellent mix of popular crowd-pleasers and deep cuts alike; here’s the roster of what they played. The backing band, featuring Mike’s son Christian Nesmith (who also produced the excellent recent Dolenz Sings Nesmith album) and Micky’s sister, Coco, was just crackerjack tight, doing a superb job bringing some of the group’s ornate studio arrangements to life. Micky was in great voice throughout the show, and I was frankly amazed to watch him effortlessly and powerfully breeze through tough vocal cuts like “Goin’ Down,” “The Porpoise Song,” and “Randy Scouse Git,” the latter of which also featured him offering some feisty tympani work.

Mike Nesmith, alas, was noticeably more frail last night than when Marcia and I saw him deliver a masterful show in Chicago about five years ago with his First National Band, featuring several of the same band members we saw last night, including Christian Nesmith. Mike used a cane to get to and around the stage, he sat through most of the show, he played no guitar, and his normally reedy voice was even more breathy than has been the case over the years, a situation not helped by the room’s sound-man apparently not being willing to turn his microphone level up, even for his solo spotlight numbers, so he was often drowned out by the band. But it was still wonderful to be in the room with Nez again (my fave Monkee, yeah), and I was really pleased to see him get so much love from a live audience.

Micky was also really supportive and loving toward Nez, which was wonderful to see. I suspect that this may be Mike’s “last hurrah” tour, though I would also expect Micky to soldier on in some fashion for years to come, based on what he was able to do last night. Micky and Mike paid tribute to their late band-mates David Jones and Peter Tork by offering a selection of the pair’s best-known/best-loved tunes, actually focusing more on Tork’s deep cuts than on Jones’ more popular fare. Which I was good with, as I always liked Peter’s rare vocal and songwriting contributions a lot. I guess if I was still in my former professional music critic mode, I would summarize the show thusly: “Micky Dolenz was in fine voice fronting a killer live band as they plowed through an excellently-curated selection of music from the Monkees’ large catalog, and it was truly wonderful that the best and most-influential songwriter Micky ever worked with, Michael Nesmith, came out to support him live one final tour with character-rich between-song stories and low-key backing vocals.”

When all was said and done, the evening was essentially a feel-good nostalgia show by a couple of artists who I quite love and admire. And, honestly, that was really quite okay, after two years have elapsed since my last concert experience, much of it filled with cultural, political, and medical dread. Music really is a powerful healer and force for emotional and psychological good, and the love and joy and positivity that washed off the stage last night made this a delightful show to end the longest concert hiatus of my adult life. Marcia and I have tickets to see Dead and Company, Lindsey Buckingham, and Sparks in the months ahead, and I expect all of those shows to be great, too, but Mike and Micky will remain memorable just for being the first step of this next phase of my concert-going life.

I offer a few low-quality snaps below (taken quickly and discretely in the aisle with a darkened phone screen, so as not to be a tool and bother the people seated around us)(not that they would have cared, apparently) to give you a sense of what it looked like. Here’s wishing you and yours some happy concert-going of your own, safely and soon!

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.

King Crimson’s timeless and titanic debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, was released in October 1969. The current “Seven-Headed Beast” incarnation of the band have been marking the record’s 50th anniversary with an audacious 50-concert Celebration Tour, which rolled into Chicago’s Auditorium Theater last night. The last time the Crims played Chicago in June 2017, the group (rightly) deemed the performance to be so stellar that they reworked their planned release dates for the year to get Live in Chicago into the hands of those who could not be in the Court that evening. While Marcia and I lived mere blocks from that show’s venue (the venerable Chicago Theater) at the time, the Scheduling Fates had us in the Netherlands that week, so we just experienced the show after the fact via CD, before catching a later date on the same tour in Milwaukee.

And now we live in Des Moines, but this year, the Scheduling Fates actually smiled upon us: I was in Chicago for work this week, and Marcia flew over to join me for the show. This is our third time seeing the Beast, twice with seven heads, once with eight; sadly, keyboardist Bill Rieflin is unable to tour with the group this year. Marcia and I also saw the fractal incarnation ProjeKCt Two together back in Albany in 1998, and I caught the five-piece 2007 version of the band in New York City. So on one hand, we theoretically know what to expect at a King Crimson show, but on the other hand, part of the magic of a King Crimson show is that if you leave your expectations at the door when you arrive, you’re likely to have a more magical, perhaps even spiritual, experience in the presence of music that transcends its creators.

King Crimson and its management company, Discipline Global Mobile (DGM), are exceptionally attuned to the sweet spots where audience and artist come together to create unique moments that cannot exist one without the other. One aspect of this culture manifests itself in strict prohibitions against photography during performances, flying hard yet consistently in the face of modern social media culture where audience members are often more obsessed with capturing the perfect Instagram shot or getting wobbly clips up on Youtube tomorrow than they are with being in the moment with the music today. Having been to countless shows marred by idiot audients in this way, I cannot tell you how refreshing a King Crimson concert feels with the gadgets put away until curtain time. It is Crim Policy that after all the music that is to be played has actually been played, bassist Tony Levin raises his camera to snap the audience, and we in a spirit of good faith and reciprocity can snap the band as they take their bows as well. I wish this practice would spread.

Another facet of DGM’s audience engagement is their “royal package” approach to the traditional VIP experience. Rather than some seedy backstage grip and grin photo opportunity where ticket holders are shoved through a rope line for a few seconds of reflected, resented glory with their heroes, DGM actually acquires the best seats in the house directly, and invites those who wish to purchase them to a nearly hour-long pre-show conversation with band members and management. We heard, at some length, from Crimson founder, composer, guitarist and visionary Robert Fripp, bassist Tony Levin, and manager David Singleton. And after the pre-show conversations, but before the concert, we enjoyed our complementary signed programs and other high quality merch from our amazing seats in the front row, on the right center aisle. It’s an exceptionally decent and dignified approach to audience engagement, and I applaud it.

I especially appreciated, as I always do, hearing from Robert Fripp, either speaking in person or sharing his thoughtful written words. (For example, over breakfast today, he summarized a portion of his remarks last night thusly). He’s one of a very small number of people in my life who have actively shaped my understanding and appreciation of music not only through what they write and play onstage or in the studio, but also in the ways in which they frame their work and practice, and place their artistry within a context beyond commerce. (Pere Ubu’s David Thomas also comes to mind on this front). Fripp is deeply thoughtful about what he does, and why he does it, and what it means. And he has been deeply committed for decades to sharing the perspectives he’s gleaned from those experiences and reflections, and I find that thought-provoking and inspiring. He’s also very funny, and he loves his wife very much and is never afraid to tell people that, and I hold those traits in the highest regard too. He moves me, at bottom line. I’m glad to spend time with him.

And then we get to the music: two sets, starting at 8pm sharp, wrapping at 11pm sharp, with a sharp 20-minute intermission that began, sharply as promised in the taped welcome from the band, immediately after the first set, and concluded immediately before the second set. After five years together on the road, the Seven-Headed Beast is truly monstrous at this point, making sounds unthinkable in their complexity with brilliant, pointillist precision,  tone and timbre and texture deployed in the full service of the music, which is almost always audibly King Crimson, but which almost never sounds the same, from moment to moment to moment, as the concert careens onward.

Since the Crims’ reboot/relaunch in 2014, I’ve often encountered eye-rolling about the very existence of the band’s triple-drummer front line (Gavin Harrison, Pat Mastelotto, and Jeremy Stacey, the latter most ably doubling on keyboards, often in the same song), which somehow seems to trigger certain critical types into exegeses on excess and essays grounded in stale musical verities from four decades ago. All I can say on that point to the disbelievers is that until you’ve seen and heard it in concert, it’s hard to comprehend how perfect and powerful it is, both in the context of supporting the four back line musicians (Mel Collins on woodwinds, Tony Levin on basses, Fripp and Jakko Jakszyk on guitar, with the later on lead vocals as well), and as an exercise in its own right in high-wire, seat-of-the-pants technical expertise that’s simply dazzling in how incomprehensibly impossible much of it looks and sounds.

Both sets opened with the drummers drumming, and it was delightful to peek up at the top riser every so often and see how much the non-drummers also seemed to enjoy watching their percussive pals playing. The technical wizardry and auditory audacity continued unabated in the early going of the first set, as the gnarly and knotty “Pictures of A City” and “Neurotica” offered a pair of peeks (written over a decade apart) into the perils of big city living, with “Suitable Grounds For the Blues” following as a most apt third element, here in the hometown of electric urban blues. A mid-set block of “Red,” “Moonchild” (with improvised cadenzae from Fripp, Stacey and Levin), and “Epitaph” felt spacious and soaring after the claustrophobic density of what which came before it, though it was no less technical, just less frenetic. Marcia and I got to hear the quirky “Cat Food” (which earned the Crims an improbable lip-synching spot on Top of the Pops in 1970) live for the first time later in the set, which ultimately wrapped up with the electrifying “Elektrik” and the title track from In the Court of the Crimson King, still as haunting and evocative as ever, even with digital Mellotrons.

The second set’s opening drum fest segued into the gamelan-like “Frame By Frame,” which found Levin and Jakszyk harmonizing the vocals sweetly, as Stacey and Harrison created circular marimba tones around them. After a swarming installment from the five-part “Larks Tongue in Aspic” suite, the sweetness resumed with the utterly lovely title track of the Islands album, an almost jazz chamber music number that allowed Collins to shine most brightly as the music swayed and swelled inexorably like the sea against some lonely summer shore. The epic “Easy Money” is featuring new lyrics this year, carrying the themes of economic malfeasance that shaped the original forward into these most venal of populist times; Jakszyk’s wordless ululations through the swelling bridge section gave the song a sense of passion and fire and perhaps even despair in the face of market evils, then and/or now. A potent instrumental pairing of the final “Larks Tongue” segment with a chunky cut from the contemporary “Radical Action” suite returned the band to the knotted instrumental complexity that opened the show. Then an inspirational “Starless” (with its memorable theme, powerful vocals, and that epic building bass bridge that got the audience whooping well before it had run its way back to the final verse and chorus) and a thunderous “Indiscipline” (featuring more of the Drumsons’ incredible “pass the beat” collaborations) carried us into the second interim.

While King Crimson set lists are written by Fripp and presented to the band the day of each concert, always tailored to the moment, never stock repetition of the prior day’s glories, it was a reasonably safe bet that we would receive “21st Century Schizoid Man” as an encore last night, having not yet heard it, and that’s indeed how we ended the evening. Whenever I hear this song — live or at home — I never cease to marvel that (a) it’s half a century old now, (b) it opened a then-unknown band’s debut album, and (c) it was written by a quintet of very young musicians without much academic or technical training between them at the time when they created it.  The song is so titanic, so sophisticated, and so iconic that it simply boggles the mind to ponder the fact that it even exists, never mind the fact that it can actually be played, and then never mind the fact that when it is, it’s as if it’s the most current, most present, most right here right now musical moment imaginable. Everywhere. Always.

I’m not often awed by audio, but that song gets me there, and it was the perfect capstone to a concert that was filled with jaw-dropping moments beyond count. This review is already probably longer than it needs to be, and I could append paragraph after paragraph describing each of the seven players’ performances, but I think it’s sufficient to summarize by saying that their deepest collective strength is how well they work as an ensemble, every one of them using their most formidable technical skills to support the whole, solos (when they occur) appearing less as acts of creative onanism than crucial elements in catapulting the canon forward, upward, onward. As the sole member who has appeared at every occasion when King Crimson has manifested itself live, Robert Fripp often consumes much of the media’s attention and focus, but in concert, he’s the consummate team player, content to create quiet textures from his back corner perch just as often as he called attention to himself with fire and flash, allowing Jakszyk to spin off as many guitar solos as he did over the fully packed course of the evening. It worked. It works. It’s wonderful.

A moving and powerful evening, at bottom line, with some notable elegiac elements for me and Marcia: with our move to Des Moines, this is the last planned concert of our wonderful years together in Chicago, and the date also marked the 17th anniversary of my father’s death. We remember. We celebrate. Life happens, change changes, and music matters, most especially if we open ourselves to its ministrations, and let it move us as it may.

End of concert photo time. Bravo to all!!!

And here is the post-show view of the sold-out room taken from the stage, courtesy Tony Levin. Click to enlarge, and spot the happiest couple in the front row.

Marcia and I caught the mighty Pere Ubu at Beat Kitchen in Chicago last night. They’ve been among my favorite bands since the ’70s, plying those sweet spots where experimental noisemaking, monster riffery and ace storytelling collide. Their front-man/mastermind David Thomas is a truly one-of-a-kind performer, and one of the very finest thinkers and writers about what it really means to rock. (Just forage around the Ubu Projex Protocols for a taste of his aggregated wisdom).

I interviewed Mr Thomas and late guitarist Jim Jones way back in 1996 when they’d issued an essential career retrospective box called Datapanik in the Year Zero, and then caught them live in New York City (with Wilson) on the subsequent tour.  The band had gone through one of its periodic personnel reconfigurations at the point, so drummer Steve Mehlman, bassist Michele Temple and synthesist Robert Wheeler were the new members at that show. They’re all still onstage with Mr Thomas to this day, and they are a mighty tight force all these years on. The guitar position has bifurcated for this tour, with Gary Siperko on the electric six-string, and ex-Swans man Kristoff Hahn on pedal steel. It’s an interesting new sound for the band. (On their most excellent recent studio album, 20 Years In a Montana Missile Silo, the sextet actually becomes a nine-piece, with long-time guitarist Keith Moline, digital synthesist Gagarin, and clarinet man Darryl Boon).

Pere Ubu remain defiantly and delightfully anti-glamorous. Mr Thomas was out front having a smoke when we got to the club, while Wheeler and Mehlman were working the merch table. Peter Prescott (Mission of Burma) opened the show with his three piece band Minibeast, offering sort of a Can vibe of rock-steady drum and bass grooves topped with shouting, guitars, loops and samples. Loud and engaging. Beat Kitchen was a funky little bar/restaurant/club in the Roscoe Village neighborhood. We hadn’t been there before, and we liked it a lot as an intimate club space with good sound and sight lines. (Roscoe Village is actually one of the neighborhoods we’re considering for a move next summer, so nice to know there’s a good little neighborhood joint there).

The Ubu show was as tight and noisy (yeah, you can do those things at the same time, when you’re this good) as I would have hoped and expected. Mr Thomas remained seated throughout, noting that the original James Brown had to dance around, while the new James Brown (he would be Thomas) gets to sit down down. He and every one else on stage played it old school with scraps of paper and notes and music stands littering the stage, rather than the annoying iPads that seem to be propagating as musical props in our always on-screen era. Mr Thomas had a bottle of wine with him as well, using his teeth to pop the cork, drinking straight from the bottle like a pirate, commenting at one point that it was actually a pretty good wine, which people don’t normally give him. Good for whoever did so.

Mr Thomas was in very good voice throughout, and the band played an interesting, career spanning set, ranging from the seminal “Heart of Darkness” through to the pummeling “Monkey Bizness” on the new disc. A touching highlight of the show for us was the elegiacal “Cold Sweat:” Mr Thomas normally sings with his eyes closed and doesn’t really look out through the lights and into the crowd very often, but as he sang the lines “Thank you / You’ve been great and I really mean that /I love you so /Hold me close /I feel the time running away / I know you must feel it too”, he opened his eyes, reached out his arms, looked around the room, held the moment.

Ubu Projex have been communicating that this tour may be “last chance to see us on the East Coast” in recent social media promotions, so if this was an onstage farewell for Chicago, then I am hugely grateful that we got to see and hear it. A powerful and memorable show from an important and impressive band who really mean a lot to me on a whole lot of levels. Thanks for the rock and roll. Now move those big black boxes.