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Greatest Misses

All this looking backward needs to stop soon, but by way of completing both an offline conversation and some sleepless listmaking, following is a random handful of shows I wished I had attended.

These, by the way, are shows that I could have seen, and so this leaves out artists who expired before I was born (Robert Johnson, Glenn Miller, Blind Willie Johnson, Milton Brown, Hank Williams…) or shows I'd have been far too young to attend (Cream comes to mind, as do the Spencer Davis Group, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, on and on). This, then, is a brief admission of errors of omission. In no particular order.

(1) Townes Van Zandt at the Backstage in Seattle, Washington. When I finally tracked down the banjo player Billy Faier he told me that he'd spent a couple weeks touring with Townes, having met him in a poker game. If I remember right, he said he left the tour after their Seattle date because there was too much drinking going on, which I know y'all find shocking. I never saw Townes, barely knew who he was before he died. And maybe it wouldn't have been much of a show, but I sure wish I'd been there, nevertheless.

(2) George Thorogood & The Delaware Destroyers at the Fabulous Rainbow Tavern, April 16, 1979. I may be slightly off on the date, but no matter. Thorogood, as I have observed before, was a kind of roots music Rosetta Stone for me; 1978's Move It On Over led me back to Hank Williams, Elmore James, and Johnny Cash. He played the Rainbow on my twentieth birthday, and I couldn't get in. Or maybe it was Parker's Ballroom, now that I type it. It doesn't matter. I was underage and I couldn't go. I saw him much later in a gold lame suit (reminiscent of Phil Ochs' Gunfight album cover) on a big stage at Bumbershoot, and, by then, realized what a ham-fisted guitarist he really is. I suspect he'd have been more compelling years earlier in a small room. And I'd have noticed fewer flaws.

(3) The Police at Astor Park, 1979. My second car was a 1972 Mercury Capri with mag wheels. Like my first car, a 1967 Camaro convertible (my stepbrother still has it, the bum), it ran only half the time. It was my first experience with a manual transmission, and I still remember coming up one of those downtown Seattle hills -- I worked as a door-to-door typewriter salesman that summer, or maybe I've fused memories here because that won't add right according to the calendar -- hearing one of the AM radio stations play "Roxanne" in their drive-time cash or trash feature. It was trashed, and the DJ was gleeful about it. I had never heard anything like it, and couldn't decide if it was good or not, but I was pretty sure the DJ was wrong. Soon enough I was pretty sure they were real good, though it was the Police's aggressive creation of marketable collectible items which got me to quit buying such things. Anyhow. They played Astor Park, which ended up being a dump across the street from The Rocket offices, and had once been a very nice supper club where people like Ray Charles held court. And I couldn't go, because I wasn't 21.

(4) Ted Hawkins at the Backstage, Seattle. Or at Goochi's in Wenatchee, Washington, July 8, 1994. That last one is a date I'm sure of because there's a track from that show on Hawkins' posthumous The Final Tour. I completely missed Hawkins when he was alive because I simply didn't believe his bio; now I think his is one of the great and complicated stories wanting to be a movie, but I don't make such things. One of the labels had sent out a metal band whose lead singer was supposed to be a homeless schizophrenic, and the whole thing was wrong in so many ways that I didn't trust Ted Hawkins to be who he said he was when the Geffen album (I guess it was The Next Hundred Years) crossed my desk. Not seeing Hawkins may be my biggest regret on this list. Yeah, it is. His reading of "There Stands The Glass" is everything. Everything.

(5) Mother Love Bone at the OK Hotel, Seattle. Green River had split before I knew what I was missing. Bass player Jeff Ament is also a designer, and would sometimes come into The Rocket office to have a few words typeset. Because he's a genuinely nice guy and we both loved basketball ( I am still more jealous that he walked away from a college scholarship to play music than I am that he became a rock star), we got to talking. He was excited and nervous about his new band's first show, and was kind enough to invite me. I was dead dog broke and spent a lot of time under the Viaduct trying to find a free parking space. By the time I got to the door of the OK Hotel, a place I don't think I'd been in before, the show was way over capacity. I half-heartedly tried to talk myself in because I was, after all, from The Rocket, but the doorman assured me somebody else from The Rocket had gotten in, and I wasn't dressed like anybody I saw in the crowd, so I went home. I was never a big proponent of MLB, nor of glam, but it would've been a show to see, far better than the desultory afternoon performance I saw at Bumbershoot a couple years after. And then Andrew Woods was gone.

(6) Nirvana at Motorsports in Seattle. Motorsports was this brick garage on Stewart Street that I drove by every day, and then it became a venue for maybe a month. This was the only show Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters played with the band after Chad Channing was tossed out. Dan is the Ringo Starr of grunge (Matt Cameron is the Ginger Baker, minus the ego and the drugs, and I don't know who Barrett Martin reminds me of because I can't name more than a handful of drummers to this day…which leaves out Jason Finn and Mark Pickerel, all of whom were essential to Seattle). Anyway, I don't know why I didn't go, no more than I don't know why I didn't see the Nirvana show at the Hub Ballroom (I think I was actually in the building that night, at KCMU with Jeff Gilbert). But I didn't. And I still think Kurt Cobain was the single best singer I will ever see, even though I never saw him on one of his legendary nights. Ah, well.

(7) The Talking Heads. Anywhere. Ever. David Byrne is the John Hammond of our age. Discuss.

That'll do. I'll get back to the present one day soon.

Posted by grant on June 17, 2007 10:18 AM | Permalink