2023 Rock & Roll HOF screechfest

Someone say Fun Boy?

 

Got to revisit those first three LC albums. I have Stain on CD, but “Vivid” was one of those late 1980s albums I wore out on cassette.

 

"The One Thing" and "Don't Change" were in heavy rotation on MTV and got radio play on pop-rock radio in 1983

 

Where the hell did they play in Highgate, Vermont? For a few summers as a kid, we spent a week at a family resort on Lake Champlain in Highgate Springs, a mile from Highgate, close to the Quebec line. I was a teenager but I do not remember anything resembling a concert venue -- much less one that could support that kind of crowd. There was no actual town there, really -- just farmland. There was Swanton, VT and Phillipsburg, QUE.

 

All I know is 1988 was the absolute worst year to have a HS summer job filing shit all day in a doctor's office where the middle-aged secretaries controlled the radio and played the local soft-rock station for 8 hours straight. A non-stop rotation of "The Flame," "Hands to Heaven" by Breathe, "Make it Real" by the Jets, "I Still Believe" by Brenda Starr and some absolute dog-shit ballad by Richard Marx. Made me want to slit my wrists every day.

 

'94: https://www.dead.net/show/july-13-1994
'95: https://www.dead.net/show/june-15-1995

 

I think I have a string of unanswered posts but there's too much in this thread not to respond to. There was an ad sales guy at a magazine I wrote for about 20 years ago. He claimed to have visited every establishment name-checked in "Girls, Girls, Girls." Yes, he had been to "Tattletales" in Atlanta (it was no Gold Club from what I hear), the Doll House in Ft. Lauderdale AND the Crazy Horse in Paris, Frnace (though I wouldn't have taken him for an international traveler). And as someone who thought INXS was fine and was an important band in the '80s, most "influential" bands that hipster dork rock critics gush over couldn't write a song as catchy, well-executed and enjoyable as Girls, Girls, Girls if humanity depended on it. There's a reason why Motley Crue was huge and, say, Mission of Burma, wasn't. Motley Crue was better. They just were. They had better songs even if they had wonderfully dumb lyrics. INXS was better too. As as who was better between Crue and INXS -- that's subjective.

 

There was an airport there? Who knew. The drive there from Michigan, through Ontario and Quebec, was interminable.

 

If the Sex Pistols were voted into the HOF on the strength of one album, and they were, I'd argue Living Colour should be in on the same basis.

 

I saw them open for the Rolling Stones on the Steel Wheels Tour in Foxboro in 1989. They were great. Corey Glover, the lead singer who also dabbled in acting and was in "Platoon," was a good friend of one of my reporting colleagues and dropped into the newsroom one day. Still had those dreads. This was probably 1999, 2000.

 

Also, Living Colour’s second album is just as good as Vivid, if not better.