Cure Retrospective and Post-Coachella Blues - Was it all just a dream?

Today, I worked from home. Normally when I do this, I check out the excellent podcast Deeper Shades of House, but today, I decided to pay homage to The Cure and listen to no less than their first six (American) albums back-to-back. As I suspected, these albums haven't lost a thing for me. I'm still in love with these songs, as much now as ever before.

First up, Boys Don't Cry, which they released as a three-piece, I believe. The band did several songs from this one in that final, infamous encore where they had the power turned off on them.

Next, 17 Seconds, from like 1980. The bands second-last encore consisted entirely of songs from this one, including M (one of my all-time faves), Play For Today, and the great closing song A Forest.


After that, Faith played itself out, and to this day it's one of my favorite Cure albums. I seem to remember that they played a lot of Faith material on the Bloodflowers tour.



The fourth album up was Pornography, which is also the first in the "trilogy" series (including Disintegration and Bloodflowers). Pornography has also long been a favorite of mine. The guts it took to put two nearly-identical songs back-to-back (The Siamese Twins, The Figurehead)! As similar as they are, I have to say I love them both.



Next up was The Top, which I've probably listened to in its entirety less than a lot of their stuff, but it's still a great album. I remember watching the movie The Cure In Orange on the big screen when I was younger, and when they opened it up with Shake Dog Shake, it was explosive, just as they open this album up with it.

Finally, I'm listening to Japanese Whispers, which was actually three singles and five B-sides that they released as an album in 1983. This one includes the high school favorite Let's Go To Bed that we'd always sing to girls at parties, and the all-time classic Lovecats that we used to play on the bass guitar and Glockenspiel back in the same era.


So I'm listening to all of this, and I decide it's time to see if the classic In Orange is available on DVD. Nope. Blu-Ray? Not that either. Well, hell, I've got a VCR/DVD burner, so I just threw that in. I'm not sure if it will work, but I'm going to give it a shot. It would make a great little present for any Cure fan, especially this one.

You know, as you drive back from Coachella, you get on the 10 West or whatever freeway, whatever direction you're driving. You start looking around at the cars around you, listening to that special set of CDs you've prepared for the long trip home, and you wonder, how many of these people were there with us? How many of these people was I standing next to last night, two, three nights ago, in the blistering heat of the Outdoor Theatre in the middle of the day? In the dark, warbling night of the Sahara tent?

As you check freeways off your list like peeling items of clothing before getting into the shower, you start to feel farther and farther away from it all. The reality of Monday is starting to seep into the cracks in this utopian time, displacing the all-encompassing feeling of living in this otherworldly society, this temporary, but very real existence. The people around you in the cars start to look more normal, like they actually could exist outside of the LA club scene, outside of The Casbah.

By the time you get back to your normal existence, you're naked. You're completely stripped of this coat of armor provided you by 50,000 other fanatics, the relative anonymity it provides you, and the total lack of responsibility with the exception of having a unique and memorable experience. You feel a little uneasy, it's startling how easy it is to acclimate to the heat, the dirt, the volume and intensity, the sound and the fury of it all.

It's all so surreal, it's a mirage almost. You get there, you can't believe you're there. Sunday night, you sit around talking about how you can't believe it's over. And Monday, and every day after that for about two weeks, you sit around wondering if it wasn't all just some illusion.