A Single Random Musical Observation, or "What I Would Do if I Could Time-Travel"
There are many shows in history that I would love to see if I could time-travel. Some predate my being born, such as the Who's live shows in 1971 (when they were using live shows to work on the material for Who's Next, the greatest straight-up rock'n'roll album ever, something others agree with); others, like Sonic Youth's 1988 Daydream Nation tour, occurred before I was old enough to go to shows (or even buy many cassettes, and those I could afford, well....the tastes of an 8-year-old are not the most refined). I'm sure we all have shows like that, that we wish we could warp the space-time continuum to witness live.
However, if there's one show I could probably go back and see, it would be when I was about to graduate high school. As I was taking my final exams for graduation, and Toronto was a 9-hour drive from where I lived, there was absolutely no way I could make it to see Spiritualize play live. At the time, they were riding high on what is unquestionably their best album, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, and the live album from that time period demonstrates that actually seeing them live would have constituted a major religious experience. I absolutely adored (and still adore) that album. It was the second-most-frequently played album I listened to at that time. The only one I was listening to more was OK Computer.
The kicker? Spiritualized, on the Ladies and Gentlemen tour, was the opening band of that concert back in spring 1998. The main act?
Radiohead. On the OK Computer tour.
If there were a time-machine, forget about going back and killing Hitler, or talking Johnson out of getting involved in Vietnam, or anything else. I'm going to that show in Toronto in April 1998.
