Cloaca Melodia

Brendan Byrne Arena, E. Rutherford, NJ.... It was a couple years before Neil was bestowed the "Godfather of Grunge" moniker, but this tour made clear he had an affinity with noisy, scruffy bands of younger vintage. A great show all around. It was my first time seeing Neil, so I was pretty psyched. He had snapped out of his weird '80s era with a vengeance on 1989's Freedom and 1990's Ragged Glory albums. I was pretty blown away with how hard he rocked at the show. My most vivid memory of the concert was a giant microphone with a yellow ribbon on it getting a lot of applause (due to the Gulf War being still in progress at the time). The opening acts were pretty memorable as well. I was struck with how low-slung Mike Ness played his guitar. And during Sonic Youth's feedback-drenched finale, Thurston Moore used his guitar as a bridge between the front of the stage and a security barrier and he carefully shimmied across it, all the while spewing caterwauling nois...

Continental Airlines Arena/Meadowlands Arena/Brendan Byrne Arena, E. Rutherford, NJ I had just reported for work at WHTG as the Production Director two days before this show, and was suddenly handed tickets to both this show and for Neil Young , both taking place the same weekend at the same arena. On top of it, the previous morning show host (Bart Cross-Tierney, who I later got along quite well with when he returned to FM 106.3 with his own specialty show) had departed on my first day on the job and I was asked to fill in on the morning show during the following week (and a week turned into eight years). post continues.... So I decided that I really liked this job. INXS was at the very peak of their success during this tour (The "X Factor World Tour"). The X album's second single, "Disappear," was a top ten hit just then. No small amount of the crowd was teenage girls, swoony at the drop of a beat for Michael Hutchence and his Jim Morrisonesque looks . So I fo...

Beacon Theater, 74th & Broadway, New York, NY One of the main things I remember about this show was sitting a few rows behind Dennis Miller (or someone who looked remarkably like him!). post continues.... I also recall the lights going down halfway through the set, and then hearing the distictive opening chords from Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" (in a way, it's like rock 'n' roll's own Beethoven's 5th). As the lights blaze back on, Sting and his band pull off a fairly fiery version of the classic. I got the call to start my new job as production director at WHTG the very next morning. I would show up and discover the Program Director doing the morning show, having just fired the DJ. The PD would ask me to fill in on AM drive for the following week, and I ended up "filling in" for eight years.