Cloaca Melodia

Irving Plaza, New York, NY sorry, Mike has not yet written about this show... add your own comments if you were also there!

Irving Plaza, New York, NY Ugh, this night would have better had I stayed at home staring at a wall.

Irving Plaza, New York, NY sorry, Mike has not yet written about this show... add your own comments if you were also there!

Irving Plaza, New York, NY My WHTG colleague Glenn Vistica urged me to come along to this show. I knew the New York alt-country band The Hangdogs (especially their song "Fools Rush In"), but neither of the other bands on the bill. But I figured, ok, why not? The Hangdogs were good, so my night was made. Then Whiskeytown came out on stage, with their sprawling richness of sound and entrancing melodies. The lineup of the band was then Ryan Adams and Ed Crawford on guitars, Caitlin Cary on fiddle, Jenni Snyder on bass, Skillet Gilmore on drums, and Mike Daly as the multi-instrumentalist. I didn't know it then, but the band's lineup was in a state of flux. Apart from Adams and Cary, the band members on their latest album Stranger's Almanac were no longer in the group; Adams and Cary had just done a few shows as an acoustic duo amidst rumors that the band was breaking up, and this concert was one of the first with the newly recruited players (I also didn't realize...

Irving Plaza, New York, NY sorry, I haven't yet written about this show... feel free to add your own recollections if you were there!

Irving Plaza, New York, NY...... Although Gin Blossoms would go on to having four top 40 hits in the U.S. including one top 10 placement while Del Amitri would only have three top 40 hits (including one in the top 10), when this concert took place Del Amitri was the bigger band and thus the Scottish group was the headliner. Del Amitri released their brilliant debut album in 1985 but it came and went with little notice in the U.S. outside of some college radio stations (including my WICB, at Ithaca College). I loved that release but when no follow-up album came out for years, I figured sadly that they were a one-and-done band. But then, they had a new album in 1989 on a new record label and lo and behold--the band scored their first top 40 hit in "Kiss This Thing Goodbye." It took the label two tries to make it a hit, releasing the song as the album's first single without success but then re-releasing it in the summer of 1990 and taking it to the lower depths of the top 40...