The Gift of Music: The Cure’s “Play for Today”
Isn’t this a blast from the past? I was a Cure freak back in the day, I guess I still am. They are definitely in my top ten all time favorite bands group. Back in the day, my friends and I used to debate which Cure album was the best; Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith, or Pornography? We were already way too cool to say that Head on The Door was our favorite, plus, I’ve always had a taste for the dark, tortured, and melancholy aesthetic.
But let me tell you my Cure story. Back in 1987, my friends and I decided on the spur of the moment to drive to Denver to see the Cure because it was the closest place to Salt Lake City the tour was stopping. Its the kind of spontaneous thing you do when you’re young and foolish and on your own for the first time. The problem was, the Denver concert sold out during our drive. I don’t know if you guys remember what it was like to actually think that you could pick up and drive 800 miles to another city and concert tickets would be magically waiting for you at the venue (in this case I believe it was Red Rocks)? Those were certainly the days weren’t they? I didn’t even have a credit card for christ’s sake!
But when confronted with not seeing The Cure and possibly seeing The Cure in L.A., guess what we did? We drove to L.A. of course and managed to get tickets to the show at The Forum after driving all night and all day (thank god we didn’t have to drive to Vancouver!). So anyway, the night of the concert, we made out way to The Forum and made ourselves comfortable among the goth/mope rockers (I typically wore my pink Izod–always a rebel!) in our semi-lousy seats. Talk about exciting–we had traveled three days for this show.
About five minutes before the show was scheduled to start (there was no opening group), a space on center court, where it was standing room only, started to open up. It was clear that something was going on–but it wasn’t clear what–only that people were beginning to move further and further out from center court. My seat was so far away that I couldn’t see much, but it soon became obvious that people were backing away from a man who had taken off his shirt and was waving his arms around like a stoned Joe Pesci. The moment had an eery feel and everything seemed to be happening in slow motion, but eventually, enough space cleared around the shirtless man for me to see that he was holding something and pounding his chest with it. Seconds later, I gasped along with 15,000 other people as I realized that he was holding a knife and stabbing himself in the chest with it over and over and over. At that moment, I was glad to be in the cheap seats because people on the floor were running for their lives. I cannot begin to tell you how bizarre and horrifying it was when I realized what was going on, and it continued to get even stranger, because after a minute or so of trying not to watch this shirtless man stab himself to death, and seconds after the police finally charged the man and swiftly dragged him off center court, The Cure began playing on stage in the dark. There were no stage lights for what seemed like forever–apparently nobody had told the band what had been happening on the floor. The crowd just looked on slack jawed, absorbing the tribal bass and drums of a song from Pornography–perhaps their darkest album. I think it was “One Hundred Years“–about the most depressing song Robert Smith ever wrote beginning as it does: “It doesn’t matter if we all die.” The concert just continued on–a solid wall of music for two hours.
I also remember that after about a half hour, somehow, everything started to feel almost normal again. There was a girl dancing wildly on the stairs beside me who slipped and fell down about 20 stairs. That was it–I was ready to drag my friends out of there–certain that I could not watch any more carnage. But as I turned to grab my friends, I watched the black-skirted girl immediately pop back up on her feet like a cat and resume dancing again. It was a strange night.
“Play for Today” is one of the early songs from Seventeen Seconds–back when the bass was still a feature of pop music thanks to punk.
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I am younger maybe and quite possibly dumber and not as cool a cure fan as say I was when I learned to play Killing an Arab on the drums but your cardinal mistake cme when you said “But let me tell you my Cure story…” If given the choise like that, a lot of people are going to be out off. She’s axeing PERMISSION? This must be some heavy emotional shit and it’s barely Sunday morning. Good grief.
I was living in SOCAL at the time and was a fan who couldn’t afford tickets - that man died - I read it in the papers next morning and heard it on the news. I’m not even certain that the fans who were there even knew they witnessed a suicide. What a long time ago……