August 1989, Capital Centre, Landover, Md.
There is this great South Park episode where Barbara Streisand becomes a Godzilla-like character with intents on destroying the world and it becomes apparent that Robert Smith, lead singer of The Cure, is the only one who can save it. “I can’t let Barbara Streisand destroy the world,” he says (and it’s actually him), then turns into a Mothra-like monster who dispatches her. As he leaves, Stan yells out “Disintegration is the best album ever.”
Indeed.
I’ve been hooked on The Cure for more than 30 years, I heard “Let’s Go to Bed” sometime in 1983 and in my ninth-grade mind found it titillating-enough that it remained in my head. It’s also a damn good pop song, and The Cure made plenty of them. Sure the band is known as leader of the goth movement, but really it’s a pop band which employs slow-down tempos and strings to create brilliant moody music. They’ve been at it for nearly 40 years now, and albums from recent years still sound good.
The fact The Cure is not in the rock hall of fame is criminal, but that’s for another day.
I saw the band for the first time during the Disintegration tour, an album so complete and impressive, many believe it one of the best albums ever. It is not my favorite Cure album — 17 Seconds and Pornography fight for top honors in my mind — but there’s no denying Disintegration’s mastery. The band would, as it did in later years, say this could be the last tour the band would ever have, but I’ve seen them four times since, and the same holds true for each show: The shows are long, varied, and you won’t leave without hearing at least a half-dozen songs you’ve loved forever.
The band doesn’t do much on stage, you won’t find Robert Smith mugging for the fans, or band members running around with props set about the stage. But for someone who does so little during a show, no one owns a big stage like Robert Smith, and it’s for two distinct reasons — his voice and his guitar solos.
The arena went dark and in an instant the dramatic opening of “Plainsong,” the first song from Disintegration, poured off the stage. A good minute or two into the song, Robert Smith walked out and casually strolled across the front of the stage, one end to the other, as the crowd of 16,000 lost it. He ambled up to the mic, and as he sang “I think it’s dark and it looks like rain,” a roar filled up the room. Complete with his crazy, raised black hair and pale face lined with makeup, Robert Smith is the most distinct of persons in sound and sight for a man with such an ordinary name.
The opening songs mirrored the first three songs off Disintegration before the band went back a bit for “Piggy in the Mirror” from The Top, the band’s playful 1984 album. When not playing songs from Disintegration (and I believe every song from the album was played), the band’s main set would be a tight curated selection of hits (“Just Like Heaven,” “In Between Days”), cult favorites (“A Night Like This,” “The Walk”) and Cure staples (“A Forest,” “Charlotte Sometimes”).
There are few songs as good live as “A Forest,” a song that builds to the point where Smith just starts screaming “And AGAIN, and AGAIN, AND AGAIN AND AGAIN” before playing an elegant yet explosive guitar solo. Robert Smith is an underrated guitarist, but listen to his solos and he’s doing some things no one else does.
There were three encores — the first was “Lullaby,” “Close to Me,” “Let’s Go to Bed” and “Why Can’t I Be You” and the second was “Homesick” and “Untitled” (Disintegration’s final two songs) — but it was encore No. 3 where the band was playing to the crowd. Three encores are a lot, and most people are more than happy with two, but here we saw the band open the third encore with “A Strange Day,” kick into “Hot Hot Hot,” then go back to the start. The crowd couldn’t believe when “Three Imaginary Boys” started up, expected “Boys Don’t Cry,” went nuts for “10.15 Saturday Night” and simply bowed in unison for “Killing an Arab”. To say the crowd was spent was an understatement, it was beside itself.
The band stepped away from three years after this album, no one was quite sure if it was coming back, but music is better for it that it did. This tour had the band at its top, I’m sure of that.
