{"id":1022,"date":"2015-11-27T23:55:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-27T23:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=1022"},"modified":"2026-06-27T23:59:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T23:59:12","slug":"the-cure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/?p=1022","title":{"rendered":"The Cure"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

August 1989, Capital Centre, Landover, Md.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. \u201cI can\u2019t let Barbara Streisand destroy the world,\u201d he says (and it\u2019s actually him), then turns into a Mothra-like monster who dispatches her. As he leaves, Stan yells out \u201cDisintegration<\/em> is the best album ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been hooked on The Cure for more than 30 years, I heard \u201cLet\u2019s Go to Bed\u201d sometime in 1983 and in my ninth-grade mind found it titillating-enough that it remained in my head. It\u2019s 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\u2019s a pop band which employs slow-down tempos and strings to create brilliant moody music. They\u2019ve been at it for nearly 40 years now, and albums from recent years still sound good.<\/p>\n

The fact The Cure is not in the rock hall of fame is criminal, but that\u2019s for another day.<\/p>\n

I saw the band for the first time during the Disintegration<\/em> tour, an album so complete and impressive, many believe it one of the best albums ever. It is not my favorite Cure album \u2014 17 Seconds<\/em> and Pornography<\/em> fight for top honors in my mind \u2014 but there\u2019s no denying Disintegration\u2019s<\/em> mastery. The band would, as it did in later years, say this could be the last tour the band would ever have, but I\u2019ve seen them four times since, and the same holds true for each show: The shows are long, varied, and you won\u2019t leave without hearing at least a half-dozen songs you\u2019ve loved forever.<\/p>\n

The band doesn\u2019t do much on stage, you won\u2019t 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\u2019s for two distinct reasons \u2014 his voice and his guitar solos.<\/p>\n

The arena went dark and in an instant the dramatic opening of \u201cPlainsong,\u201d the first song from Disintegration<\/em>, 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 \u201cI think it\u2019s dark and it looks like rain,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The opening songs mirrored the first three songs off Disintegration<\/em> before the band went back a bit for \u201cPiggy in the Mirror\u201d from The Top<\/em>, the band\u2019s playful 1984 album. When not playing songs from Disintegration<\/em> (and I believe every song from the album was played), the band\u2019s main set would be a tight curated selection of hits (\u201cJust Like Heaven,\u201d \u201cIn Between Days\u201d), cult favorites (\u201cA Night Like This,\u201d \u201cThe Walk\u201d) and Cure staples (\u201cA Forest,\u201d \u201cCharlotte Sometimes\u201d).<\/p>\n

There are few songs as good live as \u201cA Forest,\u201d a song that builds to the point where Smith just starts screaming \u201cAnd AGAIN, and AGAIN, AND AGAIN AND AGAIN\u201d before playing an elegant yet explosive guitar solo. Robert Smith is an underrated guitarist, but listen to his solos and he\u2019s doing some things no one else does.<\/p>\n

There were three encores \u2014 the first was \u201cLullaby,\u201d \u201cClose to Me,\u201d \u201cLet\u2019s Go to Bed\u201d and \u201cWhy Can\u2019t I Be You\u201d and the second was \u201cHomesick\u201d and \u201cUntitled\u201d (Disintegration<\/em>\u2019s final two songs) \u2014 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 \u201cA Strange Day,\u201d kick into \u201cHot Hot Hot,\u201d then go back to the start. The crowd couldn\u2019t believe when \u201cThree Imaginary Boys\u201d started up, expected \u201cBoys Don\u2019t Cry,\u201d went nuts for \u201c10.15 Saturday Night\u201d and simply bowed in unison for \u201cKilling an Arab\u201d. To say the crowd was spent was an understatement, it was beside itself.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m sure of that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u201cI can\u2019t let Barbara Streisand destroy the world,\u201d he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1023,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[192],"class_list":["post-1022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-concerts","tag-the-cure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1024,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1022\/revisions\/1024"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abandonedcouches.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}