"They're Still Standing"--Vol. 2

MAPLE LEAF GARDENSThe big house at 60 Carlton Street in Toronto is one of the true cathedrals of hockey.  Maple Leaf Gardens is one of only two of the longtime “original six” NHL arenas still in existence—along with the Montreal Forum—and sadly it faces a bleak and uncertain future.  In addition to its glorious past, Maple Leaf Gardens also holds the distinction of being the only sports venue that yours truly has ever been kicked out of!  More on that later…

Since the Maple Leafs (not “Leaves”, youse Americans!) moved to the antiseptic and sterile Air Canada Center in February, 1999 along with the NBA’s Raptors, MLG has been dying a slow and painful death.  The team’s owners refuse to sell the building to anyone who would create competition for ACC, so apart from hosting some amateur hockey tournaments, a professional indoor lacrosse team, and rehearsal site for a Rolling Stones tour, Maple Leaf Gardens has rarely been used in the past eight years.  If you want to see what eight years of neglect and decay of an old sports arena looks like, check out the above photo, as well as the photos on this very cool website—it’s not pretty, though.  There are also some recent interior photos of the soon-to-be demolished Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo on this site as well.

But back in the day, MLG housed some mighty fine hockey, particularly in the ‘40s and ‘60s when the Leafs fielded some bad-ass teams featuring the likes of Syl Apps, Ted Kennedy (no, not that Ted Kennedy!), Frank Mahovlich, Red Kelly, Johnny Bower, Dave Keon, Andy Bathgate and the late Tim Horton.  Toronto won 11 Stanley Cups in all at The Gardens, which seemingly hosted "Hockey Night In Canada" every other Saturday.  Ironicially, MLG was also the site of the very first NBA game in 1946 between the Toronto Huskies and New York Knicks.  The NBA returned to MLG in the late ‘90s as the Raptors split time between there and the SkyDome.  MLG was also home to The Who’s final concert on their 1982 “Farewell Tour”.  Ending North American tours in Toronto has become a bit of a tradition with The Who over the years too, as Ontario’s largest city has been their final stop no less than four times throughout their career.

What sucks about big old arenas is it’s hard to find uses for them after they’ve been decommissioned as sports venues.  The Forum in Montreal is so beloved that the people there got creative and came up with a mixed-use concept for the arena after it was gutted, and it now houses a shopping mall and entertainment complex called the Pepsi Forum.  There had been talk in recent years of converting Maple Leaf Gardens into an over-sized grocery store, and that sounds positively icky to me!  I have a better idea—the Hockey Hall of Fame is just a few blocks away from MLG, and while it’s housed in a quaint old building, what better place to have a Hall of Fame than an actual hockey arena?  This would give them room to expand as time goes on, and many of the exhibits could be placed right there on the original floor where the ice surface was.  Sure would be better than a misbegotten behemoth grocery store…

Okay, so what was it that I did to get evicted from MLG, you ask?  Well, during my “The Puck Stops Everywhere” tour in 1994, I very much wanted to see this great hockey shrine, but I knew in advance it would be a tough ticket because the Maple Leafs didn’t sell single-game tickets to their games—it was strictly season tickets across the board.  So, my only option was to frequent a scalper, an activity I normally do not condone, as ticket scalpers to me are a form of subhuman species every bit as low as child molesters, TV evangelists and radio shock jocks.  Against my better judgment, on a sunny March Saturday afternoon, I forked over the then-outrageous sum of $60 (Canuck) for a ticket to that night’s game vs. those dreaded Quebec Nordiques.

It was a shitty seat, to be sure (from which I snapped this photo), at such an angle that I had to keep my head turned at a 45-degree angle to my left to see the ice, and the seat was tiny and the row was cramped—people must’ve been a lot smaller back in the ’20s and ‘30s when they built these old arenas, because I wound up getting to know my neighbors a little more than I would’ve liked while I was there.  Anyway, about midway through the first period, an usher comes down the aisle and motions to me and the guy sitting next to me to come out.  At first, I thought maybe we were in the wrong section, but he looked at our tickets and escorted us out to the concourse where a team official stood with an exasperated “Oh no, not again…” look on his face.  It turns out that the tickets the other guy and I bought were stolen from a season ticket holder, and evidently this was a nightly ritual of having to escort people out who had purchased them on the street.  They told us that if we could point out the scalper on the street to them, they’d bust his ass, but naturally he was long gone and I didn’t remember what he looked like anyway.

To make a long story short, my one and only visit to the famed Maple Leaf Gardens was ever-so-brief.  But hey, at least I got to see the place.  That whole weekend was a bit of a FUBAR, as I made the mistake of waiting until the next morning to try to go up in the CN Tower before I left town, as it was foggy and rainy all day and you couldn’t see a freakin' thing.  But naturally, it was bright and sunny the afternoon before—d’oh!  Toronto is a beautiful city, though, and I hope to get back up there one of these days...

Classic Old-School Store Chain #2

One of my favorite memories of being a kid was when Mom would take me to the Blue Ridge Mall in nearby Independence when I was about 6 or 7.  It was there they had a Newberry's dime store, which was special to me because of the Topps baseball cards they sold.  They didn't just have the packs of ten cards with that yucky stick of gum enclosed—hell, no!  They carried the Topps multi-packs that contained three packs of ten cards in clear cellophane (minus that crappy gum), as well as the cigarette-type packs of 25 cards that always showed one card in the front, so you knew who you were getting!

The Newberry store at Blue Ridge Mall (which looked a lot like the one in this pic before the mall was enclosed in 1971) was a frequent stop for Mom and me when I was little.  What I loved most about it was the escalator that led downstairs to where the baseball cards were--there were up-and-down escalators flanking a stairway that one could take if they felt like walking.  This same escalator/stair set-up endured long after Newberry's closed up shop in the mid-'70s, as that area of the mall was converted into the North Court that housed our favorite video arcade in the early '80s, Space Port (remember all those quarters we wasted there, Tom?), as well as V's Pasta Parlor (or V's Plaster Parlor, as I derisively called it) with its rank Parmesan cheese funking up the whole downstairs area—all of which was eventually replaced by a movie theater that existed until the late '90s.  The escalators and stairs were demolished along with the entire mall in late 2005/early 2006.

During my trip to Cooperstown, NY in 1994, I happened upon a Newberry store just a couple doors down from the Baseball Hall of Fame, and when I walked in, I thought I'd stepped onto a time machine.  The place looked like it hadn't changed hardly at all since the '70s, complete with a lunch counter very similar to the one in this picture.  Naturally, I had a burger, fries and a malt there, and I absolutely loved it!  I believe there are still a few Newberry stores in existence today, and I sure hope that Wal-Mart hasn't totally driven all of them into oblivion...

Heeeeere's Johnny!

My fellow children of the '70s, do you remember this shit?  I've been dying for this old show to re-emerge on DVD.  It hasn't yet, but there's a new site on the 'net where one can view several episodes of this cult classic that I haven't seen since I was about seven when I used to watch it after school on Channel 41 here in K.C.  The new site is called Hulu, and it just debuted about three weeks ago.  It's free to view (although there are commercials mixed in with the videos), and unlike YouTube, it's strictly legitimate shows and movies as opposed to any old loser with a PC and a vidcam.  Lots of old cult classics to be found here, including stuff like "Nanny & The Professor" and "Kojak", and they're constantly adding new titles.  Looks like a winner to me...

Concert Trek - Episode 10

Rollin', rollin', rollin'—keep that trek a-rollin'...

46) Deep Purple/Bad Company (Tuesday, May 5, 1987--Kemper Arena) Ticket price: $15.00

Following that Paul Revere & The Raiders show in July, 1986, yet another unexplained extended period of concert inactivity ensued.  My best guess is I was pre-occupied with my Senior year in college, as well as my internship and subsequent employment at the “Mighty 1030”, KKJC-AM in Blue Springs, MO.  In any event, by May, 1987, I was singing “School’s out forever!”  I didn’t even bother attending my own graduation ceremony, but I digress…

Deep Purple’s second post-reunion album, The House Of Blue Light wasn’t nearly as successful as 1984’s Perfect Strangers, but I really liked it.  I would even submit that it was the last really good album DP ever made, although 1990’s Slaves And Masters with Joe Lynn Turner replacing Ian Gillan on vocals did have its moments.  As for this concert, it was rather so-so.  Much to my chagrin, Purple only played four songs from the new album (“The Unwritten Law”, “Bad Attitude”, “Dead Or Alive” and my favorite, “Hard Lovin’ Woman”), but there were some other good ones like “Black And White”, “Call Of The Wild“ and “Strangeways“ that they could‘ve also done, and I really could‘ve done without the likes of “Child In Time“ and “Lazy” again.  They made up for that a bit by including an old fave that we didn’t hear in ‘85, the mighty “Woman From Tokyo”.

The excitement generated by the reunion of Gillan, Lord, Blackmore, Paice and Glover in 1984-85 was replaced by apathy this time ‘round, as Kemper Arena was only about half-full for this show, and I distinctly remember my friend Tom and I had plenty of empty real estate in the upper deck surrounding us as we were able to stretch our legs out over the row in front of us without pissing anyone off. Speaking of pissing, the other thing I distinctly remember about this concert was the drunk idiot who just couldn’t wait and took a whiz right down the steps in the aisle to our right.  Fortunately, no one was seated anywhere near him, and we made sure to exit to our left.

Just to show you how undistinguished this concert was, I didn’t even remember that Bad Company was the opening act until I perused the log I kept of all the shows I’ve attended.  This was the Brian Howe version of Bad. Co., and sadly, I honestly don’t remember a damn thing about their set.  Please forgive me…

SET LIST:  Highway Star/Strange Kind Of Woman/The Unwritten Law/Dead Or Alive/Perfect Strangers/Hard Lovin' Woman/Knockin' At Your Back Door/Child In Time/Bad Attitude/Lazy/Space Truckin'  ENCORES:  Woman From Tokyo/Black Night/Smoke On The Water


47) Kiss/White Lion (Thursday, November 26, 1987—Kansas Expocentre, Topeka) Ticket price: $14.00

Back in the olden days of the late ‘80s, there weren’t no such thing as the Internet, so news traveled rather slowly around these parts back then.  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have even been aware of a Kiss concert taking place in Topeka, KS, which is a mere 80 miles from Raytown, but as luck would have it, Tom and I attended a Kansas City Comets indoor soccer exhibition game just a month earlier at the brand new Expocentre in the capital of the Land of Oz, and their marquee kept hyping an upcoming show by Kiss on Thanksgiving night.  Well, fuckin’-A, we were there, dude!  We wound up getting pretty decent seats too, just about three rows off the floor on the stage left side, about halfway back from the stage. Too bad the show didn’t live up to my expectations…


The Crazy Nights tour is generally regarded by most fans as the worst Kiss tour ever, and I tend to agree.  The band acted as if they were double-parked out back, as the set lists were generally very short, and the production was rather sparse by Kiss standards.  On some nights, each member of the band took a solo, and on others, they didn’t bother with them, like on this hit-and-run night in Topeka when they barely played an hour and 15 minutes, which didn’t sit well with yours truly.  For this tour, Kiss utilized what I like to call the “CD Stage”, which resembled an giant metal compact disc that had wedged itself into the back of the stage at a 45-degree angle, with Eric Carr’s massive drum set occupying the CD’s “hole”.  And once again, they employed the big, clunky light-up Kiss logo from the Asylum tour, which I never much cared for—again, bigger ain’t necessarily better!

As for the music, “Love Gun” was the opener and “Detroit Rock City” was the closer, which was backwards in my book.  Meantime, they omitted a couple really good tracks off their new album, namely “Hell Or High Water” and “Good Girl Gone Bad”, while “Bang Bang You” (not to be confused with “Gang Bang You”) fell really flat.  Paul Stanley’s standard stage rap about “I went to the doctor today to get myself checked out…” also didn’t ring true when you consider that it was Thanksgiving and there wasn’t a doctor’s office open anywhere near Topeka that day!  Another thing one finds striking when viewing video of this tour is how skinny Gene Simmons was back then—the man looked borderline anorexic!

There was a bit of levity during the encores, as Kiss futzed around with then-current popular hit “La Bamba”, featuring Gene’s horrible Spanish, as well as a few verses of Led Zep’s “Stairway To Heaven” played to a Country beat that was downright hilarious.  Still overall, this was a disappointing show from a band that I’d come to expect a whole lot better from…

SET LIST:  Love Gun/Cold Gin/Bang Bang You/Fits Like A Glove/Crazy Crazy Nights/No No No/War Machine/I Love It Loud/Reason To Live/Heaven's On Fire/Lick It Up  ENCORES:  La Bamba/Stairway To Heaven/Rock And Roll All Nite/Tears Are Falling/Detroit Rock City


Meantime, the Hottest Band In The World was damn near upstaged by its opening act, Pop-Metal upstarts White Lion.  I knew nothing about these guys before this night, but I was very impressed with what I saw from these youngstas.  Singer Mike Tramp bore a passing resemblance to David Lee Roth (minus the spandex), as he proved to be a fine front man, and the crowd responded very positively to these guys as they performed “Wait“, “Tell Me“, and “When The Children Cry“, among others, off their second album Pride.  It was rather fun to watch an up-and-coming band on the verge of stardom.

48) “Monsters Of Rock”—Van Halen/Scorpions/Dokken/Metallica/Kingdom Come (Sunday, July 10, 1988—Arrowhead Stadium) Ticket price: $25.00

A little background first here.  By this time, I was working weekends at KKJO/KSFT in St. Joseph, MO, doing the 50-mile commute back and forth from Raytown to do my graveyard shift gig, and I had to work all night the night before this concert.  I was hoping to at least grab a cat nap when I got back home Sunday morning around 7:30, but my brain was so wired that I don’t think I even nodded off once after I landed in bed.  Thus, I had already been continuously awake since like 5:00 Saturday afternoon when my friends rounded me up for the concert on Sunday, which was slated to begin at 1:30.  Good thing I was young at the time!  In spite of my fatigue, I kept meticulous notes about the show, especially the times when bands came on and off stage.

It was also the end of an era, as this was the last of the all-day multi-act concerts at Arrowhead that I ever attended, and may well have been the last one, period.  There were certainly other concerts there after this one, like The Rolling Stones, The Who, U2, Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, et al, but this was the last multi-act marathon that I can recall being staged at the home of the Chefs.


The stadium gates opened at 11:30, and we snagged pretty good seats downstairs at stage left about halfway up which would have been 50-yard-line seats for a Chiefs game.  Kingdom Come hit the stage at precisely 1:36PM, and played a 41-minute set.  Critics lambasted KC for sounding like a third-rate Led Zeppelin rip-off, but they weren’t so bad.  Their lead singer Danny Stag (don’t look at me, I didn’t name him!) did sound a might close to Robert Plant at times on their hit “Get It On” from their debut release.  He made some lame comment about turning Arrowhead into a “gigantic rocking unit” as he tried to work the crowd, but overall they were tolerable.


About half-an-hour later, Metallica came on board and played for just over an hour.  This was just before they hit the big-time, so I wasn’t all that familiar with them yet.  I couldn’t quite figure out why singer James Hetfield stood hunched over his microphone like he had the shits, but hey whatever works, I guess.  Metallica is a band I’ve yet to totally embrace—they’re certainly raw enough, just like Motorhead, but their music bores me for some reason.  I don’t relate well to their typical subject matter and they lack Lemmy’s sense of humor too.  Metallica was fairly well-received that day, but their set wasn’t terribly memorable.


Another half-hour passed and Dokken hit the stage around 4:20.  The poor man’s Bon Jovi, so to speak, Dokken were probably at the height of their popularity at the time with hits like “Into The Fire”, “Breaking The Chains” and “Just Got Lucky”, and they were surprisingly tolerable in concert.  Their set was exactly one minute longer than Metallica’s.



As the day wore on, the set changes took longer to execute, and it took 45 minutes to get things lined up for Scorpions, who came on about ten after six and played some “world-class Rock ‘N’ Roll” as the newspaper critic at the time termed it.  They were touring in support of one of their better albums, Savage Amusement, which yielded the hits “Believe In Love” and “Rhythm Of Love”, but they mixed in several old favorites like “Love Drive” and “The Zoo”, which was a highlight of the set.  To put it in their native tongue, Scorpions were fairly wunderbar on this day.


After an interminable set change of over an hour (which might partly have been to allow for the sun to set), Van Halen finally ambled onstage just before 8:30.  Of the three times I saw VH in concert with Sammy Hagar, this one was probably the best.  OU812 was easily my favorite album from the Van Hagar era, and they weren’t shy about playing stuff from it, as five tracks from their new record made the cut, although surprisingly, “Finish What Ya Started” wasn’t one of them.  Another surprise was the inclusion of the David Lee Roth era classic “Runnin’ With The Devil”, which I never thought I’d ever hear Hagar singing.  Eddie Van Halen did his usual 10-minute guitar solo, which I nearly nodded-off during, believe it or not, because I was running on fumes by that time!  For some reason, Hagar kept bitching about the sound being bad that night, and added, “If I’d paid to get in, I woulda been pissed,” but I don’t remember the show sounding bad at all.  This show was certainly an improvement over the bland gig they played two years earlier at Kemper Arena.  Van Halen played an hour and 40 minutes, and the show ended at 10:08PM.  By the time I got home and crashed, I had set my own personal endurance record for continuous sleeplessness of 31 hours and 19 minutes. I think I slept for a week after that…

SET LIST:  Summer Nights/There's Only One Way To Rock/Panama/bass solo/Runnin' With The Devil/Why Can't This Be Love?/Mine All Mine/drum solo/You Really Got Me/Sucker In A 3 Piece/When It's Love/I Can't Drive 55/Best Of Both Worlds/guitar solo/Black And Blue/Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love  ENCORE:  A.F.U. (Naturally Wired)/Rock 'N' Roll


49) Moody Blues/Cheap Trick/Glass Tiger (Tuesday, August 16, 1988—Sandstone Amphitheater) Ticket price: $5.00

This was by far the strangest triple-bill I’ve ever attended, but a surprisingly good concert all the same.  I’m not quite sure how we came by the $5 tickets, but it cost us just as much to park as it did to get in at that lovely dump called Sandstone Amphitheater.  We arrived just as Glass Tiger was playing their one and only claim to fame “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)”, so I can’t really comment on their set.


As much as I like Cheap Trick, I’m surprised it took me nearly ten years to see them in concert after becoming a fan.  The Tricksters were riding a wave of resurgence in 1988 with their excellent comeback album Lap Of Luxury, and they played a very good opening set on this night.  Rick Nielsen brought with him his usual flotilla of guitars and trotted a different one out for every song, including a double-necked number that bore his own likeness.  The guy is about a goofy-looking as one can be, but he does play a mean guitar.  “For this next song,” Nielsen said to the crowd, “we all just want to say THANK YOU!” and they launched into “The Flame”, which hit #1 for two weeks in July, and is one of my favorite power ballads of all-time.  CT also did “Never Had A Lot To Lose” (a favorite of mine) and “Let Go” from Lap, as well as their wonderfully silly Elvis cover of “Don’t Be Cruel”, featuring Tom Petersson on his stand-up 12-string electric bass.  Hell, Entwistle never even played 12 strings at once!  Drummer Bun E. Carlos was rock-solid, as always, and singer Robin Zander—when properly motivated—is one of the better front men out there, and he was in fine form during their hour-and-ten-minute set.

SET LIST [In no particular order]:  Just Got Back/On Top Of The World/Let Go/Don't Be Cruel/California Man/The Flame/I Want You To Want Me/Surrender/Ain't That A Shame/Goodnight Now/I Know What I Want/Dream Police/ Never Had A Lot To Lose


Again, how we managed to have such disparate bands as Cheap Trick and the Moody Blues on the same tour is a mystery to me, but no matter, as the Moodies played a fine set of their own, despite focusing mainly on their ‘80s repertoire instead of their classic ‘60s/70’s work.  Surprisingly, they only performed three songs off their newest record Sur La Mer (that’s “on the sea” in French for youse Americans), including the hit single “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere”.  Nice song, but it was too long and drawn-out for my liking—it kept going around in a circle, and they could’ve easily lopped 2-3 minutes off the song and still gotten their point across.  Same goes for John Lodge’s “Talking Out Of Turn” from Long Distance Voyager.

This turned out to be the final tour for keyboardist Patrick Moraz (big hair dude standing on the left in the pic), whose synthesizers more or less replaced his predecessor Mike Pinder’s signature mellotron sound.  That was fine for the ‘80s, but not for their older tunes.  Speaking of which, singer/percussionist Ray Thomas nearly brought the house down with his flute solo during his classic “Legend Of A Mind”, while “Tuesday Afternoon”, “Nights And White Satin” and “I’m Just A Singer (In A Rock ‘N’ Roll Band)” more than made up for all that ‘80s stuff they played.  “Ride My See-Saw” and “Question” made for a nice one-two punch during the encore, too.  Not a bad concert for five bucks, either!

SET LIST [In No Particular Order]:  Gemini Dream/The Voice/Here Comes The Weekend/I Know You're Out There Somewhere/The Other Side Of Life/Your Wildest Dreams/Want To Be With You/Tuesday Afternoon/Rock And Roll Over You/New Horizons/Isn't Life Strange?/Question/Nights In White Satin/Veteran Cosmic Rocker/Legend Of A Mind/Ride My See-Saw/Talking Out Of Turn/I’m Just A Singer (In A Rock ‘N’ Roll Band)

50) Chicago/Henry Lee Summer (Sunday, August 21, 1988—Sandstone Amphitheater) Ticket price: Free

During the summer of ‘88 while working at the radio station in St. Joseph, I enjoyed the perks of having connections to free tickets to stuff at St. Joseph Civic Arena like midget wrestling and the closed-circuit TV viewing of the Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks boxing match that lasted all of a minute-and-a-half (which some fools paid $3,000 to get into in Vegas).  We also had access to free Sandstone tickets at the radio station, so I snagged one to this concert.  Unfortunately, it came up on such short notice that I couldn’t round up anyone else to go with, so this was the first concert I ever attended alone.

John Cougar Mellencamp wanna-be Henry Lee Summer opened the show.  Like Mellencamp, Summer also hailed from Indiana, and to my surprise, he was actually rather tolerable in concert.  He managed to develop a good rapport with the audience and played a fairly spirited set, which he capped off with his big radio hit “I Wish I Had A Girl (Like That)”, complete with all its inherent “Check it out, Leroy”s—whoever the hell Leroy is.  HLS later joined Chicago onstage for a number during their set.  All in all, he wasn’t bad—especially for a Mellencamp wanna-be…
Chicago had been through numerous personnel changes since the death of guitarist Terry Kath in 1978.  Their sound also changed as they went from a jazz/rock outfit in the ‘70s to an adult contemporary group in the early ‘80s, with bassist Peter Cetera being the focal point, but at least they were still numbering their albums and were up to Chicago 18 on this tour.  Cetera got a big ego and struck out on his own for a solo career (with varying degrees of success), so they replaced him with the virtual sound-alike, Jason Scheff (son of musician Jerry Scheff from Elvis’ touring band).  Vocalist/keyboardist Bill Champlin joined the early ’80s, and guitarist Dawayne Bailey came on board in 1986.  Bailey had previously toured with Bob Seger, and had local ties, as he was born in Manhattan, KS and lived for a time in Bonner Springs—where the venue is located—so this show was a homecoming of sorts for him.

As for the show, Champlin traded lead vocals with Scheff and founding member/ keyboardist Robert Lamm throughout the night.  Scheff sounded like a dead ringer for Cetera on the old hits like “Saturday In The Park” and “25 Or 6 To 4”, the latter of which they restored to its proper original glory instead of the bastardized 1987 remake version they made.  One glaring omission from the set list was the classic “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”, but I was surprised at the inclusion of “Dialogue (Parts I & II)” as well as the rather obscure “Free“ from Chicago III.  Although the focus was mostly on their ‘80s stuff (just like with the Moody Blues five nights earlier), Chicago’s famed horn section of James Pankow, Lee Loughnane and Walt Parazaider did get to show off the band’s signature sound now and then on songs like “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” and “Beginnings”.  Pankow, in particular, was rather animated as he played his trombone, using it as an extension of his manhood at times, you might say!  By the way, has anyone ever actually Parazaided before?!?  Did they live to tell about it?

The band Chicago is also rather infamous for affecting Kansas City weather—virtually every time they come town, it rains whenever they play outdoors!  I remember one time about ‘78 or ‘79 when they played at then-Royals Stadium with Santana, and a deluge of Biblical proportions ensued.  Well, sure as shit, about midway through Chicago’s set at Sandstone, it began to sprinkle, prompting Robert Lamm to incredulously ask, “Is it raining again?!?”  The crowd responded in the affirmative and he said in mock disgust, “Dammit! It always rains when we come here.”  I like it when a band remembers previous shows/tours they’ve done.  The rain was actually welcome on this night too, as we were smack dab in the middle of some serious drought conditions around these parts at the time.  In any event, this wasn’t a bad concert at all, especially for free.

SET LIST [In no particular order]:  Get Away/Hard Habit To Break/Heart In Pieces/Stay The Night/Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?/Just You 'N" Me/Beginnings/I Don't Wanna Live Without Your Love/I Stand Up/25 Or 6 To 4 (1970 version)/Will You Still Love Me/Saturday In The Park/Dialogue (Parts I & II)/It's Alright/Free/Hard To Say I'm Sorry/I Can't Turn You Loose (w/Henry Lee Summer)

Oh by the way—would you believe we’re barely halfway through this little excursion?

Y'ever notice...

...the uncanny similarity between the voice of our current President and that of the infamous Charles Manson?  I was watching a show on History Channel yesterday about Manson, and later on ol' Dubya was on the Sunday Night Baseball game on ESPN, and I finally made the connection.  Watch this video of Charlie, and you can practically hear Dubya talking when he says things like, "Remorse for what?" and "I haven't done anything I'm ashamed of."

I'm a blogger, not a fighter!

HELL YES, I'M STILL HERE!
Sorry I've been so long away from my bloggery duties, but I've been a bit pre-occupied with other stuff this week, like rearranging my house in anticipation of various upcoming home improvement projects, as well as some major vacation planning for later this summer, thus my creative juices haven't been flowing while my feeble brain has been concentrating on the above.

SPEAKING OF BRAINS...
I will never ever eat that Southern delicacy known as brains & eggs, mostly because as the old axiom goes, a mind is a terrible thing to taste...

A LITTLE ROCK TRIVIA FOR YOU...
Can you name the only rock group whose four members are all dead, and one of whom was shot to death?  Answer below...

PUT A SOCK IN IT, JASON!
Time for another rant on Kansas City Star sports columnist Jason Whitlock.  Earlier this week, the Flatulent One wrote a column about the whole Barack Obama/Rev. Wright flap—what this has to do with sports, I haven't a clue—during which he prefaced his comments with the following:  "I am not political. Dishonesty is so pervasive within politics that I practice abstinence.  Conservative and liberal ideologies are the enemies of common sense.  I’m a nonvoting, casual observer."  Okay, Tubbo—if you aren't even going to get off your fat ass and exercise your hard-earned right to vote, then I don't see where you have any right to bitch about anything!  It's this kind of prevailing attitude that continues to set black people back about a hundred years.  Crude as he was, the late Richard Pryor was abso-fucking-lutely right when he said, "This could be a whole state of [N-words] if y'all would start votin'!"

As for Obama, let's just say this whole thing taints his candidacy in my eyes if he did indeed fervently follow this "man of God" who urges "damning America to hell."  Obama had been my front-runner, but after this I have question his legitmacy at this point.  Why the fuck has it all come to this?  Hillary's no option in my book—I can't take any more Clinton shenanigans in the White House.  If you think about it, since 1981 there's been either a Bush or a Clinton in the White House, going back to when Mr. "Thousands Points of Light" was VP for Ronald Ray-Gun, and I think it's high-time for some fresh blood, but McCain ain't the answer for me either.

Fuck it, maybe I'll just move to Canada instead.  Anyone know if there's some cheap housing to be had in Moose Jaw or Medicine Hat?  At least the have hockey up there in abundance.  Now, where'd I put my tuque?

HELLO, NORMA JEAN
I was watching part of A&E's "Biography" show today on Marilyn Monroe, and wondered if there's anyone else out there besides me who finds her far more attractive as a brunette?  They showed numerous photos of her before she became famous when she had dark brown hair, and she was a total babe!  Granted, I'm more partial to dark-haired women and redheads to begin with, but I never much cared for Monroe as a blonde—it looked too phony and made her look like an airhead, and based on what they said about her on the show, she was a lot smarter than people gave her credit for.

RIDIN' THE TICKET PRICES OUT...
R.E.O. Speedwagon tickets for their upcoming show at Ameristar Casino here in K.C. start at $60!  I've seen Speedwagon twice, and I don't think I even paid half that much for those two shows.  What's worse, R.E.O. has played at least half a dozen shows in the past two years either in Kansas City proper or within a 70-mile radius of the city (including two at Ameristar), so I find it hard to believe there's that big a demand to see them again.  Talk about your chuztpah...

(I THOUGHT) I HEARD IT ON THE X...
Well, damn—so much for Xavier making the Final Four in the NC-bubble-A bassit-ball tournament (as I predicted), as the Muscatels were summarily whooped by UCLA earlier tonight.  Up until that point, my Final Four was still intact.  A word of warning for Kansas tomorrow:  Be on your toes, you Jayhawks, 'cuz Davidson ain't just happy to be here—they're dead serious about winning!  Too bad Davidson doesn't have anyone named Harley on their team...

FROM FIRST TO WORST!
Congrats go out from yours truly to Gene Simmons of Kiss.  It took him 32 years to go from being my favorite member of the Hottest Band In The World to my least favorite member of The Hottest Band In The World.  It's been a long but steady plunge for the man with the tongue, but he finally supplanted Vinnie Vincent at "Rock Bottom" of my Kiss member appreciation list, thanks in large part to his A&E "Gene Simmons Family Jewels" reality TV show and appearing on douche-bag Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice" crapfest, not to mention his attempted disavowing of the recently-unearthed "sex video" featuring him doing the wild thing with some groupie to the tune of Foreigner's "I Want To Know What Love Is".  Gene's constant criticism of Ace Frehley and Peter Criss don't rate no brownie points with me, either.  At the risk of sounding too negative here, I will give Gene and girlfriend Shannon Tweed credit for one thing:  At least their kids seem infinitely more well-adjusted than Jack and Kelly Osbourne.  Still, it's beyond the shadow of a doubt that G. Simmons is a complete and total dickweed.

Brian Holland's Favorite Member of Kiss List, Past or Present
(Current standings)
1) Ace Frehley
2) Eric Carr (Rest his soul)
3) Eric Singer
4) Peter Criss
5) Bruce Kulick
6) Tommy Thayer
7) Paul Stanley (and falling fast)
8) Vinnie Vincent
9) Gene Simmons

NOTE:  I don't include the late Mark St. John on this list since he with the band for such a short time that I never really formed an opinion on him one way or the other.

CLASSIC MISHEARD LYRIC #74
"Roadhouse Blues"—THE DOORS (1970)  "Back at the roadhouse, they got some bungalows..."  Or as I once interpreted Big Jim's words, "Back at the roadhouse, they got someone who knows..."

YOUR SCHOOL TAX DOLLARS AT WORK
I snapped this pic today at a used car emporium about two blocks from my house.  Nice to see the spelling curriculum is producing honor students these days...






ROCK TRIVIA ANSWER
Mount Rushmore. I didn't say anything about rock music trivia, now did I?

Every Sha-La-La-La, Every Wo-O-Wo-O

I heard it said somewhere that for anything in life to be successful, there must be the right balance of light and dark, soft and hard, quiet and loud, etc., and so it goes with my music collection.  For every Motorhead, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath and Kiss on the dark/hard/loud side of my music spectrum, there are equal parts ABBA, Partridge Family, Bread and The Carpenters on my light/soft/quiet side, and the latter duo is the subject of this blog entry.

If you're a child of the '70s like yours truly, there was no escaping Richard and Karen Carpenter on Top 40 radio.  It seemed at times that their music was played more often than the commercials on the AM dial, and while their stuff was pure '70s pop fluff, to be sure, much of their music has stood the test of time and has aged quite well.  Several so-called "hip" '90s artists like The Cranberries and Sheryl Crow participated in the tribute album If I Were A Carpenter, so they must have done something right.  I sure's hell don't see anyone lining up to do an Air Supply or Starland Vocal Band tribute album anytime soon...

Richard Carpenter was/is a very accomplished musician and songwriter, but of course the focal point of this duo was his little sister Karen, who was blessed with quite possibly the most distinctive voice in music history.  About the only person I can think of who's even come close to rivaling her voice is Gloria Estefan, and even she is a stretch.  It's also easy to forget that Karen was a multi-tasker—she also played the drums, both on their early records and on stage at times.  Although she eventually stepped aside in favor of veteran session man Hal Blaine (in the studio) and former Mouseketeer Cubby O'Brien (on tour), it wasn't before some early '70s magazine (I forget which) named Karen best drummer of the year over Led Zeppelin's John Bonham—WTF?!?  This naturally begs the question, did Bonzo at least out-rank Karen on the best singer list?  Eerily enough, Bonzo and Karen did share one thing in common as their lives were both self-inflictedly cut way too short at age 32.  Bonham died pathetically choking on his own puke while drinking himself to death, and of course Karen became synonymous with the medical condition Anorexia Nervosa.  Extremely tragic losses in both cases, both of which could've been avoided, and they could easily both still be with us today...

What I don't get is why The Carpenters don't rate more airplay on Oldies radio stations these days, like Tony Orlando and Dawn (now Twilight) receive.  True, some of their stuff was pure schlock like "Sing" and "Sweet, Sweet Smile", and I still haven't forgiven them for the travesty that was "Calling Occupants (Of Interplanetary Craft)", but it's no sin to like Carpenters music, folks!  Their music stands up just as well today as it did in the '70s.  Give them another shot, if you've been resisting...

My All-Time Carpenters Top 10:
10) "(They Long To Be) Close To You" (1970)  The one that started it all.  I remember not liking this one much when I was a kid, but it's grown on me over the years.  Maybe it's the "waaaaah"s at the end that got to me...
9) "For All We Know" (1971)  From the film Lovers and Other Strangers.  Don't even waste your time with the flick—it sucked, big-time.  Nice song, though.
8) "Please Mr. Postman" (1975)  My all-time favorite version of this song—I like it even better than the Marvelettes' and The Beatles' versions.
7) "We've Only Just Begun" (1970)  This song was all over AM radio when I first started listening to AM radio at the age of six.  At age 43, I'd give most anything to be able to revert back to that carefree time in my life...
6) "Hurting Each Other" (1972)  Song originally recorded by Jimmy Clanton in the mid-'60s.  This version blows the doors off Clanton's.
5) "Yesterday Once More" (1973)  While the full album-side version of this song went a bit overboard, the 3:30 version of it was brilliant.  Shoo-be-doo lang-lang, indeed!
4) "Rainy Days And Mondays" (1970)  See also #7.  Oddly enough, neither rainy days nor Mondays get me down—not very often, anyway...
3) "Superstar" (1971)  Co-written by Leon Russell, the way Karen sang this one made you think it was a true story for her.
2) "Merry Christmas, Darling" (1971)  My #2 Christmas song of all-time, right behind Weird Al Yankovic's "Christmas At Ground Zero"—okay, I'm just as warped as Al is, so sue me!  This one got a lot harder to listen to after Karen died, tho...
1) "Only Yesterday" (1975)  Easily The Carpenters' most underrated song, and an all-time favorite AM radio hit of mine.  Every time I hear this one, it takes me back to the summer of '75 in a heartbeat, as does The Eagles' "One Of These Nights" and John Denver's "Thank God I'm A Country Boy".  Damn, I miss being a kid...

"They're Still Standing"--Vol. 1

"You’re Getting Even, While We’ve Got Aud"
It’s hosted more NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games (83) and Final Fours (9) than any other venue.  I saw my first NBA game and first Kiss concert there.  It’s been around since the Great Depression, and unlike other arenas of its era, it still has many many years of life left in it.  I am referring to Kansas City’s venerable Municipal Auditorium, one of the coolest old buildings you’ll ever set foot in for a concert or sporting event.

Located at 13th & Wyandotte in downtown K.C., The Aud was built in 1936 as part of President Roosevelt’s WPA—Works Progress Act...AKA, “We Piddle Around”.  It replaced the 35-year-old Convention Hall directly across the street that was built in an astonishing three months to replace the original Convention Hall on the same site that burned down just months before K.C. was to host the 1900 Republican National Convention.  Ironically, K.C. was supposed to host the 1976 Republican Convention at Municipal’s current next door neighbor Bartle Hall, but Bartle wasn’t finished in time, so the GOP event was moved to Kemper Arena in the stockyards.  Confused yet?

Similar in concept to New York’s Madison Square Garden, Municipal Auditorium is in fact four separate venues—the 9,500-seat main arena (sometimes called Municipal Arena or just plain City Arena), the 2,400-seat Music Hall, which is home to various high-brow musical and ballet events, the 600-seat Little Theater, which houses minor plays and musicals, and the Exposition Hall that runs beneath the entire complex.  Its distinctive art-deco design is prevalent both on the outside and the inside, and the building features a grand foyer that takes one back to the days of Dillinger and the Three Stooges.  It also features outstanding acoustics for concerts, and some of the finest sightlines for basketball of any venue in the world.

My first encounter with Municipal Auditorium was a Kansas City-Omaha Kings game with the Milwaukee Bucks on Christmas night, 1972, during which I got to see Hall of Famers Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar play in person.  The Aud was the temporary home of the Kings from 1972-74 after the Cincinnati Royals moved here (and to their home away from home, Omaha’s Civic Auditorium).  The Kings moved to Kemper in ’74, but The Aud (or “The Muni” as some people call it) had one more stint as an NBA facility in 1979-80 after Kemper Arena’s roof collapsed.  One of Municipal’s backboards also collapsed under the weight of the Philadelphia 76ers’ Darryl “Chocolate Thunder” Dawkins when one of his slam dunks shattered it in November, 1979, sending late Kings forward Bill Robinzine (#52 in white in this video) scurrying for cover.  The Aud was also home of those dreaded Kansas City Sizzlers of the minor-league Continental Basketball Association for one season in 1985-86 after the Kings left town for Californy.

I attended one other Kings game there in 1973, and didn’t return until September 30, 1979 for the Kiss/Judas Priest concert, the first of many concerts I attended at the Auditorium, including three more Kiss shows and two Pat Benatar concerts, plus the closed-circuit TV broadcast of The Who‘s “farewell” concert from Toronto on December 17, 1982.  Municipal Auditorium also spent one year in the twilight zone, so to speak, in 1991-92 as the indoor soccer home of the NPSL’s Kansas City Attack in their inaugural season after moving here from Atlanta and refusing to play at Kemper Arena (which the MISL’s defunct Kansas City Comets vacated the previous season).  While Municipal’s sightlines are killer for basketball and concerts, it was just plain weird for indoor soccer, with its glassed-in hockey-like playing surface.  The Attack moved to Kemper for good in 1992-93.

When my alma mater, the University of Missouri-Kansas City Kangaroos, made the jump from NAIA to NCAA Division I play in basketball in 1987, they moved from tiny Swinney Gym on campus (where I wrecked my right knee playing volleyball in 1985) to Municipal Auditorium, thus making The Aud the “Kanagaroo Court”.  I attended several Roos games during the ’90s, but kinda lost touch with them until one night in 2005 when I attended their season finale against Valparaiso, which turned out to be an exciting game that the good guys won.  I sat in the same seat I had for that first Kiss concert in ’79 (Row S, right next to the spotlight turret against the wall in the NE corner), and as exciting as the game was, I was even more floored by how beautiful Municipal Auditorium looked that night.  The city put a lot of money and effort into refurbishing the place, and it practically looked like a brand new arena.  Even cooler, the old time-of-day clock on the east wall was restored and fully-functional again, and parts of the original basketball floor were preserved as well.

The above-mentioned remodeling/ retrofitting has brought Municipal Auditorium back up to speed and made it worthy of hosting major basketball tournaments again, including the Big 12 Women’s Basketball Tournament, and NCAA Women's Tournament regionals as well as the annual NAIA Basketball tourney and various local high school tournaments.  What’s really ironic is how history is repeating itself here as it did in places like Denver, Baltimore and Atlanta, where an older arena is still in use while the venue that was built to replace it bit the dust.  Denver Auditorium, Baltimore Civic Arena and Alexander Memorial Coliseum—all still in use—were replaced by McNichols Arena, the Capital Centre and The Omni, respectively, yet those latter three are all demolished now, and I think the same fate awaits Kemper Arena in the next five-to-ten years.  In fact, there was even talk at one time about 15 years ago of "building down" into Municipal Auditorium's Exhibition Hall and lowering the current floor to add a whole new lower level and enlarge the main arena to about 17,000 seats in an effort to replace Kemper, but the plan was deemed unfeasible.  Meantime, if properly-maintained, Municipal Auditorium will easily live to be a hundred.  I plan to see a game there in 2036...

Concert Trek - Episode 9

After a brief pause, it's time to resume my chronicle of the concerts I've attended throughout the years...
41) and 42) Z.Z. Top/Jimmy Barnes (Sunday/Monday, February 16-17, 1986—Kemper Arena) Ticket price: $16.00

By the time Z.Z. Top’s Afterburner came out in the fall of 1985, they were at the height of their career in terms of popularity, with their videos in heavy rotation on MTV and they were hot enough to score a two-night stand here at Kemper Arena, and my friend Tom and I had great seats on the lower level for the first night.

While Afterburner was the weaker cousin of its predecessor Eliminator, it still packed enough of a wallop to make for a great concert anyway.  Z.Z. opened the show with "Got Me Under Pressure", then followed with the single "Sleeping Bag", which was augmented by green lazers in time to the song.  The stage backdrop was a mock-up of the dashboard of the mighty ’32 Ford Eliminator car from their famous 1983-84 videos.  About midway through the set during the song "Legs", Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill (playing their infamous fur-lined guitars like in the pic) and drummer Frank Beard were accompanied by about half a dozen leggy showgirls prowling the stage, and near the end of the song, the band used some old "smoke and mirrors" tactics that made them suddenly "vanish" into thin air.  Then some taped synthesizer music played overhead while the stage set morphed into the dashboard of the Space Shuttle Afterburner, and the band re-emerged and launched (launched—get it?!?) into "Sharp Dressed Man".

Other highlights included the new songs "Velcro Fly" and "Can’t Stop Rockin’", but I was a tad disappointed they didn’t also do the very-underrated "Delirious" from Afterburner.  Z.Z. also did their usual encore triumvirate of "Tube Snake Boogie", "La Grange" and "Tush", the latter of which ended with some more sleight of hand by the band as a fake piece of scaffolding from the lighting rig fell to the stage at the climax of the song, followed by a man-sized dummy dressed as one of the spotlight guys.  Tom and I didn’t fall for it, but I’m sure a few drunks in the crowd wound up with skidmarks in their drawers upon witnessing this!

Singer Jimmy Barnes opened the show and wasn’t too bad, as I recall, although I remember precious little about his set.  This was even before he had his hit duet with INXS "Good Times", so we didn’t know much about him.  I do remember he seemed to hold the crowd’s attention throughout his 30 minutes.

Long about 6:00 the next night, I heard on the radio that there were still some decent tickets available for the second show, and since I enjoyed the show so much the first night, I got a wild hair to go see Z.Z. Top again.  I called Tom up and said, "Whaddya reckon?" and he thought I was nuts at first, but he thought about it a while and said, "Whatthefuck," and we headed back to the stockyards for another lovely evening with that Little Ol’ Band From Texas.  We passed on Jimmy Barnes this time and arrived just as he had left the stage, and our seats were nosebleeders upstairs, but weren’t all that bad, and it was fun to view the show from a different angle.  This was the first and only time I ever attended back-to-back shows by the same band on consecutive nights, as well as the first time I’d ever caught two shows on any band’s tour—a feat I would later repeat with Z.Z. Top a few years later, as well as a couple times with Kiss.

SET LIST:  Got Me Under Pressure/Sleeping Bag/Waitin' For The Bus/Jesus Just Left Chicago/Gimme All Your Lovin'/Ten Foot Pole/Manic Mechanic/Heard It On The X/Rough Boy/Cheap Sunglasses/Arrested For Driving While Blind/Legs/Sharp Dressed Man/Can't Stop Rockin'/Stages/Party On The Patio  ENCORES:  Velcro Fly/Tube Snake Boogie/La Grange/Tush

43) The Cult/Divinyls (Tuesday, April 15, 1986—Uptown Theater) Ticket price: $13.50

A little background first:  My friend Tom latched on to this Australian band Divinyls when they first became known here in the States in the summer of ’83 on MTV with their outstanding album Desperate.  Unbeknownst to Tom and me beforehand, they were scheduled to play at Six Flags over St. Louis on the very day we visited there during our July road trip, which was right smack dab in the middle of the Great Heat Wave of ’83.  We arrived when the park opened and it was hotter than hell that day, and of course the concert wasn’t slated until near dark around 9PM, but there was no way in hell we could’ve lasted the whole day in the blazing sun, as we were already frying like bacon by late afternoon, so we reluctantly headed back to our hotel and its wonderful shaded swimming pool.

I’ve always felt badly about missing that show too, because I know how badly Tom wanted to see it at the time, so when Divinyls came to town in support of their second U.S. album What A Life, we made sure to go see them, even though they were opening for The Cult.  Lead singer Christina Amphlett—who I like to think of as a cross between a white Tina Turner and AC/DC’s Angus Young—prowled around the stage doing her best schoolgirl-gone-mad shtick, complete with her sailor uniform and thigh-high black stockings, while her partner-in-crime Mark McEntee held court on guitar.  Surprisingly, Divinyls played almost an hour, which is longer than most opening acts, and they leaned on their new record quite a bit, including the singles "Pleasure And Pain" and "Sleeping Beauty".  What A Life wasn’t a bad record, but not nearly as good as Desperate, which featured great songs like "Boys In Town", "Siren Song", "Elsie" and a killer cover version of the Easybeats’ "I’ll Make You Happy", which was the show’s encore.  Wish we could’ve seen more of them, but what we got was a pretty good set.

I’d love to review The Cult’s set, but since we came to see Divinyls specifically and either I or Tom had an early college class the next day, we didn’t stick around for them.  Knowing now what I didn’t know about The Cult then, I kinda wish we had…

44) Van Halen/Bachman-Turner Overdrive (Saturday, May 31, 1986—Kemper Arena) Ticket price: $15.00

Round Five for me with Van Halen brought with it a couple of changes.  The most obvious one was Sammy Hagar being VH’s new lead singer, and the other being this was one of the few concerts I attended back in the day without Tom, who I think was unable to get the night off and had to work at his new job.  Subbing for Tom was our mutual friend Jim—a mondo Van Halen fan in his own right—and his wife Cheryl.  Come to think of it, Jim tagged along with us the previous two times we saw VH at Kemper.

Bachman-Turner Overweight—sorry—Overdrive opened the show, and while they played a decent set of hits, plus a couple songs off their new "reunion" album, it was pretty obvious this band was way past its prime.  Randy Bachman was no longer in the picture either, and his presence was sorely missed.  Meantime, during BTO’s set, we were rather entertained by these dumb kids in the row in front of us who smuggled their own booze in.  They were really whooping it up as BTO played, and obviously knew nothing about the fine art of pacing themselves with the alky-hol.  I gave Jim a nudge and pointed to them and said, "Rookies!" and sure enough, not even a third of the way through Van Halen’s set, at least two of these dummies were hunched over with their heads between their legs puking on their shoes!  We laughed at them.  Hard.

As for Van Hagar, it was quite a different world without Diamond Dave.  Not a bad one, necessarily, just different.  The focus was more on the music now and less on showmanship, and with Sammy Hagar also being a guitarist, this added a fresh new element to the band, which was showcased right away as they opened with Sammy trading solos with Eddie on Hagar’s "There’s Only One Way To Rock".  Having the second guitar also came in handy to free Eddie up to play the keyboards on songs like "Why Can’t This Be Love?" and "Love Walks In".  The set list naturally leaned heavily on the new stuff from 5150, with a couple Hagar songs thrown in.  They only played three or four David Lee Roth songs, and one of those was "You Really Got Me", which DLR didn’t write anyway.

There were a few "Dave Who?" banners scattered about the arena, and the crowd seemed to embrace Hagar as the new voice of Van Halen, but for some reason, this show left me rather flat.  It just felt like the band was going through the motions that night, and the fire just wasn’t there like it had been the previous four times I’d seen them.  When I later saw the New Haven show they filmed about a month earlier on their Live Without A Net concert video, which was a much more energetic performance, my reaction was, "Where the fuck was all this at Kemper?"  I don’t know if we just caught VH on a bad night or what, and I don’t mean to blame Hagar because the entire band was off that night, but this show should’ve been a whole lot better.

45) Paul Revere & The Raiders (Saturday, July 5, 1986—Liberty Memorial Mall) Ticket price: ???

My first memories of being alive are of listening to Paul Revere & The Raiders records when I was all of three.  I got to see the real McCoy when I was seven at Starlight Theater in 1971, and the ersatz version of the group over the 4th of July weekend in ’86 at the Kansas City Spirit Festival.  Liberty Memorial Mall is not a shopping mecca, but rather the land adjacent to K.C.’s war monument that bears more than a slight resemblance to an erect penis, and for many years, the city held these multi-day festivals that featured nationally-known acts on its grounds.  Said grounds were pretty soggy that day, as it had rained almost the entire weekend, but since it didn’t cost squat to get in, I decided to take in da Raidas.

With their late ‘60s heyday having long since passed, PR&TR were strictly a nostalgia act by 1986, with Revere himself being the only original member still active.  There had been a couple minor Raider reunions during the early ‘80s for one-off events and such, but lead singer Mark Lindsay had no desire to be a lounge act, so Revere put together a group of new Raiders, many of whom still work with him today in Branson (where careers go to die).  I didn’t really have high expectations for this show, and it's a good thing I didn't, because I was fairly underwhelmed by it.

Revere didn't play music so much on this night, but rather more or less emceed the proceedings from behind his modified keyboard outfitted with the grill of a '66 Mustang on the front (complete with flashing headlights).  "If you don't like the '60s," he declared, "then get the hell out!"  While his new band of Raiders wasn't bad musically, I was pretty unimpressed with Lindsay's replacement, a singer whose name escapes me, but it's just as well because he was more of a poser than a singer anyway.  Revere's on-stage antics were rather humorous at times, but what really cheesed me off was how they'd whip through the Raider repertoire as if they were double-parked out back, and spent more time playing other '60s oldies instead.  I'm talking a minute-and-a-half of "Kicks" and a minute's worth of "Hungry", etc.  Not to be overly-picky here, but when I go to a Raiders show, I wanna hear Raiders songs, not "Heard It Through The Grapevine" and "Mony, Mony"!  I think it's great that Revere tries to keep the band's name alive, but this show failed miserably to do the original band justice.

Just as an aside, several years later at another Spirit Festival, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle of The Who played at Liberty Memorial, and Tom and I headed down to catch the show.  Along the way, we stopped off at the office at which Tom was working at the time, which just happened to be in the BMA Tower, which just happened to overlook the festival site from a distance.  We figured we had plenty of time since Daltrey wasn't due on until 8-ish or 9-ish, so imagine my horror when I leaned against the window and heard the faint sound of someone singing "it's only teenage wasteland..."  "Oh fuck!" was our reaction, as we realized the show had already begun.  Evidently the schedule was changed without our knowledge, so we hustled out of the building to hoof it over to the festival, but we got about halfway there and said the hell with it, since the show was almost over by then.  We just stood and listened to Entwistle singing "My Wife" off in the distance then retreated.  I found out later that my sister was at the show and she said it was great.  D'oh!

Happy Green Day!

IT’S MADNESS, ALRIGHT…
Overall, I’m fairly pleased with the NCAA Tournament brackets, and I think they did a pretty fair job of selecting the right teams to play in it.  Still, that didn’t stop Billy Packer and Dick Vitale from crusading for the ACC, claiming they got shafted because only four teams from their conference made the big dance.  Well, I thoroughly agree with the rank and file of sports talk pundits regarding the bubble teams that are crying in their beer (Arizona St., Virginia Tech, Ohio State, Syracuse, et al) because they weren’t selected—try winning more games!  If you schedule better non-conference opponents and win more games, you’ll make the tournament.  Until then, good luck in the NIT.  Meantime, can we please take Vitale and Packer (along with Digger Phelps and Bob Knight) and cast these babbling idiots adrift in a slow boat to China?

There is one little problem with this year’s brackets, however.  The NCAA either needs a new United States road atlas or a refresher course on geography.  How is it you have West Regional games being played in Tampa and East Regional games being played in Denver?!?  These regionals are geographical in name only, so why don’t they just do like World Cup Soccer and refer to them as Group A, Group B, Group C, etc.?  Or do like the NHL used to do with their divisions (Norris, Adams, Patrick, Smythe) and name each regional after someone—John Wooden Regional, James Naismith Regional, etc.

Oh, by the way, after careful deliberation I completed my brackets today, and I have three of the four #1 seeds making the Final Four—Kansas, North Carolina, and Memphis—but UCLA is going to be tripped up by my dark horse, Xavier.  Watch out for those mighty Muscatels—er, uh—Musketeers!  And even though I'm a Missouri fan, I have Kansas winning the whole shootin' match on the 20th anniversary of the last time they did it.  Remember folks, you heard it here first!

EXCUSES, EXCUSES
Speaking of the Big Dance, according to the latest issue of Sports Illustrated, "An Oregon clinic is suggesting that men who need an excuse to stay home and watch the NCAA Tournament get a vasectomy."  Unfortunately, that excuse can only be used once.  Actually, if you're thinking about getting fixed anyway, it's not a bad idea.  I had a vasexomy (as A. Bunker called them) myself about nine years ago, and thanks to my medical benefits, it didn't cost me a dime.  It didn't hurt all that much—it just felt like someone had jabbed a baseball bat in my crotch a few times.  It wasn't so bad once I got home and was able to ice it down with a bag of frozen peas, but the worst part for me was the drive home from the doctor's office.  At the time, I drove a Honda Prelude, which has all the ground clearance of a cockroach, and that car rode rougher than a stagecoach across the Rockies, thus every bump was an adventure in pain!

EVERYTHING’S JUST PEACHY
Here’s what your President reminds me of as he constantly tries to re-assure America about our plummeting economy.













WHO DAT?
Here’s a still from a deleted scene from the new film Horton Hears A Who.  BTW, did they really need to screw with this classic cartoon?  Why do we need a full-length feature film to tell the same story it took 30 minutes to tell on TV?











ARTY FARTY
I came across this in the Sunday paper.  It’s called "Super Slave Dome" by William Willmott, and it's on display at a local Black Cultural Heritage center.  According to the K.C. Star:  "It seems to suggest that one of America's favorite pasttimes is a vehicle for enslavement, as well as escape, and a key locus for racially charged influences.  A football field encompassed by what looks like people seated in bleachers is at the center of the picture.  Upon closer inspection, the bleachers reveal themselves to be a restructuring of the hatchways between decks into which men, women and children were packed aboard slave ships in the early 19th century."  WTF?!?  How do these arty types read such crap into stuff like this?  All I see here is the seating diagram of the Louisiana Superdome—it really takes a lot of talent to pirate that!  Folks who go out of their way to find racism in everything aren't high my list of people I respect either...

WELCOME TO "WHITE TRASH THEATER"
This week's episode: "Shit Or Get Off The Pot" .  You may have already heard this story on the TV news recently, but here it is again.  I couldn't even dream of making this kind of shit up!  The late Jim Morrison was right for one of the rare times in his screwed-up life when he said, "People are strange..."

I'm alright, Jack--Keep yer hands offa my stack!

With that in mind, please wish me luck on the Powerball thing tonight.  Being as the #9 has been very prevalent in the news this week, and being as I had exactly nine Yankee dollars in my wallet during my trip to the store last night, I took that as a positive sign, thus I purchased nine lottery tickets.  I have plans for that $275 million, too.  Number 9! Number 9!  Number 9!...

MORE ON MORON SPITZER
Speaking of #9 in your lineup, a couple more thoughts on the dearly-departed Gov. Spitzer.  First off, when I saw the whore-rific (sorry!) photos of the prostitute that did him (in), my first thought was, "you paid $4,300 for that?!?"  His wife is a helluva lot prettier.  I also love the way Republican readers of the Kansas City Star have been raising a fuss because the paper never once mentioned that Spitzer is a Democrat in the inital articles they ran.  This man is an elected public official who (literally) fucked around and broke the law—what the hell difference does it make what party he's from?  Get over it, already, all you Larry Craig sychophants...

MOTHER NATURE'S COLORS WERE SHOWING...
...in Atlanta last night when severe thunderstorms disrupted the SEC men's bassit-ball tournament at the Georiga Dome, blowing a couple holes in the roof and scaring the shit out of 18,000 people.  They were actually able to resume and complete the game that was interrupted, but the final game of the evening was postponed, thus causing the first "rain-in", as well as the first "twi-night doubleheader" (for Georgia) in college basketball history!

WHITE SAID FRED
Today's Kansas-Texas A&M game in the Big 12 men's tournament here in K.C. was the final broadcast in the career of Fred White, one of the longtime voices of ESPN's college basketball as well as the Kansas City Royals.  Fred recently announced his retirement, and I'm going to miss him quite a bit.  He teamed up with Hall of Famer Denny Matthews on Royals radio broadcasts in 1974 and was part of the soundtrack of my summers for nearly 25 years, until the team threw him under the bus in 1997 and fired him for no good reason other than to shake things up.  Gee, our team sucks, so let's fire the announcer—brilliant idea!  They replaced him with Ryan Lefebvre (son of former L.A. Dodger Jim Lefebvre), and while Ryan's a nice guy, he's a fairly dull play-by-play man.  The Royals did rehire White a few years ago as their director of broadcasting or some such thing, and he did get to do some fill-in work on broadcasts when Matthews took time off, but I still think he got a raw deal.  Anyway, I'm going to miss his easygoing delivery and Midwestern drawl, like when he pronounces Missouri "Missour-uh" and possession as "po-ZAY-shun".  In a very classy move, they stopped today's game briefly at the Sprint Center to recognize Fred White and honor him—bravo to the Big 12 people, and bravo especially to the man himself—ya done good, Fred!

It was also great that for his final game, White was teamed with former Royal Paul Splittorff, whom I worked with briefly during my stint at KKJC in Blue Springs in 1987.  Splitt got his start in broadcasting at the "Mighty 1030" as a color analyst on high school football and basketball games.  High school sports on local radio and TV is fairly commonplace now, but back then it was almost unheard of, and we were one of the few stations to carry high school sporting events, so I kinda like to think we pioneered it in some ways.  Anyway, Paul's delivery was very tentative and wooden at first, but he got better and more confident as the years went on, and sounds very polished now, and even does play-by-play on Royals telecasts in addition to color.  I can also say that Paul Splittorff is a truly nice man—what you see on TV is pretty much what you get in person.  He's very affable and has a very wry sense of humor—very cool guy.

OTHER BIG 12 TOURNEY MUSINGS
It appears that the new Scent Printer is a big hit with out-of-town Big 12 fans, as is the adjoining new Power & Light entertainment district.  The entire area has been quite zoo-like the last three days, and I'm tickled to see downtown Kansas City come alive again—it's been long overdue.

Memo to the Big 12:  You might re-think a couple of your corporate sponsors for this conference tournament.  There are only like two Chik-Fil-A restaurants in K.C., and there ain't a Whataburger within at least 200 miles of Kansas City (let alone Nebraska, Colorado or Iowa).  You might wanna recruit sponsors that all Big 12 TV viewers can actually patronize, okey-dokey?

And in a sure sign of the apocalypse, during the Big 12 game last night between Texas A&M and Kansas State, I heard one of the pep bands playing "Shout It Out Loud" by Kiss.  Black Sabbath, Metallica and AC/DC also get the college pep band/marching band treatment from time to time these days.  I never thought I'd live to see the day when college bands would be playing heavy metal songs!

EATING CROW?
I just had to chortle yesterday when I read that singer Sheryl Crow is joining Fleetwood Mac.  Evidently, Horsey-Face is now the ersatz replacement for Christine McVie.  This is akin to Kid Rock joining the Eagles...

ATTACK OF THE KILLER ANAGRAMS!
Some baseball fanatics with way too much time on their hands came up with the following funnies:

Alex Rodriguez = Regularized Ox
George Herman Ruth = Rather Huge Monger
San Francisco Giants = Fascinating! No scars!
Los Angeles Dodgers = All Negro Goddesses
San Diego Padres = Ignored Sad Apes
Derek Jeter = Jerked Tree
The Cincinnati Reds = Indecent Christian
Andy Pettite = Tainted Type (can that one be any more ironic?!?)
Milton Bradley = Notably Milder (ditto)
Tony LaRussa = Sour Analyst
Gary Sheffield = Large Fed Fishy
Hideki Okajima = Hi, I am a joke, kid
Chase Utley = Eyelash Cut
Pedro Martinez = Note: Prized Arm!
Carlos Pena = Anal Corpse
Fantasy Baseball = A Baseball Fan Sty
Tom Seaver = Arm Vetoes
Oscar Charleston = Anal Crotch Sores
Roy Oswalt = Wooly Rats
Kansas City Royals = Ink Ya Salary Costs!
Tom Glavine = Angel Vomit
Greg Maddux = Max-Drugged
Bruce Sutter = Cubs utterer; Butt rescuer
Jose Offerman = Major Offense
Al Kaline = Alkaline
Cal Ripken = Lean Prick; Pain Clerk
Travis Lee = Versatile
Stan Musial = Lust Is A Man
Chris Capuano = A Crap Cushion
Lou Piniella = I, Paul O'Neill
Dustin Pedroia = Super Addition
Dmitri Young = Dim Orgy Unit
Magglio Ordonez = Glamorized Goon

And one non-baseball item: Jennifer Aniston = Fine in torn jeans

Yours truly, Brian Holland = Land Ho, Brain L!