When I was in the eighth grade I went to a high school talent show. Some kid I knew had an older brother who was performing and a bunch of us went to see them play. The band’s one and only song was a cover of Just Like Heaven. Now, that was a song that had been in heavy rotation on the radio so I was plenty familiar with both the song and the band that played it. But I remember sitting there that night in the school auditorium and being totally blown away. The next day I rode my bike to K-Mart and bought Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me on cassette.
The Cure has been making music almost as long as I’ve been alive and in the first half of their careers they were almost impossibly prolific. There are endless b-sides and rarities that over the years have become just as popular, if not more so than the singles themselves. But I lived in a small town where the only place to buy music was K-Mart and so I had to be happy with that one tape until the next record came out. So, that’s what I did.
Sometime between that transformative evening and The Cure’s next record, my family moved away from that small town full of friends and into a big city full of strangers. When Disintegration came out, it was the perfect record for a depressed teenager who felt totally lost in a suddenly mad world. It is also just plain perfect. If the band has a masterpiece, this is it.
Around the time that Disintegration was making the rounds, I was moving into heavier territory. Guns n Roses, Anthrax, and Skid Row were a few favorites and as time went on, bands such as Pantera, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails sang me to sleep each night. So while there’s never been a time that I’ve ever disliked The Cure, there was a good stretch there that I just wasn’t paying attention. Then Brandon Lee died.
It’s strange to call up and then examine memories of things like this. I’ve written before about how Kurt Cobain was an obnoxious punk jackass until he died and then somehow the world collectively remembers this pensive, gentle, troubadour. Hindsight gets in the way and you don’t always see things the way they really were. It feels like Lee’s death was a really big deal at the time but I really don’t think it was. I think it was just a blurb on MTV news that the son of Bruce Lee had died in a freak accident on the set of a movie. At the time, Brandon was pretty much unknown and except for a few underground fans of the comic, so was The Crow. The world turned and life went on.
There was a record store in the mall that I used to stop into to see what was new. On this particular day the dude who worked there was all excited. “The Crow soundtrack just came out today,” he said, “New songs by Rage, Nails, Pantera…” So I bought it, threw it into my Discman and pressed play.
The first track on The Crow soundtrack is a Cure song called Burn:
Hearing this song was like getting punched in the face. It was just so damn good I couldn’t hardly think straight. Honestly, I don’t think I cared or even knew about The Crow before that moment, but I was all in from then on. The Crow was fantastic. The loss of Brandon Lee was a monumental tragedy, and somewhere in there a ghostly voice cut through and I realized that Holy Hell, I really think that this has been my favorite band this whole time and I just never realized it before. I set about collecting records.
Used record stores used to be all over the place around here and The Cure has a lot of records. At some point I counted 27 CD’s, a mix of albums and singles, rarities, etc. I lost a good chunk of that collection when my car was broken into years ago. Bastards. But, time moves on and we all get a bit older and a bit less involved with our obsessions. The hot temper of teenage angst cools and certain records fall out of rotation. It will happen to you too. Wait for it.
Then an interesting thing happened. Well, two interesting things happened. The first was, the other night we were flipping through Netflix and decided to watch The Crow. Man, was that some good nostalgia. The second was that a friend had an extra ticket to The Cure concert the following night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T68dTmBP6qU
(And no, I didn’t record this.)
Now, just like that kid in the mall more than twenty years ago, I’ve been shocked awake by that ghostly voice reminding me how great all these albums are and how I should start paying attention again. And now I’m reminding you, or telling you for the first time, that you shuld stop what you’re doing right now and listen to The Cure.
