The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable
Concertgoing Experience
by Sean Manning

Jennifer Egan writes about seeing Patti Smith in San Francisco in the
1970's. (Anyone read this to report about it?)

>From Publishers Weekly
In this uneven but engaging collection of essays, 50 writers recall
their most memorable concert experience, spanning about 50 years of
popular music history. Manning does a great job of collecting a
diverse range of writers and musicians for this project, and his
sequencing has the intuitive logic of a well considered set list.
Though the book is chronological, the parallel movements of different
musical eras are allowed to bump up against each other in fascinating
ways, such as when the smooth showmanship of Billy Joel gives way to
the raw violence of X in 1979. The pieces in this collection are most
successful when they combine personal anecdotes with specific and
original recollections of the band being profiled. Tracy Chevalier's
essay about seeing Queen in 1977 is a perfect evocation of
experiencing live music for the first time, as she describes "the
familiarity and yet also the strange rawness of the songs." While the
overall pace of the collection is slowed by "you had to be there"
essays about a Bruce Springsteen show, Woodstock and other events,
there are enough high points to satisfy a dedicated live music
aficionado. (Jan.)
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier
Inc. All rights reserved.

>From Booklist
The authors of these musings on favorite concerts include the well
known (Ishmael Reed, Harvey Pekar, etc.) and the less known, all
offering deepish thoughts about performers and performances. Chuck
Klosterman remembers the night Prince played the Fargodome in North
Dakota--surely a night when pop cultural worlds collided--while
spouses Robert Burke Warren and Holly George-Warren compare notes in
separate pieces about a 1989 Van Morrison show. Heidi Julavits lauds
proto-headbangers Rush; novelist Reed, the discreeter charms of Miles
Davis in 1955 in Buffalo, N.Y.--an event that, along with a trip to
Paris, "would determine the course of [Reed's] life" (he eventually
"dropped out of high school and went to work at a library"). For
comparing and contrasting the perceived impacts of the Rolling Stones
in 1965, Public Image Ltd. in 1981, and Nirvana in 1991, it would be
hard to beat this book. And then there's Max Alan Collins on Kevin
Spacey at the House of Blues in Chicago in 2004. Kevin Spacey? Collins
is so mysterious. Mike Tribby
Copyright (c) American Library Association. All rights reserved