A Curemas Miracle (Part 3)

Part 1-2 | Part 4


Very early in the morning on Saturday, Dec. 13th, we had finally checked into our hotel and were unwinding from the excitement of the previous day. I had descended to the lobby of the hotel to retrieve something from my car, and I was checking the Chain of Flowers front page on my phone in the elevator. At the same time, in our hotel room, Sean was checking his Myspace account. Various other people were getting the news as well, and my phone rang practically nonstop for about 15 minutes until it was apparent that all who were in our group had been informed. It was something that I never thought would ever happen to me. The Cure had announced that they were going to be playing a Myspace Secret show at the Troubadour club in Hollywood! As excited as we were, we were also in desperate need of a few hours of good sleep, so instead of heading out to sleep on the streets of LA, as some others did, we got about 5 hours of shuteye before awakening at 7 am to head out to the line at the club.

Upon arriving at the line "near" the Troubadour, I was so excited that I literally flew out of the car without turning it off and went to get my "unofficial" line number of 23. This brilliant idea, courtesy of Midnight, allowed people to be able to move in and out of line without fear that they would have to fight for their place in line and also made sure that when the time came, there was absolutely no question as to who was there first.

After I settled down a bit and re-parked my car (remembering to turn it off this time) we got out our red chairs from the day before and whiled away the time by chatting to the other fans in line. There were a lot of folks that were in the Carson Daly line from the day before, and some who were also at the Leno taping from Thursday. I finally remembered to send some pics to Craig as well! Soon after we arrived, there was a bit of unexpected excitement when a small accident occured in the nearby intersection. An older lady in a car had run the red light and struck a man on a moped. Fortunately, he did not seem to be too injured as he promptly got up from the pavement and began chewing out the lady in the car! The fans in line were the first to call 911 and run over to check out the accident, since we even had a nurse in the crowd.

Once the hubbub over the accident had subsided a bit, Sean and I went to the cafe around the corner from the Troubadour to get some breakfast. About halfway through our meal, I pulled out my phone and checked in at the CoF blog, where I found the report about needing a printout of your Myspace account in order to get into the show. We were pretty concerned about this and hurried through the rest of our meal, all the while strategizing about where I could go to print out a page from my laptop. As it turned out, on our way out of the cafe, we ran into Keith Uddin and Ricky who were getting coffee there also! The crew had just arrived to do setup for the show and of course the cafe was the nearest place to go. We stopped and chatted with Keith for a moment and asked him about what we had just read, but he reassured us that it was not true and that no printout was needed. He also told us that someone would come out around noon and distribute wristbands, and that these would be the ticket to get into the club. We were very relieved and went back to the line to distribute the information to the others who were waiting, and discovered that some had already left to try to print out their pages.

People trickled into the area bit by bit all morning, and just before noon there were well over 180 people in line, with most of those arriving after 11-11:30 am because they read on the announcement that no line-ups would be allowed before noon. Well, we were unofficially lining up LONG before that, so my bit of advice to anyone who wants to get into a show like this is to get there as early as you possibly can, and your patience will be rewarded. Waiting in line for a few hours for an opportunity like this is something you will never regret!

The anticipation grew as the morning wore on, and there were a lot of people milling around and waiting and asking questions. Finally, about 10 minutes after noon, some people came out of the club with a few handfuls of wristbands, and the security guard shouted for everyone to line up according to their number! This was a great vindication of Midnight's idea and it was awesome because there was no pushing, no fights, and you really could not claim you had been there before someone else if your number was higher. Unfortunately for those arriving later, there were only about 130 wristbands given out initially so there were quite a few disappointed people. I have heard that a few more wristbands surfaced some time later in the day, but I haven't been able to confirm that. We were instructed to hold out our right wrists for the bands and when we got them we were told NOT to touch them or take them off, not to cut off the loose end or ANYTHING! They were very stern about this and when they saw my camera hanging off my shoulder I got a big lecture about getting kicked out if they even saw a ghost of a camera in my possession. So of course in balancing out the idea of smuggling my camera in to record the historic occasion vs. getting kicked out completely and not getting to witness said occasion at all, you can tell which option I chose in the end.

We were then instructed in no uncertain terms to scatter and not show ourselves again prior to 7 pm, lest we risk the loss of our wristband or be pushed to the back of the line to get in. So most people chose to scatter. Having brought my "club" clothes with us when we left the hotel in the morning, there was no reason to go back, so we ended up driving a few places with Crowbi-wan and even went out to the Santa Monica Pier which was pretty and crowded but also extremely cold and windy so we did not stay long. Arriving back in the vicinity of the club, I camped out at a coffeehouse a few blocks away and took the opportunity to charge my phone a tiny bit and also upload some photos to my flickr account. Later in the evening, we had dinner at a small Indian restaurant near the Troubadour and ended up meeting Autumn there which was wonderful, being an admirer of picturesofyou.us for several years. She was warm, funny and kindly even helped me in the ladies room to zip up my corset :D, so thank you again to Autumn!

It was getting close to the magic hour of 7 pm, so heading back over to the area of the club, I found a strange sight. It seems that the club people preferred that the 100-plus fans who actually had wristbands should wander in and out through traffic and nervously wait in the median as opposed to waiting in an orderly fashion on the actual sidewalk by the club. Since we were strictly NOT allowed to line up, it ended up that all the fans collected themselves on the median of the street in order to be as close as possible to the line, since we were not allowed to step foot on the sidewalk which the club touched. In my opinion, they should have simply honored the numbering system already in place and let people wait just as we had that morning. As it was, exactly at 6:59 pm, there was a mad dash across the street, literally through the cars waiting at the light, for the "survival of the fittest" fight for the front of the line. Once in line, we still had another hour to wait before we would be allowed in the club at 8 pm, and security came down the line several times, checking that all in line had wristbands and tossing out the few people who were in line without them.

Before we even knew it, an hour had passed and the line began to move! Read all about Part 4 - 12:13 Dream, An Evening with The Cure on the next post.

A Dream Come True

Just about everyone has their own unique musical taste. Some people have a wildly-eclectic music collection encompassing everything from 1940's polka to avant-garde industrial, and some have more defined boundaries to their listening habits. Some people MUST wake to heavy-metal, work to light jazz or make love to a backing soundtrack of the BeeGees. You know who you are (and so does your ex-girlfriend). There do exist people who seem to get by just fine without much music at all in their lives, and then there are those who are permanently attached to their music player through the little white cords in their ears. As with everything in life, there is a wide spectrum of dedication in the populace of the planet to specific music and bands, and for some reason Cure fans worldwide seem to veer a little bit more toward the more passionate side than most.

All Cure fans have other favorite bands and music, but then there are those days when you just want to listen to the Cure. ONLY the Cure. Maybe you're having a bad day, and just need to go to your happy place for a little nostalgic comfort, but your iPod is broken and the only radio station in town plays adult contemporary rock. What is a Cure fan to do? Well one enterprising fellow named Rob set up an online Cure radio station called Dreamland and it is a Cure fan's dream come true.

There are some critical differences that give Dreamland a great advantage over automated services streaming Cure music such as last.fm or others, and those lie in the dedication and personal touch that only a fellow Cure fan can provide. Streaming 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all Cure, all the time, this station offers anyone with an internet connection a direct pipeline into the enormously broad world of Cure music and information, from rarities, demos and live recordings to remixes and radio interviews. Pulled from a vastly extensive collection, the Dreamland stream is Cure bliss. Rob is happy to accommodate requests when he is near his computer to fill them, and seems to truly enjoy interacting with other fans through the Shoutbox on his site. I thought it would be interesting to find out a little more about the history and behind the scenes activity that surrounds Dreamland, and so I asked Rob if I could interview him for my blog, and he graciously agreed to let me pick his brain a little bit.

So without further ado, may I present to you the official Dreamland Interview:


Please tell us a little about yourself
Hmm, a bio, well ... I am not the best at articulating my thoughts into words.... My name is Rob Gaver and I was born in Los Angeles, California in 1973, so that makes me 35. I now live just north of Tampa, Florida with my beautiful wife Tracey and our dog Kailey. I am a musician (keyboards) and engineer and have spent the last 15 years or so producing and recording various local acts, no one major , a lot of hiphop music! Now that I am older and settled down, I mainly just create music for myself, its my way of "getting away" from it all. I am currently a manager for an Office Supply store, mundane for sure, but it pays the bills. A few other notes about me. I am a magician (started close up magic at 14) , a science junkie (physics / The Universe), a computer technician, and a smart ass to the fullest, and I would love to do stand up comedy one day~ and yes you can post Kailey's website.

How long have you been a Cure fan?
Since around 1986 or so, Just before Kiss Me.

What or who introduced you to their music?
... I met this "little black haired girl" and was mesmerized. Naturally she listened to The Cure and introduced me to them. Head on the Door was my first taste, what a great record! Then I discovered Seventeen Seconds and that settled that.

What do you enjoy the most about the Cure?
Wow where to begin? Of course at first it was the obvious stuff like the music, the lyrics, the look. as time went by I always kept The Cure with me. Life has its ups and downs and the whole time, I had The Cure with me. So now when I listen to The Cure I feel like I am home, I feel comfort. It becomes a part of you, you know? It Sounds corny I guess but I'm sure you get what I mean. (I know exactly what you mean! -ed.)

What's your favorite Cure-related memory or experience?
This actually happened recently. My wife Tracey didn't really know much about The Cure when we met. She instantly loved them, so taking her to a show for the first time, Ultra Music Festival 2007. The look on her face when Robert walked on the stage. I'll never forget it.

What inspired you to start Dreamland and when did you start it?
I started a members only music hub called The Bassment in 2003. I ripped all my vinyl and cds , collected mp3s and built a collection of Cure music that I am still adding to. Then I started toying around with the idea of a Cure only radio station, I tried peercast for a bit, but it didn’t really take off because it required that a client program be installed on the listeners computer. Too much hassle. So started using Winamp Shoutcast in 2005 and built Dreamland... So far 3 years and still going.

How many listeners do you have on an average day?
Currently 90 listeners with an average of 15-20 listener peak a day. This covers several time zones.

How big is your collection?
I currently have 125,000 mp3s in my main library, about 1,500 cure tracks, (a lot of bootlegs). I usually have around 600 songs that I rotate in and out on Dreamland.

Have you met a lot of people through your station?
Actually no...

What are the biggest challenges you face in running Dreamland?
Bandwidth is my biggest challenge, because this is all in my home. So I have to stream at 56 kb/s ....would love to be at 128 kb/s at least. Looking for options currently.

Can you tell us a little about the equipment or software you use?
Equipment is a computer dedicated as the server with several external drives. As far as software I use Shoutcast by Winamp in conjunction with Evil Lyrics. I also have a home recording studio so I run the stream through a Ramsa mixing board and a compressor/ limiter. I use Protools for any announcements like the Intro to Dreamland.

Do you take requests or set up special playlists often or do you mostly just push the "shuffle" button and let it go?
I love taking requests. I really enjoy seeing what other Cure fans enjoy. I will always play a request unless of course I am not around to fulfill it, lol.
Actually I mix it live a lot of the time, but I do have several playlists that I have created, you know the Happy Cure, the heavy Cure, the dim the lights and listen with your favorite poison Cure. I also do at times shuffle and let it ride.

You mentioned bandwidth issues. Would you ever consider something like a subscription or donation program to help you with the costs of running the station? If not, what other kinds of options would you look at?
I have given this some thought and have decided against subscriptions. There is a legal issue here and I want to be careful not to cross the line. I would not want to offend The Cure by what I am doing. Part of me likes to think that Robert wouldn't care , but I want to be careful. Donations would be helpful and I may go that route at some point. For now I am looking at a 20 mb/s upload service and that would do the trick but the problem is getting a static ip address which will cost me about $100 additional a month. So yeah, for now its status quo, lol.

Would you share a small playlist with us of your current favorites?
This is a hard one. This is what I've been playing lately... of course that will change with state of mind. (ed. note, I tried to find these on playlist.com so that you could hear them, however most of them are not available, so you'll just have to listen to Dreamland to hear them)

Please Come Home
Ching Chang Chong
Sirensong
All around us the mermaids sing
Your so Happy
A Night Like This (Smashing Pumpkins cover)
Give me it (Concert LP)
Don't Believe a Word
Lost Flower 4
This Morning
Truth Goodness and Beauty
Strum
Closedown
Dressing Up (Paris)
Sluvy
All of This

Is there anything else that I have not asked that you think people need to know about you and your station?
Feel free to stop by the site http://www.bassmentradio.com/cure/dream.htm and give it a go, download the toolbar to get the most out of it and remember no adware or spyware and its free. also it is important to me to express the hope that any listener of Dreamland supports The Cure by purchasing their music and seeing their shows.



Many thanks to Rob for his dedication to the Cure and the many fans who enjoy his station on a daily basis!

Primary Colors of the Cure - Part 2

I hope that you enjoyed reading Part 1 of my short exploration of the colors in the Cure's song lyrics.

Following that train of thought, it seemed to me to be only natural to explore the color palettes presented by the studio albums. As we saw in the first part of this series, color is used to add meaning and emotional impact to the songs themselves. I think it is interesting how an album cover can also be distilled into distinct color palettes which can give us clues as to the overall emotional content of the songs in a particular album. For this blog post I used the color palette tool on the Colour Lovers website which is a lot of fun if you are artistically / creatively inclined and enjoy playing with color.

Here are all of the 13 studio albums as color palettes, along with an image of the album cover itself and a brief commentary on each one.

1. Three Imaginary Boys










Although Robert famously hated the cover artwork for their first album, the visual depiction of the band members as a lamp, a refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner (a hoover) is a now-iconic piece of 80's album art. Produced by the record company, the cover of Three Imaginary Boys was such an irritant to him that Robert insisted on complete creative control over the final product on all future albums.

2. Seventeen Seconds










As noted above, the cover of Seventeen Seconds was the first album cover personally overseen by Robert Smith, and the contrast between the first and second album covers could not be more striking. As the first entry in what would become the three darkest albums of The Cure's early years, Seventeen Second's cover provides a view into the new sound of The Cure after the disjointed pop of Three Imaginary Boys, The stark, minimalist expanse of white is broken by a blur of eerie tree branches and grey, undefined shapes. The splash of red on the lower left corner hints at a surge of emotion coloring the otherwise bleak landscape, and the frenetic lines suggest movement, which is fitting as the Cure's first charting single in the UK, "A Forest" came from this album.

3. Faith











Based on a photograph of the 12th-century ruins of Bolton Abbey in the fog, the moody atmosphere of the cover of Faith presents an even bleaker landscape than that on the cover of Seventeen Seconds. The second of the three dark albums, it offers little respite from the mood previously set into place. Here there is dim light, shades of gray and very little texture, broken only by the small logo and unadorned text near the top left. The brooding hulk of Bolton Abbey towers ominously above the viewer who appears to be lying on the colorless grass at the bottom of the cover. The emotional resonance of this cover is intense, oppressive and more than a little claustrophobic, perfectly expressing the music within.

4. Pornography










The final album of the three dark albums and the first in the later "Trilogy" series, Pornography takes the bleak landscape of Seventeen Seconds, and the despair and hopelessness of Faith and channels them both into a dark swirl of anger, hatred, death, lust and cynical passion. The sighs of gray on the cover of Faith have been replaced by bloodcurdling howls of red and purple, and the pale, distorted faces appear to arise from the black depths of a particularly gruesome nightmare. The narrow, unadorned text at the very top nearly fades into obscurity with its thin, stretched lines. This is the first album cover to feature the faces of the band members, and the only one to feature members other than Robert Smith on the cover. Notably, the three albums which do feature Robert Smith on the cover (Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers) are all considered by fans and critics alike to be the best work of the Cure's extensive catalog, and were the focus of 2002's "Trilogy" DVD in which all three albums were played in concert back-to-back.

5. The Top











After exploring the oppressive darkness of the last three albums, coming across the artwork for The Top feels a little like stumbling into a circus sideshow tent just after visiting the Holocaust Memorial. Many fans of the era were reported to be furious at Robert for abandoning music influenced by the somber introspection that he had been immersed in. Understandably, there should be some confusion about how and why the man who wrote the line "It doesn't matter if we all die" suddenly began to cuddle kittens and sing about caterpillars! The sudden change in mood and atmosphere is vividly reflected in the cover art for The Top, with it's poppy, psychedelically optimistic tones of yellow, red, blue, green and gold. The emerald-green font of the album title takes up most of the front cover, another departure from the previous covers, with The Cure written in gold and larger than on any other cover previously published. The loopily introspective music on The Top is reflected in the bright jewel-toned colors of the album cover as we explore what is the closest thing to a Robert Smith "solo" album that has been published to date.

6. The Head on the Door










A more subdued palette greets us on the cover art for The Head on the Door . Fluttering, indistinct shapes in pastel yellows and pinks arise from a sea of black, overlaid by blue text full of curlicues and organic shapes. Although this color palette is toned down as compared to The Top, the surreal psychedelia of the songs on the album is still well represented by both the colors and shapes on the cover. The claustrophobic pop anthems of The Head on the Door take the hint of absurdity found in the music of The Top and add a hit or two of ecstasy, the swirling guitars of Porl Thompson and an undeniable pop sensibility to produce some of the Cure's first major US hits.

7. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me










With vivid red lips illustrating the album title, the colors of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me show us a more mature intensity that is less concerned with anger than with lust and love. The fiery reds and oranges of the cover invoke the heat of coupling, the desires of the flesh and the joys of union. Many of the tracks on KMKMKM explore themes of relationships and the conflict therein, and this is expressed in both the album artwork and color palette. The happy-go-lucky lyrics of the pop gems on The Head on the Door are gone, and in their place is a furnace of sexual energy and an abundance of sophisticated intellect. Meticulously crafted love songs and catchy pop masterpieces dominate the offerings of this, their 7th studio album. This album was the one that put the Cure on the radar of mainstream music with "Hot, Hot, Hot", "Why Can't I Be You" and "Just Like Heaven" pouring out of radios and onto club floors worldwide. Here the Cure are on fire, and it shows in the colors!

8. Disintegration










Once the fiery flames of KMKMKM had subsided, Robert decided to douse the lingering embers with the deep green waters of his own nightmares, and the result was Disintegration. Famously condemmned by the record company as commercial suicide following such an upbeat, passionate musical journey as KMKMKM, Disintegration proved that the fans were ready and willing to follow Robert into the depths of his own psyche. Here the album cover of the second installment in the "Trilogy" provides yet another visual glimpse into the watery, emotional heart of the Cure. The dark green depths of the cover are broken by shadowy, silhouetted flowers and a hauntingly pale gaze upward. The psychedelia here is less concerned with colorful eye-candy than with the veiled, introspective gaze which explores the shadows of the heart. The only counterpoint to the deep and pale greens here on the cover of Disintegration is a touch of brown which could even represent the viewer grasping for a place to stand while sinking into the dark.

9. Wish










Back on dry land once more, a surge of happiness suffuses the cover of Wish like a breath of fresh air from the circle of blue sky on the cover. One of the most commercially successful Cure records after Disintegration, the lyrics and music of Wish present a vision of the day breaking after the gloomy depths of midnight have passed. The colors on the cover present a happier Cure, with optimistic blue skies and white fluffy clouds surrounded by bright reds and oranges. The strangely compelling, iconic artwork by Parched Art draws us into an exploration of the meaning and imagery of the album cover and promises an optimistic view of love and life. Uniquely, the cover of Wish seems to have inspired more Cure tattoos than any other album artwork. From the commercial hits "High" and "Friday I'm In Love" to the lush promise of "To Wish Impossible Things" and the epic masterpiece "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea", the Cure is in love, and so are we.

10. Wild Mood Swings










Fittingly, the cover of Wild Mood Swings features a windup clown toy, because this album represents the Cure at their most playful. The bright primary colors of the cover reveal songs which are very much mood swings, alternately coy and condescending, playfully erotic and heartbreakingly sincere. This album features some of the happiest Cure lyrics ever written, and some of the most underrated songs of their oeuvre. From the "gorgeous strawberry kiss" of red to the honey-colored yellow and tender-hearted blue, the clues to the moods of Wild Mood Swings are written in bright tones throughout the album and the cover.

11. Bloodflowers










As the self-described third part of the Cure's career-spanning "Trilogy" of albums, the cover of Bloodflowers is a near-explicit echo of the bleak understatement of the cover of Seventeen Seconds. Here we see the stark whites and blood reds, the dense blues and greys of that cover, but portrayed with much more intensity and depth. The mariachi band of Wild Mood Swings has decamped and the paper streamers from last night's party are but pale tatters fraying in the wind. Here the colors of the foreboding winter moon has brought us through the night to dawn and we understand that with age brings wisdom as well as bitter realization. On the cover of Bloodflowers, we return to the pale forest of Seventeen Seconds and Faith, but have brought both a compass and a friend along, so that this time, the journey is not nearly as lonely or as disorienting.


12. The Cure










Perhaps remembering the incoherent nightmares of his own childhood, for the cover of the Cure's self-titled 2004 album, Robert asked his numerous nieces and nephews to draw pictures for him and then compiled them into the artwork for The Cure. The resulting effect takes all of the unspoken night terrors of pre-adolescence and distills them into a creepily subdued palette. The muddied colors evoke the fear of that spooky old mansion down the street, the yellow color of the wash of light from the porch light and the purple shadows lurking in the yard after midnight. The colors and disconnected childish cartoons of the cover let us know what to expect, and what not to expect from the Cure's 12th studio offering.

13. 4:13 Dream










Returning once again to the Parched Art aesthetic which was missing from Cure covers for 16 years, the cover of the forthcoming album 4:13 Dream is sprinkled with effervescently optimistic colors which highlight the shadowy shapes and hand-sewn detail of the watercolors on the front of 4:13 Dream. Bright flashes and splatters of yellow, pink and blue surround the hypnotically glowing red eyes of the central mask-like figure which echoes the pale faces of the cover of Pornography. The stars invoke the much-anticipated opener "Underneath the Stars" and the surreal, dreamlike shapes bring to mind the hallucinatory lyrics of the new singles "Freakshow" and "Sleep When I'm Dead".

As with many other Cure albums such as Wish and Wild Mood Swings, the themes of the main album are repeated and expanded upon on the covers of the singles, creating a coherent and immediately recognizable visual theme, which is reinforced through use of color and style. Here, the overall effect is one of entering a bright daydream where the echoes of the past Cure albums reverberate, informing and infusing the new works with the spirit of the old.

A Final Note:

It was while writing this article that I first noticed that the three "Trilogy" albums are the only ones to feature Robert's face on the cover (albeit more abstractly with Pornography) and thought that it was interesting that they are the ones which Robert Smith considers to be the most representative Cure albums. Certainly others have noticed and remarked on this phenomenon before, however it was not something which I had thought about before doing this analysis of the album covers. It definitely made me wonder more about the process that they go through to produce the covers, and whether Robert's confidence in the material is what inspires him to put his face out there on the album, or whether that has even been a conscious decision on his part. If you have any insight into this process, please leave a comment or message, I'd love to hear from you!