Sept. 8th,1989-Los Angeles,Ca. (Dodger Stadium)

After Love and Rockets and Pixies,Stadium Crowd Was Ready for The Cure

by Bruce Britt of the L.A. Daily News (9/11/89)

Los Angeles has emerged in recent years as the post-modern music
capital of the United States. Obscure acts like Depeche Mode and
New Order,which might have difficulty selling out Elks lodges
elsewhere,somehow manage to pack Southern California arenas like
the Rose Bowl and Irvine Meadows with relative ease.

As if to cement Los Angeles' reputation as the nation's ''po-mo''
mecca, the Cure, Love and Rockets and the Pixies performed to a
near sellout crowd Friday at Dodger Stadium.

Despite this potentially strong lineup,it was the fans who stole the
show.Sartorially,Friday's show was a celebration of black leather,
sculpted hair,cadaverous makeup and other fashion curiosities.
One concertgoer even wore false vampire fangs.

These morose,young eccentrics helped enliven an otherwise
mediocre evening.If Friday's show proved anything,it's that post
modern pop is meant to be heard,and not seen.The bands performed
with about as much zeal as a totem pole.

The static performances seemed to prompt restlessness among
fans.Those who weren't sauntering about the stadium during
performances were punching beach balls,tossing toilet paper
streamers and executing the ''wave'' cheer.

During one intermission,fans in the upper tiers pelted fans below
with filled soda cups, ice, sparklers and other debris.

Some might say the monkeyshines were a response to an
inconsiderate oversight.The Cure failed to provide large,closed-circuit
film screens often used in coliseum concert settings.Therefore,some
fans had to make do with an insect's-eye view of the proceedings.All this
for $25.

As for the performances,the scorecard reads in favor of the
headliners.Though the Pixies' music recalled the Ramones,the set
was marred by a motionless performance.

After a lengthy intermission,Love and Rockets took the stage and
proceeded to deliver a disappointing performance. A poor sound mix
was partially to blame.Tunes like ''No New Tale to Tell'' and ''So Alive''
possessed no sonic detail whatsoever.It was as if someone stretched
gauze over the speakers.

The band was a visual bust as well.In an attempt to create a
mysterious ambiance,the band bathed the stage in dark lights and
smoke.Unfortunately,the gimmicks only served to obscure the
musicians.

Love and Rockets' flawed set made it all the easier for the Cure to
win over the throng.Led by singer Robert Smith,the band earned its
enthusiastic welcome with a set of sensuous,melancholy pop.

Borrowing mostly from its new Elektra Records album,
''Disintegration,'' the band performed with a power only hinted at on the
recordings.Indeed,songs like ''Last Dance'' and ''Fascination Street''
took on an almost cinematic grandeur Friday.

Like the two opening bands,the Cure's set was hampered by a lack
of movement.But in the end,the band's compelling music carried the
evening.

50,000 at Stadium Get a Listless Cure

by Chris Willman of the Los Angeles Times (9/11/89)

We don't know about you all, but when we're in a lonely, reflective
kind of mood--perhaps contemplating our own mortality and alienation
and spiritual exhaustion--and want to explore that ennui through getting
lost in some truly introspective, soul-searching mood music, we like to
look through the local listings and see who's playing over at, oh, Dodger
Stadium.

Friday evening, before a crowd of nearly 50,000, it was current kings
of pain the Cure, along with special guests Love and Rockets, the Pixies
and Shelleyan Orphan--four fairly distinctive groups whose most common
shared traits are minor-key modalities and a deliberate lack of stage
presence. "Stadium rock" it wasn't.

Listless, it often was. The Cure's 2 1/2-hour capping set contained an
hour's worth of truly riveting music, with the rest devoted to some of their
most languorous material, slow songs about the slow slide toward death
in which the same four bars drone on and on and on. The almost equally
popular Love and Rockets demonstrated equal proclivity for inflicting its
least-tuneful music (like the low-geared "Motorcycle") upon a mass
audience through a sound system that rendered the already distorted
wall of sound even more sludge-like.

The Cure's current "Disintegration" album is at once both fascinating
and aggravating look at a special band struggling to hone and perfect its
style. What variety there was in prior releases has been thrown out in
favor of homogenization. Most of the songs have no peaks or valleys. All
this, singer-guitarist Robert Smith indicates, is to strip away the
extraneous trappings of pop structure and immerse a listener in an
emotion at great, steady length.

But what can be an interesting aesthetic adventure at home, late at
night with the headphones on, is not so much fun at a baseball stadium
with terrible sound and tens of thousands of students chattering about
their high-school workdays and party animals in the upper decks lobbing
full cups of soda at the unfortunate below. (The lengthy food fight was
really something to see; reams of black-clad kids breaking down their
dread-of-life pretensions and re-enacting "Animal House.")

About two-thirds of the way through its performance, the Cure broke
into a string of its best, shortest, poppiest numbers (mostly from older
albums), climaxed by the funky "Why Can't I Be You," one of the most
delightful near-hits of recent years. Then came the encores and a return
to torpor, and the event once again became a giant teen mixer instead
of a concert.

Much derision has been directed the way of the Who and the Rolling
Stones for their tours of the nation's stadiums this summer, but there's
something even more cynical about the Cure playing in such a
setting--without even video screens as a concession for the extra
teeming tens of thousands.

True, three-story-high close-ups of Smith's face would do the music a
disservice by placing the emphasis on the singer, not the song,
which--despite the armies of young men and women who rat their hair to
resemble Smith's unique look--is not what the Cure is about. But with
nothing visual to focus on except enough continual dry ice to choke
Nanook of the North, and faced with music largely free of transitions or
climaxes, it was the occasional surprise lighting effect that got the
biggest cheers from the crowd.

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