Summer time is always the best time of the year full of big tours, lazy day & endless nights. Here are just a few examples of how we danced the night away all season long.
The Revolution – June 14th – House of Blues – Dallas, TX
Impossible to exagerate what was at stake here (nor how emotional I was/we all were before one note was even played).
Anyone that knows me or has known me will tell you that Prince isn’t ever far from my mind during his life & since his impossible to fathom passing last year. There are an infinite number of ways that The Revolution going on tour and playing Prince songs barely a year after their leader’s death could have gone badly. The hole in the center of the stage and the sound could have been too big. His absence could have made it all feel too inappropriate or, worst of all, exploitative. Or, they simply might not have been up to the task, some 30 years after they’d last played together with him, of performing those complicated, difficult songs that they used to execute with the military precision of which he relentlessly demanded. It all could have been too sad.
…and it was sad, but not for any of the reasons listed above – The band was razor sharp, inspired, and knew exactly what the audience wanted: a concert that was a celebration, a reunion, a public mourning — and perhaps most of all, a release. And from the very beginning of the set, The Revolution made everyone in the crowd a participant.
The house lights went down and the announcer said “Ladies and gentlemen, the Revolution,” just like in Purple Rain. The beat from Computer Blue kicked in as the group — guitarist Wendy Melvoin, bassist Brown Mark, drummer Bobby Z., and keyboardists Matt Fink and Lisa Coleman — walked onstage. Wendy, now the de facto frontperson purely because she’s the main singer (and the most talkative), strode up to the microphone and said, “This is about taking these songs back. Everyone’s wondering ‘Who’s gonna sing this, who’s gonna sing that’ — you are.” Then Brown Mark, playing the id to her superego, yelled, “Are you ready to party?!”
The groundswell of emotion was all around & I was contributing just as much of it as anyone there & with that nod, I along with everyone else erupted into a maelstorm of relief/release over a year/lifetime in the making.
For me personally, while I’m so grateful I got to see Prince perform literally dozens of times, but never with the Revolution. So besides a fortunate elevator ride with Wendy & Lisa at the ASCAP Expo a few years back, I’ve never been in the presence of these magical beings playing my fave shit ever. By song three they hit Automatic from 1999 & I thought my head was gonna explode. It also occurred to me that since this is their first & (so far) only tour without Prince that the last time these 5 people played together in Dallas was New Year’s Eve 1984 as Dallas was blessed to have that legendary tour land here for a three night stand including New Year’s Eve.
After a funky take on Controversy Wendy spoke about when she and Lisa wrote with Prince the song that’s become his elegy: Sometimes It Snows in April. “What has happened for a lot of us, especially The Revolution, is that he lives inside of us,” She wept as she finished speaking and struggled a bit through the middle verses.
But the uplift came right away, as the band raced through the songs they and Prince would often use to close their sets: “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Kiss,” “When Doves Cry,” and, of course, a soaring “Purple Rain,” which had hundreds in the house slowly waving their hands, continuing as the band said goodnight and left the stage. Of course there was an encore, and of course it was “I Would Die 4 U / Baby I’m a Star.” And sure, everyone wished Prince were still here — none more than the people onstage.
Setlist –
Computer Blue
America
Mountains
Automatic
Take Me With U
Uptown
D.M.S.R.
Our Destiny / Roadhouse Garden
Raspberry Beret
Let’s Work
1999
Paisley Park
Controversy
Sometimes It Snows in April
Let’s Go Crazy
Delirious
Kiss
When Doves Cry
Purple Rain
Encore:
I Would Die 4 U
Baby I’m a Star
After his passing we did four separate episodes at TrickyKid Radio covering every decade of Prince’s incomparable career as well as a one year retrospective. All of which you can stream/download for free here.
George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic – June 21st – The Bomb Factory – Dallas, TX
Following a year of major milestones such as his 75th birthday and the P-Funk Mothership stage prop becoming a permanent display in the Musical Crossroads section of the highly acclaimed new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington D.C., George Clinton chose Dallas as one of the places he’d throw a kick-ass concert to celebrate.
Atomic Dog was the first showstopper of his two-hour performance, to the delight of the nostalgic crowd who demonstrated that they could still “Do the Dog Catcher,” a knee-bent, butt grinding move for his still-young-in spirit fans. It occurred to me while I was writing this that other than the obvious influence Clinton had on Prince, the last time I saw P-Funk was just a few days after Prince passed at the very venue that the Revolution played & right as the show ended, Purple Rain came over the PA system as a gesture of healing & I remember everyone stopping to sing.
The audience of a few hundred or so lost their minds (and seats) as soon as the up-tempo Flashlight instrumental dropped. Fans, who were reaching a funky frenzy by that time, poured their heart, soul, and lungs into singing the chorus and lyrics. The only cool-off the audience of OG 40 and over listeners received was during Clinton’s nonchalant, but somewhat karaoke-style delivery of the opening lines of “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up).”
Clinton played as many songs as he could from his five-decade catalog, yet another reminder of why his so-called Afrofuturistic music was deemed worthy of the historical significance that landed his time-to-move-on ceiling-descending mothership from his concert stages of the past into the African American museum along with other relics of the creation of a culture.
(Editor’s Note: This was also a monumental moment for me personally as it was a first date with my now soulmate, will love being able to tell everyone from now how our first date went. Thank George!)
DJ Shadow – July 22nd – House of Blues – Dallas, TX
Been two decades since the release of Endtroducing …, DJ Shadow’s revered debut album. That trip-hop totem – painstakingly pieced together from atmospheric samples unearthed by Josh Davis’s patient crate-digging – still holds up, a seductive instrumental head trip of orchestral ennui and loamy beats. But, while Davis has moved on, embracing composition and collaboration, some of his fans have not. “If you only know the old stuff, that’s fine,” says the 43-year-old, in a surprisingly upfront introduction to this sold-out gig. “I’m just happy to be here.”
In front of projections of deep-space voyaging and lush rainforest exploration, Davis embarks on an enjoyably bumpy safari into his current musical vision, a sort of hyper-evolved hip-hop that manages to sound both sci-fi and vintage. For the DJ, there is a distinct lack of physical downtime. Hunched over a compact decks setup, Davis is constantly in motion, making dozens of infinitesimal adjustments to various inputs, scratching up an old-school storm with enviable fluidity and periodically upping sticks to bash out samples on a drum pad.
It’s an odd sight to see as tracks from his recent fifth album The Mountain Will Fall are folded into the churning mix. Midway through, Davis drops Midnight in a Perfect World, one of Endtroducing’s goosebump touchstones, but in the form of a so-far-unreleased remix by Hudson Mohawke that progressively mutates into a nervy sonic blitz. The classic Building Steam With a Grain of Salt also gets a revamp, its chiming piano figure and breathy chorale bracingly graffitied with a wigged-out sine wave solo.
Davis sounds completely earnest when, towards the end of this gig, he breaks off from beat-matching to address the crowd. He talks about his early love of NME and Melody Maker, and how John Peel’s championing of new music was inspirational. “Music is a healing force,” he says, and his sincerity seems to chime with the supportive crowd.
He ends with Organ Donor, a song that already took pleasure from reconfiguring a straightforward organ passage into a hopscotching freakout, and Davis pushes the 2016 version even further, turning it inside out and sending the familiar descending figure soaring upwards into a jazzy frenzy, a flamboyant exclamation mark to cap things off. Even for those who do know only the old stuff, it is highly entertaining to see DJ Shadow make it new again.
DJ Jazzy Jeff – July 28th – It’ll Do Club – Dallas, TX
Been wanting to check out this club for awhile – As a DJ myself, I’m always on the hunt for new locations that I think would be fun or a new crowd that I feel might “get” what my sets are about. When we heard DJ Jazzy Jeff was in town, the time was nigh.
Who better than one of the best known turntablists to introduce us to this great, very low maintanenace club? The two-hour set featured a heavy session of mixing between hits from hip-hop, R&B, and house genres, among others.
Some cuts that made the set include War‘s “Low Rider,” Aaliyah‘s “Are You That Somebody,” Outkast tracks like “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” and “So Fresh So Clean,” as well as some Lionel Richie, A Tribe Called Quest, Notorious B.I.G., Jay Z, Eminem, Ludacris, Talib Kweli, TLC, Toto, Tears for Fears, Will Smith (of course!), and much much more.
It’s the perfect set for the house party vibe this club gives off & we will most definitely be back, perhaps even to rock the spot myself.
Hope everyone had a great Summer!
Photos –
Roy Turner
James Currie
Joshua Pickering
Jody Collins
