Episode 96 - Slang Tour - Part 2

Right, then let's go on to the second leg of the tour, which is in North America.

So, Curse, they have a few days off after finishing in Japan, but actually only four days.

And then they are in the Wings Stadium.

Let me get this right.

In Kalamazoo, which sounds like it should be in Australia, but anyway, in Kalamazoo, if I pronounced that correctly, in Michigan, they're on there on the 26th of June in this wing stadium, as we said.

That's where they begin playing the States and Canada, and then they go up to the 20th of September, where they play the Moncton Coliseum, which is in Canada, in the place of Moncton, which I'm not going to pretend to know.

Chris, any thoughts on this leg of the tour? Oh,

when I look back at these early sets, it pains me a little bit, because...

I'm very fortunate to have seen the band at nine years old in 1996, so I'm extremely grateful for that.

Once I started to see the band more frequently, starting 99 Forward, for a while I had bad luck with missing out on rare songs and different things.

Whereas if you go back to the start of the slang tour, there's multiple venues in there that I've been to since then.

And at the very beginning of the slang tour, they kept a gift of flesh as the opener for the first week or two, including two places that I've since been to.

So had I been older at a different period of my life and traveled, I would have seen gift of flesh.

Yeah.

So, oh, that stings a little bit.

But clearly there's something about it that wasn't working, because by the time they got to, ironically, Tinley Park, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago, which, again, I've been to a bunch of times, Gift of Flesh gets the boot.

And for that one show, it seems they put another hit and run into the opening spot with Rock Rock in second place.

However, out went one slaying song, in came another, because for that show in Tinley Park, they brought Will Love and Hate Collide in its proper... half acoustic, half electric form.

So I would have seen that again, the pain.

So in the beginning, it is kind of like, you know, I mean, action was gone when love and hate collide was gone.

So those things that weren't hits in the U S you know, those were very clearly marked out, but everything else was pretty well intact in the beginning in the States, but it fairly quickly boiled down to a very static 20 song set list for the majority of the summer.

um by the time i got to see them it was the basic you know 20 song set but there were a couple of variants in there because at some point in the middle of the summer they decided to dust off high and dry saturday night for the first time since 1984 that got played a couple of times and that kind of leads me to there was a bigger emphasis on the high and dry album on the slang tour than they had had in quite a long time.

And I think the nature of the tour being so back to basics, those high and dry songs really just naturally lend themselves to that.

So it's not a surprise that another hit and run stayed heartbreak and switch went full electric and came back and, and then high and dry came into, and, you know, same thing with Billy's got a gun.

It might be from pyromania, but that very easily distills down to the style of what they were doing.