Chamblee54

The following is a repost. It is written in first person. The pictures are from the Decatur Book Festival later that year. PG no longer complains about a work/sleep lifestyle.
So the website has a tape by Husker Du. I decide to download it. It is rehearsal tapes from when they were preparing to go in the studio.
I saw them sometime in the eighties. I thought it was at the metroplex, but it might have been the 688. I say this because there is a list of shows they played, and the metroplex is not on there.
I saw a show at the Metroplex the next night, but I cannot remember who. The metroplex was a dark spooky building on Marietta street near the omni. The balcony was very dark, with everything painted black, and I tripped over a bench.
Funny how HD means “do you remember”, and my memory is letting me down here.
688 was a different story. I saw a bunch of shows there, both as 688 and Rose’s Cantina. HD may have been the last show I saw before they closed. I was well into the work/sleep lifestyle that preoccupied my life after a certain point, and just didn’t make it out much anymore. A friend won tickets to the show or I wouldn’t have made it.
I didn’t get into the show very much. HD was a trio, with the later outed Bob Mould as the guitar g-d. For all of his musical skills, Mould is not much for onstage charisma. I had the feeling that if I had been more familiar with their music, I would have enjoyed it more. Some bands you can see without hearing their records and get into it right away, where others need a bit of familiarity.
The first and second times I saw Talking Heads were like night and day. The first time I won tickets, and didn’t know much about them. They were OK, but did not really impress. The second time I had played their second album enough to know all the songs, and thought the show was great. That was the night after I saw my neighbor do blackface drag at Club Sheba.
That first time, there were a bunch of security guys standing in front of the stage. They might have been needed in New York, but sleepy Atlanta was not the place. At some point in the evening, I was standing up, and raised my left arm and lifted a ceiling tile about half an inch out of its frame, and quickly put it back in. A rent a goon came by to tell me not to mess with the ceiling.
My friend and I were riding home on the bus, when a couple of black guys started talking trash to/about us. At the next stop, this rather large black man…who we knew…got on the bus and greeted us warmly.
It is a good story how I got the tickets to the first show. WREK FM was giving away tickets. I called the station, said I was a loyal listener, could I please be put on the guest list?
So, the download is over, and DSL is a gift. It is 1016 already, and I need to function in less than eight hours. That work/sleep lifestyle is a bitch.
Spell check suggestions for this feature:
metroplex- metropolis, metropolitan, retroflex, metronome, electroplate
cantina- catina, canting
mould- could, would, gould, mold, moued, mound,moult