A Double Dose Of The Cure

 

 

My Curesickness all began when I was an innocent scrubbed-faced high school lass, the night I saw the Cure at the O.C.'s Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. Not only did that concert change my life, literally, but it gave me what is possibly the best goth-girl-gets-revenge-on-boyfriend story EVER.

No, it's not as scary as it sounds...

See, my first real boyfriend, whom I'll call Patrick (because Patrick was in fact his name) sort of turned me on to the Cure. And we were supposed to see our favorite band in concert together. But then he dumped me just one week before the big gig, presumably because I was not "cool" enough for him and his pastier-than-thou goth buddies, with whom he would rather be seen at the show. Now, not only was I suffering from the first huge heartbreak of my young lovelife, but I faced another, possibly even huger heartbreak: the possibility of the missing the Cure's show, now that Patrick couldn't be bothered to drive me to the venue 90 minutes away.

I listened to the saddest, moaniest songs in the Cure catalog to help ease the pain. But of course this only made matters worse.

But then, I got my sweet, sweet revenge when--through some fluke encounter with a high school chum whose father turned out to work for the promoter--I got a ride, snagged a backstage pass, and actually met the band at their afterparty. Imagine, little 10th-grade me, hobnobbing with the world's coolest, mopiest, blackest-clad band, behind the fabled velvet rope! I shared a Virginia Slims Menthol Light 120 fag with their big-haired bassist Simon Gallup (thinking to myself, "You've come a long way, baby!"), offered Robert Smith a swig of my Rolling Rock (which he politely accepted, natch), and had my picture taken with every member of the band. I made duplicates of these photos in every possible size at the one-hour photo lab the very next day, so I could have wallet-size pics to give to my friends and 8x10 blow-ups to tack up in my locker and next to my bed:

And the following Monday at school, I ran into Patrick and gloatingly, gleefully waved my Cure party pics in his pasty, pimply face. And suddenly I was the "cool" one. Ha!

Anyway, it was on this momentous evening that the Cure officially replaced Duran Duran (see my other blog on them) as my favorite band/obsession. This was a pretty monumental decision in my young life. I immediately chucked out any clothes in my closet that weren't black, started painting on my makeup according to lessons learned from the Siouxsie Sioux School Of Beauty, and pretty much began stalking Robert Smith. By the time I "ran into" him after, um, camping out across the street from his temporary L.A. home at Hollywood's Sunset Marquis Hotel for, um, five hours, we had both changed a great deal:

By the way, years later as an adult I got to interview the Cure (see my interview on Yahoo! Music HERE), and I am proud to say I totally behaved myself. (It's amazing how a couple of pre-interview vodka shots can steady a reporter's nerves.) And not only did I geek out by showing him the above photos, but I actually told him my ex-boyfriend revenge tale. After which Bob looked me straight in the eye from behind his trademark spidery crimped fringe, curled his lippy-scrawled mouth into a wry smirk, and said: "That IS a good story."

Who's cool now, Patrick?

Anyway, there is no cure for Curesickness, so I have seen them every time they've played L.A. since that fateful night at Irvine Meadows. This past week, the band played two nights--Saturday at massive outdoor arena the Hollywood Bowl, Sunday at the much smaller Shrine Auditorium, with different setlists--and of course I attended both gigs. Here are some of my favorite moments from each night (show #2 was particularly amazing for diehards like myself, since one encore consisted entirely of rarely played Three Imaginary Boys cuts).

Thanks for the continued memories, Bob: