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Home > Atlanta Music Scene > Archives > 2008 > June > 23
Monday, June 23, 2008
The Time Reuniting In Las Vegas Tomorrow
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
PHOTO: Bita Honarvar
It’ll be 1981 all over again June 24, 2008.
That’s when pioneering funk band The Time — led by Atlanta’s Morris Day (above) — will reunite for a concert for the first time in two decades, in Las Vegas. (Where else?)
Prince’s proteges came close to a reunion earlier this year, at the Grammys, but Jesse Johnson did not join Day, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, Jelly Bean Johnson, Monte Moir and infamous valet Jerome Benton.
However they are all scheduled to be on stage June 24-July 5, and July 29-Aug. 2 at the Flamingo Las Vegas.
“We don’t know what the show will be yet,” Day said in a press release. “It’s just like the beginning of sex. You know what the goal is, but you don’t know what the path is to get there.”
“I never planned on playing again, since I had already been in the best band,” added Jam in the release. “It’s only MY band that could make me get back on stage…It’s a great hang. I don’t have to think about what everyone else is doing. I just have to get my part right and enjoy myself!”
Would you travel to Las Vegas to see the original Time again? Think Janet Jackson, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey or any of the other acts Jam and Lewis have produced since they left the Time may show up? (Maybe even Prince - who gave them their start?) What’s your favorite Time song from their four-CD catalog?
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Rate Our Big Music Weekend
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Atlanta Music Scene surely felt like a major, live music scene —on Saturday night alone.
Athens’ rock titans R.E.M. were at Lakewood Amphitheatre. [See our writer David O’Brien’s take HERE. And the rest of the photo gallery - including the shot of lead singer Michael Stipe, above - HERE. ]
Gospel, soul and jazz were well-represented at Philips Arena, where the AARP celebrated its 50th anniversary with the Debbie Allen-directed “Songs of Soul and Inspiration,” featuring Dionne Warwick, Shirley Caesar, Queen Latifah, Patti Austin, Ann Nesby and others.
Top contemporary jazz could also be heard over at Chastain Park Amphitheatre, were guitarists George Benson and Atlantan Earl Klugh played.
Jam-rock was well-represented over at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park, where moe. and Keller Williams rounded out the bill.
Blues-rockers Blues Traveler headlined the festivities in Candler Park.
And hip-hop and R&B acts - large (Young Jeezy, Keyshia Cole) and burgeoning (Day 26, Rocko, Trey Songz) - provided the entertainment at V-103’s annual Car & Bike Show at the Georgia World Congress Center.
And again, that was just Saturday — rocker Melissa Etheridge, jazz-blues wonder Lizz Wright and others also played over the past weekend.
And that was just some of the music in the larger venues — there was also Raheem DeVaughn, Chrisette Michele and Solange at the more intimate Tabernacle; Martin Luther, Lina and IC Green at Sugar Hill; and still-going local power Dionne Farris at Cenci.
Pretty great amount of talent in town over the past few days, huh? Did you get to any of these shows? And if so, how would you rate them?
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R.E.M. is truly “back”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If their most recent album, the very strong “Accelerate,” wasn’t enough to completely convince me that R.E.M. had reclaimed its status as one of top rock bands in the world, Saturday night was.
The boys from Athens, Ga., put on a phenomenal show at Lakewood here in Atlanta on Saturday night. Seriously, this was a great rock concert.
By the end of their approximate two-hour performance, I had forgotten (and no longer really cared) that I’d missed The National’s opening set (even though I do love that band, too). Rock shows should not start when the sun is still blazing overhead, unless it’s an all-day festival show, the kind that most middle-aged working dudes like me no longer attend.
Anyway, Modest Mouse’s middle set was fine, about as good as you can expect from a band that has to fill an opening slot for the huge headliner, and thus usually must play with lesser equipment and without all the bells-and-whistles visual effects, etc.
But R.E.M. would’ve blown away most bands on this night, which I’m assuming was pretty indicative of how they’ve played on this entire tour. They rocked hard, folks. Forget that mostly bland period between the excellent “New Adventures in Hi-Fi” album and the “comeback” blast of “Accelerate.”
If they were in danger of slipping from relevance for many younger rock fans (and I admit, they had), then they have certainly stepped forward with this album and this tour and answered any skeptics and critics, at least any who are actually paying attention and listening to the music.
Not only did they play every solid song from the new album, but I was pleasantly surprised — make that thrilled — that they played so many of the older gems, including “Fall On Me,” (with the great former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr joining on guitar), “Pretty Persuasion,” “Rockville” “Driver 8,” “Orange Crush,” “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” “Electrolite,” and a slightly speeded up, muscular version of “Harborcoat.” Sublime, it was.
I’ve seen R.E.M. 10 or 12 times since 1983, the year I saw them play at old Hoch Auditorium on campus at the University of Kansas, just after Murmur was released and was the hottest thing going on college radio.
Stipe had long, curly hair then, and kept his back to the audience for most of the show. Saw them every year for the next five or six years after that, as they’d release a new album annually — “Murmur,” “Reckoning,” “Fables of the Reconstruction,” “Life’s Rich Pageant,” “Document,” “Green” — and tour annually.
While I have only vague memories of those shows for some reason (ahem), I’ve got to say, I can’t recall the band ever being much better, much tighter, much more entertaining than they were last night. Honestly.
They had a truly remarkable run of high-integrity, high-grade and original rock and roll during the 1980s, no dud among those early albums. Other than “Monster,” they really didn’t have even a mediocre album until after drummer Bill Berry left the band for health reasons more than a decade later.
Now, after figuring I’d be one of the R.E.M. completists who buys every album they put out, regardless of critical reviews, on the day it’s released, for as long as they hung on, it’s been a really uplifting thing to see one of my very favorite all-time bands come back so strong.
These are musicians who are all older than me playing new songs so good that most younger, trendier, “edgier” bands with members half their age can only dream of ever producing if they stay together half as long as the boys from R.E.M. have. Not to mention the classics most of those bands will never produce.
More than 25 years later, R.E.M. is back kicking tail. For us of a certain age, who went to college in the early 1980s, that’s great stuff. Seeing them on that stage last night, doing their thing, it doesn’t get much better.
Check out photos from the Lakewood show, and see how O’Brien compared the Braves to R.E.M. And if you went to the show, share your review here.
