My memory is not as robust as my esteemed blog-mates. I don't remember the sound check at all. What I do remember is being nervous before going on, which, believe it or not, was a first for me. We played well--pretty solidly--but we weren't our usual wild and loose selves. We were all more nervous than usual. On this and the first few shows, I had a paranoid feeling that much of the crowd was mocking us. It took me a while to realize that we had some seriously rabid fans who pretty much loved us unconditionally.
The most vivid memory for me of that night was Red Rhino and Cooking Vinyl execs courting us backstage after the show, and the first vague feeling that we were turning into a product.
I don't have a scanner, but here are excerpts from that review Dave mentioned (written by a young Stuart Maconie, now a pretty big music journalist over there):
The Holy Brail
Or How I Found God at the Fulham Greyhound
....Up until tonight I had heard one C.J.E record and I thought it was crap. But then I was a poor dumb sinner....
....The Colorblind James experience rolled into town like Jesus on the back of a flatbed truck...
....Lower your head penitent, and burn those U2 records...
....a gorgeous, anarchic cabaret that flirts with chaos thus disguising a single-minded precision....
....Sometimes (Colorblind James) reads the lyrics from a battered black ledger, like an amiable but sinister bible belt preacher...
....The crowd's devotion borders on the fanatical...
....they howl at every cheeky, demented solo....
....Long after they have taken our drinks away, pockets of stragglers remain, swaying drunkenly and chanting...
Mmmm...maybe we played even better than I thought.
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Nice posting, Ken. I greatly appreciate the quotes from the Stuart Maconie review, as I think that my own clipping is lost forever, the victim of a flooded basement here in Kansas City in 2003. You may be right in that we played better than we remember. I hope so. We'll never know for sure at this point, I guess.
Your unease that we were "becoming a product" is apt, though I don't think that we were becoming a product as much as being regarded as one. It was a confusing time, and I think that we did our best to maintain our integrity. Our mistakes, as such, were more a result of trying to protect that integrity than exploiting it. Nowadays, we'd be encouraged to establish a "franchise," and maintain its viability as long as possible. We'd be doing a Colorblind James revue in Branson, MO, three shows a day.
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