Kyuss Lives – 3/4 of the best live band I ever saw – are having a little reunion tour.
I’ve been annoyed that Manchester is just too far away for me to be happy to drive to for a night out, and that the trains stop too early for me to get home from concerts. For this one, though, I racked my brain a little bit harder and came up with the plan of parking the car at the station in Liverpool, since the last train back to there is at 23:27, and that drive home is quite doable.
The next major thought process was: “do I want to go”? For years, I carried with me the notion that the title for “best live band I ever saw” was held jointly by Kyuss and Slayer. I’m not 100% sure all these years later that I can still say that’s true, I’ve enjoyed a lot of great concerts, but how can a reunion compete with long-cherished and probably distorted memories? There have been some very successful reunions of old favourite bands in recent years — At The Gates were probably better at Irving Plaza than any time I saw them in the 1990s; Carcass were hot and cold but held up well, especially at Wacken. Dissection came back with a radically different sound and were differently good. But there’s always a fear that a poor reunion might taint the memories of particularly blissful memories.
So I downloaded a few shows from the European leg of the tour and was instantly transported to May 20, 1994, in a packed, hot and sweaty Borderline club. It was finals week, and I was determined to have a quiet evening ahead of the following day’s big exam. They opened with Thumb and somehow, before the vocals had even kicked in I had found myself transported from the back of the room to the front of the stage, with an upside-down person on my head. There was an intensity to that night that I think I’ve only experienced otherwise at Slayer shows (and was replicated perfectly by Kyuss at LA2 in 1995).
So I was listening to these bootlegs, and during the intro I was all “I don’t know if I should go” and about 10 seconds into the opening song Gardenia I was buying a ticket.
I roped in Pete for the hell of it, thinking he’d probably like Kyuss, and off we went. I haven’t been to the Academy very often, and I kind of assumed we’d be seeing Kyuss in the same room as I’d seen Cathedral a year ago, but no, it was the Academy 1, a much bigger venue with a capacity of over 2000. It was packed. That’s an amusing thing about reunions – it’s hard to compare the show with the original because the context changes from a tiny basement club to a large venue or festival stage. I must confess I always resent the loss of intimacy. (An exception to the rule involves another of John Garcia’s former bands, Karma to Burn. As I remarked to their main-man Rich after seeing their post-reunion show in NYC a couple of years ago, the audience had declined in number approximately 1000-fold since the last time I saw them).
So, Kyuss Lives! How was it? They opened with Gardenia and blasted through most of their best songs, for the most part keeping it fast and furious, with enough drawn-out jams to keep it varied. There was little crowd interaction apart from a little comedy part comparing British beer favourably to American; the focus was entirely on the music rather than the musicians. On that note, Bruno Fevery is a perfectly suitable replacement for Josh Homme. They could quite easily leave the latter to whatever he’s up to and call Bruno a full-time replacement in Kyuss. Let it really be about the music, not the personnel.
That said, the guys in the band are all roughly my age; the halcyon days of Kyuss were nearly half their lives ago and none of us have the energy and exuberance we used to. They’re probably holding up better than I, but between me, them and the larger venue, this event was never going to recapture the “most intense musical experience of my life” magic of those London shows. Instead, it was “merely” a set of great songs, performed wonderfully by some great musicians. It was a fantastic night out, and if I were in the habit of awarding marks, I’d probably give them a solid 9/10. I won’t hold it against them that they used to go to 11.
Gardenia
Hurricane
One Inch Man
Thumb
Conan Troutman
Freedom Run
Asteroid
Supa Scoopa and Mighty Scoop
Fatso Forgotso
Tangy Zizzle
Odyssey
Whitewater
El Rodeo
100°
Spaceship Landing
Green Machine
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