Friday, February 1, 2008

Drinking with The Kings



Great Plains - Live at Stache's, Columbus OH (10-31-85)

I have lost a noticeable portion of my hearing. Why? Live music. I regret the loss but not the cause. One of those live shows was Great Plains at O'Cayz Corral (Madison, WI) sometime in 1985. A dozen, maybe two dozen people came out, the band looked exhausted (they sat down on stage for a good chunk of the show) but the music was good, even "great."

You were there, maybe, if not at O'Cayz and not for Great Plains, but you were there and you know what I mean. I'm not one to wallow in nostalgia. I detest and loathe nostalgia - it is a sickness, the kind that makes people vote for aliens out of time like Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. But you know exactly what I mean about that time and place, which makes it easier for us to communicate. Communication is good.

And while I loathe nostalgia, I love history. Great Plains are part of our history. All those weird nights in all those weird clubs listening to weird music played by...people just like us. That's our history.

Enjoy your history lesson, kids!

And buy some of Great Plains' shit!

7 comments:

Rainy Day Sponge said...

Yes, although I'm living several thousand miles away from Madison or Columbus, and I've never seen the Great Plains live (and a lot of the bands I like), I understand what you mean.
After exhausting listening of the entire vinyl output of the Great Plains (which, for a strange reason, always come to mind as a pair with 9353 from DC) for the last 20 years, it's a nice change to listen to live versions of their songs. Thanks.

gomonkeygo said...

Thanks, Rainy Day S. Though I was and still remain a rather publicly shy person, I did feel a sense of community, even of communion, those nights of sound and fury and sometimes ugly beauty. I will always be grateful to the wonderful musicians who shared their love and their visions with me and the rest of that community. I'm trying in a small way to remind people of that and turn on those who weren't there to what it felt like. Also, preserving and passing on these documents is important to me. They are important cultural touchstones and really belong in archives, I think. Hopefully they will be someday.

gomonkeygo said...

Wow - thanks for the note! Do you have live tapes of Great Plains? Wanna share?

Jeff said...

yeh, I've got at least 3 live GP tapes, and a live cd-r that their onetime bassist, and owner/operator of Old 3C records, Paul Nini, put out a while back. Though there seemed to be a problem with the cd-r when I was trying to rip it to the computer a while back - I'll have to see if I can get it to read on another computer or player..

I'll try to dig out the tapes sometime this week and run 'em through the ol' digimatizorator..

gomonkeygo said...

If you wanna do a real hardcopy trade, let me know. Happy to set something up off-list.

Owsleybud said...

Great site...lots of great live recordings of my favorite 1980s neo-pysch bands. Noticed link to thi shoe by the superb Great Plains is dead. Anyway you can repost it?

gomonkeygo said...

Have to see if I can find the disc again. Things got really messed around in my basement after some flooding this spring. Thanks for stopping by. I do hope to someday start putting up tunes again, but my time is really limited these days.