Today’s Nick Cave is more akin to a rambunctious revival preacher, but back then he just seemed homicidal. Cave was then, and still is, the best frontman of our time-and this was an incarnation of the Bad Seeds that included both Blixa Bargeld and Kid Congo Powers-but in the first decade of his career, he was more intense, more dangerous, more… fucking evil, basically. If I haven’t gotten the point across that this was one of the very best concerts that I’ve ever seen, it absolutely was. It seemed obvious what had caused the delay. They stayed off for nearly ten minutes and when Cave finally staggered back onstage, his eyes were absolutely bloodshot red and he looked and acted very, very high. Or maybe he had just taken a different sort of vitamin? I don’t know, but I will say this, when the band walked offstage, the house lights stayed off, awaiting their reappearance for an encore. His performance was so energetic and so physical that it appeared to me that heroin must have exactly the opposite effect on him that it has on most people. Cave wore a blue velvet tuxedo with a ruffle collar shirt and cuffs and he looked dead cool. His stage presence was fearsome and impressive, in a Keith Richards “elegantly wasted” meets Antonin Artaud sort of way. Some of it didn’t necessarily seem like an act. It was thrilling, almost scary, being so close to someone so seemingly unhinged and angry. Now, I don’t want to imply that Nick Cave has mellowed out over the years-because he really hasn’t-but my favorite era of Cave’s work is from Mutiny! through Kicking Against The Pricks. I stood directly in front of Cave’s mic stand. The rescheduled date came some weeks after the end of the tour and the Sunday show was poorly attended, so it was easy to get near the stage. This was in the days before cell phones, and I am reasonably sure that Mick was fearing something far worse might have happened.) “We don’t know where Nick is.” (The answer, it was later revealed by the Village Voice, was that Cave had been busted copping dope in Harlem and was then sitting in jail. I asked him “What happened?” and he shrugged and threw his hands up. Mick Harvey sat atop a huge cube of equipment covered by a tarp. On that night, when I got to the venue, there was a large crowd of people dressed in black standing in the street outside.
#Nick cave best of trial#
When Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds finally played the Ritz in New York City during their Your Funeral… My Trial tour, it was a makeup date, rescheduled for a Sunday in February, after an earlier, sold out Friday show the previous October had been cancelled at the very last minute.
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