BOC - Styles, Covers & 7 Screaming Diz

[Richard Manny]

        I've rarely posted on this group, but, because I was sitting in
the audience at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, I thought I say a thing or
two about BOC's SEE.  Two buddies and I made the trek from Athens, GA
(REM, T Graham Brown, B-52's) for the concert.  If you've never been
inside the Fox Theatre, you owe yourself a good concert there.  I got
it with BOC.  The Fox had been built in the 20's (I believe) with
spiraling minarets flanking the exterior.  Within a number of smaller
rooms flanked the large central theatre (I'm clueless about all those
other doors--and I've already thought about the line from Astronomy).
The main theater is a spacious and as comfortable as you'd every want.
Around the lower portion of the ceiling is a backlit cityscape of
Altanta from the days when the Fox was new.  Overhead, stars moved like
a planetarium show.
        Our seats assigned seats had vanished under
bridge-of-the-USS-Enterprise sized mixing panel, etc.  One of the guys
on the panel, looked down on us from his lofty perch and said, "Here's
ya new tickets."  The new tickets moved us down 10 rows.  Holy shit!
This is great.  Then, one of my buds tried to get us in trouble by long
distance flirting with some of the most striking (strange?) women I've
ever seen.  Each one of these tall beauties wore pancake white make-up,
orange-brown rouge and cheek coloring, and had orange hair (not red,
not shaded, Orange!)  They also had a single male escort.  He didn't
look patient or particularly happy to have my friend trying to
establish some bedroom time with these gals.  I finally told him that
the girls were witches and if he didn't cool his jets they were going
to either whip his ass or whip some bad mojo on him.  I think when
their escort turned around that last time and indicated that my friend
might find himself "swimming with the fishes", he shut up.
        Now, for the concert itself.  BOC's opening band was called
Angel.  All wore white suits, all teleported on the stage, all
performed at the top of their lungs, and all left the stage, finally.
BOC's sound check and stage setup ended with the Who's Pinball Wizard.
 Next, the lights dimmed and we got that strange random noise intro
that some people have referred to.  As the noise declined, an announcer
gave the famous, "Atlanta, Ga.  Please welcome..."  When I heard SEE
months later, I was surprised to see how silent the intro was.  My
memory told me then that it was noisy as Hell and that the announcer
stepped on the "Random Noise" intro.  In fact, I have long thought that
there was a slightly different opening to RURTR.  (Only Al knows for
sure).  As EB pointed out, the Fox was the first Southern show that BOC
had headlined and sold out.  BOC had a tremendous "cult" following in
the South.  I think, from the effort that BOC put into the show, they
wanted a few more recordings from the concert.  However, one prick may
have altered musical history that night.
        Bottle rockets.  Stupid people shouldn't be sold matches and
bottle rockets.  On several occassions, members of the band had to jump
out of the way or use their guitars as shields because some idiot kept
launching bottle rockets at the stage.  Finally, EB paused the concert
to very profanely (and I can't blame him) describe the putz's obvious
personality and suggest an action to the person standing next to him.
Paraphased, tell him or her that he or she is a flagrantly obnoxious
person and deposit your knuckles in their mouth.
        I do not know what happened next, I couldn't and didn't see
anything.  But my deepest wish is that the moron with the fireworks
spent the next twenty minutes picking up their teeth.
        There were a lot of neat songs played that night.  I don't
remember the order.  Roughly, they were:  RURTR, Stairway to the Stars,
This Ain't the Summer of Love, Harvester of Eyes, ME 262, We gotta Get
out of this Place, Godzilla (Al donned a Godzilla head for part of the
drum solo and then left the drums to cavort on the stage while someone
else played drums behind him), Astronomy, BTBW.  The only encore I
remember was DFTR.  They did play one more encore, but I don't remember
what is was.
        My only complaint of the entire show is that at times the show
seemed to "staged" or choreographed.  I had seen BOC the year before at
a mega concert in Atlanta stadium featuring 38 Special, Bob Seeger,
Johnny and Edgar Winter, BOC, KISS.  Rain had delayed the show and Al
played his heart out on drums until the rain subsided enough for BOC to
come back out.  At this concert, Al didn't seem on top of his game.
        Anyway, to make a long story short (too late!), the SEE concert
I saw was a blast, although, a little too stiff.  Some good songs might
have been lost thanks to one thoughtless idiot.  And, for shear
performance strength, the concerts should have been recorded a year
earlier (based on what I HEARD PERFORMED).
        One closing thought, somewhere I have the SEE vinyl with two
ticked stubs taped to the inner dust jacket.  Stuffed into the album is
a top quarter page photo of BOC performing (you see only EB and BD in a
red-orange cloud of fog) with the caption--"Smoke, lasers, even music"
from the year-in-review Atlanta Journal/Constitution.

With best regards,
Richard