Brandon writes to us from Atlanta about this day 14 years ago: My little brother Trevor attends his first rock show, YLT with Versus at the all-ages Variety Playhouse. Both “You Sexy Thing” and “Love Power” are performed for the occasion (and Versus plays “Morning Glory” back-to-back with “Frog“). We stay late to get Trevor’s “Night Falls on Hoboken” shirt signed by the band members, who share stories of their own first rock shows. Here he is three years later, wearing the shirt on his first day at Georgia Tech. “You Sexy Thing” AND “Love Power”? It’s safe to say we were having a better time than three years earlier, in Pittsburgh. Despite an early curfew to make way for a disco, the promoter at Club Laga keeps trying to add a third band to the bill; had as much effort gone into assembling the p.a., Joe Hickey wouldn’t have had to spend his day rebuilding it. We’ve got troubles of our own–some untimely broken guitar strings result in a hasty rewriting of the end of the set (goodbye “Blue Line Swinger”)–but attendance is not among them: It’s probably our largest Pittsburgh crowd to date. Which made it especially unfortunate when we returned for our encore, eyes on the clock, and attempted to introduce “Antmusic” as a segue into the dance party to come, only to find the power had been cut on us. Let’s just leave it at we didn’t take it well. Hours later, when band and promoter had disagreed to agree and we made our way out of the still-empty disco, we arrived on the street where the David Kilgour group was listening to WRCT, who coincidentally were telling the story I just did, with a similar degree of perplexity.
