US KaTe tour reminiscences

[Charley.Darbo@harpercollins.com (Charley Darbo)]

White  Samurai writes:

=Yes, on that humid, never to be forgotten summer night of August 4, 
=1986, Kate performed at the Hurricane Superdome to an SRO audience. The
=program was presented in two acts, with the first a general 
=introduction to her greatest hits. After the intermission, a few lucky 
=fans were invited on stage to dance with Kate in an hour-long 
=experimental performance art opera she called "Withering Tights." 
=Needless to say, the evening was magical!   

   Thanks, WS, for sharing.  This really takes me back.  I was at that 
show, too (didn't Klark Kent open?)  Do you remember the backup singers, 
the "Bitches of Love"?  And how wet did _you_ get during "The Ninth 
Wave"?  I still have my souvenir towel.  
   But nothing will ever top the seventh or eighth time I saw Kate live.  
It was in Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Bible-belt leg of her "Pull of the 
Bush" tour.  For some bizarre reason (I think this was just before she 
fired Mike Ovitz) the Carter Family opened.  Hardly the opener you or I 
would choose, but it became apparent, as soon as Kate went on, that 
that's who most of the crowd was there to see:  by the time Kate got to 
her only-on-the-US-tours Seventies medley -- usually about twenty 
minutes into her set -- they'd all gone to the tractor pull at the other 
end of the fairgrounds, leaving just us few who were kind of travelling 
with the tour bus.  So we all moved down front.  I was about sixth row 
center, and could feel the chill from the dry-ice machines.  And I 
managed to catch more of the "tenners" than at any other show.  
   It was really too bad the others didn't stay -- if I remember 
correctly (IED?), that was the only tour where they had that wild 
special effect of the sandstorm they used for "the Dreaming."  And they 
also missed, after Kate was all encored out, when the Carter Family came 
back onstage and Kate did that now-famous duet of "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" (I 
have it on tape, but the quality's not good.  You can just barely hear 
Kate say "Y'all come back now, y'hear?").  And I think that was the show 
where I saw her do that hilarious impersonation of Neal Young with 
"Southern Man," though that may have been the previous tour (when she 
traveled with that huge "Breathing" set made for her by Habitrail) when 
I saw her in  Corpus Christi, Albuquerque, and Nome.
   But I'll save that for another time.

         --charleydarbo
            (first post; friend of chris and vickie)

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"Friends are great.  
But for a truly exciting life,                         --Jo Carol Pierce
you must have strangers."
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