Cave Preaches To Choir

Like most people currently in their mid-to-late twenties, I arrived late to the Nick Cave party. Unless your parents were older hipster elite (and mine weren't), most of us first heard Cave's menacing growl on "Red Right Hand" midway through Wes Craven's pop horror flick, Scream.

I actually bought Cave singles out of curiosity earlier that year on a trip to London, England. Annoyed that CDs were priced about $5 more than back home, I scooped up a pile of three- and four-track EPs instead. Included among them were "Henry Lee" and "Where The Wild Roses Grow," which would later be compiled on Murder Ballads. But in my mid-teens, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds were a still little too abstract for my still-developing tastes.

More than a decade on, I'm a full-on diehard. I collect as much of his music as I can in a scattershot fashion, but I collect most of it all the same. In many ways, Wednesday night's show felt less like a concert and more like a sermon on the mount.

It's fair to say more than a few people felt the same. I can't count the number of guys at the show who looked like Cave circa any era, though most highly represented was the sideburns and moustache look. From the moment Cave strode on stage — a good minute-and-a-half after the rest of the Bad Seeds — he had the crowd rapt. A heavy version of "Night Of The Lotus Eaters" and the titular track from the group's new Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! LP proved that while Cave might be 51 in years, he's still 25 in performance.

If you've ever seen the end of Before Sunset, where Julie Delpy describes a Nina Simone performance, you probably had a bit of déjà vu at the Bad Seeds show. Cave repeatedly returned declarations of love with equal vigour. "I love you, too, in every sense of the word," he exclaimed at one juncture.

Cave formed a relationship with a girl near the front to whom he tossed a towel. When he asked for it back later and then promptly returned it, he declared her "keeper of the towel." Then, in diabolical preacher fashion, Cave added a disclaimer: "If I see that on eBay, I will hunt you down and fucking eviscerate you!"

Between the banter were first-rate performances of Bad Seeds classics "The Weeping Song," "The Ship Song," "Deanna" and "The Mercy Seat," the last of which basically sealed the concert as a five-star show for me no matter what came after.

The final eruption of "Stagger Lee" put an exclamation point on a performance that seemed more like a religious experience than a night in a concrete box on the lakeshore. If you weren't grinning ear-to-ear from the first minute to the last, you hate music and you're wasting your money attending concerts. More than anything, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds put on a show of a lifetime, something every music fan should make a point to see.

To view more of Rachel Verbin's photos from this show, click here.

Here was the set list:

"Night Of The Lotus Eaters"
"Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!"
"Tupelo"
"The Weeping Song"
"Red Right Hand"
"Midnight Man"
"Love Letter"
"The Ship Song"
"The Mercy Seat"
"Hold On To Yourself"
"Deanna"
"Moonland"
"Hard On For Love"
"We Call Upon The Author"
"Papa Won't Leave You, Henry"
"Get Ready For Love"
"The Lyre Of Orpheus"
"Stagger Lee"