Vintage Tears for Fears at Chateau Ste. Michelle

Here’s me as the ultimate skeptic: The night before the concert I dreamt that the title of this entry would be “Sour Grapes: Tears for Fears at Chateau Ste. Michelle”; but I have my husband to thank for the optimistic choice, despite the fact that he doesn’t really like the band. But hey, that’s the beauty of our marriage--I drag him to concerts like Bauhaus or The The, and he drags me to, oh, something like The Cowboy Junkies or Tori Amos and it works out just fine. So, with Na and Pa and dinner in tow, we picnicked on the grass while I, at least, enjoyed the show. Pa got to watch Na run around like a free-range chicken.

The show was pretty decent—though, I’ll admit the aforementioned skepticism comes from really hating their latest release, Everybody Loves A Happy Ending. After listening to the album, I likened the much-anticipated reunion of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith to what my parents would have been like if, after thirty years of name-calling and screwing each other out of thousands of dollars, they remarried and moved into a trailer park. After all, the decade-long Orzabal/Smith feud spawned some really great songs like “Fish out of Water.” So I guess I figured that if it took them four years to come up with such sub-par material like Everybody…, then they’d suck live. Still, I didn’t want to miss the chance to see them. Call me conflicted.

Though I have loved Tears for Fears since I first saw the “Pale Shelter” video on MTV, the first concert I saw was a decade later, during the Elemental tour, when Orzabal—sans Smith--couldn’t keep his mouth shut about how much he despised his former musical partner. I guess time and aging heals most wounds and whatever caused Smith to walk away during the Sowing the Seeds tour in 1990 simply evaporated (though as a woman, I find that incredibly hard to believe), but having seen them live last night, it seemed they’ve resolved whatever it was that needed resolving because there was a lot of chemistry on stage.

I cringed when they opened with songs from Everybody… but I think they only played two or three songs at the most from that awful album before launching into some good stuff including “God’s Mistake” and then of course, they dove into songs from The Hurting, though they were somewhat apologetic about having written that material when they “were very young.”

I’ll admit, it felt kind of weird having my three year-old son on my shoulders while I danced to “Pale Shelter” (or swayed, rather, since I’ve never really seen anyone “dance” to “Pale Shelter”) because truly if “How Soon is Now?” was the rhetorical question of my adolescence, “Pale Shelter” was the answer to everything and every one; but looking around, I noticed the crowd was predominantly middle aged and pared with kids and/or non-enthused significant others, and if they, too, were former Becky Goths*, one would never know.


*for a definition of "Becky Goths" read Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli.




Yes, Mr. Na--it is a Mad World