Tubes Completion Backwards Principle Tour

[Finch Platte]

...wasn't used to staying up late, so there were many things I tried to stay up for where I'd see like the first 10 or 15 minutes, then suddenly find myself watching some random video at like half past midnight or 1:00 am, at which point I'd turn off the TV and go to bed, annoyed that I didn't get to see the whole concert.

Ha! This brings back memories!

[aith01]

Go with the first all the way through to Love Bomb. Every one (especially the first 3) have amazing and often gorgeous things. My personal favourites are their first one and Remote Control. The Foster albums (fraught though they were) Completion Backwards and Outside Inside are also both quite good, just different. Tip of My Tongue alone, though, makes the latter album worth the price of admission. The Wild Women of Wongo/Tip of My Tongue sequence kicks my ass every time. Ouch!

Thanks for the recs, Kim.

Some of these discs are really hard to find now, and that makes me sad. I was able to find a copy of Outside Inside (the remastered edition with the bonus tracks) from a seller in Europe via Discogs, and I've ordered copies of Remote Control and The Completion Backwards Principle. Guess I'm working backwards through their catalog.

I really like Love Bomb. They had a cool way of combining keyboards with a hard rock sound that totally worked and didn't sound cheesy. I think I'm really gonna like these guys.

And I totally get what you're saying about Wild Women Of Wongo and Tip Of My Tongue -- that's a serious one-two punch. Love it.

[ronmac]

Saw these guys in the summer of '79 or '80 at a local community college. Still, after all these years, it's one of the best shows I've ever seen.

[aith01]

Seriously, I started listening to more of their songs on Apple Music last night and before the song "Turn Me On" had even finished playing I went to Amazon and ordered a copy of Remote Control. What a heck of an opener. Wow.

Saw these guys in the summer of '79 or '80 at a local community college. Still, after all these years, it's one of the best shows I've ever seen.

Nice. What is it that stands out to you, all these years later?

[ronmac]

Nice. What is it that stands out to you, all these years later?

Everything. I really mean that. Everything from "Don't Touch Me There" to Quay Lude (or however they spell it). The theatrics, costumes, music (much of which I didn't know), it was all there. When I describe it to friends, I usually talk about Fee's transitions. I describe it how he came out at the beginning of the set wearing a simple white outfit, almost looking like a Good Humor man. By the end of the show, well...

[Sturgeon's Lawyer]

Yeah. I first saw them in a smallish club in the summer of '76, and the show was spectacular and the music extraordinary. They'd already toned the show down a bit - "Rock'n'Roll Hospital" and the chainsaw surgeon were gone - but it was still great.

[No Pride]

The Foster albums (fraught though they were) Completion Backwards and Outside Inside are also both quite good, just different. Tip of My Tongue alone, though, makes the latter album worth the price of admission. The Wild Women of Wongo/Tip of My Tongue sequence kicks my ass every time. Ouch!

I was in a 5-night-a-week 10 piece (plus singers) band in the early '80s and we used to play "Tip of My Tongue." It was a fun tune to play, especially because of the cool horn arrangement. A female vocalist sang it and she was a little shocked when she learned what the lyrics were, But she was a trooper and sang the hell out of it!

[GuitarGeek]

I remember Roger Steen and Bill Spooner did a joint interview in Guitar World, circa Outside Inside. As I recall, they said that Wild Women Of Wongo started out wtih someone bringing in one of those "rhythm box" drum machines with the preset rhythms, ya know "waltz", "tango", "merengue", "swing", etc. Well, someone pushed all the preset buttons at once, and it generated this weird rhythm which is what they wrote the initial arrangement to.