A Concert Geek's Dream Come True

It all started when my fiancee told me that she heard from a classmate that the had Doors played on our college campus back in the 60s. Being a pretty Doors fan I was psyched to learn that I've potentially been walking over the same ground as Jim Morrison without even knowing it. I tried to confirm this story by flipping through pages and pages of search engine results but to no avail. I don't remember what number page I reached on the search but I must have been well into the thirties when I spied a website called "Song Kick".

It looked like a concert database crossed with a social networking site which is very much something that I needed; so I decided to make an account. I even found a plugin that worked with my iTunes to track every artist in my library for concert dates! I didn't have to do anything, it just read my library and wham, I'm tracking hundreds of artists with three or four clicks. Now whenever one of them is playing near me I'll know! It's like the alerts on Ticketmaster or Livenation but they exist for basically every artist you can think of regardless of their popularity or even whether they're together or not.

You can upload photos of concerts you've attended and can look up events you were at in the past and click the "I was there" button. There's so much content on Song Kick that it would probably take years to go through. The most impressive fact is that the gigography of nearly every band is complete, even if they played long before SK existed.

I never found the gig but maybe one day I'll find the evidence elsewhere. There's always the possibility that no one has added the illusive Doors concert in question yet but even if I am wrong it's nice to think that I'm walking in Jim's footsteps when I'm bumming around campus.

Check out Song Kick and make yourself an account. You will not regret it!

45 Record Review no. 1: The Doors- Gloria

This won't be a long review but I picked up an interesting 45 yesterday. It's a Doors cover of Gloria, by Van Morrison and Them, a cover I didn't even know they did. I picked it up for about five dollars and it says it's a promotional copy not for commercial sale, which makes it a pretty cool collectors item for someone like me who really loves the Doors.

There's no B-side but it's a pretty good cover that integrates classic Doors sound of keyboards and thumping bass with Jim's ad hoc interjections of regular speaking among the singing. I think that even people who hate the doors with a passion will admit that this isn't a bad cover and that the original song certainly ain't bad. I add this last part because I always try to judge covers, even the kind I'm unabashedly fond of, for people who might not be huge fans of the artist or new listeners. If it has appeal to people who don't even identify too much with the artist then chances are, it's a great cover.

Check it out: