beyond tomorrow mementos: personal mementos of stan ridgway
Stories and pictures from my experiences as a Stan Ridgway fan.

dis-patch archive
An archive of the Dis-Patch mailing list going back to late 1997.

review of live show, 1990/4/23
This is a review I wrote after seeing Stan live in San Jose in 1990. This tour was trying out some new material that was to become Partyball; as such, it was raw and unfamiliar. I have left my original text alone, its youthful enthusiasm intact, even in places where posterity shows I guessed the wrong name or lyrics for a song.

review of live show, 1997/3/29
Another review of a live show, much more recent. This was from the Black Diamond tour, and I believe the fourth time I saw Stan live.

the newspapers autograph
For a long time, this was my best story—about how I got Stan's autograph on a piece of sheet music.

the pharoah saunders thing
But here's another story, about the amazing night I had at Stan's Anatomy CD release party/show at The Roxy, November 6th, 1999.

we took a drive down the palisades parkway...
My first contributed article! John Trivisonno's travelogue about spending a long weekend hopping from one Stan Ridgway gig to another.

letter to the editor
The Los Angeles circular "LA Weekly" published a review of Stan Ridgway's live show at the Dragonfly in their March 1-7, 1996, edition. I haven't read the original review, but apparently the reviewer brought a great deal of her personal baggage to the show and the subsequent review. Stan wrote the following deft response, which the "LA Weekly" published in their letters column in the April 12-18 edition.

Dear Editor:

Ho hum and oh well. Daina Darzin's review of my Dragonfly show was like a visit to the Twilight Zone [Music Reviews, March 1-7]. There were 400 people out on a rainy night to hear the band and me perform songs from my new solo CD, "Black Diamond"—cheering, clapping, and asking for encores—but your reviewer must have been somewhere else, crying in her beer. Or was it a Prozac highball?

She is obviously very unhappy with her station in life to falsely paint me as some bitter, cold, and lonely figure, cynically lamenting my "loss." Is she okay? I mean, is everything all right with her? Is she depressed? Is she not where she'd like to be? I normally don't respond to reviews ("Don't look at the scoreboard"—Norman Mailer), but in this case, where a review totally distorts and misrepresents what was a "good time had by all," I feel I gotta set it straight.

For the record, I am not bitter or disappointed. On the contrary, my career so far has exceeded my wildest expectations, and I'm happier now than I've ever been. I guess I just don't open my wallet and show everybody.

Stan Ridgway
Los Angeles


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Beyond Tomorrow Mementos / Larry Hastings / larry@hastings.org