You know how I tend to obsess over things...

 ..and you say  "You, Bart? Really? Obsess over things?"

 Yes, it's true.
 Sometimes I get in to something and stay there for long periods.

 Someone said the drummer for Garbage (Butch Vig, Nirvana producer) was sick
 so I looked for some Garbage news and found a list of the new tour dates.

 Whoa!

 Kansas City is four hours from K-Drag and St Louis is five hours from KC.
 So I got out the plastic and contacted  Ticketbastard.com

 bartcop.com  will be dark November 27 and 28th while we see the best
 band in the world perform two nights in a row.

 It's funny, our actual 25th anniversay is the 20th.
 Every year, we've had the great luck to see a great band on or near our anniversary.
 I don't think I wrote about it, but back around 97 or 98, we paid $225 for front row
 tickets to see ZZ Top at The Brady Theater in K-Drag.

 This is a tiny opera house (2800 seats) that Caruso sang in during the twenties (or whenever he was singing
 - they say his ghost still haunts the Brady, so world-famous K-Drag radio personality Rod D Mercer
 invited Teri the ghost chaser to spend the night at the Brady to check for ghosts)

 ZZ Top are OK, for an American band, but Mrs. BartCop likes them.  The best part of the deal
 was there's no room in this tiny opera house for all the horseshit ZZ Top travels with, so there
 were no junk cars, no lasers, no dancing girls, no conveyor belts - just three dudes in blue jeans
 playing old-time Texas blues. It was a great show.   After you stand five feet from the band for two hours,
 you can't help but have the image burned into your head. We've all heard the ZZ Top songs a million
 times but now when I hear them, I see Billy's bony fingers running up & down that pearly fretboard.

 And now we're getting to see Garbage two nights in a row, and we've never before seen a band
 at their peak a month after their greatest album came out - so this should really rule.
 
 ...oh, and the group the best band in the world is playing with is ...some band from Ireland.

 ha ha

 We're paying to see Garbage, and U2 is going to play afterwards - both nights.
 Maybe there is a God.

 Review of a recent Garbage show in Germany.

 Here, in the seedy, sex-obsessed and permanently rain-lashed German
 birthplace of the first wave of gritty, leather-jacketed British rock'n'roll
 (The Beatles played downstairs in the Kaiser Klub) the wonderfully artificial
 Scottish-American confection that is Garbage triumphed utterly. They were
 drop-dead, stone-cold, stiff-quiffed, rock-hard fucking awesome.

 Manson's voice has matured to the point where she could drown out Slipknot with
 her slightest cough. And tonight, with a confidence that occasionally bordered on
 the psychotic, she slaughtered this audience.

 With Garbage, you either adore their wonderfully blasphemous and utterly cynical
 mish-mashing of Spector-esque garage-rock, gay-euro-pop and over-produced
 grunge-slick or you are a total moron who wouldn't recognise unadulterated pop
 genius if it walked up to you in the street and caved your bigoted skull in with a huge
 box of top notch Belgian marzipan and cherry-liqueur chocolates. You deaf  scum.

 ha ha

 Tonight, Garbage met then surpassed all expectations with blazing renditions of
 old faves like 'Stupid Girl' and the awesome anti-Travis anthem 'Only Happy
 When It Rains'. And then delivered versions of new album stuff like 'Shut Your
 Mouth', 'Androgyny' and 'Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)' that sounded like they'd
 been polished for years.