Kiss Me Deadly – DREAM TOUR

In this Dream Tour segment, the indie band, Kiss Me Deadly, share the acts that they would include on their ultimate tour lineup. You can check out their picks, after the break.

When trying to imagine our Kiss Me Deadly Dream Tour, the first route we chose was geography, where do we want to play? For Jen, it’s a tour of the major cities of Europe, starting in London, England (or the Mother Country as she likes to call it), continuing through Dublin, Glasgow, Paris, Marseilles, Madrid, Lisbon, Florence, Rome, Athens, Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Amsterdam, and Brussels, not necessarily in that order since we pride ourselves on planning the most economical distances between stops. Madelyn’s ideal would be Chonju, Kwangju, Ch’angwon, Pusan, Taegu, Taejon, Suwon, Inch’on, and finish out our South Korean tour with a week in Seoul. That way she could eat all the Kimchi and Bi Bim Bap her heart desires and listen to nothing but Big Bang, Super Junior, EXO all day. She is, after all, a major Korea-phile. For Evan, the dream tour might start in Ensenada, then Hermosillo, Chihuahua, Monterrey, Tampico, Veracruz, Cancun, Oaxaca, Acapulco, Guadalajara, and end with a week in Mexico City. This choice does not reflect his love for Carnitas, Arroz con Pollo, or Cafe Tacuba but rather the fact that he is one of the foremost authorities on the Mexican Lucha Libre film (see his article “Mask and Masculinity: Culture, Modernity, and Gender Identity in the Mexican Lucha Libre Films of El Santo” in the journal, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas).

Further thought led us to realize that these were places we wanted to visit, and touring is not quite the same thing as visiting since you only get one or two days in a city and most of that time is focused on the show not on absorbing the local vibe. Then it came to us, “hey, it’s a dream tour – it can, like an episode of Starsky and Hutch, to quote the film Bottle Rocket, have the logic of a dream.” So how about playing the Cavern Club in Liverpool with The Beatles, The Marquee in London with The Rolling Stones and The Who, The 100 Club in London with The Clash and The Sex Pistols, and The Hacienda in Manchester with Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses. We would then fly our private dream plane to the west coast of the USA to play The Crocodile in Seattle with Nirvana and Soundgarden, The Fillmore West in San Francisco with The Jefferson Airplane and Its a Beautiful Day, The Whisky a Go Go in L.A. with Love and The Buffalo Springfield, and as long as we’re in the area we could play at the Masque with X and Black Flag (hey, what’s a decade in a dream?). After driving across the country in a psychedelic bus to New York we would play Cafe Wah with Jimi Hendrix, Max’s Kansas City with The Velvet Underground, and CBGB with Blondie and Television before going up to the Bronx to play at Disco Fever with Sugarhill Gang and Biz Markie. Not wishing to neglect the center of the country we would continue at 2nd Avenue in Minneapolis with Prince, Silvio’s in Chicago with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, Tipitina’s in New Orleans with The Meters and Dr. John, and the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA with REM and Pylon. This last stop is not so much a dream as Evan’s early band, The Little Tigers, held the attendance record at the Clayton Street location of this famous club. Finally, tired from all this time traveling, we would return home to Cleveland to play with our friends Cobra Verde at the Beachland Ballroom, one of the greatest rock clubs currently in existence.

In the end, though, we realized that our dream tour is the one that we are getting ready to embark upon in a few short weeks. Not every venue might be so legendary and not every band we play with so famous, but it is the tour we have literally been dreaming about since starting Kiss Me Deadly. And that dream is about to become a reality.

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