Monday, November 03, 2008

Roads

Here is a video of the band Portishead playing the song "Roads." It is taken from their 1997 show in NYC when the New York City Philharmonic backed them.




I knew people who attended this show, and I still envy them to this day.

Within a year or so of this concert, they played in Detroit, their closest U.S. show of the tour. I was in college and all set to go, but had to bail at the last minute to work on some group project for some business management course I was taking at the time. I'm pretty sure our group's job was to organize a mock public relations campaign for Wal-Mart to diffuse public outrage over their employee rights violations and the child labor violations of their suppliers in the developing world. No joke.

Our group probably received a mediocre grade because, like most group projects in which I participated at John Carroll's business school, a member or two of the group would not take these projects seriously. Most of the time, it was because they were too busy kissing ass at some internship to care about their grades (or more importantly, the grades of others in the group).

The band later took a 10 year hiatus, recently got back together, and still have yet to play live anywhere near me.

The moral of the story: Life is too short to miss Portishead shows.

1 comment:

MasterBowman said...

The irony of course is that is Portishead is a huge supporter of Wal-Mart and has been very outspoken to defend their labor practices. In fact, I'm pretty sure they were offering free admission to those attendees who provided a Wal-Mart receipt at the gate. The other irony is who would of thought that all these years later, Dave would be a fat-cat attorney defending these corporations and living the sweet life, lighting up his cigars with $50 bills and attempting to kill all those real-life Michael Claytons out there--the real heroes? Oh yeah, life is sweet Dave. How do you live with yourself?