music friday: new year's eve, 2016

A couple of nights ago, during one of my incessant vivid dreams, I found myself at some function or another with Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney. In the dream, Janet had already been excised from the band, yet things seemed congenial enough.

I saw them on New Year's Eve, December 31, 2016. It was my 15th S-K show, the third since their long hiatus. It was the first, and likely the last, New Year's Eve show I attended, and we had a blast. I've seen two post-Janet S-K shows, and they were OK, but Janet meant so much to my feelings for the band that those shows were reduced to "just another concert", quite a drop from when I would see what was my favorite band of the past 20 years.

So that New Year's Eve show five years ago remains the last time I saw the Corin-Carrie-Janet version of the band, which will always be the one that matters to me. It's not as bad as when The Who continued after Keith Moon died, but the way it ended still makes me sad.

I wrote about the show here, if you want to get my immediate reaction. I went with Elisa Salasin, who among her many talents is an incomparable photographer. We have two of her photos from that night framed on the wall of the entrance hall of our house.  Here is one:

Here they are, shot by the incredible Admiral Needa, performing one of my live favorites, "Let's Call It Love", sliding into "Entertain", before counting down the seconds until the New Year:

Honestly, it makes me wanna cry seeing Janet behind those drums for what would be my last time.