1985

The paper chase
January 23
When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played the Civic Center (for the last time, as it turns out) on the second leg of the Born In the USA tour, Rob Tannenbaum documented the mad dash for the hottest tickets in town.

By all accounts, Bruce Springsteen is a genuinely fair-minded guy who tries to insure that his fans will be able to get concert tickets. "I've never seen anything like that," says Peter Luukko, director of marketing at the Providence Civic Center, speaking of two auditors Springsteen sent to the Civic Center box office at 7:30 a.m. the day tickets for his two concerts went on sale. The auditors, Luukko explains, "were there to make sure all the tickets were here, so there weren't any unauthorized pulls."

All right, so Springsteen is the honest man Diogenes could never find, the Abe Lincoln of rock 'n' roll. So why are there so many pissed-off people grumbling about how hard it was to get tickets to his two concerts?

Bring on the mini-series
June 12
The Claus von Bulow trials attracted an inordinate amount of attention to the Ocean State -- as most trials involving nefarious rich folks do. Bill Van Siclen summed it up.

The verdict is in, the trial is over and Claus von Bulow is a free man. The jury of eight women and four men returned a verdict of not guilty shortly after 11 o'clock Monday morning.They had deliberated for less than two and a half days.

For the record, von Bulow was charged with twice trying to kill his wife, Pittsburgh utilities heiress Martha "Sunny" von Bulow, with injections on insulin. He was convicted of the charges in 1982, but remained free on $100,000 bail pending an appeal. Last year, while the appeal was still on hold, the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned the conviction, saying that key evidence in the case had been mishandled by state police investigators.That ruling set the stage for the retrial that culminated in Monday's verdict of not guilty.

Perhaps inevitably, the

verdict came as something of an anticlimax. After nearly six months of pre-trial publicity, seven weeks of testimony and reams of media coverage, the von Bulow retrial had taken on the lurid familiarity of a prime time soap opera. To have it suddenly snatched away -- the defense had predicted that the jury would need at least a week to reach its verdict -- seemed almost like a form of Indian giving.

The silent screen
October 3
When Hurricane Gloria tore through the area, Michael Tanaka was thrown for a loop with the loss of the electronic hearth.

Last Friday afternoon, as the gusting winds of Hurricane Gloria were just beginning to hit home at approximately 1:20 p.m., the electrical power went off in my apartment. Lights went out and my TVdied in mid-sentence. That's where I was when the lights went out: parked in front of the television set like everyone else, watching and waiting for news. This was, after all, a potential bona fide disaster in the

making . . . .

I sat and stared at my TV and wondered whether I was going to miss Miami Vice that night (the season premiere two-hour movie special, no less), or whether I was going to be able to tape Rocky &Bullwinkle on Saturday morning. After a few hours of AM radio and hurricane "call-in" shows I even began to miss MTV. I got nostalgic twinges for the afternoon soap operas and promised the TV that if it miraculously started up, I would watch All My Children and One Life to Live religiously until my dying day. I discovered that I was talking to the TV.

Closing time
October 23
Johnson &Wales saw, Johnson &Wales conquered. The venerable Met Cafe lease ran out, the building was gutted, and a parking lot took its place. Peggy Rosen wrote the obit.

Though it looks like someone's unkempt garage from the outside and isn't much more impressive from within, the Met is a dive many people from Providence and the vicinity hold close to their hearts. The graffiti-scrawled bathrooms, the mattress-sized stage and poster-smothered walls demand no frills from customers. They just offer good music and good times.

"You can do what you want here. You can be as crazy as you want," says Paul Gallagher, a Met regular for eight years. "There's just no other place in town where you can go and be as comfortable. The city has to progress eventually, I guess, and unfortunately the Met has to be one of the things that falls in its way."

Tales of a chronic rambler
November 27
Jim Macnie hit the road with a treasured local mainstay.

You've got to be a chronic rambler if you're going to sustain an acoustic blues career, and luckily Paul Geremia had little problem falling into the groove of the requisite solo cross-country trips. Low glory gigs in roadhouses and folk clubs helped the singer hone the physical prowess aspect of the job -- just playing the country blues right is a slick magic act. What looks like straight finger-picking can be complex improvisation, and the feel has to be there or else you come off sounding like the Encyclopedia Britannica of the Delta . . . While turning a craft into an art, Geremia has developed an immediately recognizable style, and gone through much musical territory on the way.

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