Reflection
What The Cure Was for Me
Growing up is never easy.
Maybe you feel alone.
Maybe you feel as though no one understands you.
Maybe you feel like an outsider.
Then one day, you notice a door you had never realized was there. And when you step through it, you don’t feel quite so lonely anymore.
Suddenly, it is as though someone is there for you—intimately, deeply—in a way you could never have predicted.
That was what The Cure was for me.
Maybe it was their melancholic vulnerability, filtered through heavy melodic basslines and layered guitars. Maybe it was Robert Smith’s uncompromising, nonconformist defiance of the mainstream.
But I believe it was the words that grabbed me most—words that, combined with the music, transported me into another world. A place where I was no longer alone with all my teenage angst. A world where, even if there was suffering, it was a kind of suffering we experienced together.
Dark, melancholic, melodic, joyful, and everything in between, they sang about lost love, loneliness, and saying goodbye. Their songs painted pictures of life as complex, beautiful, painful, and, above all, real. They expressed feelings I connected with on an almost spiritual level.
The Cure was an enigma—not something to be figured out, but something to be celebrated simply for being. They drew me in and made me fall in love with the magic of music and the power of words.
I remember buying The Cure: Songwords and spending hours memorizing the lyrics to my favorite songs. The Cure inspired me to write my own poetry and songs.
They made me a better writer.
And I remember the first time I saw them in concert.
For years, along the highway between Tucson and Phoenix, you could look off into the desert and see a concrete platform with a large overhang. Nothing surrounded it but flat desert landscape.
It was what remained of Compton Terrace.
I don’t remember exactly when the amphitheater stopped operating as a concert venue, but it was a landmark throughout my childhood. Every time I drove past it—until it eventually vanished—I remembered the fall of 1989, when I saw The Cure perform there during the Prayer Tour, in the middle of the Arizona desert.
I was seventeen.
The concert itself was epic.
The Cure played every song from Disintegration, followed by three encores. During “10:15 Saturday Night,” the speaker stack on one side of the stage caught fire. The crew shut down that section of the sound system while someone put out the flames.
Robert Smith never stopped playing.
While the crew dealt with the fire, the band shifted into acoustic performances of “Three Imaginary Boys” and “Boys Don’t Cry.” Then the speakers came back on, and the concert continued.
Sometimes, the busier life gets, I almost forget the magic of experiences like that.
Then I hear my teenage daughters playing “Boys Don’t Cry” or another Cure song they love, and I realize the magic is still there—working in them in its own way.
And I smile.