Song 193: Today I posted Wait 'Til We Get Home by Lone Justice (written by Marvin Etzioni, Ryan Hedgecock and Maria McKee) to the playlist. When I lived in Berkeley in the 1980s, my housemate Bob worked as a stage hand at the Greek Theatre there, and he got me a few free tickets to shows, including one by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on July 26th, 1985 (thank you Songkick for supplying the date info), with Lone Justice as the opening act. I might have heard a bit about LJ before the gig, but I didn't really know their music at all, and as I walked over to my seat a few minutes after the start of the show, the band was already well into this song. By the time I sat down, I already knew that I really liked the tune they were performing, and I could also tell that the lead singer (Maria McKee) had a really strong and impressive voice. Of course I enjoyed the headline set that followed, but well before the TP crew got to the stage, I had decided that I would have to add a Lone Justice LP to my collection as soon as reasonable, because of how much I enjoyed the opening set. That Lone Justice album has a bunch of really good songs, and it has spent a lot of time on my turntable. When I got it I didn't know anything about the Petty connections with LJ, and I'm not sure I even took much notice of their names among the songwriting credits on the LJ record, but a couple of years later I had the good fortune of seeing Lone Justice as an opening act for another band I liked a lot, when U2 took the stage at the Cow Palace across the bay on April 25th of 1987 (once again, thank you Songkick for the date). LJ performed a good set that night, as did U2, but with the dismal acoustics of the Cow Palace weighed against the fine acoustics of the Greek Theatre, not surprisingly, I have a much clearer memory of the Berkeley show, and I can tell you they sounded very good on that day in July of 1985.
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