The Date: November 26, 1997
The Event: Spiritualized play atop Toronto's CN Tower
The Result: Another elaborate drug-taking metaphor for Jason Pierce
Jason Pierce has never been one for subtle symbolism. The longtime leader of psychedelic gospel ensemble Spiritualized, and former member of garage-drone reprobates Spacemen 3, Pierce has spent 25 years walking a pharmacological knife-edge. And, like all great artists, his art has reflected that reality.
Moving between blustering space-rock and stark, orchestral ballads, Pierce is, time and again, mimicking the ecstatic rush of injection, and the hollow abyss of comedown. And, whilst he's harbored career-long obsessions with fire, the Stooges, Jesus, and Gospel music, drugs have been a recurring constant. He's sung of having "a hurricane inside [his] veins" and the "hole in [his] arm where the money goes," released songs called "Good Dope, Good Fun," and albums named Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to.
So in 1997, no one flinched when Pierce announced that he wanted Spiritualized to play atop Toronto's CN Tower, all 144 stories of it. Why? So Pierce could play "the highest show on Earth."
At the time, Spiritualized were at the peak of their powers. They'd just released the astonishing Ladies and Gentleman, We are Floating in Space..., clearly Pierce's magnum-opus, and one of the greatest records of the past 20 years. The album, too, had been enshrined in drug-related gimmickry: a limited-edition disc coming sealed in a foil blister-pick, housed in a cardboard cover designed to resemble a prescription drug packet.
Continuing in that spirit, November of '97 found Spiritualized entering the record-books: band and audience scaling the world's largest free-standing structure, heading into the frigid air of a Fall Toronto eve and rocking out on the observation deck. And all for the sake of a bad double-entendre.
Pierce, though, remained devoted to the romance of the gesture. “The CN Tower was probably the best show we've ever done," he told Rolling Stone, in hindsight. "The building was moving 12 feet in either direction. We were literally floating in space.”
