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Though last week's blackout, the largest power outage in North American history, caused a rash of cancellations in New York, Detroit and other cities, the Indigo Girls endured, playing a set for New Yorkers on Thursday night as part of the city's SummerStage program.
SummerStage, which boasts a rain-or-shine philosophy for its series of concerts, weathered the blackout with backup power generators that allowed for a set of live music, albeit an abbreviated one, due to the generators' limited power capacity. Opener Cordera performed a short fifteen-minute set, before the Indigo Girls played forty-five minutes for approximately 1,300 fans.
"There was a lot of talk of pulling the plug -- turning off the generator would be a better way of describe it," Alexa Birdsong, executive producer of SummerStage, says. "The organizers at the City Parks Foundation basically pulled their hair out and just decided to go on with the show. And the Indigo Girls were completely gung-ho. They wanted to go on."
Other music fans weren't so lucky: Iggy and the Stooges' first hometown performance in Detroit in more than thirty years, also scheduled for Thursday, was postponed. The legendary pre-punk ensemble had done its soundcheck earlier in the day before power was lost. Pop and his original backing band had only lined up two reunion performances for the summer (the other was August 8th in New York). The Detroit show has been rescheduled for August 25th.
Numerous other tours were affected by the blackout. The Detroit-area also saw the cancellation of Tori Amos' performance in Rochester Hills (rescheduled for tonight) and the Kiss/Aerosmith set scheduled for Friday. New York City lost shows by Bob Dylan, Aaron Carter and others.
Ironically enough, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera's Justified and Stripped Tour, which ran into trouble last weekend when a lighting rig collapsed in Atlantic City and caused several postponements, was not affected by the blackout. The tour resumes tonight in Uniondale, New York.
ANDREW DANSBY
(August 18, 2003)