Rock Show Recall
Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
This week’s question:
John Sellers’s Perfect From Now On tells a life as the sum of indie-rock influences. What was your first live concert like?
Next week’s question:
With Paris in the pen and Scooter Libby on the way, we’ve got to know: what was your closest brush with the law?
I should be embarrassed, at 12 I chose the most popular band I could see live: The B52s. The fact this choice has remained respectable is purely accidental as I also would play Slaughter and Vanilla Ice in my tape deck. My father and I sat down and he disapprovingly pointed out the smell of burning leaves, informing me that it was marijuana. Ziggy Marley opened and the booming bass of reggae gave me a stomachache but once Fred Schnieder stared singing, I felt great. As a later member of a misguided group that would use the word “poser” for anything inauthentic/too popular, I’m just glad I’ve always been able to sing along with “Love Shack” unironically.
The place: Madison Square Garden. The band: The Police. I had 35th row seats (center floor). My friend Jason went off to get stoned leaving me alone. The Police came on and opened with Voices Inside My Head. All three silhouetted in backlight with a hint of smoke. And all of us in the palm of their hand, joined together in the shared spectacle. It was like religion. It was transcendent. Strangely enough, it made me understand how Aztec ritual sacrifice could have happened. They played Roxanne and when they turned on the house lights… I was saved.
My first rock concert was Rick Springfield. So was my second. (If you ask my mother, both were Rick Springsteen.) Emily and I had excellent seats — her dad, if I recall, “knew someone” — and I clearly remember the sleeveless black shirt that showed off his biceps, plus the fact that even then it bugged me that in “Jesse’s Girl,” let’s face it, “cute” does not rhyme with “moot.” I also remember our breathless post-concert report to my mom: “He sweated on us!” Secretly, though, I had an even bigger crush on my Latin teacher.
The Police, with Oingo Boingo opening. In Fresno, the joke of California, an hour commute from our farm town, 3 of us girls in spiked hair and tight 50s dresses stuffed into my dad’s pickup that smelled like cropdusting chemicals. We smoked joints from strangers as we pogoed and got exceedingly wasted, mystified that that was really Sting up there on stage, singing to us. Didn’t he know this was the sticks? On the drive back to Tulare we panicked when a CHP pulled behind us and someone said “hide em under the seat!” Not quite sinking into our stoned heads that the half-full Bartles and James bottles were emptying out until the cop passed and the pickup smelled like sweet strawberry wine.
My first concert was Rush at Radio City Music Hall. I think it was the “Signals” tour, but it might have been “Turnstiles.” I had never been allowed to go to a rock concert before, but now, two weeks into my freshman year, it was time. Geddy Lee on cassette and vinyl is one thing. But while listening to him live I was sure that my head would explode like something out of the movie “Scanners.” Something about the frequency. It made my eyes hurt, too. It was a strange sensation and unlike my friends, I wasn’t even stoned. I’d come to the show with years of stored up Rush-isms and Rush-iana. It all had something to do with Ayn Rand, but it’s hard to be objective when you’re sure you’re about to have a seizure. And, by the way, what the f*** does the line “Echoes with the sound of salesmen!” mean?
My first live concert was a family outing to see The Osmonds–all of them–at the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford, Connecticut. I had been watching and worshiping Donny and Marie every Friday night for over three years, and the moment they came on stage was positively electric. There they were in three dimensions with all the familiar songs and snappy banter (”Cute, Marie. Real cute.”). I was levitating with excitement. With nine Osmonds performing it was a lively and free-wheeling variety show, and every time one of them went off the script to make a spontaneous comment, I was thrilled beyond words. “Wow, this theater is really pretty,” said Marie off-handedly as she looked around. “I know,” I thought. “That’s so TRUE! She’s so RIGHT!” After the show there was a meet-and-greet, and I got to shake the hands of Donny, Marie, and Jimmy and mumble my appreciation to them. It was like meeting God. Actually…better than God. God with sequins.
WOMAD–World of Music Arts and Dance included Peter Gabriel, Lenny Kravitz, Hothouse Flowers, Inner Circle–basically reggae/world music/rock that was big when I was in high school. When I exited the car, I felt like a big nerd. Surrounded by much cooler older kids who could drive themselves, my mom was my ride and concert companion. Highlights: first exposure to copious amounts of ganja (everyone but me and Mom seemed to be smoking and passing it on), dancing, singing, and paying too much for the T-shirt and program I still have somewhere. I still get goosebumps thinking of the performance of “Digging in the Dirt.” I saw Peter Gabriel again on tour a few years ago—maybe in a bubble?
As a 120-pound community college freshman, I almost died in a meathead stampede at a Gwar show. Things got rough once the Detroit crowd started lobbing lit cigarettes and beer bottles at the opening band. By the time Gwar took the stage, a vortex of sweaty psychopaths had engulfed me. Decked out in latex alien costumes, the band wailed ironic death metal and showered us with fake blood. I bounced around like a crash test dummy, but I survived my big city rite of passage. I was hardcore.
I forgot about pogo-ing… so good. which tour was it? I was probably there.
I’m not sure what’s worse: that I saw Information Society live on January 1, 1989, or that I’d hotly anticipated the show the entire month preceding it. Their hit song “What’s On Your Mind (Pure Energy)” had been all over MTV and the radio that fall, and it spoke to the 18-year-old me in a way that I’m now convinced must have been subliminal mind control. But thankfully the evil spell was broken a few minutes after the band, dressed in buffoonish outfits and armed with keytars, took the stage. I barely got out of there alive.
I was 13 and too pumped about seeing my favorite, the Steve Miller band, the ones to whom I had air guitared so many times, to be all that bummed about the occasion and the people who brought me to (now-demolished) JFK stadium in Philadelphia: my parents, my sister, her sixteenth birthday. When I wasn’t singing every perfect word of “Jungle Love” (”it’s driving me mad, it’s making me craaaazzzzzy”) I had questions: Why are those people passing around a tiny cigarette with a small scissors? What is that smell? And how come no one is passing it to me?
My first concert: Donnie Osmond, at BYU, with my family. I remember Donnie was cute (and tall!), we had good seats, and I wore my Donnie and Marie purple socks. However, I claim it was the Violent Femmes in 1987. I lied to my mom and told her I was babysitting in order to go. The best part of the evening was sitting next to Scott A., who was a year older than me in high school. He “casually” put his arm around me and later, after driving me home, kissed me. Twenty years later, I still geek out to that memory.
Jethro Tull. I was 16, and on a date with Tito, the Venezuelan actor/aspiring filmmaker I had met while being a Y day camp counselor at Carlow College in Pittsburgh. Tito was 23, and this made my mother very nervous, and this gave me a kind of thrill. Tito and his friend Danny, a pathologist, had both appeared in the first Latin American version of the musical “Godspell.” Danny was there, with his girlfriend Celeste, because he had a car and Tito didn’t.
I spoke no Spanish at the time, and Tito had learned his first American curse words from the movie “Lenny.” I was glad the music was loud, and, well, the flute playing was awesome. But mostly I thought about Danny, who had that nice girlfriend, but had begun writing me funny notes that referenced Borges stories we had both read, and Celeste and Tito hadn’t.
Oh, oh, oh, Aqualung.
Excellent, Lynn, funny as hell. Hope all is well.
It was September 2, 1978. Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, NJ
My buddy Dudley and I got dropped off late morning for the all-day
Grateful Dead show. I’ll never forget that feeling of going from the
comfort of a Cadillac Seville to the already 92-degree heat, with
nothing to protect us from the elements (shrooms, mesc, etc.) but a
couple bottles of water and some ham sandwiches.
I got stoned really fast…and then I actually partook in some. It was
all downhill from there. Being 14, 130lbs. and really stoned in the
late-summer heat for a few hours feels like an acid trip to anyone else,
no matter how many times they hosed down the crowd. Somewhere in what
seemed like an endless “Good Lovin’” jam… (”you
got..got..got…got…) I think my mind just brought the sundown,
whether or not it was ready to retire in reality.
What still amazes me to this day is that in an age before cell phones,
Dudley’s mom was able to find us in the Seville RIGHT at the time we
agreed up, exactly where she left us, somewhere on a service road off
Route 3.