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02 October 2007
This is too fun I had so many happy flashbacks. Can we please add to the mefi commentary or talk about it here?
I'm gonna add one, since this is MetaChat. In Memphis, when I was 26, I saw the Allman Brothers, sitting on the best hill off Beale Street, accompanied for the evening, after losing all my friends accidentally in the crowd, by one of the "prettiest men we could hope to meet" according to my friends.
And then made it back solo to the parking deck and drove us all (7 of us in a 4-door Saturn) back to the motel. Totally sober at the end of the night.
There is a picture of me from earlier that day sitting on the trunk of a Memphis cop car. Damn that was a fun day.
My first show? Blue Öyster Cult, Black Oak Arkansas, and Piper (featuring a very young Billy Squier), the illustrious Cow Palace, sometime in 1978. Amazing lazer/light show, amazing three-foot-high bong the guys sitting next to us had somehow snuck in. I brought my (platonic, sadly) friend Anne and my very geeky music posse. We rocked, we rolled, we stayed awake during Black Oak Arkansas’ interminable “Jim Dandy To The Rescue”, we (well, I, anyway) dug all the schtick that BÖC could throw at us – the lazers, the mirror ball, the all five guys playing guitar at once, the smacking of the guitars together and rubbing the necks against each other, the ripping out of the strings by Buck Dharma (although he may have actually cut them with a pair of pliers – in my memory he pulled them out with his bare hands, and that’s the way I prefer to think of it). Fun was had.
As I said over there, I think my first proper (no parents) concert was Duran Duran in Charleston at the civic center. I even wore the stupid shirt with the zipper on the side...
Also, a side note for doctor_negative: I was at that very Santana/Al di Meola show at the Greek that you mentioned, and I think it might have been 1980. That time is something of a blur for me, though, so I could be wrong.
I used to have this shitty Kramer with light strings on it. You could BREATHE on it wrong and break the strings. I can't believe I put up with it for so long... but it was the 80s thing to have a Floyd Rose tremolo.
Without my dad? I think it was Oingo Boingo (with X) in Riverside in the mid-80's, but I don't actually recall.
The better story is the White House function, in the early 80's, at which Elizabeth Taylor (already practically embalmed) was wheeled out on to the stage to make a few remarks about something (children, maybe?) and then Meatloaf came blaring out to rock the house for what felt like three hours. That was fantastical in its awesomeness.
U2 in Cork City Hall, I was 13......
this is so long ago the promotor ended up giving tickets away outside free, the main hall was only half-full. And we'd saved ages to afford the tickets! I can still remember the high on hearing Sunday, bloody Sunday for the first time.
So I was raised in a very strict Calvinist family and not allowed to listen to "secular" rock. Just before my 16th birthday, I convinced my dad that Tom Petty was a Christian musician based on "I Won't Back Down." (I made sure he didn't hear the single off Petty's newest album, Wildflowers.)
Stan Lynch had just left the band, and I was annoyed to find that some dude named Dave Grohl was on drums. Pete Droge, from whom nobody ever heard again, opened.
It was pretty much the most awesome night of my life.
So I was raised in a very strict Calvinist family and not allowed to listen to "secular" rock.
I've never 'met' a Calvinist before. I wikied it, and came up with total depravity. Fascinating!
Just before my 16th birthday, I convinced my dad that Tom Petty was a Christian musician based on "I Won't Back Down." (I made sure he didn't hear the single off Petty's newest album, Wildflowers.)
You must be the most persuasive person in the world!
My first was David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails...i was 15...
I was blown away...to be completely honest i had heard of david bowie and that i probably should like him(my sister listened to him and she was cool,) but i had never listened to him...the show was amazing...
Allman Brothers, as reported in the mefi thread. And then later that year, when I was 15, I saw Arlo Guthrie for free, also in Boston. Then I got kicked out of school for smoking pot and sent back down to South Carolina where there was no music (local bands, sure, but nobody national ever came to Charleston then) and I didn't see another concert for umpteen years until I finally ended up watching BB King at Red Rocks in Colorado.
Dead Kennedys at WUST Music Hall (which is now the 'new' 9:30 Club) in 1985. Wow, there is a flyer for it on flickr and here is the view from the balcony (different band though) where I stayed firmly put for the show. No way I was getting my virgin ass anywhere near the pit. This is indeed fun.
chuck, actually I really like the Thorns. And Matthew Sweet in general. I was being slightly sarcastic when I said nobody ever heard from Pete Droge again.
It was not all that hard to convince my dad of Tom Petty's Christianity. Being a minister, he didn't listen to secular music himself. And I was one of those stereotypical "good girls" -- preacher's kids are always either very bad or annoyingly good -- so he didn't have much reason to doubt me.
In spite of my rock and roll youth, my mother told me the other day that she is still convinced I am "one of the elect," to which I responded that she was sadly mistaken if she thought I'd ever become a person who thought her religion was right and others wrong. Alas, I must be very, very depraved.
I couldn't swear to it, but I think it was The Pretenders and Iggy Pop at Maple Leaf Gardens in the mid-80s. As I recall, my first concert was almost the Thompson Twins at Massey Hall in '83, but one of them got sick and the show was cancelled.
I can't remember my first concert. Possibly, it was Sony and Cher and the Monkees at Hollywood Bowl.
The first concert that I took a DATE to was Judy Collins at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.
The first concert that I went stoned to was the Mothers, Alice Cooper, and Wild Man Fischer at the gym at Fullerton State University.
The first Dead concert was Winterland (or Fillmore, I can't remember). I told my fam I was going up to Santa Barbara to see friends and we hitched up to SF for the concert and slept in this office lobby that was open that one of the friends knew about.
My first rock concert was actually in college. (I don't count that time in middle school when my youth group took a trip to oakland to see a few Christian Rock Bands) My friends and I saw We Are Scientists play at the on-campus coffee house my freshman year - this was back when they were still a nerd band, right before they moved to New York and became cool and sort of popular with English people. The lead singer signed a poster for me that I had just ripped off the wall.
It was not all that hard to convince my dad of Tom Petty's Christianity. Being a minister, he didn't listen to secular music himself. And I was one of those stereotypical "good girls" -- preacher's kids are always either very bad or annoyingly good -- so he didn't have much reason to doubt me.
Most of the preacher's daughter's I knew were the very bad variety.
In spite of my rock and roll youth, my mother told me the other day that she is still convinced I am "one of the elect," to which I responded that she was sadly mistaken if she thought I'd ever become a person who thought her religion was right and others wrong. Alas, I must be very, very depraved.
I had a chat with a couple of my relatives about this. They walked away thinking that I would change my mind ONE DAY and see the light... because the alternative was too unthinkable. I walked away hoping that they'd never have the guts to ask me about it again.
George Freaking Michael, in his 'Faith' glory days. He had me hooked with 'Wake me up before you gogo' when I was just a wee lass. As soon as I saw him, I was in love for the first time. Those eyes! That five o'clock shadow! That hair! He was sooooooo dreamy. I got a door sized poster and dreamed about the day we would meet and he would fall in love with me and we would live happily ever after. I held onto that magical fantasy until the day he got busted for soliciting in a public bathroom in Los Angeles. The hell? George Michael likes buttsex? How could that be? I started to query my friends and family, and it appears that I was the last one to figure it out, blinded as I was by my love for him, that he was as queer as a three dollar bill, and that he would never cast his loving eyes in my direction.... He put on a hell of a good show, though, and his ass looked great in those jeans.
I cannot remember for the life of me what my first concert was, but I have never been a big concert-goer, although I love live music. Everyone knows what my last concert was, though ;-)
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