Not Just the Ticket — #4, The Jesus and Mary Chain, July 13, 1990

Then-current album: Automatic

Opening bands: Agent Orange and some bunch of anonymous people that were never heard from again, I think. But more on that later.

Back of ticket ad: Pirate Radio once more. Yet somehow more shlockier for having been reencountered this way.

–

Rather a more ragged and faded ticket, this one, even if it is of the same stamped-type variety as the rest so far. Must have been a fairly hot night in the Palladium or something, given that there’s still warps and bends in it.

And yes, this show. The one where I got slammed in the face.

The Jesus and Mary Chain vaguely came to my attention at some point during the previous years but it was definitely Automatic and especially “Head On” that did the trick for me. Sure it might have been far more of a slick beast than Psychocandy was — and that turned out to be my favorite of the albums over time — but “Head On” and its industrial/electronic rigor thanks to the synth bass and stiff drums set against the surf twang and Jim Reid’s moaning/yearning sneer remains a winner, and I’ll stick by “Makes you wanna feel/makes you wanna try/makes you wanna blow the stars from the sky” as a line that sums up that feeling perfectly, whatever you want to call that feeling.

What prompted going to this show…I’m not sure. I think I was starting to shift from a sense of shows as big and somewhat rare events to something along more of a ‘hey that seems pretty good’ deal. Entirely possible someone had seen them on the previous go round for this tour in late 1989 — opening act being some band from the Midwest that had just put out a debut single and album, led by one T. Reznor — but it’s fuzzy stuff. I do remember it was as part of a small group that I went — there might have just been three of us — and that one was someone who thought was pretty cute and nice, a fellow UCLA student. So why wouldn’t I go, after all.

So, my first show at the Palladium, my first show on the Sunset Strip, my first show in Hollywood itself I guess — how very LA. But it had to happen at some point, given my interests, given where the shows would be held, the same way that people my age in New York would remember shows at Irving Plaza and London would remember the Brixton Academy. At some point or another you end up at certain places and you’re just one member of one crowd at a venue that thrives on received history, that has no other history much beyond the fact that they are what they are and that a slew of famous bands have played there over time (even though an even bigger slew of anonymous or now-forgotten bands have also played there, though given the size of the venue that’s definitely less of an imbalanced percentage than it would be if it were a club).

Not that I cared much about that, though there were other firsts like the fact that this was the first time I’d been at a show where there were essentially no seats — sure, there was the balcony area (or rather, the one half of the balcony that was open — the other half, every time I was ever there, was always the VIP area), but I think one sat there if one was leaning up against the wall, completely lacking any view of the stage itself, and feeling bored. I stayed on the floor the whole time and doubtless did what most people did, milled around and/or watched the stage and/or chatted with friends.

Another first was the opening act — not Agent Orange, but the band before them. I hadn’t yet seen an opening act that wasn’t some sort of national act on their own, out on a tour, handpicked by the headliners, at the least famous locally or whatever else might have gone into it. Even Xavion, the Hall and Oates openers from 1984, were on a major label, on a national tour and all. Instead for the very first time I got to experience that other kind of opener, the local act that’s added to the bill for no immediately discernable reason. Some bands are rote, others are pathetically bad, others are simply just there — and whoever they were, they were indeed, just there.

But that might be why I have a clear picture of them in my head. A five piece, all male, and performing music that made me think they were out of place, out of time. They made me think of acts like Anything Box or, later, Cause and Effect, that end of eighties/early nineties synth/rock/’new wave’ feeling that felt like a sound and a time dying out even while the initial foundations of a revival were quietly being planted elsewhere around the world, though not for some while to come. KROQ sponsored this show and with a farrago of random sonic impulses floating around during this retrospectively up-for-grabs time, before the ‘nineties’ were codified thanks to Nirvana, Dre/Snoop and so much more besides, it was understood that there were bands still trying to make it in a way that grew out of how KROQ had defined itself all those years before it too started to shift-shape and reinvent.

It was a weird feeling, seeing this band, but also a definite sign of the arrogant critic at work, at the age of nineteen, thinking to myself that this band was already out of place somehow, dated. Enough cycles of time and fashion have gone through now that I see that for the limited approach it is — it’s not that the band were secretly good (at best they were formalized and obvious, descendants of late Roxy Music and Ure-era Ultravox and Duran Duran and other things that I perfectly enjoy but which this bunch used as templates all too closely, and lacking much in the way of any real kick or spark), but that their choice of instruments and arrangements and all that were no less dated than anything else. It’s all in how it was used. Perhaps hearing them now I might think on them much more kindly.

The Jesus and Mary Chain themselves were immobile, loud and pretty good — crowd was happily going crazy for them. I do remember “Head On,” just, but I mostly remember “Just Like Honey” because it became a false start and they had to begin again. But that false start, with those Ronettes/Phil Spector drums pounding out the simple but effective intro, that got a huge, huge cheer. It was one of those ‘so this is what the shouting is all about’ realizations, in a literal sense.

Then there was Agent Orange — and they were good too, though I didn’t know anything about them at the time. Think I had heard something about how they were some legendary local punk band, and in later years I realized just how fantastically great the early recordings were in particular. At this time, Mike Palm was fitting in more with the hair metal empire in terms of looks — as might have been at least one of the others he had on board with this incarnation of the band — but the choppy riffs and son-of-Dick Dale melodies weren’t any less sharp.

As mentioned, though — first time at a show with no seating, open floor area, and there I was near the front of the stage. I had to have heard the term ‘slam dancing’ at least before then — ‘mosh’ was a little ways off still for me — but I guess I never thought I’d actually be in one or that people might act the way they did.

Don’t think the guy, if it was a guy, meant to do anything, at least in his mind — this is just, you know, what you did, at a gig, if you were him, or in his experience, or whatever. I just remember the face slam, a huge numb feeling creeping outwards from my nose, a deep sinus ache, and feeling pretty woozy. I can’t recall a nosebleed much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I had one. Vaguely remember withdrawing from the area and looking around for where my friends had gone, or perhaps walking away with them — it didn’t ruin the evening but it bring me up pretty sharp about what could happen at shows.

Yet there was a nice counterbalance after the show — one of this small group lived in an apartment building south of UCLA that had a nice rooftop pool and hot-tub for tenant use, and we all ended up there just chilling in the water on a hot summer night, talking and relaxing and enjoying life. It’s almost more vivid still than the show itself, the bonus for attending it in a way — and I do remember looking up at the stars in the sky, as could be seen through LA light pollution. I might not have wanted to blow them from the sky at that particular moment but I was sure glad that they were there.

The Stylus Decade is up, as is my essay for them

Taking a break from Not Just the Ticket today to talk a little more about the one-off return of Stylus via The Stylus Decade, giving a slew of the long-time writers from the site a chance to review the past decade’s music under its auspices. Nick Southall talks about the genesis of the project here; my thoughts on Stylus when it shut down can be found in this old blog post.

Besides a rolling singles and albums countdown, set to conclude tomorrow, the site’s featured a number of thoughtful stand-alone essays, along with some sharp illustrations of representative figures from the charts and elsewhere. My favorite essays so far are Tal Rosenberg’s “Digital Killed the Video Star” and Thomas Inskeep and Josh Love’s thoughts on country music in the past ten years, “Where Were You?”, while there are a slew of enjoyable brief takes in the countdowns — basically, browse it all at your leisure.

Then there’s my piece, and quite honestly I hadn’t realized it would be featured so prominently when I wrote it, so I have to thank the editors — especially Alfred, whose questions regarding earlier drafts now take on a stronger significance! I only thought up a title for it at his last minute request — and nine times out of ten I am absolutely awful with headlines — but “Unlisted Numbers” summed it up much more strongly than I expected. The essay itself was a chance to look back on a decade-plus of music writing on my part as well as to clear my head of various ideas that had been kicking around for a bit. There’s some restatement from past pieces and comments elsewhere but the occasional summary never hurts, especially since one can then react against those thoughts down the line given further reflection. So we’ll see what I think in ten years, say.

It’s also a little amusing to have this piece come out when I’m engaging in what is ultimately an extended exercise in nostalgia thanks to Not Just the Ticket but I do see it as part and parcel of a larger reflection on things that further helps focus thoughts for the future — and there are other, less memory-driven projects due later this year. But all in good time…

Anyway, a brief snippet of “Unlisted Numbers” here; all thoughts on the full piece welcome — and I should say I love the fact that the illustration assigned to my essay was of the Knife:

As the years went on I found it harder to draw up any sort of list; there was something about the process I didn’t completely recognize in myself anymore. It culminated last year in my intentional non-ballot ballot for Pazz and Jop, instead sending in an essay (itself linking back to a previous essay for Idolator the year before, though that’s no longer available to my knowledge) tracing my disconnection, or disenchantment if you prefer. I’ll spare you the retelling of it all – the link is there, read as you choose.

The summary, though, is a sense of letting go, of releasing from a previous state – I have no real wish to bore anyone with a statement of general philosophy, but in broadest, simplest terms, it reflected a change from being a focused proclaimer on cultural elements to being a more relaxed observer of them. If the musical crisis I allude to in my Pazz and Jop piece from the start of the decade was one such moment, my current one comes down to sensing process over product: the series of continuing experiences rather than a rigorous accounting for them, though notes can and are taken along the way, and retrospective thought can be pulled together every so often, much like now.

I don’t present this as either a recommendation or a confession, but merely as a description of an awareness that I’ve reached a certain sense of calm. Now I can more readily enjoy music than I used to do – though that is potentially loaded as a conceit. It’s not that never stopped loving music, but in the same way that in the previous decade my stint in grad school almost buried my love for reading under a larger institutional drive and goal that I realized wasn’t for me, on a much more diffuse level once I felt less of a need to be on top of everything musically – the early-decade crunch that I’ve mentioned already – I found a new centered critical self that reflected and responded rather than categorized and locked down. The strengthening of this viewpoint over time lead me to these smoother waters in which I now find myself.

Not Just the Ticket — #3, Peter Murphy, March 9, 1990

Then-current album: Deep

Opening act: Human Drama

Back of ticket ad: Pirate Radio 100.3 FM, jagged blue lettering on a black background, a font of the sort that is out to convince you that it is edgy and streetwise because it’s seemingly created by a combination of paint swipes and claw marks.

–

More of the same in terms of look and printing and all that — little wonder I assumed that tickets would always look like this after a time, right down to that pale blue color.

The nearly-a-year separation between New Order and this show covered a lot of personal ground. I went home after my freshman year for one last long extended stay at home that summer, mostly being lazy. (I think I mowed the lawns when it came to any summer money.) Then it was back to UCLA to move into the apartment that would be where I’d live for the rest of my time there, three years straight. Four people in the apartment, two each per bedroom, Rick and I splitting one room — we’d met in the dorms the previous year and hit it off, a friendly, intense fellow — and John and Mark in the other, a typical enough college housing setup. New classes, new friends like Xana, settling more into things, getting to know folks at the radio station all that much more, like Steve M. and Eric J. L., and getting to know the radio station itself more as it goes. I’ve heard the show tapes I made and they’re amusing curios.

Kept missing shows, though — in fact, I missed two shows that summer of 1989 that I kept constantly kicking myself over for years. There was the Love and Rockets show, headlining at the apex of their fluke hit fame that year thanks to “So Alive,” which I think I might have had a ticket for but just couldn’t get to, for reasons unclear to me. Then later they came back and were on another bill — performing with the Pixies, both opening for the Cure at Dodger Stadium. A show to die for, except I was dying by inches because due to whatever plans had been drawn up, I was in San Diego when that show went down. Then a couple of days later I was in Los Angeles and the Cure were in San Diego. I freely admit to being in agonies for a long time after that point, because I was still young and unaware enough to realize that Robert Smith’s claim that this would be the band’s last tour was not so much an immutable statement of fact as it was his standard response every time they were out on tour. Love and Rockets, however, wouldn’t release another album for five years and I thought I would never see them…but that’s another story for another time.

The fact that I was distressed at missing Love and Rockets twice gave an indication where one of my biggest listening discoveries had been that year — I already knew about the band due to “No New Tale to Tell” but 1989 was when I finally put all the pieces together regarding the band’s backstory, not least their membership in Bauhaus backing lead singer Peter Murphy. So when, conveniently enough, Murphy released his own new solo album some months after Love and Rockets’ full breakthrough and himself scored a pop hit with “Cuts You Up,” it almost seemed like a natural progression — of course all the members of Bauhaus would eventually break big, that only seems fair! (Or so it seemed to me in my scaling of the twists of fate according to my then-current aesthetic criteria.)

That said I don’t remember what prompted going to the show, honestly — I’m pretty sure it was due to the friendship I’d formed with a fellow at the SRLF, Beau, yet another music obsessed character at that library. He’d mentioned he was going to the show and either I’d figured out tickets were still available or he’d mentioned it offhand. I may have missed Love and Rockets, I’m sure I thought to myself, but damned if I was going to miss the other guy!

Some venues impress themselves upon you when encountered for the first time with a certain force. The Wiltern Theatre, elegant and self-consciously a ‘theatre’ in the vaudeville/movie palace sense, made me think of bright lights and gilt paint — not quite an accurate portrait of the inside but not too far removed, something reinforced by the full seating on all levels, the sweep of the staircases, and the appearance of a fair amount of the concertgoers. For the first time I was in the midst of a full-on goth audience, however impacted by random outliers like myself, and I just remember one color even more than gold: black.

Beau was down on the floor of the venue, having picked up his ticket right off the bat. When I had purchased my ticket I ended up getting one of the last ones available, and for my pains found myself perched right against the back wall of the mezzanine, the worst row of the seats in the entire theatre. The only way to view the stage when everyone in front of you was on their feet — and they were, most of the time — was not merely to stand yourself, but to stand on the seat. Quite why the hell I wasn’t busted for that I don’t know, maybe everyone else was doing it as well and there wasn’t any easy way security could have chased us all down.

I have another sense of chatting with my neighbors, comparing notes and saying hi and whatever else might be done in such situations. If anything it was a sign that I was starting to really feel more comfortable in different surroundings — besides such concert experiences, I think of lines on campus waiting to see movies or attend special events, like John Cleese picking up the Jack Benny Award, and similar conversations and situations. I can just remember the faces, just, the tones of voice and some of the subjects — the part of me that was always pretty social was starting to really feel like some sort of turning point had at last been reached.

This particular show by Murphy was one of a three night stand at the venue, with different opening acts each night. Thin White Rope opened one night, touring for Sack Full of Silver; in later years I learned how much of a missed opportunity that was, to have not caught them at that time. Exene Cervenka did another night, would have been fun, no question. It was Human Drama that night, though, and it was a powerful show — I think I had picked up their full debut Feel by then and while its utter melodrama, lyrically and in Johnny Indovina’s singing, went well over my limits of taking it fully seriously — nearly everything else’s he’s done since has been much more intriguing and enjoyable, under a number of band names and guises — no question that it was still compelling in its theatricality.

Theatrical is the only word to describe Murphy himself as well, and probably for the first time in a rock concert context I gained a sense of what it was like to see a ‘performance’ in a broad sense of the word. But for me it was compounded by the unusual angle I was looking at the stage from — the rows of heads in front of me on the balcony that were nearby, then a gap more sensed than seen, then Murphy himself, observed from a somewhat high angle. Combined with his all-black outfit and his then-blonde hair, it almost hinted at the expressionistic, not quite Dr. Caligari but perhaps not so far removed. His backing band did a fine job but they’re just shadows in the mind in comparison, unsurprisingly.

Two moments stand out — the first was a break between the songs when Peter acknowledged what were some of the more intense female screams from the crowd. By that time I think I’d heard similar examples from the Bauhaus days on live tracks and read his amusement in an interview from that time at being described as ‘an alien sex god,’ so it wasn’t surprised that he worked with the whole spectacle in his own fashion, at one point offering up a chuckle, quick introductory comment and then an “OHMIGOD, PETER….AAAAAH!” in falsetto. Seeing how someone could both revel in the role and play it up a bit without missing a beat was something instructive.

The second was even funnier — at one point in the encore, he had an acoustic guitar on and started playing what turned out to be very familiar notes — David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” I remember thinking that this seemed a bit strange given all the constant Bowie comparisons he’d been alternately fighting against and working with throughout what I knew of his career. That made what happened all the more entertaining — the crowd was happily singing along, Murphy got to the “And may God’s love be with you” part…and then stopped, set aside the guitar and said something like “Well, that’s all I know.” Laughter and applause and into one or two more songs, I’m pretty sure.

I remembered thinking it was a pretty good show, and that it would be nice to see him again. As it turned out, this was an understatement.

Not Just the Ticket — #2, New Order, April 27, 1989

Then-current album: Technique

Opening act: Throwing Muses

Back of ticket ad: just a little message saying “TICKETMASTER. CHARGE BY PHONE.” And then two numbers. Rather stark, it must be said.

–

Clearer printing on this one, otherwise the same texturing and punched-into-the-coating quality. Kind of unremarkable given the non-ad on the back, sadly.

Things I only just realized today while thinking about this, number 1: I have a recording of this show. It was released as a bootleg called Decadance, featuring the entire show plus some other track recorded elsewhere that year, and somewhere along the line I got a basic enough lower-quality rip of it, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually listened to it. Maybe after I write this, but not quite now, that might make the memories too clear. As it is, looking over the tracklisting I’m almost disappointed to even get that verification — not so much for the tracks I remember as the ones I had forgotten. (Then again, perhaps I forgot those performances for a reason?)

Things I only just realized today while thinking about this, number 2: out of nowhere, a clear memory of an out of nowhere moment:

I was walking near Sproul Hall, my dorm residence that freshman year. I get the impression it was late January somehow, don’t ask me why that should stick but it does, maybe a little afterward. It would have been on the lower road whose name I’ve completely forgotten (sure, I could look it up as I could so many other things, but why?). Pretty sure I was alone, coming back from Westwood Village, probably having gone down there to shop for some CDs, unsurprisingly.

I passed by a group of other students walking in the opposite direction, perhaps out for a night on the town, all male and Asian or Asian-American I’m pretty sure. We didn’t notice each other beyond the fact that we were passing by, and they were all in casual conversation with each other, a bunch of guys out and about. I just remember as we passed each other that one of them, looking ahead and clearly not directing at me, but at the world at large or just for the hell of it, suddenly spoke-drawled-sang these words:

“You’re much too yooooung…”

I remember walking away thinking “Huh, wonder what that was.” It was only a little while later I mentally smacked my forehead and went “DUH.” It might well have been because I was listening to the very album it was from later that night, for all I know — the release date’s about right — but I’d already heard the song it was from anyway. Plenty of times.

New Order in high school were another pop band experience for me. “Bizarre Love Triangle” on regular pop radio rotation, then “Blue Monday” cropping up on one of those station’s ‘club night’ on Saturdays, then “True Faith” during my senior year and on MTV, Substance being played on friends’ Walkmen in between classes. This wasn’t through listening to stations like KROQ or 91X, I didn’t listen to those stations — that’s what my sister did. She was the one with the Pretty in Pink soundtrack, I was the one wondering what the heck I kept hearing over and over again through the closed door — like “Shellshock.” Eventually I fell hard and then Joy Division soon after and I starting piecing together the story and the progression of twelve years or so up to that point.

And so like I said I already knew what “Fine Time” was when I heard that guy sing that and the album followed hot on its heels and so when I heard they were playing I wanted to go. But therein another problem — I didn’t have anyone to go with, and I wasn’t too sure how to find them because I needed a ride and all.

Which in retrospect feels completely ridiculous to me — it had to have been at the time, because I definitely remember others in my dorm (hell, others on my dorm floor) talking about the show after it had happened and how great it was. Which it was but I’ll get to that — the point is that somehow I was still too clueless or too shy or too something to figure out who else was going or to get a ride. It’s a classic blank spot there, not something I think I’ve specifically wished out of existence, just something, again, ridiculous, utterly crazy. The more so because I do remember getting very, very antsy about something I would completely shrug off now, but at the time seemed like a foreign world to me:

If I was going to get to the show, well, I’d have to take a bus.

Looking back over twenty years plus of slow accumulation of figuring out public transportation, to the point where I’m not only utterly comfortable with it but can’t figure out why more people don’t take advantage of it, I have to keep in mind the still pretty insular, kind of unsure person I was having to take what seemed to me like a big step. It wasn’t like I could call up the Internet to figure out the MTA routes or anything. So with whatever resources I called on I determined that there were two lines I would need to take there and two back, and that they seemed to run late enough.

Getting to the show is all something of a blur, I just know I did, and this time around I was on the floor of the Universal, looking more or less directly at the stage. I don’t recall the Throwing Muses at all so I must have arrived after they’d performed — pity, but I ended up catching them some years later after Tanya had left, so I won’t complain too much; even one Kristin Hersh performance, solo or with a band, is much better than none. I ended up chatting a bit with the people sitting next to me — I think I was right on the aisle, which I remember thinking was convenient for getting out quickly, since I knew I’d have to make the proper connections back and I wasn’t into the idea of being stranded…somewhere, someplace.

I felt a gentle but seething energy in the room that was unlike what I’d felt at the Robert Plant show, something perhaps dictated by location (floor vs. balcony) and a different kind of anticipation. It’s hard to say, I don’t want to read too much into it through my own lens; then again New Order were that big for a lot of people then and there — their previous tour with Echo and the Bunnymen had been huge in the area, and only Depeche’s 101 show seemed to rival it in terms of people I knew who said they were there, so that had to be part of it. The eighties KROQ aesthetic via the UK was in some respected validated and perfected that year — Love and Rockets were about score a massive pop hit, the Cure were about to break huge, “Personal Jesus” came out that autumn — and New Order were part and parcel of it all.

The show is mostly colors in my mind, perhaps influenced by that amazing cover for Technique, perhaps simply a sense of how the songs should be (I can’t say I have synesthesia but it would be wondrous if so). Gillian had a purple shirt or blouse on, I recall — and I remember being surprised when they started up that she was on guitar, that in fact they were ripping into Technique‘s closing song “Dream Attack” as a rough, feedback-heavy blast, quite unlike the much more measured version on the album aside from that spindly guitar line, here given a much more prominent spot. Some very snobby (or snotty?) part of me was perversely amused and wondering how many people realized the band had ultimately started as a punk act. As if everyone there had to know something like “Warsaw” or the earlier demos, as if everyone had to care, as if it really mattered — still, not surprising I thought that way.

“Temptation” is what really still feels immediate and there from that show, the way the crowd reacted to it, the dancing, the singing along — everything really connected there, something bigger than oneself. If there’s a key vision, almost a stereotype, of New Order as the awkward voice amidst the slickness and the crowd while trying to be part of it as well, and how this tension plays out constantly — while it’s a different song under discussion I commend herjazz’s recent thoughts on the band to your attention — then perhaps I romantically thought of myself as the stereotype of the stereotype, if not in those terms, alone in a huge crowd. But I don’t remember feeling ‘alone’ then in that sense, I was just really, really loving this performance by this band I’d come to adore, the way the lights changed appropriately as Bernard sang “Oh you’ve got green eyes” and more.

I remember the encore, then I remember later asking the bus driver as I got on to see if he could announce the intersection I needed to get off at to make my connection, which he did. I remember sitting at a bus stop in a bright enough light, looking around whatever intersection with Sunset in the Hollywood area it was, probably wide-eyed, feeling a touch nervous. Sure I was sheltered, I’ve never denied that, after all. But it was definitely more than that, a sense of being out of a very specific comfort zone — at the same time, again, I can’t overdramatize it, but then again, I was alone and it was late at night, so hey. And I made the connection and got back to my dorm room and life continued on. Though I sure hope I didn’t have an early class the next morning, I would have been a wreck…actually, was that the quarter I took four classes? Including the one on Russian science fiction? Maybe?

Now to see if this recording I have matches the memories at all. (Later: Turns out “Dream Attack” isn’t all that much different from the album version. Is it the mix, is it the recording, or is it just me?)

My beautiful morning

Sure it was a return to work and all but I gotta say:

That made the walk in from the bus stop more than slightly worth it. Happy New Year indeed, once more.

Not Just the Ticket — #1, Robert Plant, Nov. 30, 1988

Then-current album: Now and Zen

Opening act: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Back of ticket ad: KJOI 99 FM, “the joy of Southern California,” black lettering on white background, with a palm tree located in the center of the O. It apparently broadcast ‘beautiful music,’ and is now KYSR.

–

The first Ticketmaster ticket I specifically saved, though the repeat info to the left of the main part has been torn off as well as the basic entry section to the right, regularly removed whenever such a ticket was presented to admissions staff. Like all first experiences the appearance of the ticket set a certain level of expectation — though of course I had to have seen such tickets already. Whatever the origin point, for me tickets were ‘this’ size and shape, had these colors, had their information printed directly onto the light coated stock paper with an equivalent of a typewriting machine. You can just see the lettering indented into the ticket face, not strong enough to show up on the other side, but deep enough to be noticeable. The hole up there under the 27 is where it was pinned to the bulletin board, a familiar feature that will recur with each ticket.

I’ve previously mentioned my classic rock phase of late high school, when I started getting into — and within a few months, getting bored with — the rituals of hearing certain songs by certain artists played over and over to the point of familiarity, then numbness. This wasn’t new for me at all — I already knew the routines of top 40, but top 40, for all that it was glacial, also still changed. Old songs fell off the chart and out of rotation, new ones took their place, new and unfamiliar bands appeared, or maybe older names first being introduced to me as a listener. Classic rock in contrast was cossetted, static, an endless locked loop. Some light crept in from time to time — and in fact the station I listened to there in Coronado was a little more adventurous than most, introducing things like R.E.M. and Love and Rockets and, via their Sunday night metal show, Metallica and other similarly inclined bands to their otherwise stultifying rotation. So even if it wasn’t all bad, it was still representative of a phase I was happy to have, then happy to leave when it had served its purpose for as a musical education for a time, a place, a mindset.

Led Zeppelin was part of all that, unsurprisingly, and for the first time I started actually buying their albums, collecting them all over the course of the calendar year of 1988. But I’d already known Robert Plant’s solo work — like a slew of people in my age and place, that’s probably how I first heard of both Plant and Zeppelin. The death of John Bonham, the very existence of Zeppelin, was a completely unknown thing to me growing up, but I do remember listening to top 40 in upstate New York and hearing “Big Log” and then “In the Mood” over the course of a few months, being entranced by their easy, intricate flow, the odd lope of the former, the synth breakdown and guitar figures of the latter, Plant’s voice a bit unusual to my ears, not unattractive, still odd.

The indulgence of the Honeydrippers followed that — I admit I still probably like their version of “Sea of Love” more than the original, however coached by nostalgia and memory — and I also remember the odd, squiggly paranoia of “Little by Little” on the air in California, again all through top 40. Plant was a regular pop artist to me by then, though I’d started to hear more about this other band he’d been in. By the time of Now and Zen, sold as his ‘return to Led Zep’ roots and the first album of his I’d actually bothered to buy, he was an oldies artist to me, but in the same sense that Duran Duran was that year with “All She Wants Is,” coming back and making me think of already distant times years and thousands of miles and an adolescence away.

I’m not too sure if I’d have gone to this show, though, were it not for another reason — for the first time I was going to a show not with family members or a larger group, but with one other person on a date. Her name was Jackie (or at least that’s how it was pronounced), a UCLA student like me, from the Central Valley, Latina in background. I remember her being friendly, exuberant, funny; we’d struck up a conversation due to our being in a class together, a big poli sci course I think. A friend of hers was also part of our group but I sadly admit I don’t remember her as well.

Who knows how it all came together, if I’d noticed he was coming, if she had mentioned it first — I vaguely remember her being a big classic rock fan herself, so there was definite mutual musical interest at least. I’m honestly not even sure if we just went dutch or if I bought both tickets. The show had already been on sale for a while so we ended up over to the side of the balcony, the venue having mostly sold out by that point. I do remember the drive over, though — me being my nondriving self, we were in her car, and at some point it stalled completely on a side street somewhere, maybe even near a highway turnoff. Pre-widespread cell phone use to summon help, we might well have been in a tough situation but after some minutes she got it fired up again and off we went.

Years and years before I’d been to Universal Studios with my family, so this was a return in some sense, but the Ampitheatre I’d never been to, and I knew nothing of its previous incarnation as an open-air venue. This would also have been well before the development of Citywalk as a sanitized open-air main-street mall, so we’d've parked and walked for a bit to actual get over to the Ampitheatre itself, but there’s no memory about any of that at all in my head — in fact the next thing I clearly remember is Joan Jett, doing a song that wasn’t hers.

Then again, Jett’s always had a good line in that approach. Like Plant, she was already something of an oldies artist to me, though at an even deeper remove — “I Love Rock and Roll” was one of the first songs I specifically remember from my earliest phase of top 40 listening, in 1981-82 in Coronado, after having received my first personal radio that I would listen to deep into the night when I could. Great, great stuff, then and now, a deservedly huge hit, while her take on the stately pomp of “Crimson and Clover” similarly caught my ear, and some years later there was the remake of “Everyday People” and, well, I could go on. (My knowledge of the Runaways during all this time = none. My knowledge at the time of this show = vague.)

Perched up in the balcony, seeing the show at an almost sidelong angle, I just remember this one song that had a big, insistent riff, that she was singing to with controlled cool. I was a bit confused by the lyrics, though, wasn’t too sure I’d heard that right — Jackie must not have known either, since I recall that some time later I was talking about the show to my coworker at the SRLF library at UCLA, Jon, and mentioned the song to him. “‘I Wanna Be Your Dog?’ Yeah, that’s the Stooges!” “Oh, okay, I’ve heard of them, I’m pretty sure…”

And Plant? The crowd lapped it all up and he and his band did their thing and I think it all went down well — for me, the sense of the crowd didn’t extend to any of our immediate neighbors, in fact I don’t even remember them at all. It was almost like there was just us up in the balcony and a big massed crowd down front, though we certainly couldn’t have been the only ones up there. But the mind plays these kind of tricks, and it seemed all the roars of recognition for the Led Zeppelin songs he was playing for the first time since the band’s demise, one-off reunions aside, were down there, somewhere, beyond the darkened edge of the balcony, in the faces of those on the floor lit in the reflected glow of the stage lights.

The two songs I remember clearly were a medley of the start of “In the Light” leading into “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” — two of my favorite songs still by Zeppelin so that’s all right — and a really nice version of “Big Log” that I’m pretty sure turned up in the encore, something that stuck with me probably because it was one of those ‘early’ songs for me, something already part of a convoluted backstory of other songs and other times. Otherwise I mostly think of Plant’s long blonde waves in the stagelights, his general affability (honed by years of experience dealing with all sorts of crowds, doubtless) and one odd, wonderful moment. Flourescent glowsticks had long been a rage that decade, even before rave culture repurposed them further. At some point, in between songs someone chucked one of them from out of the crowd towards the stage. I remember tracing the arc with my eyes as Plant noticed it as well. Pausing in whatever he was saying, he realized it was going to go over his head — and then made a perfect leap and one-handed catch, snatching the glowstick out of the air and landing solidly on his feet like he had just done a simple little hop. Plenty of applause and cheers for that one — who knows what the intent of the person pitching it up there had been, but Plant doubtless had dealt with worse there too, so why not grab a glowstick for the hell of it?

That’s about all I can recall, and based on the date of the show that would have been one of the last times I saw Jackie too — the quarter ended soon thereafter and for whatever reason we ended up not staying in touch, though we saw each other once or twice around on campus since that point, exchanging hellos with a smile. I guess it was all more of a ‘friend date’ than anything else in the end, but hey, that’s life for you.

Not Just the Ticket…before the tickets

My preamble to the whole series was the other day, the first real entry as such will be tomorrow — but even though I don’t have any tickets saved from before that time, I do have some memories.

–

Untangling the whole idea of where and how I learned about ‘music’ in a broad sense would be the subject for another essay at another time. Learning about the idea of concerts, of going to the show, is no less tangled — I have no sense of it at all, of exactly where the idea of that kind of event and what it might involve first became any sort of concrete vision in my head. Being born in 1971, I had most of the decade to reach a certain point so I suppose I had figured out something by the time I got a third album by my earliest rock god as such — Shaun Cassidy. Having loved (and played to death) a couple of earlier studio albums by him, my nine or ten year old self was utterly thrilled to get the live album he put out, featuring him in a sorta-but-not-really-Frampton-like pose on the cover and with various photographs indicating that he was indeed on a stage and there were lights and he was doing moves and so forth. I had other live albums as such before then, I recall — performances for kids by entertainers, some 50s/60s folk figures or the like — but this was the first dim sense somehow that there was this big production involved, with all sorts of unnecessary characters to my mind (ie, Cassidy’s backing band, duly identified on the sleeve with their own small photos and credits but otherwise rightly anonymous because I didn’t know and care about them — why should I?).

As time passed I saw more evidence of this thanks to clips on TV or variety shows or more, that there was something beyond simply performing on a studio set, that another…world, perhaps, existed. I was pretty adept at creating all sorts of ideas in my head as to what these shows were ‘really’ like, and the concept of live performances based on the recordings I heard and the clips I saw grew further thanks to a series of shows that HBO ran in the early eighties. Keep in mind that MTV came along a little later for me — our family didn’t get it regularly until 1985 — so HBO’s own video jukebox shows and special event programming was actually more of a resource for me beyond the radio. I remember concert specials by Donna Summer, Olivia Newton-John, Men at Work, at least a couple of others. Meanwhile I’d also seen plenty of tour shirts over time as well once I’d hit middle school, thanks mostly to what the high schoolers were wearing on the shared campuses at both Coronado and Saratoga Springs — Cheap Trick and the Rolling Stones were the two big ones I remember.

By the time 1984 rolled around, I was thirteen, classically awkward on any number of fronts, a complete top 40 obsessive going into three years of active chart following and dying to finally ‘see a show.’ I was two years in to the family’s stay in Saratoga in upstate New York, and among the many institutions of the town — a classic resort spot that exploded in population and events in summer and then drowsily made its way through the rest of the year — was SPAC, a combination indoor/outdoor arena venue that hosted big events during said tourist season. It was (perhaps still is) the summer home of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York City Ballet, and any number of times my family went out to picnic on the grass area behind the seats, where I could lay out on a blanket under the stars and indulge in my passion for constellation-spotting as various familiar and unfamiliar classical pieces played. I saw a number of meteors during that time thanks to the Perseids, and at least once I saw a satellite — combined with the warm, often humid temperatures, the memories remain gently blissful.

But like I said, I wanted to see a show, and I heard ads all the time for rock concerts and the like being held at SPAC (I still remember a heavily reverbed voice announcing that “YES-ES-ES-ES!” was playing, the band then riding high on its 90125 sales). I already knew my parents had seen acts there — shortly after we arrived in Saratoga in 1982 they’d gone and seen Air Supply, which made me a little jealous as I happened to like them quite a lot (even had their greatest hits album when it came out a couple of years later). A year or two after that they also saw Paul Simon with, I think, David Brenner opening, and there might have been something else in there too, I’m not sure. There was also a bit of a to-do when the Grateful Dead came through, leading to me learning about Deadheads and the like for the first time, though my parents very definitely did NOT go to that show. As for me, though, nothing as yet — but 1984 was the year of change.

I’m not sure about something, though — I’m not sure whether I wanted to see the show I did because I really wanted to see the band, or because I just wanted to see a show. I’m pretty sure it was the former reason, since there were other shows I could have easily picked given the concert calendar, and either through ads or through talk at school or something I knew this band were performing and I had probably heard about who the opening act was as well — and I’d liked what I’d heard by them too. Maybe I asked, maybe I wheedled a bit, maybe I saved up allowance money, I have no idea, but the tickets were bought, the time rolled around and there I was, off to my first ever rock concert, my dad going with me (my mom rather understandably begged off), all pumped up with energy. Off to see, on the coattails of their big album that year Tour de Force, none other than .38 Special. With Night Ranger opening.

I’ve played that first concert story detail for laughs plenty of times over the years, especially since I know so many folks who have first concert experiences I would have killed for — friend Mackro’s first show was a late eighties Skinny Puppy performance, for instance. I still chuckle a bit over it as well. But you know, to heck with that — I was who I was, where I was, in the time I was growing up, and by god I was finally getting to see a rock show and it wasn’t like I didn’t know either of the bands, that was the point. They had hits on the radio — .38 Special’s were “If I’d Been the One” and “Back Where You Belong,” while Night Ranger had to have had “Sister Christian” on the air at that point, though I’m pretty sure I knew them more for “(You Can Still) Rock in America” at that point — and they were therefore pop acts, straight up. I didn’t know about Lynyrd Skynyrd or ‘classic rock’ as such, so any sort of cultural context on that front was lost on me. I just wanted to see the show.

The exact memories of that show are miniscule. I remember some guy running out on the stage and enthusiastically introducing Night Ranger to the crowd — I know the sun hadn’t set yet, still light in the sky even though we were actually in the seated area for once. I remember being impressed by the fact that .38 Special had two drummers, that the lead singer dashed about on stage, that there was a laser-light show that broke out near the end of the concert. I vaguely remember standing up at plenty of points when the ‘big’ songs were played and everyone stood up, including my dad and our two neighbors in the seats next to us, a fellow Navy officer and his wife — I hadn’t realized at all that they would be coming along, and obviously the tickets had been purchased together, but somehow I got it in my head that we had somehow coincidentally ended up all sitting together.

I remember two other things in particular — I kept wondering what in the world it was I was smelling during the course of the show. It was a strange odor, it wasn’t cigarette smoke, but I had no idea what it was or where it was coming from. (Trust me, folks, it wasn’t from my dad, who didn’t smoke anything at all to start with.) I’m sure if we had ended up sitting in the lawn section it would have been perfectly clear — in fact that’s probably why we weren’t sitting there — and I had to have asked my dad at least once what it all was. Time and experience at many similar concerts cleared up that question easily enough but for then it was the great mystery.

I also remember a great parking lot incident — I forget which of the two cars we drove over to the show in, probably the station wagon, but both of them had California plates and had been taken across the country. As we parked and locked the car, some guy in a bunch of teenagers or people in their early twenties looked at us with surprise and admiration and said — quite earnestly, no irony at all — “Wow, did you guys come out from California for this show? That’s dedication!” Again, time would make something like this a little less surprising to me — and after all, after the Grateful Dead visit, who among local showgoers wouldn’t be surprised at people turning up from far afield?

The overall atmosphere, the sense in my head, was the feeling that shows were fun, that big shows were entertaining. I had a great time, for all that barely any of it sticks with me (including nearly all the songs) — the performances went without a hitch, I didn’t have any sense of threat or anything going weird or wrong, I don’t recall dealing with any aggressive characters or anyone obviously drunk or stoned, there wasn’t anyone right behind me yelling along to all the lyrics, there wasn’t someone annoyingly tall right in front of me blocking my view. The going-on-ninth-grade Boy Scout that I literally was enjoyed it all, and it felt right, for lack of a better term. This was what rock and roll was surely all about to my mind, big huge shows by big huge bands, roars from the crowd, everyone having fun. Friends of mine in later years have often mentioned how they never felt comfortable at arena shows — too distant, too alienating, or else otherwise pointless — but they’ve always made sense to me, they’re my baseline for shows, really, and I have nothing but good memories associated with that first ‘real’ example of one.

Well, except for not being able to hear anything the following couple of days, admittedly.

Some months later my dad and I went to another show, only this time it was a case where we both definitely wanted to go. I’d been a fan of Hall and Oates for some years at that point — turned out my dad really enjoyed them as well, and probably both for the same reasons: they were really, really damned good, absolute masters of killer radio singles for a long stretch of years there. I’d locked into them with the run of singles at the start of the decade like “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do),” “You Make My Dreams Come True,” “Private Eyes” and so forth, and by the time 1984 rolled around they were unknowingly on the verge of wrapping up their absolute commercial domination, having released another pretty massive album courtesy of Big Bam Boom, with Band Aid guest appearances, the hit Paul Young remake of “Everytime You Go Away” and their Live Aid (and live album) appearances with Eddie Ruffin and David Kendricks all forthcoming in the following year. I don’t remember if my dad made the offer to me or I’d asked him or whatever, but sometime in late 1984 off we went to see them, only this time to a hockey arena further north in Great Falls, near the southern tip of Lake Champlain.

The impressions from this one are more haphazard but again essentially positive — having done my first outdoor arena show, now I could do my first indoor one, which probably explained why it was even louder there (though this time around I had earplugs, thoughtfully provided by my dad). I only just remember the opening band Xavion, a bunch of Prince-obsessed types who I had thought I had only imagined until I read the entry on them in Chuck Eddy’s Stairway to Hell some years later — maybe one of these days I’ll track down their one album, but in the meantime here’s “Eat Your Heart Out”, which should rightly qualify somewhere as an undeservedly forgotten song from the time — and about all I recall of Hall and Oates themselves was Hall’s mane of blonde hair and their own version of ‘well we’ve hit the big time so I guess this happens.’ I forget what song but during the guitar solo part — performed by G. E. Smith, finishing up his own lengthy stint with the group before landing the Saturday Night Live spot — a platform rose out of the fog machined depths and there was Smith on top of this huge column, noodling and riffing away. It got a huge cheer, I remember that much, and much like some of the .38 Special show, a lot of what seems ridiculous in retrospect made sense right then and there. Of COURSE there’d be something like that, of COURSE we’d all love it — it wasn’t something to question or look at askance in my experience, it all seemed correct, proper somehow.

Again, to return to baselines a bit — I have no doubt I was surprised by the moment when it happened, it was meant to do that to at least some extent, even as the fact that it existed to start with didn’t. Yet somehow I’d already been primed for this, ready for surprise and still surprised, a weird sort of double impact. It reminds me of what Gary Numan mentions when he says the thing he most remembered about his earliest musical encounter, seeing Cliff Richard and the Shadows on TV, was the sparkle of lights off of Hank Marvin’s guitar — or to draw on my own experience, seeing Star Wars on its first run in 1977 when I was six and being amazed by the razzle-dazzle but simultaneously uncritically accepting it as something that should always happen. This is a movie, movies can do this, therefore movies must do this, to oversimplify. This is an arena rock show, arena rock shows can do this, therefore arena rock shows must do this. It says something that I can remember nothing else about the actual performance but that.

There was one other thing I do remember from that show, though — it’s where I got my first concert T-shirt, which I held on to at least through the rest of high school, I’m pretty sure. As anyone who knows me well can verify, I’m rather fond of my tour shirts, though obviously this was only one shirt among many others I had at this point, from Izods to (when I got back to California) random surf shirts or two. I do remember being jealous of a friend who had seen the .38 Special show who had a shirt from said concert, though, and that probably prompted me asking if I could have one of my own — so if my dad had bought that for me as opposed to me buying it with allowance money, then hey, thanks! From that point forward I was pretty well taken with the idea that one had to have a shirt after seeing a show — another little cultural requirement that was really just an assumption, but again fit with my own experiences of seeing shirts around like that.

But that said, I didn’t see another show for almost four years after that. A few months after the Hall and Oates show we returned to California, and for the rest of high school while my musical tastes continued to twist and turn, I don’t recall — at all — any point where there was a show in San Diego that I just had to see. Not one single memory beyond, vaguely, the impression that Def Leppard must have come through at some point on the Hysteria show — and if they did then I definitely regret missing that, much as I love said band and album still to this day. My mind was full of many other things, other interests, not least of which was the all important task of surviving high school and dealing with a creeping disaffection that was relieved by graduating from it and moving on with life.

By that time, in 1988, I was working through the last part of my year long classic rock phase, buying loads of CDs for the first time, fully discovering Depeche Mode (a little too late to figure out that I really should have gone to the 101 show, alas — and I knew people who went!) and enjoying, among other acts, Sting. A bit like Hall and Oates for me, Sting, thanks to the Police — similar radio omnipresence thanks to a string of killer singles that sounded great up through 1983-84, easily sliding over into his solo career as well. Pretty sure I had not only picked up …Nothing Like the Sun but …Nadie Como El Sol, his Spanish-language EP rerecordings of some songs from that, and had at least one poster around. Then of course there was the sense of vaguely literary pretensions that didn’t hurt the proto-English major I was, of course. “Hey, he named the album after a line from Shakespeare!” (I still wasn’t sure who Nabokov was then.)

At that point he was one of those acts that seemingly everyone liked, at least in my experience. It was certainly the case with everyone down at Perkins’ Book Store in Coronado, an easy ten to fifteen minute walk from my house, where I not only purchased books but records, thanks to the small section in the back dedicated to just that. I got along very well with all the staff clerks — all very friendly and all female, for what it’s worth, given the eternal stereotype of what record store employees are supposedly like — and that spring of 1988 somehow or other a bunch of us decided in a heap to go see his show at the small outdoor stadium at one of the local colleges to the inland of the coast. I remember going over to the apartment where one of them, an Australian woman, lived in town and chatting away before a party of about five or so set out for the show.

There’s even less I could say about this show as a show. It was a warm evening out in the almost desert, I sat up in the stands though it was all general admission and watched the stage in comfort with a couple of other folks from our group while the rest headed down the front in what seemed to me like a pretty big crowd milling around. Steel Pulse opened and so I first learned what bass could really sound like through the right soundsystem (pretty damned overwhelming), and Sting was, well, Sting, delivering both solo and Police songs with the expected jazz-tinged pop-friendly etc. thing that he made his name with.

Again, only moments stick — he did “Fragile” all in Spanish, which got a big reaction from the crowd, which I remember being heavily Latino — not surprising at all given that it was San Diego and right near Tijuana, and especially not given that he and the Police had just as much of a reputation in Mexico and, as I later discovered, throughout the rest of the hemisphere as he had in the US then. Towards the end of the show he did what seemed to me like another typical thing that rock stars were supposed to do — take off his shirt and show off his chest. It got a lot of female cheering and my compatriots from the bookstore weren’t unappreciative.

But once more I’d had what was a gently positive time out — with people I was friends with, in good weather, an upbeat show from an artist I liked, relaxed and able to see it all in comfort. Even the whole aspect of seeing someone at a relative distance, the small figure on the stage, wasn’t too surprising to me at all by now, it just seemed expected, par for the course. It also brings home just how much, by the end of high school, my musical life was defined almost entirely by mediation — via records, tapes, CDs, videos, TV appearances. The sense of wanting to see someone live had obviously had its impact on me, but the fact that I attended so few rock or pop or any sort of shows like that, and the fact that I barely can sense any sort of feeling that I had missed much as a result of that, says a lot about how I perceived music and likely still do, as much a product of that formative time as anything — that the recording still has a certain cachet over the live performance, that ultimately it is what I value the most.

Doubtless in part this is due to its solitary possibilities — you can listen to songs on your own or with others, but at concerts there’s likely going to always be someone else there (there are of course always exceptions, as any number of bands can tell you). The part of me that is happily and utterly content to be curled up with a book, writing away quietly as I am now, cooking in the kitchen — that part of me doesn’t need shows, and certainly didn’t seem to need them then. Looking back of course I can sense the many what-might-have-beens — what shows did I miss? Were there any local acts of interest or touring bands playing college or club circuits in Saratoga and Coronado that I would kick myself now for having missed? (But then again, would I have even been aware of them then? My listening habits and my sporadic means of finding out information while dealing with a lot of other things in life were what they were — so while many years later I deeply, deeply regretted having missed the Chameleons’ San Diego appearance for Strange Times, I also know that there was almost no way I would have even noticed that show being announced, or even who the band was. Sure, I could be annoyed at my past self, but I certainly wasn’t surprised by said self either.)

In any event, there I was, and there I was again a few months later, now off to UCLA as a college freshman, meeting many new people, settling into dorm life, wandering down to record stores in Westwood, talking and learning and observing (‘Gee, did EVERYONE on my floor go to that Depeche Mode show at the Rose Bowl?’). It was fall of 1988, I still wasn’t even eighteen yet, and though I don’t think I consciously had any idea that another show would soon be on the cards, I wasn’t surprised when it did finally happen.

Announcing Not Just the Ticket

It’s a good day for announcing various new projects — Tom Ewing’s started up another one worth your attention, It Took Seconds, for instance. And as he says there, “this blog project – which, like all blog projects, is as likely to fail as finish – is based on a very simple idea.” Since that could just as easily describe my own new project, keep that sentence in mind, especially the ‘as likely to fail’ part.

Not Just the Ticket is the first of three projects I hope to launch this year — this is the easiest to get going so I’m starting it now, in large part to act as a writing prompt for me for the new year. Call it as close to a resolution without actually being one, though I am going to aim at a generally set schedule of one per weekday — I will allow myself weekends off, though, at least for now (then there’s vacation and etc. — point being, pacing is something which I’ve learned through experience is just as important for self-directed projects as it is when you’re working following another guideline).

The general inspirations of Not Just the Ticket more or less come courtesy of two writers and their examples of making blog projects work — Tom Ewing is one, thanks to the success of Popular in particular, and Christopher R. Weingarten is the other due to his 1000TimesYes effort on Twitter last year. But the goal of Not Just the Ticket really doesn’t claim to follow directly in either of their footsteps, most importantly because it’s not as wide-ranging as either of them — Popular thrives on the function of the UK charts over decades, 1000TimesYes addressed a broad swathe of new albums released over 2009. Not Just the Ticket draws on one specific path of listening and life, an accounting stretching over twenty years of time.

So having said all that, I should explain exactly what it is.

—

In my apartment, all I have to do is look around and see things that I’ve literally had all of my life, or at least my conscious memory. There’s a small bookcase right next to my desk that now holds DVDs and a few last VHS tapes, while in my bedroom is a dresser; both of them were in my bedroom as a three or four year old boy in Hawaii. Meanwhile, under the bed (which is far newer, I should say) is a now empty bulletin board that was also in that room and which hung on the wall of nearly all the places I lived before I came to this apartment — it too was in that Hawaii room, and there’s still a couple of marks on it from where I scribbled with chalk back then, or shortly thereafter. It’s boxed up under the bed now because when I moved in there wasn’t any room to put up the bulletin board — a basic cork affair with red metal framing, shaped like a much larger piece of 8 1/2″ by 11″ paper with the longer sides at the top and bottom.

Various things were attached and pinned up and posted on it over the years, photos, pictures, scribblings, but starting in 1988 it also started holding something that eventually took over the whole bulletin board — tickets from shows I attended, specifically basic old Ticketmaster stubs, uniformly sized and therefore easily arranged to fill up the entire board over time. When it was full, I started maintaining a separate stash of tickets in a desk drawer, but the original spree of tickets continued to sit up on the board.

I suppose it was the music geek equivalent of the trophy collection for athletes or hunters or whatever, some sort of ‘hey look at this!’ calling card. Another manifestation of a list impulse, some kind of validation, who knows. But it was also fun to look over them, think back on certain shows and memories.

Anyway, the board itself had been packed away for some years, while newer tickets kept accumulating in my desk. A couple of months back, as I drew towards the end of my main archiving project of all the CDs, I started getting a bit of a very early spring cleaning itch and started cleaning out a lot of unnecessary stuff and junk in my desk and elsewhere in storage in the apartment — still an ongoing process but I’ve already seen a lot of difference. Somewhere along the way I organized all the loose tickets, wondered where all the old tickets were, and finally found the bulletin board packed away with all those tickets still attached to them by pins. Some while of sorting later, I had a nice little rubberbanded pile of tickets a couple of inches thick sitting up on a shelf in my closet, where they sit now.

Around this time I was still figuring out what to do once the overall music archiving project was complete — and it’s not quite done yet but I’m definitely well into the final stretch — and a couple of specific ideas were prompted by that which will play out later this year. Somehow I got the part-and-parcel idea of doing something with the tickets as well, since in the act of organizing them and looking them over, they all seemed like such curious artifacts in some way — both for what they stood for and also in and of themselves. There’s a vague romanticism in my head that lingers over these things as so many shows now rely on tickets that are created by home printers or on lists printed out at the door of the venue or the like — a romanticism that actually irritates me because it mistakes a necessary creation of the time and place for what something must ‘always’ be (see also: classic rock, vinyl fetishism, etc., but those are well trodden grounds). Also there’s that sense of simply recreating the ‘trophy’ impulse mentioned earlier, and finally — and perhaps most pointedly, especially given my forthcoming Stylus revival essay, now due to run with the rest of the overall effort on Monday — there’s an inevitable sense of wallowing in nostalgia again, not the healthiest of mental modes.

With these caveats in mind, though, there’s still something I wanted to try with all these things. So a few weeks back I went ahead and scanned them all for this project, the visual cue for each piece as it appears. What each piece will be won’t be some sort of accounting of the show in a strict factual sense, ie, the amount of tickets sold, the exact set list, stuff like that. For some of these shows that information is out there and lovingly collated by dedicated fans, for others at most any specific, ‘real’ information would be a long lost shrug and vague detail for all participants from band members to bouncers and bartenders on duty that night.

Each piece instead will be…something else. I’m still not sure exactly what, part biography, part music discussion, part refracted memory, part an analysis of the trick of memory. Part of me is deeply suspicious of the idea of this simply being ‘shows that I’ve seen part 4331′ or whatever, though inevitably the course of this project will make that lens the easiest to view it through. (Also, keep in mind that not every show I’ve seen has such a ticket attached to the memories — but I’ll occasionally step out of the flow of the tickets to note a show here or there that I know I attended but lack any ticket of any sort for.) Ultimately this will be a story of impressions, a history of afterechoes, something that focuses on the fact that artifacts like these tickets stamp times and dates very specifically when so much of the past becomes this overlapping flow of memories and emotions and ideas.

I’ll begin the formal pieces on Monday with a one-a-weekday goal as mentioned, but Sunday I’ll begin with an introductory piece that hopefully will set something of the tone of the whole effort. But who knows where it will all lead? I’m not sure myself — and that may be why I’m writing this.

All thoughts and feedback will be welcome. I hope those who do read it find it of interest.