Last Friday, somebody posted two Indigo Girls tickets to the forsale list at work, for Wednesday night, in Berkeley. This is perfect, because I can get to the BART on the (work provided) shuttle, stay at Megan's house, and get back to work the same way the next morning. So of course I jumped to get the tickets before somebody else did.

Only problem was, Megan didn't want to go. This made me mad, which forces me to admit that concerts like this are not really optional with me. Just like going to plays and the occasional opera is not really optional with her. I don't want to make her go, I want her to want to go. A certain recent prospective girlfriend was dead in the water after passing up a similar last-minute opportunity to go to the Ditty Bops.

But Megan was (mostly) spared from fighting about this one because it occurred to me that her friend Heidi would almost certainly want to go. Which she did, and Megan stayed home to make food for this other friend that recently had a baby. When I got to the show, I found out that in fact all of Megan's Berkeley friends were there. Including the one she though she had to make food for. Wah waah.

So this is how it comes to seem like a good idea, being home alone and chained to the computer again, to do this little project.

An Abridged, and Self-Servingly Edited, History of Concert Tickets

	The band that played at Pomona during my freshman year was Third Eye Blind. This was about the height of their popularity, but, nonetheless, they sucked. The opening band was Eve 6, also surfing the wonder of their one hit, and they were better. I went with my sponsor group, a bunch of friends that lasted about as long as those two bands.
	Something possessed me to go to the orchestra. (Ok, something's name was Mary.) I remember only one thing, which is that some snotty Pomona guy took pains to correct me when I referred to Also sprach Zarathustra as the song "from" 2001. Yes, jerk, I am aware that it wasn't written specifically for the movie. I was speaking colloquially.
	The World Sacred Music Festival was an odd thing that featured the Dalai Lama and Crystal Method. I think I went with Anna, because I think I remember her driving to the Hollywood Bowl. I also remember being mad at Julia who not only bailed out of going at the last minute, but never paid for her ticket, which went to waste. Which is why it hasn't been torn off, as you see here...
	Another Big Bridges concert was this Lisa Loeb and Duncan Sheik. I have no memory of Duncan Sheik at all, but Lisa Loeb was pretty enjoyable. I probably went to this with Christina.
	This is the first time I went to the Indigo Girls. They rocked more in those days, and had a whole band and lights and stuff. I went with a girl named Jill who lived upstairs and hung around a good bit and was despised by the likes of Caitlin and Desiree. Once we were there, we ran into Desiree and her roommate Laura.
	So far this is the only Phish concert I have actually been to, but that should be remedied this summer. Went with Janel (yes, from high school) and Laura/Alexa. Which I can be sure of because this was the first concert to take place after I got a digital camera.
	And this was the first of at least four Barenaked Ladies concerts. Desiree was there, and the new album that annoyed me by containing a lot of songs I didn't know was Maroon.
	Cake was also awesome, also with Desiree. This would seem to have been a good year for concerts. In point of fact we saw Cake on Sunset Strip with the gold marquees and stupid band names. The Cake dude, whose name I have just had to look up and is John McCrea, wears a baseball hat and looks like a truck driver. This means he looks like I think Dave Matthews sounds. The reverse is also true.
	Eagle Eye Cherry wasn't all that. But living in LA, there were like six clubs that were playing some smaller-name band like this (but that you have heard of) every night of the week for like $10.
	It seems unlikely that this was the first Dave Matthews concert, but it's the first one whose ticket stub survived. For several years I went to every one of these with Alice, which was three or four at least.
	Bet you didn't see this one coming. Alice had to cover this concert for the magazine she worked for at the time, and her other friends didn't want to go to Britney Spears for some reason. True fact, nearly everybody at a Britney Spears concert is either: a gay man a girl between the age of 12 and 16 a woman over 35. Some of these are the mothers of #2, but by no means all of them.
	Dave Matthews with Alice again, of course.
	The only non-concert exception on this list, also the only time I have gone to a big auditorium to see a comedian, which was kind of weird. I think there was a warm-up comic who was just as forgettable as the usual opening band. Went with Bi Ji, who was a big fan.
	I had to think about this one for a long time before I could remember it at all. Now I remember that they sang Christmas songs along with some kind of local grade-school chorus as their opening act. Bi Ji and Alice were there. Can't remember much because it was just a month before I moved here, which puts it solidly in an Eternal Sunshine blackout period. Honestly I have no idea if Old Whats-Her-Name was there or not.
	Here I was, barely six weeks after moving to the Google and I responded to a random post from somebody who had one extra ticket for Belle and Sebastian, first class sad bastard music. I went with some people that I had never met and never saw again. I would never ever do that now, of course, but more interesting is the fact that nobody would do that now. The Google was a lot different then, with "only" 5000 employees and another 100 moving in to Mountain View every week.
	Probably the last Dave Matthews concert; Alice came here to Mountain View for it. We kind of agreed that it was enough Dave Matthews for a while. Nothing else has come along to replace it yet.
	Don't know MC Lars? You must not be keeping up with the latest in "nerdcore rap," which is perhaps a little bit of a niche market. It was weird and obviously backwards to give MC Lars top billing over MC Frontalot, who was also there, and much better. (Opening act, Optimus Rhyme. You have to admit that rappers named MC Frontalot and Optimus Rhyme are probably awesome.) But MC Lars's one song was popular on the radio at the time. Crutcher, Theresa, and Jenny were there. Jenny thought the rapper was named McLars, which she will never, ever hear the last of. Just like I was relentlessly mocked in the sixth grade for having once read C+C Music Factory as "C plus C."
	At last, the Indigo Girls concert that started this whole entry. As previously mentioned, I wanted to go and Megan did not, which probably makes us the only male-female couple so oriented in the history of Indigo Girls concerts. (Hint: Few of the couples at Indigo Girls concerts contain any male representation at all.)

Wow, that took forever to finish. I was on call for the last two weeks and still didn't get around to it. Actually the truth is that I got to the first Barenaked Ladies entry and got stuck for a long time. By some accident of timing, all Barenaked Ladies concerts have come just before some kind of traumatic upheaval for me, which leaves me unwilling to write about what I remember, and unwilling to delete all of them completely. (And it makes me sad to read now that Steve Page has quit the band, which means this tradition won't be broken.) In the end I dealt with it as I usually do on here, by writing in code. When I read it a long time from now, I will know what I meant. Yes I know, it's a lot of work being me all the time.

27 May 2009 00:06 PT - persistent link - trackback - 6 comments