To all the concerts I imagined as a kid
And all the concerts that made me feel alive as an adult
In a recent conversation about live music, I only had a few minutes and I feel like I failed to express the depth of my longing.
Having written the previous sentence, I now realize how pretentious it sounds. I also realize how dreadful it might be for you, gentle reader, for me to say I now intend to plumb that depth with you in tow.
Consider yourself warned.
The nearest live music venue where I grew up was many hours and dollars away.
As a kid who ate up music magazines and MTV, and is still wanted for dues unpaid to the BMG and Columbia music organizations, I daydreamed about what it would be like to go to a concert.
In middle school, a classmate had an older brother who took him to see Aerosmith. They returned like astronauts from a Mars mission. I hung on every word he recounted of the experience - including the diagram he sketched on the back of his math homework to explain where Steven Tyler fell down behind the bass amps.
Not long after, my uncle saw Metallica and brought me a t-shirt. It was too small and the front graphic was crooked, but I wore that t-shirt until it was holey.
This was the same uncle who gave me a Christmas gift of Metallica’s Live Shit: Binge & Purge - a box set with three VHS tapes and three cassettes, all live shows from the …And Justice for All and Black Album tours.
I fell in love with live records and VHS tapes. Any cash for records went to live albums because they were rougher, louder and it felt like almost being there, almost.
U2’s Zoo TV tour was my next obsession, despite it having ended 5 years prior to me finding the Zoo TV: Live from Sydney show and the U2: At the End of the World book by Bill Flanagan.
I was a good kid and made it home by curfew every night and spent the next two hours watching U2 in Sydney at a volume I hoped would not wake anyone up. Very rock and roll.
Fast forward a few years and I’m in college, majoring in journalism, at my first U2 concert with my future wife and I’m sobbing.
I’m not an expressive person - frustratingly so. Borderline robotic.
It seems I was holding something, because I broke open.
Live music is one of the few things that can break me open. Electricity rattles my spine and shoots from my fingertips. I always cry, even just a little, even when Motorhead played “Ace of Spades.”
I can’t say I’m more physically expressive now than I was as a self-esteem-challenged teenager daydreaming of rock concerts. I’m too self-conscious to ever let loose.
Off an on for the last twenty some years, I’ve been fortunate enough to write some live reviews for antiMusic. (A little something about that here) It was the dream. Still is a dream on the rare chance I can make it happen.
My wife and I saw Pearl Jam last week in Raleigh (courtesy of my generous sister-in-law), almost 25 years to the day we last saw them. And it was effin’ magic.
I was crying by the second song. The bridge of “Corduroy” always did that to me on the live records I listened to relentlessly in college.
In the years between Pearl Jams, there are so many memories connected to live music breathing ecstatic life into us.
I remember:
The Pixies reunion tour
Standing a head taller than my wife and all the young women yet still afraid I might get hurt by their enthusiasm for The Strokes
The Cure playing for three hours on a cool desert night
Rob Halford of Judas Priest threatening an incoming thunderstorm
Ronnie James Dio hugging me and telling me to “be good”
Weezer and The Pixies at Madison Square Garden at the spur of the moment
Against the barrier with Michael Franti one night and The Flaming Lips the next
Surviving an Ozzfest, barely
Alice Cooper opening for The Rollings Stones (with our baby boy in tow, couldn’t find a sitter, we left early)
B.B. King may have spent more time chatting than playing, but it was still B.B. King
Taking my son to see U2, and crying
and more
I’m still not sure I’ve expressed what live music means to me. In the meantime, I’ll keep trying and keep bothering my kids with live concert videos on YouTube.
Like this camcorder footage from our first Pearl Jam show back in 2000: