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One of my favorite get-to-know-you questions is, “What’s the first concert you went to?” Whether a cool act or a cringy one, talking about that experience always stirs people’s emotions—and I get a better understanding of the person telling the story. At that moment, I see a glimpse of their younger self. 

My first concert was Depeche Mode, the masters of 1980s industrial-tinged synth pop. I remember buzzing with anticipation alongside my sister Rachel, then howling with thousands of our fellow teenagers when the lights dropped. As the band walked on stage, a distinctive series of notes echoed through the suburban arena, and the song “Black Celebration” began. We were all dressed in black, ready to celebrate. It was perfect. 

A few decades later, Rachel and I took our daughters to their first concert: the boy-band phenomenon One Direction. The girls liked their music but were hardly superfans; my sister and I were the ones who really wanted to go. (An attempt to recapture our lost youth, perhaps.) The band seemed aware of this intergenerational dynamic; at one point, Harry Styles took the mic and thanked all “the mums and grandmums who drove tonight.” It was both mortifying and hilarious. I hope my daughter enjoys telling that story one day. 

Thanks to pent-up, post-COVID demand, it’s been a great year for concerts. Ed Sheeran set attendance records during his recent United States tour, and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé did their share of filling stadiums, with Swift’s The Eras Tour already the highest-grossing concert film of all time. There’s something about losing yourself in a communal experience that’s immensely appealing in this age of virtual meetings and not-so-social media. We want to see the artists we love in person. We want to believe they’re singing directly to us. 

With streaming services paying minuscule amounts per song played, most musicians can no longer support themselves through recordings alone, so touring has become a financial necessity. While icons such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan can still draw a crowd by simply singing on a stage, other musical acts lure audiences with special effects, multiple costume changes, and eye-popping sets. The singer Pink even does high-flying aerial stunts during her shows. 

This reading list takes you on a mini-tour of different concert experiences, from moments of emotional connection to high-tech extravaganzas that are creating an entirely new kind of show. 

I Paid to See Beyonce in Three Different Cities on the Renaissance Tour. Here’s Why (Malaika Jabali, Essence, September 2023)

For Essence editor Malaika Jabali, Beyoncé’s album Renaissance was a lifeline, “a jolt of infectious energy pumped into our veins after two years of angst and despair.” She considered herself lucky to get tickets to see her musical idol in Toronto, but seeing the show only made her want to go again—and again. She even caught a last-minute flight from Atlanta to Tampa when she was able to get resale tickets hours before the Florida show. 

Jabali’s essay starts with a confession: “My name is Malaika, and I have a problem.” By framing Beyoncé’s concerts as a form of addiction, she explains how fandom can turn into near-obsession. Why else would anyone pay so much for last-minute tickets, let alone a madcap rush to the airport? 

Before reading this piece, I’d forgotten how much it means to see one of your musical idols in person. The Renaissance tour, Jabali writes, was a tribute to Beyoncé’s most die-hard followers, celebrating influences and references that resonated on a personal level. 

U2 Takes to Playing in the Round (the Very, Very Round) at Las Vegas’ Sphere With Spectacular Results: Concert Review (Chris Willman, Variety, September 2023) 

How does one of the world’s longest-running rock bands keep themselves relevant? By performing a one-of-a-kind show in a one-of-a-kind venue. U2 was the debut act of the recently opened Sphere in Las Vegas, and music critic Chris Willman says it was an apt pairing, “the apotheosis of a bigger-is-better ethos that has regularly occurred throughout the band’s career, and which they are not about to give up now that they’re in their 60s for any back-to-basics false modesty.” 

As a U2 listener from way back, I was curious about their latest reinvention; if money were no object, I’d have been dancing in the Sphere alongside Willman on opening night. Reading this account was the next best thing. Willman’s descriptions of the visuals that accompany each song are particularly vivid, but the show’s real brilliance, he writes, comes from the band’s ability to connect to its audience, despite the cavernous space.

The group that has spent so much of its recording output urging you to think about God, and other only slightly less weighty matters, is in Sin City mostly to make you say: “Oh my God.” And we can vouch that we were hearing that utterance, from people above, below and around us, in a kind of reactive, quadraphonic effect that nearly matched Sphere’s vaunted 22nd-century sound system.

This being U2, they would like to be seen as an overgrown club band at their core, at the same time they are producing the rock blockbuster to end all blockbusters. Wanting to have it both ways has worked for the group before, and it works again, in this setting. . . .  It’s a cliche to say that U2 can achieve intimacy in the midst of the most ridiculous extravaganza, but nobody in rock history has done a better job of taking visual and aesthetic dynamics to extremes. 

How Park Jimin of BTS Helped Me Feel Seen in My Brown, Queer Body (Padya Paramita, them, February 2021)

Like plenty of others in the COVID lockdown era, Padya Paramita dived into the music of K Pop superstars BTS as a form of escape. Even before the world shut down, she hadn’t been sure how to reconcile her conservative Bangladeshi upbringing with the gender non-conformity she’d experienced at her American college: “I struggled to share my pronouns and was confused about what they even were.” Being isolated at home only made that confusion catastrophically worse. 

Then she watched BTS play an online concert that was live-streamed to almost a million fans around the world—and a performance of the song “Filter” by singer/dancer Park Jimin brought her to tears. For me, this piece was a moving example of the power live music can have, even when you’re watching a concert performed halfway around the world.

The K-pop industry is heavily gendered. There have only been a handful of mixed gender bands among hundreds of boy and girl groups, and being openly queer is often completely out of the question for most K-pop stars — even heterosexual artists aren’t allowed to date publicly. Despite everything, Jimin started coming out of his shell, openly wearing outfits originally designed for women, shirts with the words “gender equality” and “radical feminist,” laughing at his bandmates for claiming selfies aren’t for men, and letting his dance moves flow freely.

Jimin reminded me of myself — I was born 75 days before him, 2500 miles away. Yet both of us had tried hard to please society and performed gender in a way we weren’t meant to put on. It both took us time to realize that society’s gender norms weren’t the law, there was no “male” or “female” when it came to fashion and behavior. We would still be loved, even if we took the risk of expressing ourselves in a real way.

The Story of the First Ever Glastonbury Festival (El Hunt, NME, June 2023)

Woodstock in 1969 was an era-defining event, paving the way for a new kind of concert: multiple bands playing outside over multiple days, to an audience of young people who were willing to put up with rain, mud, sunburn, and questionable portable toilets. Today, festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza are big businesses, with VIP tents sponsored by corporate brands. 

The Glastonbury Festival in England is one such success story, but as El Hunt writes in this appreciation, it started with “1500 hippies, five dogs, and one goat.” The festival’s co-creator, Michael Eavis, was a dairy farmer with “grand ambitions and a hefty overdraft,” who thought hosting an event on his land would be a good way to make money. (It didn’t quite work out that way.) 

Interviewing some of the original attendees, Hunt paints a picture of a more carefree time, when festivalgoers not only didn’t worry about pulling together Instagram-worthy outfits but often arrived with no luggage at all. Their memories take us back to a long-gone spirit of open-minded adventure when no one was quite sure what they’d find when they reached the festival grounds. 

Entry for punters cost £1, the equivalent of £5 in today’s money, and for that you got a carton of milk from the dairy farm. 

There was no super fence to keep out gatecrashers. In fact, when a group of hippies walked all the way to the farm from London thinking it was a free festival, the crowd chipped in for their entry fees. Advertising for the event was minimal, and info was spread by word-of-mouth. Attendance was far lower than the 3000 people expected, and Eavis didn’t break even, let alone earn enough to clear his overdraft. “It hasn’t been a disaster,” he told the BBC afterwards. “But it hasn’t been as good as I hoped.”

ABBA Voyage Concert Review (Paul Sinclair, Super Deluxe Edition, May 2022) 

Even at the height of their late-’70s/early-’80s fame, the Swedish pop phenomenon ABBA played relatively few live shows. As other nostalgia acts reunited in recent years, ABBA resisted the lure of a hefty comeback-tour paycheck; as music writer Paul Sinclair puts it, “45 years from their heyday, all four members are in their seventies and have concluded that no one wants, or needs, to see ‘old ABBA’ on stage, least of all them!” 

But was there a way to get “young ABBA” back? Sinclair describes the journey that led to ABBA Voyage, a London show starring the “ABBAtars,” 3D virtual images that perform alongside a live band. Why would anyone want to sit through an entire concert’s worth of holograms, I wondered? Then I read Sinclair’s review of the opening-night performance. Like me, Sinclair went in full of doubts, which were quickly swept away by a wave of ABBA-licious magic. 

ABBA Voyage is like some kind of wonderland. For 90 minutes you believe the unbelievable. I was concerned that I might have to work hard to enjoy the evening, but actually the suspension of disbelief is easy. Why? Because ABBA in their primes are standing right in front of you. Your brain might be trying to tell you it’s not real, but your heart, your databank of emotions – love, joy, regret, sadness – are tripping on overload. . . .

It seems inconceivable – and ultimately become irrelevant – that we are witnessing images on a 65-million-pixel flat screen. I’m still not sure I believe it. When the show starts, the lighting in the 3000-seat arena drops very low –but not so low that you can’t see the other people you are sitting amongst. This sense of a communal experience – laughing, singing, and crying and dancing to ABBA with other people – was very important to producer Svana Gisla, and I can understand why. Total darkness is too isolating. It’s these kinds of details that make all the difference. 

Survivors of Concert Violence Speak Out (Quinn Moreland, Pitchfork, March 2018)

Any time large numbers of people come together in a confined space, there’s a chance of things going wrong. When the Rolling Stones decided to play a show at the Altamont Speedway in California and hired the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security, it led to one of the first, most notorious concert disasters: a fan was stabbed to death while trying to rush the stage. 

Sadly, the death toll has risen significantly since then. For this piece, Moreland interviewed the survivors of four different tragedies: the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater in Paris; the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England; the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida; and the shooting at the Route 91 country-music festival in Las Vegas. In their own words, these witnesses describe how the experience affected the way they process large, public events. Some always look for an exit route when they go to a new venue; others check how much security is evident. 

What’s striking is how many of those people still go to concerts. Before reading these accounts, I assumed that anyone who’d experienced such traumatic violence would stay away from crowded events entirely. A few have, of course, but I was touched and inspired by the stories of those who’ve refused to give up on live music. For Steve Munoz, a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting, going to concerts has even become a form of healing. 

Before that weekend, I’d never been to a music festival before, but I’m definitely more obsessed with going to concerts now. Listening to country music was a big part of it. I have all kinds of tastes when it comes to music, but ever since Route 91, I’ve only really listened to country. I felt like if I did not listen to music, I was giving that guy control because I would be associating all the evil that had happened with the music of that night. We all heal and deal with things differently, but for me, the music was what helped me get past the darkness of that night.

Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

People find their joy in many ways: a nice weekend dinner, family time at the park. The pandemic has brought those lost joys into sharper relief. For Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield writes about the way the pandemic has removed live music from the center of so many listeners’ lives, and how he’s dealing with its absence.

Music is more than sound. We measure our years, even our weeks, by the shows we see. Music is also relational. We experience it with other people, including strangers joined in sweaty community at cramped music venues. This communal experience is part of what Covid-19 has taken away. To compensate for live music’s absence, Sheffield remembers past concerts. He enjoys livestreams and Neil Young’s weekly Fireside Sessions, and he listens to a lot of live albums.

Ministry called one of their live albums In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up — I always love the bitchy tone of that. Showing up is what the live show is all about: We go to be part of that crowd. I started by going to all-ages hardcore matinees on weekend afternoons — that’s where I began learning to handle the chaotic presence of strangers, before I was mature enough to learn any other way. All the people I used to hate at shows, I miss them now. Yes, even you, the douchebag who can’t turn off your goddamn phone because you need to video every moment. Here I am now, scrounging for YouTube scraps and cursing you for not getting better footage. (Seriously, nobody got any video of Stephen Malkmus doing the Cars’ “Good Times Roll” on the 2001 Jicks tour? You people, honestly.)

I keep listening to live albums these days, just because it’s therapeutic to hear a crowd making noise. I’m getting to know the Grateful Dead’s spring ’77 tour all too well. Like the Dead, Taylor Swift had summer stadium shows I was already looking forward to. I revisit shaky fan-cam video of Taylor and relive the night I first saw the Red tour, in 2013. When Taylor busted out the drum solo in “Holy Ground,” the little kid behind me yelled, “She’s rocking out, Mom! She’s rocking ooouuut!” I will think about that moment once a week for the rest of my life.

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Kevin Sampsell| Longreads | April 2019 | 11 minutes (2,777of words)

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Prince’s “Erotic City” was one of the most played songs at dance clubs in the mid-`80s. If I were with my friend, Angie, and the DJ played this infamously dirty B-side, we’d be on the floor immediately after that first sexy note — a lone string plucked and whammied, dreamlike. Prince was the bond in our friendship, one that started when we were horny teenagers and has lasted in some small way or another throughout the years. Even though we live in the same state, we don’t see each other much. I guess you’d say we’re more like Internet friends these days. We chat about parenting, old friends, or jobs. But back in the day it was pretty hot and heavy, and it seemed like the good chemistry between us was heavily influenced by our love for the one and only Prince Rogers Nelson. Which is why it felt oddly appropriate when Angie messaged me on Instagram last year to see if I wanted to go see Prince’s most popular backing band, The Revolution, at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. “It would be a cool flashback if you wanted to go,” she wrote.

***

I have to admit, I stopped paying attention to Prince around the time he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol (in 1993), but Angie had stayed a superfan. She interacts with people on Prince message boards, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, and newsletters. She has a wardrobe of Prince t-shirts, tank tops, leggings, necklaces, and earrings. She saw him in concert eight times, most recently in Oakland in 2016 on his Piano and a Microphone tour, and before that, in Portland in 2013, when his backing band was the all-female group, 3rdeyegirl. He died less than two months after the Oakland show. Mournfully, she flew to Minneapolis shortly after his death to see The Revolution reunite and perform his songs at the legendary First Avenue nightclub, where scenes from “Purple Rain” take place.

I saw Prince perform only once, at (in my opinion) his creative peak, in 1988 on the Lovesexy tour. Just a year after Sign O’ The Times received rave reviews but before his oddball choice to record a whole album for a Michael Keaton Batman movie. The concert I saw was an elaborate stage show in Seattle, with a horn section, Sheila E. on drums, a seductive dancer named Cat I was obsessed with, and gratuitous stage props like a basketball hoop, a bed, a fountain, and a Ford Thunderbird. Even though The Revolution was not his band at the time, they were his band on his two best studio creations (Around the World In a Day and Parade). I guess I should say “arguably his two best” because when it comes to Prince, every other detail, achievement, and rumor concerning him and his work is argued about.

It took me just a few seconds to reply to Angie and tell her I wanted to go. I didn’t know exactly who would be singing the songs, but just the idea of seeing Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman, Brown Mark (Mark Brown), Matt “Doctor” Fink, and Bobby Z. (Robert B. Rivkin) on stage together, locking into one funky groove after another — circa 1979-86 — seemed amazing enough.

***

On the night of the show, Angie and I meet for dinner and it feels totally natural and chill, even though it’s been almost 30 years since we’ve slept together. Some thoughts cross my mind as we eat pasta: Is this a date? Is she thinking about the time we had sex in her hatchback in the graveyard? Or the time we did it in a sleeping bag on the football field and called it “the human burrito?”

She looks good to me. Do I still look good to her? Could I still pull off the look I had when I was 19 — the paisley jacket, stretch pants, and dangly earrings? Am I thinking too much about the past instead of paying full attention to our conversation?

But as we eat and check the time on our phones every 10 minutes, I realize it is what it is: Two aging Gen-X folks reliving some sexy glory days and mourning an old hero, gone too soon.

I ask Angie if she remembers the day Prince died. She says she remembers hearing the first rumblings of the news on a Prince fan page saying that there were ambulances at Paisley Park, where he lived and made music. Then the news that there was a dead body. Then the news that it was Prince’s body. And then the shocked feeling that numbed her as texts and messages from friends started blowing up her phone. She said it didn’t fully hit her until her ex-husband called to check on her. That’s when she felt it crush her.

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I consider the legacy of Prince as heroic. He was like a hero, or even a superhero, complete with cape and special powers. His musical prowess, his nonstop songwriting and boosting of others, his bravery of expression, the gender-bending, and his inspiring integrity (he wasn’t part of the whole 1985 superhit, “We Are the World,” because he thought it was a bad song). The way people tossed the word “genius” at him felt legit and rare for that time. Not like the way everyone calls themselves a genius now (Hi, Kanye). There are Prince albums where he played every damn instrument. He had so many songs coming out of him he had to make up other names for himself and give out hits to people like Stevie Nicks, The Bangles, and Chaka Khan. When he started his record label, Paisley Park, most of the bands on it were essentially Prince soundalikes. I know because I bought a lot of those records. They may be obscure now but I loved albums by The Family, Jill Jones, and Taja Sevelle.

A big part of the appeal of Prince for me was also the blunt sexuality and freedom of his music. I saw his video for “Controversy” in 8th grade and knew right away that he was giving us something truly bold. His album, 1999, pushed the lascivious boundaries even more with its flawless, cool funk. Even listening to it now is shocking. His uncensored depiction of sexuality — and the questioning of it — was my first glimpse into queerness and X-rated (many parents would call them “inappropriate”) fantasies. Prince was, to many people, the musical equivalent to your first look at a porn magazine. I remember finding a bad cassette dub of the infamous Black Album after he decided not to release it because he deemed it “evil” and it became like contraband. The eight songs on the album were ultra-funky and perhaps too reactionary against critics who felt as if he had sold out to the pop-rock world. The lust in the music was overcooked and some songs swerved into negativity and dark violence (the narrator of the song “Bob George” wields a gun and threatens to “slap your ass into the middle of next week.”). As a catholic boy, I found this conflict between his dark side and his spiritual side to be a comfort.

***

Angie and I get to the show almost an hour early because she wants to get a spot in front. She knows a bunch of the other early arrivers from other Prince-related happenings, and introduces me to them. She points out one woman who was a fellow student in a one-off belly dancing class taught by Prince’s ex-wife, Mayte Garcia. I imagine a dance studio full of belly dancing women who are probably more curious about being close to the woman who gave birth to Prince’s son than they are about this kind of dance. I remember the headlines on gossip magazines about Prince and Mayte’s son, who died six days after he was born from Pfeiffer syndrome. Days after that (and before the death was known to the public), the couple gave an interview on Oprah, during which they pretended their son was still alive. It’s a jarring part of his history, and a reminder that his life was not as idyllic as many would think.

As Angie and I talk and point out the various styles of Prince gear worn by other fans, she spots her friend, Jonathan, who tells us that he has two extra wristbands for the VIP area, a less-crowded space close to stage left with its own bar. We take him up on his offer, wondering if it means we might meet the band as well. Angie is especially excited about this possibility because she has a raging crush on their legendary guitarist, Wendy Melvoin.

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It’s kind of a sad VIP area. At first it’s us and just two other people. One of them is a guy in a long cape and steampunk gear, and what looks to be a fake “all access” Prince and the Revolution sticker on his coat. He starts talking to us like we know him. He asks me if we’ve seen Terry or Jerry yet. I can’t quite understand who he’s talking about, but he’s dressed up like he’s in the band, or a band anyway. I play along and pretend like I know who he’s referring to and say, “No, I haven’t seen them.” I overhear someone close to us say they spotted drummer Bobby Z. in the bathroom. The steampunk guy says his name is “Funk Love.” He’s with a quiet woman named Kate who has a tattoo on her shoulder that says, “I’m Kate.” I try to talk to Funk, but he’s wearing sunglasses that look like goggles, and it’s disconcerting. I step over to Jonathan to get the story on the guy, but he doesn’t know him either. We speculate on the validity of his “all access” sticker and whether it’s ever really worked at a concert. Funk and Kate are talking conspiratorially behind us and I step back to see if I can hear them. In an effort to make conversation, I ask Funk if he’s a musician too and he pulls back, as if it’s an offensive question. Then he walks backwards in slow motion, sulking at me, like I’ve made a grave mistake and should know who he is.

A few minutes later, the VIP area gets a few more bodies, and the main space and balcony are mostly full, though the show isn’t sold out. Most of the people look to be the same age as me, hovering just below or above 50. Lots of graying hair, or hair colored various vivid shades in an attempt to look younger, including, of course, purple. Some of the fans in their 30s have that excited glow of adults who’ve hired a cheap babysitter for the night. Then the lights go down and the distinct intro of “Computer Blue” starts, sending everyone’s endorphins skyward.

“Wendy?”

“Yes, Lisa?”

“Is the water warm enough?”

“Yes, Lisa.”

“Shall we begin?”

“Yes, Lisa.”

And just like that: Holy shit! It’s The Revolution on stage in front of us!

The set list itself is fairly average. Since they focus on the Prince albums they played on (1999, Purple Rain, Around the World In a Day, Parade), there’s not a huge scope, or many deep cuts. Iconic albums like Sign O’ the Times and Lovesexy are not even mentioned. Apparently The New Power Generation are playing some of those songs at their recent reunion shows.

Bassist Brown Mark and Wendy take lead vocals on most of the songs, like “Raspberry Beret” and “Take Me With U.” I notice that the band seems to give center stage a wide berth, as if the empty space is reserved for Prince. I imagine a hologram of him beaming down from above, like at the 2018 Super Bowl half-time show. But that space is filled a few times during the set by guest vocalist Stokley Williams, the high energy singer for Minneapolis band, Mint Condition. I’m not sure how I feel about Williams’s presence. He’s a good dancer and confidently engages the crowd like a seasoned frontman (and at 50, he’s the youngest), but he also tilts the show toward cover band territory. Toward the end though, Dr. Fink, Bobby Z., Lisa, Wendy, and Brown Mark take turns in the solo spotlight and the focus turns back to them. It’s clear that this was Prince’s hand-chosen band for a reason.

As much of a control freak Prince was, you can’t help but wonder what he would think of all this. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who didn’t want his music available on iTunes and had any of his videos taken off YouTube as quickly as they popped up. He once sued 22 fans for $22 million for sharing recordings of his concerts. Some of the bands he put out on his label had to change their names because of contract disputes with him (The Time became The Original 7ven and The Family are now called fDeluxe). This all makes me wonder about the financial aspects of the tour and its players. A cynical music fan would assume they’re capitalizing on Prince’s death and doing it for money, but publicity for the shows hasn’t been great and the venues are mostly mid-size halls and clubs. In more recent interviews with the band on YouTube, it’s obvious that some members were fired and some quit after the Parade tour in 1986. During those final days, Prince’s behavior toward the band was strained and dismissive. During rehearsals for that tour, Prince added new players to his band and started ignoring his oldest bandmates.

The Revolution have been playing these songs again now for over two years. If the band sometimes had bad blood with their leader, it’s also very clear that they understand the vital role they performed in the history of one of our most important musical artists. It’s fully evident that they love playing the music and being with each other again.

***

I had hoped to hear some between-song anecdotes or stories about Prince during the show. I had envisioned something more like a memorial in a way — something more cathartic and raw — but each concert the band plays probably makes it easier to not dwell on the sadness of his absence and to just deliver a badass funk party. While writing this essay, I watched hours of interviews with the band, as well as other performances. One video of them performing in Minneapolis just months after Prince’s death shows just how intensely emotional their first reunion shows must have been. In it, Wendy struggles to sing the beautiful ballad, “Sometimes It Snows In April.” It’s hard to watch and not cry when Wendy sings the last lines: “Sometimes I wish that life was never ending/ But all good things, they say, never last/ And love, it isn’t love until it’s past.”

At the end of the set in Portland, over two years after his death, there is still plenty of melancholy and feelings of loss from Prince’s departure. The Revolution start playing those familiar opening chords of “Purple Rain.” It’s one of his songs that I’ve heard thousands of times and, frankly, I don’t care if I don’t hear it again for a long time. But the band plays it with the perfect blend of strength and vulnerability, and the sentiment of the words hits hard. It could almost be an apology letter to the band he disbanded at the height of their power. Wendy sings, “I never meant to cause you any sorrow/ I never meant to cause you any pain.” I see a couple near the stage, holding each other, almost slow dancing. They seem so deeply connected, and they’re crying, like the song is part of their life story. They look like normal, ordinary people that I see every day out in the world — at a grocery store or on the bus. But in this setting, with the music in the air and the room riveted to every note, they glow, and look enchanted. I remember dancing with Angie to this song way back when, but it probably wasn’t as important to us as it is for this couple. We were just kids, after all.

I keep watching this adult couple, their weeping to an ‘80s power ballad, and feel a little envious of their love. But mostly I’m grateful I get to witness it. At the end of the song, the couple slowly release each other, wipe their tears away, and smile as the band waves goodbye to everyone.

* * *

Kevin Sampsell is a writer, editor, collage artist, small press book publisher and bookseller living in Portland, Oregon. His books include the novel, This Is Between Us, and the memoir, A Common Pornography

Anna Armstrong | Longreads | December 2017 | 12 minutes (2,903 words)

“Jefferson, I think we’re lost.” — Little America, R.E.M.

The distance between Rodeo and Santa Cruz is just over 90 miles. For the most part the drive is unremarkable — urban, industrial cities and rural, unincorporated towns along the Eastshore Freeway, shaping the wasteland east of San Francisco Bay. But then the interstate gives way to Highway 17 and you begin the ascent to another world. The road is a thin, curlicue curved by the green Santa Cruz Mountains.

As a child I made this trip many times with my parents in our wood-paneled station wagon packed tightly with my five siblings and me — my gaze resting out the window, tracking the miles by the three-minute pop songs on the radio while an endless imaginary flat-panel saw tethered to my slight wrist sliced through the redwoods. Our destination? The historic Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The winding highway was a signal that we were close to the magical unworldliness of rickety wooden roller coasters, salty ocean breezes, barefoot children, bikinied girls, sun-kissed boys, a symphony of voices, crashing waves, tinny arcade bells, the smells and tastes of corn dogs and candied apples — and far, far away from the broke-down, shuttered place of stillness, silence, and late-to-bloom fondness in the rearview mirror. What separated Santa Cruz from Rodeo was not just miles but a tangible joy you could hold in your hands. Coming home sunburned, exhausted, happy — sleeping through the curves of the highway, waking abruptly in time to see the straight line to home.

June 1985. I was 17 years old and newly licensed. I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu that braved a Black Flag bumper sticker in a town that just didn’t get it. The destination? A very different type of spectacle: A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

My mother was adamantly against me going since I would be traveling solo; I only had one friend who was always game to hit up shows with me in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, but she was grounded. With my standard quiet defiance, I determined I was going no matter what. Life at home was difficult. My dad had died from cancer two years earlier. Mom was distracted by her loss and was in a state of full-blown avoidance, throwing herself into waitressing, picking up shifts that kept her away from home and the foundlings who remained there. I was never quite sure when she would parent me, so I was a little surprised by her refusal to let me take off to Santa Cruz on my own.

Grief was confusing for all of us; it was an unpredictable ghost around our home, an untranslatable word, that made us restless. I looked desperately around the house, laid eyes upon my 13-year old brother, Billie Joe, and threw him in the car before he or our mother could say a word of protest.

I was preparing to make the trek from home to Santa Cruz in my very first car, a 1972 Chevy Malibu. The destination? A rock ‘n’ roll show. The Athens, GA band R.E.M were scheduled to play the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium.

A few days prior to the Santa Cruz show I had been at the Greek Theater in Berkeley to see R.E.M. They had become the only band that mattered to me. But a persistent summer rain caused the band to cancel. I was sickened. I had been carrying around a wild yellow mustard seed flower that I had picked outside the venue. I was at the front of the stage. When the band members came out to break the news to the audience, I reflexively crushed the flower in my fist. As the band turned to leave the stage, I threw away the weed and headed for home. No choice but to head to Santa Cruz.

* * *

I’d like to say that I discovered R.E.M. serendipitously but that wouldn’t be the truth. I had been quietly yet assuredly cultivating a new path for myself — a graveled, pot-holed road that might lead me out of Rodeo. It started the year I turned 16. I traded in my mall jeans for dresses from the thrift store that smelled of old lady and cat piss, white Reebok sneakers for funky black oxfords, the must-have puffy down jackets for moth-bitten cardigans. I switched off episodes of Family Ties and The Cosby Show to spend time alone in my room with poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, reading The Bell Jar as if it were an oracle. I skipped school dances to watch low-budget films in the dusty, dark independent theaters of Berkeley. Desperately Seeking Susan was one of those pictures; I identified with the female characters’ reckless desire for transformation. I was desperately seeking me, a singular expedition driven by awakening hope and aching naivety. What was missing from my private revolution was a killer soundtrack.

I obsessively read music magazines: Creem, BAM, Circus, and Hit Parader. R.E.M. was featured in Rolling Stone and I was struck by the photo that accompanied the article. They were the kind of boys who stirred up crushes in me and, unlike the hard boys at school, might think of me in some soft way too. Their second album, Reckoning, was out, and MTV’s “120 Minutes” was playing the video for the gorgeous single “So. Central Rain.” I hit up Music Land record store at the local mall but it wasn’t carrying any R.E.M records. I continued to search until I came upon Irregular Records, a tiny independent record store housed inside a trailer atop a long, dirt road in the neighboring, arcadian town of El Sobrante. I took it as proof of life there were others like me close by.

I came home with the albums Murmur and Reckoning. “Radio Free Europe” — the first track on Murmur — was chaotic, disruptive. So different from the Top 40 bands I listened to, and loved. By the third song I was hooked. “Laughing” was an absolute revelation. It uncoiled something inside me. The darkness surrounding me, the unnamed grief I had skipped around, was suddenly illuminated. The music didn’t make it go away, but rather heavy-lifted the confusion and gave me a glimmer of understanding. It was the combination of sound — vocals, guitars, drums, bass — that, for the first time, provided a sonic language of what it was like to be me at that very moment in time.

I sent a $10 money order to an address in Athens, GA, and in return I became an official member of the R.E.M. fan club. I received a bright pink “Little America” tour shirt and promptly began wearing it once a week to school. I wrote a review of the just released Fables of the Reconstruction for the school newspaper. My purple-prosed enthusiasm did little to win any new fans, for me or the band.

* * *

It was silent in the Black Flag as Billie Joe and I headed on our way. Soon we were cranking Camper Van Beethoven’s Telephone Free Landslide Victory and the Replacements’ Let it Be, and other bands discovered after I’d found R.E.M. I’d abandoned the commercial FM rock stations and tuned left of the dial to college radio stations KALX and KUSF. Billie was familiar with the music, having had it played throughout the house, blasting out of my bedroom via my cheap record player. He had been playing guitar for a couple of years. His favorite bands were every 13-year-old boy’s: AC/DC and Van Halen. That list would expand after our night in Santa Cruz.

Of all the kids in the family, Billie Joe and I look the most alike — same thick, dark hair, almond-shaped hazel eyes, chubby cheeks, and crooked teeth. That summer we were both at watershed moments: puberty (him) and quasi-adulthood (me). I was a watcher with plenty of thoughts and ideas and opinions, but I kept them to myself. And Billie was the same. But in the Black Flag, we talked to one another. We talked of our perceived weirdness, our otherness — real or imagined. We were young and unrooted in a world we were unceremoniously dropped into without our permission. We talked of music. Because we were both fanatical about rock ‘n’ roll. True believers in its simple and pure power. A loud, reverberating dog whistle only we could hear. And we craved more and more of it.

Life at home was difficult. My dad had died from cancer two years earlier. Mom was distracted by her loss and was in a state of full-blown avoidance, throwing herself into waitressing, picking up shifts that kept her away from home and the foundlings who remained there.

So we rose on Highway 17. It took us into the part of Santa Cruz that leads to the boardwalk, but how were we to find the venue? (This was 1985.) I pulled into a gas station to get directions. Once we found the place, we parked and started walking. I didn’t have tickets so I hit up the first scalper we encountered and paid the man what he was asking. No time for bargaining, my pace quickening with Billie behind trying to catch up. We queued up with the others and waited for the venue doors to open.

Billie Joe was freaking out on the inside. I recognized the look of alarm coupled with fascination on his face. I too had worn that same expression the first time I attended a small, indie rock show at one of the clubs I would start to call home every weekend: The Berkeley Square, The Farm, The Kabuki, The Stone. The kids there were so unlike the ones we grew up alongside. They wore their outlaw weirdness boldly and bravely. Billie accepted that his sister was dressing funny, but my wardrobe expressions were Natalie Merchant inspired — angsty, self-conscious bookworm. R.E.M. was becoming the biggest post-punk band, and their audience embraced the fashion and faculty of punk rock. Before us stood a skyscraper boy with bleach-blonde hair wearing a frayed denim vest, tight skinny pants, and big black boots. With him were two black-eyed sullen beauties with bright red lips on their death-pale, soft faces. I smiled down at my brother as I watched him fall in love.

I abandoned Billie at the door but not before nailing him with big sister instructions: Meet me here after the show, don’t leave the building, be good, have fun. I made my way to the front and pressed up against the stage. I would remain in that spot all night. The Three O’Clock and True West — bands from the Los Angeles Paisley Underground music scene — opened the show. But I really was of one mind tonight: Me and R.E.M. finally connecting. It was going to be personal, intimate — an experience all for myself. It was that and so much more. My brother and I, on opposite ends of the venue — and all those stranger-souls between us — would know deeply that this one night had altered all of our lives. A community born, a family found, a vocabulary defined.

The venue grew dark. I’d been holding my breath for hours — maybe for the last 17-years. Sounds of locomotives, sirens, feedback. The band quietly walked on stage, at first just shadows. Michael Stipe wore an old man’s overcoat too big for him and an abused, misshapen fedora. He carried a lighted lantern. Peter Buck was above me. My close proximity to him was unnerving enough that I reached out and impulsively touched his blue suede Creeper.

The beginning notes of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” from the new album filled the arena, shattering our collective anticipation. A signal that for the next 90 minutes I would be transported — not to a place outside of myself, but returned to me. A cracking joy that was authentically me.

Michael Stipe, a voice deep and rooted in the earth. Guttural howls wrapped in bright vulnerability. Peter Buck, a rubber band launched from the palms of your hands. Strange, awkward angles matched his guitar playing. Bassist Mike Mills, a school boy on his tippy-toes adding a familiar warmth with his backing vocals. Bill Berry, dictating a shared heartbeat for all of us with the pounding of his drums.

The in-between song banter was limited to a nearly inaudible “Hi,” and a bashful wave from Michael. The more up-tempo songs like the buoyant “Harborcoat” and the funky “Can’t Get There from Here” unleashed Michael from his visible shyness. His body shook and undulated. He assaulted his microphone, dragging it around the stage by its neck. He was a true dialectic, with Johnny Rotten’s violent physicality and Patti Smith’s tenderness. The deep, percussive “Driver 8,” with its childhood traveling memory lyricism (“Children look up, all they hear is sky-blue, bells ringing”) moved into a gentle cover of Creedence Clearwater’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” (an obvious tip of that old battered fedora to those of us left outside in the rain in Berkeley). An ethereal cover of Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and the explosive “Radio Free Europe” bookended the two encores.

The movement from darkness to institutional lighting let us know the show was over. We looked around us and searched out faces that would confirm our suspicions that yes, we had just been lifted skyward and were finding ourselves back on earth. And what a fucking trip we’d had!

My mother was adamantly against me going since I would be traveling solo. I looked desperately around the house, laid eyes upon my 13-year old brother, Billie Joe, and threw him in the car before he or our mother could say a word of protest.

I easily found Billie Joe exactly where I told him to be. We were both sweaty and buzzing. We stopped at the merch table and I bought ourselves matching tour shirts — his white, mine black. Settled in the Black Flag for the long ride home, we were back in our bodies. Our shared adrenaline had us both speaking loud and fast.

Billie’s evening had begun in the farthest back reaches of the venue. I had recently taken him to a heavy metal concert at the cavernous Oakland Arena and his first rock show imprint was that of masculine aggression and sweaty violence. As much as he loved hard rock and the intensity of that crowd, he was wanting more emotion, more melody, more poetry. Billie remained reluctant to move from the safety of his seat as R.E.M. took the stage. He surveyed the crowd with uncertainty. But what unfolded before him — jubilant dancing, bright shining faces of boys and girls alike — compelled him to move a little closer. Then a little more. And a little more. He spotted the tall boy from the line outside, his bright yellow hair a beacon, drawing Billie Joe further and further into the crowd, and farther and farther away from any preconceived ideas of what a rock ‘n’ roll show was really meant to be. The tall boy must have sensed Billie staring at him because suddenly he was by his side, grabbing him by the shoulders, and carrying him into the pack. Come with me and I’ll tell you a secret. Freed by the information, Billie began to jump, dance, smile, laugh, sing, breathe.

* * *

A sleepy Billie crawled over into the back seat of the Black Flag, using our new T-shirts as a pillow. I kept the radio low. The miles home spread out before me. Now and again I’d leave my dreamy reverie and notice the familiar sign posts of Interstate 80. Ten miles from home I rested my eyes on the Black Flag’s dashboard and saw for the first time that the speedometer went to 120 miles per hour. With no emotion and little thought, I pressed down harder on the gas. The Black Flag was fast and strong. The warm June air rushed through the window and made a sound like the roar of hummingbird wings. I was wide awake.

I abandoned Billie at the door but not before nailing him with big sister instructions: Meet me here after the show, don’t leave the building, be good, have fun. I made my way to the front and pressed up against the stage. I would remain in that spot all night.

Minutes from our exit to home I heard sirens and the lights of a California Highway Patrol car filled the Black Flag with bright blues and reds. I took the Rodeo exit — the only one into town — and pulled into the Park & Ride lot. The officer approached the car and shined a flashlight at me, and then into to the backseat where Billie slumbered on. I dutifully handed my license and registration to the cop. I spoke only two words to the officer: No. (I didn’t know how fast I was going.) Yes. (We are going home.) I sat in the silence and darkness as the officer wrote me up a ticket for excessive speed.

Tonight would not be the last rock ‘n’ roll adventure for me and Billie. He would for a while be my partner for many shows — from the Replacements at the Fillmore to the Meat Puppets at the Berkeley Square (with Soundgarden opening). I supported his unabated love of hard rock with a Motley Crüe show at the Cow Palace. Soon, though, he would strike out on his own — finding a community of like-minded spirits at 924 Gilman where his young band would make its own joyful noise. And all the other stuff that would surely transpire over the next thirty years of living — love and loss, joy and despair, contentment and restlessness, rapture and disillusionment, faith and fear, peace and rage, substance and shadow, truth and fiction, clarity and confusion, hope and disappointment, blessings and curses, friends and enemies, babies and burials, triumphs and failures, sound and silence, youthful dreams and middle-aged reality — well, we would always have this. A fable made of 90 minutes and 90 miles.

The Black Flag navigated us safely home where everything and nothing would ever be the same again.

* * *

Anna Armstrong is a writer and mother living and working in Oakland.

Editor: Sari Botton

Whether by accident or design, [the Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham] has succeeded in launching most of the international pop groups whose claim to fame is musical rather than fashionable. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Who all owe a great deal to his fanatical championship. And at the beginning of January, he promoted a new group called, rather enigmatically, Led Zeppelin. If their LP is anything to go by, he has discovered a worthy successor to the defunct Cream.

They’re all in their 20s and extravagantly hirsute in the current manner. They started as a group in November last year and the LP now released is the product of their first improvisations together. They rely on formalised beginnings and endings and leave the rest to the mood of the moment, and they are complete masters of their material. They bend and twist the simplest of lines into architectural caverns of sound, careful but throbbing with violence. Their music crouches like a giant panther and shudders like a mighty jet waiting to leap down the runway.

—Tony Palmer writing about the role San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium played in promoting Led Zeppelin during the band’s early days. Palmer’s article was originally printed in The Guardian on March 9, 1969; an edited excerpt was reprinted on their site this year.

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During the 90s there was something of an arms race to see who could write the biggest deal. That is, the deal with the most money being spent on the band’s behalf. In a singularly painless contest the money would either be paid to the band as a royalty, which would take that money out of the system and put it into things like houses and groceries and college educations. Or it could be paid to other operators within the industry, increasing the clout and prestige of the person doing the spending. It’s as if your boss, instead of giving your paycheck to you, could pay that money to his friends and business associates, invoking your name as he did. Since his net cost was the same and his friends and associates could return the favour, why would he ever want to let any of that money end up in your hands? It was a system that ensured waste by rewarding the most profligate spendthrifts in a system specifically engineered to waste the band’s money.

Now bands existed outside that label spectrum. The working bands of the type I’ve always been in, and for those bands everything was always smaller and simpler. Promotion was usually down to flyers posted on poles, occasional mentions on college radio and fanzines. If you had booked a gig at a venue that didn’t advertise, then you faced a very real prospect of playing to an empty room. Local media didn’t take bands seriously until there was a national headline about them so you could basically forget about press coverage. And commercial radio was absolutely locked up by the payola-driven system of the pluggers and program directors.

International exposure was extraordinarily expensive. In order for your records to make it into overseas hands you had to convince a distributor to export them. And that was difficult with no means for anyone to hear the record and decide to buy it. So you ended up shipping promotional copies overseas at a terrific expense, never sure if they would be listened to or not.

–Music producer and Shellac frontman Steve Albini’s reminder about what the “good old days” of the music industry were really like for artists.

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BLVR: I’ve heard you guys had a no-analyzing rule for a while. You wouldn’t talk to each other about how the show went.

TA: That was for about a year. You come offstage and no one can say anything. At all. At all. Because everyone’s got their own perspective.

BLVR: Someone might think it’s a horrible show and another person could think it’s a great show.

TA: Today what I do is—I do this every night we play—I have a little quiet moment where I picture some guy having a fight with his girlfriend, getting into his car—the battery’s dead—then he gets to the parking lot and it’s full. Meets up with his friends. Comes into the show. I try to picture this one person having their own experience, and I picture them way in the back of the room. And I try to remember how insignificant my experience is, and how people’s experiences with music are their own thing. We put it out there, and if it’s of service to someone, great, but I try to get away from the idea that it’s even starting from us. And when you do that listening-exercise stuff, when I actually get into a moment where I’m only listening, I find that the music gets so much… beyond us. And I can tell that from the reaction I hear from the audience. It always feels more resonant if I can get my hands off it. If all four of us were here, they’d all be saying the same thing. It’s great as long as you listen to anybody but yourself. Anything but yourself.

BLVR: Seems to be true of life, just walking around.

TA: Right. It’s when I start applying my own fucked-up perspective to a show—so I had a bad day, whatever—that I start adding judgment to it. Or I play something and start judging what I’m playing. It’s just like that, walking around in life, that’s true! How often do I find myself walking around and being aware of my surroundings and not having some fucked-up internal dialogue in my head that never ends?

-Trey Anastasio, in a 2011 interview with The Believer.

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More interviews in the Longreads Archive

Photo: ctankcycles, flickr